Upset North of the Limpopo

When ex-Missionary Garfield Todd was dumped two months ago as Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia (TIME, Feb. 24), the move was based on a hardheaded political calculation. Todd's own party, the Southern Rhodesian division of the United Federal Party, decided that Todd's vigorous advocacy of racial "partnership" between blacks and whites in the Central Africa Federation (Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) had alienated white voters.

As Todd's successor the party picked Sir Edgar Whitehead, 53, the Federation's Minister in Washington, an Oxford-educated moderate whom no one had tarred with the label of "too liberal." Since Whitehead was not a Member of Parliament and could serve only four months as Prime Minister without being elected an M.P., the party shopped around for a safe seat, picked Hillside, a suburb in Southern Rhodesia's second city of Bulawayo (pop. 139,700).

Both Whitehead and his opponent of the white-supremacy Dominion Party--Jack Pain, a bluff and genial Bulawayo accountant and city council member--left no doubt that they wanted to maintain the white man's unfettered rule over the blacks, who outnumbered them 13 to 1 in Southern Rhodesia. But White Supremacist Pain argued in the campaign that the United Federal Party, even with Todd gone, was pushing partnership "too far and too fast." Betting odds favored Whitehead 4 to 1, but when the votes of Hillside were tallied last week, the result was: Pain, 691; Prime Minister Whitehead, 604. A grim and grey-faced Whitehead promptly ordered dissolution of the Southern Rhodesia Parliament and new general elections in June. His defeat was widely taken as proof that South African-style ideology has at last established a beachhead north of the Limpopo.

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