Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian prime minister, who made his unilateral
declaration of independence from Britain in 1965 and fought a bitter
rearguard action to prevent black majority rule, never lost the ability to
inspire strong emotion. When he died last week, aged 88, he was still hated
by many for his unrepentant belief that white rule was better for all races
in Rhodesia.
It is quite common to hear him blamed for having created Robert Mugabe and
having thus helped to father the human catastrophe of present-day Zimbabwe.
Yet the odd truth is that in retirement after 1980, when Mugabe took over,
Smith not only did not fade away but grew both in stature and popularity.
As Mugabe’s regime became steeped in blood and violence, Africans of all
persuasions flocked to Smith’s house to consult him. The (all black) student
body of Zimbabwe University gave him a standing ovation for his ringing
condemnation of “the gangsters”, as he always called Mugabe’s corrupt ruling
mafia.
Visiting him at his house in Harare (next to the Cuban embassy, the hammer and
sickle flying) I marvelled at the fact that, after the death of his wife
Janet, he lived alone with just a cook and minimal security. When he walked
the streets of Harare, Africans would almost queue up to grasp his hand and
wish him well. How could this be?
What you’ve got to think about, one shrewd old Rhodie said to me, is Geronimo
driving around in a Model T Ford. He might have seemed a harmless old guy,
but whites still regarded him with awe: he was the enemy incarnate. They
knew just how tough the Apaches had been, how Geronimo had fought hardest of
all. He would forever be a great tribal chief, a great warrior. Africans saw
Smith the same way: a great white tribal chief, a bonny fighter, a man true
to himself, someone to be in awe of.
There was no doubting he was a fighter. On the outbreak of war in 1939 he gave
up his studies to volunteer for the RAF. A bad crash in his Hurricane in
north Africa in 1943 meant his face had to be rebuilt, giving him a frozen,
fixed stare. No matter, he was soon back in a Spitfire, was shot down over
the Alps, lived five months with Italian partisans and then escaped to
France to rejoin the RAF and keep fighting.
Back in Rhodesia he helped found the Rhodesian Front to seek Rhodesian
independence, came to power as deputy prime minister in 1962, and when the
premier, Winston Field, quailed at the prospect of confronting Britain,
Smith – ever ready for a fight – took over as prime minister himself in 1964
and declared independence the following year.
He then clashed with successive British governments while also leading a
bitter war against African guerrillas, until finally forced to come to terms
in 1979. Many had predicted he would flee to South Africa if Mugabe came to
power, but he never considered it. He loved Rhodesia passionately, and as
Mugabe’s rule became intolerable, he stood his ground, even after Mugabe had
deprived him of citizenship in 2002.
His last days were spent in a clinic in the Cape, trying to raise funds to
help poor white pensioners in Zimbabwe. He died within a stone’s throw of
where Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia’s founder, had died a century before.
Smith’s image improved inversely as Mugabe’s plummeted. Paul Themba Nyathi, a
leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who had fought
Smith’s regime tooth and nail, told me that in retrospect Smith’s Rhodesia
had been “a paradise”.
In material terms that was certainly true: everything then was better for
Africans than it is now – education, healthcare, standard of living, life
expectancy and employment. But as people saw Mugabe cloistered behind high
walls and Kalashnik-ov-toting guards, venturing out only in armoured cars
and vast militarised motorcades, they also remembered how Smith had lived a
simple, unguarded life.
When he needed to travel abroad he drove himself unescorted to the airport,
parked his car and carried his own bag. Just before the last presidential
election in 2002, Smith said to me: “If Mugabe and I walk together into a
black township, only one of us will come out alive. I’m ready to put that to
the test right now. He’s not.”
I never understood the Smith phenomenon properly until I attended the launch
of his book, The Great Betrayal, in Durban in 1997. I’d been unsure about
going, not wanting to be taken for someone applauding an old white
suprema-cist, but I needn’t have worried. It was a family occasion for old
Rhodies and I wasn’t part of the family.
Transparently, they all loved him, hung on his words as he talked about what a
fine country Rhodesia had been, how it had been fully worth the fight. As
people queued for him to sign their copies you could see big men shaking
with tears. “They’re stateless, you see,” an old Rhodie said. “They belong
to a country which no longer exists. They’re lost. We all are.”
I was left wondering, why do no South Africans feel like that? For the strange
fact is that even people who were hidebound Afrikaner nationalists evince no
nostalgia for their old leaders or for the apartheid period, which is now
seen as having led the country into a disastrous cul-de-sac.
A month ago I had to meet a high-ranking Afrikaner policeman, a man of the old
regime if ever there was one. He insisted we meet in his new home, an
ex-serviceman’s “shell-hole”. There on the walls were pictures of the
motorcycle escort for the 1947 royal visit, of a youthful Ian Smith, of
Hurricanes, Spitfires, Lan-casters and of Jan Smuts.
Amazed, I asked what of Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd? His opinions were
unprintable. But why Smuts? Afrikaner nationalists always saw him as a
sellout to the English. “He was a fighter, he was a general. In the backroom
we’ve got the other Boer generals, De La Rey, Louis Botha and Kruger. All
fighters, like Ian Smith. Not sellouts like De Klerk.”
Thus is collective memory reformulated. For black and white alike, Smith is
now seen as someone who fought in the last ditch for “white civilisation”
and, given how things have turned out, it’s difficult not to respect his
fight.
The two enduring reproaches to Smith were that he was a crude racist and that
his resistance to African advancement caused an unnecessary war. When he
denied he was a racist, what that meant was that he had good relations with
many black people and wanted somehow to construct black consent to
continuing white leadership as representing the best deal available for all
Rhodesians, black and white. He was completely unrepentant about this, but
it’s difficult to see how he could be exonerated on either charge.
Yet even so, things were not always quite what they seemed. It would be unfair
to describe him as crude. His time with the partisans meant he spoke fluent
Italian, loved opera and could quote great reams of Shakespeare. And,
actually, the African nationalists had taken up arms against white rule in
1962, two years before Smith came to power, so he didn’t really start that
war.
Moreover, when Mugabe gained power in 1980, Smith abandoned all his previous
feelings about the man and rolled up every day at Government House to offer
his help. He had, after all, run the country and economy surprisingly well
in the face of tough international sanctions. He was incorruptible, the
country he handed over was in good shape. The only thing that mattered now,
he said, was to make a success of the new Zimbabwe.
Mugabe was delighted to accept his help and the two men worked happily
together for some time until one day Mugabe announced plans for sweeping
nationalisation. Smith told him bluntly he thought this a mistake. Their
cooperation ended on the spot. Mugabe, furious at being contradicted, never
spoke to him again. From time to time Mugabe made threatening noises,
suggesting Smith ought to be locked up and “punished” for his opposition,
but Smith’s attitude was contemptuous: “I’d like to see him try.” He never
did.
When Smith’s delegation met Harold Wilson’s in their long and fruitless talks,
observers were struck by the fact that the white Rhodesians were all older
men who had fought for Britain in the war, tough guys who thought their
opposite numbers naive. Wilson was taken aback and railed at him as a
“tinpot dictator”.
Smith turned his back on him in a long silence before replying: “Look here,
Harold, if you and I are to get on you can’t talk to me like that.” It was
Wilson who had to retreat.
The key to understanding Smith was that, like other white Rhodesians, he clung
to an almost Victorian view of the world both in moral values and in the
easy assumptions of British primacy that characterised the empire.
Such emotions made it automatic that he would rally to the defence of the
mother country in 1939, his war-time service undoubtedly the central
experience of his life. He remained passionately committed to the fellowship
he found among his RAF friends. He faced death many times, his wounds cost
him great pain in his face, knees and back ever afterwards and left him a
supremely self-confi-dent man, unafraid of pretty well anything.
Interviewing Smith in the sitting room of his Harare home a few years ago, I
was reminded of how the French left-wing intellectual Régis Debray described
being sent by François Mitterrand on a mission to Hanoi. The communist
leaders welcomed him with open arms and poured out their devotion to France
– but, to his embarrassment, it was the France of Jean Jaurès and Victor
Hugo, bearing almost no relationship to the urbane Paris of the 1980s that
he had just left.
It was the same with Smith. He had, he told me, been bitterly disappointed by
the Britain he had encountered in the permissive 1960s, but he’d just been
to London for an RAF reunion and he’d been to the last night of the Proms.
“And, my goodness, to see some of those young people sing Land of Hope and
Glory – why, I think they have the spirit I thought was gone. Such fine
young people, it will all come again, they’ll carry it on,” his bony old
hands making emphatic gestures of enthusiasm as he spoke.
It was, I realised, just like the Viet-namese. He was in love with a Britain
long past, had been so all his life, a Britain of the King-Emperor,
Kitchener and Kipling, a Britain that remained far more alive in the minds
of those in the colonies than it did back home.
The tragedy was not just that this brought him into a bruising conflict with
modern Britain, but that he had given his heart to a country that no longer
existed, that he could only dream about as still going on by paying undue
attention to the wholly atypical last night of the Proms. A natural leader,
he had sought to preserve some of what he thought was best in that
anachronism in an unlikely but beautiful little country in central Africa,
and ended up like all those who followed him, lost souls who remain forever
devoted to another country that now no longer exists.
