Premier from Invercargill

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 738, 4 September 1953, Page 18

Premier from Invercargill

ARFIELD TODD, who, according to a cable message from Bulawayo, will become Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia when its Parliament meets early this month, was born 45 years ago in Invercargill, and educated at Otago University. He visited New Zealand briefly on furlough in 1950, when he broadcast a series of talks for the NZBS and gave some of his impressions of Rhodesian economic life in an interview with The Listener. At that time he said he had spent the past ‘16 years in Southern Rhodesia, the first 13 of them as a missionary living in a native reserve. He had risen to become a member of the Southern Rhodesia Legislative Assembly, and Superintendent of the Church of Christ Mission and Boarding School at Dadaya in Matabeleland. He also became a ranch-owner. According to the latest news he will succeed Sir ‘Godfrey Huggins both as Prime Minister and as leader of the United Party, having been elected to the latter position at a party meeting in Bulawayo. Sir Godfrey Huggins is giving up both posts to enter the interim Central African Federal Government representing the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, In 1950 Mr. Todd said that land, in Southern Rhodesia was being sold to approved immigrants at four to five shillings an acre for tracts of 2000 acres or more, The white population had doubled itself in ten years to well above 100,000, in a country half as big again as New Zealand. Mr. Todd was formerly adviser to the Southern Rhodesian Government on native education,. and during his 1950

visit he investigated current education practices in the primary schools here. Almost all native education in Southern Rhodesia was in the hands of 17 missionary societies, he said, which ran 3000 schools teaching about a quarter of a million children. The State, however, was in charge of secondary and technical education. His long experience with the African people and as an educationist and farmer, as well as his New Zealand background, should be of considerable value to him in his new post.