The truth about Rhodesia - a warning to liberals of the AABC countries

Rhodesia’s story isn't what you've been told! Today, it's barely mentioned at all. You would be hard-pressed to find, in the AABC countries (America, Australia, Britain and Canada), anyone under the age of 60 who could tell you what or where Rhodesia was. 

For 15 years (1965-1980), the world poured its energy into erasing Rhodesia from the map. But once it was gone, silence! Zimbabwe, like so many "decolonised" African nations, soon collapsed into chaos. Under Comrade Robert Mugabe, the dictator who ruled from independence in 1980 until he was deposted in a coup in 2017, and his successor Emmerson "E.D." Mnangagwa, the country was brought to ruin. Watch this video and ask whether the Rhodesians were really the villains history says they were, and what happens if people of that stripe come to power. FAFO!

Walt first visited Rhodesia, as it then was, some 57 years ago. As the narrator of this video says, the handwriting was on the wall, even then. When I returned to live in Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia had been renamed) in the 1990s, there were still many Africans (as black people like to be called) who said that things were better in the days of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. 

After independence, Zimbabwe quickly became a basket case, destroyed by the corruption, ignorance and incompetence of the Marxist government of Comrade Mugabe. One of Walt's agents, who left the sinking ship at about the same time, and now resides in the Disunited Kingdom, returned in January to attend to some legal matters. She reports that things have not got any better in the quarter-century since we left. It is not wrong, she says, to regard Zimbabwe as a failed state, which has hit bottom and can never rise again. What a pity.

VIDEO: Wm. F. Buckley talks with Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Regular readers of WWW will know that I have an abiding interest in Zimbabwe, a dictatorship in southern Africa which went from being the second-most prosperous on the Dark Continent to what Still-President Trump would now call a "shithole".

I lived and worked in Zimbabwe in the 90s, and could see the handwriting on the wall after the former Big Man, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, decided to pay all his "war veterans" gratuities of Z$50,000 each after they had staged a series of protests, claiming that they had not received the "benefits" of their revolt against the "white settler regime", viz: white cars, white houses and white women.

The unbudgeted payouts saw the Zimbabwe dollar lose its value by 70% in one day -- I remember it well -- and analysts say the move signalled Zimbabwe's well-documented economic collapse. Banknotes were issued in denominations of billions and even trillions of dollars and were literally not worth the paper they were printed on.

The Mugabe government abandoned the "Zimkwacha" because of hyperinflation in 2009 -- 1 US dollar was worth around Z$35 quadrillion at the time -- and started using American dollars and South African rand. 

But I digress. I was about to tell you that when I first went to Africa, there was no Zimbabwe. The country was then known as Rhodesia, a former British colony which declared its independence from No-longer-great Britain on 11 November 1965. I went there about four years later, over five years before William F. Buckley Jr. went there to record this interview with Prime Minister Ian Smith. 

I went to Rhodesia on a fact-finding mission, to see for myself whether the Africans (by which was meant "blacks") were so badly off under white minority rule as was argued by the "progressives" at the United Nations, the World Council of Churches and elsewhere. I concluded that it would be a mistake -- detrimental to the well-being of the Africans -- to overthrow the "white settler government" and impose "majority rule". But it was clear even then, in 1969, that the mistake was going to be made, in the name of "freedom and equality, yada yada yada. The mistake was made, and the result is the shithole that is Zimbabwe today. 

In this interview, recorded in April of 1974, Ian Smith makes the case for the continuation of minority rule until the majority population should be ready to govern themselves. Mr Smith was right, but of course that doesn't matter now, does it. 

One thing to note, at about the 38-minute mark, is that Mr Smith asserts that the black revolutionaries were financed and trained by Communist China. Of course today's China would never do that kind of thing.

Further viewing: Thames Television documentary visit to Rhodesia, June 1975. Includes interview with Ian Smith.  

Hundreds of Zimbos* fall for joke employment offer

Assiduous readers will know that Walt spent some years, before the turn of the century, knocking around Zimbabwe (the Rhodesia that was), watching a state becoming a failed state, before my very eyes. Almost everyone I knew there has since departed the country, or departed this life entirely So, to keep up with the news from the Dark Continent, I rely on my old chum, Dr CZ, who writes the second part of "Cabinet Files" in the Financial Gazette, every Thursday. It is Dr CZ who calls his compatriots "Zimbos", *meaning "Zimbabweans", nothing more or less.

In last week's column, Dr CZ invited Zimbos interested in assisting him in carrying out a strategic survey that he was planning to undertake to contact him as a matter of urgency. Here is the notice which appeared at the end of the column.

"This is very urgent. Dr CZ is looking for six Zimbos out there who are willing to help him with some strategic research that he will be conducting in the next few days. It is a three-day contract. Over and above being provided with transport, accommodation and meals, the assistants — who should be holders of at least any tertiary qualification — will each be paid an allowance of US$800 per day. The contract days are from the 29 to 31 of this month. Anyone interested should urgently e-mail their name and contact number to the e-mail below. The offer is strictly on a first-come-first-served basis."

The column appeared on February 23rd, and readers will note that the contract on offer was to run "from the 29 to 31 of this month". The joke should have been obvious to anyone who learned "30 days hath September...", but it seems post-colonial Zimbabwean education does not include any reference to that little saying. This week, Dr CZ reports on the aftermath, as follows...

"Although Dr CZ had just asked for those interested to submit their names and contact numbers for the piece of work that was to take place between February 29 and 31, as late as at the time of going to print this March, desperate emails were still trickling into his mail-box… most of them accompanied with bulky CVs and several phone numbers and dozens of the applicants are holders of several post graduate degrees. It was one of Dr CZ’s many asinine pranks that many of his fans took seriously. What was intended to start and end as just harmless mischief has turned out to be a real survey. The results of the survey show what happens when people become hopelessly desperate.

"If the applicants were mere village yokels who could hardly tell their left from right, one would have assumed that none of them knew that the dates on which the survey was supposed to take place do not exist on this side of the rainbow yet, but these are very educated men and women whose basic commonsensical reasoning has since been evaporated by the dire personal situations they find themselves in.

"Most of these people could be fathers and mothers, whom entire clans look upon. Yet they cannot do anything about their situation. This explains why seemingly normal people end up doing things that people in normal situations would not think possible. This perpetuates the abnormality that this country is increasingly getting known to be. This is the sad reality of the situation that this country has deteriorated to… never mind what officialdom says."

Quite right. 37 years after the perfidious British sold out Ian Smith's "white settler regime" to the darker-complected Africans, Zimbabwe has become a basket case... with the bottom now on the verge of falling out of the basket. With every passing day, Zimbabwe gets worse and worse. The Dark Continent gets ever darker.

Further reading: "Mugabe's corpse could win next Zimbabwe election, widow-to-be says", WWW 18/2/17.

Zimbabweans wishing to run whites back INTO town?

Tomorrow will mark the 34th anniversary of Zimbabwe's deliverance from the rule of the "white settlers". At the time when the reins of government -- and the keys to the bank vault and printing presses -- were handed over to Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Rhodesia (as it then was) enjoyed a standard of living second in southern Africa only to that of South Africa.

Rhodesia was a net exporter of food, the infrastructure (including a railway and an airline) worked, life expectancy was rising and it took two American dollars to buy a Rhodesian dollar. Now, having been looted six ways from Sunday by Mugabe's kleptocracy, Zimbabwe is an economic basket case. Millions of Zimbabweans are dying, not just from HIV/AIDS but from hunger. 1/12th of its citizens, including all but a handful of whites, are living overseas.

Celebrations of independence and "majority rule" will thus be a little muted. Some older people even dare to suggest that perhaps things were better in the days when the country was run by people who knew how, even if those people were, errr, a whiter shade of pale. Here are some thoughts along those lines from Walt's old friend CZ, writing in this week's Financial Gazette.

Patriotic as Dr CZ would love to be seen to be, if he is going to be allowed the freedom to be honest, he would confess that he is divided as to which event to celebrate tomorrow… that is if he has an option to choose between independence and Easter Friday.

There are, however, many reasons CZ would rather celebrate Easter than independence because independence is there, yes, but a lot of things are quite amiss… so amiss as to tempt some like Yours Truly to think Ian Smith could have been right after all when he told the then newly-sworn in Prime Minister Robert Mugabe at his new official residence in 1980 that the success of the new nation depended largely on the size of the white component of the population that new government was able to retain.

What the political hooligan called Smith was simply doing was wantonly casting aspersions at the leadership qualities of black people, which naturally was an insult to any patriot. Sadly, Dr CZ now feels that the collective behaviour of many of our leaders over the years — be they political, business, religious et al — seem to be totally divorced from anything remotely suggestive of even a fleeting hint towards debunking this “stereotypical nonsense”. Dr CZ regrets it if he has failed to properly articulate his point as to sound racist!

Blaming the white settlers for the plight of black Africa

In yesterday's post about the correlation between race and poverty -- the poorest countries on earth being overwhelmingly in black (sub-Saharan) Africa -- I anticipated the hoary left liberal argument that it's all the fault of the colonists.

Here's what the revisionist historians and lamestream media keep telling us.
The British, French and others took all the resources and left nothing behind.
They drew "national boundaries" without regard to linguistic, cultural and, errr, tribal differences.
They imposed on Africa systems of social organization and government which are "unsuitable" to Africans. Like democracy.

Let me just relate my own personal observations of southern Africa.

I first visited Zimbabwe in the days when it was still Rhodesia. The status of the country, in 1968-9 when I was there, was disputed. Its white government  -- called "the white settler regime" by the Western (and Communist) media -- declared independence from Britain on 11 November 1965. We can run our own affairs, they told the Brits. There was a precedent for this course of action, set back in... wait for it... 1776, by a country which has gone on to achieve considerable stature in the world.

Why would the rest of the world not recognize Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence? The problem was race. Of course. The founding fathers of the USA were white. And they kept black slaves, or at least some of them did. But the white folks were in the majority of the Thirteen Colonies, so everything was OK, except perhaps with George III and Lord North.

The government of Ian Smith  was similarly composed of white men. They (or their families) came to their country from Britain and did what they could to develop the land and the people they found there. Unlike Washington and Jefferson, though, they did not keep slaves.

Unfortunately for the white Rhodesians, they comprised only about 1% of the population at the time of UDI. Thus the Smith government was inevitably and always referred to as "the white minority regime".

"Africa for Africans" was the slogan shouted incessantly following Harold Macmillan's "Winds of Change" speech, which signalled Britain's loss of will to govern its colonies. "We're tired," said the Brits. "Let the Africans look after themselves."

What was wrong with "Africa for Africans"? The "white tribes" of Rhodesia and South Africa were quick to point out that they were Africans too -- not just by adoption or settlement, but by birth, with family histories in Africa going back in some cases to the 17th century.

So, the liberals and those bent on the destruction of the West changed the party line to "Africa for the real Africans", meaning the blacks. Well, OK, coloureds too. And maybe Asians. Everyone except the honkies.

Rhodesia was the second-last of the white dominoes to fall. The Portuguese  gave up on Moçambique and Angola in the 70s. South Africa finally succumbed to "majority rule" in 1994. The British betrayed their kith and kin and Rhodesia, effectively selling out to Comrade Robert Mugabe and his terrorist buddies in 1980.

When I visited Rhodesia in 1968-9, there was a small but healthy economy, growing in spite of illegal international sanctions. The country was more than self-sufficient in food, a net exporter to the rest of the continent. The Rhodesian dollar was worth around two US dollars. The major cities (Salisbury, Bulawayo and Umtali) had electricity and clean water, and were connected by well-maintained paved highways. There was a small but reliable airline. Schools and hospitals provided all Rhodesians -- black and white -- with education and health care unmatched in any of the "black countries" to the north.

All this -- the thriving economy, the modern infrastructure, the lot -- was the work of the "evil white settlers". This was the legacy the "racist colonialists" handed over to Mugabe and his henchmen.

By the time I returned to Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia was renamed, in 1992, the capital city (now called "Harare") was in a state of decay. It has got worse still in the 20 years since. You can't drink the water now. Electricity is intermittent. Air Zimbabwe exists only to fly Comrade Bob to hospitals and shopping malls in other parts of the world. The roads are crumbling. Traffic lights have been stolen for the scrap value of the metal frames.

Hospitals are short-staffed and virtually without equipment or even medicines. The educational system is a shambles. The economy, which all but collapsed with the Zimbabwe dollar, is actually shrinking, and has never matched its pre-independence levels. And as land seized from white farmers lies idle, hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are starving.

Who is responsible for the plight of today's Zimbabwe? The government has been in the hands of "the majority" -- actually a "majority" of just one man -- for nearly 33 years. A perusal of The Economist's Pocket World in Figures reveals the country as a basket case. It is going back to bush, and that's a fact! It's also a fact that it wasn't the "evil white settlers" -- most of whom are gone now -- who built the basket.

Zimbabwe's wounds are, like those of the rest of Africa, self-inflicted. The "real Africans" got their hands on the "white houses and white cars" they coveted, and they have made their country "really African".

Picture credit: The image of Ian Smith is taken from a cover of Time magazine. Mr. Smith died in 2007.

Book review: The Fear

Knowing of Walt's interest in Zimbabwe -- one of the poorest and most misruled countries in the world -- Agent 17 asked if I'd yet read The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, by Peter Godwin. I replied that I hadn't, and immediately hied myself off to the local library where I was pleased to find it and a surprising number of other books on Rhodesia and its miserable successor.

Before 17's reminder I hadn't been in a big hurry to get Godwin's book, because I knew of the family and their white liberal, Stephen Clarksonish sympathies. Peter Godwin's parents -- father a Jew, mother not -- came out to Rhodesia after WWII, as did many other Brits who were nothing back in Old Blighty and aspired to be bwanas in British Africa.

Although their children -- Peter and his younger sister Georgina -- went to the right (white) schools and enjoyed the privileges of little baases and medems, they quite unaccountably acquired "red socks", becoming admirers of all things black and haters of the white society of their country. Some Americans would have called them "nigger-lovers".

Predictably, they sympathized with the black terrorists during the bush war of the 70s, and rejoiced at the coming of independence and majority rule. Only later did Peter learn that Comrade Bob's idea of "one man one vote" is that he's the man and his is the vote. The scales fell off Peters's ideas during the Gukurahundi ("ethnic cleansing") in Matabeland in 1983. It was then that he found himself on the wrong side of Mugabe's law, and "gapped it" to greener -- or less black -- pastures.

His sister, Georgina, took a little longer to realize that a dictator is a dictator, no matter whether black or white. She was a spokesperson for Bob's régime until the mid-90s, a bingo-caller on the state-owned radio/TV network -- Zimbabwe's one and only -- until the mid-90s. Peter spends a lot of time, in The Fear, talking about his adorable sister, but modestly omits this little smudge on her résumé.

To get to the book... In April 2008, when it appeared that the MDC (the opposition party led by Morgan Tsvangirai) had won a badly-rigged presidential election and was set to oust Mugabe from power, Peter and his addled sister decided to return to Zimbabwe from their comfortable homes in, errr, New York and London, to record the dramatic reversal of the country's fortunes which was sure to follow.

Things didn't quite turn out that way. In Africa, you can't lose an election. The worst you can do -- in Zimbabwe at least -- is tie. So, while the Godwins were interviewing victims of Mugabe's pre- and post-election violence, Tsvangirai settled for the position of Prime Minister in a Government of National Unity (GNU). Mugabe retained the presidensity and the only key to State House. The GNU, of course, has turned out to be a complete farce, which is why Zimbabweans say no GNUs is good GNUs. Comrade Bob clings to power, and will do so until someone or something does for him.

About half of The Fear is a catalogue of horrific examples of Bob's brutal and relentless campaign against the MDC and all who would oppose him. The details of torture, rape, pillage and murder make gruesome reading. Peter Godwin deserves credit for recording these stories and naming names of victims and perpetrators alike. That part of the book should be read (but not while eating) to appreciate the enormity of Bob's crimes against the humanity. Walt hopes that one day he will be brought to trial, which is exactly what he now fears.

The Fear would be a lot better if an editor had excised the other half of the book, which is given over to little anecdotes about how cute and precious Peter's children and sister are. Sample: "Georgina is tapping at her netbook, which is covered in leopard-print laminate and coordinates with her blouse."

We also learn that Georgina once made love in the open air on top of Cecil Rhodes's grave while rainbow skinks watched, that she gave birth to a daughter named Xanthe and planted a tree on top of the placenta. TMI. Skip over those parts.

You should also ignore Peter's proclivity for hyperbole. He plays fast and loose with numbers. Example: "...up to 700,000 were left homeless". The weasel words there are "up to".

Walt also found annoying the white liberal bias that is still evident in Godwin's writing. He calls the pre-1994 government of South Africa, "the apartheid authority". And Rhodesia was under "white settler rule", not the Ian Smith government. Never mind that the Godwins were themselves white settlers. And never mind that Ian Smith was right, a fact which the author can't bring himself to acknowledge.

Read The Fear anyway for a good explanation of how Mugabe won the 2008 election after all, and insight into how African democracy works. Not.

Better off in Rhodesia than Zimbabwe

For those a little hazy on African geography, Rhodesia and Zimbabwe refer to the same land mass at different points in history. Welcome to the 4th dimension.

Rhodesia was the name given to the country settled by white, British pioneers around the turn of the 20th century. It was named after the legendary Cecil Rhodes, the man with the vision of British Africa -- and a railway to unite it -- extending from the Cape to Cairo.

Later Rhodesia was divided. When the British lost the will to maintain their empire/commonwealth, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia. Southern Rhodesia resisted black rule, and declared independence from the U.K. on November 11, 1965.

The next 15 years, now known as the UDI period, saw illegal (and largely ineffective) UN sanctions against the government led by Ian Smith, and a vicious terrorist war waged by "Africans" -- black Africans, that is -- against the "settlers" -- white Africans, that is -- from bases in Mozambique and Zambia. It was during this time that I first visited Rhodesia.

The Rhodesians, betrayed by their kith and kin in Britain and dismayed by loss of support from South Africa and Portugal, were finally coerced into accepting "majority rule" in 1980. At that time Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe and power was handed over to Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, as he is still called in official documents and the sycophantic state-run media.

Zimbabwe is now governed by the principle of "one man one vote"...the one man being Comrade Bob, who has clung tenaciously to power ever since, despite being aged at least 85 and appearing to have somewhat lost the plot. As for the country, the once breadbasket of Africa has become a basket case.

I wish I had a dollar for every time a Zimbabwean said to me "Things were better in the old days." Or "It's too bad you [meaning whites] aren't still running things." That sentiment resonates even more loudly today, according to a recent article by Nicolas D. Kristof in The New York Times.

"Postcard from Zimbabwe" is well worth reading for a true picture of the life of the ordinary "Joe Povo" under Comrade Bob's despotic rule. Thanks to Agent 17 for drawing my attention to it.

The year of no summer; the summer of no politics

The Canadian political scene this summer has been as quiet as Walt can ever remember. It's as if all the rain (in the Ottawa area) has dampened everyone's spirits along with their clothes.

"Call me Steve" Harper went on a tour of the Arctic. "Let me drive the boat! Let me fly the chopper!" After securing Canada's Great White North, he turned his attention to the Senate, appointing another nine hacks, flacks and cronies to sit with Mike Puffy on the government side. (Is it true that the Duffster has a double-wide chair?)

As for the Liberals, their "war room" looks like the Marie Celeste. Everyone, up to and including the Iggster, has apparently taken the summer off.

This week they trotted out El Hacko Supremo, David Smith (one of the masterminds behind the great victories of John Turner, Paul Martin and "Call me Stephane" Dion) to say the Grits are in no hurry to force an election. You damn betcha!

The Liberal war chest is still closer to empty than full and in many ridings, including Walt's, the Grits can't even find a credible candidate. By the way, Walt lives in Ontario -- not Toronto, but the real Ontario -- where the next federal election will be won or lost.

Walt's prediction: December 31st will see Harpoon still in office, thanks to the fecklessness of the gutless Grits. You read it here first.

Self-rule: the curse of sub-Saharan Africa

Following World War II, the colonial powers lost their will to rule Africa. The first indicator was British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's "Winds of Change" speech, made to the parliament of South Africa on February 3, 1960. "We're pulling out" pretty well sums up what Macmillan said.

And so the British pulled out, followed quickly by the French and Belgians, then the Spanish (never a big power in Africa in any case) and, after the Communist overthrow of the Salazar government, the Portuguese. After the Portuguese abandoned Angola and Mozambique, it was inevitable that Rhodesia would fall, and finally fortress South Africa.

So ended white man's rule in sub-Saharan Africa. The world, in a fit of liberal guilt, welcomed self-rule by the black majority. Warnings that the continent would go "back to bush" were ignored. What has happened since?

Readers who don't know that Africa is now worse off than it was in the bad old colonial days should read Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing, by Moeletsi Mbeki, a relative of former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Parts of it were published on July 1st in the Johannesburg Star under the headline "Colonised by the black elite".

"Nationalism in Africa has always paraded itself as a movement of the people fighting for their liberation," Mbeki says. "The reality is rather different." He points out that "African nationalism" (read "terrorism") was the preserve of a small, Westernised, black elite fighting for their place at the colonial trough. He argues that their record in power has been spectacularly damaging.

Mbeki gives the example of Zimbabwe where, once the Communist-inspired ruling party (they still call each other "comrade") consolidated its hold on power, "the ZANU-PF political elite proceeded to enrich itself to the great detriment of the national economy and of the welfare of the population at large."

Such actions have ensured that most Africans in sub-Saharan Africa are poor and getting poorer, Mbeki says. He quotes statistics from the World Bank and US National Bureau of Economic Research to show that:
* 36% of the region’s population lives in economies that in 1995 had not regained the per capita income levels first achieved before 1960 (i.e. while they were still colonies);
* another 6% are below levels first achieved by 1970, 41% below 1980 levels and 11% below 1990 levels;
* only 35 million people reside in nations that had higher incomes in 1995 than they had ever reached before.

When Walt was in Zimbabwe, he heard many older Africans decry the oppression of the black chefs and wish aloud for the return of Ian Smith. But the foreign governments who conspired to push the white man out of Africa didn't want to hear that, and still refuse to believe that black self-rule -- let's say self-misrule -- has been the disaster which these figures prove.

Mr. Mbeki's book should be required reading for all those who still think Africans are capable of governing themselves. This is not racism. This is realism!