Well, we've come to Wednesday afternoon.
Very quickly.
It's almost unbelievable.
But the final of three sessions on Sir Garfield
Todd by Michael Casey.
These have been fascinating presentations.
And this one, just from wedding appetites, my
appetite is ready for this one to be the most
interesting of all.
Because this is the prophetic time of his life.
After he leaves formal politics, elected
politics, he has other things to say and do.
So let's give Mike all the time he needs.
Let's begin with prayer, and then we'll begin
immediately with today's presentation.
Thank you, Father, for giving us this time, for
Mike and for the work that he's done.
On Garfield Todd and so many other things as
well, thank you for his being here.
And we ask your continued care of him and the
treatments that he'll have in the future.
We're so grateful for the stimulating
information that he's bringing to us about this
important person in our Sun Camel heritage.
I'll be with him this afternoon, in Christ's
name, amen.
Amen. Thank you, Doug.
Just a couple of quick items.
I sold out all of my books, and I know some
were still interested in it.
And I've opened up one copy, but it's still in
real good shape.
I'll sell it for $29 if someone wants it.
I haven't marked it at all.
And then I have a sign-up sheet.
If you want to email me and give me your
address or whatever, I'll sell you copies at
home for $30.
I have another book Doug's got a copy of, The
Stone Camel Movement, International Religious Tradition.
They're selling that in a bookstore for $45.
I'll sell it to you for $30 as well.
And then my final book, Saddlebags, City
Streets, and Cyberspace, A History of Preaching
and Churches, Christ is Out of Print.
But I'm getting the final remainder copies from ACU.
I'll sell you, if you're interested in that.
I don't have a copy for $8.
If you get bored, you can sign the sheet.
If you don't want to sign it, that's fine.
That's perfectly okay.
Anyway, we've looked at Sardarfield Todd.
A handful of you have been here.
I think maybe you and Doug are the only ones
who have been here for all three.
Judy, for all three sessions.
And so we've seen a transformation of Todd.
And what I've argued is there are three stages
in his rhetoric.
The first day we looked at him as a preacher
and as a missionary.
And he ever remained the preacher throughout
his entire career, even up into his 90s.
He would still occasionally preach.
And so that was, to my thinking, Foundational
to everything that he did.
Then yesterday we looked at the improbable turn
to politics,
where he was asked, because of his savvy at
lobbying the government for political stuff,
for the mission work,
and for challenging the prime minister in a
question and answer session,
the prime minister and his party asked Todd to
run for parliament.
And he thought they were crazy.
He was a missionary, and the ranchers and the
people in town hated missionaries.
He thought they were just daft.
There's no way they'll ever elect me in parliament.
But he decided to go ahead and run because it
allowed him to give a chance to speak out about
the rights of Africans
and the need for more money for education.
Surprise, surprise, he won.
He wasn't expecting to win.
So he became a member of parliament, and that
was kind of like our congressman in a way,
but even more so as a part-time job.
So it allowed him to remain as the missionary
at the Dadaia mission
while he continued to work in parliament and
run his ranch and all that.
When he became prime minister, which was
another improbable story,
where he was sort of picked because he was the
main one, talented one left after everyone else
went to the federation government.
He said, okay, I'll become prime minister.
When he became prime minister, he then resigned
as the head missionary at Dadaia,
but he remained chairman of the board at Dadaia
and continued to support it with money
and was very much involved in the life of Dadaia.
He failed as a politician, as we talked about yesterday.
He tried to expand African rights in a very
limited way.
The whites rebelled, and he became, in the
terms of many people,
the most hated man in Rhodesia by the whites.
But the Africans saw him as a Christ figure, as
a Moses of our time.
The whites had crucified Todd, and they were
horrified at what happened.
So he begins a transition then, once he's
sacked as prime minister, to becoming a prophet.
Now, he doesn't do it right away.
He continues to try to be involved in politics
for at least three more years,
but he lessens his interest in politics and
turns more towards being a prophet.
There's a rhetorician at Georgia State, James Darcy,
who's written a book about radical rhetoric and
the prophetic tradition in America.
And he's drawn from Brueggemann.
He's drawn from, I think, Westerman.
He's looked at leading Old Testament scholars
and putting together what he sees as Hebrew
prophetic rhetoric.
And then he argues that in America there's been
a longstanding prophetic tradition
that basically says, I'm not going to adapt to
the audience.
I'm going to speak the truth.
And it's God's truth or the truth of whatever
cause they're stating,
and the audience has to come to the rhetor.
The rhetor doesn't adapt to the audience.
And so the prophet speaks what he or she thinks
is the truth of their particular cause.
So the prophet has a sense of mission, as I say here.
The prophet wants to bring the people in line
with some kind of divine principle or purpose.
And they are uncompromising, often excoriating,
just blasting the audiences that they are
speaking to
because they see themselves as speaking the truth.
And so Todd's rhetoric begins to shift and to
change once he's out of office.
And he fits into, I think, this prophetic tradition.
A prophet, Darcy argues, is propelled by some
type of crisis.
And there were a couple of crises that began to
propel Todd out of politics.
The first one was in 1959.
There was a series of riots.
Edgar Whitehead replaced Todd, continued his
limited liberal policies,
but he began to become more draconian
because African nationalism was fueled more and
more by the sacking of Todd.
So Whitehead begins to crack down and outlaw
the nationalist parties
and raided their offices and seized papers.
And so riots broke out because of this happening.
No one was killed in 1959, but Todd was
absolutely horrified by what happened.
And I may come back to this slide.
I'm summarizing a little bit too much with that slide.
Unfortunately, I don't have a text of this speech.
March 16, 1959, Todd decides he's going to give
a speech at the major hall
in the capital of southern Rhodesia, Salisbury.
And the hall held maybe 2,500 people in it.
7,000 Africans showed up to hear Todd speak.
So to prevent any kind of riot or any kind of problem,
he worked out an agreement with the police that
he would give a speech three times
so everyone could come and hear his speech.
So the police agreed to this.
Three different audiences, Todd speaks, and he
calls for an immediate end to the color bar.
It wasn't about franchise at this point, but
the color bar was,
it was like segregation in the south.
You had white-only restaurants, white-only bus
stations, and so forth and so on.
It was just like the segregated south where you
had the whites only
and the blacks only and whites only sort of
stuff, and the blacks couldn't get that.
Same thing in southern Rhodesia.
There were places Africans couldn't go to.
And so he calls for an immediate end to this,
and he kind of compromises a bit with the government.
He says the government has a right to protect
the safety of people,
so the police have the right to arrest people
if they want to,
but they've gone overboard with the raiding of
the African nationalist offices,
and the only way we're going to end all of this strife
is to pull together an immediate end to the
color bar.
And you can find here, I think, a quote that I
was going to read on this.
One of the things he said in his speech was
Todd criticized the federation
that I talked about yesterday, the uniting of
northern Rhodesia, southern Rhodesia,
and what is now Malawi into the central federation
with the idea that whites could have more
control over Africans in central Africa.
In this speech, he makes this amazing statement.
He criticizes the federation as a great bus,
which is taking all of us to a happy place and
a higher standard of living.
But the unfortunate thing was that there were
certain people
who believed the bus was clearly marked
Europeans only.
So he had some pretty inflammatory rhetoric
towards whites in this particular speech.
And he also felt that the new laws that
Whitehead had passed to crack down on these dissidents,
he said, was utterly unworthy of a British country.
And he said the law would bring Rhodesia into
the contempt of the whole commonwealth,
and it would be a major cause to break up a
peace, order, and tranquility in southern Rhodesia.
And, of course, he was correct in his assessment
that these laws simply were going to create
more riots, more disturbance,
and inflame Africans rather than controlling
law and order and making things more peaceful.
So this was an absolutely amazing scene where
7,000 people show up,
and there were a handful of whites that show up
and heckle Todd.
And, of course, he's very talented in repartee,
and so he handles all the hecklers really well.
And even the white papers in southern Rhodesia
praised Todd's speech
and said the crowds were courteous, the crowds
were fine,
except for a handful of whites who decided to
try to upset Todd, and Todd handled them quite effectively.
And so it was the largest audience in southern
Rhodesia ever to hear a speech.
This is a picture of the crowd of the speech.
You can see how many people were crammed into
this hall.
And you see the faces are all Africans.
And so this is another reason why Todd has felt
out of politics was whites hated him,
Africans loved him, but the whites were the
only ones who could vote,
and a handful of Africans could vote.
So he never could get enough African votes in
order to ever win a seat.
And, again, here's some pictures of the crowd.
There's some pictures of Todd speaking.
This is from the documentary that I mentioned
the other day of Todd.
They actually have some from the BBC, some live
shots of him.
They're soundless, but live shots of Todd
speaking during all this.
Well, in 1960 then, a year later, Todd's
prophetic call comes.
Todd finds himself in London.
And while he is in London, more riots break out.
And, unfortunately, this time people were
killed by the Rhodesian police.
And Todd points out this was the first time
since 1898
that anybody had ever been killed by police
action in Rhodesia.
They had had all these years of peace in Rhodesia,
and the new white-headed government, supposedly
liberal, was cracking down so much,
and African unrest was increasing.
Things had to give.
So Todd realizes something has to happen,
and he could no longer remain silent about what
takes place.
And so, as I say, his call comes on July 26, 1960.
And what he does in London, he felt like he
could no longer mollify the white government.
The white government had lost its legitimacy at
this point.
He could no longer remain silent about the
abuses of the government that was in power.
And so he said,
I was not prepared to face the situation
squarely until the inevitable riots occurred
and some men were killed.
He knew the Africans were not prepared to
submit any longer.
So Britain had either faced her
responsibilities or abdicate and leave the
struggle for freedom,
for advancement, for dignity to the
two-and-a-half African people themselves.
And what happened on that day, July 26,
Joshua Nkwomo, the nationalist leader I
pictured last time,
also happened to be in London.
Todd had drawn up a letter that he was going to
give to Lord Holm, the British Secretary.
Nkwomo read it and said he liked the letter,
but it doesn't go far enough.
So Todd revised the letter.
He signed it, and Nkwomo signed it, and another
African nationalist leader signed it.
And it's in my book. I've got it in the collection.
Basically, the letter says the government of
Rhodesia has lost its legitimacy.
Britain needs to go in and take over the
colonial government
and bring troops into southern Rhodesia to make
sure that no riots break out
and keep the situation under control.
And a new government needs to be created that
allows the Africans the right to vote.
The letter inflames the whites in southern Rhodesia.
They all proclaim, Todd is wanting Britain to
come in with troops
and by force take over and overthrow the
colonial government.
They misinterpreted what he said.
And they became very, very angry.
And again, he became clearly one of the most
hated men in southern Rhodesia.
I'll see if I can find some of the quotes.
The Prime Minister, Whitehead, thought Todd's
statement was utterly irresponsible.
Other MPs said it was utterly disloyal.
Todd responded, some people call me a traitor,
but I believe I'm a patriot
and I believe somebody's got to say these
things now.
And he knew he committed political suicide, so
he resigned from his own political party
knowing they probably couldn't support anything
that he had to say.
Oh, here it is.
Rhodesia's prickly whites, this is an
Australian paper,
called Todd a traitor, commie, Kefir Lover, and Scab.
White Rhodesia's most rejected white man was
the epigram for Todd.
So Greg, this may be what your parents are remembering,
the polarization that breaks out in 1960 with Todd.
He becomes despised, utterly despised by most whites.
Now there are a handful of liberals that
supported what he was doing that were white,
but by far most whites completely and utterly
rejected him.
So Todd knew his political career was done.
It was over.
Africans now recognized him as one of their own,
that he supported them, that they could trust him,
that he would speak for their cause and he
would speak out for things.
And so he demands at this point a one-man,
one-vote for Africans.
Now if you think about, in many ways, this is incredible.
This would have been like Harry Truman or
Dwight Eisenhower
or if Kennedy had lived in the mid-1960s,
a former president of the United States coming
out and saying,
we need to end segregation now.
All Africans, Americans need to have their
franchise and a vote.
That didn't happen.
We didn't have any president who said, former
president who said that.
But here you have a former prime minister of
southern Rhodesia, a white man,
saying this in 1960.
So he was brave and extremely courageous.
And I've got stories later on where he was
nearly killed many times,
particularly when Ian Smith took over the government.
And many prophets, as you know, were martyred,
whether you're talking about Hebrew prophets
or you're talking about people who are
prophetic within the United States.
Many prophets went to prison.
And that lays in the future for Garfield Todd
from where we are in 1960.
So what are the key things that Todd does?
In 1962, the United Nations had formed a
committee on Colonialism
with the idea of ending colonialism around the world.
The first country they decide to explore was
southern Rhodesia.
So they call for the African nationalists to
come to New York,
to the United Nations, to testify before this
UN committee.
So Joshua Nkwomo goes.
But then he realizes, hey, we've got a person,
a unique person,
who can say some things in ways that we can't.
So Nkwomo invites Todd to come and testify
before that United Nations committee in 1962.
And so, again, the speech is in the collection.
And it is just, in many ways, an amazing speech.
And this is Nkwomo's descriptions.
And this is one of the things that made me
realize Todd fits into the Campbell heritage.
Nkwomo talked about his oratory was devastating.
Facts flowed in fast sequence.
He spoke like one possessed.
He refuted all the arguments of the colonialists.
And again, I realized this fits in so much with
the Campbell heritage
and the Campbell predilection of focusing on
facts and arguing and debating
and being able to refute.
And so the speech fits very much into this
Campbell ideal.
And so Nkwomo describes it as a thunderous
ovation except for the British representative.
Because basically what Todd had to say is
Britain are bloodshed.
Britain had to take care of her
responsibilities towards this colony
and go in and give the franchise to the Africans.
But Britain, in those days, was backing off.
The British Empire was falling apart.
Britain was washing its hands of so many of its colonies.
And Britain refused to intervene in that situation.
The vote overwhelming by the committee was to
end the colonialism in southern Rhodesia,
but they didn't have any power.
And Britain was unmoved by what Todd had to say.
Then 1964 is another amazing speech by Garfield Todd
where he's invited to the University of
Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, Africa.
And there he attacks apartheid openly
and talks about that South Africa and southern Rhodesia,
yes, they have a democratic government, but
it's democracy for whites only.
And so it's a form or a shell of democracy.
It's not true democracy.
True democracy would be freedom and democracy
for everyone.
Freedom of speech, the ability to criticize the government,
the ability for everyone to vote.
And he said it's only for whites, so it isn't a
true democracy.
So it was a pretty courageous speech.
He talked about academic freedom was his topic,
but he talked about academic freedom as well as
political freedom in the speech.
And it was a rather amazing speech.
As I mentioned yesterday, he gets invited back
to the same university
to deliver a second FITM lecture.
This university is known as a university that
pushes social justice issues
even back in the 1960s.
The South African government looked at his
transcript of his speech,
second speech, when they saw what he was going
to say,
they denied Todd's visa.
And so the students, as I said yesterday, set
an empty chair up on the stage
and had a student then read a text of his
speech to the crowd
then had it printed in the local newspaper to
kind of subvert
what the South African government was going to do.
And again, I have a text of that speech which
also attacks apartheid
and what's going on in southern Rhodesia as well.
This picture here is, I love this picture.
This is actually from the 1950s.
The gentleman here behind the dog is Basil Holt,
a Disciples of Christ minister that I wish I
knew more about.
He opposed apartheid and was an early activist
against apartheid.
I don't really know his full story.
At some point in the 60s or early 70s, he left
South Africa
and moved to the States and died like in Nebraska.
And his kids live here in the States.
He's got an interesting history himself, but I
don't know the full story of it.
And he's got some interesting siblings.
A Canadian historian has actually been
exploring some of the activities
of some of his siblings, and I've been in
contact with them
and they've given me a little bit of
information about Holt.
But Todd and Holt were friends in the 1950s and
into the 1960s.
And Holt actually arranged for some of the
speeches that I have in my collection
that he gave in South Africa in the 1950s.
And even there, in his sermons, he talked about
the church needing to be a model
for oneness, that all races are fundamentally
one in Jesus Christ
and there's neither black nor white in Christ,
and that Christians need to work together.
A couple more quick things I'll read before I
talk about Todd being silenced.
Todd also gave a 1964 United Nations speech to
the Colonial Committee.
And I didn't put this in my collection because
it was similar to the 1962 speech,
but here's what Time Magazine had to say about
Todd's speech in 1964.
Many heard an eloquent speech dedicated to the
proposition that black men
rather than white men should have the ruling
voice in African nations.
But seldom has the committee listened to this
argument so intently
as it did last week when a visitor from Africa
roundly proclaimed
what the Europeans of his country had clung to
power too long.
What stirred the committee was the fact that
the speaker, R.S. Garfield Todd,
was both a white man and a former prime
minister of segregationist southern Rhodesia.
And so they were just amazed that you had this
white former prime minister
saying the things that he had to say.
Well, there are other interesting quotes I
could have from Todd.
The other ones I'll just simply read real fast,
then we'll get into how he was silenced.
The opening quotes that I have from Todd really
illustrate his prophetic ideals.
Truths must be supported and vindicated for
their own sakes.
Truth is truth, right is right, duty is duty,
and the end is God's, not mine.
That was in 1967.
And then 1960, and this actually kind of speaks
even for today.
The free peoples of the world must work to
ensure that freedom, liberty, and opportunity
be made the heritage of all men.
We who believe in democracy cannot evade our responsibility,
for liberty is threatened in America when it is
denied in Africa.
Peace is in jeopardy when the minds of men are
at war.
And this is a 1960 speech that Todd gave in
Wellesley College in the United States.
So you get a sense of his eloquence and his
prophetic rhetoric.
Well, he's silenced.
1965, in March, Ian Smith is now the prime
minister of Southern Rhodesia.
Edgar Whitehead is eliminated and a more
conservative racist party comes into control.
Ian Smith, the guy I said last time, said if
it's Todd or the donkey,
then we're going to vote for the donkey.
The same guy, he is now the prime minister of
Southern Rhodesia.
He makes the Universal Declaration of
Independence, UDI, of Southern Rhodesia from Britain.
He declares we're an independent colony.
He boxes up the British representative in the
house that he lived in
and basically kicks all the British
representatives out and says we are now independent.
A lot of people thought Britain would crack
down on Smith, but they didn't.
They refused to move against Smith.
Two weeks before UDI, Garfield Todd was
scheduled to give a speech in Edinburgh.
And as he's on his way to the airport, police
show up, arrest him,
and confine him and put him in detention back
on his ranch.
Basically, Smith did this because he feared
that if Todd went to Edinburgh,
he might form a government in exile or even
stir up Britain enough
to actually bring military forces to Rhodesia.
He feared Todd's eloquence that much.
So for one year, Todd was in detention on his ranch
and was not allowed to telephone anybody, write anybody,
or have any contact with newspaper reporters.
And so a lot of people agitated, even Senator
Edward Kennedy, Ted Kennedy.
There were representatives all around the world
that had known Todd, that had met Todd.
And they pushed and pressed very hard.
And finally, after one year, because of
political pressure,
Smith ends the detention and allows Todd to go free.
And immediately, he starts speaking again,
speaking out against all the things that are
going on.
Then, a few years later, there are all these
failed negotiations
between Britain and Ian Smith.
And in early 1971 and 1972, there was this
commission formed by Britain
to go and pull the people of southern Rhodesia.
And they had worked out an agreement with Ian Smith
to allow Smith to remain in power and for
Rhodesia to go free
if the population of Rhodesia agreed with the
propositions of this commission.
Garfield Todd and his daughter Judith goes
around holding meetings
describing to Africans what this meant.
And basically what it was, was a system set up
to where Africans got like half a vote.
It was manipulated enough where whites would
stay in control
and Africans would have not quite half of the
control of the legislation.
So Smith would remain in control, whites would
remain in control.
And so Todd and his daughter went around and
told Africans what this meant.
So when the Peirce Commission went around and
started talking to all the different constituencies,
they came back to Britain and reported that the
whites supported the new idea
and constitution and proposal, but the Africans
did not.
So it fell apart.
Smith was angry.
So what does he do? I have it up here.
In 1972, he arrests both Judith and Garfield
and throws Garfield into, as Garfield said,
this big prison filled with these black convicts.
And he was the lone white in this big prison.
And for 36 days, he is confined in this prison.
And they kept him in isolation.
He even was able to talk occasionally to some
of the black guards and black prisoners.
And one black prisoner came by and said, are
you okay, Sir?
And Todd says, yes, I'm fine.
And he put his hand through a little peephole
and Todd touched his hand.
And somehow the prison authorities saw this.
And so the next day, Todd saw all this
hammering and they closed up the peephole
so he would have no contact at all with any of
the black prisoners.
And when he walked outside for exercise, he was
the only one.
He wasn't allowed any contact with the black prisoners
because they feared how the black Africans
would react to him being there.
After 36 days, he's released and he goes to his
ranch and he's in detention then for four and a
half years.
He cannot write letters.
He cannot make any telephone calls.
No one is allowed to contact him.
Letters that were sent to him were censored.
No journalist could come out and visit him.
And they even put a policeman out in front of
the ranch
to make sure he could only go like 800 paces or
so around this particular border in his ranch.
His daughter, Judith, was imprisoned longer,
and she actually engaged in a hunger strike in
protest of what was happening.
They force-fed her to keep her alive.
She was in prison longer.
And then basically when she got out of prison,
she decided to go to London.
She decided to go into exile rather than being
detained on the ranch.
In London, she began to agitate for her
father's release and freedom
and also protested against what's going on with Smith.
The documentary shows her leading some protests
in London against the South African government.
Finally, in June 1976, Todd is released because
of political pressure.
And this is a picture of Todd in London with
his wife, Grace.
They were allowed to leave.
They went to London to visit Judith.
And I'll have a pointer with me.
This is Judith. Of course, there's Todd.
That's Judith's husband.
He's now divorced from him.
That's Grace Todd, and that's his son, her
stepson there.
They're popping a bottle of champagne to
celebrate his release from prison.
But he immediately goes on a speaking tour
and starts talking about the abuses of the
Smith administration.
Then, as I say, he gives speeches in Rhodesia
against racist policies.
He lobbies Britain, the United States, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand.
Very much still filled with the prophetic
rhetoric that clarifies rights and wrongs
and basically talks about all the different
abuses that take place with the Smith government.
Now, what begins to happen now in 1976 and on
is the revolution starts in southern Rhodesia.
Blacks realize now the only way they're going
to get the right to vote is to rebel openly.
And so Nkwomo runs the rebels out of the south,
and Robert Mugabe runs the rebels out of the north.
Mugabe was kind of devious.
The Rhodesia Africans basically had been united,
and Mugabe and Nkwomo and others worked together.
But then Mugabe started talking about the two
different tribes of southern Rhodesia.
Mugabe was Shona, and Nkwomo, where Todd's
mission was, was Mektebeli.
And the Shona people outnumber the Mektebeli people.
And so Mugabe came in and split the
revolutionaries between the two different tribes
in order to kind of take control.
And so Mugabe ran the rebels out of the north,
and Nkwomo ran the rebels as a rival group out
of the south.
And so the two groups kind of got along but
didn't really get along
and had slightly different political agendas.
But you basically were having people being killed.
You actually had open civil war,
and they had rebel camps in Mozambique and
Zambia and other countries coming in and doing
armed raids.
And the Smith government was also killing people.
And Todd talked about the abuses of the Smith troops.
They would shoot children if children didn't
follow their orders.
And so there was all kinds of atrocities
committed by both sides,
and Todd very reluctantly said he had to choose sides.
And so he went with, of course, the rebels.
And the amazing thing about Todd and the
Dadaia, the Dadaia mission never closed
throughout the entire civil war.
Most missions closed.
Todd's ranch, he didn't lose a single animal.
Todd never carried a gun.
All he would do is give food to the rebels,
and he would report on train movements coming
in from South Africa that was illegally
supporting the Smith regime to prop it up.
And he would give reports to the rebels about
train movements, which was a capital offense.
He could have been executed by the Smith
government for doing this.
And he actually did this some during his detention.
And so Mugabe and other rebel leaders were
absolutely amazed that the mission remained open,
that Todd didn't lose any animals at all.
In the documentaries, there's this funny story
of Grace talking about the cattle inspectors
would come to inspect their cattle.
And they would come with these armed guards
with machine guns.
And the inspectors would count the cattle, and
then they'd all leave.
And they'd say, leave me, this white-haired
woman sitting out here in the bush all by
myself with the cattle,
with all this fighting going on around the ranch.
And they talked about there were some
frightening moments when troops would show up,
and they didn't know whether they were friend
or foe.
And if it was Smith troops, they could find
themselves in trouble.
If it was rebel troops, then everything was okay.
And so, say, in the night, you would never know
who was going to show up on their doorstep.
And so it was a very frightening time for Todd.
One of the stories that I found was that there
was a Smith agent who discovered Todd was on
the same flight that he was
and followed him to Zambia.
And he didn't have any orders to kill Todd, but
Todd was on the second floor of the hotel.
And he said he thought about using his standard
tactic of going up, knocking on the door of the hotel.
When the person would open the door, smacking
them on the head to daze them,
then grabbing the person by their belt and
heaving them out to the second floor window.
And they would be killed by the fall.
And the inquest would say the person committed suicide.
And he almost decided to do that to Todd, but
he didn't have orders from the Smith government.
There was another story where two black agents
did have orders from Smith to assassinate Todd.
And they chickened out.
They saw Todd and they decided, no, they
couldn't follow through on the orders because
he was so beloved.
And so they decided not to kill him.
So there were times that Todd nearly lost his
life because of stuff that happened to him.
In 1977, he speaks for a third time before the
United Nations that Cyrus Vance on the two-year left,
and of course it's Andrew Young on the right,
he met with both of them to lobby the United States
to put more pressure on Ian Smith.
And he speaks in lots of different venues.
I have a couple of those speeches in my collection.
But finally, as I say, he supports the
revolution. I've gone through all of this.
Finally, in 1980, you have independence.
I won't get into all the details, but finally
you have the independence.
You have an election run.
Mugabe and Cuomo and a third guy were the three
main candidates.
And Mugabe won the election, unfortunately.
And Cuomo finished second.
The Shona voted for Mugabe, the Montebelli
voted for Cuomo.
For five years, things were okay.
And Todd was asked by Mugabe to be a senator
for Rhodesia.
And so he became a senator for a while.
But then abuses began to start.
Mugabe began to organize death squads against
Montebelli people in the south.
Todd is incensed by this.
He resigns from the government and starts to
criticize Mugabe for his abuses.
And he continues that all the way up until just
before he died.
And he became more and more outspoken about
what Mugabe was doing.
And basically, he was just saying Mugabe wasn't
being true to the revolution.
And he spoke many times.
I've got one speech where there's a celebration
of Joshua and Cuomo's life.
And they could pick anybody to be the keynote speaker.
And they picked Garfield Todd to be the
celebratory speaker for the life of Joshua and
Cuomo in the late 1980s.
And it's a fascinating speech because basically
he's charging Africans,
let's be true to the revolution.
Let's be true to the democratic ideals of the revolution.
And you can read through that that he's saying
Mugabe wasn't.
And so I have a chapter that talks about Todd's
narrative rhetoric in the later parts of his life
where he's calling Africans back to democratic ideals.
And so I will close here.
That's one of my hopes of the book, with the speeches,
that it will be a resource for Africans because
Todd very much puts forth democratic ideals
and puts forth ideals that I think have to be
in place for a true democracy to take place.
As you all know, the story of the political
regimes in Africa is pretty bad.
And basically, in post-colonial Africa, they
have replicated the patterns of the
authoritarian colonialists
from Britain, from France, and from Belgium.
And they've simply replicated the oppressive
things that took place in colonialism
rather than putting forth democratic ideals.
And so Britain and the other European powers
did not train Africans in their own democratic ideals.
But yet you have this man, Garfield Todd, that
out of our democratic heritage of the disciples
of Christ,
modeled, I think, democratic principles for all
Africans and modeled it through his own
Christian ideals.
So I think I'll quit at this point.
We have a little bit of time for questions.
We have to be out of here, I think, at 10 till.
I don't know if I answered your question or not.
Well, that one I figured out, actually. You
were talking about how the white Press praised
him, and that's just from this many years away
and half the world away seems utterly bizarre
that they praise him and yet turn around and
everyone who hears him,
it sounds like what you're saying is that they
cannot deny the truth of what he says.
And so momentarily they're true to their
consciences, and they write what they see, and
people everywhere see that.
And then, of course, they turn around and shut
him up for ignoring everything he has to say.
I couldn't help but remember the Jewish police
that were sent to arrest Jesus.
Nobody had ever talked like this before. It
seems to me a remarkable parallel.
Of course, Jesus was crucified. Garfield Todd
was not.
Nearly was, but wasn't.
But that sounds like, in many very real ways, a
distinct parallel.
You're seeing what Darcy talks about in terms
of the prophetic tradition, and it's one of the
ironies of the prophets. The prophets actually
are one of the people in trying to get the
people to live up to their own ideals.
And some people see it, and some people see it
and go, no.
It's one of the two-edged sword of the prophet.
The prophet comes from the people, is one of
the people, and tries to encourage the people
to go live up to your own ideals.
This is what you said. This is what you believe.
Now act on it.
But most aren't willing to do it.
And you have these momentary moments where the
white press saw the truth in the things that
Todd had to say.
And it's interesting to see those moments in
the white press.
Will your book be able to circulate in the public?
Well, I don't know. It's so expensive.
I've given two or three copies to some key
people, and I'm going to send some copies to
some other key people.
It's cheaper than Ruth Weiss' book that was
thinner than my book, and just was a lot more expensive.
It's now out of print.
That's really one of my hopes.
The situation in Zimbabwe, in terms of
economics, is so chaotic.
People are carrying wheelbarrows of money around.
They devalue their money, and it's just making
everything worse.
It's spiraling down.
I expect violence probably at some point is
going to break out, because there's no food for people.
It's just becoming a terrible, terrible situation.
Well, they might.
Well, I've sent copies, and people have gotten it.
I was a little bit worried about that, but they
got their copies of the book.
So the government may not...
Well, they check mail. I do know that.
They really do. They check mail. It goes back
and forth.
You could tell when I got things from Todd that
had been opened and resealed.
So, you know, they monitor stuff like that.
What is the white population now? Are they all gone?
Well, they're not all gone. It's amazing.
I think Greg still has some relatives in Zimbabwe.
There are still some whites.
Most have left.
I don't know what the population is now, but
it's tiny, very, very tiny,
because of the seizure of the white farms, a
lot of the white businesses.
But it's an awful situation, because you have
all these whites that are Zimbabweans.
They were born there.
They're not from South Africa. They're not from
New Zealand.
They're not from Britain.
They're born and bred.
They're Rhodesians or Zimbabweans.
They've put up with the chaos.
Where are they going to go?
It's tragic.
People are leaving Zimbabwe by the hundreds and
thousands into South Africa.
It's creating a crisis now in South Africa,
because so many Zimbabweans are illegally leaving.
In fact, one of my students, who is from Round
Rock, Texas,
and a Zimbabwean student and graduated from Pepperdine,
his parents have a green card.
He's going to become an American citizen.
He went to Zimbabwe last summer,
and he had trouble getting back into South
Africa from Zimbabwe,
because the border guards had this big list of
countries banned, people banned.
And even going from South Africa to Britain,
you weren't supposed to allow Zimbabweans to
fly from South Africa to Britain.
And his American passport and green card,
he still had to talk his way into South Africa,
then talk his way on the plane into Britain.
He had problems, because he had a Zimbabwean
passport and an American passport.
And this was the first time he'd been to Zimbabwe.
You know, he speaks, when you hear him speak,
he sounds like a Texan, because that's where he
grew up,
even though he was born in Zimbabwe.
But yeah, it's just...
What relationship?
I mean, obviously, he was stripped of his
citizenship in 2002 by Mugabe, I'm assuming.
Oh, yes, yes.
Well, the election.
Was there any other action against Todd by
Mugabe in those last years? No.
There was one time when they were seizing white farms,
Judith got a phone call that said,
we're coming to get your farm.
And she said, this farm is owned by Garfield
Grace Todd, and I'm Judith Todd.
So you do know who we are.
And then the person went click, and no one ever
showed up.
And I think, basically, they didn't touch his
land, his house, because of who he was,
because that would have created an
international outcry if that had happened.
See, Ian Smith has not had his farm seized.
They still allow him to roam free, and they
kind of use him as kind of like a...
What do you call it?
They use him as sort of an example.
Oh, here's this ex-white racist prime minister,
but we allow him to roam free and to live free
and so forth.
So they won't touch him for 10-foot pole
because they kind of use him as an example.
Oh, yeah, we treat whites freely.
Look, we don't bother Ian Smith.
And does Judith live on the ranch?
Well, see, they sold the ranch and moved and
gave all that away for scholarships for
Zimbabwean students
and some of the money to Dadaia.
Then they own a house, two houses and a little
bit of land outside of Bulawayo in the suburbs.
So it's not really a...
But it's quite a bit of land, from what I understand.
But she's bouncing back and forth between
Zimbabwe and South Africa
and spending more time in Cape Town now.
So they stripped her of her citizenship,
and New Zealand was generous enough to give her
a passport,
even though she has visited New Zealand but was
born in Zimbabwe as a Zimbabwean citizen.
So for a New Zealand passport, she can travel
back and forth between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
But it's getting so bad, she's spending most of
her time in Cape Town.
What last name does she carry? Todd.
In fact, the review I gave to Doug, she goes by
the name Judith Garfield Todd.
That's her name.
So this guy talks about, is there kind of a
Todd succession?
Does Judith carry on Garfield's ideals?
In some ways yes, in some ways no.
She's not Christian.
She's, from all I can tell, rejected Christianity.
Now her cousins, Todd's nephews, are still
very, very active in Churches of Christ in New Zealand.
Tom went to Wellington and got to meet some of
his family.
They are very active.
In fact, they've even been to Zimbabwe.
His nephew, Alan, has done some preaching at Dadaia.
But he's a pharmacist or chemist or something.
He's kind of a lay preacher, if you will, in
Churches of Christ.
And her book, by the way, you can get on Amazon.c
Om now.
I think it's called Through the Darkness.
And it talks about her father and stuff that's
happened to her from 1980 up to the present.
Because she wrote an earlier book back in the
60s about the chaos with Ian Smith in southern Rhodesia.
It's been long out of print, but it's an
interesting read too.
This scholarship, I don't mean scholarship, the
gift of her father to the mission, how is it administrated?
Well, unfortunately, I don't know the full
story of what he did with Dadaia,
but unfortunately because of all the
hyperinflation and all the chaos in Zimbabwe,
the scholarship fund is basically closed.
Because the money that he sold the ranch for
has been devalued so much, it's now worthless.
And so originally my plan was for any royalties
I got out of this book to go to that Todd scholarship.
And Judith wrote me and said, it's defunct now
because of all the hyperinflation, so don't do that.
So I had to change it, the royalties go back to me.
Now I had no place to send the royalties to.
Because I saw this book as much Garfield's book
as mine because of all of the speeches that
I've included in it.
And that's what he would have wanted, was it to
go for scholarships, but the fund is gone.
And Dadaia is still functioning.
And Dadaia, in fact, BJ, how do you pronounce
his name?
Mopopo is kind of one of the key people in the
New Zealand, well the Churches of Christ,
they have ties to New Zealand.
He's going to become president of World
Convention, if I remember right.
He's one of the leaders of the Zimbabwe, of the Dadaia.
See, the other thing that's interesting is that
even though you've got acapella churches and
instrumental churches,
people tend to kind of move back and forth
between the two.
And Washington Mulanga spoke at Pepperdine, and
he's an elder at a church in Harare.
And he came and spoke at the Pepperdine
lectures and taught a class.
He's an Oklahoma Christian alum and University
of Michigan Ph.D..
And Washington told me one of his fellow elders
is on the board of Dadaia.
Another elder is on the board of the mission at
the Mitchells and the Palmers that we know
quite well.
And that's the name of their church.