Africa: We Want Our Country

(6 of 10)

column marched 400 miles northward, formally took possession of King Lobengula's vassal state of Mashonaland, and began staking out their plots. The old King was dismayed. "I thought you came to dig gold," he wrote the British South Africa Co.'s board of directors, "but it seems you have come to rob me of my people and my country as well."

It did not take long. When Lobengula's armies finally rose in 1893, company police cut them down with machine guns, burned his capital to the ground, and made off with half a million cattle. Lobengula, forced to flee for his life, died in flight. The company took over his throne.

Settlers' Choice. Under hardheaded commercial management, Rhodesia quickly flourished. Cheap labor was provided by a hut tax, which forced the penniless natives to go to work for the settlers to pay it. But the settlers worked beside them in the fields and gradually adopted a paternal feeling toward them. New settlers poured in, built themselves Victorian towns and sturdy houses, and planted mealies (corn) and tobacco on the veld. When more land was needed, the natives were moved off, until in 1928 the officials decided something had to be done to protect them. The result was the Land Apportionment Act, which set aside roughly half of the countryside as "native reserves"—but also prohibited the blacks from owning or even leasing land in white areas.

The company's charter had expired in 1914, and rather than go to the expense of setting up a full colonial regime, London offered the settlers their choice between joining South Africa or forming their own "responsible government." For a hardy people accustomed to freedom, the choice was obvious. In 1923, Rhodesia became Britain's first self-governing colony.

All went well until after World War II, when the blacks of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland—also founded by Rhodes—began to demand their freedom. The white populations of the two colonies, too badly outnumbered to maintain control, began calling for help. In British eyes, the only solution was to weld them into a federation with Southern Rhodesia, whose large white police force and greater degree of self-government might quell the cries for kwacha, or independence. It was a scheme worthy of Rhodes, but not even federation could stem the tide. It lasted exactly ten years.

First Voice. In the meantime, strange things had been happening in Salisbury. Into office as territorial Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia came Reginald Stephen Garfield Todd, a strapping, handsome ex-missionary. To the shock of his own United Party, he began to speak softly to the Africans. He managed to ram through a bill giving Southern Rhodesian blacks their first tiny voice in the territory's government—a separate ballot under which they could elect five of the 35 members of parliament. It was not much, but to the settlers it seemed a step toward their worst fear: that their servants would some day rule.

A wave of public reaction forced the Party to scuttle Todd, and his place was taken by Sir Edgar Whitehead, a conservative farmer from Umtali. To restore his party's shattered image, Whitehead took up the settlers' ever-present demands for full independence from Britain. Britain's prerequisite was a constitutional conference to which all political