Ian Smith – yesterday’s man

Coverage in Zimbabwe’s official media was indifferent.  This is in stark contrast to the vitriol and libel civic activists are meted out with daily by the boot-licking hacks at The Herald. Perhaps this is no surprise. The victims of the official media’s calumny do present a challenge to the power of the present regime whereas Smith was yesterday’s man and threatened no one. Nonetheless if the comments on the’ Have your Say’ section of the BBC’s website are anything to go by, he will be sorely missed by some. Mostly the contributors were white but Smith received the occasional salute by a black contributor. In media terms however this was a non-event. Predictably, his apologists contrast the state of the country inherited by the nationalists in 1980 with its present slide into disorder. They have a point. On every measure of human welfare, things have gotten worse. With the fastest contracting economy outside a war zone, the highest inflation anywhere, and a life expectancy on par with medieval England, would the country be better off if Smith had stayed in power? In answering this question, we need to bear in mind that he Smith regime was not sustainable. It could not have held out as an alternative model of governance to majority rule. It was doomed and change was inevitable. Not surprisingly, his apologists raise a few stock myths to deny this.  Foremost of these is the stab in the back theory: Smith was never defeated on the battlefield but by the machinations of the treacherous British. This is nonsense. The British did virtually nothing to back up their public protestations against the UDI and indulged the Rhodesian’s sanctions-busting.  By the late 1970’s the British were the bit players in the diplomatic maneuvers to end the war. Far greater a role was played by the South Africans and the Americans, who cajoled and chivvied Smith into accepting a settlement. It is true that both Smith and his opponents were exhausted militarily at the end of the 1970’s. In terms of casualties inflicted and suffered, the balance was overwhelming on the side of Smith. But like the Americans in Vietnam in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, Smith was further from victory than the nationalists. Smith had virtually no allies that counted with even the South Africans deserting him. The nationalists could court on the sympathy of vast swathes of world opinion, on both sides of the Cold War ideological divide, and extensive financial and material support.  Had Lancaster House never happened, the outcome of the war would have been no different. The fact was that increasing numbers of young white men were no longer willing to fight for Smith. His regime relied increasingly on black troops, whose loyalty could hardly be relied upon in the longer term. Besides that, the increasing depletion of white soldiers through battlefield casualties and (more significantly) emigration and draft evasion, the only option in due course would have been to have allowed black enlisted men to rise through the ranks. Had this occurred then the raison d’etre of the regime would have been fatally undermined. Its existence depended on reserving command positions and privileges exclusively for the white population. In addition the war was making greater and greater demands on the economy which was increasingly unable to bear the load.

I don’t believe in black majority rule’, Smith once notoriously averred, not in a thousand years’. Many of his supporters believed the inevitable really could have postponed for that long, and were it not the machinations of the British, communists, terrorists etc then we might still have a Rhodesia with us today. The regime offered peace, stability and a relatively high standard of living in return for the circumscribing of the rights of the indigenous population. We had the highest standard of health and education and housing for our black people than any other country on the African continent,’ he claimed. The economy performed impressively despite war and sanctions, which were far broader in scope than the targeted restrictions applied to the senior echelons of today’s ZANU-PF (a fact that Mugabe’s apologists overlook when they attribute today’s collapse to Western sanctions’). 

But despite this the racial economy was not sustainable in the longer term. The economies of minority-ruled South Africa and Rhodesia provided lavishly for any white lay about and scrounger but offered zero incentive to the black population to engage in any form of productive investment because any rewards derived from such investment faced confiscation. This was not just economic but social. Blacks were not just barred from the professions but from any leadership position anywhere.  On Rhodesian railways for example blacks could be stokers but never train drivers. In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel The Book of Not, a gifted black girl in a white-dominated elite school struggles to prove her worth in the 1970’s.  In a pivotal scene, she eagerly awaits recognition at a prize ceremony, having achieved top marks. Instead the much-coveted O-Level trophy is granted to a white girl with inferior marks, a blatant fix, designed to deny her the prize and maintain the badge of inferiority that justifies her oppression. Colonialism claimed to offer benefits such as education to the vanquished indigenous inhabitants as compensation for their humiliation. But to grant this meant undermining the basis on which colonial domination is founded. But colonialism was economically irrational. The cumulative effects of these distortions produced bottlenecks as the underutilisation of black labour and the inability of blacks to contribute capital placed limits on economic expansion, which in turn undermined the regime’s ability to pay for the war.

The system, even if it had not been besieged by insurgency, would have struggled to remain upright in the face of the blacks’ desire to advance socially and economically.  There is no reason to believe that Rhodesia was immune to the process of decolonisation operating elsewhere in Southern Africa, in Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s and then South Africa in the 1980s. If one needs any confirmation of this then one only need to look at South Africa in the 1980s, which was in a stronger position than its Rhodesian peer in the 1970s but which was compelled nonetheless to settle. None of the white minority regimes ended on account of a decisive defeat on the battlefield. But demographic, ideological and economic pressures combined to undermine each and every one of them over time.

The roots of the insurgency in the 60s and 70s cannot be attributed to the lure of communist subversion seducing a docile and contented population.  Even if true, this begs the question as to what rendered the black population so susceptible to such blandishments. The motive of the rank and file nationalist fighter was not terrorism in the sense of an irrational urge to inflict indiscriminate violence but a desire to be accepted and treated as a moral equal. We need not indulge in sentimentality here. The liberation movement was capable of great brutality. Press gangs rounded up rural boys into the ranks of the insurgents; male guerilla leaders treated girl fighters as sexual chattel. And then the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s followed.  However, the fact remains the minority-regime confronted a genuine popular rebellion, which it did much to fuel by bloody and indiscriminate reprisal.

In summary then the minority regime was doomed. The country by definition could not have been better off under a regime whose days were numbered. Change had to come.  Even if this is conceded, it is possible for apologists of Smith to find plenty to gloat over. Indeed there is a scarcely concealed element of glee in some of the comments made by Smith’s supporters when talking of Mugabe. We told you so. It was bound to end up this way. There is little call for such self congratulation on their part. For one thing, the assumption that the only two choices available to the country were either Mugabe or Smith is false. Moreover just because this regime is bad, it does not follow that that the previous one was better. The appalling quality of the present regime provides arguments for changing it, not arguments for vindication of minority rule. Majority rule does not equate with Mugabe rule. Moreover, there was a Smith before there was a Mugabe. Smith’s refusal to compromise doomed Rhodesia. Smith wrote the script for the country’s modern political history, opting for confrontation over compromise, no matter what the cost. Mugabe has added some more chapters but inherited the script. Andrew Meldrum, the Guardian’s former correspondent in Harare, in comparing Smith and Mugabe in his book Where We Have Hope, noted that both men have used political cunning and brutality to maintain their rules. To my mind they need each other. Ian Smith justifies all the wrongs of his rule by pointing to Mugabe …Mugabe justified the violence of his rule by citing Ian Smith’. But Smith was the more culpable because he came first … Smith created the conditions so only the most ruthless, the most violent, would succeed him: Robert Mugabe.’

But there is more than just a continuity of political personality between the two men.  There is a continuity of governance in terms of the operational style of the two regimes they have led. The styles of rule of both regimes are strikingly similar in their fundamentals. How can this be so? On the face of it the two regimes seem so dissimilar.  Smith’s regime presented itself as a settler colony in the midst of a land of happy sambos, who were happy to forgo basic human rights and the prospects of social and material advance in return for a supposedly benign paternalism and respect for African tradition’. If anyone needed confirmation that this anything but the case, then one needed only to look at the explosion of educational provision in the first years of independence, at the hunger of the black population to improve their lot in life.

While markedly contrasted at the outset in 1980, the present regime’s continuities with the previous order have become evident over time. The continuities emerged from the refusal of the successor regime to accept the emancipatory consequences it had unleashed. Education stimulated urbanisation and increasing expectations and aspirations of the black majority. By 2000 the majority of the population had no direct recollection of the liberation war. Although expectations were as high as ever, the regime was unable to deliver. At the end of the 1990s, the overwhelming ambition of swathes of young people was to move to the city and get ahead. In part the opposition Movement for Democratic Change arose from this demographic and cultural shift. It was the sort of movement and attendant aspirations that the Smith regime attempted to contain for the same reasons as the successor regime has tried to do: cities breed free thinking, dissent and opposition to the status quo.

Instead of reforming to meet these aspirations the regime chose two responses. The first from 1999/2000 was a crackdown on civil and political rights. Freedom of expression and freedom of assembly intensifies the circulation of ideas and ferment that fuel change which is intrinsic to cities. In so doing the regime has unashamedly made lavish use of legislation such as the Miscellaneous Offences Act, dating from the days of minority rule, as well as forging its own instruments of repression such as the Public Order and Security Act.  The second and far more violent response was the mass demolition of urban and peri-urban settlements in 2005, which some compared to the operations of the Khmer Rouge back in the 1970s. Taken literally, then this comparison is facile. The scale of deaths inflicted and the destruction wrought do not begin to compare. But in one sense the comparison is valid. The deindustrialization and deurbanisation resembles a Khmer Rouge in slow motion, driven by a regime that extols the virtue of the countryside and rural idiocy as much as the previous minority regime did. The demolitions of urban settlements were accompanied by exhortations for the evicted inhabitants to return’ to their villages. The operation was presented as a clean up exercise. But in effect it was an exercise in restoring people to their rightful place in the pecking order of oppression.  Before 1980, the people at the apex were white. Now they are black. The justifications are different. One talked of civilising missions and the other one talks of liberation. Assessed in terms of the effects on human well-being there is no difference. Mugabe’s apologists fail to see this in much the same way as Smith’s apologists do. But Smith is dead. Mugabe clings on and seems intent to spread as much misery as possible before he joins his former adversary in the grave. In the meantime, the list of Mugabe’s felonies grows and grows. The longer it gets, the greater the danger that he will end up giving Smith a half-way decent name.