The Rhodesia Syndrome and Its Impact on American Society
(UPDATED VERSION)
1. A New Syndrome
For those born after 1980 (Millennials, that is), Rhodesia was an African country led by a white anti-communist militant regime (1965–1980), in a region dominated by black Marxist administrations and military factions self-titled “liberation armies.” Its unique case — during a short-lived existence and especially after — shows us what happens when a social construction led by competent elites is sacrificed on the altar of political and racial correctness, in the name of some utopian ideals shared by the majority of the local population.
The Rhodesia Syndrome is a term that I have coined in order to describe the degeneration of a society, partially anomic, whose administration camouflages its perverse socialized communist-type policies through its ethnic narrative overtones about the so-called “racial injustice.”
The phenomenon is vividly present here, in America, from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta, and from one coast to another. The same expired theories and bankrupt economic solutions, consistent with the left-wing party activist lines and doubled by racial components, have made today part of communities from Detroit to Atlanta and New Orleans, and from San Francisco to Chicago and Baltimore, to look more like Zimbabwean microcosms.
2. The American Model
Like the United States, Rhodesia was a British colony. In 1888, Cecil Rhodes, the British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa, who later on served as a prime minister of the Cape colony (1890–1896), obtained a concession for mining rights from the local tribal leaders. In 1890, he established Fort Salisbury (the current country capital of Harare), in 1895 his company adopted the name “Rhodesia” for the territory, and in 1898 “Southern Rhodesia” became the official name for the region south of the Zambezi River, which later became Zimbabwe. The region north of the river — Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) — was administered separately. Rhodesia was annexed by the United Kingdom in 1923, and under the same year new constitution, and subsequent to a 1922 referendum, it became a self-governing British colony.
Between 1953 and 1963, in the face of growing African nationalism, the British consolidated the two Rhodesias with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in a Central African Federation (dominated de facto by Southern Rhodesia). With Zambian independence in 1964, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front (a white conservative party) issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965. The act repudiated the British policy of granting independence without majority rule. Basically, this was the first act of its kind taken by a British colony since the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, which Smith claimed, providing a suitable precedent to his actions.
Unlike the United States though, the British did not send troops “to subdue the first national treason against the Crown since the American War of Independence,” but opted, through their then Labor prime minister Harold Wilson, for sanctions instead.
3. An Integrated Society
By that time, Rhodesia — in comparison with the United States at the time of their independence — was a more integrated state, socially, electorally, and militarily. Rhodesian society was not shaped after the American segregation system of the pre-70s, or the South African apartheid system of the pre-90s.
The electoral system followed Cecil Rhodes’s dictum of “equal rights for all civilized men,” with no overt racial component to the franchise. But since the requirement excluded a majority of native blacks from the electorate, it geared to resist to majority rule. The system was based on the Westminster Parliamentary System, modified by a system of separate black and white electoral rolls (A and B, each with qualifications), with differing property and education qualifications, without regard to race. Being wealthier and more educated, whites ended up with the majority of the parliamentary seats. However, the mechanism whereby the number of black members of parliament would increase in line with the proportion of income tax revenues paid by black citizens, was up to the moment blacks had the same number of seats as whites, since the declared goal was “parity between the races” rather than majority rule (see: Phillippa Berlyn, The Quiet Man: A Biography of Ian Douglas Smith, M O Collins Publishers, Salisbury, 1978, pp. 240–256).
The importance of education during the electoral act — during a surge of ideological egalitarianism preached by most of the African black leaders of the time — was properly emphasized by the Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith in an April 28, 1974 televised interview with William F. Buckley, Jr. and other interviews.
The issue has kept its importance until today, vis-à-vis the Millennials’ appetency in voting for “Free Stuff Matters”-type of policies tested elsewhere with disastrous results, and the “Black Lives Matter” anti-marginalization and entitlement movement.
The non-segregated military and police forces were well-equipped and operationally efficient. Rhodesia had contributed, per head of population, more in both world wars than any part of the British Empire, including the United Kingdom itself.
4. A Man for All Seasons
During its fifteen years of existence, Rhodesia crossed several stages:
(1) as Rhodesia, a unilaterally declared independent commonwealth Rhodesia (November 11, 1965);
(2) as Rhodesia, a unilaterally declared parliamentary republic (March 2, 1970);
(3) as Zimbabwe Rhodesia, a unilaterally declared parliamentary republic (June 1, 1979 to December 12, 1979), and
(4) as Southern Rhodesia, a re-established British Commonwealth (December 12, 1979 to April 17, 1980).
After that, Zimbabwe was internationally recognized as an independent state (April 18, 1980). The country used the Rhodesian pound during 1965–1970, and the Rhodesian dollar during 1970–1979.
Ian Smith (1919–2007), the country’s prime minister not born abroad, was a man with love for his people and land, and a true patriot. He was born in the small farming town of Selukwe, southwest of Salisbury, and studied farming at a Salisbury agricultural college. His father was a rancher, and young Smith inherited from him some solid principles of fairness and moral values. Smith acquired a Victorian vision of the world, both in moral standards and in the belief of British primacy that characterized the empire. In his 1997 autobiography, The Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal, Smith recollects about his father: “He always told me that we’re entitled to our half of the country and the blacks are entitled to theirs.”
After retiring from political life, he spent some of his later years at his Gwenoro ranch, near Selukwe. During the Second World War, he was a Royal Air Force officer pilot and flew combat missions in the Middle East and Europe.
His task, of keeping Rhodesia afloat, was almost a “mission impossible.”
Given the impact of economic and diplomatic sanctions, the country was still able to develop and maintain a significant and professional military and police capability.
5. A Divided Black Society
On the domestic front, Smith cracked down hard on the two black nationalist Marxist parties and their guerrilla movements in what is called “the Bush War” (1964–1979).
Both black militant groups (whose members saw their parties as “national liberation movements”) were operating from the outside: Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) from Zambia and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) from Mozambique. As a result, Rhodesian authorities treated them as external communist threats. ZAPU was logistically supported by Soviet Russia (plus Cuba, East Germany and others), while ZANU (initially a ZAPU dissident wing turned into a party) was receiving support from Maoist China (plus Mozambique, Tanzania, Libya and others). Yet neither militant group possessed basic knowledge of guerrilla warfare. Basically, this allowed the Rhodesian army to maintain the control in the theaters of operations.
The control was maintained in spite of a 22 to 1 black-to-white ratio.
Other factors for their inefficiency consisted in tribal differences. ZANU consisted mainly in Shona tribe members (80% of the population), while ZAPU was formed basically by Ndebele tribe members (20% of the population, spread mostly in the south-west).
6. A World with Too Few Friends
On the international arena, Rhodesia’s early counter-insurgency successes were neutralized to a great extent by the Western powers themselves (some of them early allies), like United Nations, United Kingdom (called “Perfidious Albion” in Smith’s memoirs), United States, South Africa, and Portugal.
Immediately after 1965 UDI, the British Labor Party Government, followed by the United Nations’ Security Council, started to apply economic sanctions (countered to an extent by the Rhodesian government and companies in cooperation with some third states’ authorities).
The United States, although it refused to recognize Rhodesia, allowed its Consulate-General to function as a communications conduit between the American government in Washington, DC, and the Rhodesian government in Salisbury. Rhodesia set up an information office in Washington, DC, which remained open after UDI, but its staff was deprived of their diplomatic status.
In April 1974, as a result of the socialist Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, the sympathetic right-wing Salazar regime was removed, together with Portugal previous political and economic support. Portugal’s withdrawal from its colonies led neighboring Mozambique turn into a communist state openly allied with ZANU.
In December 1974, South African prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster pressured Smith into accepting a détente policy involving Rhodesia frontline states, outlining that South African interests (the apartheid policy, that is) would be better served by cooperating with the black African governments over a Rhodesian deal.
In 1976, the U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pushed for a deal of his own, involving the principle of majority rule, which Smith reluctantly conceded to, in exchange for an “internal settlement” with more moderate black leaders (like bishop Abel Muzorewa). A Geneva Conference was organized from October 28 to December 14 the same year, presided by the British Labor Party member Ivor Richard, in order to implement Kissinger’s agreement terms, but since some black nationalists from Rhodesia refused to recognize the agreement, no progress was made.
7. From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe
Once Zimbabwe had become an internationally recognized independent state, as a presidential republic (April 18, 1980), the degeneration of society began. The new leader Robert Mugabe, an avowed Marxist-Leninist, served as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987 and then as President from 1987 to 2017. He dominated Zimbabwe’s politics fro almost four decades, turning himself into a dictator responsible from crimes against humanity, human rights abuses, anti-white racism, economic mismanagement and widespread corruption.
From January 1985 until the end of 1985, he triggered a vast military operation, called Gukurahundi, for neutralizing the ZAPU “dissident” members.
The task was carried out by his personal North Korean trained paramilitary Fifth Brigade, held responsible for killing an estimated ten to thirty thousand Ndebele people, in the south-western province of Matabeleland and its capital, Bulawayo. Ultimately, this led to a unity accord (December 22, 1987), effectively dissolving ZAPU into ZANU, renamed Zimbabwe African National Union — Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and paving the way toward a one-party system.
The destruction of society continued in the following decades.
The 1990s were marked by anti-Mugabe social protests organized by students, trade unions, and health personnel, related to poor life standards (reportedly, 25% of the population had been infected by HIV in 1997). The 2000 land reform (the “fast track” version) involved compulsory land acquisitions and confiscations from the white farmers, holders of some 70% of the country agricultural land.
In 2002, as a result of the continuing degradation of the society — white farms seizures, gross economic mismanagement, electoral and human rights violations — the country is suspended from the (former British) Commonwealth of Nations. In 2008, Mugabe was controversially re-elected as president, but the opposition party of Movement for Democratic Change — Tsvangirai (MDC-T) won the parliamentary elections, and their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, becomes prime minister. In 2013, a new constitution extended Mugabe’s presidential powers (followed by his re-election, with accusations of vote rigging). As a result of grossly mismanaging of economy and corruption in society, the formal unemployment rate reached 80%, while inflation rose from an annual rate of 32% in 1998 to a high of 11,200,000%, which represented a state of hyperinflation, and a new 100 billion dollar note was introduced by the central bank.
This marked the abandonment of the national currency.
Mugabe was a die-hard fan of printing money. So was then-president Obama in the same fatidic year of 2008 and after, when the U.S. national debt had peaked to several trillions of dollars.
The only difference between the Rhodesian dollar and the U.S. dollar was that the latter one still had credibility on the market.
8. Degeneration and Decline
Another visible effect in the post-independent Zimbabwe has been the rapid decline of the white community. The white population dropped from 7% (1960) to 4% (1975), then 2% (1999), 1% (2002), and reached 0.20% (2012). A Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZIMSTAT) Report specified that out of the total population of 13,061,239 residents, the European ethnic group counted only for 28,732 residents (see: ZIMSTAT, 2012, p. 22).
www.zimstat.co.zw/sites/default/files/img/National_Report.pdf
In a “revised” edition (COMPENDIUM OF STATISTICS 2012 — Zimstat), any reference to population “ethnicity” was carefully removed.
Between 1980 and 1990, two thirds of the white émigrés (nicknamed Rhodies) left the country.
About 50% of them went to South Africa, about 30% to United Kingdom and Ireland, and 20% to United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The other third consisted in non-émigrés (nicknamed Zimbos), who did so either because they were wealthy and/or skilled, or poor and unable to emigrate. Most of the remaining white Rhodesians are elderly.
For them, and the old elite of the country, the slogan has become “Farewell, Rhodesia! Hello, Zimbabwe!”
The phenomenon has also characterized the last decades of some large American cities.
A more recent trend shows a discrete reverse, but some are skeptical that this reversed trend will hold.
In 2014, while in Rhodesia the white community is becoming progressively extinct, in the neighboring Zambia (former Northern Rhodesia), a white acting president became breaking news.
Opposition to Mugabe grew, in spite of his 2002, 2008 and 2013 presidential re-elections, whose campaigns were dominated by violence, electoral fraud and nationalistic appeals to his rural Shona voter base.
Following a November 2017 coup, Robert Mugabe resigned the presidency.
On September 6, 2019, Mugabe, aged 95, dies while he was receiving treatment in the Gleneagles private hospital, in Singapore.
9. The Rhodesian and American Models
Some striking resemblances between Rhodesians and Americans deserve to be pointed out:
— the sense of belonging to a great nation, carrying the same solid values and frontier spirit (vis-à-vis the American pioneers and minutemen, and the early Rhodesian Englishmen settlers);
— collective upholders of principle and defenders of values against both decadence of Britain itself, and communism worldwide;
— front-line states against communist expansion (in Africa, for Rhodesia, in the world, for the U.S.);
— Christian heritage of their pioneer ancestors in “defending the free world”;
— retaining their own economic prosperity through a gradual progression to other racial/ethnic groups.
Unfortunately for Rhodesia, all these sets of values gained little international recognition during its existence. The gradual progression to black majority rule was seen by the international community as a rationale perpetuating policies of racism. The attitude of the Western powers was rooted in a larger decolonization context, during which countries like United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium hastened to grant independence to their colonies in Africa.
There are some factors that explain why the white rule in Rhodesia lasted for so long, namely from 1895 to 1980.
First, Rhodesia was longtime considered the Africa’s breadbasket. White farmers were skilled, and after the 1980s the black farmers’ low skills or lack of incentives led to a farming policy with disastrous results.
Second, the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Shona and the Ndebele, were many times more in conflicting than in partner relationships. It was said that, in a way, Rhodesia’s white administration was the black majority chance for a balanced approach, toward prosperity and the creation of a solid middle class.
There are also some lessons to be learned from Rhodesia’s case.
Domestically (nationally and locally), going along racial lines and political convenience, and against the expertise of the few, can be the sure recipe for economic disaster.
Regionally, your neighbors can be both good and bad, but at the end of the day they can all turn up being even worse.
Internationally, your allies’ diplomacy of duplicity, followed by treachery, will be pursued for their own pure self-interest, and later justified by Realpolitik “principles and requirements.”
But in the end, even if you remain alone with your pride, standards and values, you can rest assured that your place in history has been secured. Or to put it in Ian Smith’s own prophetic words: “I told you so!”.
10. A Close Call for America
Former president Barack Obama didn’t realize or didn’t want to realize that without the votes of the white Americans his election and reelection as the President of the United States (in 2008 and 2012, respectively) wouldn’t have been possible. Whites alone (European-Americans, that is) comprise 72.4% of the US population, while blacks (or African-Americans) are only 12.6%.
Ignoring this basic truth and choosing to rule in a divisive manner throughout his two mandates, Obama alienated a large portion of whites, mostly from rural areas, but also from some significant urban regions of the country (both from the South and Mid-West, including the Great Lakes area). As a result, Donald Trump won the white non-Hispanic voters by a 21 percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton (57% to 37%), slightly better than Mitt Romney in 2012 (20 percentage points, 59% to 39% compared to Barack Obama). Trump has fared a little better among blacks (8% compared to 6%) and Hispanics (28% compared with 27%) than Romney did in 2012.
Constantly criticized and ridiculed by the politically correct segments of the American society and the mainstream media, the “silent majority” of whites (within an impressive arch, ranging from white nationalists, traditional conservatives and populists, to independents and moderate democrats) voted in an extremely disciplined and efficient manner. Those “forgotten men and women” offered a caveat to the unsuspecting Establishment, who attempted to foresee their intention by using corrupted polls, and who constantly ignored them, belittled them, and took them for granted for so many decades.
In a sustained effort to defend its core set of traditional values and principles, the white electorate in the United States has regained its voice. They have prevented for the Rhodesia syndrome to take over the American society in the years to come.
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