SOUTHERN RHODESIA: Case of the White Goose

Had it not been that his thirst for education took him to England six years ago, Patrick Matimba, 26, might have had quite an ordinary life as just one more Negro making out as best he could under the segregation laws of his native Southern Rhodesia. But. at an interracial dance near London, Patrick met and fell in love with a sturdy young blonde housemaid from Holland. A short time later the two married. When, after returning home alone, Patrick sent for his wife and baby daughter to join him, he became the center of the thorniest and most widely publicized racial dispute in all of Southern Rhodesia’s history.

Though never before had the government had to deal with a case in which a Negro married a white woman, it found no legal way to keep Mistress Matimba out of the country. But since the Land Apportionment Act of 1941 forbids whites and blacks to live in the same community, the question arose: Just where could the Matimbas go? At first, Patrick, the son of a Negro Anglican priest, helpfully offered to become his own wife’s servant —the only kind of Negro permitted to live among Europeans. Then Saint Faith’s Anglican Mission, in the white tobacco-growing settlement of Rusape, where his father had worked, gave Patrick a job as a £12-a-month storekeeper, and two rooms where he and his family could live together in the mission. It seemed a satisfactory solution—until the whites of Rusape, many of whom migrated from South Africa, were heard from.

The Unwanted. At a protest meeting, 350 farmers and their wives passed a resolution demanding that the government “stop this kind of thing.” When Mistress Matimba went shopping, the white ladies of the village turned their backs on her. A tailor refused to accept her husband’s trousers for dry cleaning. When Patrick entered a bank without removing his hat, a teller ordered him out for failing to show the proper respect for white depositors.

One day Mistress Matimba collapsed after a miscarriage and had to be rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery. The white hospital let her in, but the superintendent bluntly told Patrick he could not see her—”even,” as Patrick said later, “if dying.” Frantic, Patrick transferred her to an African hospital where an operation was performed just in time.

A Question of Conscience. Last week, as Rusape citizens hammered away at the government to exile the Matimbas from the area, Prime Minister Sir Edgar Cuthbert Freemantle Whitehead rose in Parliament to move the second reading of an extraordinary amendment to the Land Apportionment Act. The amendment proposed that any European woman who married a native would legally become a native herself. Whitehead said that everybody would be free of party discipline to vote as they wished, because this “is more a question of conscience than of government policy.” One opposition member foresaw some unexpected consequences. “We say,” he began, “that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Here you have the instance of the white goose wishing to become black, and sooner or later you will want the black geese to become white.”

To Patrick Matimba, the whole episode was proof that in multiracial Southern Rhodesia there is “very little hope that mutual tolerance and understanding will ever prevail. When the news got out that I had been banned from the European hospital, a European youth grabbed me by the tie in a fit of rage and nearly throttled me. He thought it was a crime that I should want to be beside my wife when she was “ill.”