Digby reflects on Testing My Memory
Testing My Memory – by Digby Hartridge
As an erstwhile oral historian I know that the trouble with a memory is that each time you retrieve it, compose it into a story, perhaps curtailing or even embellishing it for a particular audience, or rationalising it for your shifting sensibility, and then refile it in your leaky memory buckets (“merge formatting”, as it were), it changes. Fortunately, there are a couple of tales I can check with others, and their memories more or less chime with mine, and sometimes they add quite a bit of forgotten background.
One memory: a typical snake story. Over a long weekend in 1961 I travel with friends by car from Salisbury (Harare) to Kariba and westwards through the Kafue Valley in Northern Rhodesia to Victoria Falls, returning home via Bulawayo. We pitch our tents by the swollen river – stupidly, for at night hippos are wont to come out for a bit of stroll and they could well have lumbered right over us. Then, while I’m breakfasting, squatting with my back to the river, one of the great beasts rises from the deep and yawns prodigiously; three startled faces alert me, but when I turn round I see just a series of concentric ripples. John can recall this hippo. But he can’t remember that we burst a tyre and get it repaired in Bulawayo – on a bank holiday Sunday. However, we’re both sure of the substance of the snake episode.
Pounding along at 80 mph between Victoria Falls and Bulawayo John runs over a mamba – you can feel the bump – and in his rearview mirror sees it lying across the road. We stroll back to inspect it and I photograph Derrick as he holds it up by the tail, its head dangling to the ground. Now it’s John’s turn and in the viewfinder I see the head rearing up and outwards. John flings the snake away; and it loiters briefly in the shallow ditch before darting off into the veld.
Just another snake story.
For the second story I’ll assume the reader has some knowledge of Southern Rhodesian politics. The following took place when the franchise was for Europeans only, but before the governing Rhodesian Front Party declared unilateral independence from Great Britain. It was a chilling experience that should’ve told me everything I needed to know about the future of my country…. In late 1964 the Front held a referendum, like all too many referendums dishonest and open to misleading interpretation: “Are you in favour of or against Southern Rhodesia obtaining independence on the basis of the 1961 Constitution of Southern Rhodesia?” No mention, of course, of an illegal declaration. Anyway, I can replay the scene in my mind, a fresh little film rush: a rally, and Primer Minister Ian Smith and his henchmen walk à la Nazi up the middle of a hall, the audience frenzied. In our brave row we don’t stand up for them. Someone I can’t see properly extends his arm straight and forward with the palm down and cries “Sieg Heil!” A cig is stamped out on the neck of a chap two along from me. I suffer merely angry mumbling behind me, someone kicking my chair.
But who were “we”? If I’d turned up casually, I wouldn’t have found myself with like-thinkers…. It was my first year working in the National Archives and my boss often held forth on politics. Perhaps I went with him.
And here comes the point. Recently I compared notes with my friend Peter Emmerson, a student in 1964, later a journalist and then an archivist, whom I didn’t then know. He, too, has a clear mental “video” and his tale is more detailed: “I remember the cigarette burn incident. Steven Lombard, who was sitting with Judy Todd [daughter of a former Prime Minister] a couple of rows behind me, was the perpetrator of the Nazi salute…. The hall had raked seating and the place was packed. The stage backdrop consisted of large photographs of Smith, one either side of the speaker’s podium. I think Dennis Divaris was in the chair. Ivor Benson, who had almost certainly staged the whole affair, was there. A posse of toadies and cronies, who, as you say, processed with Smith down the centre of the hall, to rhythmic stamping and clapping. Only the searchlights and uniforms were missing. The man himself seemed particularly energised when he spoke. I have half a memory that the event was at the Showground….”
Divaris became the Member for Belvedere (near the Showgrounds). Benson was a right-wing journalist and pro-apartheid crusader, Jewish World Conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denialist, originally brought up from South Africa by the sinister PK van der Byl, at that time Deputy Minister for Information; Benson became Director of Information and was in charge of censoring the press and issuing insidious propaganda. After the meeting Lombard was lucky to escape injury. Steve was of Afrikaans stock and an Afrikaans contrarian can be very contrary; I had been at school with him but I barely knew him.
You may well know the eventual outcome. The Rhodesian Front finally slightly relaxed, reluctantly and far far too late, its apartheid policies. But even in 20 March 1976, only eight years before capitulating, Ian Smith famously declaimed: “I don’t believe in majority rule ever in Rhodesia… not in 1,000 years.” I know the pronouncement has been explained away, and concede that by then he pretended to believe in a gradualist approach to equality between the races, but it was clear what he wanted his audience to think – though one hopes he was ignorant of the echoes of Hitler. Poor old Smithy was a regular sort of bloke, who began to believe in an image of himself created by zealots. And he ruined my homeland for Whites.
That was the way it was.
Digby is the author of the biography of Sir John Christopher Willoughby.
