The Union Jack was lowered at Government House Thursday as the bugler played last post. At midnight, before a cheering crowd, Prince Charles handed over the formal documents of sovereignty. The nation of Zimbabwe was born.
They are familiar ceremonies. Forty-two times, starting with India in 1947, what was once a British territory has become independent but for Commonwealth ties. For both Zimbabwe and Britain, however, last week's events carried more than the usual weight of symbolism. Years of bitterness and death preceded the outcome peacefully celebrated. And much now depends - not only for Zimbabwe but for Britain and the West generally - on whether the new country can overcome that past.
Two basic facts underly Zimbabwe's bloody past and uncertain furture. In population it is an obverwhelmingly black country: about 7 million blacks and 230 000 whites. But white farmers and businessmen and investors created th economy of what used to be Rhodesia - with black labor - and whited held all the economic and political power. After seven years of war and a much longer political struggle, the majority has gained political power. A great question for the future is whether the power can and will be used to sustain the economy.
Robert Mugabe and his government, for example, face an immediate decision on the fundamental matter of food prices. The price of staples was kept low in Rhodesia, for political resons, by the white Government of Ian D Smith and the interim regime of Bishop Abel T Muzorewa. Corn for meal, the most basic item in Southern Africa, still sells here for less than half the price in neighboring Zambia. The subsidy on corn alone is said to cist the Government nearly $40 miilion a year. The hidden economi costs are even greter. With prices held artificially low, tribal villages have realised that it costs them more to grow their food by traditional methods than to buy it. So more and more have gone to townsm to try to fins work and send money home. Five years ago, the large peasant sector of the economy produced more food than it needed. Today it buys a third of what it consumes.
Zimbabwe urgently needs to make its peasant agriculture more productive. But the political cost of letting prices rise to increase productivity would put a burden on the masses who voted the Mugabe Government into office. That is the kind of anguishing choice that will have to be made by the Government again and again. Zimbabwe's advantage is that it is not another desperate third world nation. It has the potential for economic take-off. The country's large white-owned farms boast some of the most productive agriculture in the world, for example. While neighboring Mozambique and Zambia have had to depend on food imports, sometimes coming close to bare cupboards, Rhodesia fed itself. Under the right conditions, Zimbabwe's grain surpluses could help the whole region. As for industry, the world learned during 15 years of trying to supress the white rebellion with sanctions how ingenious Rhodesians could be in supplying their own needs. Andrew Young, in Salisbury las week as a member of the American delegation for the independence celebrations, remarked ironically on the high quality of the workmanship in the modern hotel here the delegates stayed. "if they could build this during sanctions," he said, "maybe they could give us soe advice ..."
Unlike many newly independent countries, Zimbabwe has a reservoir of human skills o which to draw. The white population, small as it is, includes crucial technical and managerial experts. But there is also a black professional and middle class. The country has had an integrated university for years, and there are large numbers of black graduates.
Prime Minister Mugabe has made a particular effort so far to reassure white Zimbaweans and potential investors from abroad. even before independence he emphasized that, though he calls himself a Marxist, he did not want to 'disrupt the economy' by early nationalisation. On the night of independence, he made a moving appeal to blacks to treat white fairly. "It could never be a correct justification," be said, "that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil ... Our majority rule cold easily turn into inhuman rule if we opressed, persecuted or harassed those who do not look or think like the majority of us."
Anothe reasurance to whites, at the moment of independence, was the atmosphere of friendliness between Mr Mugabe and the British Government. In light of history, this was one of the most amazing aspects of an amazing week. The British were humiliatingly powerless when Ian Smith led Rhodesia into unilateral independence in 1965. That was in part because Rhodesia had been a self-governing territory since 1923. The Bristish Prime Minister in 1965 and for years afterward, Harold Wilson, was also singularly unable to marshal effective diplomacy against the Smith regime. The black nationalist movements, including Mr Mugabe's, always suspected that British governments were not so much unable as unwilling to take firm action against their white kith and kin in Rhodesia. The suspicions deepened when a Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher took office. When Lord Carrigton, the Foreign Secretary, convened the Rhodesian conference in London last fall, Mr Mugabe was highly skeptical. At one point a Mugabe spokesman said the British cease-fire proposals were "a pot fathered by Mrs Thatcher in concubinage with Satan Botha" (Prime Minister PW Botha of South Africa).
The hostility and suspicion carried over into the election run by the British Governor, Lord Soames. Mr Mugabe held out some of his troops, beleiving that the British would deny him the fruits of political victory. There were botter recriminations on both sides about alleged violations of the cease-fire accords. Then, just before the election, the two men met alone together for the first time - and something happened. Aides say each came out of that meeting believing in the other's bona fides. In the days after his sweeping victory, Mr Mugabe sought the Governor's advice, and urged him to stay longer. "I must admit," Mr Mugabe said of Lord Soames in his independence speech, "that I was one of those who originally never trusted him, and yet I have now ended up not only implicitly trusting but fondly loving him as well. He is indeed a great man, through whom it has been possible, within the short period I have been Prime Minister, to organize substantial aid from Britain and other countries."
Robert Mugabe is not looking for Christopher Soames, then, but to the west. That is another reason why Zimbabwe means so much to so many.
Source: New York Times
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