Acquaintance with David Steel

This is not a trumpet blowing exercise and I have hesitated with the title. This is because my old friend Heidi Holland titled her book `Dinner with Mugabe' about the man whose ignominious life touched us both very profoundly. She explained that it was really a dinner FOR Mugabe that brought her briefly within arms reach of her subject. In my case, I reminisce, vaingloriously about attending a dinner with a group of opposition politicians in former Rhodesia with Sir David Steel more than thirty years ago.

David Steel, leader of Britain's Liberal Party in 1976, appeared on BBC television's `Empire's Children' this evening. The program took me back to the year 1977 (if I remember rightly) when he visited Rhodesia. It was at a time when a flurry of VIPs from Britain and America were calling in to meet the country's political leaders and members of a formal opposition party of which I was an executive member. He found time to meet members of the National Unifying Force, a party I helped to found towards the end of my long and unsuccessful quest to defeat the Rhodesian Front at the polls. I remember Steel as young, dark haired, keenly intelligent and an earnest enquirer into the complexities of Rhodesia's rebellious and illegal status as a former British colony. We exchanged a few words but it was only through today's TV revelation that I discovered that a little his life's experience has been linked with gossamer-thin threads to my own.

For starters, I too am one of Empire's children but Steel's reminiscences are of Kenya, a kind of `sister-colony to the Rhodesia where I was born and where I lived for 70 years. David Steel the younger lived in Africa until he was twelve years old and his Empire story reveals him in a journey of re-discovery of the important episode in Kenya of his hugely respected father, also David Steel, a Presbyterian Minister of St Andrew's Church in Nairobi. The Rev. Steel spoke out powerfully and bravely against the colonial government's harsh treatment meted out to Kenya's blacks at the time of Kenya's `emergency' when the majority (mostly Kikuyu) took to the warpath, led by the Mau Mau. It was a very violent time and the BBC's photographs shown on the programme left viewers in no doubt of that.

My late brother, also a David, was a forensic photographer in the Kenya Police during that time and I felt sure that he took some of those pictures. He carried a collection of them and showed them to me when he left Kenya, horrified and embittered about an Africa he had loved and lived in for his first quarter century. David Steel's journey of enquiry into the past told me much that I needed to know about that period of colonial history. Much of it chimes with Rhodesia's story of African nationalist struggle to repossess the land. No Mau Mau-type oaths there, but many more violent deaths - many thousands of blacks and a couple of thousand whites in Zimbabwe's struggle for independence. I joined with a minority of Rhodesia's whites in an effort to deflect Ian Smith's RF party from the path of war. As in Kenya, there were brave and outspoken Christians in Rhodesia: the Catholic Bishop Lamont, Anglican Rev Sam Wood, Methodists, the Rev. Fred Rea and Ken Mew to name a few.

I looked up David Steel's biography in Wikipedia and noted with interest that he succeeded the disgraced Jeremy Thorpe as Party leader. I met Jeremy Thorpe (over two lunches, no dinners), when he visited Rhodesia to see his old school friend who was my political mentor, Jeremy Broome. Even more interesting: I learned that Steel and David Owen, another, more powerful British politician whom we (opposition to Smith) met in Rhodesia was closely linked, not always amicably, with David Steel's political party life.

Finally, after meeting many and various of his father's admirers, inclluding a group of ancients who remain bouond in solidarity together in a Mau Mau veterans association, David Steel is recorded most recently searching the Kenyan National Archives in Kenya in order to learn more of his illustrius father's life in that colony. He discovers an impressive collection of letters revealing Rev. Steel's struggle with British officials on behalf of his African flock.

This last puts me in mind of the fact that I must hasten to see that my papers (the lifetime collection of an ancient, `colonial relic') - both personal and political - must continue to be safely stored. The first twenty years from 1962 when the Rhodesian Front came to power in Rhodesia are safely archived at my old Cape Town University; the next twenty, to 2003 will soon be on their way to the Hoover Institution at Stanford in America. Insignificant though my personal role in the greater scheme of Zimbabwe's history might have been, there are often many marked down truths from long-gone witnesses to be found in carefully preserved documents, wherever they may be.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) flag's official prayer.

I found a poster among my papers today and found I have forgottern how to copy to my blog. Originally, it was a full colour illustration "inserted on behalf of the Government" as Advertisement Supplement :The Sunday Mail - The Sunday News. September 2, 1979.

The advert was published on the day the Zimbabwe Rhodesia flag was raised on September 2 at thirteen centres throughout the country and six months before Zimbabwe's Independence was formally ushered in on April 18, 1980 . The "Rhodesia" bit was forever dropped but the colours remained the same and the design was varied to match the aspiration of a new Zimbabwe. Unhappily the message now is more true than ever - 28 years on on the accompanying logo "The people want peace - That is what the people want". This appears at the foot of every one of the full colour, A3 pages.

The expressions of great and good intentions advertised in the September poster show how tragically Zimbabweans were duped by Mugabe and his gang of political assassins and thieves into believing we would be well ruled after the liberation struggle was ended.

If I can master the technology I will copy another page of the advert in another blog. It tells us the meaning of the dumped flag's five colours:

GOLD for the bird of Gold that tells our country's wealth;
GREEN, our land that grows food for all and fulfils our needs;
BLACK that says the government belongs to the people;
WHITE that promises home for every minority and faith;
RED that speaks of our nation's sacrifices.

Only the black and the red now speak truth. Especially the red; the sacrifices are still being made while their true purpose has, since 2000 been utterly betrayed.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell

What more is there to say?

I bought a copy of The Guardian newspaper today because the front page blared out "Exclusive:secret film reveals how Mugabe stole an election". I followed this up on the internet. The video was brief but plausible. Brave Shepherd Yuda seems to have done his best to give his testimony to history before he escaped to a safer place.

Mr Yuda went along with a despicable regime for a long time. Thank God he got away. I know dozens of Zimbabweans who at various times "saw the light" and either left the country, changed their careers or made an effort to support one of several political parties opposed to the ZANU PF regime. Until the MDC arrived nothing changed, except for the worse. Things changed with the MDC all right, but now they are worse than ever.

What I find so galling is that Mugabe's elections have been stolen over and over again and by attrition - nobody beyond the country's borders with any influence has ever made any but token efforts to stop him - his demonic rule has prospered while the country has slipped over the precipice.

Can it be that the oft repeated call to Zimbabweans to solve their own problems is, in the final analysis, going to be the only way back? Morgan Tsvangirai has given a lead and has earned himself huge respect for his refusal to be goaded into a civil war where a military machine would face unarmed peasants and townspeople in a dreadful bloodbath, a fight to the finish. For now, there is a stalemate with a lot of secret maneuvering going on.

A defiant Robert Mugabe spits his venom at enemies manufactured entirely in his deranged imaginings. Pity the crowds who scream with delight as they watch him caper before them. Their screams, will echo through the blackest darkness as their children die of malnutrition, their young perish with AIDS and almost every able bodied adult who is unable to escape across the borders scrabbles for food. I hope I am wrong in my own worst imaginings.

I lived 70 years in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia where I was born). Like the majority of Zimbabweans today, I find it hard to believe that a nation with so much going for it could be destroyed by one man. Admittedly his military cronies will hold him up because they are even more corrupt than he is.

I foresaw that the camps set up to forcibly indoctrinate young, innocent school-leavers would seriously damage if not destroy the peaceloving nature of Zimbabwe's people. Those "green bombers" doing the bidding of their Zanu PF masters would set in motion unstoppable waves of violence throughout the country.

Today we are seeing the consequences of a great historical error: we were duped in 1980 into believing we would be well led by Robert Mugabe. I was among the believers until he slaughtered those 20 000 in Matabeleland. We allowed a mentally unstable, liberation leader to destroy hopes of a peaceful and prosperous future in a beautiful country for us all - black, white - everybody, including those in the feeding trough, the destroyer's allies and their progeny. Zimbabwe was a potentially great country. The craven collaborators of SADC are as blameworthy as his party aparachiks for the Robert Gabriel Mugabe catastrophe which will affect all Africa.

Until "Chinja"becomes more than a word, I will write only of the past. There is nothing more to say about the future.

(I have been making a feeble start at mastering links

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell