The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (35 page)

He was born in Africa, in Selukwe, Rhodesia, to a Scotch immigrant father and an English mother. His father was a farmer and an entrepreneur who set up a small chain of bakeries and butcher's shops around the local mines (and tried a little mining himself), maintained the Selukwe auto garage, and bred race horses as an avocation (he even jockeyed a bit). As part of his civic duties, he judged cattle, led the local rugby and cricket
clubs, and was a captain of the local defense force. He was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his work raising money for Britain's defense during the Second World War. He was business-minded, hard-working, and, like the Scots of old, a man of stubborn moral convictions. Ian Smith's mother was equally active in local affairs—sporting, social, charitable, and educational (she founded the local branch of the Women's Institute). She too was awarded an MBE.

Smith was a boy's boy (as he would later be a man's man), preferring math and science to the liberal arts, but vastly preferring sports to either. He was proud of his own athletic prowess—and that of the rugby players and cricketers of independent Rhodesia (rugby and cricket were mandatory sports for boys in the secondary schools). He enrolled at Rhodes University in South Africa, where his focus was all sporting: he was a sprinter, a rugby player, and rowed crew as therapy for a knee he had banged up playing rugby.

Then came the war. Rhodesians rushed to enlist—and actually had to be held back, as those in essential industries, like mining, needed to have someone fill their jobs before they put on khaki. University students were encouraged to finish their studies, but Smith finagled an interview with the Air Force—not bothering to mention he was a university student—and was accepted as a recruit, joining Australians, Britons, and fellow Rhodesians training to fly in the clear blue skies of Rhodesia. Smith hoped to be assigned to a squadron in Britain, but instead was sent Egypt, Lebanon, Persia, and Mesopotamia before returning to the western desert of North Africa. On one flight in Egypt he crashed his plane and was lucky to survive—his face was smashed (requiring plastic surgery to repair); his jaw, a shoulder, and a leg were broken; and his back was badly injured. His recovery took five months. He was offered a chance to return home as a flight instructor, but was still hungry for action and rejoined his squadron in
Corsica. He had flown Hawker Hurricanes before—now he achieved his dream of flying Spitfires.

Smith saw heavy action in missions over Italy, and was eventually shot down. He evaded the Germans and was taken in by a rural Italian family, keeping fit with mountain climbing, wood chopping, and his RAF exercises. He tried to teach himself Italian, made contact with another RAF officer in the area, and then linked up with the partisans. The partisans wanted to keep him as one of their band, but Smith was determined to find his way back to the RAF. After several months he was smuggled into France, crossing the frozen Alps in summer clothes, and was eventually picked up by an American patrol.

He was sent to Naples where he again skirted the truth—about how long he had been behind enemy lines (the truth was: long enough that revealing it would have meant a posting back to Rhodesia), and about how England was essentially a second home to him—in order to see action on the Western Front, which he did. After a bit of training to knock off the rust, he flew from an Allied base in Germany; he wound down his service with a tour of the Nordic countries and a return to Blighty.

Smith resumed his studies, and sports, at Rhodes University, graduating with an economics degree. He had relatives in America who urged him to emigrate, but Rhodesia was home, and Smith was happy and determined to stay there. He became a farmer, married a young widow with two children (she was herself something of a sportswoman), and was cajoled into running for Parliament as a member of the free market Liberal Party. The Party was beaten badly, but Smith won his race. He remained a farmer—Parliament sat for only three months a year—but politics became his vocation. His strength was not his oratory or his deal-making; rather he seemed the epitome of what it meant to be a Rhodesian—a blunt, straightforward, principled farmer and war veteran, who was, as the Rhodesians thought of
themselves, “more British than the British.” Smith, like most Rhodesians, was stunned and disturbed when the British electorate gave Churchill the order of the boot in 1945; and he and they were even more disturbed when British politics followed an anti-colonial course over the next three decades.

Smith's other political strength was that he represented the views and ideals of most white Rhodesians. He was hated by the minority of white Rhodesian liberals who thought he stood athwart an harmonious multiracial society; and he was disdained by the minority of white Rhodesians who saw apartheid South Africa as the model African state. Smith's view, and the majority white Rhodesian view, avoided extreme racialism, while denying the viability of one man, one vote in Africa—except perhaps as a distant goal—if a free and civilized society was to be maintained.

In 1953, Rhodesia (or Southern Rhodesia, as it was known at the time) joined Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which existed until 1 January 1964. Smith supported the Federation on economic grounds, and joined the new Federal Party, but his enthusiasm for the Federation was tepid. Southern Rhodesia was, de facto, practically self-governing, and while he and his fellow Rhodesians were extremely loyal to Britain, he also wanted to ensure that Rhodesia in no way jeopardized its future independence.

In 1961, Rhodesia enacted a new constitution, which broke the electorate into two voting rolls—divided not by race (though the vast majority of blacks would be on the secondary or “B Roll”) but by education and class (based on income and property, and hence on the taxes one paid). The constitution was endorsed and partially drafted by representatives of the British government who estimated that it would lead to black majority rule in
a ten to fifteen years time. But black nationalist politicians, who had originally signed on to the constitution, changed course and urged black Africans not to register to vote—a surely self-defeating strategy.

Matters came to a boil with the breakup of the Federation and Britain's granting of independence to Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia in 1964. Independent Malawi and Zambia (as these nations became) were considered perfectly respectable members of the British Commonwealth even though both fulfilled Ian Smith's constant warning that in Africa one man, one vote meant one man, one vote, one time. Malawi immediately became a one-party totalitarian state looted for thirty years by its president-for-life Hastings Banda. Zambia became a one-party (de facto in 1968, de jure in 1972) socialist state and economic flop, governed by Kenneth Kaunda from independence until 1991. To Smith's dismay, Rhodesia, with its multi-party elections, free press and free judiciary, and economic success was considered unworthy of independence because it did not immediately grant equal voting rights to all black Africans.

Smith—who became the leader of a new party, the Rhodesian Front, in 1964—thought this was rank hypocrisy on the part of the British, who were more interested in appeasing liberal opinion than in doing what was right for the people in their African colonies. The British, in his view, ignored the practical problems—how to accurately register voters when most rural-born black Africans had no birth certificates—and the already clear evidence of the chaos, violence, dictatorship, and
economic collapse of most post-colonial African states, an experience white Rhodesians did not want to see repeated in their own country. While seeing white Rhodesia as an outpost of Western civilization, Smith accepted that black Africans did things differently, and supported the tribal chiefs who were the traditional authorities in black African politics. Smith was derided by liberal opinion outside of Rhodesia for upholding the chiefs as a barrier against Communism—which only highlights the blithe ignorance of liberal opinion, for this is precisely what they were and why they were targeted by the Communist-backed nationalist insurgents.

On 11 November 1965, Prime Minister Ian Smith announced Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence (UDI), a decision endorsed unanimously by the largest Indaba (political gathering) of chiefs (622) in Rhodesian history, representing, in their headman roles, ninety percent of the black African population. The declaration was consciously modeled, in part, on America's Declaration of Independence, though the United States government, with black civil rights controversies of its own, was in no position to accept a rebel white-dominated state in Africa—even an explicitly anti-Communist one that was willing to send troops to Vietnam.

For all the liberal angst over the horrors of white rule in Rhodesia, the country itself was peaceful; Smith had no security detail (his official residence had no staff either); the crime rate, Smith was told, was one of the lowest in the world; and in absolute comparisons of the educational, medical, and other facilities
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available to the black population, black Africans in Rhodesia were far better off than their compatriots anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. Smith often said, “We have the happiest Africans in the world,” and while that might sound patronizing, it was an honestly held opinion confirmed by the black Africans he met in his normal rounds and by the statistics his government provided him.
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The response of the British government, led by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was a mixture of the peevish, the preposterous, and the
perverse: refusing to pay the pensions of Britons living in Rhodesia (the Rhodesian government made good the shortfall); sending British RAF units to Zambia (before independence, the superlative Rhodesian armed forces had been integrated with the British military; relations between the forces were extremely fraternal; and the British planes relied on Rhodesian air traffic control, which covered the entire area); and, most important of all, supporting international economic sanctions against what economically was one of the few success stories in Africa. While the British government backed punitive actions (short of violence
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) to bring Rhodesia to heel, it also pursued a course of negotiations with Smith to end the embarrassment (to liberal and Commonwealth opinion) of its white-led rebel colony. Smith, however, was not inclined to accept that British embarrassment was sufficient reason to put Rhodesia's future as a prosperous, free society at risk.

In 1970, despite its loyalty to the old ideals of the British Empire, and hence the Crown, Rhodesia became a republic with a new constitution. That same year, a Conservative government was elected in Britain; and an
agreement was reached in 1971 between the British and Rhodesian governments establishing a gradual path to majority rule. But the agreement fell to pieces when a British commission judged that black African opinion did not support it, though the head of the African National Council, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who had led opposition to the agreement, backtracked and announced, in 1973, that he now did indeed support it. That was too late for the British. The agreement was not resubmitted.

In the meantime, in 1972, a decade's worth of Communist-supported subversion had finally ignited what became the Rhodesian Bush War. The Rhodesian Army faced two main terrorist groups: the Soviet-inspired ZAPU (the Zimbabwean African People's Union) led by Joshua Nkomo, whose military forces (ZIPRA, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army) operated mostly from bases in Zambia, and the Maoist ZANU (the Zimbabwean African National Union), which was eventually led by Robert Mugabe, whose military forces (ZANLA, the Zimbabwean National Liberation Army) were concentrated in Mozambique, where they were sheltered by Communist forces fighting the Portuguese government. The two terrorist groups also occasionally fought each other, and were divided on tribal lines. The Rhodesian army and air force were extremely effective at counterinsurgency, but with the collapse of Portuguese Africa to the Communists, and South Africa's decision to try to appease its African neighbors by ending support for Rhodesia, Smith recognized that his country's isolation had become perilous.