Rhodesia Infelix: Fact and Fiction

Extract

Rhodesia today is an unhappy country. It is unhappy in its divisions, its rulers and the direction they have taken; unhappy in the international ostracism its white citizens have brought upon it and in the kind of friends they are making abroad; unhappy too in that its human and moral problem has been made a bone of political contention in Britain; unhappy especially because its Christian citizens by and large differ so little from the rest in their social attitudes and aims that Christianity seems irrelevant to the solution of the basic problem.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that Rhodesia should become the centre of a controversy that is assuming international proportions. Its problem is very much a problem of our time: a problem of acceptance of and adjustment to new social patterns and unities which conflict with habits of mind and living acquired in the past and the expectations they have engendered. To those who have enjoyed a dignified and stable existence with a comfortable standard of living, far-reaching social change, however inescapable in the long run, appears as a threat to their own and their children’s security and, if this security has been won by their own enterprise and effort, as an unjust undoing of their achievement. When the required change is one of the integration of two groups of people so different in cultural background, experience and present attainment as are the two major racial groups in Rhodesia – the Africans and the Europeans