Word: rhodesian
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Like all other European settlers in Africa in years past, the Rhodesian whites, by reason of their numbers alone, had always been vulnerable. Of the estimated 313 million people who live in Africa south of the Sahara, 61 million are in southern Africa (including Angola, Zambia and Mozambique). Of these 61 million, only about 5 million are white ? and of these, 4.3 million live in South Africa. Before the independence of Angola and Mozambique changed the power balance in southern Africa, it was just conceivable that 274,000 Rhodesian whites could maintain their position indefinitely over the country...
...somber one: of frightened individuals preparing for a racial Armageddon. In Rhodesia, no group has been more willful and less realistic than the whites, who refused throughout the 1960s to consider the alternative path of an orderly transition to majority rule. It is good for them, for the Rhodesian blacks, and for just about everybody else that the wrongheaded rebellion is at an end, and the financial "safety net" will certainly ease the blow. Yet, as members of Kissinger's flying squad of negotiators acknowledged, there was something poignant about the way Smith finally bowed to the inevitable...
...rights of a minority are protected, and a minority usually has a chance of becoming a majority; in an African setting, where parties and governments and dynasties are determined by race (or even tribe), a decision taken today by a Smith or a Vorster is irrevocable. Obviously, the Rhodesian white minority had no right to think that it could rule indefinitely. Yet, as the whites well knew, there are precious few black-ruled states in Africa where the whites who stayed behind have been able to retain their full rights of citizenship...
...area smaller than West Virginia), are too wrapped up in their own tribal rivalries to pay much attention to tensions elsewhere between blacks and whites. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, the grand old man of African liberation, has kept Kenya out of the Rhodesian confrontation, perhaps because of the frustration he experienced while trying to mediate the Angolan civil war last year. Uganda plays a noisy but purely verbal role in the southern Africa drama. Uganda's dictator Idi Amin Dada regularly threatens to dispatch a "suicide battalion" to Rhodesia or South Africa; so far, however, Amin has limited...
...swing position between the moderates and the militants. Tanzania's capital, Dar es Salaam, is headquarters of the Organization of African Unity committee charged with planning confrontation strategy with white regimes, as well as a port for guerrilla supplies from the Soviet Union and China. Five thousand Rhodesian insurgents are training in Tanzanian camps...