by Peter Rimmer
Wilson’s only weapon was economic sanctions backed by the American white establishment fearful of the black American civil rights movement. The media publicity for the British Labour government and the American Democrats in being seen to oppose colonialism and, more importantly, racism, without any adverse consequence to their countries was a democratic politician’s perfect scenario. To be seen to champion the poor of Africa in the United Nations would help stop the communist infiltration into what had been a Western sphere of influence. In the end, Byron knew from his research, the two hundred and seventy-three thousand white Rhodesians would be brushed aside by the tide of history but it would take longer than anyone in Britain or America believed.
There were certain strategic minerals mined in Rhodesia, of which ferrochrome was the most important, that were found in few other places on earth, outside of communist China and Russia. Byron hoped the Americans had not done their homework. Without Rhodesian chrome, an important ingredient in the space and arms industry, the Americans would be forced to turn to their enemies for supplies.
The new movement of copper from Zambia had been disastrous for the Zambian economy but beneficial to Langton Merchant Bank and its clients. The process of channelling funds into numbered Swiss bank accounts had gone smoothly, along with the physical supply of copper to Western factories.
A similar tangle of buying and selling companies with foreign bank accounts had been created for cobalt leaving Zaire, the old Belgian Congo that had been in a state of anarchy since independence from the Belgians. In Africa, the vultures were firmly in power, growing fat from the old colonial carcass. Money or the gun, usually both together, ruled. One man one vote, democracy, had been brief.
One hour and ten minutes after Heath flew out of Heathrow airport for Africa, Byron left the same airport on a BOAC Comet aircraft for Hong Kong via Cyprus and India, landing at Kai-Tak airport thirty-three hours later. A helicopter flew him across to Hong Kong Island where the courtesy bus dropped him outside the Mandarin Hotel.
After a good night’s sleep, Byron called on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank where he had made an appointment with the manager. The manager, not having done business with Langton Merchant Bank, had telexed his London office who gave him the background on Byron Langton. ‘African and Swiss connections. Possible major future player. Origin obscure. Probable crime connection for laundering money. Known in market for ability to manipulate funds into tax-free havens. Despite some clients’ dubious background has good reputation. Provide full courtesy.’
Ten minutes of polite conversation in the bank’s offices led to lunch in Kowloon and only after lunch, over good Brazilian coffee, did the bank manager learn the reason for his guest’s visit to the bank.
“I believe the Chinese authorities would wish to buy cobalt from Zaire. Your introduction to a discreet commodity broker here in Hong Kong would ensure your bank handled all our commercial transactions.”
Within half an hour of leaving the lunch table Byron had his contact into mainland China.
“You will understand,” he said to the Chinese, “all business will be passed through Portuguese Macau. My information is that Portugal, with its Mozambique and Angolan colonies will, along with Switzerland for historical neutral reasons, and South Africa for political, not apply sanctions to a rogue Rhodesia. The chrome when offered to the Americans at a premium will purport to have originated in China. With the Western world suffering a severe chrome shortage the Americans will not be concerned about a Chinese communist origin. Full cargo ore shipments will be made from the port of Beira in Mozambique and the documents switched to Chinese origin when the cargo is on the water. The vessels will sail to Macau where their names and ports of registration will change and they will then proceed to the west coast of America to offload their cargoes. You can bet by the second shipment everyone will know exactly what is happening but more importantly, the buyer wants the chrome ore and the seller wants money. We will provide the system and documentation to make it legal for the buyer. My Swiss company will give your Macau company instructions. No British laws will be broken. Fact is, after today, my name and that of my bank will not feature in this business. Here is a list of American buyers of ferrochrome. Offer each of them small quantities by telex as you do in normal trade.”
“Where did you get the list of buyers?”
“From the largest chrome mine in Rhodesia. Those are some of their clients. This UDI may not happen. Smith may capitulate. If he doesn’t, we stand to make substantial profits for being in position before the event, ensuring American continuity of supply despite United Nations mandatory sanctions.”
“What else can the Rhodesians supply?”
“I will send you a list when I return to London. More simply, you tell me what you want out of Africa and I will see what I can do.”
“When do you return?”
“On this evening’s flight.”
“May I suggest you delay your flight and join me for dinner? It is more beneficial to do business with a man one has come to understand. I believe in people as well as bank references.”
“So do I.”
When, on Thursday the 11th November at one-fifteen in the afternoon the white Rhodesian government declared itself independent from Britain, the United Nations was in uproar, country after country outdoing each other with abuse for the racist, colonialist, white settlers who defied world opinion and the rights of man, the right of every man to be equal in all things to his fellow man. A week later mandatory sanctions were imposed by a United Nations for once in full agreement with itself. The outrage was to be squashed by placing a total embargo on all cargo in and out of the country and the freezing of all overseas funds of persons residing in Rhodesia together with dividends due to them from their investments. Finally the British declared that anyone furthering the rebellion would be charged with high treason should they set foot on British soil.
The Daily Garnet, with help from Heathcliff Mortimer’s sense of the ridiculous, drew pictures for the readers of a flurry of heads rolling down Tower Hill and the Tower of London being unable to fulfil its traditional commitments from gross lack of space.
In Kenya, it was reported, officers of the rank of captain upwards in the Black Watch regiment flown to Kenya in emergency refused to embark on an airlift for Rhodesia and military intervention. Heath was unable to confirm the mutiny but whatever the facts, the Scottish regiment remained grounded in Nairobi. A more accurate assessment, Heath wrote in his column, was the British high command’s calculation that it would require seven British divisions to subdue Rhodesia and control the corridor from Beira inland to guarantee British supplies in a country belonging to Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally, who was fighting a small-scale guerrilla war to maintain their hegemony in a country, Mozambique, they had ruled for five hundred years.
The Rhodesian government, by diligence of precaution in their long-standing argument with the British to remove the right of the British Parliament to legislate in certain cases for Rhodesia, and being in full control of their own fiscal matters, had removed their foreign exchange reserves from London six months before and placed them in safekeeping in a numbered bank account in Switzerland.
The day after American factories were denied access to Rhodesian chrome, small amounts were made on offer to them from China at three times the price paid the week before. Chrome being a small part of manufacturing armaments and space material, but without which the whole world would not function, the Americans instantly accepted the offers and clamoured for more. Within a month, the first ore carrier, full to its hatches, left the port of Beira for Macau.
In London, Byron smiled to himself. There was always money to be made from shortages. It was one thing to impose sanctions with words and another to implement them with deeds. There was a risk of which he was well aware, but he also knew everyone was getting what they wanted. The Americans had their strategic chrome, the Rhodesians the same money they would have had in the first plac
e, the British government their righteous indignation at no cost and the risk-takers, the risk of their cargo being confiscated before it was paid for, high compensation for their trouble and ingenuity. The wheels of industry continued to turn despite government intervention.
Towards the middle of the following summer, Heathcliff Mortimer received a phone call from his mentor asking him for a drink. It was the end of the week and Byron had left the choice of the venue up to the journalist, who gave the address of the Duke Inn on the Chelsea waterfront. They had not seen each other since the wedding over a year ago, their business conducted by telephone and hand-delivered mail.
Heath had returned from Malawi, previously Nyasaland and part of the old Central African Federation, where he had seen the only candidate allowed to stand in the election become the new president. One or two people had been stupid enough to object out loud and found themselves in jail where the rumour said they would languish for a considerable time without trial. Doctor Hastings Banda, the saviour of Malawi from the British, had no intention of seeing all his hard work go to waste. Heath’s article lambasting Banda as a tinpot dictator had been blocked by the Daily Garnet editor as out of line with modern political thinking on Africa; the man was a hero for liberating his people from colonialism and the clutch of the white settlers. The press had spent considerable capital on building up the likes of Hastings Banda, the Garnet editor had told Heath, and they were not about to find their prodigies walking the dusty earth of Africa with feet of clay. The man was and would be a hero and Heathcliff Mortimer would leave the matter closed.
The phone call from Byron Langton came half an hour after the interview with the editor and Heath wondered, on his way to the Duck Inn, conveniently close to his new flat, whether the owner of the newspaper was going to override his editor or tell Heath to follow the political thinking of a majority socialist Britain.
Byron came into the Duck Inn looking annoyed.
“Give me a Scotch,” said Byron sitting on the empty stool next to Heath. “How’s the book going?”
“Not bad, thanks,” answered Heath.
“You had a good trip in Malawi?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Not a word. That editor never tells me anything. Probably right. The paper makes money.”
With relief, Heath ordered a double Scotch and a refill of his double Southern Comfort.
“You seem irritated,” he said after ordering the drinks.
“I am,” said Byron. “We’ll take our drinks outside. It’s good to talk to you.”
Heath picked up the drinks and followed Byron out onto the lawn and down to his favourite bench next to the willow tree.
“Bloody two-faced Americans!”
“What’ve they done now?” asked Heath, sipping his drink and smiling over the glass at Byron.
“Breaking sanctions. Buying chrome direct from the Rhodesians.”
“You were making money out of that chrome from China! My guess had always been it was Rhodesian chrome. Supplies in that quantity don’t appear from nowhere overnight.”
“The Americans are hypocrites.”
“Maybe, but they were buying it from China, I believe, and at three times the price. The real gripe was the price you and your Chinese friends were charging, Byron.”
“If you took American industry’s imports of chrome they wouldn’t register on any scale but to Smith it’s a lot of foreign exchange for his tiny country.”
“Don’t you worry about this government catching you?”
“My head rolling down Tower Hill? I read that one of yours… Not really.”
“How’s your wife?” asked Heath, changing the subject.
“She’s with her parents.”
“Meaning?… Sorry, none of my business.”
“No. Everything’s fine and Fiona’s looking forward to editing your book. The marriage is fine. Just the Americans making me sick. There’s not a backbone in their spine.”
“You heard from your brother in Africa?”
“Not since he left Barotseland. Vanished.”
“I’ve asked around. Not a word. Laurie Hall too. Vanished.”
“I feel like getting drunk,” said Byron.
“Good. We’ll go back to my place. Walking distance. Plenty of Scotch and plenty of Southern Comfort. It’s good for the soul to get drunk every now and again, my son. And I should know. Let us see if we can solve some of the problems of the world.”
Josephine Langton’s flat in Westminster was close to the House of Commons and her job as a junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Aid Office, her minister, Andrew Flock, having personally chosen her for the job.
Andrew Flock believed the enemy was the rich, people who had inherited for no other reason than the chance of birth or made it by exploiting the people. Both the minister and Josephine agreed that it was the main purpose of world socialism to redistribute the wealth of the world. Through a member of the Fabian Society, which advocated the slow introduction of socialism, he was in greater agreement with the British Communist Party that believed in the revolutionary process of changing the ways of man’s greed. Josephine’s brief membership of the British Communist Party in 1959 was known to the minister, though his sympathies for communism were only suspected by Josephine. The fact that he was in direct and regular contact with Moscow was known only to himself and the Russians.
Among the immediate enemy for Andrew Flock were the white settlers of Rhodesia who were the worst kind of bigots and exploiters, men and women who had gone out to Africa to steal the land from the black man.
Josephine’s journey to Rhodesia before Smith’s UDI had been, according to the press release of the British government, a last serious and genuine attempt to look at Smith’s concept of meritocracy, whereby everyone would vote but those with education, position and ownership of land would carry bonus votes in accordance with their position and understanding in society. A high court judge would carry one hundred votes as would the chief of a tribe; an illiterate peasant in the fields, one.
Josephine’s instructions had been to ignore the whining of the rich and privileged whites and take notes on anything that would denigrate their position in the eyes of the British public. She and the rest of the delegation had known before leaving London that the British government had only one agenda: to hand over full power to the blacks and to conduct an election on the basis of one man one vote to determine the party to govern the country.
Unfortunately for the British Labour government, Southern Rhodesia had been a self-governing crown colony since 1923 and the civil service, police and army were appointed and paid by the settler government in Salisbury, voted into power by the settlers without one vote from the indigenous blacks.
Josephine’s leak to the socialist press, of white farmers with ten servants and a lifestyle out of feudal Britain, sparked the kind of envy and hatred in the majority of Britons that was to be expected from people who had to do their own washing up. The whites that Josephine pictured for the press were swaggering mini-dictators as close to fascism and Hitler as made no difference.
The Labour Party had won the previous election with a slim majority but the popular action of Harold Wilson in throwing every curse at the privileged racist Rhodesians gave his popularity a well-needed boost: better still, it was done, as Josephine was aware, without cost to the British exchequer.
There were two clichés often swimming in the mind of Byron Langton: If you can’t beat them, join them, and Know your enemy like your friend.
Before the last British general election, Byron, through his twin sister, had donated ten thousand pounds to the Labour Party to further their pursuit of power. He did not tell Josephine he had given the exact same amount to the Conservative Party. Both parties were promised the full support of the Daily Garnet which caused the editor some concern when the mixed messages reached him from his political reporter. He had thought of phoning the owner of his newspaper but the owner had not phone
d him on a vital aspect of editorial bias and the silence, in the editor’s words to himself, ‘was deafening’. There was a wry smile on the editor’s face when he understood the humour.
Byron Langton believed that socialism, in any one of its many forms, was gross over-government and inefficient distribution of charity. Byron’s careful and private research had shown him that eighty per cent of the charity money was enjoyed personally by the dispensers in collecting the money from the public and, like anyone handling money that was not their own, they gave it away with careless abandon. In Byron’s mind, the altruism of socialism was akin to a professional thief administering the bank.
Since his sister’s appointment to the government he made it his business to call socially on a regular basis, which Josephine attributed to his conversion to social democracy and the ten thousand pounds. Being a politician she found her private life lonely. New friends had to be chosen more carefully. Her twin brother was her twin brother who could be talked to without the restraint she applied to her colleagues, even Andrew. The evenings in her flat with Byron were the moments she looked forward to most.
“Why don’t you bring your wife?” Josephine asked on a summer evening in the middle of September. They were sitting on her small balcony with its view over the River Thames. Both held a crystal whisky glass in their right hands.
“Oh, sis, whatever for? Just because a man takes a wife he doesn’t stop private conversations with his family, ’specially his twin. Had a letter from Hilary on Monday asking for money. Wrote back and told him to come home. No place for a white man. That kind of thing. Goodness, they killed half the missionaries in the Congo. Hilary says the conditions are appalling and most of the medicine and supplies sent to him from London disappear before they reach him. They want to tax donations. Not the government, just every official who can stop the free movement of the goods.”
