The Blacks Vote No

Servants usually know their masters, someone once observed, but masters seldom know their servants. The thesis has been overwhelmingly proved during the past six weeks in Rhodesia, where the white man is customarily called "boss" and the black man "boy." Since early January, a commission of British investigators headed by Lord Pearce, a noted jurist, has been canvassing the country to test the acceptability of Britain's proposed agreement with Prime Minister Ian Smith's white regime. The agreement would give the blacks, who outnumber the whites 22 to 1, a faint hope of coming to power in Rhodesia in 60 or 70 years. The Smith government had assured the British that the Africans were solidly in favor of it.

The assurances were dead wrong. Far from giving their docile approval, Rhodesia's blacks have been angrily shouting no--and with a determination that has surprised even the Africans. As a Pearce Commission interpreter put it last week: "Someone has badly misjudged the Africans of this country."

Given their first chance in a decade to express themselves politically, Rhodesia's African masses at first exploded into violence (TIME, Jan. 31). The rioting has since subsided, but the Africans are still saying no to the commission. Some simply do not trust the Smith government to carry out the agreement; others oppose the plan largely because the whites support it; a few are essentially holding out for better terms. TIME Correspondent John Blashill reports that the Africans are rejecting the proposed agreement by a ratio of more than 99 to 1. The official report will not be ready until April, but the commission is believed to have informed London already of the way the tide is running.

White Rhodesians have blamed the opposition on intimidation by a black organization called the African National Council. The government has arrested more than 1,500 people in the past six weeks. It has placed in detention without trial four well-known critics of Smith's regime--two blacks, African Politician Josiah Chinamano and his wife, and two whites, Southern Rhodesia's onetime Prime Minister Garfield Todd and his daughter Judith. Last week the regime bowed to British pressure by transferring the Todds from prison to house arrest on their ranch near Shabani; it also moved the Chinamanos to house arrest at an undisclosed location.

If the Anglo-Rhodesian settlement fails, what will happen next? The British may well inform the United Nations that continuing the economic embargo of Rhodesia is no longer feasible, and may eventually try--probably in vain--to negotiate a new deal that will be acceptable to Rhodesia's 5,260,000 blacks as well as its 239,000 whites. In the meantime, the whites may well turn further to the right, perhaps toppling Ian Smith from office. They will deal with the African National Council as they have handled troublesome blacks in the past--by locking up the leaders.

"We can put all the genies back into the box, have no fear about that," boasts Rhodesian Information Minister P.K. Van Der Byl. The blacks, however, will not soon forget what they have learned in the past six weeks. "It may take six years, it may take ten," says Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the council's principal leader, "but we will not stop until we have reached our goal--freedom."

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