The Fall of Mugabe

Born hopelessly out of time and place, a paternalistic white so-called liberal in Southern Rhodesia at Empire’s end, I loved my country unreservedly.  Nowhere else can take its place.  I was proud of the broadly beneficial role played by Britain around the globe: it was, for instance, the nation that had put a stop to slavery (I didn’t realise then the extent to which others were still practicing it).

When a gullible man led a frightened electorate into trying to perpetuate white rule in a shifting world I didn’t shy away from claiming he was mistaken.  I wasn’t hounded in the way I might have been in, say, South Africa or East Germany.  But when the war intensified, well, then I was in a real bind.  The last chance was gone for us whites to make a pact with the black majority.  It’d always been a slim chance, for the misgoverning had started early on, and yet I hoped against hope....  But no.  Old Rhodesians of the die-hard breed and many a new immigrant – a well-off refugee from the welfare state, perhaps, or an ex-trade unionist with a fancy to be the boss – stiffened the backbone of the Rhodesian Front, and they prevailed at the ballot box.

I had, by chance, exemption from military service, but I was now perfectly fit enough to fight and my status was coming up for review.  However, I didn’t fancy fighting in the patently hopeless war against the insurgents.  The time for moderates, who try to understand all points of view, who call for goodwill, was past.  I left Rhodesia, feeling guilty, and the intransigent and callous white government was inevitably replaced by its black shadow, much more intransigent, much more callous.

Ian Smith’s nastier twin, Robert Mugabe, has now gone, but you would have to be a pollyanna to think a new era has dawned.  So my heart is heavy and my only consolation is I can pronounce “Mnangagwa”.  Why can’t the English get their tongues round foreign names: Hyundai, Melbourne, Capri?  (I digress.)

I learned one thing only about human nature from those years.  That was that we’re all driven by emotion, which we rationalise away if we’re would-be intellectuals or just go along with if we’re not.  One day before I left Rhodesia I was debating with a pleasant, generous fellow, explaining in purely economic terms that to encourage an educated African bourgeoisie – “partnership”, it was once called – would benefit us as much as them, and he listened with a sceptical smile and then he cut me short: “Tell me,” he said, “do you like the buggers—?”  That shut me up.  Well, actually, yes, I did: I liked the cheerful servants I knew and the few black professionals I’d met and I had been brought up to believe in a sentimental notion of “fair play”.  And I was as much driven by emotion as he was.  

Where do all the chameleons go? & the expansion of Earth & allied topics

The child is father of the man.  I remember, aged about eight, being called into the garden to look at the big bush in the front garden – I wish I knew its name.  I couldn’t see what the fuss was about until I noticed that it was alive with dozens of tiny camouflaged newborn chameleons.  The servants were petrified of them, for the beautiful creatures star in an African myth about the origin of death.  For a like reason, I too fretted: where, I asked, would all the baby chameleons go?  I wasn’t told then, but most would die, and soon.

At about the same time I started worrying that the land would run out.  Bulawayo was expanding and each month another plot or two, for white immigrants, would be carved out of the bush.  I was reassured that there would always be more land, so it was a rude shock a few years later to find out that the planet was not literally expanding to need.  (Also misunderstood was my parents’ reassurance that Africans were happy with their dispensation and did not – as I would see it now – chase the same wasteful consumerist goals we did.)

Step on five or six years and I was reading Biggles, Foreign Legionnaire by WE Johns.  My heroes are flying over the Iraq-Syria border and Biggles is pontificating:

“... There was a time when this district must have been fertile.  If there was water there would be vegetation.  Like so much of the Middle East it dried up and died when the water fizzled out.  This is what men can do to a country.  They’re doing the same thing now, in more countries than one.”

“Men?”

“Cut down the forests and there’s no cool ground to bring down the rain.  But that’s not our worry now....” 

There was a more immediate threat: von Stalhein and the alarming War Syndicate.  But I had been alerted!

Next I was working in the National Archives of Rhodesia and geographers from the University were scouring reports and photographs for indications of the encroachment of the desert on farmland near Plumtree.  There was plentiful evidence!  The only question was, who did the more damage, the blacks overstocking the tribal trust lands (due to modern medicine their population now doubling every 23 years) or the whites with their machinery and pesticides?  The government did strive, with some success, to educate both sets of farmers.  And meanwhile I read how in the 19th century hunters such as Selous, Hartley, Finaughty and Johannes Cornelius van Rooyen, to name a few, had killed tens of thousands of elephants, denuding the highveld, before the BSA Company reined in the slaughter.

I emigrated to Australia and grasped the impact on the environment of introduced species.  I emigrated to England and the first thing I saw was a tractor ploughing up and over a hill in chalky Wiltshire (after wrenching out hedgerows).  I went on holiday and learned what the Romans did to Sicily.  A TV historian expounded on the Dust Bowl that had driven my great uncle out of America.

The evidence is all about us.  We are destructive animals.  Why did I demur when my old friend Phil said the world would be better off without us and that trees are superior to humans? 

My country right or wrong

It astonished me, when the Southern Rhodesian government under Ian Smith declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) in 1965, that the large minority – possibly even majority – of those voters (overwhelmingly white) who had not been in favour of the perilous move immediately switched to supporting it wholeheartedly.  Bar a few mutterings.  Though exactly a year later I witnessed a clandestine act of defiance ­–a white teacher raising a black flag in the dead of the night at Goromonzi High School. 

My father was firmly against UDI and continued to support the ten per cent of Europeans who campaigned for a “multiracial” settlement (to use the terminology of the times) but, like most of us, he felt he had no option but to buckle down and make the administration and the economy work – indeed, he played an important part in managing the sanctions-busting “grey ladies”, the unmarked road tankers that kept the oil flowing.  And the ninety per cent that continued to vote for “good old Smithy” apparently believed, because they felt they were in the right, that he could carry off their coup against the whole weight of world opinion.  Since when was being in the right, whatever that may be, a passport to success?  By the end of the war, of course, the doubts were more often and everywhere acknowledged. 

Ian Smith was profoundly misguided and totally out of his depth but he was a good enough man at heart.  The loathsome politicians were the ones who were consciously playing a little post-colonial game, like PK van der Byl and Lord Graham – seeing how far they could get away with a naughty little adventure – and they, unlike me, had ready boltholes to flee to and money outside the country.

Now all this has nothing to do with love for country.  A third generation “settler”, I loved Rhodesia and shared this love with recent (postwar) settlers, intransigent racists and brave farmers.  And shared it with the Ndebele (who had “settled” there, too, albeit fifty-odd years earlier than my grandfather) and the Shona, also comparatively recent immigrants.  (The only folk with real cause to feel they had an exclusive claim on the country were the Bushmen – as we called them – and they were long since driven away.) 

Nor have my remarks got anything to do with the efficiency with which Rhodesia was governed.  Do not confuse the issue with economics.  Or with the injustices of modern Zimbabwe. 

When you vote and if you want to change the way a country is governed a few tangible facts and figures become useful.  Which is pertinent to us in Britain now.  You will find them in short supply.  Meanwhile, if you realise that your country is being destroyed there is no requirement to plunge about crazily proclaiming that now “we” have made a decision – whether through a decree by the Cabinet or in a referendum – we should support it blindly.  “My country right or wrong” is an idiotic code. 

“And what should they know of England who only England know?”

Winds of the World, give answer!  They are whimpering to and fro—

And what should they know of England who only England know?—

The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag,

They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!

Kipling’s verse should be seen in context.  It is his complaint about Little Englanders, those limited fellow countrymen of his who knew and cared little about England’s obligations to the wider world.  Prevalent then and now – Brexit!  Superficially, Kipling is writing about Empire while today’s Little Englanders are “whimpering” about quitting  Europe, but the same mindset of parochial ignorance, xenophobia, national self-absorption and lack of imagination is on display.  I know Britain can no longer run to an Empire, can no longer pretend with any conviction to be a great power, but surely we should be trying to create a better world. 

My late 19th century political hero is Lord Salisbury, an intellectual, deeply religious, self-critical man.  He had to keep Britain in balance between the great powers of Europe and the Middle East while trying to hold the Empire down to manageable size, for he reckoned that conflict and killing was contained by village elders or local warlords or nation states or great confederations and the bigger the unit was, the fewer the flashpoints.  The huge British Army could barely contain the little bushfires that popped up around the globe and was never strong enough to take on any one of the other Great Powers without allying itself to another.  His main ally was Germany but as it grew too ambitious so he was forced to think about courting old enemy France. 

And now I support the European project not primarily for economic reasons or to save us from falling into savage American and Chinese hands (though these motives are very valid) but because the European Project is a fine ideal and it could be strengthened and improved by Britain, and Britain outside it could do it harm.  You see, I am old enough to remember when we could be proud of Britain’s role in the world, even just old enough to remember the Second World War (my father went away for three years), and so I am also old enough to remember when Europe last forgot to pull together. 

Note, by the way, how I have segued from “England” to “Britain”, but I do know they should never be used synonymously.  Scotland, who made such a brilliant contribution to Empire, has its pragmatic head screwed on properly, and wants to remain in Europe.  Meanwhile, at a visceral level, I like going through Europe and learning from other countries’ strengths about the failings of our own.  

Can I ever be English?

There was a phrase in Southern Africa – “pass for white” – applied to “Coloured” (Eurafrican or Eurasian) people who were light-skinned enough to pretend to be Europeans in apartheid society.  Which gave them a lot of advantages.  (It also meant they found they did not have to show a “pass”, or permit, but that’s a side issue.)  And it was a precarious existence in the longer term, particularly if you cohabited with a white and produced what we charmingly called a “throwback”, a child no longer quite light-skinned enough to pass.  Silly, really, because all the main proponents of apartheid had a little bit of black blood in their veins, just as Englishmen can boast varying amounts of Celt or Neanderthal. 

It was even tougher if you were middle class (here the term is used as a slur) – as with a lot of superficial anxieties.  Though the class structure was less pronounced than it was in European countries, being overridden by race, there was still of course a class hierarchy. 

Anyway, this is merely a long introduction to my claim that in Britain today I can pass for English.  I have to be a bit careful about my accent in the South (many Northerners cannot distinguish between a Rhodesian accent a strangulated toff’s).  Accent aficionados, of whom there are many, for the English are obsessed with accent, sometimes pinpoint me to Zimbabwe; others think I may be a New Zealander, for New Zealanders swallow their “e”s, too.  Plenty of folk cannot place me at all and if they are charitable souls may even default me to high-born.  In fact, strangers have occasionally assumed I have an entrance hall forty feet long.  Very flattering.

But eventually they sense there is something wrong.  I am deficient in an essential characteristic of the English, and that is a coating of impermeable complacency.  No migrant exhibits complacency.  And if I do find myself getting on with an English person it is probably because they have a dodgy CV – lived five years in Nigeria, an aunt married a Sri Lankan, caught cholera in Venezuela, something like that.

It is hard to avoid topics that will reveal my defect.  Sport?  I cannot stick to football, because I know nothing about it and only found out yesterday that it is what I used to call “soccer”, an excitable game played in Salisbury (Harare) by Africans.  In motor racing circles I can get by for slightly longer.  I know no cyclists.  As for politics and religion and sex: if I want a fight I can talk about them, but we’ll surely end up at cross-purposes. 

Solihull Immigration and Naturalisation Centre

Australia was very kind to me when the only passport I had was a Rhodesian one – and only South Africa and, I think, Uruguay, recognised it.  Despite my British heritage and my opposition to the Rhodesian government’s disastrous policies, the UK would not grant me a passport in the 1970s, nor even agree to admit me should I choose to rock up at Heathrow.  Canada, New Zealand, the US, even Hong Kong, were in their various ingenious ways, unhelpful.  But Australia accepted me on my perceived merits and gave me a temporary travel document.  You can see why, though I no longer live in Australia, I am fiercely proud of my Aussie passport.

I had to get a special visa when I emigrated from Australia to Britain.  My grandparents were, all four, English, but that was considered irrelevant, though two had patriotically responded to the British government’s campaigns encouraging settlers in the colonies.  But now that Empire was inconvenient I discovered that loyalty works one way only and is anyway time-limited.

Fortunately, my wife had been born in Colchester.  The Consulate in Sydney interviewed me at length before deciding our marriage of ten years was not one of convenience.  I was in – would it be worth the trouble? – but I had to apply for an “Indefinite Residence Permit” stamp in my Australian passport.  Then, after twenty years of increasing panic about immigration, it became more difficult and more expensive exercise to acquire such endorsement.  (Immigrants, by the way, are more enterprising than people who have not chosen a country but just happened to be born there.)

Anyway, I was summoned to attend the Immigration Enforcement Centre at Sandford House in Solihull, and joined the other applicants as they waited fearfully for ages in their serried rows.  My name was eventually called and three minutes later, after a perfunctory interview and a cheerful welcome, I was pronounced genuine!  Great.

But of course I am white, aren’t I?  There was an Asian student nurse ahead of me and one of her documents was slightly wrong: extension denied.  “Can I come back with the right document later?”  No, she would have to reapply from scratch.  The official’s tone was curt, unsympathetic, dismissive.  And it would have been cripplingly expensive for her.  Then there was the fellow who had bought a Post Office cover for his worn Pakistani passport, to keep it tidy, he said.  The official positively screamed at him: “The cover says ‘UK Passport’!  You are committing a criminal offence!” and the offending cover was snatched away and binned.  A large black man with a tiny baby was behind me in the queue.  He looked like Joshua Nkomo.  He was sweating with fear.  Uncharacteristically emotional, I laid my hand on his arm and whispered: “Good luck, mate.”  Officialdom was probably worse where he came from. 

At first I was not allowed to have dual nationality unless one country was my place of birth – and Zimbabwe wanted none of me.  Later the rules changed and I was allowed to hold two passports, and neither had to be my place of birth, but I carried on with just the Australian one.  There was an element of bloody-mindedness in my attitude, but I was more Australian than British, though I feel an alien in any country.  However, it became hideously expensive to have the embossed mini “Indefinite Leave” authorisation placed in my Australian passport – cheaper to become a UK citizen and sport two passports.  No more trips to Solihull.  God knows how crassly ill-mannered, after a few more years of practice, they are today. 

And when I next pass through Heathrow I hope I will be received politely, as I always have been.  And who knows, perhaps darker-hued folk will also be well-received.  And how will Brexit affect things?  I bet ours won’t ever be as offensive as the rudest of all passport officials in the history of immigration control, the South Africans at Beit Bridge in the 1950s. 

Unwillingly torn from your homeland

It is the custom to distinguish between economic migrants and refugees.  I, and many of my friends, fall between these rigid categories.  Money was not a motive for my leaving Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia, as it was then) but nor was my life in constant danger when I left, and I was not deported.  I love to travel but I was not seeking a new way of life; I did not sense that I was actually an Australian under the skin with the sort of conviction that affects, say, a transgender person.  Though I had read the Billabong books of Mary Grant Bruce....  However, I believed that when Zimbabwe emerged from its bitter war I would no longer be welcome there and so I started looking for suitable opportunities to depart.  Commonplace enough.

Anyway, I am naturally interested in the reasons why people take the hard road of quitting their country of birth and settling elsewhere, perhaps without having much choice in their destination, and in how they adapt.  I know many migrants from Southern Africa: some have been required to leave home; many have suffered hardships; most pine for their old country; a few have allowed their lives to be destroyed by regrets; all have tales to tell.  It is their tales that I plunder when I write about migration and assimilation. 

Actually, at certain points in any life, there are decisions to make.  In Rhodesia, where they were made against the backdrop of the guerrilla war, they gained urgency, especially at points of crisis.  These pressures could easily precipitate or worsen existing personal problems.  Over and above everything, in a way not known in stable countries, the question of emigration would hang.  Talk and speculation gave way to an imperative and the moment of departure would be chosen.  And this was a forced departure, not a lifestyle choice.  Leaving the place you love for a strange life in whatever country will accept you....  But I cannot complain.  Any true refugee knows what I mean, but with a vengeance.

I always knew the war in Rhodesia would result in an extremist, racist black government, probably a dictatorship.  Old and recent history told me that.  If I said so, outside a coterie of “liberal” friends (that is, rationalists), someone would be sure to start raging and denying the obvious.  I wonder what they really thought?  But of course it is natural enough to deceive oneself; in my own way, hoping against hope, I sometimes wondered, looking round at my relatively prosperous homeland and its ingenious, well-educated inhabitants, with its relatively good race relations and plentiful resources, if there was a future for me and mine.

The immigrant experience

The immigrant experience is intrinsically interesting.  I am an immigrant and if you include “internal migration”, from one part of the country to another, most of my neighbours are, too.  And as this is the case around the globe as, we are told, the centuries-long movement from the land to the cities intensifies.  Anyway, it is not surprising that I end up writing about immigration.   

Europeans in the country of my birth, Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, were all immigrants and many of the Africans were – certainly a majority of those I knew had been torn from their ancestral lands to come and live in a city.  Then I became an Australian and Australia, like the US, is a country of immigrants, apart, of course, from the downtrodden aborigines and I saw hardly any aborigines, and those I did see (never met) struck me as decidedly gloomy – perhaps only as a contrast to the smiling black faces I suddenly found I missed so much.  Come to think of it, all Australians seemed rather grim; the besieged white Rhodesians were surely more cheerful; or was that just because I worked in an institution of tertiary education? 

Immigration has been a raging issue as long as we have been in Britain, and especially now.  I have said the immigrant experience is nearly universal.  It is the experience of not quite belonging anywhere.  But to balance it is the widespread and sometimes burning desire to assimilate, to become, in my case, a fair dinkum Australian.  I despised the “when-wes”, the “Rhodies” who collected together to gripe about their condition and rail against a world that could not see how wonderful we Rhodesians had been.  But most of them were, in fact, making a better fistful of becoming Australians, braaivleis (sorry “barby”) and sunshine Australians, at any rate.  I, of course, became intellectually Australian, an anorak on subjects such as Australian impressionist painters or or 19th century Australian literature of internecine Labor Party politics.  Which is probably to say not Australian at all. 

Of course, wanting to fit in is not the inevitable concomitant of homesickness.  If the host country hates me perhaps you want to destroy it or at least try to impose your own values upon it.  Fortunately, Australia did not hate me, it merely did no notice me.

The title of my novel, Assimilation, says it all.  Mind you, it is ironical.  The protagonist is also unusual in the depiction of migrants, a white African rather than a black, a Rhodesian but not the Rhodesian of stereotype (a farmer traumatised by terror attacks or a bitter racist) – indeed, someone who by language and religion and colour has everything you might think would fit him to assimilate – but still he experiences the fate of the exile, and as his mind assimilates his very soul resists assimilation.

And, of course, events, dear boy, events (as the politician said) intervened.  You should not take on more than a couple of life’s great challenges at once and when you change house and job and nationality and lifestyle all at once the worry and anxiety trigger all sorts of new challenges and the loaded gun goes off.

In my novel Richard, my protagonist, seeks to embrace Australia and to shut out Rhodesia but, initially, he is unsuccessful.  His loaded gun discharges.