This is the first volume in a new series, to be known as Men of Our Time, in which will be presented the memoirs and biographies of persons who, in recent times, have influenced the course of Rhodesian history and those who have contributed to the growth and development of national life in any of its many facets. This author's memoirs move from his boyhood spent in the Hillside area of Bulawayo, where he arrived in 1909, through his student days overseas and a law practice on his home ground, to the Rhodesian and Federal political arenas. He takes the reader behind the scenes and through the corridors of power to his numerous meetings with members of the British government, among them Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State. His disclosures make interesting reading and will form a valuable part of the record, notably of the protracted negotiations, fruitless and frustrating in the extreme, which led to the breakup of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with its laudable concept of racial partnership. Few Rhodesian politicians have given us their memoirs. Apart from Desmond Lardner Burke's brief encounter with constitution breaking, only Major Lewis Hastings, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, Sir Roy Welensky and Sir Robert Tredgold have put a little on record. The last-named would no doubt prefer to be remembered as a judge rather than as a politician. The present author prefers it the other way round. Politicians, he says, deal with the future, judges with the past. Coming at the end of an era of minority rule, Greenfield's book is well timed. It covers a broader canvas than the title might suggest, though the main emphasis is on Federal times. His testimony is not hearsay, and may be a useful corrective to some of the impressions conveyed in A History of Rhodesia by Lord Blake, after listening to what others have to say.

 

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