Mukiwa - a white boy in Africa

Mukiwa: A White Boy In Africa by Peter Godwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

History can be dull without the personal touch, especially if one wants more than just a bare chronicle of events and dates, and it is books like this one that help to put flesh on the bare bones of history -- a memoir showing how one person and one family were affected by the events.

Peter Godwin was born in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia of British immigrant parents, The country was part of the Central African Federation, which broke up when Zambia and Malawi became independent in the mid-1960s, and Southern Rhodesia became just Rhodesia. Godwin's father managed a factory in the eastern part of the country, near Melsetter in the Chimanimani mountains. His mother was a medical doctor and as a child he often accompanied her on her rounds, helping her to vaccinate other children and sometimes assisting with postmortem examinations. This probably gave him a wider experience of life (and death) than most young children.

Some of the things he describes have strange echoes of my own life. 

A man had reported the deaths of his family as suspicious, and Godwin's mother, the district medical officer, goes to his remote rural home to perform a postmortem on the bodies. The complainant wore torn shorts and a tattered T-shirt with "Things go better with Coke" printed on it. He tells Peter, then a young child, that he suspects witchcraft.

"How?" I asked. "How did they die?"
The Coke man lowered his voice still further, so I had to strain to hear. "It was a spell he said, a spell cast on them by my neighbour, who is a muroyi."
A muroyi was an African witch. They didn't have long noses or warts, and they didn't wear silly pointy hats or ride on broomsticks. African witches were much more dangerous than European witches, and they rode around on the backs of hyenas at night.
"He suspect me of stealing his goat," said the Coke man. "So he cast a spell on my family and they died."

And I was reminded of the time, 45 years ago, that I met a man, Cain Nxumalo, suffering from gangrene, and his family believed that he had been bewitched by neighbours who had accused them of stealing their goat.

There were reminders of more recent times and events, too. 

Easily the single biggest life-saving aspect of my mother's practice was her vaccination programme. It was a long haul, though, to get it going. To start with, the witch doctors were totally opposed to it. A vaccination might initiate rural Africans into Western medicine and help to break down their fear of it. And for every patient who went West for medical treatment there would be one fewer for the nganga. The witch doctors put out the most hair-raising rumours abut the dreadful things that would happen to people who were vaccinated. They would be rendered infertile, they would go mad, they would die a lingering mouth-frothing death.

And one only has to look at the Internet to find similar rumours, spread by people in many Western countries, about all the dreadful consequences of being vaccinated against Covid19.

At the time Rhodesia was a British colony with self-government by a white-dominated parliament, and there were conflicting views of independence. Most whites wanted continued white rule after independence, and most blacks wanted majority rule. These conflicting aims led to a civil war, which becomes the theme running through the book, which dominated Peter Godwin's life. While he was still in primary school the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, made a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI), thus rebelling against Britain, whose government's policy was "no independence before majority rule" (NIBMAR). As a result, the civil war hotted up, with two African liberation movements, ZANU and ZAPU, fighting against the Smith government and sometimes each other, though they formed a shaky alliance called the Patriotic Front and put the letters PF after their acronyms.

Peter Godwin's parents moved to the other side of the country, and he spent his high school years in Salisbury, the capital. After leaving school he had to spend a year in compulsory national service, and he opted to do it in the police force rather than in the army. But because of the civil war, the police became very militarised, and Godwin found himself caught up in the fighting. Even as a relatively new recruit, he often found himself in a moral dilemma. He witnessed atrocities committed on all sides, and their effects on the victims and wasn't really committed to fight for continued white rule.

After completing his national service he went to Cambridge in the UK to study law, but after only a year returned for his sister's funeral. She had been killed in an ambush by the Rhodesian Army, and since he had returned, the government wanted him to do more national service, but eventually allowed him to return to Cambridge to complete his degree.

When he returned after finishing his studies, Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe, but the civil war continued between ZANU and ZAPU after their alliance in the struggle for independence disintegrated. Now practising as a lawyer, Godwin found himself defending ZAPU members who were accused of treason by the ruling ZANU party,. After the one high-profile case, Godwin became disillusioned with the law, and became a freelance journalist, and covered more of the battles between ZANU and ZAPU, though it was mainly a matter of the Zimbabwe army against civilians in the south-west of the country, Matabeleland, who were suspected by the government of supporting ZAPU.

In all this, Peter Godwin was a witness to a lot of the the fighting, and how it affected ordinary people and families, And so he describes how that turbulent and violent period in the history of his country affected ordinary people and disrupted their lives, both of his own family, and other people he came into contact with, at school, as a policeman, as a lawyer, and later as a journalist. That is the strength of the book. It adds the human touch, and shows the human cost of war and conflict.

A weakness, especially for readers who are not familiar with the wider history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, is that it does not have enough of the historical background. I have probably given more of the historical background in this review than appears in the whole book. He mentions background events in passing, as if everybody knows what they were.

 

I knew what he was referring to in most instances, but mainly because about 20 years ago I got involved in the publication of a book on Christian healing ministry in Africa, with a lot of case studies from Zimbabwe, and had to read up a lot of the history to be able to write a chapter on that history to set the healing accounts in their historical context of both church and secular history. That book is African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, and it could do with a few more reviews!

Another weakness, it appears to me, is that Godwin does not give enough of his personal history. Yes, he describes his childhood in great detail, and gives a great deal of detail about the events in Zimbabwe that he was involved in, but when he left to study overseas, we only learn after his return that he had studied law. It would be good to know why he chose that field, in the same way as he told us why he chose the police over the army. Though the book concentrates on the time he spent in the country, at least a page or two could have said something about his studies overseas, He was writing a book, not a play with the scene set in Zimbabwe, so that when the actors were offstage the audience could not see them at all until they reappeared. A book need not be confined to the main setting all the time.

I had other personal reasons for reading this book and finding it interesting. I had several friends and relatives, contemporaries of mine, who grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and I was curious about their life and the kind of society they had grown up in. And, coincidentally, the three that came most readily to mind were all, like the author of this book, named Peter. One was my best friend at prep school when we were aged 11. He was Peter Russell. I met him once later, in London in 1966, where he was training in hotel management. The second was Peter Bridges, who was at university with me, though he did not come back after a vacation, and I was told he had had a nervous breakdown. He was a gentle and innocent soul, and the only person I had ever met who was completely without guile or malice. I was convinced he was a saint, and wish I knew what had happened to him. The third is my second cousin, Peter Badcock-Walters, who has produced illustrated books on some aspects of the wars and violence.in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. One of them is Images of War.

 The three Peters I have mentioned were kind and gentle people, but in the 1960s, when I was a student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg there were a lot of Rhodesian and Zambian students, all white in those days. And what struck me was that, with a few exceptions, like Peter Bridges, the Rhodesian students were far more racist than the South African ones, and many of them vocally professed their admiration for Dr Verwoerd and his policies, which few of the South African students did. And a lot of their attitudes are described in Godwin's book. 

They were also an interesting contrast to the Zambian students. In 1964, when Zambia became independent, each Zambian student received an independence kit from the Zambian government, with a small flag, the words of the national anthem, "Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free" (which went to the same tune as Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika) and as a group they were given funds to hold a party to celebrate independence, which they did.

Godwin's book is well-written and very readable, and well worth reading for anyone who wants to know what life in war and conflict situations is like behind the scenes and behind the smokescreen of propaganda.

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Ian Smith and Bram Fischer -- memories of a bygone era

The death of Ian Smith calls to mind a memorable day when he issued his UDI, and Bram Fischer, after several months on the run, was rearrested.

The 11th of November 1965 was particularly memorable for me because that was the day on which I had been summoned to the chief Magistrate of Pietermaritzburg to receive an official warning under the Suppression of Communism Act.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Ian Smith, Rhodesia's last white prime minister whose attempts to resist black rule dragged the country now known as Zimbabwe into isolation and civil war, died Tuesday at age 88. Smith unilaterally declared independence from Britain on Nov. 11, 1965. He then served as the prime minister of Rhodesia from 1965 to 1979 during white minority rule. He finally bowed to international pressure, and Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party won elections in 1980. Just as Mugabe accused former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of interfering in Zimbabwe to protect the interests of whites, Smith poured vitriol on the government of the late Harold Wilson for pressing him to hand political power to the black majority. Smith was born to Scottish immigrants in western Rhodesia on April 8, 1919, but renounced his claims to British citizenship in 1984. Smith became premier of the British Crown Colony of Southern Rhodesia in April 1964. On Nov. 11, 1965, he issued a declaration of independence

The other day I heard a radio announcer remarking that a street named after Bram Fischer had been spelt wrongly, saying that it should have been "Braam", not "Bram". But no, he was always known as Bram Fischer. For any of the younger generation, like that announcer, and for those interested in the history of those days, here is what I wrote in my diary on that memorable day:

I went to see the magistrate, at Room 116 in the Magistrate's Court, as instructed. I knocked on the door, which had been left slightly open. A deep voice inside said "Ja". So I went in and said "More, Omie" , and the beak looked slightly puzzled, so I said, in Afrikaans, that he had said I should come and see him. He continued to look slightly puzzled, and then suddenly his face lighted up, and he said, "Are you Mr Hayes?" in English. And I said Yes. He scratched around among the pile of papers on the table and pulled out a folder, and then asked me if I understood Afrikaans. I said I did, and so he read out this rigmarole about engaging in activities which were calculated to further any of the objects of communism, with a rather apologetic expression that implied it had nothing to do with him, and that he knew nothing about it, but had merely been asked to do this by the minister. He seemed very nervous and embarrassed. When he had read it out, he gave his interpretation of what he thought it meant, and advised me not to go to any political meetings. He asked me what the badges were that I was wearing on my blazer, and I told him that one was the church badge, and he looked puzzled again. I then told him that the other was the Liberal Party badge, and once again the light dawned. "O, ek sien." That explained everything.

I went outside and met Pam Taylor in Commercial Road. She said she had been worried about me, and had come down to see what had happened. Then I went to see Pat in the party office, and told him I had been warned, and told him I would have to give up my idea of having a political holiday between the last exam and going home to Joburg. It is not worth getting banned for five years for just two weeks of political activity.

After lunch I was in my room lying in my bed doing nothing, when John Aitchison burst in, with great jubilation, saying Ian Smith had just gone mad, and made his oft-threatened UDI. This means the beginning of the end of white supremacy in Southern Africa. We went up to see Isobel, who told us that all the Rhodesians in varsity had given up swotting and gone off to town to celebrate. And some of the Zambians had done as well, which was worse. Two of them came past waving a Rhodesian flag, so we sang "God save the Queen" and "Land of hope and glory".

In the evening John and I went to see Pat, and discussed the Rhodesian situation. Then we went to Pechey's place and listened to Wilson's broadcast on Rhodesia at 11:00 pm. He announced economic sanctions, said Rhodesian passports would no longer be recognised, and said Rhodesia would be placed under direct rule of the Crown, and that Britain would not abdicate her responsibility for Rhodesia. It was quite a good speech. The rest of the news followed, with a report that Bram Fischer had been arrested. So Pechey got some booze out and we drank three toasts: to Fischer, the Queen, and Wilson. Fischer may be a communist, but anyone who can keep the SB guessing for 11 months deserves admiration, no matter what his politics are. The stalemate has broken at last now that Smith has gone off his head, and things can start moving again.

The "Pat" referred to there was Pat McKenzie, the national secretary of the Liberal Party of South Africa.

Ian Smith went on for another 15 years, and turned Rhodesia into a police state. When that came to an end there was a brief flicker of hope, but Smith's successor Robert Mugabe has turned out to be just as bad, driving millions of Zimbabweans into exile with his oppressive policies.

And Harold Wilson's successors, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have been doing their best to turn Britain into a police state, as South Africa was in 1965.

The "warning" issued by the magistrate was the preliminary to a banning order, issued by the Minister of Justice (then B.J. Vorster). These banning orders were similar to the "control orders" recently introduced in Britain by the Blair/Brown regime.

The day after I received the warning the South African Prime Minister, Dr Verwoerd, spoke at a National Party meeting in the Pietermaritzburg City Hall. The national and international press were there, waiting to hear what he would say about Smith and his UDI, and had to listen to a long diatribe against Sir de Villiers Graaf and the United Party, and he dismissed the whole Rhodesian UDI business in a couple of sentences, when he said smugly that South Africa didn't believe in interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries and that was a matter for Britain and Rhodesia to sort out between them.

The security police reported to the Minister of Justice that I had ignored the warning I had been given by attending the meeting -- ie that by attending the National Party meeting I was "engaging in activities that further, or are calculated to further any of the objects of communism".

I wrote my final exam on 15 November, and returned to Johannesburg, where I got a job as a bus driver with the Johannesburg Transport Department to save money for postgraduate study in the UK. On 11 January 1966 Mr Vorster signed a banning order for me. A few days later a Detective Sergeant van den Heever phoned and said he wanted to come and see me, though he did not say why. I was about to go to work to do overtime, so I told him I would go and see him the following day, between my overtime and my main shift. I suspected that he either wanted to give me a banning order or to confiscate my passport., so instead of going to work I went to ask the advice of John Davies, the Anglican chaplain at Wits University, and decided to skip the country. We left immediately and drove to Beit Bridge where we crossed into Smith's Rhodesia, the first impression of which was notices in the immigration office saying "Please do not allow your children to scribble on the blotting pads".

We reached Bulawayo at lunch time, and had lunch with a local Anglican priest, Leslie Gready, who told stories of how the Rhodesian police used the rainwater tanks of black peasants for target practice, thus depriving them of drinking water.

Late in the afternoon I got a plane to Salisbury (now Harare), and from there to London via Rome.

Such are my memories of Ian Smith and his Rhodesia.

As for Bram Fischer, he spent most of the rest of his life in jail. Unlike Smith and Mugabe, he wasn't a racist.