Apartheid Goes North

"Vote Rhodesian Front for a white Christmas!" shouted a heckler at a Salisbury rally as the campaign for Southern Rhodesia's 65-seat Parliament wound up last week. The man he interrupted--Sir Roy Welensky, white supremacist Prime Minister of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland--has never settled for anything less, but this time "Royboy" was up against an opponent who outbleached him. The result was a disastrous defeat for Welensky and his United Federal Party.

Though Welensky's job was not at stake, he put his prestige behind Southern Rhodesia's Prime Minister Sir Edgar Whitehead. Both were routed by the far-right Rhodesian Front, which won 54% of the predominantly white vote with a platform scarcely distinguishable from the apartheid practiced across the border in South Africa. Under posters showing the legs of white and black schoolgirls standing side by side, the Front blared: "Rhodesia is not ready for this!"

The U.F.P. didn't think so either, but it did promise a gradual end to segregation in residential areas, shops, movies and eating places (though not in schools and hospitals). "We have 200 million neighbors to the north of us shouting 'Africa for the Africans,' " cried Whitehead to raucous catcalls from white farmers. "We must plan a system that will last 25, 50 or 100 years." Stumping energetically for Sir Edgar, Welensky argued that the surest way to preserve white rule was to toss some concessions to the 2,900,000 blacks in the self-governing British colony.

The whites, outnumbered 13 to 1 by Southern Rhodesia's blacks, clearly did not see it that way. The Rhodesian Front is expected to wind up with 35 seats, to 29 for the U.F.P. Chosen to succeed Whitehead as Prime Minister was Front President Winston Field, 58, an English-born tobacco and cattle farmer who looks like Howard Hughes with a suntan.

The swing to the extremists owed much to fear of the growing power of the blacks in the other two regions of Welensky's wobbly federation. Nyasaland already has a black majority in its Executive Council and loudly declares its intention to secede. In copper-rich Northern Rhodesia, the two big black political factions have agreed to form a coalition, which assures the territory its first African government. With a white government in Southern Rhodesia ranged against him, too, Welensky's long fight to hold the federation together seems doomed. "Welensky.'' said one Rhodesian Front leader, "is now chairman of a club without members."

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