AFRICA: The Countdown for Rhodesia

"The choice for the Europeans in Rhodesia is not between handing over and hanging on. It is between a chance of survival and certain suicide." That ominous warning from London's conservative Daily Mail was echoed in many Western and African ministries last week. But if Rhodesia's Prime Minister Ian Smith got the message, he failed to heed it. Instead, the embattled Smith clung more tenaciously than ever to his minority government (273,000 whites v. 5.8 million blacks). Meanwhile, an economic noose was tightening around the breakaway British colony, and there were ever louder alarms of a debilitating racial war...

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