By Wole Arisekola
The death of a tyrant, Mr. Ian Douglas Smith brought a flood of bitter memories to any African who lived in the 1960s and 1970s. Many African youngsters may be blissfully unaware of this, but up until 1979, Ian Smith was a knife in the African heart, a razor in the skin of African nationalism, a sword on the throat of African independence, a pain in the neck of African dignity and a scorpion in the trousers of African progress.
The road to this special African agony was set in 1898, when Ian Smith’s father, a Scottish butcher, migrated to the British colony of Rhodesia and became a cattle rancher. Ian Smith was born in 1919 and he was a gallant fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force in World War, having survived a crash in Scotland and having been shot down by the Germans over Italy in 1943.
After he returned from World War Two, Ian Smith bought a farm, which he gradually expanded [by snapping up black lands] until it was 21,500 acres, or 87 square kilometres. That’s the size of several Nigerian local governments rolled up together.
Ian Smith entered politics in 1948 and in 1964, he rose to become Prime Minister of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. The question is, how did a White man become leader of a solidly black African state under British supervision? Well, the Brits themselves laid the foundations for that to happen. In 1923, when Britain introduced self-government to Southern Rhodesia, a citizen was required to have a certain level of either property or education before he could vote. As a result, the White settlers, who made up 5 percent of the population, became 95 percent of eligible voters, a situation that continued until 1979.
From Smith’s entry into politics until he became premier in 1964, a string of other Whites ruled over Rhodesia. They included the Prime Ministers Godfrey Huggins, Sir Roy Welensky and Winston Field. However, in the early 1960s, as Britain granted independence to one African colony after another, it asked Southern Rhodesia to institute black majority rule before it could gain independence. This prompted Ian Smith, who became prime minister in 1964, to declare the Unilateral Declaration of Independence [UDI] from Britain on November 11, 1965.
Ian Smith was categorical in this matter. In 1966, he said, "I don’t believe in black majority rule, ever. Not in a thousand years!" He also said, "There would be no plans to bring majority rule to Rhodesia in my lifetime. Or my children’s". Ian Smith’s UDI was a very painful business for all Africans, but as youngsters in the 1980s, we used to joke about it, saying if you loved a girl in your heart and she didn’t know about it, then you had made a "Unilateral Declaration of Love", or UDL.
Ian Smith’s UDI attracted a host of political, economic, travel and sporting sanctions from the OAU, Commonwealth and the UN, all to no avail. Repeated talks with the British government during the 1960s and early 1970s, aboard warships, all ended in failure. That was because Ian Smith had powerful backers of his own. The most conspicuous was the apartheid regime in South Africa, which regarded Smith as a bulwark against hostile black states to the North. The Conservative Monday Club of Britain also supported Ian Smith, as did many American conservatives, including the arch-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. On a visit to Rhodesia in 1967, Goldwater had said, "We need more men like Ian Smith, I think, in the world today. We have too few leaders and I would like to see him multiplied a little bit, and spread around".
In 1972, two groups of guerrillas attacked White farms and started what became known as the Bush War. One group was Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army [ZANLA], the armed wing of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union [ZANU], while the other group was Zimbabwe Peoples Revolutionary Army [ZIPRA], the armed wing of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African Peoples Union [ZAPU]. In the next seven years, the war became increasingly fierce, with ZANLA based in Mozambique and ZIPRA based in Zambia. Ian Smith’s forces, led in those days by General Peter Walls, carried out constant retaliatory raids into the two African countries in pursuit of the guerrillas.
In early 1979, when the situation became unbearable, Ian Smith sought a way out by reaching an "Internal Settlement" with two small black parties, Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s United African National Council [UANC] and the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole’s ZANU-Ndonga party. In school in those days, we used to sing songs against Muzorewa and Sithole, widely seen then as the African Quislings. Internal settlement did not work, the guerrilla war was intensified and Smith finally accepted British invitation to the Lancaster House Talks in London in 1979. It was there that majority rule for Zimbabwe was agreed, which led to elections in March 1980 and the sweeping victory by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
However, there were important caveats. Twenty seats out of 100 in the Zimbabwe Parliament were reserved for Whites for a period of 7 years, which enabled Ian Smith and his Whites-only Rhodesian Front party to continue to sit in parliament. Another, more serious caveat was the constitutional provision that for ten years, no form of compulsory land redistribution could take place. If you listen closely to Robert Mugabe and his party men these days, you will hear that it was this provision that laid the ground for the current troubles.
Not that Ian Smith was a good loser at any stage. Soon after the March 1980 elections, Smith loudly complained that ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas had intimidated the voters and he demanded that the British Governor Lord Soames must cancel the elections. The man refused, because international observers said the polls were free and fair "given the circumstances". Next, Zimbabwe’s Whites planned a coup to stop Mugabe from assuming power. It was called "Operation Quartz". This planned coup was averted after Robert Mugabe made some concessions to Ian Smith at a private meeting, reportedly including a promise to retain General Peter Walls as head of the Zimbabwe military. That was no small concession, given the pain and misery inflicted on the ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas as well as their Zambian and Mozambican hosts by General Walls over the years.
Anyway, since Smith’s Rhodesian Front party captured the 20 seats reserved for Whites, he became Leader of the Opposition. Events in the years after independence blew Smith’s cover as a die-hard racist. During the years of White minority rule, he had said that educational and property requirements for voting were non-racial and that more and more blacks would eventually acquire those qualifications and become voters. Yet, after independence, he insisted that the Rhodesian Front party would remain a Whites-only party. Many of his party’s elected MPs defected, some going to ZANU. Anyway, once the moratorium period was over, Mugabe abolished the seats reserved for Whites and Smith was forced into retirement, first in Zimbabwe, and later in South Africa, where he died last week. He was a bitter man who left a bitter legacy, including his autobiography, The Great Betrayal, and another book, Bitter Harvest.
Ian Smith saw the contemporary problems of Zimbabwe as a vindication of his belief that blacks cannot manage a prosperous country. Well, I don’t think many Africans are happy with the way Robert Mugabe handled matters in the last ten years. [Or even in the first two years. We still remember with much sadness the civil war between ZANU-PF and ZAPU-PF in the early years of independence, leading to much turmoil in Joshua Nkomo’s native Matabeleland and the jailing by Mugabe of top ZIPRA commanders Lt General Dumiso Dabengwa and Major General Lookout Masuku]. Nor are there many Africans who are happy with the enthusiasm with which the British and other Western governments rushed to isolate and punish Mugabe for his poor-handled land reform program. If they had shown half as much enthusiasm in punishing Ian Smith, who rebelled against the British Crown by declaring UDI in 1965, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved and untold misery to millions of people would have been averted. But nothing spoil.
Thinking about the passing of Ian Smith reminds me of many other people, including "the great apartheid architect" Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the stone-faced Johannes [John] Balthazar Vorster, Die Groote Krokodil [the great crocodile] Pieter Willem Botha, the notorious Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons Jimmy Kruger, his successor the Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok, the apartheid Foreign Minister Roelof ‘Pik’ Botha, the Information Minister Cornelius Petrus [Connie] Mulder of the Muldergate Scandal, as well as General Jannie Geldenhuys, head of the South African military at the height of the liberation war. These men were daggers in the African heart