Independence at 5 O'Clock?

One of the knottiest problems that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson inherited when he took over last October was the matter of Rhodesia, the self-governing colony bordering South Africa. Once part of the Central African Federation--whose two black-ruled regions last year broke away to win separate nationhood--Rhodesia's white supremacist leaders have looked with longing to Verwoerd's apartheid state for support, now threaten to declare, unilaterally, their independence from Britain. To try to head them off, Wilson dispatched Commonwealth Relations Secretary Arthur Bottomley in search of common ground between Rhodesia's two varieties of freedom-loving people --the European minority, which wants freedom under white rule, and the overwhelming African majority, which wants it under black.

As Bottomley soon found out, compromise was all but impossible. Prime Minister Ian Smith's harsh tactics have kept the blacks divided--and resentful. At airports and on the streets, Bottomley was cheered by crowds of Africans waving banners and homemade signs with such messages as THE MINORITY STINKS. Demonstrations, however, were quickly broken up.

Smith was in control throughout the tour, permitted his guest from London only a fleeting glimpse of black nationalist spokesmen who oppose white rule. He was allowed three hours with restricted Nationalist Leader Joshua Nkomo in eastern Rhodesia's steaming Hippo Valley, two hours with another delegation in the seclusion of the ladies' powder room at a Rhodesian airbase. Scarcely had Bottomley landed in Salisbury than he was whisked off to nearby Domboshawa for an indaba (powwow) with 600 government-paid chiefs and headmen. One after another, the chiefs, who are the leaders of rural tribes but have little following in the cities, stood up to attack British insistence on dealing with black nationalist politicians instead of "the true leaders of the people, the chiefs." Britain has meddled too long in Rhodesian affairs, said one red-robed patriarch: "We want our independence now--tonight, at 5 o'clock."

Almost everywhere that Bottomley was taken, the harangues continued. He tangled with 100 labor leaders (mostly white) in Salisbury's Unity House, was assailed by 50 farmers (all white) at an experimental farm south of Zambezi Escarpment. At an elephant barbecue on the shores of Lake Kariba, while maidens of the primitive Batonka tribe danced bare-breasted to the throb of buffalo-hide drums, Batonka Chief Binga attacked the African nationalists, adding with solemn African symbolism that "you cannot change a brown cow into a white one."

Bottomley came away with no easy answers. Shortly before he flew back to London last week to report to Wilson, he told reporters that he had been trying "to find a way for the British and Rhodesian governments, and the African nationalists, to arrive at a solution whereby there could be a peaceful transition to majority rule." Added he: "I do not say how or when."

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