Mrs Valintine writes

Friends in New Zealand sent me newspaper reports of an address given by Mr Garfield Todd to your students recently. It is because I think you should hear something of the other side of the picture that I am writing to you.

Mr. Todd is a very clever man and a polished speaker. He told newspaper reporters in Australia and New Zealand that he had to be careful what he said as he wanted to return to his ranch in Rhodesia. They loved it and it was flashed across the world. In the meantime he had said all he wanted to say and had made his point. It made things sound so much worse when there were things he would like to tell but daren't if he wanted to come back to this country. This is very sound psychology on his part. Your imagination immediately fills in the gaps for you and you try to think of all the terrible things he daren't tell you.

My psychology is all right too—the bad boy who will do anything to attract attention otherwise denied him.

Now let us take some of the points he made:

(1) That the infitrators were being welcomed with open arms by the local African population. This is not true. The local Africans report them to the police on every possible occasion. The fact that this country is completely peaceful bears this out. If the local population welcomed them we could not hope to maintain peace in this country. That is obvious as there are so many of them. As it is we are one of the most peaceful countries in the world today and any visitor will bear this out. Even my brother and his wife who have been receiving our letters have been amazed at the feeling of peace and vigorous endeavour and the working together amongst all sections of the community here. No doubt my brother would be prepared to bear this out on his return to N.Z. if you were interested.

(2) That the local chiefs are paid by the government, are the servants of the government and do as they are told. This is very wide of the mark. They do receive a salary from the government as it is very necessary that they maintain a certain standard of living to retain the respect of their own people. There are not many ways in which they can obtain money. They are there to look after their people. They rule by African tribal law. The government endeavours to help them where ever possible but there is no interference with the authority of the chiefs. Our Department of Agriculture and our district commissioners and district officers and their staff are extremely able people and the help and assistance given to the Africans in the rural areas would require a book to do it justice.

(3) As regards his vituperation against Mr Smith and what he calls his "racialist policy"—It isn't Mr Smith who is a racialist but Mr Todd. Mr Smith is trying to govern the country for the benefit of all its people, no matter what the colour of their skins. The problems are many and they need a great deal of understanding. This can surely only be supplied by the people on the spot. Mr Todd on the other hand has set as his goal the driving out of the white people. It would appear that he wants to punish them for what they did to him. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"???

New Zealand-born

(4) It is difficult to understand how our government has suddenly become an illegal regime. Mr Smith's government is a legally elected one—elected by the people of this country both black and white (the African can have a vote) long before independence was declared. How can a declaration of independence make it an illegal regime? It is still the constitutionally elected government of the country!

I am New Zealand-born, having lived in Africa for the past 30 years. I have a brother and a sister living in New Zealand. One of my brothers was on the N.Z. Wool Board prior to his death. My other brother is at present visiting this country to find out things for himself. He plans to return to N.Z. in the new year. It is because of this New Zealand background that I am interested in New Zealand hearing the truth about this country. I do not feel that Mr Todd presents things in their true perspective.

To understand Mr Todd it is necessary to know a little of his past history. Nobody needs to be told that Mr Todd was once a Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia. This is made public constantly. No one is allowed to forget it. Mr Todd is apt to imply that he was rejected by the people of this country because he was too liberal. This is not correct. The fact is that decisions were not referred to his cabinet and were made by Mr Todd without reference to his cabinet, who naturally resented this state of affairs, as did the electorate when it became clear what was happening.

It became dangerously near a dictatorship. At a party congress Mr Todd was replaced as leader of the party by Sir Edgar Whitehead, who returned from a post he held in Washington to take on the Prime Ministership. Mr Todd formed another party, which he called the Progressive Party. At a general election neither Mr Todd nor any member of his party was returned to parliament. He has never forgiven the electorate for their rejection of him. He liked his taste of power and he wished to retain it.

Like a small boy who cannot attract attention by behaving circumspectly, he decided that it was better to behave badly and receive attention than to receive no attention at all. His rejection has rankled. His bitterest attacks are always aimed at the white electorate of this country. Perhaps he reports things as he sees them, but it is certainly not as I see them and I feel that another side should be presented to you.

(5) As regards press censorship. It must he obvious to most people in all parts of the world that there is press censorship in some shape or Form in most countries. I cannot believe that you do not have it at all in N.Z. It is certainly operating in Britain today. Not only is press censorship there but the British government controls the BBC. We have had ample proof of this. We have also noticed that reports concerning Rhodesia are often slanted and inaccurate. It is Hitler's theory all over again. "the greater the lie, the greater the chance of it being be lieved".

The British government established a relay station at Francistown so that we could listen to the news which they were so sure was sadly missed by Rhodesians. In fact, after the first burst of curiosity, no one wanted to listen to it. It was so inaccurate as regards our own affairs that it became impossible to believe any of it. We. very quickly realised what they were trying to do to us—pump propaganda into us—and we resented it. Rhodesians are a freedom-loving people and they felt their freedom was being interfered with. We do not resent the press censorship, as we understand the reason for it. Propaganda to uneducated people who have no means of assessing it can be a very harmful thing. It was necessary to take what steps we could to prevent it. Zambia also broadcast their poison directed at our people. A large new broadcasting station was built with British money and incitement to murder, arson etc. was directed at our African population. Very little was achieved.

Mr. Todd's remarks about Africans being suppress, repressed and oppressed are very wide of the mark. I can only tell you a few things from personal experience

We have many African friends. One family who live near us have 10 children. The wife is a trained nurse, a master farmer and she does a great deal of work amongst her own people helping to teach them how to raise their living standards. This, she says, is due to me. She says that I work so hard for her people with women's clubs etc. that I made her feel she must do something for them too. She runs women's clubs and is teaching them Red Cross work.

The eldest son left school nearly two years ago and through a wrong postal address failed to gain admission to a teacher training college. She mentioned this to me and I set about finding him a job, which, I thought, with his background, should be in agriculture. I managed to find him a job in the Department of Agriculture, Co-operatives and Loans Branch at the same starting salary as a European school leaver would earn. He writes to me advising me of his progress. He is very happy in his job and is well thought of by the department.

We have another friend who is a school inspector and who earns the same salary as would a European in the same job. No doubt there are many, but this one I know.

I have a woman friend who is employed by a municipality to look after the Africans in their area and to promote club work etc. She earns a very good salary, drives her own car and generally enjoys life.

The African orderly at a clinic about nine miles from us teaches women in his area Red Cross work—first aid, home nursing, hygiene and mother and child care. I am his class secretary and do the organising for him, arrange examiners and exams and the presentation of badges and certificates to successful candidates. There is tremendous amount of this work going on in this country. I am only talking about one very small section of it. A very great deal of it is done with voluntary European workers. The number of African Women's Clubs is growing daily and the amount of volutary work being done would astound anyone sufficiently interested to come and find out.

These are just a few instances to give an idea of what we are trying to do ... not quite the picture Mr Todd painted for you, I think.

I would also like to tell you a little about Farm Schools. There are many of these in this country. These schools arc often built and run at the expense of the farmer for the children of his employees. My husband runs one of these here on our farm. These schools are subject to government inspection and can sometimes obtain a small grant from the Department of Education to meet portion of the teacher's wages.

I trust this will all be of interest to some of the students belonging to your body and that they will be sufficiently interested to feel that they would like to know more about this country, which is such a tremendously interesting one and which is striving so hard to take its rightful place in the world.

K R Chihambakwe writes

Sir.—Last week when I opened the Evening Post at my flat in Kelburn alter tea the first thing I saw was a picture of Mrs. Mlambo—with a caption that told me her son, my friend, Victor Mlambo, had been hanged by Ian Smiths, de facto government.

I first knew Victor in 1956, when we were going to the same boarding school in the Eastern Highlands of Southern Rhodesia. Me was our school's star soccer player. When last I heard of him he was teaching in a rural primary school in Chipinga District.

What happened to him after this, until he decided he had no alternative but to fight the Smith regime by the only means posible—I do not know—but I find it very easy to imagine.

Victor Mlambo was hanged in a country, your correspondent, Mrs. Valintine, calls the most peaceful in the world—why? If it is so peaceful, did they need to hang page 5 Victor? Why does Rhodesia ask for military aid from South Africa if it is not afraid of its African population? why are they executing more than 100 African activists besides Victor; And why is it probably the only country in the world which makes a death sentence mandatory for such offences as throwing a stone at a bus or a goods train.

Two of the African chiefs whom Mrs. Valintine claims express the will of African majority in their forced support of Ian Smith were killed by three of the men hanged in this peaceful country.

"Some of us will be shot", Rhodesia's national leader, Joshua Nkomo once said, "others will be hanged—but all these things we have to go through before our country can be free".

The news from Rhodesia all this week has been news of hangings—news sufficient by itself to give the lie to Mrs. Valintine's picture of a peaceful, united country. There are 4¼ million Africans in Rhodesia. The African population is growing at the rate of 3y% each year. Thereare about 200,000 white people in Rhodesia—slightly less than the population of Christchurch. The number is hardly growing for many of them are leaving the country. In another 10 years Africans will outnumber whites by 1 to 40 instead of the present ratio of 1 to 22. The Smith regime is nothing more nor less than an attempt by 20,000 people to deny 4¼ million Africans their human rights. This is why there is fighting; this is why Smith's only way of dealing with this protest is—the rope.

Mrs. Valintine says Africans have a say in Rhodesia—that they have a vote. It is true there is a second-class electoral roll for Africans and people on this roll can elect only 15 out of 65 members of the Rhodesian parliament, It is also true that Africans have boycotted such elections—for they are a mockery of democracy. Mrs. Valintine says that the chiefs support Smith and the Africans are behind their chiefs. But the chiefs are paid government servants, dismissed by the Goverment if (like Chief Mangwende of Mrewa District in 1960) they choose to disagree with the government policy. In fact they (the chiefs) have authority over less than 50 per cent of the African population who live in officially designated tribal areas.

Mrs. Valintine says there is economic opportunity for Africans. But the European average wage in Rhodesia is more than ten times the average wage for the African—on official figures. I know a school where a white man who supervised the cleaning of school grounds on Saturdays and supervised school boys' manual work when they were not doing lessons during the week (he had no qualifications officially) earned £95 a month—while an African accountant earned only £39 a month. It was not the job, but the skin pigmentation that counted.

Would anyone blame the accountant for taking to the hills to fight the Smith regime? I would not.

As for Mrs. Valintine's assertion that Todd was rejected by the white electorate because he was 'undemocratic' the answer is very simple-undemocratic to whom? Todd wanted Africans to have a greater share of the franchise: Mrs. Valintine does not—yet, somehow, it is Todd, not Mrs. Valintine, who is undemocratic.

Mrs. Valintine's democratic principles will not allow her to support Garfield Todd, yet support censorship, to prevent the untutored Africans from being contaminated by propaganda they cannot evaluate. It becomes very clear that democracy and racialism mean very similar things to her. If her racialist assumption is true, though, that Africans cannot 'evaluate' propaganda, why is it that according to her, they have resolutely spurned "propaganda", from the B.B.C. and the Zambian radio?

Mrs. Valintine tells us she really loves the African people. She will not protest the hangings. She will not protest against concentration camps where nationalist leaders are interned. She will not protest against Garfield Todd's restriction to his farm and debarment from political activity. She will not protest against a state depending heavily on its security service that its C.I.D. executes a search warrant when two African graduates have tea together with their wives—to ensure they are not plotting subversion. She will not protest against inferior wage levels or educational standards for Africans. But she will join a charitable society to help Africans in need. Mrs. Valintine, you cannot appease your conscience this easily. We do not Want charity on such terms.

The Africans in Rhodesia and the African states are looking closely at divisions over race relations both in the Commonwealth and at the U,N. They want to find out who are their enemies and who are their friends. The line should prove easy to draw. New Zealand might not care what happens in a country as distant as Rhodesia—but at least this apathy should not lead her to support Smith. New Zealand—we know—can do very little diplomatically and otherwise, but there is no reason why it should not take a moral stand on this issue.

Rhodesia is a beautiful sub-tropical country—its immediate future is troubled. Either there must be majority rule in Rhodesia or the settlers will have to maintain minority rule by physical extermination of the African population. These are two alternatives—and the first is the most probable and desirable. Would it not be better to recognise this fact now?