"Bang Gang"

Armed reporters in Rhodesia

Winston Churchill packed a pistol when he covered the Boer War for London's Morning Post, and it was hardly a farewell to arms when Gun Fancier Ernest Hemingway went off to report the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. But to most front-line journalists nowadays, carrying a weapon while on assignment is a grievous offense against professional ethics. It also means forfeiture of a journalist's status under international law as a neutral noncombatant, and it encourages troops to consider all journalists as fair targets.

In the guerrilla war now raging in Rhodesia, however, that convention has been shattered. Many of the 40 or so foreign correspondents who regularly cover the country carry weapons on the job at least some of the time. The journalists are so often armed that visiting colleagues have disdainfully nicknamed them the "Bang Gang."

Rhodesia's journalistic arms race first came to international attention last year after Freelancer J. Ross Baughman won a Pulitzer Prize for his Associated Press photograph of a suspected Rhodesian guerrilla; it turned out that the photo had earlier been rejected for an Overseas Press Club a Ward, in part because the judges learned that Baughman was armed and wearing a Rhodesian cavalry uniform. Then Richard Valentine Cecil, a British television correspondent and TIME stringer, was killed last April by guerrillas, reportedly while carrying a rifle and accompanying an army detachment. A check by TIME turned up an arsenal of reportorial aids that includes revolvers, small-caliber automatic pistols, automatic rifles and Rhodesian-made submachine guns.

Journalists who have covered other mid-century conflicts might argue that a side arm is not much protection in a rocket attack. But reporters in Rhodesia counter that their war is different: there are no battle lines, no secure areas/and every white man is a guerrilla target. "There is no such thing as a neutral here," says one freelancer. "If you've got a white face, you are the enemy. This is a race war."

Most Rhodesian-based correspondents have either been forbidden by their editors to carry guns, or would be if the home office found out they were doing so. Some reporters prefer to remain unarmed. "If you're captured, having a gun is a death warrant," says the Los Angeles Times's Jack Foisie. But the armed correspondents maintain that such ethical hairsplitting is irrelevant to their workaday peril. Says one: "Anyone who can sit in an editorial chair and demand that reporters ride around the Rhodesian countryside unarmed should come here and try it for himself." --

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