Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [14]
It is tempting—because it is less complicated—to think of the Rhodesian War as being about right and wrong, black and white. The truth is, of course, blurrier than that. On the whole, it was a war of race, but it was also a war of clashing nations and conflicting ideals. The whites claimed they were defending a way of life, that they were defending the country against communism, that they were protecting “our munts from themselves.” In the late seventies, when the Rhodesian War was at its most desperate and brutal, some of the rest of Africa was in the throes of a postcolonial massacre. The liberators of many African states had learned too well the vile lessons of their erstwhile oppressors and had turned their jaws—sometimes literally—onto their own people.
Blaine Harden, the Washington Post bureau chief in sub-Saharan Africa from 1985 to 1989, offers up a smattering of examples of the bizarre behavior of some of Africa’s leaders in the late seventies in his Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent:
Uganda’s Amin declared himself King of Scotland, sent a cable to Richard Nixon wishing him a “speedy recovery from Water-gate,” and ordered white Britishers to carry him on a throne-like chair into a reception for African diplomats. Before he was toppled in 1979, his troops killed an estimated quarter-million people and ripped Uganda, once the most prosperous country in East Africa, to pieces. Bokassa installed himself in 1977 as “emperor” of the Central African Republic in a diamond-studded, Napoleonic-style ceremony that cost $22 million, one quarter of his country’s national revenue. After his overthrow two years later, he was convicted, among other things, of murdering members of his army, poisoning his grandchild, and taking part in the killing of at least fifty children who had refused to wear school uniforms to school. At Bokassa’s trial in 1987, the prosecutor said there was not enough evidence to convict the former emperor of cannibalism. One of Bokassa’s former cooks, however, testified that his boss kept corpses in a walk-in refrigerator and that Bokassa had once asked him to serve one for supper.
Rumors of cannibalism and chaos in independent Africa were, of course, rich fodder for Rhodesia’s propaganda machine. White Rhodesians, the government argued, had only to look north to see what was in store for them if they allowed the blacks to run the country. Pointing to examples of brutal and inept dictators north of the Zambezi, Ian Smith felt justified in calling black Rhodesians the “happiest blacks in Africa.”
The black guerrillas were fighting for their freedom—the freedom to vote, to own land, to receive a good and equitable education, and to walk the streets of their own country without fear. The liberation forces were regaled by their leaders with a picture of Rhodesia as it had been in precolonial times: an era of prosperity and pride, of great architecture and stunning art. It had been a time of self-sufficiency, freedom, and fairness. It had been, above all, a time when the great Mashona farmers had been allowed to cultivate their own land and when the brave Matabele warriors and cattlemen had been allowed to defend their own livestock against lions and theft.
Both sides claimed to be morally right.
Acts of stunning bravery and of spectacular cowardice were committed on both sides. Neither side was exempt from atrocities. Both sides were brutalized by the experience. The guerrillas terrorized villagers, raped civilian women, killed alleged “sellouts,” murdered innocent families, and desecrated churches; the Rhodesian Security Forces tortured and murdered their prisoners, burned villages, raped civilian women “sympathizers.” And at the end of it all, soldiers of all colors and political persuasions were left washed up and anchorless in some profound