We were bundled into the back of the Zephyr. My mother had made up a bed so that we could sleep on the long journey on the Great North Road from Joburg to Salisbury. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, feeling the motion of the car. All very exciting, I peeked out of the window and saw the shadows of the landscape that one day would become our home. We were on a holiday through the southern part of Rhodesia where my father clearly yearned to return and spoke about his homeland with almost in religious tones.
Reality was far removed
Thinking of that time stirred in me that mood and captured my imagination of a place that had warmth and loads of sunshine. The perfect place to grow up. Reality was very far removed from this supposed utopia and this paradise where, woven into the narrative, the whole thing would crumble when faced with the facts.
It was October 1964. I had never watched television before and quickly became glued to it, including the news, the origin of my obsession, I was nine years old and never really looked back! I seem to remember seeing Harold Wilson on the television. He had just arrived in Salisbury to intervene and try to prevent unilateral action on the part of Smith. He had just been elected PM and one of his first international problems focused on an urgent need to deal with the Rhodesia problem.
Ian Smith had become PM eighteen months, hell bent on gaining independence for Rhodesia. The British government pursued a policy of NIBMAR.1 This effectively meant that the mother country and the self-governing colony of Rhodesia would reach a stalemate and when Smith declared independence unilaterally it set the country on a particular historical trajectory that would end badly.
Not in a thousand years
Later Smith would go onto say these words that did have the ring of a thousand years Reich. ‘Let me say it again. I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia—not in a thousand years. 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.’
The thousand years ended up as fifteen. Hello, Canute was utterly deluded.
It was white Rhodesia against the world. Not one single country recognised its independence. Not even South Africa, or Portugal which, at the time, was involved in its own failed attempt to maintain its colonies in Africa. ‘The Rhodesians attracted little sympathy at the time,’ wrote Mike Hagemann, as they were perceived to be recidivist racists, clinging to outmoded colonial myths and imperialist models, and punching way above their weight in world affairs until they were defeated [in 1980].’
The Wind of Change
Just over a year after the initial visit, we settled permanently in Rhodesia. We quickly came to believe the fiction that we were an exceptional people fighting for our rights in a hostile world. We would stem the tide of history. The Winds of Change did not apply to us. We would forge this little country and make it great. Our great leader, the no nonsense straight talker, the born Rhodesian, would see off our foes and ensure that we would in the end win. He had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War and had been shot down over Italy. That made him a war hero fighting for Britain that was now not to be trusted, that had betrayed us and would not concede our god-given right to independence. We had earned it. Our forefathers had, through sheer fortitude, created this country out of nothing. Rhodesia had been self-governing since 1923 and independence was an extension of that permission to have self-determination.
All of this went headlong into reality. The United Nations and the Commonwealth and all the counties around the world saw us rebels, as outliers that needed to wake up. That white minority rule was a blight. We thought we were bigger than all of this. Yet we did not see that we were in fact a footnote in British imperial history. A settler state that really had collectively lost touch with the world. That what we were doing was anti-democratic, anti-black and quite frankly deluded. We were white supremacists and like all extremists we were living in a parallel universe.
It was rare to hear an alternative political view in the household. If any did intrude into our world it would be dismissed with, ‘If they don’t like it they should leave. They have no right to be here with their liberal attitudes.’ Or, better still, ‘Give them (the white immigrant) time. They will quickly learn what these people are like.’
One of the best memories I have is watching Ian Smith in an interview and how, with a straight face, he said, or words, to this effect. ‘Every day I have black Rhodesians come to see me to tell me how happy that we are in charge.’ What is probably most galling for you, dear reader, is how I believed this blatant propaganda, hook, line and sinker. We really did believe that we had the best race relations in the world, that the black people were grateful to us for what we provided. My mother, also with a straight face, said, ‘Give them a radio and Thursday afternoon off and they are as happy as Larry.’
Thinking back on these conversations, I have strong memories of the servants heading off to the Location on their time off, walking miles from the white suburbs to be in their own communities, while we drove/rode past in our Morris Oxfords or bicycles. I only feel shame that, at the time, I thought this was the natural order of things. I didn’t even think for one moment what it was like living in a dingy outhouse, on an uncomfortable bed, drinking tea out of a jam jar or steel cup donated by the madam.
Alice, the ironing ‘girl’ in her fifties, would greet me with a broad smile calling me ‘baas’ at the end of every sentence grateful to have ironed the young baas’ shirts. My mother thought it would good idea for me to tip her when I earned money on university vacation jobs and the one dollar note that passed between us was like passing her gold she bowed and scraped to the point I became so embarrassed and didn’t know where to put my shame. By then, the scales were falling from my eyes and all my mother’s well-meaning behaviours towards the servants were, for me, so patronising I could barely cope. Did I say anything at the time? Of course not. That would have been honest.
By this time, I had already begun to see the world in a different light. Up until university, the only black people I had personally come into contact with were servants. I had never supped at the same table with anyone other than a white person. I still remember the moment that I shared a meal with black people and, looking back, I remember seeing it as a big deal – WTF! - and how I could move on from this stupid racial separation that had given the veneer of protection but was, in fact, anti-humanity in every respect and an unbelievably stupid way to navigate the world. The illogicality has come back to me. Men and women who made my bed, who cooked my food, who washed my clothes and dishes, who touched what we touched, who felt what we felt, who felt sadness and joy were not my equal. What insanity. What collective madness. Othering on an industrial scale to keep them in their place because they would want what was ours. Paaaleeze!
★
It was the course at university, Comparative African Government and Administration, that pointed me in the right intellectual direction. We had a young lecturer who was a radical and said things about the settler state of Rhodesia that opened my eyes wide. The fact that I surprised myself by not doubling down in my white conservative position indicated that I was ready for another view on the country I came from. He provided me with an intellectual critique of Rhodesia that meant that I could never unsee or unhear this perspective. On one occasion, he compared the country to pre-revolutionary France and I found this discourse fascinating.
By the time I studied this brilliant course on Africa, a continent of which I knew very little, a brutal war had begun to unfold in Rhodesia. Although the opening shots had been fired a decade a year before, it had become a security nightmare in the north west of the country since December 1972. In April 1976, the war spread across the country and would mean the country was at war until the ceasefire in December 1979.
This guerrilla war caused me to have a range of emotions, particularly as my brother, Bonts, had been called up to do his national service in the very year the war had hotted up. People on both sides were dying, as were civilians in the farmlands and the TTLs.2 It was all very well to have an alternative view of the country I was living in, and rightly so, but it was also a struggle to come to terms with the reality happening on the ground.
I have to be frank. There were two parts to me. One that was intellectually affronted by the injustice and the discrimination against fellow countrymen, and the other still believing much of the propaganda about the black liberation armies. On top of that, Smith conceded that the government would have to implement black majority rule if it was to achieve international recognition.
There had been some considerable pressure applied by the South African prime minister, PW Botha and, to my shame, I bought the lie that the South Africans had sailed the country down the river. What a load of bullshit that I sprouted as Josie sometimes reminded me when we talked about that time. Eventually I would become more integrated and that the two parts were like oil and water and that I would have to decide one way or the other. It would take some time to get there but these things take time, don’t they?
During the winter holiday of my last year at university, before starting life as a teacher, I spent some time at home. My mom brought me tea in bed and carried a copy of The Rhodesia Herald. On the front page screamed the report of a massacre by one of the Liberation Armies of innocent people killed in their homesteads in the TTLs. I don’t remember the details but I do remember my mother’s face. She was clearly upset and, after saying good morning, she launched into a ‘we can never give in to these barbarians’ spiel.
I have a friend whose family had never supported Smith or the Front, as they were called by this family. She had already offered me a different view of these massacres. That some were carried out by agents of the Smith regime and made to look like terrorist attacks. On hearing this at the time I was deeply shocked, but it certainly made me more wary of just accepting the government line on the atrocities in this vicious war. To have offered my mother an alternative view at this point and suggested that it could well be a fake terror attack would not have been helpful and so I chose to keep quiet.
★
Years later, I considered myself hugely fortunate as I came across the work of Mike Hagemann3 whose PhD thesis focused on the war poet, Chas Lotter. In it he provided an alternative narrative from the one that we had been led to believe behind the excesses in the war. ‘No longer were the soldiers engaged in aimless sweeps of the countryside or delayed reactions to old information. Instead, they were deployed on aggressively specific, outcomes-oriented tasks such as ambush laying, propaganda pamphlet drops and hut burning.’ Hagemann indicated that the ‘army’s rationale behind the burning of huts was punitive. Villagers suspected of having sheltered guerrillas had their huts and possessions torched. For peasant farmers, this was devastating and instantly turned them into refugees, caught between the pincers of the Rhodesian army and the guerrillas.
Lotter wrote of his experience in the poem Retribution.
'I stood on a rise. Watching the smoke billow, blot out the sun. Hell must be like this. Panic, fear Fire and smoke. Devils Egging you on. But I feel no pity. This war Has gone on long enough.’
Hagemann rightly describes this as an atrocity and, when I first read it, I wasn’t even surprised. A reprise of the conversation I had had with my friend forty five years before, she had had no reason to bullshit me. Ever grateful to her, she had lifted the lid on my ignorance and view that in this war we were defending ourselves. The brainwashing reached that tipping point, coming to a final conclusion.
It was helpful years later to have another angle on the past. To go back to it and see it face to face. I had been thinking about my first year of teaching in the border town of Umtali. It was 1979 and the internal settlement with black nationalists who had disavowed the war was drawing to its conclusion - from it would emerge the new regime of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia on 1st June 1979. Perhaps this change meant that I did not have to think that far. I am struck by how at the time how little I raced ahead, wondering what would happen next.
I took a hard look at what Hagemann had written about our shared experience of growing up in Rhodesia to see if it jogged my memory of how I felt then. I came to the conclusion that I was not thinking too far into the future and did not look to see what was around the corner. Perhaps it was my way of coping, my way of avoiding any existential crisis and not really think about how the country was falling apart. Picking up the thesis on the war poet, I saw some commentary that might provide some answer to the questions I was asking. ‘It would be disingenuous of me,’ wrote Hagemann, ‘to claim that white Rhodesians were oblivious to or ignorant of politics, but as colonists they were, by nature, conservative in outlook and not inclined to consider views and positions that might ultimately threaten their privileges and the status quo.’
As Chas Lotter wrote in his diary in 1979, ‘people were not ready to accept the slow, steady deterioration of the situation, would not see the ravenous, blood thirsty monster sniffing around their back doors while they wrapped themselves in the complacent fog of not knowing and lost themselves nightly in the soothing TV world of make believe.’ Again, this forced me to think back to that time. It was a tough year and the war had become increasingly awful and Lotter was right. I was not yet prepared to look deeper and stuck to the surface of what we were going through. Later, I was to become all too aware of the huge forces of history that would take us to another place altogether.
There was a tug of becoming renewed, seeing that there were other possibilities other than this deeply adversarial narrative through which we were living. That we all could emerge and touch one another’s humanity. The arrival of Trump and Johnson was a shock because they circled back to the badlands of a rearguard action fighting to maintain their privileges, their deep prejudices, and recast their countries in their image. When the Smith regime and all it stood for shuffled off its mortal coil, I imagined that history was personally taking us in the right direction. Mandela’s release from jail in 1990 provided a lot of hope. I even had become to believe that globalisation and regional blocs like the EU were beacons of light, breaking down barriers and differences between people. I didn’t imagine for one minute that narcissists would hijack our world and wreck everything.
As an historian I should have imagined that nothing is a given. That bad men, with their narrow self-interest, are often waiting in the wings, ready to pounce. That messianic complexes are real, lurking in would be demagogues. They give space to and attract other tricksters and hucksters. And all the while, good people are too polite or too afraid to say anything and allow the ‘shallows and miseries’4 to happen.
Betrayal narratives
The Lost Cause was the mythology that emerged in the wake of the defeat of the Confederate armies at the hands of the Yankees in 1865, ending the American Civil War. This Lost Cause has a lot to answer for in that it suggests a betrayal of the white people of the Deep South. It was a revisionist history that gained popularity in the 1890s, and was singularly successful in re-writing the history of ‘the Confederacy’s humiliating defeat in a treasonous war for slavery as the embodiment of the Framers’ true vision for America. Supporters pushed the ideas that the Civil War was not actually about slavery; that Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general, gentleman, and patriot; and that the Ku Klux Klan had rescued the heritage of the old South, what came to be known as “the southern way of life.”” 5
You may wonder why I have raised this topic. I have become fascinated how in defeat, individuals and people explain what has happened to them and their cause, their project, their presidency or premiership. Thatcher, in saying that she had been betrayed, immediately absolved herself of her own role in her downfall. Her fall from power created fifteen years of division in the Tory Party as they fought over her legacy and the fact that the MPs and not the electorate had seen her off, thus perpetuating the mythology around her being stabbed in the face.
Johnson is going to follow in exactly the same theme. He has already started the betrayal narrative. Nothing in his departure, in his sickening ‘lap of honour’ at PMQs, the hypocrisy of the standing ovation with absolutely no reference to how he had brought the disgrace upon himself. In fact, he looked the opposite of disgrace. If you feel disgrace then you will be disgraced. If you don’t, then it’s everyone else’s fault. He had even blamed those MPs at the Carlton Club for not stopping Pincher. Nothing about the victim. Nothing about his amnesia. Nothing about the briefing. Zilch. Didly squat. Pure and simple brassneckery. Boosterism and calling on the spirit of the Terminator. Since then we have seen him as a fighter pilot and dressed up as a soldier doing war games. Do not believe for one moment that it is a coincidence. It is Johnson performing. Providing another narrative. ‘Look what I have done to save Ukraine,’ it screams. Propaganda and bullshit.
Warnings from history are important. The Nazis used defeat at the end of the First World War to perpetuate the myth of betrayal. Germany had been stabbed in the back by those who had signed the armistice in November 1918, calling them the November criminals. They blamed communists, Jews, the Weimar Republic. It was not only symbolic but massively emotional, reminding Germans of their humiliation and the Versailles Treaty that had traduced their once proud army to nothing. Over the course of a decade, this narrative built to a crescendo and Hitler, in coming to power in January 1933, would use this narrative to restore Germany’s honour. With the Fuhrer increasingly vitriolic, the British and French used the policy of appeasement to prevent war but Hitler, with his messianic complex and pathological hatred for anyone who was not Aryan, could not be stopped.
I am fascinated that in defeat from 1945 the Germans have in fact come face to face with their history and have actively not done a collective amnesia and bullshitting.
This got me thinking about white Rhodesians. Detached from their country, scattered across the world, far removed from the place where the myths were allowed to form in their psyches, whites perpetuated a belief that they had been right all along. Robert Mugabe’s subsequent actions and complete mismanagement of the country and the economy became the feeding ground for the righteousness of their beliefs.
I know no one now that calls themselves a Rhodie, so I do not know what they are thinking as they stagger into their middle age and beyond. After all, it was over forty years ago and, as a group of people, there is no coherence unlike those who still believe in the Lost Cause. It has long been over – it was a lifetime ago - and writing this slays some of the demons that raise their ugly head every now and then. This is putting it to rest finally, a reminder of my own part in the whole awful system. I think I have exorcised the original sin of racism and I know that it has not been passed down to the next generation. Goodness knows, they have enough to be getting on with.
Next: Chapter 10 - a blessed relief - here
No independence before black majority rule
The Land Tenure Act had divided up the country into different parts and many Black peasant farmers lived in the Tribal Trust Lands
Shadows, Faces and Echoes of an African War: The Rhodesian Bush War through the Eyes of Chas Lotter – Soldier Poet; this is the thesis by ME Hagemann that provided an alternative to the white Rhodesian bullshit and nostalgia that had become all too common in the diaspora and post-colonial amnesia.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3
Michel Paradis, The Lost Cause’s Long Legacy, The Atlantic, June 2020