As these future presidents, prime ministers and ministers were systematically restricted, deported or thrown in jail, Mackay ran the newspapers which kept their cause alive, publishing in defiance of censorship, advertising boycotts and CID snooping. A loyal prison visitor, he made sure these most intellectual of detainees received the academic books and goodwill messages needed to keep their brains working and morale high.
When the authorities in Southern Rhodesia tried to conscript him, he went to jail himself rather than do military service. Forced to rebase in neighbouring Zambia, he transformed himself into a benign form of human trafficker, ferrying refugees fleeing Portuguese rule and South Africa’s apartheid system to new lives in ‘Africa-free’ in a dodgy Land Rover. The same battered vehicle later served a more sinister purpose, dropping off weapons for Rhodesia’s budding guerrilla movements.
Such an eventful life history should, in theory, make for a swift, pacey read. The fact that this book is no such thing is, in part, a reflection of the 80-year-old author’s somewhat idiosyncratic writing style. While Mackay undoubtedly has a newsman’s feel for the vivid image and the nature-lover’s eye for the beauties of the African landscape, his phrasing can be frustratingly circumlocutory.
He has also been poorly served by his editors, who should have made a concerted effort to contextualise the story for a modern audience which will struggle to place immediately the likes of ‘Bechuanaland’, ‘Nyasaland’, ‘Northern Rhodesia’ and many more. I found myself constantly flipping to the appendix of ‘New Place Names’ provided at the back to establish where, exactly, Mackay’s wanderings took him. My growing irritation was not assuaged by a map which — in a book which features many perilous border crossings and extraordinary road trips — omits cities, key roads, rivers and major landmarks.
This is a shame, for We Have Tomorrow deserves a wider audience than it is likely to win. The dew-fresh period upon which Mackay focuses his gaze — a time when Hastings Banda had not yet fallen prey to full-throttle megalomania, Robert Mugabe was no more than a skinny stripling and UDI was in its infancy — is one that cries out for excavation. With delicacy and sympathy, Mackay traces the well-meaning errors and all-too-understandable mistakes that would eventually lead to oppressive white regimes being replaced with equally stifling black equivalents. And as we are reminded of this moment of great, unrealised promise, we also register — contrary to what our own press too often implies — that dictatorship and social ruin in Africa are neither necessary nor inevitable.
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