In December 1975 it was announced that overall responsibility for Rhodesia's protected villages was to be progressively transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Defence. A new unit, the Guard Force, is now being set up as an autonomous part of the Defence Forces to take over the control and administration of protected villages and keeps. It is due to go into operation on 1 July 1976. As far as the African residents of the "operational areas" are concerned, the move probably has little significance, but it does emphasise the essentially military, anti-civilian nature of the Smith regime's massive programme of population removal.
Approximately half a million people in Rhodesia's Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs) i.e. African reserves, have now been moved into *protected* villages, or "keeps", and *consolidated* villages in the north-eastern part of the country. Consolidated villages are designed as a second line of defence in areas less subject to guerilla incursions, and are not fenced. The regime claims that the moves are made voluntarily, after many weeks and even months of discussion between the Defence Forces and kraal heads.
The official purpose of the protected villages is to shield villagers from "terrorist attacks" - and coincidentally to cut the guerillas off from sources of support within the local population - and a number have allegedly been set up at the specific request of headmen and elders. In practice some villagers are known to have been moved as a disciplinary measure for supposedly assisting guerillas, or other offences. What is certain is that the protected villages are bitterly resented as a humiliating and unpleasant form of imprisonment in which traditional norms of privacy, hygiene and hospitality are forcibly broken down.
Once "behind the wire", the villagers are, in the main, expected to fend for themselves. A certain amount of assistance has been forthcoming from the regime with large scale construction works such as water reservoirs, but, in the words of a European District Commissioner, the security forces "are definitely not here to give them everything. We provide advice and materials for certain projects, but the people provide the labour". In Fort Mopane, for example, a 6 km by 12 km protected area in the Zambezi valley, 70 km north of Mount Darwin, bridge building, irrigation and drainage systems, the installation of protective fencing and the installation of latrines have been undertaken by the people at the direction of the military. Supervised by soliders of the Rhodesian African Rifles armed with loudhailers, the villagers have been set to work on a communal basis, ploughing the land and planting crops, a project which, it is claimed, reflects traditional work-sharing practices, but is in reality forced labour.
During set hours of the day, the people are allowed out of most - but not all - protected villages to cultivate the land. In many cases they have nothing to plough with, their cattle having been confiscated as a form of collective punishment or sold on the orders of the District Commissioner to purchase food for the first weeks of life behind the wire. Inside the fence itself, families are provided with small plots of land on which they are expected to construct their own huts and plant gardens, and, so the theory goes, breed pigs, poultry and rabbits. In practice, these so-called "development" projects are confined to a minority of showcase villages; in others, the people are still living in the grass and cardboard shelters hastily constructed when they first arrived, and without water supplies or sanitation.
A typical protected village in Madziwa TTL, near Mount Darwin, "Keep Nine", encloses 1,300 people on 65 acres of land. They are housed in 13 kraals within an inner security fence, which is, in turn surrounded by a 2 km perimeter fence, floodlit at night and patrolled for security purposes. Next to each hut is a small bunker in the event of mortar attacks by guerillas. The Guard Force - in this case two White District Officers and a unit of African District Assistants - are housed in a brick barracks within an earth and sandbagged "fort", surmounted by a look-out tower, at the centre of the village - so that the people they are allegedly "protecting" are between them and the "enemy". Men of the Guard Force are armed and maintain a state of continuous alert. With the added protection of the Indemnity and Compensation Act, their power over the lives of the people under their control is complete and undisputed.
Since September 1975, staffing shortages have been considerably eased by new conscription requirements. All European, Asian and Coloured men between the ages of 30 and 38 are now liable for a 56-day call-up which can be served in the protected villages.
Towards the end of last year considerable energy was expended by the regime, through the press and otherwise, in convincing the public at large of the success of the protected village strategy. In December a group of more than 20 Rhodesian and foreign journalists were taken on a tour of Fort Mopane, which was described as "an ambitious community development project aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the local African population". A series of enthusiastic articles on this and other villages appeared in the main daily paper, the *Rhodesia Herald*. Since the New Year however, the Rhodesian African Rifles have been withdrawn from the Fort Mopane project and, with a renewed upsurge of guerilla activity and an increasing security clampdown throughout the eastern border zone, the flow of reports has been brought to an abrupt halt.
