Word: rhodesia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...majority rule by the colony's 4,000,000 b'acks. Wilson told Parliament, however, that the British wanted to empower the commission to draw up what would amount to a new constitution and then present it for the approval of both the blacks and Rhodesia's minority of 220,000 whites. Moreover, said Wilson, Britain would expect to have a veto over the Royal Commission's work. Even then, Wilson added, "the British government cannot guarantee that it will accept the report...
Ominous Gesture. To Smith this seemed a far cry from the deal he had discussed with Wilson in Salisbury. Abruptly, he slapped government controls on all imports, supposedly to halt a buying panic that was rapidly depleting Rhodesia's hard-currency reserves, but perhaps to suggest that big events-such as a unilateral declaration of independence-lay ahead. Then, after a furious 24 hours in which he presided over a caucus of his Rhodesian Front Party and held three long Cabinet meetings, came an even more ominous gesture: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency...
...Douglas Smith, 46, is Rhodesia's first native-born Prime Minister. His father came to the land from Scotland in 1898, settled down to make his fortune as a gold miner, cattle farmer and butcher in the town of Selukwe, 180 miles southwest of Salisbury. "My father rubbed shoulders with Cecil Rhodes," Smith says proudly. "He was one of the fairest men I have ever met, and that is the way he brought me up. He always told me that we're entitled to our half of the country and the blacks are entitled to theirs...
...Rhodesia Smith inherited was not conciliatory either. When the United Party decided to accept the 1961 constitution, Smith resigned in a rage-and immediately received a telegram of congratulations from archconservative Tobacco Tycoon Douglas Collard Lilford. "Ian Smith, and Ian Smith alone, was the one to get up and say no," recalls "Boss" Lilford. "He was the only blessed one to resign. This man has steel in him." Smith drove out to Lilford's estate near Salisbury, talked the tobacco man into helping him found the Rhodesian Front to preserve "Rhodesia for the Rhodesians...
Smith makes every effort to dress up Rhodesia's brand of white supremacy in respectable terms. He claims he is governing in the interests of the Africans, who could obviously not govern themselves. He points proudly to the fact that their living standard is higher in Rhodesia than in any of the black nations to the north. He boasts that 85% of all school-age children are actually in school and that there are modern hospitals for the blacks in Bulawayo and Salisbury. Blacks and whites get along just fine, he says; Rhodesia is a sort of "racial partnership...