THANK you for your article in the Examiner featuring Patrice Dlamini (April 3). Those of us with good memories recall how Robert Mugabe and his band of savage cohorts dealt with Peter and Sandra McCann, and their children, when a group of thirteen good souls were butchered in what is now Zimbabwe in August 1977.

The last thing that Peter and Sandra saw before they were killed was their children’s eyes being cut out their little heads. Sandra was a local girl from Marsh – near Pearson – and it fell to my dreadful duty to go to tell her parents Tom and Eva what had happened. The full description of their terrible end (given by terrified black witnesses who were hiding to save their own miserable skins) was included in the paperback book The Rainbow And The Thunder. Their offence? Helping to educate the good children of what was then Rhodesia towards a better life.

For me, his end cannot come soon enough. Eva was never the same again and I saw Tom a broken man, sitting for days on end in Greenhead Park trying to make sense of it all.

The Foreign Secretary of the day, David Owen, wrung his hands in despair but did nothing. Perhaps if there had been oil in Rhodesia things would have been handled differently. May Mugabe rot in the ground very soon now.

G Smith

Cowlersley