AS THINGS in Zimbabwe have gone in recent months from bad to worse to slightly better, Kevin Nolan has watched with a particularly keen eye. Now living in retirement in Skerries, Co Dublin, he spent nearly 50 years in that African country, where he was the manager of Alitalia, the Italian state airline, for Central Africa.
Kevin has had the misfortune to have been twice widowed, first in 1972 and, after remarriage five years later, again in 1998. His first wife was Sheila Broderick, Aer Lingus’s very first air hostess, whose life was extraordinary by any standards.
Her Irish father, John Broderick, had been British minister to Cuba in the early 1930s. Knighted by King George V in the late 1920s, he had just been appointed ambassador to Argentina when he collapsed and died, aged just 51.
So when Kevin and Sheila Nolan took the decision, in hindsight brave and even daring, to emigrate to what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1956 with their very young family, they were reprising an expatriate experience that was very familiar to Sheila, with her memories of a childhood spent partly in the magnificent British residency in Havana. Like pre-revolutionary Cuba, the Zimbabwe of those times was approaching a crisis, although it did not seem so then. Everything was calm and orderly for the Europeans who ruled it.
As Kevin recalls now, it was a time when Africans hardly ever flew as passengers in airliners. His clients included, in what he describes as “the economic basis of the business”, Catholic clergy “on the missions”, going to and from Rome.
One afternoon in 1961, when visiting one of these clients – a Marist Fathers’ mission about 30 miles from Salisbury (now Harare), Kevin brought Sheila along for the ride. Once there, they overheard joyful African music, and, on enquiring, discovered that there was a “native” wedding in progress. The young couple had no camera to take photographs of the great occasion, so Sheia Nolan, who had her camera with her, offered to do the honours after getting permission from the brother superior, Brother Charles. The offer was readily accepted by the couple, who became that afternoon Mr and Mrs Robert and Sally Mugabe.
This event was to resonate years later when the Nolans’ eldest daughter Maeve was at a boarding school located near the Mozambique border, and civil war was raging between the guerrilla forces of ZANU-PF and the white government of Ian Smith.
Sheila, fearful for her daughter’s safety, but also not wishing to disrupt her education, wrote to Maeve with a photograph of the Mugabes’ wedding, writing on the back that if the guerrillas should visit the school, “show them this photograph and say that your mother is a friend of Robert Mugabe”. By this time, Sheila was herself involved in politics as a member of the multi-racial Centre Party, which contested the 1970 general election in Rhodesia.
Sheila stood in a constituency in Salisbury. The poll was to elect a parliament in which, ridiculous as it now seems, 50 seats were reserved for whites, at most 8 per cent of the population, and 16 for Africans. Tellingly, the Centre Party won none of the white seats, all of which were taken by Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front, but took all of the seven African seats that were not reserved for tribal leaders’ nominees. This seems to suggest that those Africans sufficiently well-educated and prosperous to have voting rights wanted conciliation with the whites.
Sheila became parliamentary liaison officer for the Centre Party’s African MPs, attending parliament every day it sat, helping to draft speeches and providing secretarial assistance. Sadly, she was to pass away within two years – like her father, aged just 51.
Kevin Nolan is still deeply concerned about a land and a people he loved, and still does. He and his family set up a pension fund for an African man, Aaron, who had worked for them for over 40 years. Today the income from this barely provides enough for Aaron to live on, and they send him extra money by an informal route.
Of Smith and Mugabe, he says: “They were the same, in that they each believed that he was completely right,” and each was unwilling to countenance another view. However, he gives the white leader this credit: “We were against what he did [in declaring independence from Britain in 1965], but he was honest; he never feathered his own nest [unlike Mugabe].” The Nolans were principally against “the fact that Smith didn’t support the principle of advancement on merit” (as opposed to race).
Kevin still has a letter he received from Sally Mugabe in 1981, in which she assured him that she and her husband remembered with fondness Sheila’s photography, and that the then new and first president of Zimbabwe was committed to building a multi-racial country.
Sadly, that was not to be. And Kevin Nolan, like countless others who love the land and people of Zimbabwe, can only watch from afar in hope.