Pigs for Burumatare

Though Africa's hot-eyed nationalists wear European suits and talk knowingly of constitutional provisions and voting qualifications, they are well aware that many African tribesmen are still more impressed with black magic than political oratory. Last week an official pamphlet issued by the Southern Rhodesian government reported that some black leaders, unable to fire up their loyal constituents in the cause of black nationalism, have tried to fan antiwhite feeling by more primitive means.

They spread a story that a gang of whites with occult powers was kidnaping native men and women and turning them into pigs to feed the inhabitants of a land called Burumatare. Tribesmen were told that the whites roam the countryside with a machine that looks like a camera but which actually makes an indelible mark on the bodies of potential victims. Later a lorry arrives. When its horn blows, all those marked will be irresistibly drawn toward it and abducted, later to be injected with a solution that transforms them immediately into swine. "We must believe that the Europeans have invented this thing," explained one Southern Rhodesian native, "because only Africans have fallen before its evil."

Last week, on a British-owned farm, 200 workers--victims of the Burumatare syndrome--quit work in terror, refused to return to their jobs in spite of the owner's attempts to reassure them. "Our hearts are different to yours, master," they said. At the suggestion of his African foreman, the farmer painted 200 rubber bands white and slipped one on the wrist of each laborer. Only then did the local natives finally return to work, confident in the power of the white master's juju magic.

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