Rhodesia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rhodesia was an unrecognised state in Southern Africa, and it lasted only fourteen years, from 1965 to 1979. It ran its own parliament, fought a long war and kept selling to the world. Yet almost no government would formally accept it as independent. Even its name was a legal quarrel, because two governments used two different ones for the same territory. A small white minority held power over a far larger black population. How did a breakaway colony hold out against the United Nations and its former ruler? What kind of country did it build while it did? And what replaced it when it finally gave way?

  343545

• 2. Name and Colony

  ›

  Cecil Rhodes gave Rhodesia its name, and the name caused trouble from the start. The constitution adopted alongside the declaration of independence in November 1965 made Rhodesia the official title. British law disagreed. It held that the legal name was Southern Rhodesia, a label dating from 1898, when the British South Africa Company administered the territory. The self-governing colony kept that name after company rule ended in 1923.

  The quarrel began in October 1964, when Northern Rhodesia became independent and renamed itself Zambia. Officials in Salisbury saw no reason to keep the word Southern once no Northern territory remained. They passed legislation to shorten the name. London refused to approve it, because British legislation defined the name and a colonial government could not alter it. Salisbury used the short name officially anyway, while Britain went on writing Southern Rhodesia. Neither side gave way for the whole period of independence.

  In 1922 the electorate of Southern Rhodesia faced a choice. It could join the Union of South Africa as a fifth province, or it could accept nearly full internal autonomy. Voters rejected South African integration. The United Kingdom annexed the territory on the 12th of September 1923, and the first constitution took effect on the 1st of October 1923. It gave the colony its own thirty-member legislature, premier and cabinet. Britain kept a formal veto over measures affecting natives and dominated foreign policy.

  Voting rights carried no racial bar in writing. The franchise for the first Legislative Council election in 1899 required voters to be male British subjects aged 21 or older who could write their address and occupation. They also needed a registered mining claim, property worth 75 pounds, or a salary of 50 pounds a year. Rhodes spoke of "equal rights for all civilised men", and these money and education tests kept most black people off the roll without ever naming race.

  The economy grew at a pace almost unrivalled in sub-Saharan Africa. Deposits of chromium and manganese helped, but the larger advantage was people. Most African colonies lacked technical and managerial skills, and rotating colonial civil servants had little reason to invest locally. Southern Rhodesia solved the problem by importing a skilled workforce through European immigration. In 1951 more than 90 percent of white Southern Rhodesians worked in occupations the British government classed as skilled. That allowed a diversified economy with manufacturing and iron and steel industries, which colonial policy normally discouraged. Capital flowed in rather than out, especially after the Second World War. About 200,000 whites arrived between 1945 and 1970, lifting the white population to 307,000, and many were of British working-class origin.

  In August 1953 Southern Rhodesia merged with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to form the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It was a loose association that put defence and economic direction under a central government. As decolonisation began to look inevitable and black populations pressed for change, the federation was dissolved at the end of December 1963.

  513141721

• 3. Breaking Away

  ›

  Garfield Todd, prime minister from 1953 to 1958, invested in education, housing and healthcare for the black community. Many whites judged his proposed reforms too radical, and the government forced him from office. From 1958 onward, white settler politics hardened around resistance to majority rule. The 1961 Constitution used separate voter rolls with differing property and education qualifications, without regard to race. Even so, whites held 50 of the 66 Assembly seats and black members only 16.

  After the federation ended, British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home set preconditions for independence talks that he called the "five principles". They demanded unimpeded progress to majority rule and assurance against future legislation harmful to black interests. They also called for an "improvement in the political status" of local Africans, an end to official racial discrimination, and a settlement "acceptable to the whole population". Harold Wilson and his incoming Labour government took an even harder line. Britain's policy became no independence before majority rule, often shortened to NIBMR.

  White Rhodesians balked. Many felt they had a right to absolute political control, at least for the time being, despite their small numbers. They were also disturbed by the chaos of post-colonial transitions elsewhere, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One faction accepted gradual inclusion of black Rhodesians in theory, once more of them had reached higher educational and vocational standards. The other faction would not concede even the principle of equality. Both opposed majority rule in the near future.

  In 1964 white dissatisfaction helped oust Winston Field as prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. His successor was Ian Smith, chairman of the conservative Rhodesian Front and the colony's first Rhodesian-born leader. In September 1964 Smith visited Lisbon, where Portuguese prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar promised him "maximum support" if he declared independence. Salazar was still angry that Britain had refused to back Portugal when India annexed Goa in 1961. A Rhodesian Trade Office opened in Lisbon to coordinate breaking anticipated sanctions. London complained that it functioned as a de facto embassy.

  Smith rejected all five principles and implied that Rhodesia was already legally entitled to independence. The predominantly white electorate endorsed that claim in a referendum. Wilson warned that a unilateral declaration would be treasonous, but he ruled out force against English "kith and kin". That refusal encouraged Smith further. On the 12th of October 1965 the United Nations General Assembly called on Wilson to use all means, including military force, to prevent a declaration. Last-minute talks failed, and on the 11th of November 1965 the Rhodesian cabinet issued its unilateral declaration of independence. London denounced it as an "act of rebellion against the Crown", and Wilson promised the action would be short-lived.

  Britain had few options. Southern Rhodesia had long financed and developed its own security forces and command structure. Wilson remarked that ending Rhodesian independence "would not be a case of arresting a subversive individual. It would mean a bloody war, and probably a bloody war turning into a bloody civil war." British leaders also feared that South Africa would intervene on Rhodesia's side.

  The new state at first kept its loyalty to Queen Elizabeth II, whom it called Queen of Rhodesia. When Smith and Deputy Prime Minister Clifford Dupont told the Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, of the declaration, he condemned it as treason. After Smith announced it on the radio, Gibbs dismissed Smith and the whole cabinet on orders from the Colonial Office. The ministers simply ignored him. The Queen would not even consider Smith's advice to name Dupont Governor-General. Most of the international community still treated Gibbs as the only lawful authority in the country, and he stayed in Government House in Salisbury until 1970.

  3442505758

• 4. Sanctions and Evasion

  ›

  United Nations Security Council resolution 216 called on every state to deny recognition and assistance to the breakaway government. UN officials branded it an "illegal racist minority regime" and asked members to cut economic ties voluntarily, recommending sanctions on petroleum products and military hardware. In December 1966 the UN made the measures mandatory. Member states were explicitly barred from buying Rhodesian tobacco, chromium, copper, asbestos, sugar and beef.

  Britain, already running extensive sanctions of its own, sent a Royal Navy squadron to the port of Beira in Mozambique. A strategic pipeline ran from Beira to Umtali in Rhodesia. The ships were ordered to deter, "by force, if necessary, vessels reasonably believed to be carrying oil destined for (Southern) Rhodesia".

  The embargo leaked badly. Switzerland and West Germany were not UN members, and both traded openly with Rhodesia. West Germany stayed the Smith government's largest Western European trading partner until 1973, when it joined the UN. Japan took more Rhodesian exports than any other country outside Africa, and Iran supplied oil in violation of the embargo. Portugal passed Rhodesian goods through Mozambique with false certificates of origin. South Africa refused to observe the sanctions at all.

  Trade was not recognition. In 1970 the United States declared it would not recognise the declaration "under any circumstances". South Africa and Portugal, Rhodesia's largest trading partners, also withheld recognition. They opened no embassies in Salisbury and worked through "accredited representatives". That let both governments claim to respect British sovereignty while accepting the practical authority of the Smith administration.

  Inside the country, sanctions changed the economy. Before independence, Rhodesian exports were competitive and had enjoyed preferential treatment on the British market, so there was little urgency to diversify. After the declaration, the Rhodesian Front introduced incentives for domestic production, and industrial output expanded dramatically. A rigid system of countermeasures blunted the impact of sanctions for at least a decade. Over nine years, Rhodesian companies set up local and foreign subsidiaries that fed a clandestine trade network, despite frozen assets and blocked overseas accounts.

  In 1971 the United States passed the Byrd Amendment, which allowed American firms to go on importing Rhodesian chromium and nickel products as normal.

  5256537870

• 5. Republic and Failed Deals

  ›

  A 2005 conference at the London School of Economics concluded that the declaration grew out of an existing racial conflict, complicated by Cold War intrigues. Critics said Smith meant to protect the privileges of an entrenched colonial ruling class at the expense of an impoverished black population. Smith replied that the black majority was too inexperienced to take part in administering what was, by African standards of the time, a reasonably industrialised state. White Rhodesians, mostly British immigrants or of British descent, came away more suspicious of London than before.

  In September 1968 the Appellate Division of the High Court of Rhodesia ruled that Smith's administration was the de jure government, not merely the de facto one. Chief Justice Sir Hugh Beadle leaned on the writings of Hugo Grotius, who argued that a nation could not rightly claim to govern a territory while waging war against it. Beadle held that Britain's economic war against Rhodesia meant she could not also be described as governing it. The ruling set the precedent that the Smith government "could lawfully do anything its predecessors could lawfully have done".

  A Salisbury commission chaired by the lawyer W.R. Waley began studying constitutional options in April 1968. It found that "Europeans must surrender any belief in permanent European domination", because minority rule could not last forever. Waley also testified that majority rule was not desirable immediately.

  Talks with Britain aboard Royal Navy vessels in December 1966 and again in October 1968 both failed. Wilson did add a sixth principle to his five: "it would be necessary to ensure that, regardless of race, there was no oppression of the majority by the minority or of any minority by the majority." Rhodesian resolve stiffened, and the most radical members of the Rhodesian Front called for a republican constitution.

  A two-proposition referendum in 1969 approved severing all remaining ties to the British Crown by 61,130 votes to 14,327. Rhodesia declared itself a republic on the 2nd of March 1970. A ceremonial president became head of state, and a new Parliament had a directly elected House of Assembly and an indirectly elected Senate. The arrangement effectively reserved most seats for whites. Some in the government hoped in vain that a republic would finally win recognition abroad.

  Dialogue with London then went silent from 1968 until 1970. Edward Heath's election reopened it, with Douglas-Home now foreign secretary. In November 1971 he announced a proposed agreement that accepted Rhodesia's 1969 constitution as the legal frame of government. It promised gradual legislative representation on the road to majority rule, an immediate improvement in black political status, and a guarantee against retrogressive amendments. The Rhodesian government refused to put it to a universal referendum.

  Instead a twenty four-member commission under the jurist Lord Pearce began sampling opinion in 1972, though it noted widespread apathy. Whites favoured the settlement, and Rhodesians of Coloured or Asian ancestry were generally pleased. The black response was resoundingly negative, and as many as thirty black chiefs and politicians voiced opposition. Britain withdrew from the proposals on the strength of that report.

  5966347631

• 6. Guerrillas Take Aim

  ›

  Between January and September 1962, nationalists detonated 33 bombs and were implicated in 28 acts of arson and 27 acts of sabotage against communications infrastructure. Armed politics had begun well before independence. As early as 1960, nationalists such as Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole were leading a rising tide of political violence. The Zimbabwe Review observed in 1961 that "for the first time home-made petrol bombs were used by freedom fighters in Salisbury against settler establishments."

  In 1962 Nkomo's party, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, or ZAPU, announced a military wing, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA. That July Nkomo went to Moscow and asked for money and weapons, explaining that "ZAPU needs arms, explosives, revolvers". The Soviets agreed to supply limited funds from 1963 and began training ZIPRA militants in guerrilla warfare in early 1964. The Rhodesian government banned ZAPU and passed security laws restricting assembly. For the first time it introduced the death sentence for politically inspired terrorism involving arson or explosives.

  Smith preferred to call the insurgents "gangsters". Soviet weapons and training let white Rhodesians frame the struggle as a communist plot rather than a domestic political movement. Many saw themselves as defenders of the Christian heritage of their pioneer ancestors, appealing to "Western civilisation" against both communism and Western decadence. A United States intelligence dossier found that many southern African whites held the same view of the unrest across the continent.

  ZAPU split between 1962 and 1963. Dissidents who rejected Nkomo's authority formed the Zimbabwe African National Union, or ZANU, with Sithole as president and Robert Mugabe as general secretary. The government banned it in August 1964, citing widespread violent intimidation by its members. ZANU recruited almost solely from Shona-speaking peoples, with its base among the rural peasantry in Mashonaland. ZAPU recruited predominantly from the Ndebele after the split. Ostracised by the Soviet bloc because of ZAPU's Moscow ties, ZANU found an ally in the People's Republic of China. Its ideology leaned more toward Maoism, and after the declaration it formed its own military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or ZANLA.

  The two armies disagreed about method. ZIPRA followed Soviet thinking and wanted sophisticated weapons, hoping to win a conventional battle like the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. ZANLA stressed politicising local people and fighting an irregular war. One ZANU official declared that the declaration of independence "has set a collision course that cannot be altered". Yet it was years before the nationalists made armed struggle their primary strategy, and early violence aimed mainly at provoking outside intervention.

  In early April 1966 two groups of ZANLA insurgents, trained at a Chinese military facility in Nanjing, crossed into Rhodesia from Zambia. They carried vague orders to sabotage installations and kill white farmers. Five were arrested almost at once. Seven others planned to destroy an electric pylon near Sinoia, but their charges failed to detonate. Security forces tracked them to a ranch on the 28th of April and killed all seven in a brief firefight. This is considered the first engagement of the Bush War, and supporters of the guerrillas commemorate it as "Chimurenga Day".

  In August 1967 almost seventy ZIPRA insurgents entered from Zambia, reinforced by recruits from the South African organisation uMkhonto we Sizwe. They had cultivated no local contacts, and villagers informed on them immediately. Within the month, Operation Nickel killed forty-seven, captured twenty and drove the survivors into Botswana. A column of over a hundred was annihilated in early 1968, and a third attempt in July 1969 fared as badly. ZANLA drew its own lesson from the failures and began a long-term covert programme to win civilian support in its future area of operations.

  8384478929

• 7. Manpower, Money and Poison

  ›

  By December 1972 ZANLA had cached arms and built a vast underground network of informants in northeastern Rhodesia. The Mozambican War of Independence was eroding Portuguese authority along the border, which gave ZANLA external sanctuaries and a growing alliance with FRELIMO, the leading nationalist movement in Mozambique. On the 21st of December 1972 a group led by Rex Nhongo crossed from Mozambique and raided an isolated commercial farm. Raids on white farmers across the northeastern districts followed. Rhodesian forces began coordinating with the Portuguese Army to catch insurgents before they crossed the border.

  Rhodesia, South Africa and Portugal began routinely sharing information under the Alcora Exercise. South African Lieutenant General Alan Fraser wrote in 1970 that "there can be no doubt in any of our minds that we have a common enemy". Portugal, depleted by a decade of war, could offer little decisive help. Rhodesia expected far more from South Africa.

  Until 1972, containing the guerrillas had been little more than a police action. By 1976 guerrillas were attacking roads, railways, economic targets and isolated security posts deep inside the country. The government copied a policy used in Malaya and Vietnam and forced rural people into protected villages. Guerrillas compared them to concentration camps, and some contemporary accounts say the policy turned neutral residents toward the insurgents. Mike Subritzky, a former New Zealand Army ceasefire monitor, said in 1980 that the war was "both bloody and brutal and brought out the very worst in the opposing combatants on all three sides."

  Manpower was the state's constant weakness. Of 3,000 white men liable for conscription in 1973, only about 1,000 reported. In February 1978 the army said it needed at least 1,041 men, and only 570 of those called up reported. The rest moved to South Africa. Emigration rose as call-ups rose, creating a vicious circle. A 1975 law banned citizens from holding foreign currency to slow the exodus, but it was widely flouted. Both ZANU and ZAPU estimated that each white civilian killed prompted about 20 others to leave, and they attacked anything of economic value to force more call-ups.

  White men aged eighteen to twenty-three owed four and a half months of national service, later extended to nine months, followed by three years in reserve. By 1974 intakes had doubled. By 1978 the army had about 14,000 white national servicemen, and service was extended to white men up to sixty. For much of its life Rhodesia kept a standing army of just 3,400 troops, about a third of them black volunteers. By 1978-1979 up to 70 percent of the regular army was black, including 30 commissioned officers. At the end the army had swelled to about 20,000 and the British South Africa Police to over 40,000 including reservists.

  Spending followed the war. Defence took R$30 million, or 8.5 percent of the national budget, in 1971-72. By 1978-79 it took R$400 million, or 47 percent. Special forces carried out raids such as Operation Dingo in 1977. In 1979 some units were accused of using counterinsurgency operations as cover for ivory poaching. Colonel Reid-Daly of the Selous Scouts found his phone bugged, challenged a superior and was court martialled. He received a caution, the lightest sentence possible, and later resigned his commission.

  From 1975 to 1980 the government also tried to weaponise chemical and biological agents. Security forces contaminated supplies before returning them to guerrilla caches and poisoned water sources along infiltration routes. The chemicals most used were parathion, an organophosphate insecticide, and thallium, a heavy metal found in rodent poison. Cholera had some effect on ZANLA's fighting capability. Some former officers alleged that anthrax was used in the late 1970s, a claim that is disputed. Anthrax, ricin and botulinum toxin were favoured for attempts to assassinate prominent guerrilla commanders.

  8990889199

• 8. Collapse and Zimbabwe

  ›

  In August 1975 Rhodesian and nationalist leaders met at Victoria Falls in talks brokered by South Africa and Zambia. They never got beyond procedure, and Rhodesian representatives made clear they would fight an all-out war to prevent majority rule. Then Portuguese rule in Mozambique ended in 1975. Rhodesia found itself nearly surrounded by hostile states, and Zambia and Botswana allowed resistance bases on their territory. South Africa's John Vorster concluded that white rule was unsustainable in a country where black people outnumbered white people 22:1. In 1976 the population included 270,000 white Rhodesians and six million black Africans. Business groups such as Lonrho shifted their support to the nationalist parties.

  South Africa limited the fuel and munitions it supplied and withdrew personnel and equipment, though covert military support continued. In 1976, prompted by United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Smith accepted the principle of black majority rule within two years. Smith later wrote in his memoirs that Vorster's policy of détente left Rhodesia as the "sacrificial lamb" to buy South Africa more time.

  By the late 1970s the government had stopped trying to defend the borders and concentrated on key economic areas and supply lines to South Africa. The rest of the countryside became a patchwork of "no-go areas". Smith had dismissed his hard-line Defence Minister, P. K. van der Byl, as early as 1976. Van der Byl argued, "it is better to fight to the last man and the last cartridge and die with some honour."

  The year 1978 brought blow after blow. On the 20th of April ZANLA fighters killed Lord Richard Cecil, an ITN journalist whose reports had stiffened Rhodesian morale, while he accompanied an airborne unit. On the 3rd of September ZIPRA fighters shot down the civilian airliner Hunyani, a Vickers Viscount, with a surface-to-air missile. Ten of its 18 survivors were then massacred. The attack is widely considered the event that destroyed the Rhodesians' will to continue. In December a ZANLA unit fired rockets into the main oil depot on the edge of Salisbury, and the tanks burned for five days. The smoke could be seen 80 miles away.

  An Internal Settlement signed on the 3rd of March 1978 brought moderate nationalists into government. April 1979 elections were won by Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council, and on the 1st of June 1979 he became the first black prime minister. The country was renamed Zimbabwe Rhodesia. The settlement left police, security forces, civil service and judiciary in white hands and assured whites 28 of 100 parliamentary seats. ZANU and ZAPU refused to take part. The United States Senate voted to end sanctions on the 12th of June, but no other nation recognised the government, and the war went on. That April, special forces raided Nkomo's residence in Lusaka, but he had been warned and left hours earlier.

  Britain, under the recently elected Margaret Thatcher, invited all parties to a peace conference at Lancaster House in London in late 1979. The three-month conference nearly collapsed over land reform but produced the Lancaster House Agreement. The declaration of independence ended, and the territory reverted to a British colony under Lord Soames, who held full legislative and executive powers as governor. A ceasefire and an internationally supervised election in February 1980 followed. Robert Mugabe's ZANU won, and some alleged intimidation by former insurgents who had left the assembly points. The Rhodesian military seriously considered a coup, called Operation Quartz, including Mugabe's assassination. It was scuttled because Mugabe plainly had widespread support and the coup would have had no external backing.

  On the 18th of April 1980 the country became independent within the Commonwealth as the Republic of Zimbabwe. It inherited a national debt of US$500 million. Salisbury was renamed Harare two years later. The Lancaster House constitution reserved 20 of 100 House of Assembly seats and 8 of 40 Senate seats for whites. The government amended it in 1987 to abolish the white seats and in 1990 abolished the Senate.

  9693863138