Molly Clutton-Brock: Campaigner for racial justice
1912-2013
MOLLY Clutton-Brock, who has died aged 101, was the wife and devoted collaborator of Guy Clutton-Brock, a campaigner for racial justice in white-ruled Rhodesia who became the first and only official white “hero” of Zimbabwe on his death in 1995.
The Clutton-Brocks, who described themselves as “practical Christians”, travelled from Britain to what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1949. There they established a series of nonracial, cooperative farming enterprises — most notably Cold Comfort Farm on the outskirts of Salisbury (now Harare), which they founded in the early 1960s.
While Guy Clutton-Brock worked to teach modern agricultural techniques and encouraged young black nationalists —including the ANC activist Didymus Mutasa — to develop their political ideas, Molly established clinics where physically handicapped black children were treated using the latest “NeumannNeurode” remedial exercise and physiotherapy techniques.
The Clutton-Brocks became ei- ther the most celebrated or the most infamous couple in Rhodesia, depending on one’s political viewpoint. In 1957, Guy helped to draft the constitution of the ANC. During the emergency two years later, he was detained and briefly imprisoned with other ANC members.
Then, in 1971, after Rhodesia declared independence from Britain, he was stripped of his citizenship by the government of Ian Smith and deported as a “threat to public safety”. Cold Comfort Farm was taken over and sold to a white businessman. As the couple boarded a plane for Britain, hundreds of black Rhodesians turned up at the airport to say goodbye.
Although they kept in touch with their friends in Rhodesia, the Clutton-Brocks returned only once, in 1980, after the country had won its independence and became Zimbabwe. When Guy died in 1995, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe attended his memorial service at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, London, and carried his ashes back for burial in Harare’s Heroes’ Acre.
Guy always argued that people could not expect Zimbabwe to be perfect after 100 years of colonial capitalism. But it was perhaps fortunate that he did not live to see his protégé, Mutasa, morph into Mugabe’s ruthless and hated minister of national security and head of the secret police — or see his beloved Cold Comfort Farm, which Mutasa and others had reconstituted after independence, appear on international lists of companies under targeted sanctions as a suspected front for foreign investments by the country’s corrupt ruling elite.
Molly Allen was born in Cheshire on February 3 1912. Her father died when she was two, after which her mother moved the family to Eastbourne.
After leaving school she became a handicrafts teacher, and it was while she was working at a youth detention centre in the East End of London that she met Guy, a Rugby- and Cambridge-educated idealist who had scorned his privileged background to work among the poor. They married in 1934.
During World War 2 they moved to Oxford House, an Anglican “settlement” in the East End of London that Guy developed as a community centre, offering employment to conscientious objectors. Their daughter was born there, and Molly undertook training in the Neumann-Neurode system.
After the war they travelled to Berlin, where Guy served briefly as head of the religious affairs section of the British Control Commission, then worked for Christian Reconstruction in Europe. In 1947, they moved to a tiny cottage in Pembrokeshire, where Guy worked as a farm labourer. They went to Africa two years later to work at St Faith’s Mission, an Anglican centre near Rusape.
Molly’s work with handicapped children began on a table on their farmhouse veranda. To begin with she worked with babies, but as word spread older children and patients from further afield began turning up. With financial help from supporters overseas, a makeshift clinic was built and equipped with an exercise ladder, trapeze and other aids for physically handicapped children. It became known as the Mukuwapasi Clinic.
Molly went on to found several more clinics in Rhodesia and Botswana, training local people in physiotherapy techniques.
After they were thrown out of Rhodesia, the Clutton-Brocks bought a small cottage in Denbighshire, where they continued to live simply, with only cold water and no electricity.
Molly Clutton-Brock is survived by her daughter. — Telegraph, London