How long?

I met strong dissent two days ago when I suggested that Ian Smith has some responsibility for the present situation. ‘It has nothing to do with Smith,’ I was told, ‘it is all the responsibility of the present government.’ Certainly the government could act far more wisely and compassionately than they are doing but we cannot escape the history that formed us for good or ill.

Smith himself flourished for a time because he rode on the crest of a wave of feeling that had been growing among his constituents for decades. He played on the fears of the minority who were the ones at that time who had the vote. The long history of segregation from the late twenties and early thirties bred a fertile seed bed for the Rhodesian Front. The settlers who made the early decisions to turn their back on working with the sons and daughters of the soil – and exclude them from a meaningful partnership – are the ones who set the trend. Smith was the logical heir of such decisions.

Blaming Smith now is a fairly fruitless exercise but assigning him some responsibility helps to understand the present. Because he was such a particularly intransigent expression of the trend set long before he was very hard to remove. In the end the people of the land decided they could only win freedom by force. But here again there were heirs and our present leader is the principal one. Intransigence can only be removed by force, he concluded, but in the process he learnt all the ways of intransigence – and force.
So we are back where we were 20 years ago and again our leaders aren’t listening to the people. The difference this time is that no one wants to remove them by force. We want to do it peacefully as they did recently in Sierra Leone where an unpopular government was simply voted out office. Yet it will not be that easy. The old habits, learnt from Smith – foremost among them, intransigence – persist.

So what else does Habakkuk have to say? A little further he has this, ‘the upright person will live by his faithfulness.’ Faithfulness! What is that? It is a quality of attention and patience that looks for solutions everywhere but does not lose hope when there seems to be none immediately in sight.