Jason Cowley

Cecil Rhodes's dream ends where it began - in Bishop's Stortford

The Observer, April 16th 2006

We have just rented out our house in the quiet market town of Bishop's Stortford to a South African family. They arrived one morning in a friend's car, suitcases packed high on the back seat, resembling nothing so much as refugees fleeing a war zone. In one sense, they were, because they were coming from Johannesburg and theirs is a familiar story. Earlier this year, they awoke in the night to find three men in their house, each of whom had a gun. The family were led downstairs and tied up.

They lived well in one of the wealthier suburbs of the city, in a gated compound, protected by security fences, armed guards and surveillance cameras. But out there, beyond the walls, was an urban landscape of violence and fear: car-jacking, rampaging gangs, extreme poverty. A few months earlier, a neighbour in the compound had been shot dead during a raid on his house.

My tenants were lucky; the gunmen left with what they wanted, including the car, but without firing any shots. Now the family are in England, starting again, without their swimming pool, their black servants and the comfort afforded by all their former privileges.

Not a month passes but it seems another white family arrives from South Africa to begin a new life in the surrounding area. Not so long ago, the town was a model of benign parochialism: conservative, monoglot, insular. But in the last decade, the rapid expansion of nearby Stansted Airport and an improved train service to London have changed the culture and atmosphere. Now, you walk into a shop, pub or restaurant and hear any number of languages.

These are the voices of the new arrivals, the global souls who have opted to settle in the town where Cecil Rhodes was born and his father was vicar of the fine local church, St Michael's.

Rhodes once said that he would have liked 'to annex the planets if I could'. In the event, he had to settle for establishing his own country, Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe in 1980), as well as becoming stupendously rich through controlling the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal.

Today, there are fewer than 20,000 whites left in ruined Zimbabwe, many of them elderly widows who have nowhere else to go. At independence in 1980, and after a long civil war, there were 280,000 whites, and 70,000 or so when Robert Mugabe began to confiscate white-owned farms in 1999 and systematically turn his once prosperous country into a kind of open prison.

In South Africa, a critical mass of whites remains, about 9 per cent of the 44 million population. But they are, according to President Thabo Mbeki, in the grip of a 'psychosis of fear'. What they fear is the return of the repressed, the rage and resentment of the black majority who were excluded and humiliated during the repugnant apartheid years.

South Africa is now certainly more unstable and dangerous than it was under apartheid, for the simple reason that it is more open, with its people free to go wherever they wish. It is also wealthier, having experienced 87 months of continuous growth.

But the traumas of nation building remain acute. The complaints of the once ruling white minority, unsettled by the loss of their group privileges, are anguished, especially on the issue of affirmative action, a form of positive discrimination that privileges black over white in an attempt to reverse the inequalities of old. And the murder rate is terrifying, among the highest in the world (nearly 19,000 were murdered in the year to March 2005 against 853 in Britain in the same period).

Have whites any future in Africa? Certainly, they have been in long retreat throughout the continent but especially from southern Africa. Since 1960, white settlers have fled first from Congo and then from Zambia, Malawi, Rhodesia and now, in ever increasing numbers, from South Africa (16,000 whites emigrated in 2003, most of them middle-class professionals with children; there are now 750,000 South Africans living in the London area).

There was, too, the exodus of the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, in the mid-Seventies, which condemned those states to long and catastrophic civil wars.

One day, the remaining whites of Africa may be clustered only in the Western Cape, in their heavily fortified compounds at the very tip of the continent. From there, they will have nowhere left to go, except, perhaps, into the sea whence the original settlers came.

Yet anyone who believes in the multiracial ideal ought to feel saddened by white flight. Many of these migrants, like my tenants, will never return and they will probably never cease to mourn the loss of their former lives, a loss that is Africa's as well. It is certainly not what Cecil Rhodes had in mind when he set off for South Africa from Bishop's Stortford in 1870.

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