The Spectator readers’ party was as always a swell affair, with long-time subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the sainted editor’s office for Lagavulin whisky. But for once I was on my best behaviour, first out of respect for our readers, secondly because of the man I had personally invited to the party, Hannes Wessels, a Rhodesian-born 14th-generation African, whose book A Handful of Hard Men has me shaking with fury at our double standards where whites are concerned, and at the gauzy mythology of PC that has painted white Rhodesians as oppressors.
Just as American race relations are unravelling, with the odious New York Times running editorials just about excusing the murders of five white police officers in Dallas by a black hoodlum, let’s take it from the top where the battle for Rhodesia is concerned. As I write, public anger has brought Zimbabwe to a standstill. Ninety-two-year-old Mugabe’s 36-year rule has been celebrated at a cost of $1 million while the country is totally broke and unable to pay its civil servants.
Evelyn Waugh had it right. In 1932 he wrote that the unthinkable had come to pass. Europeans were departing Africa, leaving the benighted natives to fend for themselves. How prescient was Waugh? Here’s our own Theodore Dalrymple writing about his arrival in Rhodesia in about 1975. ‘Rhodesia was being condemned loudly and insistently as if it were the greatest threat to world peace and the security of the planet …I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England …The large hospital in which I was to work was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency.
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