Bitter Harvest Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Janet, my loyal and constant and compassionate supporter and companion during the turbulent decades of my political life. She was tireless in her work of researching history and facts, and editing and bringing some order to my writings, which were often erratic and disjointed because of my numerous other commitments.

  My gratitude to her is eternal and unwavering.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Growth of a Nation

  I: In The Beginning

  II: The Fatal Turning Point: 1948

  2 From Innocence to Experience

  I: My Younger Years: School, University and Rugby or Rowing?

  II: The Outbreak of War

  III: Pilot Training and 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron

  IV: Corsica and the Partisani

  V: The End of War

  VI: Home to Rhodesia and University

  3 Settling Back Home

  I: Farming in Rhodesia

  II: Early Days in Politics: the Federal Era

  4 The End of Federation

  5 The Formation of the Rhodesian Front

  6 The First Rhodesian Front Government: Field and Independence

  7 The Premiership in 1964

  8 The Advent of the British Labour Government and the Issue of Independence

  9 The Final Steps to UDI in 1965

  10 The Immediate Consequences of UDI

  11 First Moves to Settle in 1966: HMS Tiger

  12 Renewed Settlement Efforts in 1968: HMS Fearless

  13 The Home–Smith Agreement, 1972

  14 The Loss of Mozambique, Vorster and Détente in 1974–75

  15 The Kissinger Agreement of 1976

  16 The Geneva Conference 211

  17 The Internal Settlement of 4 March, 1978

  18 The Interim Government of 1978–79

  19 My Last Days in Office

  20 The Government of National Unity and the Lancaster House Conference

  21 The Election of Mugabe

  22 The Aftermath of the Election

  23 Life under Mugabe

  24 Elections — 1995–96

  Janet

  Glossary

  Postscript

  Afterword

  Index

  Acknowledgement

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Ian Douglas Smith died on 20 November 2007, a few months short of his 89th birthday. For 15 years, between 1964 and 1979, he had been prime minister of Rhodesia, the last but one country in southern Africa to be governed by whites, once called Southern Rhodesia and today known as Zimbabwe.

  In the great drama of the 20th century decolonisation of Africa, he will perhaps be seen in future as little more than a footnote, a Canute who declared unilateral independence in a futile attempt to resist the tide of black rule sweeping across the continent. Had he never existed, the history of his stunningly beautiful native land would probably have been much the same.

  But for a decade and half, Smith held British and international diplomacy to ransom. Vilified by many, lionised by a few, he became a household name around the world. Then Rhodesia vanished. Had independent Zimbabwe flourished, or merely avoided the shambles of today, there would be little more to say. Instead it has experienced one of the most devastating collapses on a continent that has tasted more than its share of them. A country that set out life as a jewel of post-colonial Africa has become a basket case, a nightmarish kleptocracy sustained by violence, corruption and reverse racism, its every failing blamed by President Robert Mugabe on a plot orchestrated by the country’s remaining whites and by the old colonial power in London to overthrow his rule.

  History rewrites reputations, and the plight of Zimbabwe after 28 years of Mugabe’s rule is forcing a second look at the reputation of Ian Smith. The depth of the crisis has surpassed even his own bleakest warnings – and questions most of us would prefer not to ask must be asked. Was he right all along, with his prophesy that black rule would be a disaster? Which leads to an even more unmentionable thought: might it have been better for Zimbabwe and Africa to have remained under white rule?

  Ian Smith’s background was quintessentially colonial. His father Jock had emigrated from Scotland to Rhodesia in 1898, eight years after the first pioneer column despatched by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company crossed the Limpopo river – modern Zimbabwe’s border with South Africa – to explore and exploit the rich virgin lands that lay beyond.

  The Smiths settled in Selukwe, 200 miles south of the capital Salisbury, now Harare. There Jock ran a farm and a mine, chaired the local cricket and rugby clubs and bred racehorses. Their son Ian, born in 1918, followed in his footsteps. He was an undistinguished student, but like his father (and most white Rhodesians for that matter) a passionate sportsman and lover of the outdoor life. A self-described ‘African of British stock,’ Smith symbolised a society that considered itself more British than the British, and behaved as such. He believed in the old country, in the British Empire, and in the Empire’s civilizing mission.

  When conflict loomed in Europe in 1939, the adventurous and patriotic young man trained as a pilot, before serving in the Rhodesian air force, and then in Spitfire Squadron 130 in the Royal Air Force. His war took him to Persia, the Middle East and finally Europe where he was shot down over Italy in 1944 and spent five months with the partisans behind German lines.

  This gallant war record vastly complicated British attitudes to Smith during the crisis over Rhodesian independence two decades later. Many of a certain generation could not understand why ‘Good Old Smithy’ and ‘Plucky Little Rhodesia’ were held in such official disapproval. Yes, he led a white minority government that in 1965 had the temerity to declare independence. But he might have come from the home counties – though he had done more to defeat Hitler than the majority of British citizens. Beyond argument moreover he was extremely brave.

  It is thus hardly surprising he enjoyed unwavering support from elements of the British Conservative party and of the conservative press. He also knew exactly how to appeal to British nostalgia, an especially potent emotion during the 1960s and 1970s, as the country’s global influence declined, amid a succession of sterling crises and withdrawal from an empire that could no longer be afforded. ‘If Churchill were alive today,’ Smith said soon after UDI, ‘I believe he’d probably emigrate to Rhodesia – because I believe all those admirable qualities and characteristics of the British we believed in, loved and preached to our children no longer exist in Britain.’ In golf clubs and saloon bars across the old country, countless Britons undoubtedly agreed with him.

  Had his father left Scotland and settled in Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, the world would have been no problem with a Prime Minister Ian Smith. Instead Jock chose Rhodesia, whose ambiguous initial status was largely responsible for the difficulties later on. Rhodesia was not a typical African colony, ruled directly from Whitehall. It was founded by Rhodes under a charter extended to his company. From the start it was a sub-contracted or, to use the modern term, outsourced form of empire.

  Unlike Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and Nyasaland, now Malawi, Southern Rhodesia’s two partners in the short lived Central African Federation, few if any British administrators lived there. From 1923, it enjoyed quasi-dominion status, for all practical purposes run by the local white minority which liked to think of itself as no less ‘African’ than the black majority it ruled. But unlike Australia, New Zealand and Canada, Southern Rhodesia’s whites were outnumbered 20 to 1 by the native population. And when the crisis broke, Britain would find itself in the uncomfortable position of having responsibility without the power to go with it.

 
Smith’s political career had begun in 1948 when he was persuaded to stand for Parliament for the Liberal Party. In the elections that September 16, the Liberals lost six of their previous 11 seats, but not Selukwe where Smith was standing. Thereafter events moved fast.

  Self-governing on almost all domestic matters, white Rhodesians were already pressing for nationhood. Britain established the Federation in 1953 as a half-way house, but the unnatural entity was soon strained to breaking point by growing demands by the black majorities in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia for full independence. In the outside world too, circumstances were changing rapidly. Addressing the South African parliament in February 1960, Harold MacMillan evoked the ‘wind of change’ blowing through Africa, while the US, Britain’s most important ally, was also pressing for de-colonisation.

  In 1963 the Federation collapsed. Majority black rule however was not what Southern Rhodesia’s whites had in mind. In Salisbury the Rhodesia front, a new white nationalist party of which Smith was deputy leader, won power. Within a year Winston Field the prime minister was voted out of office by his parliamentary colleagues who deemed him too moderate. He was replaced by Smith, with a mandate to go for independence. Six months later Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won the general election in Britain, and the stage was set for showdown, between the de facto colonial power committed to black majority rule and the white settlers who had taken over an African land.

  Months of tortuous negotiation followed, but it was quickly obvious that the diametrically opposed positions could not be reconciled. Placing Rhodesia in the context of the Cold War, Smith accused Wilson’s Government of being ‘hell-bent on appeasing the cult of Marxist-Leninism’There would be no surrender, he vowed, to ‘Communists’ in Africa and beyond.

  On the morning of November 11, 1965 and despite a last appeal by phone from Harold Wilson, Smith took the step that had long been inevitable. A Thomas Jefferson however he was not. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence read like a parody of the American version of 1776, full of ‘whereases’ and ‘therefores,’ but in practice a charter for white rule. Nonetheless, in a radio broadcast to the nation, Smith told his countrymen they had ‘struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilisation and Christianity.’

  Britain’s initial response to this challenge consisted of economic sanctions. For all Wilson’s initial bluster, and his prediction that UDI would fail in a matter of ‘weeks not months,’ it was clear he would never use force to topple the rebel regime. The sanctions, intended to choke Rhodesia’s imports of oil and exports of its vital cashcrop tobacco, caused inconvenience. But Rhodesia’s shared border with white-ruled South Africa, the economic giant of the continent, ensured that they were ultimately unenforceable.

  Soon efforts to reach a compromise began. First came ‘talks about talks,’ followed by a meeting between Smith and Wilson aboard the destroyer HMS Tiger in the Mediterranean, in October 1966. In 1968, the two leaders tried again on HMS Fearless, off Gilbraltar. But there was no bridging the basic disagreement over Rhodesia’s refusal to abandon UDI and return to the British fold, pending a settlement acceptable to the black majority.

  The next half dozen years were the apogee of the Rhodesia of ‘Good Old Smithy’. In Britain, the leader writers of conservative newspapers sung his praises, and in 1970 the more congenial Tories returned to power. Sanctions by now were little more than a joke, guerilla activities were comfortably contained by the Rhodesian security forces, and what white opposition existed was mostly silenced by the house arrest of the former prime minister Garfield Todd in 1972, and the exile of his daughter Judith.

  But there was one ominous setback – though it did not seem so at the time.

  In 1971 Smith struck a deal with the Conservative Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas Home, that would have legalised UDI in return for a new constitution pushing black rule into the remotest of futures. The agreement however was massively rejected when the African population was consulted by the Pearce Commission. Smith dismissed Pearce’s report as an ‘absolute fraud,’ but thereafter the ‘Nibmar’ formula – No Independence Before Majority Rule – was set in stone. The last hope of securing an independent, internationally recognised white Rhodesia had disappeared.

  For a while life went on as before. But in the mid-1970s two events sealed the fate of the Smith regime. The first was America’s new concern, after Cuba’s forays into Angola, that southern Africa might fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. This brought Smith face-to-face with global geopolitics and the diplomatic might of the US, wielded by Henry Kissinger and supported by the Labour Government returned to power in London in 1974.

  Even more important was the collapse of Portugal’s African empire in 1975.

  Suddenly an independent black-ruled Mozambique was on Rhodesia’s eastern frontier. The guerillas had a sanctuary, and the war was now unwinnable.

  The last four years of white rule saw a series of increasingly desperate manoeuvres by Smith to delay the inevitable – even as South Africa, so long the vital ally, now embarked on its own drive for detente with its black neighbours, and began to distance itself from the pariah regime in Salisbury. Variously, Smith sought to involve Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole, Rhodesia’s ‘internal’ black leaders, and even Joshua Nkomo, the Matabele leader and most prestigious of the insurgent ‘external’black politicians, in the search for a solution. After the failure of a conference promoted by Kissinger in 1976, Smith played his last card of an ‘internal’ settlement, all the while assailing Britain, the US and South Africa for this cynical abandonment of their ‘kith and kin.’

  Militarily, the situation worsened by the month as guerillas stepped up attacks from their bases in Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. At its height, Rhodesia’s white tribe had never accounted for more than 6 per cent of the population (a peak attained in 1951) and never exceeded some 260,000 in absolute numbers, compared to 6m blacks. White immigrants arrived in the first decade after UDI, reassured by the apparent security on the ground and lured by the prospect of a new life in a land of opportunity.

  But between January 1976 and Zimbabwean independence, the white population dropped by almost 50,000, almost a fifth. Contrary to the impression encouraged by the regime, only a minority of the white population was actually Rhodesian born. Alarmed by the military draft, to which all whites up to the age of 60 were liable, and fearful of their security, many recent immigrants decided to return home. The precise death toll of the war is unknown, but the vast bulk of the casualties – some 80 per cent – were incurred in the three years of 1977, 1978 and 1979. An end to the fighting was finally agreed at the Lancaster House confererence of 1979, which provided for all-party elections the following March.

  For several years after Zimbabwe’s independence, Smith played an active part in politics. In retirement he became an ever fiercer critic of the Mugabe government, especially when it launched its violent campaign to take back white owned farms. His warning that this policy would dislocate the mainstay of the national economy, and thus depress living standards for the very black people whose interests Mugabe claimed to be fighting for, has sadly proved all too accurate. As disaster piled upon disaster, his refrain was simple – ‘I Told You So.’

  Ian Smith was a limited and by all accounts somewhat humorless man, of simple tastes and blinkered outlook. But though he knew how to appeal to British nostalgia, his love of the country of his ancestors was not feigned. He rebelled against the Crown, but was intensely patriotic – as attested by the final words of his 1965 declaration of independence: God Save the Queen.

  Was he a racist? Not in the Ku Klux Klan sense of a white supremacism founded on violence and naked terror. Nor did his Rhodesia follow the South African model of an explicit, rigidly enforced apartheid, or ‘apartness’ of the races, written into the law of the land. If anything, he subscribed to the ‘separate but equal’ fantasy that prevailed in the US until it was struck down in the landmark 1954 Brown Vs. Board of Education ruling
by the Supreme Court that ordered the desegregation of schools and launched the American civil rights movement.

  For Ian Smith, white rule was the natural order of things. White settlers had built the country, they paid the taxes, and they deserved to reap the fruit of their labours. Blacks, he maintained, were happy in their separate universe. When pressed, he might talk of a gradualism, of ‘evolution not revolution’ as if to suggest that one day blacks might take charge, by a route that avoided the ‘disasters’ that had occurred in many newly independent for colonies to the north. But Smith let slip the truth to an interviewer: ‘I don’t believe in black majority rule ever, not in a thousand years.’

  In his Rhodesia, self righteous paternalism was the order of the day.

  Whites would refer without a trace of self consciousness to ‘our black people’. Smith would contrast the turbulence of post independence Nigeria, the Congo and Uganda with his own placid, contented and white-ruled patch of southern Africa, home of ‘the happiest black faces you ever saw’.

  The British writer David Caute, in his 1983 history of the period, Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia, described Smith’s attitude thus.

  His attitude towards Africans was empty of hatred. He bullied them, but politely. He hectored and lectured them, but not at the level of personal abuse. Because he he could always ban them, detain them and lock them up – which he often did – he felt unthreatened by them at a personal level. They were opponents but within the wider contours of history and geography.

  That judgement rings true. Smith’s real enemies were whites, above all the hypocritical ruling establishment of the mother country, emblem of all that had gone wrong with post-war Britain. The worst offender perhaps was David Owen, Labour’s youthful Foreign Secretary between 1977 and 1979, ‘a petty arrogant little man, trying to fill a job that was too big for him.’