Garfield Todd ( 1908 - 2002 )

The clock has struck 13 in New Zealand,
just as it was always going to do
one day; and humans do the unsealing
of time, not an angel that knows no rue.

Their dispassion is that of folly
and risk, like in like-minded nations now.
The secular zone is not the holy;
There is no Crown to bind us to its vow.

I recall standing in Trafalgar Square
when Garfield Todd had died, and no flags
were lowered from Zimbabwe House quite near,
to New Zealand House. In Britain’s time-lag,

Big Ben now strikes one to our thirteen strokes.
Nations whose histories misspoke.

Woodford Halse - 27 February 2026

Born in Invercargill, Southland, New Zealand, and educated at Otago University. Sir Garfield Todd the former Prime Minister of what was called Southern Rhodesia ( 1953 -58 ) was abandoned by everybody.

A missionary and rancher in Zimbabwe, he had opposed the former Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, was active in the boycott and isolation of the country, and supported Black resistance by guerillas, because he had come to support majoritarian democracy in the country.

He was made a Knight Bachelor at the instance of the New Zealand Government in 1986, yet stripped of his Zimbabwean citizenship by Robert Mugabe, who had also arranged for Todd’s daughter, Judith, to be raped.

His homeland New Zealand faces its own history of a fugue from history. Let us hope it will not be a case of Don Jose Avellanos’ Firty Years of Misrule in Conrad’s Nostromo. There has been a trahison des clercs of the Left in New Zealand, and by the universities, while the Labour Party has lost its nationalist intelligentsia.

Todd named his Zimbabwean ranch Hokonui after the Hokonui Hills in Southland. To what or whom, is a settler loyal ? Camus did not live to experience his expulsion from Algeria.