SOUTHERN RHODESIA: Who’s Civilized?

“Equal rights for civilized men,” was Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes’s 19th century formula for peace between black and white in Africa. It promised the black nothing immediately, but gave him a future hope. Now the South Africa where Rhodes made his fortune seeks to deny the blacks even a future claim to equality. To the north, in the lands named for Rhodes, South Africa’s course is viewed with foreboding, but Rhodesia’s own halfway house is an anxious place. The tendency among the frightened and the angry is to find ingenious definitions of “civilized” to exclude as many blacks as possible. Last month Southern Rhodesia’s whites erupted in angry debate after a government commission proposed that anybody, white or black, was entitled to vote if he could read and made $42 a month.

Hulking, handsome Garfield Todd, the ex-missionary from New Zealand who is the colony’s Premier, was indignant. “We are in danger of becoming a race of fear-ridden neurotics,” he scolded. “In Southern Rhodesia, the spirit of Rhodes will pass from the land unless racialism is banished.” Summoning a caucus of his dominant United Rhodesia Party, he told the legislators: “The vote must be “given to those Africans who have earned the right of being called civilized and responsible persons.” His suggestion: Give the vote to all Africans who have reached “Standard Eight” level of education—corresponding roughly to the sophomore year in high school—whether they meet the income requirement or not. To mollify the conservatives, Todd conceded that for those not qualifying under this “special” educational dispensation, the income requirement should be kept at $56 (which excludes all but a handful of top Negro wage earners) and that the enrollment of “special” voters should not be permitted to exceed 20% of the total electoral roll. Faced with Todd’s threat to resign if they balked, the legislators surrendered.

The change will add an estimated 6,000 skilled African workers—teachers, medical orderlies, agricultural demonstrators, senior policemen, etc., to the electoral lists. But this would scarcely threaten white control. Under present rules, there are about 50,000 European voters on the rolls v. 800 Africans in a population where blacks outnumber whites twelve to one.