THE SIEGE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA by Douglas Reed To LORELEI and LORELLE Published 1974 CONTENTS although no chapter numbers were used in the original, they have been used here for convenience Foreword Author’s Note 01 The Siege 08 In Blanketland Again 02 The Ravening Wolves 09 L’Etat C’est Moi In Swaziland 03 Angolan Ordeal 10 The “Non-Racial” Republic 04 “Wilson’s War” 11 The Chinese Invasion 05 The Martyrdom Of Mozambique 12 Interim Balance Sheet 06 South West 13 The Unabated Storm 07 South Africa; The Great Change Appendix Acknowledgements Foreword In the first book which I wrote after my arrival in South Africa in 1947[1] I said, “I expect Africa to become of major importance during the next fifty years ... for third parties, international aspirants to world power who sought to raise the dark man against the white one, and to divide the white men among themselves, South Africa was a land of opportunity.” In 1948-9, when this was written, it was a very long shot even for a man of my experience.[2] In 1948-9 Africa was a minuscule dot on the outer periphery of the radar screen of international affairs and events. It was not present in the mind of the public masses at all. Africa was for them a large place far away which they knew nothing about (as Mr. Neville Chamberlain might have said). That was to be radically changed in the 1960's when, by obvious preconcerting at the super-national or behind the scenes level, a propaganda campaign equivalent in its noise and intensity to a barrage on the Somme in 1916 or a thousand-bomber raid on Hamburg in 1944 was suddenly opened against the remnant of White-ruled Africa because it did not lie down and let the tidal wave of massacre, one-man-dictatorship and terrorist police sweep over it from the north, where one newly “emergent” state after another demonstrated the abiding validity of old Tippu Tib's dictum that “the man with the gun will always rule Africa”. I also discovered in those far-off days of the Forties, when the word “Africa” was not present at all in the mind of the masses at large (today it preponderates in the screaming daily headlines and violent opinions about it are loud on the lips of every initiated conspirator or imbecilic infatuate in the world), very large plans for Africa were already shaped in those secret places “behind the scenes whence the world is truly governed” (Disraeli). Thus a Mr. Truman from Missouri, having ascended the Democratic elevator from the Vice- Presidential to the Presidential floor at the close of Mr. Roosevelt's catastrophic fourteen years, was soon prompted to announce a programme for “saving the world from Communism” which contained a “Fourth Point”, “a defence master plan to open up Africa South of the Sahara”. This envisaged a “huge project” for building roads and railways between the African possessions of Britain and those of other countries, and establishing “new airways and modernizing scores of new ports”. (Long before any of these blessings could accrue, Britain had been bereft of all “possessions in Africa”.) Intrigued by the discovery of this stupendous scheme for developing Africa, I pursued my researches and found that a similarly stupendous scheme had already been outlined in a book by the then American Communist leader, Mr. Earl Browder. Mr. Browder's vision (or his masters'; Communist leaders in countries outside the Soviet area do not have such ideas of their own) was that America should underwrite “a gigantic programme for the industrialization of Africa ... large- scale plans for railroad and highway building ... all-round modernization ... in undeveloped areas”. Fine and fair words, but all that came of them in the next twenty years was bloodshed, of Black men by Black men, on a scale probably greater than that of the Second World War. They revealed, however, the continued collusion of American and Communist strategy “behind the scenes”, the earliest public sign of which was given by the words of the first of the puppet Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, to Congress in 1917 on the occasion of the Bolshevist Revolution: “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have happened in the last ten weeks in Russia ... here is a fit partner for a league of honour”. A straight line runs from this early revelation through the fourteen Roosevelt years. President Roosevelt told a penitent Communist defector to “go jump in the lake” when informed with proof that his right hand “adviser” was a Soviet agent: the same who was the dying President's right hand adviser at Yalta when the decision was taken to transfer half of Europe from the Hitlerist to the Stalinist curse, and to drive out the Allies' Chinese allies from China and establish the Communists in their place. These are all matters of authentic and verifiable record. Some day a competent dramatist might take the Yalta Conference for his theme. The scene showing Stalin gazing sardonically at the dying President opposite him, surrounded by men whom Stalin well knew to be his (Stalin's) own men has all the stuff of high drama. This shadow policy of parallelism with Communism in deeds while publicly professing inflexible antagonism to Communism continued through the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower. Under President Nixon there was a recoil from it. As far as Africa is concerned, at any rate, President Nixon took off the heat. He did not send “Special Emissaries for Africa”, like the egregious Mr. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, to go round Africa calling for the South African Government to be “brought to its knees”. Neither did he send members of his family to harangue students of South African universities about the evils of South Africa. President Nixon, indeed, showed a sense of responsibility in world affairs: and because of that the termites in his administration, and those in other countries who also work “behind the scenes” under the cover-name of “liberalism”, will break him if they can. The reader will be able to judge of that for himself by 1976. If this president can survive the international onslaught against him and can halt his country in doing the Communist revolution's work for it, which is what his predecessors did, the outlook for Africa, and for much else, would greatly improve. If the next President is of the Wilson-Roosevelt school, the world can, in my opinion, say goodbye to the United States it has known, and should watch out for its own survival. And now, to Southern Africa and its beleaguerment. Douglas Reed South Africa, South West Africa, Angola, Rhodesia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, 1973-4. *** Author's Note For the purpose of this book the term “Southern Africa” denotes the following States and territories: South Africa (with its several Black Homelands), South West Africa, Angola, Lesotho, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Botswana and Swaziland. I spent nearly a year between 1973 and 1974 travelling the immense area which contains these territories, and covered some 30,000 miles by jeep, landrover, military or civilian aircraft, army convoy, military or private car, and rail. My thanks are particularly due to the South African, Portuguese and Rhodesian authorities, who enabled me to go anywhere and to see whatever I wished in the terrorist-infested and other areas. “Southern Africa”, in the meaning of this book, is of course the part of Africa which so far has been spared the régime of massacre and gun-rule bequeathed to the remaining northern part by “the wind of change”, and the words “The Siege” allude to the intense campaign waged from the outside world, and supported by arms, money and the most poisonous propaganda this writer has ever known, with the purpose of spreading the area of massacre and gun-rule to those parts which as yet have resisted the infection. May 1974 D.R. *** Chapter One THE SIEGE Siege: Operations of encamped attacking force to take or compel surrender of fortified place (Concise Oxford Dictionary); The investiture of a town or fortress by hostile troops in order to induce it to surrender either by starvation or by attack at a suitable juncture (Chambers Encyclopaedia); The “sitting down” of an army or military force before a fortified place for the purpose of taking it, either by direct military operations or by starving it into submission (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The reader will see that none of these definitions describes the siege which is the subject of this book, though the direct military attack has for twelve years now been clamoured for by the warmongering majority at the United Nations, and a detailed military, naval and air blue print for such an operation was published years ago by one of the various American Government- subventioned “foundations” in New York. The open frontal attack has not happened, or not yet, and the siege of Southern Africa which has been conducted during the last decade is of an entirely new nature. It is one of bombardment by falsehood, threat and menace from the body ludicrously called the “United Nations” in New York; of murder, arson and rapine by hired assassins on the borders of the four countries chiefly besieged; and of incitement by words and money gifts from innumerable “democratic” Governments and Communist “cover organizations” all over the world. This, in short, is a siege of a kind never before known in recorded history: but then, this century is like none in recorded history.