SPEECH GIVEN BY A.D.HARVEY AT THE "RAISING OF THE FLAG" CEREMONY IN NORFOLK ON 14th SEPTEMBER 2014.
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Rhodesians,
I trust that you don't mind me referring to
myself as a Rhodesian, even though I never actually lived permanently in the
country. I first became aware of the Rhodesian struggle during the run-up to
UDI in 1965, and as a patriotic Britisher identified
fully with my Rhodesian kith and kin. As a result I joined the Anglo-Rhodesian Society shortly
thereafter.
I was not alone in this pro-Rhodesian
sentiment however, for there was undoubtedly far more support for the Rhodesian
cause among ordinary British citizens than most people in Rhodesia actually realised. I remember
well that the giant slogan "Up Rhodesia" had been painted on a wall
in Dock Road just outside Chatham Dockyard, and on a
bridge over the A2 between the Medway Towns and London the painted phrase
"Support Ian Smith" became so well known locally that the bridge came
to be known colloquially as the "Support Ian Smith" bridge!
The first time that I actually set foot on
Rhodesian soil was in 1974, when I was following Willie-John McBride's British
Lions on their tour around Southern Africa. My colonial mindset had earlier caused me
to fall in love with South Africa and its lifestyle, but once I
reached Rhodesia I realised that it was a very
different - and I would assert an even better country. My total support for the
Rhodesian people started at that moment.
My happy and exhilarating experiences from this
tour of Southern
Africa
convinced me that I should emigrate to the
sub-continent, where already my Imperial heart was really lying. It was a
toss-up whether I would settle in Rhodesia or in Natal, but as I had friends living in
Durban, and I must admit the lure of the sea, it
was the latter which I eventually decided upon. Even so, however, my
affiliation with the Rhodesian nation and people never faltered.
Many of you may remember the famous tour of
Rhodesia in 1976 by a group of, then, young members
of the Anglo-Rhodesian Society who
wished to express their complete solidarity with their Rhodesian kith and kin.
I was a member of that party, although by that time I was already based in South Africa. I hitched up from Durban to Salisbury (an experience and a half in
itself, which I could give another full talk about!) and arrived just in time
to meet the other four members of the party who had flown in from Britain at Salisbury Airport. This tour had a similar
positive and inspirational impact upon the other members of the party, and
although I had to say goodbye to them at Beit Bridge
in order to hitch back down to Durban, the rest of the party were interviewed
on RTV after they arrived back in Salisbury, where their message to the
Rhodesian people was basically "don't listen to the media - you have far
more support at grassroots level in Britain than you realise".
As soon as my South African work permit had
been granted I joined the infant Save
Rhodesia Campaign, and quickly worked my way up to become Organiser of the
Durban Branch. Here again is a story that I could give a complete enthralling
talk about - which indeed I did at a Springbok
Club meeting a few years ago. I won't go into detail about the endeavours
of the SRC therefore, suffice to say that it was under the auspices of the SRC
that I made my third visit to Rhodesia in late 1978 as part of the
organisation's "Vote NO" campaign in the run-up to the vital January
1979 Constitutional Referendum. Alas, as we know, the Rhodesian people voted
"Yes" at this referendum, still undoubtedly labouring under the
misapprehension that they didn't possess sufficient outside friends - not even
from South Africa, in spite of all the massive support which the SRC had
obtained.
After I was forced to leave South Africa and return to the UK in 1990 I was most encouraged
and enthused to learn about the Rhodesians
Worldwide organisation which was keeping the Rhodesian ideal alive. I
joined up with RW almost a soon as I re-settled, and indeed founded the East
Kent Branch, and although I no longer hold any office in this branch (devoting
most of my energies to the wider-orientated neo-Imperialist Springbok Club) it continues to
flourish, now under the title of the Kent Branch, and indeed is one of the most
vibrant branches in the country, with a significant number of youngsters
attending all their monthly braais, most of whom have
never even set foot in Rhodesia.
I hope therefore that I have established my
bona fides, and have demonstrated why I think that I have every right to term
myself a Rhodesian. I don't think I need to explain to you what was so magic
about Rhodesia which made me wish to identify
so strongly with the country, as most of you undoubtedly know far better than
me from firsthand experience why it was indeed "God's own country".
Let us however look back briefly at the
history of that great country. We gather here today to commemorate the 124th
anniversary of the foundation of the nation of Rhodesia out of barren African
wilderness in September 1890 by great visionary geniuses such as Cecil John
Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson and Charles Dunell Rudd
- heroic figures all. The truly remarkable factor about the newly founded
country is that within only a few short years it had built and established all
the infrastructure of an advanced Western state - and don't forget that this
was not only way before jet aircraft, the Internet and satellite navigation,
but even in the days before the general use of the motor car, the typewriter
and the telephone!
One most interesting fact in this regard
was brought home to me personally by a client who commissioned me to trace the
birth of her great-grandmother, who she maintained was the first White girl to
be born in Rhodesia in 1895. My researches uncovered that this was not true
however, as the first White child had actually been born in Salisbury just a
few short months after the Pioneer Column had established the city in 1890, and
that my client's great-grandmother had actually been born in a fully
established maternity hospital. Imagine that, a specialist maternity hospital
had been founded less than five years after the foundation of a new state!
In the years which followed the
achievements of Rhodesia - or Southern Rhodesia as it was known for several
decades - were phenomenal. During both World Wars Rhodesia supplied more
volunteers to fight per head of population than any other part of the British
Empire (and as a point of interest during our tour of the country in 1976 we
met one old gentleman who ran a store near the Matopos
who told us that he'd only been out of the country once in his entire life - to
fight for King and Empire in Flanders during WW1!). Rhodesia became the bread-basket of Africa, the world's greatest supplier
of tobacco, and produced some of the greatest sportsmen and women of the era,
such as Colin Bland, Mark McNulty and Jim Redman - and all this from a White
population which never exceeded 300,000!
It was particularly pleasing to see that
today's commemoration has been advertised as celebrating "The Jewel in the
Crown" - Rhodesia. That Crown, of course, was an
even greater success story than Rhodesia alone, namely the British Empire - and of course it is the basic
underlying aim of the Springbok Club
to strive for a rejuvenated British Empire. It was my very great honour to
be able to meet four times shortly before the end of his life another great
heroic Rhodesian, the Hon. Ian Douglas Smith - a man who possessed the same
visionary genius as Rhodes, Jameson and Rudd. The one thing which impressed me most about his
speeches on all four occasions, and something which will remain in my mind for
ever, was his optimism and confidence in the British people, particularly our
younger generation. You are the people who built the greatest Empire which the
world has ever seen he reminded us, and your youngsters of today - tearaways
though they might seem at times - possess exactly the same blood and pioneer
spirit as previous generations of Britons did!
Ian Smith was right. When I first toured
Southern Africa in 1974 I was regarded as exceptional by most of the people who
I knew, but now 40 years later back-packers from the UK are very common,
exploring the most exotic parts of the world, most of them being former
territories of the British Empire. In spite of claims by the "politically
correct" brigade that British military power is a thing of the past, three
times during recent years British forces have intervened in areas of former
colonial power where the decent local populations were threatened by despots
and/or terrorists, in Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first two of these (and
to a lesser extent in the third) British officials were welcomed with open arms
by the vast majority of the local population, though alas over-hasty
withdrawals have enabled terrorists to re-establish their evil control in the
latter two. The important thing to note, however, is that these interventions
have confirmed that British forces are just as capable of establishing order in
uncivilised lands during the twenty-first century as they were during the
nineteenth.
In that land which we must
unfortunately currently refer to as Zimbabwe the situation
is just as chaotic and unpalatable as it was in those other three countries
where the UK recently
intervened.
It is a land therefore which is crying out for a re-establishment of British
control, as Ian Smith implied. The Chinese have stepped in to take the place of
White colonialists - just as they have in most other African countries - but
they are highly unpopular with the local populations, and furthermore there is
no explorative colonial tradition among the Chinese, who anyway current face
severe internal difficulties themselves. They therefore will not last. A
leading member of the Springbok Club,
Bruce Anderson, who sadly died at a tragically early age three years ago,
retained good contacts in the current Zimbabwe, and he told me that once Mugabe
died there would be a power-struggle in that land, but if a certain faction of
the younger generation of ZANU-PF seized control they would welcome back White
farmers and other skilled personnel, and that furthermore they would re-sell
land to new White pioneers at knock-down prices.
I have no reason to disbelieve what Bruce
told me. There are undoubtedly thousands of young Britons of today - currently
only in their teens and twenties - who possess the same pioneer spirit as the
members of the 1890 Pioneer column did and, dare I say it, those of us from the
Anglo-Rhodesian Society who toured
the country in 1976. It will be they, and not necessarily those with Rhodesian
roots, who will be re-colonising that beleaguered land in the decades ahead.
I have already mentioned four great
Rhodesian heroes and visionaries, Rhodes, Jameson, Rudd and Smith, but to them I
would like to add two other names of true Rhodesian heroes - namely Peter Sladden and Mike Thorburn, who
for the past over 30 years have been staging this annual "Raising of the
Flag" ceremony in order to keep the traditions, culture and ideals of
Rhodesia alive. Mugabe may have thought that he won in 1979, but he didn't, as
those behind this ceremony, the Rhodesian
Worldwide organisations and other similar bodies such as, dare I say it,
the Springbok Club, prove. It is
vitally important that all these traditions are preserved and passed on to the
next generation of pioneer adventurers, so that the glorious history of the
Rhodesian spirit is preserved and carried on.
Ladies and gentlemen, the "politically
correct" brigade will undoubtedly decry today's ceremony and claim that we
are merely the last of yesterday. I maintain, however, that we are the first of
tomorrow.
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