African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [3]
Meanwhile the nationalist movements of Southern Rhodesia, encouraged by the success of their northern allies, fomented ‘trouble’ most successfully, everywhere. Already in 1956 I met a couple of young men, whose names I was not told, who described an underground life smuggling political literature, of police harassment and arbitrary arrest, beatings, imprisonment. This underground war, still minor, did not find its way into the newspapers, though people spoke of it. Throughout the 1960s the writing on the wall became ever more visible, but the whites, who had learned nothing from Kenya, chose to ignore it. The War of Independence in Southern Rhodesia, like many other wars, need not have happened. The whites numbered 250,000 at their maximum. Of these, many, if differently led, I believe would have compromised and shared power with the blacks. But a minority of the whites, led by Ian Smith, were determined to fight for White Supremacy. There was no date for the start of that war, which slowly simmered into one of the nastiest conflicts of our time. The opposing armies were not neatly separated into black and white. On the white side fought black soldiers and black police. The whites, far from united at the start, became united by the passions of war, and the few who thought the War was a mistake, and should be ended, and could not be won (for look what was happening in Mozambique where the whites were thrown out after a terrible war) were treated with hysterical hatred, were persecuted, victimized, vilified. The blacks, too, were infinitely divided. Not only were there different armies with different leaders and ideas, there was division in the armies themselves. Robert Mugabe’s army was only one, but was the most extreme, communist, or marxist, and while the War went on most people thought that the majority of the blacks would choose Joshua Nkomo or Bishop Muzorewa, moderates and democrats.
The War was fought with cruelty on both sides. People living in the villages had a hard time, for both the government forces and the black armies punished them for aiding the other side, but they had to help whichever soldiers arrived and demanded it. Large numbers of villagers were taken by force from their homes and put into what amounted to concentration camps–of course ‘for their own protection’. Young men and girls, as soon as they were old enough, ran away to join guerilla armies, in Zambia, or Mozambique, or even the forests of Southern Rhodesia itself, for there at least they would not be subjected to harassment, torture or death by the government troops. Part of a whole generation of black youth was educated in guerilla armies, sometimes to the accompaniment of marxist slogans, but always unified by their hatred of the whites.
The War over, the atrocities on both sides were gently allowed to be forgotten, for when the black population voted–for the first time in their lives–it was Robert Mugabe they chose, and he at once announced a multi-racial society and the end of race hatred. It is known that Samora Machel of Mozambique (and others) said to Robert Mugabe: ‘Don’t make our mistake, don’t throw out the whites, because you will be left with a devastated economy.’ The devastation was not all the result of war, but because the departing Portuguese made a point of burning and destroying everything they could before they left–behaviour we saw recently when Saddam Hussein was forced out of Kuwait.
The young nation Zimbabwe came into being in 1980. That is to say, from the arrival of the Pioneer Column at the foot of the small hill that would mark the beginnings of Salisbury, called the Kopje, to Independence, took ninety years. Ninety years–nothing. Yet in that time the culture of that large area–roughly the size of Spain–had been destroyed; the people had been kept subdued by all the power of modern weapons, policing, propaganda; finally they had rebelled against armies equipped with the most advanced