Excerpt from African Chronicles Volume I: Rhodesia-Zimbabwe
Salisbury, Rhodesia, circa 1965
Chapter 6. First Impressions
Filled with great expectations, we disembarked into sparkling mid-afternoon sunlight. It was a clear warm winter day in southern Africa. Our team was now just four male teachers, four wives and five children. We were met on the tarmac by John Fraser and four gleaming black Rolls-Royces, driven by well-groomed black chauffeurs. Fraser was a senior officer of the Rhodesian Ministry of Education. He was white, somewhat under middle age, direct and friendly in a business-like way. “You are all welcome to Rhodesia,” he said and shook hands with all thirteen of us, including Danny Weary, age two. The chauffeurs stood beside their purring vehicles, hands behind their backs. Fraser collected our passports and baggage stubs and assured us that he would look after all immigration and customs procedures and bring our stamped passports and bags to the hotel. We gave our hand luggage into the white-gloved hands of the drivers, who guided each couple or family into the spacious interior of one of the vehicles.
As our Rolls sped off, Louanne and I said nothing to each other, reluctant to personalize the VIP treatment we were receiving. We were a teacher and a teacher’s wife assigned to a remote missionary school on the edge of a desert. These practiced protocols, the trappings of a tentative relationship between two distant governments, had nothing to do with us and, as we soon discovered, did not endure. Still we savoured the moment.
We tried engaging our driver in small talk: how in Canada we drove on the other – the right – side of the road; how smooth the roads in Salisbury (how smooth the car!); how fine the city. But he was reluctant to respond. So we understood that conversation with our white-gloved chauffeur was also tentative, as if our words were crossing a frontier and subject to the conventions of diplomacy or, as I later understood, the rules of “petty apartheid.”
Salisbury was sprawling, sun-blanched and beautiful. Wide boulevards intersected at perfect right angles. There were palm trees, flowering trees and shrubs, and small green parks. Expansive white bungalows crouched on well tended properties that resembled the small parks. The traffic was steady, but the vehicles were just part of the infrastructure and, strangely, for me that first afternoon in Salisbury the infrastructure was everything. It was past closing time for shops and offices. I saw few people on the streets, none of whom were black. As we neared the centre of the city one and two storey concrete colonial structures, white or cream coloured, with red tile roofs lined the roads, gracefully giving way in places to blocks of stylish five and ten storey brick and glass high rises. Surely this whole city had been designed to please the eye. The elegant Ambassador Hotel was at home in this graceful setting.
There was little time to unpack and rest. We had to shower, shake out our best clothes after two days in suitcases and dress for dinner. The Deputy Minister of Education had “cordially invited” the four Canadian teachers and their wives to a reception at his home and had arranged for daughters of ministry officials to babysit the children in their hotel rooms. At 7:30 PM our small fleet of soundless vehicles returned. It was already dark, well past sunset in the sub-tropics. The evening air was fragrant with unseen blossoms. We pulled away from the hotel and joined a police motorcycle escort waiting on the road. Discrete sirens led us carefully through respectful traffic. The atmosphere, the whole experience, was profoundly seductive.
But stepping inside the rambling house, we came face to face with the anomalies of white Rhodesia. We had seemingly crossed from the manicured city into the comfort of a farmhouse – or the family home of a slightly down-at-heel late Victorian English gentleman. We were greeted by an array of hard and soft furnishings of diverse ages and styles and a confusion of about two dozen middle rank white Rhodesians, men and women in about equal numbers, also of various ages and remarkably diverse styles of apparel. Black men in white uniforms floated about with drinks, napkins and meat balls on tooth picks.
John Fraser introduced us around the room as best he could. Names and titles quickly became a blur. It seemed that everyone worked within the Ministry of Education but few of them had any inkling of our mission. One woman chastised us for choosing to work only in black schools. “Our white children need good teachers too,” she said reprovingly. When I responded that our schools were selected by the Ministry, she seemed perplexed.
Another woman asked me whether it was true that Canada was a police state. I felt that I disappointed her when I responded in the negative. She said, “Are you sure?”
At the far end of the large living-dining room was on oversize wooden dining table draped with a heavy white linen tablecloth and bearing an assortment of heavy glass casseroles and china serving dishes. The chef, a black man with a tall white toadstool-shaped hat, carved us slices of roast beef and baked ham while we helped ourselves to potato salad and cold canned beans. “Heinz,” said the chef. “Heinz beans.”
The sidebar held an immense silver tea service.
“Tea or coffee?” asked the waiter.
“Coffee,” I replied. “Thank you.”
“Black or white?”
“Pardon?”
“Black or white?”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant. He saw my puzzlement. “Would you like milk with your coffee?” he asked, smiling at last.
“Oh, I’ll take it white,” I said.
He poured the coffee and the warm milk simultaneously into my cup, in equal quantities. The coffee was indeed white.
Filled with great expectations, we disembarked into sparkling mid-afternoon sunlight. It was a clear warm winter day in southern Africa. Our team was now just four male teachers, four wives and five children. We were met on the tarmac by John Fraser and four gleaming black Rolls-Royces, driven by well-groomed black chauffeurs. Fraser was a senior officer of the Rhodesian Ministry of Education. He was white, somewhat under middle age, direct and friendly in a business-like way. “You are all welcome to Rhodesia,” he said and shook hands with all thirteen of us, including Danny Weary, age two. The chauffeurs stood beside their purring vehicles, hands behind their backs. Fraser collected our passports and baggage stubs and assured us that he would look after all immigration and customs procedures and bring our stamped passports and bags to the hotel. We gave our hand luggage into the white-gloved hands of the drivers, who guided each couple or family into the spacious interior of one of the vehicles.
As our Rolls sped off, Louanne and I said nothing to each other, reluctant to personalize the VIP treatment we were receiving. We were a teacher and a teacher’s wife assigned to a remote missionary school on the edge of a desert. These practiced protocols, the trappings of a tentative relationship between two distant governments, had nothing to do with us and, as we soon discovered, did not endure. Still we savoured the moment.
We tried engaging our driver in small talk: how in Canada we drove on the other – the right – side of the road; how smooth the roads in Salisbury (how smooth the car!); how fine the city. But he was reluctant to respond. So we understood that conversation with our white-gloved chauffeur was also tentative, as if our words were crossing a frontier and subject to the conventions of diplomacy or, as I later understood, the rules of “petty apartheid.”
Salisbury was sprawling, sun-blanched and beautiful. Wide boulevards intersected at perfect right angles. There were palm trees, flowering trees and shrubs, and small green parks. Expansive white bungalows crouched on well tended properties that resembled the small parks. The traffic was steady, but the vehicles were just part of the infrastructure and, strangely, for me that first afternoon in Salisbury the infrastructure was everything. It was past closing time for shops and offices. I saw few people on the streets, none of whom were black. As we neared the centre of the city one and two storey concrete colonial structures, white or cream coloured, with red tile roofs lined the roads, gracefully giving way in places to blocks of stylish five and ten storey brick and glass high rises. Surely this whole city had been designed to please the eye. The elegant Ambassador Hotel was at home in this graceful setting.
There was little time to unpack and rest. We had to shower, shake out our best clothes after two days in suitcases and dress for dinner. The Deputy Minister of Education had “cordially invited” the four Canadian teachers and their wives to a reception at his home and had arranged for daughters of ministry officials to babysit the children in their hotel rooms. At 7:30 PM our small fleet of soundless vehicles returned. It was already dark, well past sunset in the sub-tropics. The evening air was fragrant with unseen blossoms. We pulled away from the hotel and joined a police motorcycle escort waiting on the road. Discrete sirens led us carefully through respectful traffic. The atmosphere, the whole experience, was profoundly seductive.
But stepping inside the rambling house, we came face to face with the anomalies of white Rhodesia. We had seemingly crossed from the manicured city into the comfort of a farmhouse – or the family home of a slightly down-at-heel late Victorian English gentleman. We were greeted by an array of hard and soft furnishings of diverse ages and styles and a confusion of about two dozen middle rank white Rhodesians, men and women in about equal numbers, also of various ages and remarkably diverse styles of apparel. Black men in white uniforms floated about with drinks, napkins and meat balls on tooth picks.
John Fraser introduced us around the room as best he could. Names and titles quickly became a blur. It seemed that everyone worked within the Ministry of Education but few of them had any inkling of our mission. One woman chastised us for choosing to work only in black schools. “Our white children need good teachers too,” she said reprovingly. When I responded that our schools were selected by the Ministry, she seemed perplexed.
Another woman asked me whether it was true that Canada was a police state. I felt that I disappointed her when I responded in the negative. She said, “Are you sure?”
At the far end of the large living-dining room was on oversize wooden dining table draped with a heavy white linen tablecloth and bearing an assortment of heavy glass casseroles and china serving dishes. The chef, a black man with a tall white toadstool-shaped hat, carved us slices of roast beef and baked ham while we helped ourselves to potato salad and cold canned beans. “Heinz,” said the chef. “Heinz beans.”
The sidebar held an immense silver tea service.
“Tea or coffee?” asked the waiter.
“Coffee,” I replied. “Thank you.”
“Black or white?”
“Pardon?”
“Black or white?”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant. He saw my puzzlement. “Would you like milk with your coffee?” he asked, smiling at last.
“Oh, I’ll take it white,” I said.
He poured the coffee and the warm milk simultaneously into my cup, in equal quantities. The coffee was indeed white.
