Ian Smith's Last Stand

...Thus Whitehall has openly welcomed Mozambique's recent closing of its 800-mile border with Rhodesia, offering President Samora Machel up to $30 million in compensation for any financial losses his country might suffer by denying the Smith regime access to the Indian Ocean ports of Beira and Maputo...

...This will strain the economy further, make the land-locked country reliant on non-South African ports, and encourage political instability...

...The country was named after Cecil Rhodes, an opportunistic scoundrel who was disowned by his clergyman father and became a millionaire through exploitation...

...General "Jock" Anderson, the commander of Rhodesia's 3,000-man Army, told this reporter at the time that if a detachment of British soldiers or police arrived, they would not be resisted and the revolt would be over...

...Smith, after all, is still in Salisbury and Rhodesia is far from achieving a peaceful transition to black rule...

...Nkomo, a jovial Matabele in his '60s whose political model is Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, appears to be profiting from his position as the only major leader left in Salisbury...

...But the attempt by two British noncoms of the Indian Army to establish themselves as monarchs in the region beyond the Khyber Pass ends in disaster after a brief time of euphoric triumph...

...Britain stands substantially to the Left of where it was in 1965, making it possible for Wilson's present Labor government to consider the settlers expendable...

...He, in turn, was ousted by his far-Right party's extremist wing, led by Smith...

...A small Commonwealth force will have to be imported...

...So is Bishop Muzorewa, his initial official approval notwithstanding...

...Rhodesia is about to dump its set of rascals...

...The greatest single problem will be producing a black political leadership from what has thus far been an undistinguished and quarrelsome nationalistic movement...

...If Salisbury has yet to learn that the clock can no longer be stopped, let alone turned back, Pretoria did persuade it to release political prisoners, and to release them again when they were rearrested...

...Chinamano has been loyal to Nkomo throughout and was in prison with him??as was his forceful wife, at terrible cost to their four school-age children...

...urban guerrilla activity in Salisbury and Rhodesia's second city, Bulawayo, where the white population is predominately South African...

...With the tobacco industry in ruins, copper prices down by 40 per cent and white investment fleeing, an independent Zimbabwe will face the immediate threat of increased recession, inflation and unemployment...

...But before long Zimbabwe, like its neighbors, will be obliged to become a sanctuary for the impending guerrilla revolt in South Africa itself...

...The U.S., incidentally, has hardly been helpful where the economic boycott is concerned...

...One man clearly expecting a role in a representatively governed Zimbabwe is Garfield Todd, a New Zealand-born missionary who was the colony's most liberal prime minister and has been under house arrest for several years...

...But that may be looking too far into the future...

...In part, at least, this is thought to explain Pretoria's relatively conciliatory role, and its desire to absorb as many as possible of the 270,000 ruling whites facing retaliation from Rhodesia's more than 6 million blacks...

...No one, though, backed the move more ardently than settler Ian Smith and his friends in the far-Right Rhodesian Front...

...The best course for the United States in the area at the moment, therefore, would seem to be to help Zimbabwe establish itself no less generously than the Russians and Chinese can be expected to do...

...An exuberant 300-pound Polish-South African train driver, amateur boxing champion and redneck union leader, as well as a natural politician, Welensky charmed the British into setting up the federation, investing in it, and eventually allowing him to lead it toward representative government at a snail's pace...

...But out of desperation and fear, whoever is sitting in Salisbury??Smith or a successor??will probably ask Britain for a strong, governor-type minister, as in Northern Ireland...

...Few of Salisbury's white politicians ever went to college...

...If Rhodesia is true to pattern, many whites who had opposed African advancement will become instant liberals in the hope of winning senior posts under African rule...

...In addition, about 17,000 Zimbabwean guerrillas are massed in western Mozambique...

...The man who would be the tri-state unit's second Prime Minister, Northern Rhodesia's Sir Roy Welensky, was largely responsible for the linking...

...The one hope for a less violent resolution of the Rhodesia problem would require Portugal and South Africa to follow Mozambique's example and fully implement the economic sanctions against the colony voted in 1966 by the UN...

...Wilson's hesitancy enabled the Smith regime to successfully defy the world for a decade, and Nkomo's naive approval of secession resulted in his spending those years in a concentration camp near the Mozambique border...

...As those familiar with the original or its current film version know, the story immortalizes the dream of sergeants in the imperial raj for a colony of their own...

...Smith's Cabinet even agreed to allow the formation of a moderate party under Bishop Abel Muzorewa...

...And his support of the breakup, despite the fact that white authority in the colony would be absolute, was decisive for Britain...

...Frustrated revolution induces friction and until now Rhodesia certainly has not encouraged blacks to show their prowess...

...But the degree of ease with which a passle of sergeants managed to divide and rule the country's two tribes??the industrious Mashona around Salisbury, and the once warrior-like Matabele around Bulawayo??must be taken into account in a realistic assessment of native power...

...Britain's Colonial Office clerks, no doubt with Kipling in mind, used to refer to Kenya as the Officers' Club and Rhodesia as the Sergeants' Mess...

...They got it within a decade when first Nyasaland (1963) and then Northern Rhodesia (1964) was granted independence, as Malawi and Zambia...

...Thanks to an amendment slipped through Congress in 1971 by specialty steel lobbyists and Southern segregationists, it has partially reversed its adherence to the UN call by importing Rhodesian chrome and other ores...

...Whatever the case, Prime Minister John Vorster clearly recognized that South Africa could not ignore the prospect of independence in bordering Portuguese Africa, and that no government stood to lose as much from the April 1974 revolution in Portugal as the Smith regime...

...Talented and selfless white support will be as difficult to find as effective and widely supported black leadership...

...At present Sithole, a Mashona and relative hardliner who spent years in prison for allegedly plotting to assassinate Smith, is in exile in Zambia...

...Especially since Pretoria controls Salisbury's last rail link with the outside world, it would appear to hold the ultimate weapon for bringing Smith around to some compromise before the blood begins to flow...

...The Rhodesian leader has thoughtfully bought himself a farm in South Africa's Cape region, though, and when the heat becomes too intense he will probably retreat, resign and retire...

...Trained by Chinese as part of Peking's effort to counter the influence of Moscow and Havana in the area, they have nevertheless been buoyed by the success of Communist forces in Angola...

...Meanwhile, guerrillas from two banned parties, Nkomo's African Peoples Union and the Reverend Ndabaninghi Sithole's Zimbabwe African National Union, have stepped up their activities against white farmers...

...So, mistakenly, did the moderate Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) African leader, Joshua Nkomo...

...Malawi's Prime Minister Hastings Bauda and Zambia's Prime Minister Kenneth Kaunda naturally favored dismantling the federation to insure more rapid independence for their own countries...

...Some Russians and Cubans are in Mozambique, too, and may be concentrating on organizing a neglected feature of the campaign...

...But it would be as difficult for Smith and his friends to accede to Britain's demand for "one man, one vote" within 12 months as it once was for George Wallace not to stand in the school-house door...

...South Africa's proximity will ease the exodus of all the other whites and prevent more than a handful from becoming a burden on Britain's wilting economy...

...It wasn't long before he had his revenge...

...All African leaders, including Nkomo, were jailed at once...

...The tendency has been to write this off as typical Sergeants' Mess hard-headedness...

...externally, he began leaning on Rhodesia to face reality...

...Similarly, once guerrilla actions reach the point where whites generally begin to realize that their position is far more precarious than they might have gathered from the censored press, most can be expected to flee to South Africa for safety...

...Internally, he started making cosmetic concessions to blacks and initiated major changes in his own foreign policy...

...The first reaction will probably be to take as much aid from South Africa as it is willing to give...

...But even this was too fast for extremist white settlers, who wanted a place where they could retain complete control...

...In the end, the inevitable transfer of power in Rhodesia will probably be achieved under a British umbrella...

...During the last year all this has been changing rather rapidly...

...Traditionally, the Crown's representatives in colonial Rhodesia have had relatively little power: The settlers were granted self-government in the '20s in return for choosing British, rather than South African rule in a referendum...

...Others who can be expected to play important roles are Nathan Shamuyarira and Josiah Chinamano, both Mashona...

...And President Ford has strongly criticized Mozambique's blockade, contrary to official State Department policy??a sure source of embarrassment to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on his visit next month to black-ruled southern Africa...

...Chinamano has substantial entrepreneurial skills and was once the principal of the British colony's largest private school (for African children only...

...Smith has refused, however, to negotiate seriously with the Africans...

...He probably hopes to achieve power quickly, secure safe conduct for his rivals, then invite them to join in his government...

...With the dismemberment Rhodesia's Prime Minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead, lost an election and was replaced by the Front's leader, Winston Field...

...The colony, formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, was joined in 1953 with the African-dominated British protectorates of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia...

...Its immediate tasks will be the maintenance of law and order, the Africanization of middle-echelon jobs in government and the private sector, and persuading enough entrepreneurial, professional and senior administrative whites to stay on to rescue the economy from disaster...

...But Prime Minister Harold Wilson, having a bare three-vote majority in the House of Commons, was unprepared to risk even minor settler rioting that could cost Labor the support of British voters with relatives in Rhodesia...

...On November 11, 1965??Britain's equivalent of Veteran's Day??the disgruntled ex-airman announced his rebellion against the Crown, concluding his television address with a chuckling sneer: "An' Gawd save the Queen...

...Shamuyarira, a former managing editor of the banned daily newspaper for Africans in Salisbury, belonged to Sithole's party but has broken away in exile to form a new group, including defectors from Nkomo...

...Now, like the fictional kingdom, the whole anachronism is collapsing...

...But Todd's record is uneven and his abilities are slight...

...son of a small-town butcher and a past chief whip in Welensky's party, had entered politics some years earlier to settle a grievance ??the rejection of his World War II medical pension claim against the British Royal Air Force...

...Smith, the Russell Warren Howe, a past contributor to this magazine, writes frequently on African affairs...