SOUTHERN RHODESIA: The Party

In Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia one day last week, the great crimson gates of the jail swung open, and out straggled the strangest parade the city (pop. 220,000) had ever seen. There were cowboys and clowns, Indians and Davy Crocketts and riverboat dandies. Finally, from across the guards’ sports field came Father Christmas himself, riding on a farm cart in the hot afternoon sun. As he stepped down from his cart to hand out the presents, screaming children grabbed his arms, hugged his legs, reached for his beard. “Man,” said Father Christmas, “this is tougher than breaking rocks”—and he had reason to know.

It was a murderer, serving a life term at hard labor, who first had the idea for the Christmas party three months ago, and it took him only a day or two to persuade his European and African prison mates to go along. Then he convinced the warden. Using an empty cell as an office, the prisoners wrote to stores and charities in town explaining that they wanted to invite as many of Salisbury’s European orphans and needy children as possible: ”We would like to be their parents for one day.” Soon, the gifts began to arrive, and the prisoners, snatching every free moment from compulsory chores and sometimes staying up until 3 a.m., went to work.

In one cell they put the old and broken toys that had been collected—dolls without arms or legs, bicycles without wheels, Teddy bears without eyes. They made tiny wooden doll furniture, welded miniature sports cars, restuffed drooping Pinocchios. Gradually, the cell with the old toys emptied, while the one next door turned into a wonderland. The boys and girls arrived in cars and buses on Saturday last week—three weeks before Christmas in order to get in ahead of the mid-December rains—for the big event on the sports field.

The old convict dressed as Father Christmas gave out the presents under a 20-ft. tree. Other convicts served iced cakes, candies and jellies that a former bricklayer had made in the prison kitchen the day before. Guards, unarmed, strolled about in costumes too, but had nothing to worry about: convicts were on their honor. Near by, the African prisoners swung into a haunting Silent Night, And on the fringes of the crowd, snatching bits of paper streamers and begging slices of watermelon, were scores of ragged black children who had not been invited. “Next year,” promised a prison warder as he watched them, “we’ll make it a multiracial party.”