Vowing to prolong white rule and infamous for declaring UDI, Ian Smith ruled Rhodesia for 15 years
Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian prime minister who unilaterally declared independence from British rule, has died aged 88. Smith ruled the country for 15 years from 1964 to 1979, in an ultimately futile effort to maintain white minority rule. During that turbulent time he fought a guerrilla war against fighters from the majority black population. He remained a member of Parliament in what became Zimbabwe until 1987, and only moved to Cape Town in South Africa in the last few years. He died there at a family home on Tuesday.
Seen by many as the symbol of colonial-era racism in Africa, Smith remained unrepentant to the end, convinced that Zimbabwe would have been better off under his rule than that of his successor, Robert Mugabe. The son of a Scottish butcher, Smith was born in Southern Rhodesia, then a British colony, in 1919, and educated in South Africa. He served as an RAF fighter pilot in World War II before becoming a government minister. During the 1960s, when the waves of independence were sweeping across Africa and Britain, the majority of the 250 000 white Rhodesians supported the idea. But they rejected the notion that the black majority, numbering about 5-million, should take over.
Smith became prime minister in April 1964, promising to prolong white rule. He made his historic Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, immediately separating from Britain and the Commonwealth. The move attracted widespread international condemnation. The United Nations issued the first economic sanctions in its history. Britain dismissed Smith and his cabinet, but he ignored the move. With international companies breaking the sanction, the isolation did not seriously harm the economy.
So confident was Smith that white rule would go unchallenged that he famously declared that he did not believe in black majority rule over Rhodesia, ”not in a thousand years”.
His prediction proved wrong. What brought the white minority government down was the armed resistance of the black opposition, which started attacking white farms in 1972, and the withdrawal of support from the apartheid government in South Africa, which was looking to curry favour with the rest of Africa.
Eventually, Smith succumbed to the inevitable and agreed to a form of majority rule. He took part in the Lancaster House talks that paved the way for formal independence in 1980, when the country’s name changed to Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party took over.
As part of the negotiations, Smith had managed to include a resolution that no compulsory land redistribution would take place for at least 10 years after independence, and that 20 seats in Parliament would be reserved for whites. He became leader of the opposition and stayed in Parliament, much to the government’s irritation, until 1987, when he retired to his farm.
Ten years later he published his autobiography, The Great Betrayal, which heavily criticised the Mugabe government. In an interview in 2000 he described Mugabe as ”mentally deranged”. — Zan Rice Â