Ian Smith

Ian Smith declared Rhodesia independent in 1965 rather than accept majority rule and said that it would not come in a thousand years. He was a Rhodesian-born farmer and a Spitfire pilot who had been shot down twice, once over Italy, where he spent five months with partisans. Britain's policy after 1960 was no independence before majority rule; Smith's Rhodesian Front, elected by an electorate of about 220,000 whites in a country of four million Africans, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence on 11 November 1965 in language borrowed from the American one. It was the first such break from the Crown since 1776. Sanctions followed and were leaked through South Africa and Portuguese Mozambique for a decade. The war against ZANU and ZAPU guerrillas killed perhaps twenty thousand people and turned decisively after 1974, when the Portuguese empire collapsed and the Mozambican border opened. He signed an internal settlement in 1978 with Bishop Muzorewa that no one recognised, and finally accepted the Lancaster House agreement in 1979. Robert Mugabe won the 1980 election. Smith sat in the new parliament for seven years, kept his farm, was unrepentant in two volumes of memoirs, and died in Cape Town. Zimbabwe's independence in 1980 left him leading twenty reserved white seats under the Lancaster House settlement until they were abolished in 1987. He was never prosecuted and never left. Mugabe's own record after 2000 was used by Smith's admirers as retrospective vindication, an argument that requires forgetting that the war and the settlement were about the franchise and not about competence.

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