[For context: Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, an English officer who had built a grand English estate in the middle of Central Africa, later turned to politics and spent much of the later part of his life in colonial government fighting for the rights of the native Africans, eventually helping to bring about independent rule.]
In his study he poured a glass of port from the decanter and flicked through the large pile of mail. Among it was a stiff envelope bearing a gold-edged invitation card to the Buckingham Palace Garden Party in June, as well as the usual scrawled blue sheets complaining of colour bar [state-mandated segregation] incidents.
Dear Gore-Browne, Sir
I am writing to you about the problem of shopping in Rhodesian shops. Recently I witnessed with my own eyes and ears a case in this township when a certain European lady, wife of a high-up officer, found many Africans buying at a sale in a shop situated on so called European site. This lady said to the trader ‘You are going to lose your license because you are selling European goods to these stinkin kaffirs [South African racial slur for native Africans] and what not’. All the Africans kept quiet in the usual way, and walked out one after one, greatly disappointed…
Gore-Browne received hundreds of such letters and at the end of the last LegCo session had made his most outspoken speech to date on ending the colour bar, proposing that post offices, banks and railway stations employ African clerks, the Africans be allowed to form trade unions, and that the other LegCo members set an example by inviting Africans to take tea with them, a suggestion which had been greeted by a shocked intake of breath.
’We English are not cruel by nature,’ he had said. ‘All I would ask, as I have half a dozen times before, is the recognition of our common humanity with the African.’ There had been a hostile silence around the paneled room, as he ended by reminding them of the Northern Rhodesians’ role in the war [World War II, in which they fought with Allied troops in North Africa and the Pacific Theaters], and appealing to the Governor who presided over the sessions, ‘I would ask whether those men back from Burma who marched past you, Sir, the other day, I would ask whether they are stinking kaffirs?’
Source:
Lamb, Christina. “Part Two: 1927-1967, Chapter 16.” The Africa House: The True Story of An English Gentleman and His African Dream. Harper Collins Publishers, 2004. 247-48. Print.
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