There could not be a more stark warning of the perils of “multiculturalism” for the western world . We have still not learnt our lessons today , as we drift unknowingly towards a Zimbabwean style denouement.
Rhodesia should be considered a keystone story to Anglosphere nations. With Canada, Australia and New Zealand only escaping the Rhodesian fate by being a supermajority European, and why the reversal of that reality is dangerous for any European populace that wishes for their society to continue as it has traditionally, as an extension of Western Civilisation.
Another chapter of misery released upon the world from Moscow.
The Soviet Union explicitly coopted nationalist and anti-colonial movements into the Marxist fold to cause trouble for Western nations and play a spoiler role. Its one of history's counterfactuals whether postcolonialism could have been made to work without this sabotage. The same source mind you that is the driver of contemporary anti-Zionism.
“This short story is a lesson about the catastrophic naïveté of believing that moral intention is a substitute for power, institutions, and racial/cultural reality. The Todds believed, like so many Western liberals still do, that history bends naturally toward justice once the “right side” is chosen. That dismantling an imperfect order guarantees a better one.”
I’m GenX, American, a cardiologist. This quote describes the belief of essentially all western university professors and “thought leaders” - though any one of them would much prefer to live in 1965 Salisbury as opposed to 2026 Harare.
The infuriating disconnect - that there is one thing that is acceptable to say publicly (Rhodesia is awful!) vs the thing that is true in reality (Zimbabwe is awful - Rhodesia was much better). Man is not meant to live under such cognitive dissonance.
Rhodesia was far better for all - both whites and black Africans. The only groups who benefited from the disaster that is Zimbabwe are moralistic westerners who judge from afar to feel good about themselves, tribal Africans who just want power and don’t give a damn about quality of life in any regard, and nihilist communists who want the whole world destroyed in some sad self-hating experiment.
The pathetic Judith Todd idiocy shows the insanity well - excuses her own rapists because otherwise would imply she was wrong all along. People who don’t hate themselves, their families, and their culture clearly see through all the B.S.
I was born in East Africa (born in Tanganyika and lived in Uganda until the age of six), so I have an inbuilt empathy for the sentiment you express and for the emotional power the Rhodesian story still carries. I understand why it continues to resonate.
That said, I don’t think the lessons drawn from Rhodesia apply cleanly to what is happening now in the West, and particularly in the UK.
The key difference is structural. Rhodesia was a settler society in which a white colonial minority ruled over an indigenous African majority on African land. Whatever one thinks of Rhodesia’s competence or stability, its fate was inseparable from the end of empire and the reassertion of indigenous political control. In that context, demographic change was not immigration overwhelming a native society, but decolonisation bringing colonial rule to an end.
In Britain today, the positions are reversed. White Britons are not a settler elite; they are the indigenous population. If one is concerned about cultural displacement or loss of continuity in the UK, then structurally the closer analogue is not the white Rhodesian, but the black Rhodesian — the population whose demographic weight eventually translated into political power.
This is where a crucial difference emerges. White Rhodesians, for all their attachment to the land, did not possess a thousand years of historical continuity, cultural rootedness, and institutional inheritance. In the UK, by contrast, the native population does. Yet that inheritance is now under pressure not only from unprecedented levels of mass migration, but from a political elite that increasingly treats identification with Britain’s historical and civilisational legacy as morally unacceptable. Expressions of pride in British history and culture are frequently branded as “far right” or even “fascist,” not merely in fringe discourse but within official and quasi-official settings concerned with “radicalisation.”
None of this is to deny that Rhodesia offers genuine warnings — about elite abandonment, moral abstraction, or the risks of dismantling imperfect orders without viable replacements. But those are lessons about legitimacy and power, not a direct template for understanding immigration and identity in contemporary Britain. Treating the two as equivalent risks obscuring important differences rather than clarifying them.
We are the wrong colour, too competent, wrong faith, and above all, wrong heritage....some amongst us might remember what was, whom we came from...
It is all down to one's eschaton....the study and picture of Last Things. The devil does not like to be reminded of his eternal destiny....the LAKE OF FIRE. Kind of like Basil Fawlty's "don't mention the war"......heheh....
This is from a novel I wrote. It features an ex-Rhodesian soldier and is aimed at informing the rest of the West, especially countries like Australia, what awaits them.
'Lighting up, he climbed into the vehicle and less than a minute later he was heading back to San Miguel. The roads were as empty as ever, and he drove fast and in silence, watching a host of insects as they died on the windscreen. Bright in the headlights like incoming tracer, they reminded him of a night back in Rhodesia when the bullets had been real, and he recalled a firefight so intense that it had lit up the sky with a great golden glow.
He grinned at the memory. In retrospect, those had been good times; times when the enemy was easy to identify, and the rules of engagement had been clear because there weren't any. Back then it was all just point and shoot, the quick and the dead. Now, though, he and his countrymen were fighting a different kind of war. Now the bad guys were almost impossible to spot; most of them didn’t even have a name as such. Now they had a bodyguard of lawyers and politicians to protect them. Now they had ‘rights’. But it was a war all the same. And if there were differences, there were also similarities - far too many for his liking…
People, he recalled, used to joke about Rhodesia being about thirty or forty years behind the rest of the rest of the world, but in one respect the opposite was true. In one respect, Rhodesia had been thirty or forty years ahead of everywhere else. The 'Winds of Change' that had swept through Africa then had since moved on, growing and strengthening all the time. Now they had reached into every part of the Western world, and Rhodesia, far from being a backward joke, was looking more and more like the grim future that they all could look forward to.'
As the child of Portuguese parents born in Mozambique, I can personally attest to the realities described in this article and to the dangers of what is often called “suicidal empathy”, because I lived it. What strikes me most is that Westerners who ventured beyond Europe in an attempt to make things work in parts of Africa learned these lessons decades ago, often at great cost. When we were forced to flee for our lives back to the Western world, we were labelled intolerant and racist.
Today, many of the same dynamics: corruption, violence, racial hostility toward Caucasians, and wilful ignorance enabled by virtue-signalling liberalism, are increasingly visible in the West itself. When will we acknowledge that cultures and populations are not interchangeable? When will we have an honest conversation about fundamental human differences without fear or denial?
I fear for the future of the Western world, and it saddens me deeply that my children and grandchildren may ultimately bear the consequences.
Great thinking piece — thank you for writing it. In the interest of finding common ground, I want to focus on what resonated with me here, and why — especially as someone who reads the Rhodesian case less as a story about peoples, and more as a warning about institutions and elite moral failure.
What stayed with me most is the pattern of legitimacy withdrawal: how authority was hollowed out not primarily by mass uprising, but by decisions made far from the ground — in diplomatic circles, international bodies, and moral consensus-setting elites who bore none of the downstream cost. Whatever one thinks of Rhodesia’s injustices, its collapse was accelerated by actors who never had to live with the consequences of the transition they demanded.
That’s the part of this story that feels most relevant now. Not the identity of the population, but the behavior of elite systems that moralize outcomes while externalizing risk.
In that sense, the tragedy isn’t that one group “lost” and another “won.” It’s that ordinary people on all sides paid the price for a transition engineered by institutions that treated legitimacy as symbolic, enforcement as shameful, and accountability as optional once the “right side of history” had been declared.
Seen that way, Rhodesia reads less like a racial parable and more like an early case of a now-familiar failure mode: moral certainty at the top, institutional collapse below.
That pattern — elites rewriting rules, withdrawing support, and then washing their hands of the aftermath — is the part of your piece I think deserves the most attention, because it recurs across ideologies and eras. When legitimacy becomes a moral credential rather than a shared rule, the people who suffer first are rarely the ones who made the call.
I may diverge from you on some framing, but on that institutional warning, I think we’re pointing at the same danger — and it’s one that transcends race, nation, or generation.
👏👏👏 A tour de force of a piece, Celina! This is history written at its best! This paints for the reader a more nuanced portrait of Rhodesian history then we usually hear. The truth as it usually is, is more complex than its popularly made out to be. Rhodesia wasn’t perfect, but it was the breadbasket of Africa and a prosperous pro-western, anti-Communist state where blacks had better living standards and greater education and economic opportunities then did their counterparts in most other African countries. Why did Rhodesia fall and a successful non-racial democracy never took hold in Rhodesia? The answer to the former is that it was betrayed by a guilt ridden West that had lost faith in its own legitimacy and the latter is because one side refused to play by the rules of the democratic game leading to a white backlash that Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front rode to power in 1962.
The white electorate of Rhodesia did try a more liberal approach in the days before its independence from Britain. Sir Edgar Whitehead became Southern Rhodesia’s Prime Minister from 1958 to 1962. Whitehead was an imperial liberal who wished to see a partnership between whites and blacks in Rhodesia and the creation of a multiracial democracy and non-racial state. He repealed the most discriminatory sections of the Land Apportionment Act and launched the “Build the Nation” campaign urging Rhodesians to form a non-racial national identity.
But this vision was rejected by the African nationalist movement and whites alike. The former rejected his reform as not going far enough. They boycotted black voter registration drives using intimidation and violence to prevent moderate blacks from casting their ballot. The latter were terrified by the chaos that followed Congo’s independence and the bloodshed of the Mau Mau Uprising. This is why white voters came out in droves to support Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front who were dedicated to preserving white minority rule in Rhodesia. Whitehead was a good man who tried his hardest to bring about positive change in Rhodesia but the intransigence of the African nationalists and the course of history prevented his noble vision for the country from ever coming true.
Whitehead died in exile in Newbury, England in 1971 his dream shattered into a million pieces. There was a new proposed Constitution in 1961 that created a dual voting system. You had A-Roll voters (mostly white) who met the educational qualifications and then you had B-Roll voters (mostly black) who met more minimal qualifications. Blacks could move up to be a A-Roll voters as they advanced economically. In time, they would achieve a majority. This was a brilliant system that was both meritocratic and evolutionarily. But again, the African nationalists rejected it because they wanted one man, one vote right now consequences be d*****! They knew the international community swept up in decolonization and white guilt would be on their side. The problem with doing universal black suffrage and having an independent black majority run Rhodesia was eloquently explained by writer A.J.A. Peck. As Peck astutely noted, black Rhodesians were culturally backwards compared to their white counterparts. He was not talking in terms of race or genetics but rather that black Rhodesians were not as developed a civilization as the Europeans were.
The entire black population was illiterate, a few herbs were all they used for medicine, their personal hygiene was bad, money was unknown to them as they used cattle to measure their wealth, and belief in witchcraft was widespread. Furthermore, as he would explain in a prescient piece for The Times, almost no independent African nation had succeeded. Almost all of them had collapsed into chaos, authoritarianism or outright dictatorship. When the Europeans left, that vacuum was filled by pre-colonial elites or Communist or Socialist dictators. The nationalist groups like ZANU and ZAPU weren’t just a threat to white people, but to black people as well. As the traditional tribal chieftains explained to a British official, the nationalist groups who were aligned with the USSR and China murdered black people and attacked black schools, dip tanks and churches. This is the people who Britain wanted to hand the country off too. These violent elites neither represented nor had any intention of protecting regular Africans.
White Rhodesians responded to British pressure by circling the wagons and unilaterally declaring independence in 1965. Despite an international arms embargo, they built one of the best militaries in the world with the Rhodesian Security Forces. The country itself thrived and was a wealthy first-world industrialized nation. As to Ian Smith, he was a complicated figure. Under Smith, blacks faced racial discrimination, segregation and inequalities, he should’ve negotiated the internal settlement much sooner and he sometimes used brutal tactics to fight the guerrillas. All that being said, Smith was a brave man and competent leader. He had served as a spitfire pilot in the RAF during WWII. He loved the British Empire and believed strongly in its ideals. He lead Rhodesia to become a strong, prosperous nation and a bulwark against Communism in Africa. But things were not looking good for Rhodesia. The Portuguese withdrew from Mozambique, South Africa had withdrew its military support and America and Britain continued to push Smith and his government to negotiate a settlement. Smith cut a deal with moderate black leader Abel Muzorewa to form a black majority, biracial government. But the U.S. and UK insisted that ZAUF and ZAMU had to be involved in the settlement and forced the Smith government to include them.
At the same time, the Rhodesian Bush War had been raging since 1964 and a bloody civil war had broken out in the 1970s. The war was characterized by raids, ambushes and terror in rural areas. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the crossfire and both sides committed atrocities. American and British pressure coupled with the devastation of the war, is what lead Smith and his government to give in and let the nationalists take part in the election. Robert Mugabe would rise to power with the ZANU-PF party in 1980 and would declare himself the countries’ absolute dictator. The results of Mugabe’s election were devastating: racism, graft, corruption, the end of democracy, political repression, economic collapse, and genocide. 20,000+ Ndebele civilians were murdered in Gukurahundi. Mugabe oppressed whites and didn’t bring freedom to blacks.
Ian Smith wasn’t prefect and was a paternalistic racist. But he nonetheless was a good man who loved his country and all its people and had a genuine respect and concern for the well-being of black Rhodesians. Mugabe and his party did NOT. They instituted Leninist policies and their death squads the North Korean-trained Fifth Column slaughtered anyone who stood in their way. This was the price that the Rhodesian people paid for western betrayal and loss of faith in itself. In the times we live in of stagnation, economic recession, mass immigration, identity politics, demographic decline, and political polarization here in the West, it is a lesson we would all do well to learn. Lest we suffer the same tragic fate that Garfield Todd and his poor daughter did.
Thanks for posting. This narrative is chilling and does appear to be the case in the U.S. today. The U.S. could be different in that I believe the blacks and white can unite and we are seeing the beginning of this. I also see that a large portion of the Hispanic population is also joining this grouping. But is not a coalition yet. However the huge problem is the unlimited immigration of the past 4 years. Getting these people out has to be a priority and all the liberal protests needs to be ignored. The insurrection act needs to be invoked.
There could not be a more stark warning of the perils of “multiculturalism” for the western world . We have still not learnt our lessons today , as we drift unknowingly towards a Zimbabwean style denouement.
South Africa is trying.
I talk about this
You have made some very good videos on Rhodesia (and other topics besides). Thank you.
Very kind, thanks!
Have the two of you seen Willem Petzer's recent stuff about it? You might find it rather interesting.
I agree they were brave but also kind of dumb to think that their system would last.
Rhodesia should be considered a keystone story to Anglosphere nations. With Canada, Australia and New Zealand only escaping the Rhodesian fate by being a supermajority European, and why the reversal of that reality is dangerous for any European populace that wishes for their society to continue as it has traditionally, as an extension of Western Civilisation.
Another chapter of misery released upon the world from Moscow.
The Soviet Union explicitly coopted nationalist and anti-colonial movements into the Marxist fold to cause trouble for Western nations and play a spoiler role. Its one of history's counterfactuals whether postcolonialism could have been made to work without this sabotage. The same source mind you that is the driver of contemporary anti-Zionism.
Good point and the same Pan-African Marxism that indoctrinated the Mamdanis
Not just Moscow; Global Capital, Israeli's as usual and Britain
Fantastic article. Thank you.
“This short story is a lesson about the catastrophic naïveté of believing that moral intention is a substitute for power, institutions, and racial/cultural reality. The Todds believed, like so many Western liberals still do, that history bends naturally toward justice once the “right side” is chosen. That dismantling an imperfect order guarantees a better one.”
I’m GenX, American, a cardiologist. This quote describes the belief of essentially all western university professors and “thought leaders” - though any one of them would much prefer to live in 1965 Salisbury as opposed to 2026 Harare.
The infuriating disconnect - that there is one thing that is acceptable to say publicly (Rhodesia is awful!) vs the thing that is true in reality (Zimbabwe is awful - Rhodesia was much better). Man is not meant to live under such cognitive dissonance.
Rhodesia was far better for all - both whites and black Africans. The only groups who benefited from the disaster that is Zimbabwe are moralistic westerners who judge from afar to feel good about themselves, tribal Africans who just want power and don’t give a damn about quality of life in any regard, and nihilist communists who want the whole world destroyed in some sad self-hating experiment.
The pathetic Judith Todd idiocy shows the insanity well - excuses her own rapists because otherwise would imply she was wrong all along. People who don’t hate themselves, their families, and their culture clearly see through all the B.S.
Thank you !
I was born in East Africa (born in Tanganyika and lived in Uganda until the age of six), so I have an inbuilt empathy for the sentiment you express and for the emotional power the Rhodesian story still carries. I understand why it continues to resonate.
That said, I don’t think the lessons drawn from Rhodesia apply cleanly to what is happening now in the West, and particularly in the UK.
The key difference is structural. Rhodesia was a settler society in which a white colonial minority ruled over an indigenous African majority on African land. Whatever one thinks of Rhodesia’s competence or stability, its fate was inseparable from the end of empire and the reassertion of indigenous political control. In that context, demographic change was not immigration overwhelming a native society, but decolonisation bringing colonial rule to an end.
In Britain today, the positions are reversed. White Britons are not a settler elite; they are the indigenous population. If one is concerned about cultural displacement or loss of continuity in the UK, then structurally the closer analogue is not the white Rhodesian, but the black Rhodesian — the population whose demographic weight eventually translated into political power.
This is where a crucial difference emerges. White Rhodesians, for all their attachment to the land, did not possess a thousand years of historical continuity, cultural rootedness, and institutional inheritance. In the UK, by contrast, the native population does. Yet that inheritance is now under pressure not only from unprecedented levels of mass migration, but from a political elite that increasingly treats identification with Britain’s historical and civilisational legacy as morally unacceptable. Expressions of pride in British history and culture are frequently branded as “far right” or even “fascist,” not merely in fringe discourse but within official and quasi-official settings concerned with “radicalisation.”
None of this is to deny that Rhodesia offers genuine warnings — about elite abandonment, moral abstraction, or the risks of dismantling imperfect orders without viable replacements. But those are lessons about legitimacy and power, not a direct template for understanding immigration and identity in contemporary Britain. Treating the two as equivalent risks obscuring important differences rather than clarifying them.
Very good point. As I said earlier, Rhodesia is not a good example. The UK and the USA are not being colonized to establish feudalistic minority rule.
We are the wrong colour, too competent, wrong faith, and above all, wrong heritage....some amongst us might remember what was, whom we came from...
It is all down to one's eschaton....the study and picture of Last Things. The devil does not like to be reminded of his eternal destiny....the LAKE OF FIRE. Kind of like Basil Fawlty's "don't mention the war"......heheh....
Superb, Celina. Thanks!
This is from a novel I wrote. It features an ex-Rhodesian soldier and is aimed at informing the rest of the West, especially countries like Australia, what awaits them.
'Lighting up, he climbed into the vehicle and less than a minute later he was heading back to San Miguel. The roads were as empty as ever, and he drove fast and in silence, watching a host of insects as they died on the windscreen. Bright in the headlights like incoming tracer, they reminded him of a night back in Rhodesia when the bullets had been real, and he recalled a firefight so intense that it had lit up the sky with a great golden glow.
He grinned at the memory. In retrospect, those had been good times; times when the enemy was easy to identify, and the rules of engagement had been clear because there weren't any. Back then it was all just point and shoot, the quick and the dead. Now, though, he and his countrymen were fighting a different kind of war. Now the bad guys were almost impossible to spot; most of them didn’t even have a name as such. Now they had a bodyguard of lawyers and politicians to protect them. Now they had ‘rights’. But it was a war all the same. And if there were differences, there were also similarities - far too many for his liking…
People, he recalled, used to joke about Rhodesia being about thirty or forty years behind the rest of the rest of the world, but in one respect the opposite was true. In one respect, Rhodesia had been thirty or forty years ahead of everywhere else. The 'Winds of Change' that had swept through Africa then had since moved on, growing and strengthening all the time. Now they had reached into every part of the Western world, and Rhodesia, far from being a backward joke, was looking more and more like the grim future that they all could look forward to.'
Link here for reference but I'd be delighted to send you a free copy.https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Causes-Richard-Nichols/dp/B09KNGF7XN/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1618187048&sr=8-1
As the child of Portuguese parents born in Mozambique, I can personally attest to the realities described in this article and to the dangers of what is often called “suicidal empathy”, because I lived it. What strikes me most is that Westerners who ventured beyond Europe in an attempt to make things work in parts of Africa learned these lessons decades ago, often at great cost. When we were forced to flee for our lives back to the Western world, we were labelled intolerant and racist.
Today, many of the same dynamics: corruption, violence, racial hostility toward Caucasians, and wilful ignorance enabled by virtue-signalling liberalism, are increasingly visible in the West itself. When will we acknowledge that cultures and populations are not interchangeable? When will we have an honest conversation about fundamental human differences without fear or denial?
I fear for the future of the Western world, and it saddens me deeply that my children and grandchildren may ultimately bear the consequences.
Great thinking piece — thank you for writing it. In the interest of finding common ground, I want to focus on what resonated with me here, and why — especially as someone who reads the Rhodesian case less as a story about peoples, and more as a warning about institutions and elite moral failure.
What stayed with me most is the pattern of legitimacy withdrawal: how authority was hollowed out not primarily by mass uprising, but by decisions made far from the ground — in diplomatic circles, international bodies, and moral consensus-setting elites who bore none of the downstream cost. Whatever one thinks of Rhodesia’s injustices, its collapse was accelerated by actors who never had to live with the consequences of the transition they demanded.
That’s the part of this story that feels most relevant now. Not the identity of the population, but the behavior of elite systems that moralize outcomes while externalizing risk.
In that sense, the tragedy isn’t that one group “lost” and another “won.” It’s that ordinary people on all sides paid the price for a transition engineered by institutions that treated legitimacy as symbolic, enforcement as shameful, and accountability as optional once the “right side of history” had been declared.
Seen that way, Rhodesia reads less like a racial parable and more like an early case of a now-familiar failure mode: moral certainty at the top, institutional collapse below.
That pattern — elites rewriting rules, withdrawing support, and then washing their hands of the aftermath — is the part of your piece I think deserves the most attention, because it recurs across ideologies and eras. When legitimacy becomes a moral credential rather than a shared rule, the people who suffer first are rarely the ones who made the call.
I may diverge from you on some framing, but on that institutional warning, I think we’re pointing at the same danger — and it’s one that transcends race, nation, or generation.
Excellent synopsis.
Another great article 👍🏻
I lived in Zambia (formerly northern Rhodesia for those who don’t know) from Nov 1967 thru 1971 timeframe.we visited both
Salisbury and Bulawayo during that time and both were pristine, peaceful cities. In Rhodesia back then we went to a historical site, it was called
Zimbabwe
a castle, with stone walls, very thick.very similar to those of Europeans from that era.
I had not finished editing
,and it just posted.,much more to say. Stupid interface,
Sobering! Thank you!
👏👏👏 A tour de force of a piece, Celina! This is history written at its best! This paints for the reader a more nuanced portrait of Rhodesian history then we usually hear. The truth as it usually is, is more complex than its popularly made out to be. Rhodesia wasn’t perfect, but it was the breadbasket of Africa and a prosperous pro-western, anti-Communist state where blacks had better living standards and greater education and economic opportunities then did their counterparts in most other African countries. Why did Rhodesia fall and a successful non-racial democracy never took hold in Rhodesia? The answer to the former is that it was betrayed by a guilt ridden West that had lost faith in its own legitimacy and the latter is because one side refused to play by the rules of the democratic game leading to a white backlash that Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front rode to power in 1962.
The white electorate of Rhodesia did try a more liberal approach in the days before its independence from Britain. Sir Edgar Whitehead became Southern Rhodesia’s Prime Minister from 1958 to 1962. Whitehead was an imperial liberal who wished to see a partnership between whites and blacks in Rhodesia and the creation of a multiracial democracy and non-racial state. He repealed the most discriminatory sections of the Land Apportionment Act and launched the “Build the Nation” campaign urging Rhodesians to form a non-racial national identity.
But this vision was rejected by the African nationalist movement and whites alike. The former rejected his reform as not going far enough. They boycotted black voter registration drives using intimidation and violence to prevent moderate blacks from casting their ballot. The latter were terrified by the chaos that followed Congo’s independence and the bloodshed of the Mau Mau Uprising. This is why white voters came out in droves to support Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front who were dedicated to preserving white minority rule in Rhodesia. Whitehead was a good man who tried his hardest to bring about positive change in Rhodesia but the intransigence of the African nationalists and the course of history prevented his noble vision for the country from ever coming true.
Whitehead died in exile in Newbury, England in 1971 his dream shattered into a million pieces. There was a new proposed Constitution in 1961 that created a dual voting system. You had A-Roll voters (mostly white) who met the educational qualifications and then you had B-Roll voters (mostly black) who met more minimal qualifications. Blacks could move up to be a A-Roll voters as they advanced economically. In time, they would achieve a majority. This was a brilliant system that was both meritocratic and evolutionarily. But again, the African nationalists rejected it because they wanted one man, one vote right now consequences be d*****! They knew the international community swept up in decolonization and white guilt would be on their side. The problem with doing universal black suffrage and having an independent black majority run Rhodesia was eloquently explained by writer A.J.A. Peck. As Peck astutely noted, black Rhodesians were culturally backwards compared to their white counterparts. He was not talking in terms of race or genetics but rather that black Rhodesians were not as developed a civilization as the Europeans were.
The entire black population was illiterate, a few herbs were all they used for medicine, their personal hygiene was bad, money was unknown to them as they used cattle to measure their wealth, and belief in witchcraft was widespread. Furthermore, as he would explain in a prescient piece for The Times, almost no independent African nation had succeeded. Almost all of them had collapsed into chaos, authoritarianism or outright dictatorship. When the Europeans left, that vacuum was filled by pre-colonial elites or Communist or Socialist dictators. The nationalist groups like ZANU and ZAPU weren’t just a threat to white people, but to black people as well. As the traditional tribal chieftains explained to a British official, the nationalist groups who were aligned with the USSR and China murdered black people and attacked black schools, dip tanks and churches. This is the people who Britain wanted to hand the country off too. These violent elites neither represented nor had any intention of protecting regular Africans.
White Rhodesians responded to British pressure by circling the wagons and unilaterally declaring independence in 1965. Despite an international arms embargo, they built one of the best militaries in the world with the Rhodesian Security Forces. The country itself thrived and was a wealthy first-world industrialized nation. As to Ian Smith, he was a complicated figure. Under Smith, blacks faced racial discrimination, segregation and inequalities, he should’ve negotiated the internal settlement much sooner and he sometimes used brutal tactics to fight the guerrillas. All that being said, Smith was a brave man and competent leader. He had served as a spitfire pilot in the RAF during WWII. He loved the British Empire and believed strongly in its ideals. He lead Rhodesia to become a strong, prosperous nation and a bulwark against Communism in Africa. But things were not looking good for Rhodesia. The Portuguese withdrew from Mozambique, South Africa had withdrew its military support and America and Britain continued to push Smith and his government to negotiate a settlement. Smith cut a deal with moderate black leader Abel Muzorewa to form a black majority, biracial government. But the U.S. and UK insisted that ZAUF and ZAMU had to be involved in the settlement and forced the Smith government to include them.
At the same time, the Rhodesian Bush War had been raging since 1964 and a bloody civil war had broken out in the 1970s. The war was characterized by raids, ambushes and terror in rural areas. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the crossfire and both sides committed atrocities. American and British pressure coupled with the devastation of the war, is what lead Smith and his government to give in and let the nationalists take part in the election. Robert Mugabe would rise to power with the ZANU-PF party in 1980 and would declare himself the countries’ absolute dictator. The results of Mugabe’s election were devastating: racism, graft, corruption, the end of democracy, political repression, economic collapse, and genocide. 20,000+ Ndebele civilians were murdered in Gukurahundi. Mugabe oppressed whites and didn’t bring freedom to blacks.
Ian Smith wasn’t prefect and was a paternalistic racist. But he nonetheless was a good man who loved his country and all its people and had a genuine respect and concern for the well-being of black Rhodesians. Mugabe and his party did NOT. They instituted Leninist policies and their death squads the North Korean-trained Fifth Column slaughtered anyone who stood in their way. This was the price that the Rhodesian people paid for western betrayal and loss of faith in itself. In the times we live in of stagnation, economic recession, mass immigration, identity politics, demographic decline, and political polarization here in the West, it is a lesson we would all do well to learn. Lest we suffer the same tragic fate that Garfield Todd and his poor daughter did.
Thanks for posting. This narrative is chilling and does appear to be the case in the U.S. today. The U.S. could be different in that I believe the blacks and white can unite and we are seeing the beginning of this. I also see that a large portion of the Hispanic population is also joining this grouping. But is not a coalition yet. However the huge problem is the unlimited immigration of the past 4 years. Getting these people out has to be a priority and all the liberal protests needs to be ignored. The insurrection act needs to be invoked.
God I wish there was a Rhodesia alive today I could defend to my dying breath.
Don’t tell the Groypers this but Israel supported Rhodesia during the Bush War.