Ian Smith: Ian Smith, who led white Rhodesians throughout the notorious unilateral declaration of independence period that marked the country's unhappy transition from being a British colony to achieving full independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, has died, aged 88.
He was a man who wore his mind on his face, as others wear their heart on their sleeve. His glass eye and half-frozen features proclaimed his obduracy before he opened his mouth to make history - by defying it for an unlikely decade and a half.
Those subjected to his nasal monotone, coloured only by the unmistakable "Rhodie" twang, are unlikely to forget the grinding, righteous whinge of a man who knew he was the only one in step and never understood why the rest could not grasp that elementary truth. This conviction never left him in his long and bitter twilight, and helps to explain how he clung to power for so long: to sustain UDI or its big brother, apartheid, tunnel vision was essential.
The cliché attached to Smith soon after he personally read out his unilateral declaration of independence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1965 could not have been more apt: "in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king". The bizarre sense of occasion that led him to choose the precise anniversary moment of the 1918 armistice to seize power on behalf of the white 5 per cent of the Rhodesian population was nevertheless a useful reminder to his British kith and kin of his wartime service as an RAF fighter pilot - when Smithy was shot down, lost an eye and had plastic surgery for facial burns.
Britain seized Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today's Zambia and Zimbabwe) in 1890. Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1911. In 1953 it was united with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the Central African Federation, designed to defer black rule. It collapsed in 1963, when Southern Rhodesia reverted to its status quo ante.
As the future Zambia and Malawi moved towards African rule, (Southern) Rhodesia with its significantly larger, but still tiny, white minority was denied it. The whites would not concede majority rule; successive British governments, first Conservative, then Labour, would not impose it.
When Rhodesian premier Winston Field proved insufficiently intransigent for the hardliners, he was ousted by a palace coup, which brought Ian Smith to power on April 13th 1964.
The weak British government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home was unable to persuade the Rhodesian Front regime with its overwhelming white support to concede progress, however slow, towards African emancipation. In Britain, the much more gifted Harold Wilson fared no better after he led Labour to a hairsbreadth victory in October 1964.
When talks broke down on the Nibmar issue - no independence before majority African rule - Smith went on the radio to deliver his UDI speech, which contained distorted echoes of the US version of 1776. It was followed by a sub-Churchillian address to the nation which was a challenge to the world and a defiance of the wind of change that had already swept across most of Africa.
But ex-Flight-Lieutenant Smith's appeal to his kith and kin was cunningly calculated and gave London the creeps. Armed intervention was publicly ruled out from the beginning because Wilson privately feared disloyalty among the British military.
Oratory was not Smith's forte. Nor was logic: "We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilisation and Christianity - and in the spirit of this belief we have thus assumed our sovereign independence," was the coda to his long apologia on UDI day.
But the flight from reality lasted nearly 15 years. Britain lacked the will to depose him and much of the world gave mere lip service to sanctions. Many countries, including black-ruled African states as well as South Africa and Portugal with its African colonies, found it expedient to undermine them.
Smith and his cronies were kept in power by a combination of white redoubt solidarity in southern Africa, deep divisions among Rhodesian-African tribal groups and guerrilla movements, irresolution in London, inertia and insincerity elsewhere - and a small group of white Rhodesian, South African and British army officers, police, security men and sanctions-busters whose cunning knew no bounds.
As a nasty bush war (20,000 killed) simmered away round the periphery of the country, the capital Salisbury (now Harare), sank into an eerie state of suspended animation. Smith declared that the only important item which sanctions denied him was Marmite; but the shops were communist in their bareness.
But now and again there was a bit of excitement as London put out another feeler, even after the breakdown of the Smith-Wilson talks on HMS Tigerin 1965, on HMS Fearlessin 1968 and Smith's declaration of a republic with a new constitution in March 1970.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, by then Edward Heath's foreign secretary, reached an agreement with Smith in November 1971, which breached the Nibmar principle but was subject to approval of all Rhodesian people. The Africans told the investigating Pearce commission in 1972 that they emphatically rejected it.
The stalemate continued as the world began to close in on the subcontinent. Portugal succumbed to a leftwing revolution in 1974 and conceded independence to Angola and Mozambique the next year. Bloody civil wars ensued. South Africa, under increasing pressure over apartheid, became disenchanted under John Vorster just as the Zimbabwean guerrilla movements, led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, stepped up their attacks inside the country.
Smith therefore bit his lip and signed an accord in March 1978 with three black nationalist leaders with whom he was to share power equally from the end of the year. Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, uneasily united in the Patriotic Front, the UN Security Council and the Organisation of African Unity, all rejected the deal.
Smith turned to Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council, an internal grouping, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was born on June 1st, 1979 - recognised by nobody. Its parliament gave 72 seats to Africans and 28 to whites via separate voting rolls, and Muzorewa became prime minister. In August the new British premier Margaret Thatcher came under intense pressure at the Commonwealth conference in Zambia. She called a new Rhodesian constitutional conference at Lancaster House in London.
Smith, Muzorewa, Mugabe and Nkomo hammered out an agreement over 14 weeks incorporating a ceasefire and majority rule qualified only by a transitional guarantee of 20 white seats in parliament until 1987. Sanctions had at last worked, and a bitter Smith bowed to them, to the increasingly effective guerrillas and to his own total isolation.
Lord Soames went to Salisbury as governor-general of the reconstituted British colony of Southern Rhodesia in December 1979. Elections took place in a tense but euphoric atmosphere in March 1980, followed by independence under prime minister Mugabe.
Smith was born to Scottish immigrant parents at Selukwe (now Shurugwi). He attended Chaplin school at Gwelo (now Gweru) and distinguished himself in rugby, cricket, tennis and athletics, becoming head prefect. He went on to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and graduated with a BComm before joining the RAF in 1941.
He crashed a Hurricane in north Africa, receiving burns to his face and losing his eye, but returned to action in a Spitfire with 237 (Rhodesia) Squadron. Shot down over Italy, he baled out and joined the partisans behind the German lines for five months. Escaping via France, he rejoined the RAF.
He was a founder member of the hardline Rhodesian Front in 1962, acting as its president from 1964 until its dissolution in 1987. He was deputy premier and treasury minister from 1962 until taking over as prime minister in 1964.
To mild general amazement, he did not follow the example of 100,000 of his fellow whites, who fled to South Africa as UDI crumbled. He left parliament when the reserved white seats were abolished and returned to his farm.
As the new Zimbabwe effectively became a one-party state under the gifted but autocratic Mugabe, as terrible droughts undermined the economy and confidence of what was so recently one of the richest and most fertile African countries and as Aids cut a swathe through the population, the old pariah, defiant and bigoted to the last, could not resist saying, with the familiar Smithy whine: "I told you so."
Ian Douglas Smith: Born April 8th 1919; died November 20th 2007.