The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (36 page)

Smith accepted the principle of majority rule and in 1978 reached an “internal settlement” with Bishop Muzorewa, Chief Chirau of Mashonaland, and the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, the former (and more moderate) head of ZANU who had been displaced by Robert Mugabe. Smith argued that these leaders, who had agreed to negotiate with him, represented the views of roughly 85 percent of black Rhodesians. Smith had agreed to a universal franchise, and as a necessary prerequisite to negotiations on the “internal settlement” these black leaders had agreed to an independent judiciary and civil service, a bill of rights to protect property and pension rights in particular, and a military immune from political pressures. The black leaders wanted majority rule, and Smith wanted to ensure that Rhodesia did not fall prey to the political disasters that were the African norm.

In April 1979, Rhodesia became Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, and Bishop Abel Muzorewa was elected prime minister (Smith remained in government as a minister without portfolio), but the two major parties supporting terrorism, Nkomo's ZAPU and Mugabe's ZANU, boycotted the election and continued their war. Appallingly, neither Britain (in deference to the Commonwealth) nor the United Nations recognized the new democratically elected government; Rhodesia-Zimbabwe would have no international standing until the Communist-backed terrorists participated in an election.

The British called all parties to negotiations conducted by Lord Carrington at Lancaster House in London. Muzorewa, Mugabe, and Nkomo agreed to a new constitution and new elections, with a British governor (Lord Soames) acting as interim leader of the country as it made its official transition from dependent colony (albeit in rebellion and enduring sanctions) to independent state. Smith attended the Lancaster House negotiations as part of Muzorewa's delegation, and though he was cast as a lone dissenter, he was the one man who accurately predicted events: that the radical Robert Mugabe would win the election on the basis of intimidation and the fact that he came from the Shona, the tribe of 80 percent of black
Rhodesians. Lord Carrington—and most everyone else—assumed that the somewhat more moderate Joshua Nkomo would win or that a coalition government of Nkomo, Muzorewa, and Smith (because of twenty seats reserved for white Rhodesians) would emerge. Smith recognized that Lord Carrington was unable to imagine how African politics actually worked, and he was disgusted at what he saw as British politicians' appeasement of radical black nationalists who only despised them.

In March 1980, Robert Mugabe became the leader of the new nation of Zimbabwe. The first man he consulted was Ian Smith. The black leader that all the other leaders had considered the most radical and dangerous had won, but he assured Smith that he had no intention of alienating the white Rhodesians who had given the country such a prosperous economy. Doctrinaire Marxism, he assured Smith, would not be the order of the day—and it wasn't, at first. Mugabe's public stance was one of conciliation, but the new Zimbabwean broadcast media churned out hours of pro-Communist propaganda. Then Mugabe himself began agitating for a one-party state and
urged reprisals against whites who did not support him, threatening to imprison Smith. He also began a vicious war against the Ndebele (Nkomo's tribe). Mugabe's notorious North Korean-trained 5th Brigade ravaged Mata-beleland. As a Catholic priest told reporter Peter Godwin, “I have lived through the Second World War in Austria and I have seen the terrible things the Gestapo could do. But let me tell you something, the Gestapo couldn't teach these Fifth Brigade fellows a damn thing!”
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The justice system became increasingly corrupted by the Mugabe government; political intimidation and repression became the norm; the economy was pillaged in socialist style and with socialist results; and white farmers were driven from their land by Mugabe-supported mobs. The breadbasket of central Africa became an economic basket case. Smith watched all this with sorrow. He remained a member of Parliament until 1987. Even in his retirement he was often threatened by the Mugabe regime, but he retained too much popularity—especially among black Zimbabweans opposed to the government—for Mugabe to take the political risk of imprisoning him or forcing him into exile. Smith lived to see all his worst predictions come true; had he been able to read his obituaries he would have seen that liberal opinion blamed him for being right.

I
n the beginning it was all about India. It was India that made the acquisition of Aden on the Persian Gulf necessary in 1838. It was India that made Egypt and the Suez Canal vital British interests; by the end of the nineteenth century, three out of every four ships through the Canal were on the passage to or from India. British India administered Aden and Mesopotamia, and conducted its own Arabian policy. But there was something else, too. Britons became explorers of Arabia—attracted either by its dangers and religious mysteries (Sir Richard Francis Burton) or by the English love for desolate places (Charles Doughty).

Within imperial circles there was an entire class of English Arabists who made their careers in the desert and might better be called Anglo-Arabs. As was usual with British imperialists, they favored the “martial races,” in this case, the Bedouin tribesman, who with his “patrician style,” “picturesque appearance,” and love of war (British officers lifted it above a love of booty), “seemed almost a kind of Englishman himself, translated into another idiom.”
¹
The Bedouins lacked British discipline, but theirs was a proper, conservative, hierarchical society that an Englishman could appreciate. City Arabs, the oily commercial classes, the jabbering nationalists, the vast Egyptian mob—these the Englishman often disdained. But the desert warrior was a worthy ally, and to some English women, a romantic foil.
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Britain's first foreign policy goal in Egypt was evicting the French. Napoleon entered the annals of Egypt's conquerors in 1798 and marched his armies up through Syria, posing as the liberator—as the British later would—of Egyptians and Arabs from Ottoman tyranny. But after Lord Nelson's smashing naval victory at the Battle of the Nile in 1799 and a resulting Anglo-Ottoman land campaign, Napoleon's conquests were rolled back in 1801.

More important was the British-French entanglement over the Suez Canal. The British had built a railway from Alexandria to Suez in the 1850s, but were skeptical of and hostile to the French Suez Canal Company (even fomenting a Bedouin-led revolt against the company's use of forced labor). But once the Canal was opened in 1869, British ships, eventually more than any others, made use of it. When the Egyptian khedive had to sell his shares to pay off debts in 1875, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli tapped his friend Lionel de Rothschild for a loan, and Britain became a major shareholder in the Canal, leading to joint British-French control.