1987 – Black and White
On 30 December 1987, Robert Mugabe was declared President of Zimbabwe, a new position which embraced the previous roles of head of state, head of government (he had been Prime Minister up to that point), and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It was the culmination of a process of reform, throwing off colonial dominance in Africa. Looking back, I realise many of us were caught up in a perception war 35 years ago. As events were described, the British, and Ian Smith in Rhodesia were the white-skinned good guys, and Robert Mugabe was the leader of merciless black rebel natives. It was all quite clear and simple. Knowing more today, with a better appreciation of what was taking place in Africa, the picture looks far from straightforward. Mugabe and Smith were caught up in evolving events and political tensions: now both seem more complex than events then suggested.
Robert Mugabe came from a poor background. His early education was in Jesuit-run schools, giving him a lifelong love of literature, and an intense self-discipline. He was a Catholic for many years, and by his twenties had something of the air of an academic, preferring reading, avoiding sports, and dressing conservatively, wearing what were to become a trademark pair of heavy-framed spectacles. In 1945, aged 21, he began working as a schoolteacher, with an interest in literature and history. Away from the classroom, he read extensively, especially interested in Marxism and in liberation movements. In 1958, he moved to Ghana, the first African state to gain independence, where Kwame Nkrumah was spearheading African nationalism. It was a turning point, and he left there a revolutionary and professed Marxist.
The push for independence had been sweeping Africa. Joshua Nkomo established the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress in 1957, an anti-colonialist movement. On his return from Ghana, Mugabe joined a 7,000 strong demonstration protesting the arrest of ANC members where he was asked to be a speaker. It was another turning point, and Mugabe resigned from his teaching position to become a full-time activist. A year later the British and Nkomo agreed to limiting the black populations representation to 15 of the 65 seats in the country’s parliament. Mugabe and many others were furious. By the end of the year, Mugabe was appointed general secretary of the Zimbabwe African Political Union (ZAPU). Racial violence grew, and nine months after its foundation, ZAPU was banned by the government. It was the first of many occasions on which Mugabe was placed under arrest.
The rise of African nationalism had generated a white backlash in Southern Rhodesia, and the right-wing Rhodesian Front won a general election in 1962. The new government wanted to preserve white minority rule. It tightened security and sought full independence from the United Kingdom. In December 1963, Mugabe was arrested and sentenced to 21 month’s imprisonment. Released in 1965, he was arrested once again, and this time sentenced to remain behind bars for eight years. He used his prison time to read and study, completing several degrees from the University of London: a master’s degree in economics, a bachelor’s degree in administration, and two law degrees. Years later, fearing guerrilla war in Southern Rhodesia would spread south, the South African government pressured Rhodesia to join a détente with the politically moderate black governments of Zambia and Tanzania. As part of the deal, the government agreed to release several black revolutionaries who’d been indefinitely detained. After almost eleven years of imprisonment, Mugabe was released in November 1974. Prison, study, and a fierce commitment to both Marxism and national independence combined to make Mugabe a fierce, committed and ideological leader.
While Mugabe had been learning revolutionary tactics, Prime Minister Ian Smith was attempting to consolidate his power. Like Mugabe, Smith was born in Southern Rhodesia, his parents British immigrants, and successful ranchers. Unlike Mugabe, he loved sport and in his final year at school he was captain of the school teams in cricket, rugby and tennis, as well as a champion in athletics and the school’s outstanding rifle marksman. When Britain declared war in September 1939, Smith, about halfway through his university course, decided he wanted to fight for Britain, abandoned his studies, and joined the Royal Air Force.
His war service was marked by accidents. In October 1943, in Egypt, he crashed his Hawker Hurricane jet fighter after the throttle malfunctioned. He incurred serious facial injuries, and broke his jaw, leg and shoulder. After skin grafts and plastic surgery on his face, he was able to fly again a year later, but enemy flak hit Smith’s craft during a raid, and he had to bail out behind German lines. Finally escaping by hiking across the Alps with three others, Smith finished the journey walking barefoot on the ice and snow. Seemingly unstoppable, he returned to active service in April 1945, flying combat missions in western Germany. His war wounds and facial disfigurement were to remain evident for the rest of his life.
Back in Rhodesia in 1948, he bought a ranch and land where he could raise cattle and grow tobacco and maize. In July 1948 a general election was called for September. In August, a month before election day, members of the Liberal party, then in opposition, approached Smith and asked him to stand for for parliament. In a few weeks in August, Smith became a Liberal Party politician, finalised the purchase of his farm and married, adopting his wife’s two children as his own. Campaigning hard, Smith won support among the white families, (his RAF service helped), and won the seat. 29 years old, he was the youngest MP in Southern Rhodesian history, although the Liberal party as a whole was roundly defeated.
For the next ten years, Smith was a rather undistinguished politician, paralleling Mugabe’s early, quiet years as a teacher. The politics of Southern Rhodesia through this time were complicated and increasingly violent. Southern Rhodesia was part of a federation with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. British political leaders were coming to terms with the process of decolonisation, a process to be immortalised later by Harold Macmillan in his famous 1962 ‘Winds of Change’ speech: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact”. He was right, but there were tensions within the Federation, encouraging Southern Rhodesia to seek independence. Smith was one of the leaders of white dissent against the new constitution, opposing its proposal to split the existing non-racial, qualified electorate into two rolls, saying “Our policy in the past has always been that we would have a government, in Rhodesia, based on merit and that people wouldn’t worry whether you were black or whether you were white.” At a vote on the constitution in 1961, Smith was the only member out of 280 to reject it. Disillusioned, he resigned sitting in the Assembly as an independent. Meanwhile, the rest of overwhelmingly white electorate approved the new constitution.
As the UK government granted majority rule in Nyasaland and made moves towards the same in Northern Rhodesia, Smith decided that the Federation was a lost cause and resolved to found a new party that would push for Southern Rhodesian independence without waiting for a transfer of power. With the support of a millionaire rancher, miner and industrialist, he helped form the Rhodesian Reform Party (RRP), later to link with other groups to form the Rhodesian Front (RF). Led by Winston Field, it contested the Southern Rhodesia elections. By now the Federation was slowly collapsing, and the Front won.
Announcing his Cabinet on 17 December 1962, Prime Minister Field appointed Ian Smith as Deputy Prime Minister. Now in the front line of politics, Smith and Mugabe were on a collision course, to reach its climax fifteen years later. The Federation had collapsed and was formally dissolved at the end of 1963. Southern Rhodesia was now keen to move forward on independence, given its progress had been slow compared to Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, which were both on track to achieve full statehood by the end of 1964. It was tricky. The UK’s Conservative government was worried about international criticism if Southern Rhodesia’s minority government became well known. However, the Labour Party was determined to bring colonial power to an end, supporting black nationalist ambitions.
From the start, Field was widely criticised, seen as vacillating and uncertain; by April 1964, he was gone. Ian Smith became the first locally born Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister. He was later to observe “For the first time in its history the country now had a Rhodesian-born PM, someone whose roots were not in Britain, but in southern Africa, in other words, a white African.” He wasn’t expected to last. One of his first actions was to crack down hard on the black nationalist political violence that had erupted following the establishment of ZANU. After restricting their leaders, banning ZANU and jailing members including Nkomo and Mugabe, Smith turned his attention to gaining the country’s independence.
Very quickly, the sticking point concerned the views and representation of the whole community. While Ian Smith accepted the British condition that the terms had to be acceptable to the majority, he claimed he had sufficient support from a referendum among the white settlers, and a meeting of tribal chiefs and headmen. However, both black nationalists and the UK government dismissed the views of the tribal chiefs as an inadequate representation of the views of the black community. Sniping between the UK and Southern Rhodesia continued, and on 11 November 1965, Smith signed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Now life was tough. Smith’s government managed to keep going despite UN economic sanctions, partly offset by support from South Africa. After inconclusive talks with the UK over the next five years, Smith declared Rhodesia a republic.
If Smith had problems with the UK government, he also had an internal war, the so-called Rhodesian Bush War. This had begun with Zimbabwe African nationalists attacking farms in north-eastern Rhodesia. Early success by government forces met resistance in the UK, where Labour had returned to power. Then South Africa’s PM Vorster tried to stop the fighting, having concluded Rhodesia’s position was untenable in trying to maintain white rule in a country where blacks outnumbered whites by 22:1. In fact his views were self-serving: by agreeing a Rhodesian settlement with black African governments; he hoped success in this might win South Africa some international legitimacy and allow it to retain apartheid. Throughout, Nkomo remained unchallenged at the head of ZAPU, but the ZANU leadership had become contested, and eventually Robert Mugabe left for Mozambique to lead some guerrilla forces. Smith was in talks with Nkomo, but Mugabe was waiting in the wings.
On 20 March 1976, Smith gave a televised speech including what became his most quoted utterance. “I don’t believe in majority rule ever in Rhodesia—not in 1,000 years,” he said. “I repeat that I believe in blacks and whites working together. If one day it is white and the next day it is black, I believe we have failed, and it will be a disaster for Rhodesia.” For many this the clear evidence that Smith was a crude racist who would never compromise with the black nationalists. Perhaps, but Smith had made it clear power-sharing with black Rhodesians was inevitable and that “we have got to accept that in the future Rhodesia is a country for black and white, not white as opposed to black and vice versa”. Some commentators have suggested the ‘not in 1,000 years’ comment was an attempt to reassure Smith’s right-wing supporters that white Rhodesians would not be sold out. True or not, it was a phrase to dog him for the rest of his life.
Over in Mozambique, Mugabe called for the overthrow of Rhodesia’s predominately white government, the execution of Smith and his ‘criminal gang’, and the expropriation of white-owned land. More to the point, he also sought the transformation of Rhodesia into a one-party Marxist state, asserting violence was the only path to get there. For Mugabe, armed struggle was essential to establishing a new state, in contrast to Nkomo, who sought a negotiated settlement as meetings on Rhodesia continued. At a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 1979, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher jumped into the fray by announcing the UK would officially recognise the country’s independence if it transitioned to democratic majority rule. 1979 negotiations at London’s Lancaster House eventually forged an agreement, with a reluctant Mugabe convinced he had acceptance of a democratic black majority governmentwhile compromising on the other main issue, land ownership. On this, Mugabe agreed to protecting the white community’s privately owned property on the condition that the UK and U.S governments gave financial assistance to the Zimbabwean government to buy land for redistribution to its traditional communities.
In a sense, Mugabe had won. Southern Rhodesia gained its internationally recognised independence on 18 April 1980, with Mugabe as the country’s first Prime Minister, pledging racial reconciliation. He moved into the PM’s residence, which he left furnished in the same style as Smith had left it. Across the country, statues Cecil Rhodes were removed, and squares and roads named after colonial figures were renamed after black nationalists. Mugabe’s government continued to make regular pronouncements about converting Zimbabwe into a socialist society, but his government’s budgetary policies were conservative, emphasising the need for foreign investment. Under his leadership, there was a massive expansion in spending on education and health. At the same time, a new leadership elite emerged, people who expressed their newfound status through purchasing large houses and expensive cars, sending their children to private schools, and acquiring farms and businesses.
Once in power, Mugabe became increasingly dictatorial. In late 1987, Zimbabwe’s parliament amended the constitution and declared Mugabe to be Executive President, a position that gave him the power to dissolve parliament, declare martial law, and run for an unlimited number of terms. Fairly quickly he exercised a stranglehold on government, with unlimited opportunities to exercise patronage. Further amendments abolished the 21 reserved seats for white representatives, leaving parliament less relevant and largely ignored.
For years, I’ve thought of Robert Mugabe as a tyrant, a self-serving dictator, a merciless instigator of violence and theft from landowners. Now, I understand he was a hero for many Africans, a revolutionary leader dedicated to opposing colonial rule, promoting national liberation. He did become ruthless, but in doing so provided another example of how Marxists slip into dictatorships, initially for good reasons, but soon illustrating that familiar adage “power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely’. If Mugabe was the bad guy for many years, so Ian Smith, once seen as the lone voice protecting white colonists in Rhodesia, now seems equally flawed. Racist? Almost certainly. For him, it was the crucible of war that shaped his temperament, willing to confront the UK in his desire to sustain a form of democracy, albeit one representing only a tiny minority. Rhodesia’s history was shaped by relations between natives and colonials; and it is easy to stereotype Mugabe and Smith, but that would be wrong: their story isn’t one to be reduced to simplistic black and white.
