THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
YOU must remember Ian Smith. Ian who? I hear you ask. Who could forget the obdurate, dour leader of the Rhodesian government, with his skein of black hair parted perilously close to the right ear? The man who tried to hold up the march of history by leading his country through 13 years of bloody civil war rather than allow black majority rule.
Well, he has written his autobiography. A weighty tome aimed at blaming everyone around him for handing his beloved homeland to “terrorists” and “Marxist-Leninist” gangsters. Hence the title – The Great Betrayal.
Here is a man who even at age 78 is not about to admit that he did anything wrong. His mulish rearguard action may have cost at least 30 000 lives in a bitter civil war, but Smith claims the deaths stemmed mostly from black-on-black violence. “Only 6 000 whites were killed,” he says. Well, I suppose that’s all right then.
To hear him speak, his was the most progressive government on the continent. A virtual Utopia, where everyone lived in harmony and the economy was sound. So there was no need for blacks to run things.
In his words: “We had the happiest black faces in Africa.” Images of Tarzan movies with happy smiling darkies flashed through my mind. “There was no racial discrimination, though whites did have some preferential status.” He blames this on the Constitution handed down by Britain.
We have arranged to meet at his daughter’s house in Hout Bay, Cape Town, where Smithy is on the last leg of his promotional tour in South Africa – he’s already done Britain. The book seems to be selling like hot cakes. At least it would be, if only the agents could get their hands on copies.
“People are reserving copies, but the book shops won’t get them for a couple of days,” explained the harassed Cape Town publicist. “We have been bedevilled because the publishers did not do a big enough print run and have already had to do several re-prints.”
Ian Smith scoffed. “They thought people won’t be interested in what an old man had to say. I don’t want to appear arrogant, but I knew it would sell well – especially south of the Limpopo River.”
Ah, if only people would listen to Smith. He knew that when two-thirds of his “people” (that is, whites) fled black Zimbabwean rule, they either trekked to South Africa or Australia. Even those who loathe him might want to hear why he acted as he did.
Personally, I wanted to meet the man whom I remember seeing through a child’s eyes, declaring on television that blacks would not rule his country in 1 000 years, or was it over his dead body? It had left a vivid impression.
Yet here he was looking decidedly alive, if a little shaky and very grey; even his parting appeared to have slipped more to the right. He tottered gingerly into the modest sitting room (the decor was nondescript) looking frail and defeated – a forgotten figure from history – barking orders to the pet dog howling hysterically in a locked room.
“I’m the only one he listens to … because I’m the grandfather,” he says with a sense of importance. Animals are the only creatures Smith has power over these days.
I ask why he had written the book, and he begins a lengthy explanation about treachery and misrepresentation. Even the famous quote about black rule was twisted and distorted, he insists.
“I didn’t say there would never be a black government in my lifetime. What I said was, why should it be black and not one based on the best candidates, whatever their colour?” Then he thanks me for a chance to set the record straight.
But the issue Smith really wants to get off his chest is the B-word – Betrayal. The greatest being that of neighbouring South Africa. “We could have withstood everything but that,” he says wistfully.
“They were the ones who put the final nail in our coffin. We could have defied Britain and her allies; during sanctions we had the greatest growth of any country in the world. But we could not survive South Africa because they controlled our lifeline.”
The then prime minister John Vorster sold out Rhodesia, he says, to appease black leaders of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). “He said they had agreed to accept South Africa and apartheid in return for settling the Rhodesia issue. I said surely you don’t believe that, and he brushed me aside saying I was out of touch with the world.”
Smith may have been out of his depth when negotiating with wily politicians like Vorster, Harold Wilson and Lord Carrington, but on this he was correct. It was only a matter of time before majority rule landed south of the Limpopo. “History has proved me right,” he says, with just enough Schadenfreude to make his point.
As for Britain, expressions like two-faced, reneging on agreements and acting in its own interest, abound. His Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 was the only option in the wake of such duplicity, Smith insists.
“We tried to be honest. We had no option. The country would have collapsed and we would have had a communist government even earlier.” He still harps about “challenging the forces of evil” and holding the line against communist incursion. It is almost as if Smith has been caught in a political timewarp and the Cold War was still going strong.
Actually, Ian Dudley Smith has an unbudgeable belief in the lost idyll of old colonialist Rhodesia. He believes history had chosen him to “make a stand for those ideals of Western Christian civilisation” against the surge of people “whose ancestors had not even invented the wheel by the time the white man arrived”.
You can almost see his mind wandering back to the good-ol’-days when being white was not just right, but it also meant that you knew what was best for blacks. Smith talks about black people with a proprietorial base that shrieks racism cloaked in missionary paternalistic zeal.
“We tried all the time to help our black people. We brought them up, trying to help bring them into power. We built them schools, but what was the point when they did not want to go?”
It’s a philosophy which reflects the world in which he grew up. Smith was born in the small rural town of Selukwe, where his father, Jock (from Scotland) and mother Agnes (from Cumberland in England), were wealthy social do-gooders. “They strove to instill principles and moral virtues, the sense of right and wrong, of integrity, in their children,” he writes.
Like those other pioneering whites who flocked to Rhodesia in search of gold and other wealth, they did so because they believed in Cecil John Rhodes’s idea of an empire from the Cape to Cairo – ironically called the Red Route. They felt they had been sent by Queen Victoria to spread British civilisation and in their landlocked country evolved to become even more British than the British.
That, said Smith, was what he was told every day while serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the World War II. “We were proud to be part of the Empire. It was a privilege to fight for our King.”
His war record reads like something from an Alastair McLean novel. He was critically injured in a Hurricane crash in 1943 and, after recovering, rejoined his squadron to be shot down over the Po River in Italy in June 1944.
Was this how he ended up with a glass eye? “That’s rubbish! I don’t know where it started, but I can tell you I can see you perfectly well out of this eye and this.” He held a hand intermittently over each blue eye to prove his case.
Smith fought with the Italian partisans before escaping over the Alps to liberated France. In 1945 he flew over Germany before returning to Rhodes University to complete his degree in commerce. He became prime minister in 1964.
This craggy old soldier still lives in Zimbabwe – as do two of his three children – unharassed by the “terrorist” Robert Mugabe, who sadly went on to epitomise all the megalomania and corruption Smith had prophesied.
“During the past 15 years the lot of the black man has deteriorated in our country at an alarming rate,”says Smith. “Corruption is rife and we have a one-party state with politicians who have numbered bank accounts outside Zimbabwe.”
He bolsters his arguments by pointing out that before black rule the Zimbabwe dollar was worth 1,02, but today it is a mere five cents to the pound. “If only we had had a Nelson Mandela, who puts his country’s interest before that of his party.”
It seems strange to hear him praise Mandela who was also regarded as a communist and terrorist by his white oppressors.
Mugabe and Smith have not spoken for about 15 years. “My secretary used to phone his office for three years – remember I was leader of the opposition party for a while – but he never responded.”
Does he still think he has a role to play politically? “I’ve been in the front line for more than 50 years and that’s enough. But when people come to talk to me about the dreadful situation of bankruptcy, intimidation and corruption – and most are black – I feel I would love to rescue the country and bring back a bit of sanity.”
It’s all rather simplistic, with a dash of the Boys’ Own comic script. Only his most devoted followers will be able to read the book without cringing in embarrassment.
But he has a right to tell his truth about an important period in history – even if it sometimes appears to be through the tinted lens of a glass eye.