AFRICA
(See Cover)
The Prime Minister of Rhodesia stood tall and thin in the cavernous banquet hall of the Meikles Hotel. Before him sat the leaders of Salisbury society, formally attired. They had raised glasses in a toast to their Queen, but nodded approvingly when he warned that they might soon be leaving her realm. Now they listened silently as Ian Smith, in the flat, nasal accent of the settler, read from the eve-of battle speech of Henry V: "That he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart. He today that sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother, and gentlemen in England, now abed, shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here." When he finished, the Salisbury Municipal Orchestra played God Save the Queen.
Another throng of the Queen's subjects poured onto the tarmac of Salisbury Airport last week, but there were no leaders of society among them. For they were black, and had straggled in from the African townships of Harare and Highfield outside the city. They crowded onto balconies, perched in jacaranda trees, and clung to flagpoles around the airport building. More than 6,000 of them were squeezed in alight mass, hemmed in on one side by a 12-ft. wire fence, on the other by a cordon of police and their dogs. When the R.A.F. Comet whistled to a stop and the chubby, unsmiling man appeared at the cabin door, they loosed a thundering cheer. "Mambokadzi tinoda nyi-ka yehu!" roared the black Rhodesians who had come to greet Harold Wilson last week. "Your Majesty the Queen, we want our country!"
The British Prime Minister had come to Rhodesia to try, somehow, to prevent the white-supremacist colonial regime of Ian Smith from seizing independence. It was as critical a mission as Wilson had ever undertaken. The United Nations had urged sanctions to starve the settlers out. Some African states were talking of leaving the Commonwealth. And Wilson himself had talked grimly of the "bloodbath" that might follow a unilateral declaration of independence. At home, where many Britons had blood ties with the settlers, he was under heavy fire to salvage some sort of solution, if only a delay that would prove that Britain had done its best.
Road to Suicide? Wilson's chances seemed slight. In his talks with Smith last month in London, it had become painfully clear that neither side would make any meaningful compromise on the fundamental issue. The British would give Rhodesia its freedom only on condition that the nation's 4,000,000 blacks be guaranteed control of the government within the foreseeable future. To most of the 220,000 whites, however, that would be suicide. They offered only two meaningless gestures: allowing more blacks to vote for the 15 African seats in parliament, and the creation of an almost powerless senate composed of twelve African chiefs (who depend for their livelihood on the government). Any further freedoms for the blacks were absolutely refused.
The Rhodesians are determined that the blacks will never rule. Deep in their hearts, they believe that the first African government would murder them in their beds and drive them off the land. As Africa's former colonies have been granted their freedom, the settlers have shaken their heads in dismay. They talk of the violence of the Congo, of the autocracy of Ghana, of Communist penetration everywhere, and of