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If
only Ian Smith had shown some imagination, then more of his people
might live at peace
Peter Godwin
November 25, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,,2216725,00.html
Bestselling
author Peter Godwin once had Rhodesia's leader in his sights. Here
he recalls his encounter with the man who died last week, and reflects
on the legacy of division and oppression he has left
So the obituaries
of the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, are done and, as one might expect,
most of them identify twin legacies: his unilateral declaration
of independence from Britain (UDI), and his confident prediction
that black rule would never happen - not in 1,000 years. Each legacy,
in its own way, is wrong.
Responsibility
for UDI is not Smith's alone. Blame must be substantially shared
with Britain. The disengagement from Africa was irresponsible, little
more than a hasty jettisoning of colonies, however ill-prepared
they were for self-rule, and a virtual guarantee that they would
fail as autonomous states. The Foreign Office particularly mismanaged
Rhodesia. Its attitude was tainted with cultural condescension.
(Even now, in the obits, much is made of Smith's nasal twang, and
the sniffy aside that his father was 'a butcher'. The Washington
Post more accurately described Smith's father as 'a farmer and a
businessman who bred champion racehorses'.) Foreign Office mandarins
dismissed white Rhodesians as lower middle class, no more than provincial
clerks and artisans, the lowly NCOs of empire.
And so, hard as
it is to credit, the FO was ambushed by UDI. They didn't believe
that the Rhodesians had the initiative or the chutzpah to rebel
against the Crown. And after UDI, this diplomatic ineptitude continued:
Harold Wilson, advised by the FO, confidently predicted that the
Rhodesian rebellion would collapse in weeks rather than months.
He was wrong; 15 years wrong. This miscalculation helped prepare
the arena for a civil war that ultimately cost thousands of Zimbabwean
lives, mostly black civilian ones.
The second plank
of the 'Smith legacy', his 'never in 1,000 years' quote, is also
unfair and inaccurate. Over the years it has become shorn of all
context and compressed into a free-floating clip that has now become
his epitaph - the epitaph of a white King Canute railing against
an inevitable black tide. In fact it was not a prediction of a millennium
of white rule - as Ian Hancock and I tried to explain in our book,
Rhodesians Never Die
It was quite the
opposite. Made on 20 March 1976, Smith was actually conceding for
the first time that UDI was negotiable and that power-sharing with
blacks was inevitable. But in tortuous phrasing, he was also trying
to placate his white constituency (and the right wing of his own
Rhodesian Front party), assuring them that black rule shouldn't
happen overnight. What he actually said was: 'I don't believe [my
emphasis] in majority rule ever in Rhodesia... not in 1,000 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.' The language was
tortuous, but what is clear (especially if you read the whole speech)
is that he was advocating, not predicting, the survival of white
rule and telling his people that while he was still opposed in principle
to black rule, he had not ruled out the possibility of power-sharing
in the immediate future. He was actually laying the ground work
for compromise. And in negotiations with the black Zimbabwean leader
Joshua Nkomo, he had privately accepted the timetable of black rule
in five to 15 years.
But there is more
than enough for which to quite legitimately criticise Smith, without
resorting to fabrication.
I am no Smith
apologist. I once came quite close to killing him. In 1976 when
I was doing my military service in a unit of the British South Africa
Police I was briefly placed in charge of Smith's close security
when he came to visit the troops in the 'operational area'. Just
as he arrived, I heard for the first time that, because of manpower
shortages and an escalation of the war, the length of conscription
had just been increased, and that I would not be released to go
to Cambridge, as planned. Furious at the news, and armed, I was
left alone with him. As I described in my memoir, Mukiwa, I had
both motive and opportunity.
Smith sat at a
desk flicking impatiently through the pages of his speech. He looked
immensely tired. So, this was the man - good ol' Smithy - followed
blindly by white Rhodesians even though he had no bloody idea where
to lead us. Then, the thought popped into my mind that I could easily
shoot him. My pistol was in my holster, its bullets snugly spring-loaded
into their magazine. He was about 25 feet away from me through an
open door in the next room; it would be perfectly easy.
I tried to imagine
the consequences: the whole history of Rhodesia would be changed;
the war would be bound to end sooner with Smith gone. I wondered
what would happen to me. I'd be arrested, tried for murder and hanged,
going to the gallows as some sort of liberation hero. Or I'd be
declared criminally insane, like the parliamentary messenger Dimitri
'Blackie' Tsafendas, who had assassinated the South African Prime
Minister Hendrik Verwoerd 10 years before.
Smith looked up
from his papers and for a moment our eyes met across the room. His
seemed to be begging me to give him an honourable way out of this
fiasco.
Just then the
door flew open and his personal bodyguard arrived. I realised I
was standing now, with one hand on my holster. The bodyguard looked
at me oddly. 'Are you all right, patrol officer?' he enquired. 'You
look angry.'
'No, sir, I'm
fine,' I said and I turned down the steps and walked quickly away
over the flagstoned path and back to the war.
The terrible situation
in Zimbabwe today conforms in many ways to the worst of everything
Ian Smith had feared of black majority rule, and is the very spectre
that inspired him to fight so hard to prevent it.
And yet in many
ways, the war to which I was returning in 1976 was precisely what
radicalised a generation of the black Zimbabwean leadership and
created Smith's nemesis, Robert Mugabe, elevating him to the rank
of a liberation hero, who set about cultivating an almost messianic
status. And in many respects Mugabe's methods now mirror those of
his old oppressor.
In his political
rhetoric nearly 30 years after he assumed leadership of the new
Zimbabwe, Mugabe still reaches for the increasingly threadbare fig
leaf of Ian Smith's white settler rule (and an even more antique
British colonialism) to shore up his own beleaguered track record
and spin race as an excuse for his own ineptitude. Although few
black Zimbabweans still heed this once effective demonology, without
it, the increasingly dictatorial Mugabe would surely have been easier
to dislodge. This is part of Smith's legacy. As is the model of
one-party rule, and the useful levers of repression he bequeathed:
the draconian Emergency Powers - still relied upon by Mugabe to
conduct his own oppressive minority rule.
The last vestiges
of the people that Ian Smith pledged to protect, the white Rhodesians,
are being swept away. From their peak of 300,000, there are barely
20,000 whites, mostly the elderly, in Zimbabwe today, and their
diaspora is boosted now by many, many black Zimbabweans. If Ian
Smith had shown more historical imagination, then more of his own
people might still live in a place they once considered home.
*Peter Godwin
is the author of, most recently, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,
a memoir of Zimbabwe, published in paperback by Picador
*This article
was amended on Sunday November 25 2007. The article above was headlined
'I once thought of killing Ian Smith. Now I think he was misunderstood'.
We wrongly used quotation marks suggesting these were the author's
words. They were not. Godwin believes Smith's policies were a major
contributing factor to Zimbabwe's present crisis. This has been
corrected.
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