An Evaluation of Ian Smith

Posted by Jew from Jersey
25 February 2024

In the years since Ian Douglas Smith stepped down as prime minister of Rhodesia, perceptions of him have probably softened somewhat. In the eyes of his admirers, his faults and limitations have become more apparent. In the eyes of his detractors, they have become more relatable.

In the documentary A Bit of a Rebel, filmed just before Smith’s death in 2007, Ernest Mtunzi, a former associate of Joshua Nkomo and apparently something of a Ndebele separatist, had this to say:

Smith was being realistic. If you give people something before they are ready, they are going to mess it up. And that has happened. If Smith had had the opportunity to work with the people and sort of help bring them up, Zimbabwe would be a better place now. Smith did make it better during his government. There is no reason why he could not do that if he had been allowed to go on.

In the same film, Kathy Olds, by then a refugee after her husband Martin was murdered by government forces in 2000, had this to say about the UDI period:

At that stage the country was terribly united and I would like to believe that the majority of us believed in what we were doing. We were fighting communism. We were standing up for what we believed in and what we felt was right and Ian Smith was highly regarded.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing too, isn’t it? I mean, looking back now perhaps there should have been a lot of changes but at the time yeah, we believed it was right. And independence, we all sat back and wondered what was going to happen next.

For 14 years, something of a siege mentality had set in among white people in Rhodesia that burnished the image of the Rhodesian Front as a party and of Ian Smith on a personal level. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a cult of personality had sprung up around him. It is not clear how many people actually agreed with his political philosophy or even understood it. He had critics and rivals on the right and the left, both within and outside his own party, and among the business community. But he soon emerged as the only candidate who looked like he knew what he was doing and over time it became clear that trying to run against Smith in any election of mostly white voters was an exercise in futility.

UDI had been controversial in 1965. Many Rhodesians felt a closeness to Britain they did not want to lose. Many feared the political and economic consequences of unilateral independence. Many were by nature conservative and viewed with suspicion any decision that appeared rash or reckless. Smith succeeded in part because he addressed these fears directly. He too was proud of his British ancestry. No one could question the bravery he had demonstrated as an RAF pilot in WWII. He was overcome with sentiment whenever the Queen was mentioned. He too was conservative by nature, to the point of being a stick in the mud. In private he must have had quite a lot to fume about, but in public he seldom raised his voice or his hands. He gave every impression of a man who preferred to be home on his farm with his wife and his children and his cattle. As for the practical implications of UDI, he assured the country that he and his team had spent over a year immersed in the details and now had a plan.

British responses to UDI proved so vitriolic, so spiteful, so sadistic and petty, that many Rhodesians who had had their doubts about it or had sat on the fence soon started to take it personally. When British MPs denounced Rhodesians on a personal level as racists and criminals and threatened them with sanctions and war, when habitual pacifists like the Archbishop of Canterbury and Oxfam gloated at the prospect of military action against Rhodesia, when the Queen signed letters of pardon for terrorists who had been convicted of murder in Rhodesian courts of law, Rhodesians came to feel more alienated from Britain, its institutions and politicians, and even from the Queen. They grew to support UDI, the RF, and Smith in greater numbers.

From the one side, an us-vs-them mentality set in. When you feel the world is against you, internal dissent is not well tolerated. Those who doubted the wisdom of UDI became isolated and themselves took on more extreme positions. Some older establishment figures like former chief justice Robert Tredgold and former PM Garfield Todd openly opposed everything the government was doing and advocated immediate majority rule. Disgruntled tobacco farmer Pat Bashford attempted to lead a multiracial opposition party called the Centre Party, but got little traction from either whites or blacks.

From the other side, it seemed Smith’s plan was working. Exports were down, but things were not as bad as had been predicted. If the economy was not as buoyant in the late 1960s as it had been in the Federal era, it was at least stable. Threats of military invasion were shown up as mere hot air and terrorist violence seemed under control. Smith must have seemed prophetic. Even if people couldn’t understand how the country was still functioning, it seemed that Smith knew how to ensure its continued survival.

Smith’s policies veered first to the right, enacting separate voter rolls and parliamentary seats for blacks and whites for the first time in the country’s history in 1969 and then to the left, enacting a universal franchise for the first time in the country’s history ten years later. For both changes, new constitutions were required and were passed in parliament and by referenda among the mostly white electorate with large majorities. Neither change would have been possible without the near lock that the RF had with the public and the near lock that Smith had on the RF.

The RF had been formed in 1962 from elements of two earlier parties: the ruling centrist United Federal Party and the right-wing opposition Dominion Party. Smith had come from the right wing of the UFP and subsequently occupied the left wing of the RF. The RF’s first leader had been Winston Field, who had been leader of the DP in the Federal parliament. After Field failed to secure independence from Britain at the breakup of the Federation in 1963, Smith ousted Field in 1964.

The RF had been united around the issue of independence. That had been the reason for its existence. Smith knew that like Field before him, he too would be ousted if he failed to declare Rhodesia independent. But once independence had been achieved and it seemed the new country had staying power, party unity began to crumble around the direction the new country was to take.

Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia, was beginning to purge itself of its white inhabitants, the former Northern Rhodesians. This decimated its copper mining industry, Zambia’s main cash cow. Rhodesians looked on as this African country most familiar and most similar to them went under politically and economically. Some paranoia must have begun to set in. Rhodesia was now estranged from its former Federal sister countries and from Britain and was growing closer and more dependent on its new ally, Apartheid South Africa. It seemed the 1950s Federal model of multiracialism was finally dead. A new constitution seemed in order to make Rhodesia into a republic. Many in the RF, including some of the ministers in Smith’s cabinet, wanted the new constitution to bring Rhodesian racial policies more in line with South Africa’s. By opposing this, Smith again put himself in danger of being ousted, most likely by Minister of Internal Affairs William Harper who had been leader of the DP in the Southern Rhodesian parliament during the Federal era. Smith beat back an attempt within the RF to ban future negotiations with Britain. Then he fired Harper.

A number of mid-level RF members then left the party to form a new right-wing party called the National Party, the same name as the ruling party in South Africa. Christopher Phillips, a candidate for the National Party in a hotly contested by-election in 1968 that was widely viewed as a referendum on Smith and his plans for the future of the country, elaborated:

No sir, he’s never stood for white rule at all. He is a man who bases his whole theory, on — well, it’s rather difficult — he calls it “merit” and I believe he’s being called a “meritocrat.” Well, of course this is a childish business because if a society is based on merit, and I understand the — in theory anyway — the American society is based on merit, there is no distinction at all between the races. And therefore, to call it “merit” is merely selling the goods under a false name. The correct name for “meritocracy” is “integration.”

No candidates from the National Party ever won any seats in the Rhodesian parliament and it’s something of an achievement that elections like this continued to take place, even in Rhodesia’s most isolated days in the last decade of its existence, with opposing viewpoints being openly debated like this without violence. However, the storm brewing within the RF was not yet over. This is how Pat Bashford of the Centre Party put it at the time:

Ian isn’t a racialist, strangely enough. Personally, he isn’t a racialist, but he’s terrified and I don’t think he’s a completely free agent. I think he’s completely in the grip of a dedicated band of white supremacists.

It is something of an exaggeration to say that Smith was in the grip of white supremacists, but it is true that he was by now operating in a political window that had shifted considerably to the right. In the early 1960s, the debate in Rhodesia had been over the “how” and “when” of transition to black majority rule. In all his negotiations with the British, Smith, like Field, Whitehead, and Welensky before him, had insisted that such a transition take place within the framework of the Rhodesian constitution as administered by the Rhodesian government with no foreign interference. Now that negotiations with Britain were at an end and Rhodesia had cast its lot with South Africa, some in Rhodesia were questioning if a transition to majority rule was even necessary or desirable.

At the RF convention in 1968, Smith’s preferred draft of the new constitution only narrowly won out over a more right-wing version. The author of the defeated version, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lord Graham, resigned from the government. The final version, presented to the public and passed in 1969, was complex and in the end pleased no one, but Smith had likely prevented the RF from presenting the public with an apartheid-style constitution. It is not certain such a thing would have been approved in referendum and likely would have led to some kind of constitutional or other severe political crisis, which is probably what the British government expected would happen. As it was, Smith got his republic and so extended the life of independent Rhodesia another ten years.

This period was the high water mark for segregationist sentiment in Rhodesia. Allan Savory, a most impressive Rhodesian and probably the most left-wing member of the RF, quit the party in 1972 and lost his seat in the following election to an RF candidate. That year also saw Smith’s final attempt to achieve reconciliation with Britain: the Home-Smith proposals. The failure of this agreement led to the near complete withdrawal of black participation from the Rhodesian parliamentary system and launched the career of Abel Muzorewa, whose UANC movement occupied the middle ground between parliamentary participation and violent insurrection. After 1974, white Rhodesians began to realize that the National Party government in South Africa would not stick its neck out for them and they would do better to seek reconciliation closer to home.

In 1977, Smith faced another threat from the right when twelve RF members of parliament defected in protest over his plans for the “Internal Settlement” that would include black leaders and lead to universal suffrage. They formed yet another new right-wing party called the Rhodesian Action Party, but it did not fare any better than the National Party had nine years earlier. Smith called new elections, and all their candidates were defeated by RF candidates. The Internal Settlement was signed in 1978 and white voters approved universal suffrage in January 1979.

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Outside of Rhodesia, of course, most of Smith’s critics have been on the left. Since he became prime minister in April 1964 and throughout the rest of his life, they have quoted him as saying that there would never be black majority rule in Rhodesia “in my lifetime.” This is usually cited as a solemn vow in the tradition of They Shall Not Pass. When Smith enabled majority rule himself, the same critics gave him no credit, but merely crowed about how they had forced his hand. A similar quote has him saying “in a thousand years” instead of “in my lifetime.”

James Barber sources the “in my lifetime” quote to just before Smith became prime minister, in the context of the public debate over the 1961 constitution, and specifically the question: “how long would it be before Africans could form a parliamentary majority on the basis of the 1961 franchise?” Barber summarizes the estimates given by various Rhodesian politicians and British officials familiar with the issue:

In 1962 Sir Edgar Whitehead estimated fifteen years. In 1963 Mr. Duncan Sandys said it would take twelve years, but Mr. Garfield Todd replied by affirming that Africans would still not have a majority after twenty-five years. In 1964, Mr. Ian Smith said he did not foresee an African nationalist government in his life-time, and in London in 1965 he said he had heard various estimates ranging from fifteen to fifty years.

Barber quotes Smith in a similar vein in September 1963:

We must remain flexible politically. We must maintain a position where there is hope for all. To put a wall in front of African political advancement will lead to frustration which will provoke desperation of a different kind. Equally to abandon the standard of civilization we have built up will lead Europeans to despair and provoke desperation of a different kind.

His critics on the right accused him of opening the door to the possibility of black rule, while his critics on the left accused him of using phony concern for the good of the country to introduce endless delays whose real purpose was to maintain white rule indefinitely.

The “in a thousand years” quote comes from a 1976 televised speech given to prepare the ground for the Internal Settlement:

I think we have got to accept that in the future Rhodesia is a country for black and white, not white as opposed to black and vice versa. I believe this is wrong thinking for Rhodesia. We have got to try to get people to change their line of thinking if they are still thinking like that. This is outdated in Rhodesia today. I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia—not in a thousand years. I repeat that I believe in blacks and whites working together. If one day it is white and the next day it is black, I believe we have failed and it will be a disaster for Rhodesia.

Janice Benatar even draws a parallel between Smith’s “thousand years” and Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich! In context, it seems implausible that as part of a campaign to induce whites to approve a referendum that would clearly lead to black rule before the end of the decade, Smith would at the same time be promising no black rule for a thousand years. In light of his earlier quotes, and indeed of his entire career before and after, it is more likely he was imparting his vision of Rhodesia as a unique biracial country. He may also have meant this as a warning to black leaders, with whom he was in close negotiations at the time, against the dangers of black nationalism.

Smith might be accused of trying to have it both ways and be all things to all people. He certainly would not be the first politician in history to attempt such a strategy. He survived for as long as he did in politics by being flexible enough to adapt his policies to changing conditions. But this did not mean he ever changed his mind about anything. In more than half a century of public life that spanned numerous turbulent upheavals, he never apologized for anything nor even acknowledged changing any of his beliefs concerning anything fundamental.

He had opposed the 1961 constitution over the issue of separate “A” and “B” voter rolls. But when he became PM in 1964, this was the constitution he governed under. When a new constitution was needed to support independence in 1965, the separate voter rolls remained. At that time, independence was the vital issue. The 1969 constitutional change from “A” and “B” rolls to “white” and “black” rolls was also likely not his ideal, but it at least maintained a comparable number of eligible black voters and black parliamentary seats, with a provision to add more black seats as more blacks began paying taxes. The removal of all voter qualifications in 1979 was not his preferred choice either, but it was the only way to bring black nationalists into the political system without jeopardizing the rule of law. He opposed the Lancaster House Agreement later that year and he did not recognize the subsequent election of Robert Mugabe in 1980 as legitimate, but he attempted to work within that framework, too.

His ideal policy would probably have been a highly restrictive single common roll, as had existed before 1961. Under such a scenario, those blacks who could meet requirements joined the modern world with full rights. According to Robert Blake in his History of Rhodesia, “Winston Field encouraged Africans to join the Rhodesian Front, and a few actually did.” By contrast, Smith made no attempt to appeal to black voters. As a longstanding member of the UFP, he had seen that party’s multiracial participation model deteriorate into mutual suspicion and acrimony. The UFP had been the party of Federal and territorial government in the 1950s, but by the early 60s it had been abandoned by whites and blacks alike. He likely expected blacks would form their own modern political identity and eventually build up a party capable of governing as a majority, something like a black version of what the UFP had once been. This was not something whites could do for them. To his mind, majority rule by any other means would not produce a “responsible” ruling party. By all accounts, Smith’s relations with small black parliamentary parties like the United People’s Party were mutually respectful. But these parties were small, since few blacks voted. He certainly did not expect them to be a majority in his lifetime, and probably for much longer than that.

Anyone who did not meet voting requirements could enjoy what modernity had to offer without voting, as did the small number of non-qualifying whites. Blacks who could neither meet requirements nor accept white rule for as long as it took were welcome to return to the TTLs and live traditional lives under the leadership of their tribal chiefs.

Smith’s affinity for tribal life was certainly self-serving. The chiefs tended to support him and his policies. Also, having the TTLs as socioeconomic “reserves” helped to absorb black socioeconomic strife from the cities. But this was not so disingenuous as it probably seemed to his critics. Both the black nationalists and the British tended to view the chiefs as inauthentic and tribal life an embarrassment. But to Smith, who had grown up on the frontier before WWII, traditional life was not so devoid of value or dignity. He did not necessarily see it as a step up for an African to abandon his traditional way of life to go to the city seeking an unskilled job.

Besides “racialist,” one of the most common pejoratives critics applied to Smith was “parochial.” In this they were not wrong. He came from a small town. He was educated entirely in Africa. As a student, he had excelled more in athletics than in academics. His unfashionable style of speech was described by Robert Blake as “a slow South African drawl which is very marked even by Rhodesian standards.”

But he was also parochial in a deeper sense. He saw politics as downstream from civic engagement and communal pride. To him, a town that did not support voluntary civic organizations and its own sports teams was not capable of producing responsible citizens or leaders. He saw a danger in the deracination of urban blacks just as he saw a danger in the British loss of connection to a British way of life. A sense of pride and purpose had to originate in the community. It could not begin and end with politics. A nation of individuals ruled directly by a national government could not be a free people no matter how many elections were held.

In far-off Africa, people of English descent drew pride from the traditions and institutions they were able to successfully transplant so far from the mother country. But the English in England were diminished when they could no longer draw pride from their past and transplant it into their own future. It is often said that black Americans are different from black Africans because they do not know their past. But the same process of losing one’s past is happening all over Africa, and all over the world, and it is also happening to white people everywhere.

Smith was a meritocrat to a sticklerish extent, but this is not to say he was color-blind. He saw tradition and community as integral to good governance and indeed to any life worth living. This meant preserving the Shona and Ndebele and other unique African identities. Not in the sense that they should be frozen in time, but that their autonomy should be respected as they figured out how to adapt themselves to the future. And Smith saw the “white tribe,” the unique mostly-British white identity that had grown up in Rhodesia since 1890, as vital in making this future possible, even at the cost of cutting its own political ties to Britain.

After the 1980 elections, he met with Mugabe and told him he meant to defend the interests of the white community which was essential to the country’s future. He also met with Nkomo and tried to convince him to do the same for the Ndebele. Smith writes of his plans during this period:

There are many tribes in our country — the Matabele in the west, the Karanga in the midlands, the Zezuru and Manyika in the east, the Venda and Shangaan in the south, and the MakoreKore and Tonga in the north — all composed of black people. There is only one white tribe, the Rhodesians, who are indigenous to this country. Our blacks admire those who are strong and have pride in themselves, their traditions and their history. They would welcome the white tribe as part of our new nation, making their unique contributions towards building a great, free, democratic, viable and happy country which would continue to be the envy of the rest of Africa.

Smith’s understanding of Zimbabwean politics breaking along ethnic lines followed naturally from his parochial view of community. Nkomo did not accept until it was too late that he could not win a national election and it was the Ndbele who suffered the worst under Mugabe’s moves to solidify power in the 1980s. The country has been ruled ever since by Zezuru.

Smith’s associates and supporters were repeatedly arrested and assaulted, but Smith himself never came to any harm and was never taken into custody. The worst that befell him personally was a police raid of his home in 1982. Mugabe was clearly trying to scare people away from him while not focusing attention on him personally or making him into a martyr. Defectors from his party were offered government positions or safe ZANU-PF seats.

In the elections of 1985, Smith’s party, now renamed Conservative Alliance Zimbabwe, lost some support among the white community: they only won 75% of the white seats. The following year, Mugabe barred Smith from parliament. Without him, the party disintegrated and the remaining white MPs voted with ZANU-PF to end separate seats for whites.

Despite his professed love for farming life, Smith stayed on in the capital another 20 years, always ready to meet people and give interviews. He stayed through the country’s darkest days. Mugabe ignored him, even when Smith occasionally spoke to black audiences or met with black opposition figures. At the age of 86, he left for South Africa where he died two years later. Mugabe didn’t even seize his farm until several years after his death. By then, over 90% of the white population had left the country. Black people, especially the middle class, were also leaving in large numbers.

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Smith’s moral blind spot was not some secret plan to subjugate Africans, but a lifelong faith that a majority of black people in his country supported him and his policies. That such support did not in fact exist became most obvious during the abovementioned Home-Smith fiasco of 1972. By this agreement, Smith conceded that the British government should conduct a “test” of opinion in Rhodesia regarding the constitution of 1969. British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home conceded that this test would not be conducted along the one-man-one-vote lines that Smith objected to, but by a British investigative commission under Lord Pearce, a British Judge. If the commission found support for the current Rhodesian constitution, Britain would recognize Rhodesian independence under its existing form of government.

There can be little doubt that Smith sincerely expected a positive result. The Home-Smith Agreement made little sense otherwise. As it played out, the entire plan backfired, galvanizing black opposition to the agreement, to the constitution, the government, and to Smith himself. According to Peter Baxter:

In fact so confident was Smith of an endorsement of his government by the black majority that he authorized the release of a handful of detained nationalists representing both movements in order that a moderate internal black political front could be formed to impress upon the Pearce Commission not only the impartiality of the Rhodesian government, but also the sagacity of the current agreement. This gambit failed.

Smith insisted until the end of his life that hostile gangs had colluded to target the commission and those interacting with it, to obscure evidence of black Rhodesians’ popular support.

This same moral blindness and weakness exhibited by Smith and many other Rhodesians had also been a great source of strength over the years. Without it, they would never have come to Africa or attained any of Rhodesia’s economic, military, or political achievements. It is the same cocksuredness that inspired Rhodesians to arm and train blacks during the two world wars and during the Rhodesian Bush War itself. It is the same chutzpah heard in Squadron Leader Christopher Dixon’s jovial warning to Zambian air traffic controllers during Operation Gatling in 1978. It is what Peter Godwin meant when he said that Rhodesians’ “worst collective fault was an almost infinite capacity for self-deception”. They were genuinely incredulous that anyone, black or white, who had witnessed the wonder that was Rhodesia, could possibly not be in favor of it. Only a communist would object, and we were all united against the communists.

After his fall from power and banishment from politics and after the exodus of most white people from Zimbabwe, Smith remained as cocksure as ever that he retained the good graces of majorities of his black compatriots. And it was in these later years that his assumption probably came closest to being true. As disillusionment over ZANU-PF rule became more widespread, Smith openly taunted Robert Mugabe, calling him mentally ill, and boasting that he, Smith, was the more popular among the black populace. That Mugabe never acted on any of these challenges made Smith’s “almost infinite capacity for self-deception” look even more like a superpower that protected him. And that Smith would never again be allowed to hold office made grumbling comments like “Smith was better” into effective insults to Mugabe and ZANU-PF without Smith having to take any future responsibility.

The legacy of Ian Smith has been summed up by admirers and critics alike as one of “I told you so!” But by what he was able to achieve while in office, he also proved the positive corollary: Africa does not have to be dysfunctional. And to the end of his life, Ian Smith never stopped believing in Africa.

There was a lot of tragedy in Rhodesia as there is also in Zimbabwe. Smith, however, was not a tragic figure. Unlike Welensky and Sithole, he had his moment in the sun. And he pushed it about as far as humanly possible.