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