The Corpse
1 February 2023
Like Prussia before it, Rhodesia is a country that has ceased to exist. This is not something we see every day and the fascination with such things is not unlike the morbid interest a child experiences when encountering a corpse for the first time.
Unlike Prussia, which gave birth to something greater than itself — Germany — a country that changed the fate of the world, Rhodesia has given birth to something smaller than itself — Zimbabwe — a country the world has done its level best to ignore.
Rhodesia was also more photogenic than Prussia. It came to an end rather recently. It had a national airline. Rhodesians were partial to Toyota Land Cruisers. They had their own rock music and standup comedy. They even produced a feature film, a sort of a western called Shangani Patrol. They just missed the internet by about 15 years. After the fact they were quick to distribute memorabilia on VHS and they set up websites when this became feasible. Since the advent of youtube, every last shred of their national history has been uploaded. Many have also posted their own oral testimonies.
The country’s penultimate prime minister, Ian Smith, was a media-savvy publicity hound who loved giving speeches and interviews. Smith and the international media had a love/hate relationship. He was always good for ratings. Foreign news crews would visit and film endless hours of documentaries about the country’s problems. Much of this footage is also now available online.
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Rhodesia suffered from serious racial problems, so serious in fact that they brought the country to a political cardiac arrest it was never to recover from, tarnishing the reputation of its memory forever. And so Rhodesia remains on permanent display online, a full public viewing of a corpse that greatly resembles us the living.