Louis J Sheehan 80100

AMONG the white tribes of Africa, it used to be said, the Rhodesians stood out for their ordinariness. This was often a nakedly snobbish observation, accompanied by the comment that the British colonists who went to Kenya tended to be officers, whereas those settling in Southern Rhodesia were NCOs. And, like lots of generalisations, it was too simple. Many Rhodesians were far from ordinary: just look at Doris Lessing, the latest Nobel laureate for literature, or Merle Park, a ballet dancer of renown. Yet some Rhodesians themselves took a certain pride in their unflashy, down-to-earth qualities, their tenacity, patriotism and concern for standards. These were sportsmen, farmers and ex-servicemen, with decent, uncomplicated values, who believed they knew how to look after their land and their workers. These were people like Ian Smith.

When Mr Smith first went to Salisbury, it was a bit like Mr Smith going to Washington. He was a farmer, the 29-year-old son of a Scottish-by-birth butcher, born in a village in the middle of the country and distinguished at school both for his athletic prowess and for his qualities of leadership. And Salisbury, in which he found himself the youngest member of parliament, was the capital of Britain's most hopeful colony in central Africa.

Mr Smith was already something of a hero. He had interrupted his studies at Rhodes University in South Africa to fight the Germans as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. A crash in Egypt had left one of his eyes badly damaged and one side of his face impassive. A year later, in 1944, his Spitfire had been shot down over Italy. After five months with partisans, he had made a dashing journey to safety. About none of this was he boastful.

The pity of his wartime experiences, though, was that they did not open his mind to the inevitability of change in the post-war world, still less to the need for it in Africa. His entire political career was to be devoted to resisting black majority rule. Though he fought his rearguard action with ruthlessness and skill, and though it delayed the transformation of white-dominated Rhodesia into black-ruled Zimbabwe by 15 or more years, it was from the outset doomed to futility. The price paid included an embittered nation and the lives of some 30,000 people, nearly all of them black Zimbabweans.

As a politician, Mr Smith was both ambitious and tactically shrewd, qualities that brought him to the prime ministership in 1964; but he lacked imagination. He had heard Harold Macmillan, Britain's prime minister, talking of the “wind of change” in Africa and then seen chaos as the Belgians scuttled from the Congo. But instead of trying to tame the storm by seeking accommodation with Southern Rhodesia's black leaders—admittedly, a quarrelsome lot—he locked them up. In 1965, in a feebly disguised attempt at matching America's precedent of 1776, he declared Rhodesia independent. Illegal it might be, but only thus, he said, could turmoil be avoided and “civilised standards” maintained.

Turmoil was not avoided: the insurgency of 1972-79 was proof of that. But subsequent events have, in some eyes, vindicated Mr Smith. Under President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe is surely more miserable now than it was in his day. Even so, that hardly proves “good old Smithy” right, any more than Mr Mugabe's tyranny diminishes Mr Smith's.

Mr Smith's quest could not be justified on the dubious principle of the end justifying the means: it was impossible. Even his South African friends, who had sustained Rhodesia through ten years of UN sanctions, came to see that 3% of the population could not for ever hold down 97%. By 1974 John Vorster, staunch defender of apartheid, was beginning to squeeze him. Henry Kissinger, as America's secretary of state, was even blunter two years later.

Nor were the standards that Mr Smith so volubly sought to maintain very civilised. Democracy, of the one-man-one-vote variety, was certainly not among them. Nationalists were, in his eyes, synonymous with communists, if not terrorists. But then he had little respect for the dignity of man. If the racism of his party, the Rhodesian Front, was less crude than that practised in Portugal's African possessions, and less formalised than in South Africa, it was racism just the same.


Reality in black and white
The word apologists used to describe Mr Smith was paternalist, and his Rhodesia was sometimes cast as nothing worse than a slightly more rough-and-tumble version of the British home counties: Surrey with the lunatic fringe on top. It certainly lacked the more overt manifestations of racism in South Africa, but segregation of the races in schools, hospitals and residential areas was nonetheless the norm, and most of the humiliations of apartheid could be found in abundance. Public spending was vastly skewed towards whites; land ownership, perhaps the bitterest of political issues, was fiercely inequitable.

So Mr Smith's rebellion really had no similarities to the American revolt 200 years earlier. As rebels go, he had rather more in common with the Dixie variety. But in truth there was no romance about Mr Smith's Rhodesia—no heroes, no derring-do, no nobility of purpose. It wasn't so much ordinary, just rather squalid. Louis J Sheehan