by Ian Smith
But the gallery of traitors included not just left wing politicians, indeed Smith took them for granted. He was especially shocked by the perceived duplicity of Tory grandees like Harold MacMillan and Rab Butler, foreign secretary when the Central African Federation broke up in 1963, described by Smith in his memoirs as ‘flabby, overweight … a sad specimen of humanity.’
Then there was Lord Carrington, the Conservative foreign secretary who presided over the Lancaster House talks, ‘the most adept at double talk of them all’. Carrington’s greatest sin was to have adroitly convinced the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom Smith regarded as a potential ally, that Mugabe and Nkomo had to be part of a final settlement, even though she instinctively shared Smith’s view that the two external leaders were not freedom fighters but terrorists.
The final agreement, though it ended the war, appalled Smith. In vain did he warn that the winner, whether by fair means or foul, was certain to be Mugabe, backed by China and about whom the British as well had the gravest misgivings. In the end he was so disgusted by proceedings that he skipped the closing ceremony, preferring to attend a re-union dinner with his old chums from 130 Squadron. ‘It would have been a nauseous occasion for me, and to pretend otherwise would have been hypocritical,’ he writes in these memoirs. ‘Even if I had attended in mourning garb it would not have rung true, because funerals are occasions when one pays one’s respects. My only feeling would have been contempt.’
In the light of subsequent events, it is hard not to have some sympathy for Smith. Whatever one’s views of colonialism and white minority rule, every one in Zimbabwe, apart from a tiny ruling elite and their cronies, is worse off under Mugabe’s despotic regime. At independence, Rhodesia had everything going for it: a decent industry and infrastructure, a solid currency, a government bureaucracy and social services that were the envy of Africa, and the good will of the world. Everyone wanted it to succeed, none more than Britain.
Today the country is on the brink of total collapse. In November 2007, the month in which Smith died, inflation was running at an official rate of 25,000 per cent. Some unofficial estimates put the figure six times higher, meaning that prices would have multiplied 1,500 times in a single year – if there was anything in the shops to buy.
But what has happened since cannot justify what went before. A wise leader must distinguish between the temporary vicissitudes of history and its irresistible flows. The former test his mettle. But to the latter, he must adapt. Barely a decade after blacks took power in Rhodesia, South Africa – the last bastion of white rule on the continent, whose white population was proportionately four times as large as that of Rhodesia – had no choice but to embrace majority rule as well.
An exchange with Harold Wilson, as recounted here by Smith, offers a telling snapshot. Always the pragmatist, the Labour premier pointed out that it would be easy enough for the two of them to reach an agreement. The problem was that it would have to be acceptable to the Organisation of African Unity. Smith dismissed ‘that bunch of communist dictators,’ but Wilson replied simply that ‘You cannot divorce yourself from the world we live in.’ To which Smith responded, ‘Perhaps it’s the politicians we have to deal with, rather than the world we live in.’ To the last Smith believed he was the victim not of irresistible pressures, but of the spinelessness of his supposed friends.
Nor could he understand the underlying harshness of white rule, epitomised during the bush war by the uprooting of an estimated 750,000 Africans, herded into ‘protected villages’ that were little more than guarded camps, in a vain bid to thwart the guerrillas, or ‘terrs’ to the minority regime.
Nor did he grasp the fundamental, all-pervasive unfairness of land ownership in the old Rhodesia, whereby a few thousand white farmers held more than half of the country’s arable land. Mugabe’s depredations were self defeating. But no-one could dispute the underlying injustice of the situation he inherited in 1980.
The descent of Zimbabwe in these last few years is an unalloyed tragedy. Some say that had Smith been less obdurate and readier to compromise at the outset, his country might have been spared the misery that followed.
Perhaps – but then again, perhaps not. When Mugabe did take power, after the 1980 election, his victory was comprehensive and indisputable. After all, he belonged to the majority Shona people. Even if there had been no war of independence, he might well have come to power, sooner or later. The argument of course is moot. The old Rhodesia is gone for ever, and modern Zimbabwe is home to twice as many elephants as whites. Ian Smith might be the symbol of an untenable past. But as his country endures its agony, his shadow looms larger than ever over its equally untenable present.
Rupert Cornwell, Washington DC, March 19 2008.
Introduction
Since the Second World War, and particularly from the 1960s onwards, we have been prone to arrive quickly at firm — often unshakeable — opinions of leading personalities of our time. This is because, for the first time in history, all our senses are saturated not only by what we read in newspapers, but by what we hear on the radio and see on the television. As people under scrutiny are ‘live’ on a screen before us, we feel that we know them personally and can judge them — forgetting our own ignorance of them and that what we see, hear and read about them is edited by unseen hands. We are fascinated by their foibles and mannerisms quite as much as by their achievements and qualities. We judge them with confidence — finding them guilty or not guilty. Then later, sure of our opinion, we are often disappointed, even outraged, when the biographies and historical analyses emerge to show us a very different picture. They uncover what was hidden from us, what we could not know and, particularly, how complex everything was.
Ian Douglas Smith is a man about whom much of the world had (and probably still has) firm opinions. Depicted mostly as an obstinate, dour leader of a right-wing white minority government in an obscure land-locked African colony, this essentially private, reticent but patriotic man was brought to public attention by the drama which led to his declaring his country unilaterally independent on 11 November 1965. He would probably have been forgotten if his rebellion (UDI) against Britain had not endured for another fifteen years. Time has served, perhaps, to soften the image of this quintessential Rhodesian but, as misconceptions abound about the man and his country, his autobiography is timely.
Ian Smith has had an almost universally hostile press — even at home in Rhodesia — and that hostility has persisted because there has been nothing of substance written to ameliorate it. There are dozens of books on Rhodesia, but none explains how he struck a chord with the public both at home and abroad even at the height of the confrontation with Britain and the world. This always puzzled his political opponents, who saw him only as they wanted to see him. A major sin of course, was that he offended the establishment by not accepting the fate of Rhodesia as decreed by Whitehall. His rebellion against the Crown forfeited the support of many who otherwise would have been his allies within the British and other bodies politic. Nevertheless, he secured the admiration of many ordinary people, who admired his unwavering stand for his principles.
There is academic concern about ‘Rhodesianness’ and attempts to deny it. But anyone who lived his or her life there knows its reality. Whatever the origin of the white Rhodesians, they were simply not South Africans, nor were they the British abroad, talking of ‘home’. Ian Smith shows this in this book.
Southern Rhodesia was not the typical British colony because it was neither founded by nor ruled directly from Whitehall. The uniqueness of its founding in many ways prescribed its later crises and some of what still haunts Zimbabwe today. The colony was neither the outcome of British imperialism at the height of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, nor part of a vision generated in London. Instead, it was the product of sub-imperialism by Britain’s Cape Colony, where Cecil John Rhodes the mining magnate and politician, dreamed of expansion into Central Africa to find another Rand and to annex great portions of Af
rica to the existing possessions of the Crown. Because the British Government acquiesced and in 1889 granted the British South Africa Company of Rhodes a royal charter to exploit land north of the Limpopo, it abdicated the power to control what happened thereafter.
The influence of Cape society, rather than that of Britain, had profound effects. Like the Cape and Natal, but few other African colonies, Southern Rhodesia was a colony of settlement. The company’s corps of pioneers was recruited in the Cape, as were the civil servants who were to serve the company and governments thereafter. Roman-Dutch law, not English law, was adopted along with many legislative ideas — including the non-racial franchise. The Court of Appeal was later in Bloemfontein, not London. Young Rhodesians — including Ian Smith — were educated at South African universities. Even the flat accent of the white Rhodesian has its origin in the Cape.
The British government soon had second thoughts about the unbridled BSA Company after the embarrassment of the Jameson Raid of 1896, followed by the company’s harsh handling of the reaction of the Shona and Ndebele to the loss of their land and sovereignty in the first uprising against white rule in 1896–7. The company was brought under stricter surveillance and was not allowed, for example, to govern Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia). From 1900, the settlers were given representation in the Southern Rhodesian legislative council. Company rule ended in 1923 when, after being given the opportunity, in a referendum, of joining South Africa, the Southern Rhodesians were granted limited self-government. Under this they could elect a legislative assembly, on a non-racial franchise, from which a prime minister and a cabinet would be chosen, The new Southern Rhodesian government had wide powers, including the right of defence. The British retained a veto on matters affecting local Africans and they controlled foreign relations. The quasi-dominion status of Southern Rhodesia was reinforced in 1924 by its affairs being placed under the new Dominions Office — and not the Colonial Office — in London, and by the country’s being invited, after 1931, to participate in all the meetings of the Dominion — and later the Commonwealth — prime ministers. This privilege, and the fact that the British never saw fit to exercise their veto, contributed to the impression in Rhodesia that, in due course, limited self-government would be translated into full dominion status as it had in New Zealand, for example.
By 1948, having governed Southern Rhodesia successfully for twenty-five years, the Southern Rhodesian Parliament concluded that dominion status should be sought. The objective of the Prime Minister, Sir Godfrey Huggins (later Lord Malvern), however, was a larger British dominion in Central Africa. Moves had already begun to rationalise services common to Southern Rhodesia and its nearest British colonies to the north, namely Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (later Malawi). Amalgamation with Northern Rhodesia was sought by Huggins to create a large enough entity with the resources — the copper of the north, for example — to justify a new dominion. The British did not wish to allow Southern Rhodesians control over the Africans of the area, so settled for a federation of the three territories which allowed the two northern territories to continue under direct rule from London. This was the fatal flaw of the subsequent Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1953–63. Independent of the interests of the Federation, Britain was able to move the two northern colonies rapidly towards independence once Harold Macmillan had decided to abandon the Empire in 1958–9. Yet Southern Rhodesia saw itself as the senior partner because it had been self-governing since 1923 and, unlike Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, it possessed a sophisticated economy based on agriculture, mining and industry through local enterprise. Rhodesia had a stock exchange, merchant banks and other aspects of a developed society. If such assets were the criteria of independence the Southern Rhodesians felt that their territory should be the automatic choice to be independent first.
The Federation was doomed by the decisions in 1962–3 to give Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia independence. In any case, the new African governments of Kenneth Kaunda and Hastings Banda had nothing in common with their Southern Rhodesian federal partner. Winston Field, the new Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, could secure nothing more than a verbal promise of independence for his territory from Lord Butler, the presiding British Minister. Immediately after sealing the Federal dissolution at the Victoria Falls conference in mid-1963, the British reneged. In the era of self-determination and under pressure from the Afro-Asian bloc, they would not allow Rhodesia to be independent while the whites remained in a dominating political position. The British wanted rapid advancement to full enfranchisement of all. African nationalist opinion (voiced by Joshua Nkomo, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and later Robert Mugabe) was more impatient and demanded instant majority rule. By contrast, the white Rhodesians brought up on a qualified franchise and possessed of practical experience of Africa, sought an evolutionary and gradual path to full democracy. There were African moderates who fell in between, but by 1963 the militant African nationalists, sponsored by the Eastern bloc, embarked on the armed insurgency which would result in Mugabe’s coming to power in 1980.
Ian Smith replaced Field in April 1964, but he was not the first prime minister, Southern Rhodesian or Federal, to have earned British censure for attempting to impede the British rush of all colonies to independence whether they were ready or not. Sir Roy Welensky, as Federal Prime Minister (1956–63), had already offended the British establishment by his obdurate resistance to expediency. Welensky had compounded the offence by contemplating UDI on three occasions but, with two British-administered territories within his Federation, such action was impossible. There was, however, no British presence in Southern Rhodesia, so UDI was possible for Smith.
As with other Rhodesians, the British officials also underestimated Smith, and their ignorance contributed greatly to the impasse over independence. They knew nothing of Smith when they first encountered him in 1963 in Field’s cabinet, describing him simply as ‘a tough, somewhat difficult personality’. Set on their path, they were determined to give the Rhodesians nothing. When Smith was due in London in September 1964 to negotiate the terms of independence to match that being given to Zambia, Sir Saville Garner, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Commonwealth Relations Office, advised his minister, the Duke of Devonshire: ‘Short of a miracle, there is no possibility of the granting of independence during Mr Smith’s visit. Our best hope lies in not provoking a crisis at this stage with the aim of finding later on an administration with whom we can hope to make progress.’
The advised inaction produced the crisis of UDI and the British had to wait until 1978–9 before they had someone else (Bishop Muzorewa) with whom to deal.
The depth of the British ignorance of Smith is to be found in a biographical note supplied in September 1964 to the British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home. Having outlined Smith’s career, it concluded:
He is a simple-minded, politically naïve, and uncomprehending character. His political approach has been described as ‘schoolboy’. He possesses a strong vein of schoolboy obstinacy and there is a mixture of schoolboy stubbornness, cunning and imperception about his speeches. Likewise there is a Boy’s Own Paper ring about his patriotic utterances. Nevertheless his pedestrian and humourless manner often conceals a shrewder assessment of a particular situation than at first appears on the surface and he should not be under-rated.
Because they acted on such advice without heeding the final sentence, it is not surprising that the British found themselves faced with UDI a year later.
Professor J.R.T. Wood, Durban, South Africa 1997
Growth of a Nation
I: IN THE BEGINNING
‘You Rhodesians are more British than the British.’ So often I heard that during the war years 1939–45. It was a comment which pleased Rhodesians. To think that we were not British would be ridiculous. After all, what is our history? Rhodes’s dream of a British route from Cape to Cairo.
In 1889 Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of a mining empire and inspirational lead
er of the British in South Africa, secured a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria to form the British South Africa Company to explore and exploit the land north of the Limpopo River. Blessed with the sanction of the Matabele chief, Lobengula, to assess the mineral wealth of the lands to the north and east of Matabeleland, Rhodes sent Major Frank Johnson and 250 young pioneers in a column of wagons on a daring adventure into the unknown.
The formation of the British South Africa Police (BSAP) in 1889 in Kimberley, 500 men in all, was to provide protection for the pioneer column of 1890. Their task was to raise the Union Jack, first at Fort Tuli, then Fort Victoria and finally at Fort Salisbury. They were going into uncharted country, the domain of the lion, the elephant, the buffalo, the rhinoceros — all deadly killers — the black mamba, the most deadly of all snakes, and the Matabele, with Lobengula’s Impis, the most deadly of all black warriors, guarding their frontiers against any intruders. But if the mission was to raise the flag for queen and country, no questions were asked. Moreover, their consciences were clear: to the west the Matabeles had recently moved in. They were a tribe of the Zulus in Natal, who had broken away after a difference of opinion with their King Shaka and migrated north, first to the Transvaal and thence crossing the Limpopo and settling in this new country, which was uninhabited apart from wandering Bushmen, and became known as Matabeleland. The eastern parts of the country were settled by a number of different tribes, nomadic people who had immigrated from the north and east, constantly moving to and fro in order to accommodate their needs and wants. To the south were scattered settlements of Shangaans from Mozambique and Northern Transvaal. Clearly it was no-man’s land, as Cecil Rhodes and the politicians back in London had confirmed, so no one could accuse them of trespassing or taking part in an invasion.
