The death of Ian Smith, the former prime minister of Rhodesia, was marked by official revilement in Zimbabwe today.

“He will be remembered for being a racist, and for killing thousands of innocent young Zimbabweans,” state radio said, referring to Rhodesian commando raids on black nationalist guerilla camps during the country’s civil war.

The view was different for Ambrose Madzovha, sitting in a crowded minibus on his way to work as a bar bottlewasher. “There was one war veteran (a member of one of President Mugabe’s militias) in the bus who was saying Smith was very rough,” he said. “But everybody else was saying he was a good man, when he was here, you could buy bread without queuing, you could get meat every day, beer, and it was cheap. Today we are starving, everything is on the black market and life is terrible.

Ambrose was born in 1977, three years before a seven-year civil war ended with elections that brought Mr Mugabe to power, close enough for him to have been familiar with both leaders.

“One thing I can tell you, Ian Smith was never corrupt. Mugabe is corrupt,” he said.

Twenty-seven years of relentless propaganda demonising Mr Smith as a bloodthirsty racist murderer appear to have made little impression on ordinary Zimbabweans. The words, “It was better under Smith,” are heard constantly from the lips of hungry, desperate people who remember, or have been told, of the pre-independence days of relative abundance.

To many young black Zimbabweans, though, the man who rebelled against the Crown 42 years ago and dominated the international agenda for decades, is unkown.

Unlike most deposed African leaders, Smith did not have to live behind a fortress in a foreign country. He never locked the low gate of his comfortable double storey in Phillips Avenue, Belgravia, Harare, where his neighbour was, ironically, the embassy of communist Cuba.

He drove himself to and from his farm, Gwenoro, in Shurugwi in the country’s Midlands, sometimes picking up a hitchhiker. His stooping, limping walk, the result of a crash in a Hurricane fighter in World War II, was seen often on the streets of Harare.

Several times he found himself being saluted by police officers.

Soon after Mr Mugabe’s violent invasions of white-owned land led to food shortages, Smith went to a Harare supermarket to buy maizemeal for his staff and took his place at the back of a long queue. He was instantly led to the front.

It was not just Smith’s unconscious ordinariness or people’s memories of cheap, amply-stocked Rhodesian shops that endeared him to people. Many of his fellow Rhodesian Front politicians deserted him after independence and made alliances with Mr Mugabe’s ruling ZANU(PF) party. To their surprise, they were looked down on by ordinary blacks for their disloyalty to their own leader.

Smith was admired for his blunt speaking and for openly defying Mr Mugabe. In 1985, a ruling party militant appointed to a senior local government post in Shurugwi was enraged to find a portrait of Smith in the council offices. “That is the lion of the country,” a black policeman told him.

In 2000, Mr Mugabe declared, not for the first time, that he would have Smith arrested and tried for genocide. Smith was in Britain to address the Oxford Union. He won a standing ovation for calling Mr Mugabe “a terrorist,” and flew home. Instead of an arresting party at the airport, Smith was affably welcomed home by Zimbabwe immigration officers. Smith appeared to exert a kind of talismanic influence. Mr Mugabe regularly says, with apparent regret, he could have had Smith beheaded, but didn’t.

He was able to continue farming on Gwenoro for the last seven years of illegal land seizures without much interference. When he died, there was still a strip of land being actively farmed by a manager.

It was repeated dizzy spells that finally forced him to leave his beloved country. He fell down the stairs at Phillips Avenue about four years ago and his stepchildren, Robert and Jean, demanded he come to Cape Town, South Africa, where they could look after him.

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