THE WHITES:'TIRED OF RUNNING'

Spring has arrived in Rhodesia, gracing the rich, rolling farm land and the still oddly serene streets of Salisbury (pop. 569,000), where jacaranda trees are in spectacular purple bloom. This spring, however, is like no other in the country's history: it marks the crumbling of white colonial rule, which has lasted nearly a century. TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs filed this report on the scene in the Rhodesian capital:

The week-long Jacaranda Festival is in full swing. The thoroughbreds are running at the Borrowdale Race Course, the stores are holding sales, and whites out in the suburbs are talking about filling their swimming pools again. Yet there is a definite undercurrent of foreboding. At the annual Jacaranda Parade, which featured the usual floats and miniskirted majorettes (both black and white), a white housewife said calmly: "We won't see many more of these. The blacks won't bother with parades. They take too much effort and organization."

Resignation, rather than rage, seems to be the prevailing mood. A middle-aged farmer from the Mozambique border area struck a common theme. "I'm tired of running," he sighed. "I left Kenya when it became independent and went to Zambia. Then Zambia turned sour for whites, and I came here. Now Rhodesia is going black. The logical place to go may be South Africa, but race relations there are a bloody sight worse than ours. So I'll stay and take my chances, just as long as the blacks don't go bonkers." His buddy, a Salisbury mechanic, concurred: "I don't like the idea of being ruled by blacks, but we've had our heads in the sand here for ten years, and now we're going to pay for it."

Many white businessmen hope there will not be all that much to pay; they expect the projected lifting of the economic boycott against Rhodesia to help everyone. Indeed, stocks on the Salisbury exchange have begun edging upward. Houses that had been up for sale in affluent white areas are being either withdrawn from the market or marked up in price. One white who now pays only $225 a month for a five-bedroom house in the capital's suburbs of Highlands was startled to be told that his rent will double when his current lease expires.

"There's still a lot of good will between blacks and whites," says Michael Daffy, head of the Association of Chambers of Commerce of Rhodesia. "Given a chance to effect this change without emotion, we may all come out all right. More than South Africa, we have the makings of a black middle class here. Profits in Rhodesia are color blind, and blacks have just as much a stake in stability as we do."

The morale of the 20,000-member security force may become a problem. The Smith capitulation has raised questions about the soldiers' zeal in fighting Rhodesia's guerrillas. A young trooper in a downtown Salisbury discotheque sounded a now familiar complaint: "What the hell. We've surrendered already. If Smith's not going to fight, I damn well won't either." A letter from a reservist to the Rhodesia Herald seconded the soldier's view: "Is it worth doing my call-up in two months time? I don't want to lose my life only to see the leaders of this country sitting around a table with terrorists."

One sign that the transfer of power may go smoothly is that there has been almost no talk among blacks of revenge on the whites, and there is a surprising lack of exultation. What most concerned a black gas-station attendant, for example, were the rivalries among the various nationalist leaders. And while a hefty black laundress insisted that Smith "must go, for he is a racist," she emphasized that "most Europeans [whites] must stay, otherwise we will have no jobs. We must show them we can run things and not frighten them off."

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