THE
10 February 1979 The international Catholic weekly 30p
TA B L E T Italy’s concordat: Giancarlo Zizola Responsible love: Jack Dominian Reviews: Theological words: Laurence Bright Kolakowski on Marxism: Andrew Gamble Puebla chronicle: A. Mendoza in Mexico
An African plan for Rhodesia It is distressing that in recent months thousands more have died in Rhodesia while the crisis there seems to have no solution. The Anglo-American plan is clearly moribund if only because Mr Nkomo wants nothing to do with elections which he would surely lose, and Mr Mugabe, who might win, wants his people to be in power before the elections take place. The internal settlement is, we are told, already beyond redemption and, whatever the result of the forthcoming election, it will not win international recognition. There is an increasing feeling that Mr Nkomo's army is poised for war against Mr Mugabe rather than against Mr Smith. Finally, there is much suspicion among black Zimbabweans at the prospect of a United Nations force to supervise elections.
to discover and test black opinion in Rhodesia, but some Zimbabweans with whom we have recently been in touch (some of them strong supporters of Mr Mugabe) have spoken of a strange ambivalence in African feeling. In one sense, they say, ZANU has never stood higher. This is true in the Tribal Trust Lands, it is true among intellectuals and even among some African businessmen. It would be foolish to underestimate even now the support still commanded by Bishop Muzorewa, but no one can doubt its drastic depletion. Yet even among its own supporters there is a great uneasiness about what would happen if ZANU came to power, in terms of suppressed freedom and wholesale nationalisation.
This paper has always approached the Rhodesian problem on the basis that, faced with a range of seemingly unworkable solutions, the most likely to succeed, albeit far from ideal, should be pursued. Hence we believed that the western powers should have helped the internal settlement to work — if only because they had influence inside Rhodesia which they lacked with the forces outside. Given the right kind of help, we do not believe that the Salisbury Accord would have been the weak reed that it is.
It is true that, even if the guerrillas do not wreck them, the April elections will not be conclusive or force a ceasefire, and Mr Smith's victory in the recent vote on the new Constitution was hardly an impressive one — it only signified that the whites would prefer the internal black leaders to Mr Mugabe. However, it did also imply white acceptance of black majority rule. If a mainly black government comes to power in April, albeit with an entrenched white minority in Parliament and key ministries still in white hands, some of the supporters of the Patriotic Front might be less convinced of their own position than they are today.
What then should be the next move? It is always difficult
It is not so much Mr Mugabe who is in question. Our informants do not believe him to be a Marxist or indeed anything but a Christian, committed to new and authentic concepts of African socialism. Some of the fiercer attitudes attributed to him may have been either hyperbole under stress or the product of the immoderate public relations man who issued the so-called “ death list” in Mugabe's absence. But Robert Mugabe is not wholly his own man. Though some of his enemies are in prison, he is hedged around by militants who cannot do without him now but might wish to dispose of him later if he rejected their policies. There have been many secret efforts to bring him into a new axis with Muzorewa’s UANC or, alternatively, with those disaffected and expelled from the bishop’s group. But some of Mugabe’s colleagues fiercely oppose these moves; to their mind the UANC weaken the revolution, while those thrown out of that party are "somebody else's rejects."
Against this background there is the surprising fact, alluded to many times by this paper, that for some incredible reason many black Zimbabweans retain a residuary faith in Britain, and more and more of them are demanding that
