Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
November 26, 2007
The Ian Smith I Knew:
Hero and Fool
Ian Smith, who led the last settler government in what was then
Rhodesia, and is now Zimbabwe, was a man of great physical courage,
modesty and historical and political blindness.
Smith died last Tuesday at the age of 88.
A
hero to conservatives in Britain and America, Smith came to global
attention in November 1965, when he declared Rhodesia to be a
free-standing country, independent of Britain. But despite sympathy from
conservatives around the world, Rhodesia was immediately isolated and
subjected to United Nations sanctions and the conditions that led to
the bitter bush war of independence were set in motion.
I
knew Smith and I did not like him. I thought he was wrong and was
leading his Rhodesian Front party into catastrophe. But I did admire
him.
Smith's World War II record was exemplary. He learned to fly in the
Royal Rhodesian Air Force and was transferred to the Royal Air Force,
operating out of a base in Wales. Smith's first test was when his plane
crashed on takeoff. His face was severely burned, and primitive plastic
surgery left part of it rigid. But he went back to war. When a Spitfire
he was piloting was shot down in Italy, he parachuted to safety, landing
behind enemy lines. Partisans helped him get back to Allied forces.
But the Britain for which he had fought so boldly was a post-war
disaster for the young Rhodesian. It was a land of strikes, socialism
and class warfare. What a pleasure it must have been for Smith to return
to his homeland: A halcyon place of hope, order and the values that it
had obtained in Britain before the two world wars.
The big year in Smith's life was 1948. That was the year that the
returning war hero bought the farm that was to be his home and refuge in
Selukwe, a small farming and mining community where his father, a
butcher from Scotland, had settled in 1898. The early Rhodesians were
soldiers, miners and farmers working men and women looking for a place
in the sun.
1948 was also the year that Smith married and entered politics as a
Liberal. The colony was prospering and attracting many tax refugees from
Britain. These new arrivals were well-to-do, well-educated, often
aristocrats, and they gave Rhodesia its upper-class British flavor. They
founded and joined clubs, played polo and, using local labor, lived in a
way that their families had lived until the great convulsions of two
world wars.
The new Rhodesians treated their central African home as they would have
treated an estate in England. They imported everything they could from
London, sent their children to school in Britain, and had very little
interest in the indigenous inhabitants. They also did not have a lot of
interest in people like Smith, who spoke with a different accent and had
no aristocratic pretensions. And they had the option of returning to
Britain, if the political situation changed.
In 1948, and through most of the 1950s, the idea that white dominance
might be challenged seemed decades, if not hundreds of years, in the
future. But forces outside of the comprehension of the 240,000 white
Rhodesians were building in London, Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
Why, the settlers asked themselves, would anyone interfere with the
little Eden that was Rhodesia? It was more prosperous than any country
in black Africa, and more egalitarian and just than South Africa.
Democracy? It was there for anyone who wanted it black or white. If
you wanted to vote, you could do so by qualifying through having
property and proficiency in English. It was the same franchise that
Cecil John Rhodes had offered in Cape Colony nearly 100 years earlier.
The standards were too onerous for the majority and too comforting for
the minority.
As other white leaders before him, Smith saw his moral and political
duty as securing total independence for the colony from Britain. The
British government saw its duty as protecting the black majority and
establishing black rule.
In November 1965, Smith declared unilateral independence from Britain.
Over the next 15 years he negotiated often in bad faith with the
British. He became a master of broken promises and prevarication. Smith
had no intention of capitulating to black demands.
In the early 1970s, guerrilla war began to escalate with attacks on
remote farms, indiscriminate murder met with brutal reprisals, until it
was clear that 5 percent of the population could not hold onto power
much longer. Yet Smith was slow to sue for peace. The last two years of
the bush war were the most brutal with the most casualties and the
most avoidable.
In the end, Smith was forced to negotiate with an uncompromising Labor
government in London and an outlandishly unreasonable black coalition,
led by Robert Mugabe. The result was the Lancaster House Agreement in
December 1979, which gave the nationalists everything they wanted and
entrenched Mugabe in power. Soon Mugabe turned on his allies in the
southern part of the country, and slaughtered tens of thousands of them
something Smith ought to have known would happen.
Smith showed his extraordinary courage in continuing to live on his farm
and participating in national politics until 1987, when protected white
seats were abolished. The most unbecoming thing about Smith was his
propensity for blaming other people for the bad outcome in Rhodesia. He
blamed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the United States; Harold
Macmillan and Harold Wilson in Britain; and above all, he blamed South
Africa. Somehow he thought South Africa would overtly come to his aid.
In fact, South Africa had gone as far as it could go in covertly
breaking the sanctions, keeping Smith's Rhodesia afloat and trying to
persuade the Rhodesian leader to settle with Britain. South African
leaders could see the writing on their own wall and did not want to take
on an additional race-based fight.
Those who opposed Smith also got it wrong. I was among them. I wrote
against him in newspapers in America and Britain. But the school of
thought that the liberal Rhodesians subscribed to was flawed. We simply
believed that a multi-racial democracy had a chance. In the 1980s and
early 1990s, it looked as though we were right. Then Mugabe began his
march into insanity, destroying everything that he had inherited, making
life impossible for the remaining whites and most blacks, and
sanctioning lawlessness on a grand scale.
The question that will always hang over Smith's legacy is whether his
intransigence created Mugabe.
© 2007 North Star
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