Part One: Ian Smith: The Prime Minister of Rhodesia

It's finally time for our episodes on Ian Smith, and the founding of Rhodesia! Buckle up for some racism kids.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
that you and I mean you, my friend, are listening
to right now. Uh, unless you're the not the youth
that I was referring to, in which case I'm not
talking to you right now. Go away, come back later,
you know, and you know, if you've got to come

(00:23):
back later, make sure that you're back in time to
hear from our guests in this episode today. Uh that's
not really a very clean way to go to to introduces.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hello.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm sorry, I don't know. I didn't have a good
intro planned out, and I just started talking and letting,
letting the words follow. But yes, Becker Ramos, welcome to
the show. Do you want to plug your pluggables better
than I?

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Sure. I am a producer here at iHeart, But I
also have my own show called Welcome to al Barrio,
which is a podcast about all things Porto Rican history, news, culture.
I interview really amazing port Rigans that are redefining what
it means to be Puerto Rican all in hope somebody
and every episode you feel a little closer to bord

(01:12):
Agen no matter where you are in the world. And
we have had some amazing guests lately. We literally on Tuesday.
I'm like, when is next Tuesday?

Speaker 1 (01:24):
It'll be Chewy Day.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
If you are a fan of that bunny, you're a
fan of Chewy probably, so tune in. It's gonna be
a great episode.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
That rocks, that rocks cool. And this is my first
episode back after I mean, it's not the first episode
you'll hear me and it's my first episode was sick.
But uh, you guys on the reddit. Ian's a real
person and is very much real.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
We have one episode with our producer Ian instead of Sophie,
and I forgot to do a separate introduction.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Because I was yeah he and Johnson is a superprising producer,
cool Zone Media, really great guy. Can't say enough nice things.
But that is who was filling in for me, and
nobody reminded Robert that he should.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Have separate our producer. Yeah that was that was the subreddit.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I'm safe and that was I mm hmm, well done.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
I fucked up. But you know, well, actually we're going
to talk about people who fucked up today. Absolutely, we're
talking about Becca. What do you know about Rhodesia?

Speaker 3 (02:29):
You know, I'm gonna say.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Not much, not Okay, okay, not much. That's good. They've
come up a few times in previous episodes of our podcast,
like Rhodesia is kind of like a specter haunting the
white supremacist cause for the last like several decades in
the US and abroad, and so we've talked around Rhodesia.

(02:51):
We've talked about like how Soldier of Fortune used to
try to recruit like white racists in America to fight
for the Rhodesian Army in Africa, but we haven't talked
about but Rhodesia directly as like the pure subject of
an episode we talked about that fucking guy who got
wrongfully blamed for doing the anthrax attacks in the US,
who like volunteered the Rhodesian Army. We've talked about We've

(03:13):
talked around Rhodesia a bunch, but this week we're talking
about Ian Smith, who was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia
for its entire existence. Is what you might call an
independent country, although it's never recognized by the rest of
the world as an independent country. But the kind of
TLDR before we get into this is that Rhodesia was

(03:33):
a state in southern Central Africa, that was started as
like a colony of the British Empire and declared its
own independence illegally from Great Britain in the late twentieth
century and fought like a twenty year war against the
black majority of the country, which was fought by like
the white colonists who owned all of the guns, and

(03:54):
eventually they failed and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. And that's like
the long story, short version, Right, So we're going to
talk about how all of that happened this week. Are
you excited, Becca, let's get into it. Yeah, you should be.
You should be. So in the early eighteen eighties, that's

(04:16):
where we're going to start our tail because that's kind
of where the origins of Rhodesia come from. Right, You've
got this this period of time in which the great
powers of Europe are all caught up in what was
became called the Scramble for Africa. Right near the end
of the eighteen eighties, kind of all of these different
European powers that had gotten rich by setting up colonies

(04:37):
all over the world had started to like they'd kind
of run into two horrifying realizations. The first was that
the map was no longer mostly empty, right, like the world.
We knew what was in the world as a general rule,
and we knew like there were no longer blank spots
on the map. In the European mind of those had
never really been blank spots on the map, but as

(04:58):
far as white people were concerned, there used to be
a lot of those. And the other was kind of
only Africa. We know what's going on in Asia, we
know what's going on in the Americas, and in fact,
most of those American colonies that we used to have
have started kicking us out right, but Africa would never
do that to us. And there's this also this understanding
because of the kind of dominant economic understandings of the time,

(05:20):
there's this wide spread belief that like, well, the world,
you're not just like making new more of anything, Like
there's a finite amount of all the resources we have,
and so the countries that want to be great have
to steal as much of the rest of the world
as they can. And when we're out of the rest
of the world to steal the power, positions of the
great powers will be locked. So there's this real panic,

(05:41):
especially among countries like Germany that are like, wait a second,
we'll never get a chance to be bigger than the
British Empire. And obviously the British empires, like, wait a second,
other guys are going to try to like swoop in
and grab enough Africa that they can they can get
bigger than us, Absolutely the fuck not. So everybody starts
rushing to try to grab as much of Africa, like
every part of Africa that wasn't nailed down in the

(06:04):
possession of other Europeans. Right. All this gets sparked when
the Belgians take the Congo, but it it goes on
for decades, and it's it winds up causing most of
the problems in Africa that we're gonna be dealing with
in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Right. Weirdly enough,
if you look back at like and read how a
lot of these imperial thinkers talked about African colonization during

(06:28):
the Scramble, there's this kind of manic paranoia to them
that seems really similar to how like venture capitalists talk
about AI today, where they believe that, like we have,
we've got a we've got a couple of years to
set out who's going to be powerful forever and so
if we fuck up and don't get enough Africa, then
that's the game plan obviously, right.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
I love all the consideration that there were people there
were never on their mind, you know, Like it's this
concept that it's like we must be the rulers of
civilization because we lead civilization as the European majority.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, where the civilizing power. Yeah, And if we don't
get enough of Africa, maybe those those dastardly crowds will
get to do you know, more of civilizing than us.
So part of the idea here and again these are
bound up in all these mercantilist attitudes about how the
economy works back then. They don't fully graft even how
we understand stuff like capitalism today. But part of the

(07:26):
idea that was in vogue among people at the time
is that land is the only resource that really mattered,
and you know, all of the freeland was running out,
and that put a ceiling on how wealthy and powerful
in a European nation could get. In eighteen eighty nine,
the crown granted a royal charter to the British South
Africa Company, which are allowed it to expropriate land and
the vast chunk of Southern Africa that the Brits felt

(07:48):
was ours basically and exploit its resources. Right, So the
Crown gives this guy, Cecil Roads, who's the founder of
the b SAC. Yes, Cecil, we've done.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Episodes of Cecil fucked Cecil.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
They give Cecil, the founder of the British South African Company,
you know, this charter to colonize a bunch of British
South Africa right under the governance of the British South
Africa Country Company. And Rhodes goes in to this area
and he signed some treaties with local leaders, including the
big local leader, this guy named King Lobengula of the Nebele, right.

(08:21):
And the idea of all these treaties is that that
way none of what we're doing will look like an
invasion and a land grab. This is kind of again
the Belgians started this. But the idea is if you
go in and you get like treaties from the locals,
then you're not taking over. Then you're like helping the
locals govern you know, this territory with their consent, and
it doesn't seem as gross. This is always a lie

(08:44):
and the light of this is made is as Cecil
is making these treaties. He's also formed what's called the
Pioneer Column, which is this giant mercenary army, and he
just grabs white fighters from all of the white parts
of British Africa and is like, hey, were you too
late to wind up, you know, becoming a rich farmer
in South Africa. Well maybe you can be a rich

(09:04):
farmer in Rhodiji. You just pick up a gun and
join the Pioneer Column, right, Like, that's the idea here.
We're going to clear these locals out and we're going
to take land. I'm going to give anyone who fights
for me a big chunk of land, you know. So
he sends this column up. The locals get really pissed.
There's a war. We've already covered the First Matabelele War
in our Cecil Roads episodes. It's very bloody and it

(09:27):
ends in eighteen ninety three with British forces winning a
bloody victory because they've got machine guns and stuff. Right.
That first war buys Rhodes's colonizers about three years of
peace before another war called the First Chimorenga breaks out
in eighteen ninety six. That name came from a warrior
who led the Marenga people in a rebellion against the

(09:47):
British a few years earlier, and the Chimaerenga becomes the
shown US people's term for a revolutionary struggle. When we
eventually cover Robert mcgabi, that term will be really like meaningful,
because that's one that he uses a lot. But the
first Chimoringa is this rebellion of all these peoples and
what becomes Rhodigia against Rhodes and his like pioneer settlers.

(10:08):
And it starts when of a religious leader, a guy
named Milimo, convinces a bunch of Nobele and Shona people
that white settlers in the area, who were numbered about
four thousand at this point, were responsible for the drought
that had been hitting for the last couple of like
growing cycles. And obviously they weren't, but they were responsible
for other things that were making the people in the

(10:29):
area unhappy. So these folks band together and they carry
out a series of attacks on like Native police stations,
which are a big thing that they Because there's not
a lot of white people, the white people will find
groups of like black indigenous people who they considered more trustworthy,
and they'll make them, you know, native police, and you'll
get to police this area and we'll give you some money.

(10:50):
So the rebels kill wipe out some of these police
stations and they start attacking like white settlers on their farms,
these like farms full of white families that have taken
land from the indigenous people and have started farming there.
And within the first week of this rebellion, about three
hundred white settlers have been killed. So this really pisses off,
you know, the British South African Company, and it provides

(11:12):
sort of the justification for them to send real forces
into the area, and in very short order the rebellion
is broken. Right, the Shona and the Neballe people they
don't really have the firepower to contrast like any of
these sort of pioneer armies, and they get wiped out
in pretty bloody fashion after this point. So this is

(11:33):
like eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seventh that you have
this war, and none of the white colonial leaders who
are on the ground and becomes Rhodisia at the time,
are stupid enough to believe that like, just because we
beat them in a second war, they're going to be
peaceful forever, right, we had fought a war three years previously.
There's been a lot of history of colonization in South
Africa that evolves, you know, pretty regular war and violence.

(11:57):
So their plan after this eighteen ninety six to seven
war is, let's create a bunch of changes that will
make it impossible for the locals to resist and mass
ever again. Right, We're going to as we set up
the governing for what's going to be a colony and
then a country, our entire legal system is going to
be based around making sure black people can't organize and

(12:18):
resist white people, right like, that's the foundation of Rhodesian
political society. As an article in The Conversation summarizes, the
British South Africa Company introduced commercial agricultural development after discovering
that the colony was not rich in gold. Commercial farming
was dependent on the expropriation of land from the rural population,
so in eighteen ninety eight it encouraged expropriation for commercial

(12:40):
agricultural production of tobacco, maize, and corn. It also set
up a reserve system which aimed to move and concentrate
Shona and Theble populations into so called native reserve lands.
So they're doing the in America, and this is very
consciously they're kind of looking at what I mean. This
is also based on other things the British have done elsewhere,
but they're influenced by what the is doing with reservations,

(13:01):
you know, of the native people of North America. And
that's kind of what Rhodesia starts by doing, is we
need the best farm land, so we're going to kick
people off of it. We'll give them farms, but in
land that they can't really support their population on. And
that'll also allow us to kind of concentrate them in
areas where we can control them better, where they can't

(13:22):
link up together and make better use of their numbers.
So what becomes Southern Rhodesia, which is initially a private
corporate colony of the British South African Company, starts up
in this period of time. The name Rhodesia starts getting
used in eighteen ninety five when they're still fighting these wars,
and it's kind of adopted unofficially before it's adopted officially.

(13:43):
Is the name of this colony. As Charlton Cussons wrote
for a twenty twenty four article in the journal Historical Research,
its purpose was both to line the Coffers of Roads
and his backers in the Cape in London and also
outflank the Boers of the Transvaal Republic. So this is
also this is both like a way for these white
farmers to get rich in an area that hasn't been

(14:05):
settled yet, but it's it's a way to deal with
the fact that this this the South like South Africans
are not they're under like control of the British Empire,
but they're not British, right, They're like they're Boer and
the British don't trust them, and they're like, we're gonna
have to fight these fuckers at some point. It would
be really helpful if we had like a polity, like

(14:25):
a colony on their border that we could use as
a base, but that we could trust. So that's another
part of like they're not just starting Rhodesia in order
to take shit from the indigenous people. They're also starting
Rhodesia in order to make sure the Boers don't control
too much. Right, It's it's both of those things at once.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
It's great Britain they love to colonize.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Historically, they love to colonize, and they also periodically have
to create new colonies to deal with the problems created
by the colonies they created earlier or wound up in
charge of earlier. So the name Rhodesia again, it starts
as kind of a bit of a joke, but it
sticks because of its fundamental honesty, given that it borders
South Africa and comes to share a white supremacist outlook

(15:09):
on government. A lot of people are surprised to hear that.
Initially Rhodesians and South Africans do not get along at
all because Rhodesians are British and South Africans are Boers
and they kind of hate each other for a long time.
In nineteen twenty two, yeah, classic white people in Africa.
In nineteen twenty two, white people in Rhodesia have a

(15:31):
referendum on whether or not to join South Africa. You know,
in the early nineteen hundreds, not long after Rhodesia's establishment,
you have these brutal wars, like this brutal war that
the British Empire fights against the Boers in South Africa.
You've got this Boer War where they really experiment with
concentration camps in a big way for the British in
the first time against these Boer people, and it's this

(15:53):
really hideous conflict. And so not long after that, after
you know, South Africa has been kind of beaten back
into shape, there's this referendum on like do we want, hey, Rhodesians,
do you guys want to be part of South Africa?
And the British are like, absolutely not. We're not Boer, Like,
we're British people. We're part of Britain. We want to

(16:13):
be part of the British Empire. We won't want to
be part of South Africa. Like that's not our kind
of thing. And it's interesting because this is the white supremacists,
the folks whose primary political goals are white supremacy want
to combine Rhodesia and South America because they see, we
need to keep all of the white people in this
area together so that they can pool their military power.

(16:36):
But the Rhodesians, initially they're white supremacist, but they're also
British supremacist before anything else, so they just don't want
to be they don't want to deal with these like
dirty Boers. It's kind of like a big factor in
Rhodesian politics is they're a little too racist to be
friendly to South Africans until they really need it, which

(16:56):
is very funny. You have to be super racist to
be like, oh, South Africins not the right kind of
white sorry, guyside, yeah yeah, And we have our own
apartheid from them, from the Bowers. So one of these
early Rhodesions, these British Rhodesians, is a guy named Jack Smith.

(17:20):
Jock is originally a Scotsman. He immigrates to Rhodesia in
eighteen ninety eight, not long after it becomes a thing,
and he settles in a small town called Selukwe, where
he comes to own and operate a farm and a mine.
He's like got a butcher's shop, and he's good. He's
a good businessman. He's successful. He becomes one of the
biggest men in town in fairly short order. And part

(17:41):
of what makes them successful is he's one of these guys.
There's like a gold rush, right, there's mining and farms
that people are like rushing to fill. And instead of
trying to become a mine owner or a farmer, I mean,
he does a little bit of both, but he primarily
sells things to miners and farm owners to allow them
to like do their bit jobs and that the smart play.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
My question is it is Jock Smith, Yeah, the right
kind of white for them?

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yeah, oh yeah, Jock Smith is the British kind of white.
Well he's Scottish, but that's close enough. Yeah, so Jock, Yeah,
Jock is a successful businessman. He invests wisely and he
makes a lot of money. He comes to own a
business breeding racehorses and becomes one of the leading men
in the growing white settler community of Rhodesia. His young son,

(18:30):
Ian Smith, is born in nineteen nineteen, just three years
before Rhodesia would vote in that referendum, and Ian Smith
is this is the guy. He's going to become the
political leader of Rhodesia. And his life is a very
normal one, and it was like early years are very
normal for kids in colonial British African possessions in this period.

(18:52):
His family background is pretty standard for this sort of thing.
His mom's family came from some money back in England,
and Jock had been you know, he was the sky
men who was kind of hungry for success. So he
he moves to Rhodesia and he makes a lot of
money in Rhodesia and he meets other members of his
wife's family before she's traveled over there, and it's like, hey,
I'm successful here, why don't you send your fancy daughter

(19:16):
to marry me? And like that way I can kind
of marry into a higher status in society, and you'll
get the money that I've made being successful in this
new quality, right Like, that's kind of his background. So
from the beginning, his family are like the first generation
of like aristocrats in Rhodesian society. And that's the whole
that's the whole reason why you want colonies if you're

(19:39):
a country like Great Britain and this time, is that
it gives something for your hungry young men to do
in a way, for them to like climb the ladder
without upsetting the apple cart or pushing anyone out of
power back home, right like that that's a big part
of the appeal. And so colonialism is going to kind
of work perfectly for Ian Smith and his family for
his entire early life, he is these are some of

(20:02):
the people for whom the colonial system is made, and
they love it as a result. This is the water
that Ian Smith grows up waiting in. He never knows
any other way to be right. He loves colonialism.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
As those who benefit do.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
As those whose entire life like they were crafted in
a lab to further this kind of thing. Basically, like,
it's not really weird why he's so loyal to this system.
It's everything he's ever known. His dad is the founding
member of their town's Masonic lodge. His mom runs the
local women's institute. They both get awarded the MBE, which

(20:41):
is like the members of the British Empire, right, for
their various contributions to civic life in Siluque and in
Rhodesia as a whole. And they see this as again
like we're creating a new white civilization to civilize and
clean up this like wild but valuable and untamed land
that's populated sparsely by savages. That's how they're talking about

(21:03):
this to themselves, right, is like we're the first generation
of people who are like making a civilization out of
this like wilderness. Ian would later recall his parents teaching
them quote principles and moral values, the sense of right
and wrong to their children. His father, who Ian recalled
as one of the fairest men I have ever met,
repeatedly told his young son, We're entitled to our half

(21:26):
of the country and the blacks are entitled to theirs, right,
And Ian is going to see this as like and
that means that I'm a fair man. I think that
white people should have half of Rhodesia and black people
should have half of Rhodesia. But at the time he's I.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
Will say that is insane, as people who came into
that space.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
You know what I'm saying, Yeah, like they were there first.
And also at the time he's born, there's like two
hundred something thousand Rhodesians and there's like four million black
people in Rhodesia. So he's like, well, we just want
equal space for both races. It's like, but that means
white people get a lot more, right.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
That's that's not called being fair, that's called being.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Definitionally.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
You know, it's entitlement.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, but that's like, that's the big Rhodesian thing is entitlement.
That's like sense of like we are here, like we
own this in a special way because like we came
and stole it very recently. So Ian Smith was again
by birth African. He's born in Africa and he's raised there,
and he's gonna spend his whole life there, but he's

(22:31):
not raised to see himself as an African. First, people
like Ian's parents very much considered themselves citizens and part
of the British world. And this idea of the British
world is a nebulous concept, and it's distant to us
today because people don't really talk about that the British
world today like they did back then. But this is
still the period where the sun never sets on the

(22:53):
British Empire, and so we need to we need to
like think about this concept a little bit because it's
very influential to everything that comes later. So I'm going
to quote Charlton Cousins again. Writing in the journal Historical Research,
Carl Bridge and Kent Fetterwich made the argument that the
British World was a phenomenon of mass migration, where migrants
found they could transfer into societies with familiar cultural values.

(23:16):
In doing so, these settlers and migrants created a global
community based on the commonality of values in which people
could enjoy a liberal, pluralistic polity regardless of their location.
Whiteness was a dominant element, but people of color across
the world adapted a British identity out of conviction and necessity, right,
And that's a really important point because these people are

(23:38):
any in as a white supremacist, but they're not necessarily,
especially not at the start, white nationalists, because that's not
the concept of the British world. The British world always
includes a lot of non white people, even as citizens, right,
not always as people who are like don't have any
legal recognition, because there's a lot of like non white

(24:00):
people who are British like citizens of the British Empire
in this period too, which again doesn't you know that
it's not white supremacist and not racist, it's just not
white nationalists in the same sense that we use that
word today. And so there's both this idea that, oh,
there's this beauty of anywhere in the world British people
are it's a little piece of Britain. So you can
pick up and move from Scotland to Africa to you know,

(24:23):
Myanmar or Burma that as they're calling at the time,
and you're still a citizen of the British world or India,
and you're still in the British world. And that's really
cool to a lot of people. But at the same time,
what you don't have as much in all of these
other corners. It's always a factor the fact that white
people are out numbered, but there's also in other different

(24:44):
parts of the British Empire, there's more idea or concessions
to the idea that other people are parts of the
British Empire. In Rhodesia, there's both this understanding that we're
part of this world wide thing, but also we're really
badly outnumbered here by black peace people like ten to
one or more by the time Ian comes up. And
so there's also this kind of bunker mentality that merges

(25:07):
with this sense of the British world in the mind
of white Rhodesian people, right. And so the upside of
Rhodesian society for white people is there's the sense of egalitarianism.
Everyone who's white is equal, which is not a factor
in England, right, there's a lot of class stratification, whereas
in Rhodesia, doesn't matter how you're born, if you're a
white person, we're all equal because there's not enough of us, right,

(25:31):
And that's a big pull to a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Why do they think, why do they think that it's egalitarianism?

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Like what forces white people are equal for white people.
It's equal, right. In other words, if you're born a
poor white guy and you move to Rhodesia, you don't
have to feel ashamed that you're not born into the
upper class because members of the aristocracy will treat you
with a basic level of respect they wouldn't take because
they need you, because we all have to band together

(26:00):
to hold the line, right. So it's a lot that's
part of the appeal to these parts of the British
world that aren't really British is I can go there
and gain respect as a white British person, but also
like I have to do that by holding the line
against this greater number of non white people. Right. There's

(26:21):
this bunker mentality in Rhodesia that's also merged with this
sense of the British world, right, And that's there's also
this idea that like, we're building something great, we're like
saving the world in a way by creating these cults,
we're civilizing this chunk of the world too. So there's
this part of like, I'm not just seeking benefit to myself,

(26:42):
I'm helping to improve humanity at the same time. And
that's really appealing to a specific kind of guy that
makes the obvious dangers seem tolerable and inequalities of daily
life in Rhodesia makes sense, right, the fact that you're
viewing it all this way. And so by the early
time twentieth century, Rhodesians have developed a reputation among colonial

(27:04):
communities in Africa as being quote more British than British.
And here's what Ian Smith later wrote about that idea.
That was how we were all brought up and taught
to live. When you walked past the Union Jack, and
it was in the forefront of most buildings of any consequence,
you looked at it and admired it. All formal occasions
commenced with the national anthem, with everyone standing at attention,

(27:24):
and if you move there would be a restraining hand
on your shoulder. Right, this is intense propaganda. These kids,
white kids like Ian are being well, yeah, but they're
being raised not just to believe that like they're better,
they're engaged in this noble, heroic, sacred project of civilizing,

(27:45):
but also like you're a part of this thing that
will protect you from these obvious dangers that you see
staring out at you every single day. Right, And so
that makes young white kids who are deeply, unceasingly loyal
to this idea of the British world right and this

(28:07):
idea of Rhodesia, and they're going to fight very hard
to maintain these things. This is kind of this ideological
training is going to make perfectly loyal soldiers to go out,
who are going to want to go out and push
the frontier. And that's how Ian grows up. That's how
he describes himself as a child. Right, we'll talk more
about that, but first here's some ASTs. Yeah, we're back,

(28:36):
so I want to read a little quote. Another quote
from Ian Smith. This is later from his autobiography, how
he kind of talks about his own ideological makeup as
a little kid. This is how he grows up, believing
the world works, law and order in your society, discipline
at your school, play the game by your fellow man,
you cannot let your team down, and then the final analysis,
it may even be necessary to die for your cause.

(28:58):
Those are the conditions under which you lived under, which
is a member of the British Empire, you were privileged
to live, right, These are they're very much kind of
see themselves as like modern spartans. In a lot of ways,
including like we've got all these helots we've got to
keep down, right.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, it's pathological propaganda.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
And you have to do that if you want to
maintain an empire. Right, this is part of the machinery
of empire, is you need white kids like this who
grow up surrounded and thus really both dedicated to their
fellow white people and also with this kind of just
gut understanding that I have to be willing to fight
at all times because I'm surrounded, right, Otherwise they're going

(29:41):
to take away what's mine which I took from them,
or my parents took from them. Right. But yeah, so
Ian grows up this way. He describes himself as a
pretty average child, and my only quibble with his autobiography
is the fact that, like, we don't get a lot
about his early childhood. He opens his aobiography with two
full pages talking about how badass and amazing his parents were,

(30:04):
like listing all of the awards his mummy and daddy got,
all of the clubs that they started, all of the
cool things that they did, and he doesn't talk anything
about his own childhood. There's nothing in here about his
early life. The first three pages are almost exclusively about
his mom and dad, and all he says about his
childhood is that it was pretty average and he did
well in math and science as opposed to the arts

(30:26):
and classics. He doesn't talk at all about his own youth.
He's only interested in what his parents did. And I
kind of read from that this is a kid who
grows up worshiping his parents, right and kind of threw
them worshiping the British Empire. But he doesn't see anything
as important about himself as a child because he is
All he's ever doing is thinking about how amazing his

(30:46):
mom and dad were and now he has to live
up to their example. That's kind of out what I catch,
at least by analysis of his work. So he is
not really going to talk at all about his own
childhood until he starts playing sports in high school, and
then he we have pages about how good he is
at rugby and how good he is at all these

(31:07):
that I'm not going to quote for you. You don't
need to hear this old dead racist talk about how
good he was at sports in high school, but it
is noteworthy. That's probably.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Most of you are You know who you are?

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Yeah, I mean I don't know. I'm sure he was
good in fucking colonial sports in his class of like
ten other white kids. Right, it's also not the I
don't know in that situation.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Yeah, exactly, sports looks very different.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Then we only have.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
His word for it. And you know what, I don't
trust Ian Smith.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
But you know, I bet it is easier to be
like the best kid in your school at basketball when
your school is like twelve other rich white kids. Like
of course, yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Robert, you would be the Lebron James of that high school.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
I would be. I would have been the Lebron, yes,
because I'm taller than most of these Rhodesian kids were.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
So. And yet this is though, one of the things
I noticed, because I thought it was weird at first
going through Ian Smith's out of biographiography and being like,
he only talks about the sports he played as a kid.
We don't get anything about Like, he doesn't give us
any specific details of like things his dad told him
early experiences in childhood that made him think about the
way his society was ordered, the first time he saw

(32:19):
a black person working in a field. We don't get
any of that from Ian Smith. What we do get
is in talking about sports. And you see that in
a lot of memoirs by right white Rhodesians when they'll
talk about, like how before Rhodesia fell, before those you know,
the natives took it over and made Zimbabwe and destroyed
the wonderful country we had, they'll talk about what life
was like, and nearly all of those anecdotes are just

(32:40):
about like sporting. They'll just talk about polo and hunting.
That's like every Rhodesian account of life in Rhodesia is
like polo and hunting and being served by servants. And
I found that kind of weird until he read a
piece in City Journal by a guy named Theodore Dalrymple
who moved to Rhodesia in like the sixties or seventies
and worked as a doctor there, right, And he's working

(33:01):
there as a doctor while the country is falling apart.
So he's a foreigner who comes there to work as
like an emergency medicine basically, and he gets to see
the country as an outsider. And so I read his
recollections and there's a piece in there that gave me
pause because I think it made some of Smith's stuff
make a little more sense. To me, And so this
is Dalrymple talking about being a doctor in Rhodesia. We

(33:23):
worked hard. I have never worked harder. The luxury of
our life was this that once our work was done,
we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves.
The rest of our time and our most beautiful surroundings
was given over to friendship, sports, study, hunting, whatever we wished.
Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling
inequality and social difference. The staff who freed us of
life's little inconveniences lived in existence that was opague to us.

(33:46):
Though they had quarters only a few yards from where
we lived. Their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours.
Their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us. Does
that make sense what Theodore is saying in terms of
like making the fact that all of these Rudesion is
only right about like playing sports and hunting makes sense
that their life isn't anything else. They don't have it.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
The way he writes it, though, is so like dissonant
of the experience they're putting onto the black people that
are native to that land, where it's like they are
doing this service to us to free us of the
burden of work, but then also being like, their dreams
are different than ours, and it's like, well, you robbed
them of their dreams because they have to do all

(34:28):
the hard work for you.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Dalrymple is saying that because I because he's not a Rhodesian.
He's saying like, because he calls it startling inequality, right,
And he's saying that, like, I recognize because I had
to recognize that we only didn't have to deal with
chores because all of these people were like forced to
work for us, and we didn't like we had I
had no idea what they wanted because they're not even
allowed to talk to us. I think that's what Theodore

(34:50):
is saying.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yes, I guess I was saying. The dissentance was coming
from his his wording of the use of opague.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
I guess, yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's it's
it's deliberately made O pay because they were not supposed
to be talking. And that's the thing Dalrymple recognizes. But
Ian Smith and guys like him never do. They never
wonder was the reason why your entire life until the
war started was just like hunting and playing because you

(35:16):
never had to be a real person. All you had
to do was be on vacation most of your life
while other people worked for you. Right, that's the white
Rhodesian lifestyle. When people talk about the glorious Rhodesian lifestyle,
it's having other people do all the work for them.
It's the same as the Confederacy. Right when people when
you get this like lost cause narrative about like, oh,
but things were so different than people were so much

(35:39):
nicer and more genteel in the Old South, it's like, well,
because they didn't have to do stuff, it's because other
people did all the work.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
The way that you were not to be bravo pilled,
but the way you were reading that text was very
Southern charm esque.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yes, it is.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
It is very much that where these very rich, old
socialized refuse to acknowledge the lend that they're on. And
then also speaking that way, where like I love art
and culture and these things, and it's like on the
backs of the slave labor that is this land.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Yeah, are you really cultured if you're able to like
fucking learn to play the piano because you never have
to cook your own food or what exactly right, if
that's the reason you're cultured, is that really cultured? Or
are you just a blood drenched demagogue? Right? You know exactly? So,
uh yeah, And that's that's the thing, because I think
Dalrymple is kind of like recognizing that as an outsider,

(36:32):
And that's the thing. Ian is never going to examine
or understand about his own life. Right, So he gets
sent away to boarding school for his secondary education and
Evan's awards for rugby and the one hundred yard dash
because again, his parents aren't Rhodesian parents don't raise their kids.
They like occasionally give them lectures and then like their
black nannies, raise them until it's time for them to
go to boarding school, right, Like, that's how a rich

(36:56):
Rhodesian family raises their children. His own only detail recollections
of his childhood involved sporting events. He goes to college
in South Africa because Rhodesia didn't really have a college yet,
and he gets to work on a degree in commerce
and things are going well for Ian Smith, but he's
not going to get a chance to finish that degree
right away because near the end of nineteen thirty nine,

(37:18):
World War Two rears its ugly head and Great Britain
is going to be one of the first powers to
get involved. Now, we don't have Ian describing his own
reaction to the outbreak of hostilities. We don't have him
talking about like how he felt about any of this,
but we do have him writing about how many of
the how many of the young men in his hometown
were eager to fight just to have something to do. Right,

(37:39):
there's like nothing to do in Rhodesia. It's really boring
because I don't have to work. Other people do all
the work, but like all I have to do, Like
life is just kind of boring, and war seems more
exciting than like playing sports back at home. All Right,
I get a chance to fulfill my patriotic duty. And
I've been raised to feel like I'm a member of
this great society that's now being threatened at war, and

(38:00):
I want a chance to fight for it too. That's
another part of what's going on for Ian. So, because
he's a special boy, he's not going to join the
regular military. He's like at the child of special parents,
and he feels like he deserves the sexiest job in
the military at the time, which is fighter pilot. So
in the winter of nineteen forty, he travels to the
Rhodesian capital, Salisbury to meet with a contact at the

(38:22):
Air Force whose name that he had been given is.
All he writes is that, like, I was given this
guy's name and I went to meet with him, and
he got me like a spot in the Air Force
training academy. I think he has like a family or
a school connection. Right, this is a rich guy sort
of thing. Like he gets the job everyone wants in
the military because he comes from a family who's something,

(38:43):
but he gets it. He drops out of college to fight.
This does not seem to have bothered him. Full of
patriotic fervor. He was posted to a training wing in
Bulawayo alongside British and Australian cadet groups. The Rhodesians are
the only ones without a uniform because there'd been no
need for a Rhodesian Air Corps before the war, right,
So like they don't even have like an outfit to

(39:04):
wear it first. They're so like alien to the idea
of having an independent military of any kind because they're
just British. Right. So after training, he joins the RAF
and he gets posted to Egypt and then Lebanon. Where
he grows comfortable flying. The war came for him in
a belated fashion, but when it did, it hit hard.
Over the course of World War Two, he was shot

(39:25):
down twice in combat, the first time in North Africa,
and he was badly injured in this first crash.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Incredible he survived twice being shot down twice twice.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Real Harrison Ford levels of luck here yes as a
writer for the AP noted in their eventual obituary of Smith.
Plastic surgery to fix scars from the first crash, paralyzed
the right side of his face, giving him a sinister,
expressionless appearance. So for the rest of his life he's
this man who can only glare right. That's like a
big part of his is like, especially when he gets

(39:57):
into politics. He's really like scary to a lot of
people because he can't smile or even move his face
at all. It's just like locked in this stony position
because he got horribly injured in the plane crash. It's
a very like Bond villain kind of origin story. So
he gets better from this first crash and he gets
posted to Europe where he gets shot down a second time,

(40:19):
this time over Italy, and he winds up. He has
like a very cool World War Two. He meets and
embeds with a group of Italian partisans after he gets
shot down, and he like fights with them until he
gets like rescued and Italy is conquered. On the whole
great World War two story, right, you know. He does
his bit, no real notes there, and he returns home

(40:40):
to Africa after the war and finishes his degree at
Rhodes University. So he comes home a war hero. He
gets elected when he's back at college in South Africa
spokesman for veteran students. So there's like a veteran students
group of the kids did to go away to fight
World War Two, and he becomes their spokesman at Rhodes University.
And this is going to be like his first experience

(41:00):
in politics, Like he has to get basically elected to
this job. And so he realizes from that, like I
kind of like campaigning, I kind of like politics. I
think that might be the thing for me. You know,
my family's rich. I just became like a war hero.
I have this kind of gravitas from that. Maybe that's
what I'm going to do the rest of my.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Roy from succession, He's like Ian Smith was interested in
politics at an early age.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
What experiences.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
My family's rich.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
That sounds and I got shut down.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, he's like a colt's that's the and like low key.
I look them up. They kind of look the same.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
So once he graduates, he goes back to Rhodesia and
he does what all affluent white men are supposed to
do in Rhodesia. He buys land and he establishes himself
as a farmer. In Ian's case, this initially meant tobacco.
Most farming in Rhodesia was done by black people. At
its peak, the country had sixty two hundred white farming
family who employed some three hundred and fifty thousand black

(42:02):
laborers to work their fields. Right, So that should tell you,
like how much work is being done by these white
farmers who always brag about being great farmers and how
productive they were, how much better the country did. They're
not farming. Each farming family, on average, had fifty to
sixty black laborers, right, They're not doing real farming work.

(42:25):
They're telling people what to do while they wear white
linen suits and drink julips. You know, like absolutely not. Yeah,
I cannot exaggerate the degree to which Rhodesians are not farmers.
White Rhodesians are not farmers. Now. In his autobiography, Ian
doesn't discuss black workers on his farm at all. He

(42:45):
doesn't acknowledge that they exist. He talks about his farm
and how well his farm does, but we don't get
any discussion about the people who like lived there. He
makes in his whole autobiography, I only found one brief
reference to the people who lived on his land before
he bought it, and this is that reference. Our land
had been utilized over decades as a squatting camp for workers.

(43:07):
On the main section of Aberfoil Ranch. There had been
indiscriminate plowing without the necessary measures for soil protection, and
uncontrolled wood cutting, not only for fuel, but even more
devastating for building houses under the traditional Poland dagga system.
And that's like his issue is, Oh, these squatters who
were like workers for this nearby farm have been plowing

(43:27):
the land and ripping up trees to build their houses,
and they build their houses like the wrong way, so
they waste all these beautiful trees, and they're damaging the soil.
And he writes about them like their squatters. They're these
workers who are like wrongly on my land, damaging it
as opposed to like but like before the Aberfoil ranch,
they just lived there and they probably got kicked off
of wherever their village was because a white guy wanted

(43:50):
a ranch, which is why they had to move over
to your land before you owned it, which is the
only place that they could live. And then you moved
in and there you're like, oh, these guys are bad
for the bad for the environ They're bad for the climate.
Look at how bad they are for the trees. They're
destroying trees. Better kick them off, right. They're not thinking
at all about the fact that these are people who
live here. They're thinking about them as like, well, I

(44:10):
own this beautiful land and these people are making it ugly.
They're bad for the land, right, the people who live here.
That's the Rhodesian attitude in a nutshell. Yeah he sucks, Yeah,
so that's pretty cool. He doesn't like acknowledge, you know,
the fact that the people needed houses or needed to

(44:31):
live there, and he doesn't mention what happens to these
people who would relied on his land for housing materials
after he kicks them off. He just moves from talking
about forcing them off to expressing glee that there were
still some areas and sound natural condition, and the important
fact was we were able to arrest further deteriorations. So
again he doesn't talk about how did you make these
people leave? What happened to them later? Where did they go?

(44:54):
Did they ever find housing? Again, he's just like, don't worry.
We were able to stop them from damaging the land further,
and then I was able to fix it. And then
comes this very telling line. All land requires dedicated people
who believe in that well known maxim that we do
not inherit our land from our fathers. We borrow it
from our great grand children, and each generation is honor

(45:16):
bound to pass it on in better condition than it
was when it was received. I didn't inherit, We didn't
steal our land from the people who owned it before.
I'm borrowing it from my kids.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
And those people never get it back.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
Oh no, absolutely not, absolutely not. We have to pass
off the land in better condition, which means with less
black people on it than it was when we received it. Right,
Like you can both tell how like white supremacists today
look at and read Ian Smith and are like, what
a good man, a decent truly a conservationist. He cared

(45:53):
about the environment, you know, as opposed to be like,
but what about like the people? But hey, like there
were people there, Hey like this was just like a
farm forever for one white guy, Like this was like
a community, and he forced him off so that he
could have his nice farm. Maybe that's not actually being
good for the environment. Maybe he's just a tyrant. I
don't know. And a lot of Rhodesia works this way, right.

(46:15):
You can find all manner of lovely Rhodesian childhood memoirs
by white people, all of which act as if white
people just kind of stumbled upon Rhodesia when it was
empty and started civilizing it. Right, that's the official attitude
as to how they got their land. There's a good
example of this in the website Window on Rhodesia, which
was written by a former Rhodesian citizen named Colin Wire.

(46:36):
It's like an old fucking GeoCities looking website, but it's
still up today, and so you can get an idea
of how Rhodesians justified the state of affairs to themselves.
And here's a quote from Colin's memoir, it must be
remembered that the whites really did settle in a country
which was all but empty, probably no more than about
half a million people in a country three times the
size of England. To get that in perspective, the city

(46:58):
of Oxford has a population of about one hundred and
sixty thousand people in eighteen ninety. The native population of
what became Rhodesia was only about three times this. But
as Rhodesia is three times the size of England, a
fair impression may be gained by imagining that people of
Oxford is the only people living in the whole of England,
but living in small, scattered communities with large areas uninhabited.
This was the situation whites found in Rhodesia. First off,

(47:21):
it wasn't They fought two different wars just to clear
off the people who had been there before they started farming.
And second, half a million people is twice as many
Rhodesians as existed when Ian Smith was born. That's what
they're saying, is like, the inconsequential number of black people
that were living here when we founded it, right, is

(47:41):
twice as many as the number of white people who
existed at the height of Rhodesia. Also just because.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
There weren't enough people. In your mind, what makes you
think having more people on that land is good?

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Simp The environment was empty? Is empty? It was empty?

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Good?

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Yeah. In fact, it seems like Rhodesia are the worst
for the land because by the time, like if there's
only half a million people living there, when Rhodesians start
fluttering it and killing them, and then by the time
the seventies come around, there's three hundred thousand Rhodesians and
four and a half or six million black people living
in Rhodesia, then that means that like the land has
gotten more crowded under the Rhodesian state, exactly right, if

(48:20):
that's what you're judging it by. So yeah, there's a
lot that's flawed about this attitude. Speaking of things that
are flawed, my sponsors aren't. They've never made a mistake
ever except for sponsoring me. I guess fuck, I don't know,

(48:45):
and we're back, okay, So uh yeah, we're talking about Rhodesia.
So again, this attitude that like it was empty when
we got there. Africans fought constantly against the expansion of
company Tarot story from the earliest days. They never just
seated this land. It was never empty, and as the
territory grew more populated, it always had way more black

(49:08):
people than white people, who always enjoyed a very different
set of rights. And this happened because white Rhodesians needed
more poor black workers. That's another important point is when
Rhodesians started colonizing this area, they deliberately set up their
legal system to bring in more poor black people because
they needed them to do work they didn't want to do.

(49:31):
As one British South Africa Company report concluded, cheap and
abundant native labor also had to be provided to attract
settlers from kinder environments, and this meant creating artificial inducement
to the Africans to leave their own farming on an
already even larger scale than was necessary to provide labor
for the mines. That's an official company document about the

(49:51):
founding of Rudisia saying that like we had to make
it untenable for people to keep living on their own
farms so that they would work ours and our minds.
We had to ruin the lives of a huge number
of black people so that they would become impoverished and
have no choice but to work for us. That was
a conscious part of creating Rhodesia to ensure that white

(50:14):
people had their labor supply. In eighteen ninety six, the
company imposed a native hut tax on black people living
in the area. And this is basically, if you're not
in a white person house, you have to pay a
tax on your hut. That's what they that's what it's called.
And that means that like you have to work. Even
if you're like making enough food in your small farm

(50:35):
to feed yourself, it's no longer enough because now you've
got this tax to pay, so you have to go
get a job somewhere, which means you don't have time
to farm to feed your family, which means your family's
going to have to move with you and become impoverished
and spend the rest of their lives for generations working
for white people because you've stolen their ability to support
themselves from them. Right, that's how the Rhodesian state is constructed.

(50:57):
In nineteen oh two, this there's a pass law law
that gets added. So in nineteen eighteen ninety six, black
people start having to pay this tax for their houses
and in nineteen oh two, they have to start carrying
around a pass and this restricts them to only living
in certain areas of the country. And the reason for
this past law is then you can tell people, if
we know, oh, we need more workers in this region

(51:18):
and there's too many of them, too many black people
down here where we don't need them, we can make
it illegal for them to live where they've been living.
So they have to move where they have no support
and no community and work in order to avoid starving
for white people in area where we need more of them.
That's why the pass system comes into effect. It's to
destroy and break up communities and create artificially a labor

(51:42):
force who have no ability to resist or agitate for
better conditions. The past system ensures that workers have no leverage.
They can't even vote with their feet and leave to
a different part of the country to get a better
job somewhere. Right. This is slavery and all but name.
That's the system that Rhodesha Bild holds up over the
years with all of these different laws. In nineteen oh four,

(52:04):
the tax has increased to about a pound sterling per
native home. Since workers made about four to twelve pounds
a year. This was like a thirty percent income tax
that you're paying just for the home you already own.
A legal study published by the International Commission of Jurists
in nineteen seventy six summarizes how the Rhodesian system developed
from here. From these early policies favoring land expropriation and

(52:27):
the creation of a manual labor force grew the vast
network of contemporary legislation which is enforced in Southern Rhodesia.
Its primary purpose is to formalize and maintain a division
between the races, a division which largely dictates the range
of jobs open to a man, the education his children
will receive, the wages he is paid, where he can live,
how he may behave to his fellows and to members
of another race, and what civil and political freedoms he

(52:50):
may be permitted to enjoy. So when we talk about
why are there so many more people in this area
by the time of the seventies, right, why are there
more than half a million people living here, and why
are like the entire black population so impoverished, It's because
the legal system was created to make them slaves. That's
the system. The white people are the only ones voting

(53:10):
in Rhodesia created right, and the British government largely leaves
Rhodesian voters to figure out their own shit. Right. They
are generally given complete control over their own internal affairs
by the British Empire. In nineteen twenty two, Rhodesia had
become an official colony, but British law gave it a
unique disposition. It's a self governing colony which they don't

(53:32):
really grant anyone else right that like, Rhodesia has this
unique position because they're more British than the British. From
this point on, the governor of the colony is referred
to as the Prime Minister of Rhodesia. And while England
retained the power to veto any law proposed by the
Rhodesian Parliament, she never acted on this. It was generally
understood for most of the pre and immediately post war

(53:54):
period that the Rhodesian Parliament would ask British Parliament basically
before we passed they passed any laws governing their African subjects. Right.
The British government doesn't want to get embarrassed by like
Rhodesia putting out any laws that sound too much like
the apartheid laws South Africa has, so when they want
to push through a new law to govern their African subjects,

(54:16):
they have to get approval of the Commonwealth Secretary first,
which is why these laws are never framed as oh,
black people don't have this right. It's more framed as no, no,
there's at tax on huts because they're more they're less
environmentally friendly, the kind of houses the natives use. That's
why there's a tax on them. And oh, we have
this past system to make sure that they're not like becoming,
you know, just lazy or homeless or like filling up

(54:39):
the streets in some area. That's why we have the
past system. It's not meant to limit what they can do.
And that's how all of these laws are kind of
justified and stopped from sounding like embarrassingly racist to the
mother government.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Yeah, question, it's how so they think they have this
like illusion of autonomy, but yet they're crying back to
Daddy Britain on everything.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
Sample is that kind of no, no, no, They have to
get like that. That's the deal is the Crown won't
stop them from governing their own society, but they have
to ask that, hey, we've got this rule that's kind
of racist. How should we reframe it so it doesn't
cause bad pr for you guys. They don't want it great.
The British government in London doesn't want to hear Rhodesia

(55:27):
passed a law saying that black people can't be out
at the same time as white people. So instead they're like,
what if we pass this law saying that, like there's
a past system that determines where you're allowed to work,
you know, based on criminal problems that we've had, and
like then the crown will be like, Okay, that's different enough,
that doesn't sound racist. You guys can do that, right,
That's why they're referring back. London is happy to let

(55:48):
Rhodesia do what they want to do, but doesn't want
to deal with the blowback of getting yelled at by
the international community for having a white supremacist slave state
as part of the Commonwealth. Right, that's what's happening here.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
So we'll help you be racist, but like we're not
with you.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
We're not with you, and you've got to like walk
it back past us, right, you gotta let us like
pencil in like noa, noa, no. We got to change
some wording. We don't want to get in trouble over this, right.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
They're fucking wordsmithing their racism.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
Oh yeah yeah, like that's a tails all this time, right,
I mean if you think.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Everywhere, yeah, that's especially British racism. And there's this there's
this expectation Rhodesia that because the call the Crown has
given us everything we've wanted, eventually we'll be allowed to
get our full independence and will gain dominion status. Right,
And so there's this understanding by white Rhodesians that Britain

(56:43):
is going to let us become an independent country and
call us a dominion at some point while still having
minority rule, so we will never have to be a
full democracy. Dominion status is what Canada had. I mean,
technically it's still a dominion, right, but like a dominion
in the Commonwealth is thing where you're basically your own country,
but the queen is still your sava or and YadA YadA,

(57:05):
Like there's some stuff like that. Rhodesians think they're going
to get that and they're not going to have to
give black people to vote, right, That is the understanding
of right white Rhodesians coming into like the sixties is
because we're so special. Once we're ready, Great Britain will
make us a dominion and we won't have to give
up any of our political power, right Like, that's that's

(57:26):
the understanding that white Rhodesians have, is that like, as
long as we don't embarrass mom and dad, one day
we'll get to be an independent western country and we'll
never have to give up everything we've taken. Everybody, Robert here,
I didn't want to make it really clear, and this
isn't really change much of what I've said. Technically, or
there was like a vote that black citizens in Rhodesia

(57:47):
could get, and that franchise had expand a tiny bit
over the amount of time that Rhodesia existed. But at
the peak of like the black franchise in Roodji, you
were talking about like eleven or twelve thousand people who
are able to vote out of a popular of like
four or five million. So I think it's just more
accurate to say that they essentially did not have the vote. Right.

(58:07):
That is what Rhodesians want. That is the animating understanding
belief of their society is that because we're so special,
we will always be part of the British world. But
we're never going to have to hand over power to
the Blacks. Right. That's Rhodesian like civilization in a nutshell.
And Ian Smith is a huge backer of this idea.

(58:30):
He's very bullish on becoming a dominion. When he returns
home from the war, you know, he doesn't just start farming,
but he gets involved in politics because he knows this
change is coming, and he knows Rhodesia is going to
be an independent country soon and he wants to be
one of its founding fathers. Right. He realizes that we're
in our last probably ten or twenty years of being
a colony. And if I make myself a top man

(58:52):
in Rhodesian politics now, when we become an independent country,
I'll be part of the ruling class of Rhodesia as
it becomes a modern state. Right, that's what Smith is
looking at. That's how he sees his future. By the
end of the nineteen forties and by the end of
the forties start of the fifties, Rhodesia has become. This
is if you want to know, had the Confederacy, if
it had the US Civil War either not happened, or

(59:14):
had the Confederacy somehow survived into the twentieth century. What
would it have looked like? That's Rhodesia, right like that,
that's your best guess for how it would have looked
as Rhodesia. For roughly fifty years, the colonial government of
Rhodesia had sold or awarded all of the best growing
land to white men. Rhodesian defenders will often point out

(59:34):
that Rhodesha's land was again split up evenly between white
and black populations, but those populaces were nowhere close to
equivalent in size. As New York Times reporter Henry cam
noted in a nineteen seventy six dispatch quote, whites lived spaciously,
mainly in individual houses with a lot of gardens separating
them from their neighbors. Car ownership is so high that
Salisbury's public buses seem segregated because only blacks appear to

(59:57):
use them. Skilled labor is the lowest job category held
by white adults, and even they have, for the most part,
domestic servants two per families. Seems par for the course.
Fourteen percent of the total black labor force is in
domestic employment, a huge proportion. So you have this as
number one they've kind of recreated, like the dream American
suburb society. All the white people drive, the only people

(01:00:21):
on buses are are black or other like non white
people in a handful of poor whites. But white people
have cars and big gardens and a lot of space,
and even poor people have servants, you know, whereas the
black people primarily exist to like work their properties and
their lands. White people earned on average about eleven times

(01:00:41):
as much as their black counterparts. And even that statistic
underplaces the scope of inequality in Rhodesia because so much
of the white population were people for whom the very
concept of working for money was a bad dream. Right,
most of these white people again, as they say it,
like skilled labor is like the most shame full thing
to do as a white person in Rhodesia because you

(01:01:03):
most of them don't have to. And you can even Ian,
you can tell this is not a guy as much
as he brags about being a successful farmer, like he
never has to think about money as like a limited
thing that he worked for. Money is a thing that
comes to him because of the people who work for
his family, right, Like that's the only way life ever
works for Ian Smith. The fact that there are people

(01:01:27):
to this day who call this guy like a farmer
and a good man and a hard worker is so
absurd on its face. This guy never has to work.
In nineteen forty eight, he's elected to the Southern Rhodesian Assembly,
becoming a minister of the Rhodesian Parliament at age twenty nine,
and initially he backs the Liberal Party, which is the
party in opposition at the time. That's not going to

(01:01:48):
last long, but the same year he gets into parliament,
he meets a South African school teacher named Janet Watt
and the two were soon wed. Over the following years,
Ian Smith and his wife will have two sons and
a daughters. He becomes a leading figure in this plan
that like white Rhodesians start to craft in the mid century,
which is it's probably a little too obvious for just

(01:02:10):
us to say, we want Southern Rhodesia to be an
independent country governed by white people. So instead there's Northern Rhodesia,
which is another colony that's majority black with a tiny
number of white people governing it. And then there's this
other British colony in Nyassa Land, which is like Malawi today,
and they're all governed by this tiny number of white

(01:02:32):
people at the top, and the tiny number of the
white people the top, and all of these colonies are like,
what if we put all of these three things together
and pretend we're an independent nation called the Central African Federation,
and we try to get independence as a federation of
these three countries, and we just kind of pretend that
it's not just white people in charge. That's what they're

(01:02:53):
going to try for a few years, from like the
mid fifties to nineteen sixty. They're going to be like,
what if we pretend we're trying to start our own
Central African Federation as opposed to what we just want
to keep Rhodesia for ourselves. And that's Smith is going
to back this play initially. And this is the reason
why they have to do this is everyone knows by
the fifties decolonization is coming. White rule is ending in

(01:03:17):
colonial Africa, right, and so they're all trying to figure
out how can we continue to keep everything we have
without pissing off the international community, because it's also become
kind of gross to want to keep a tiny number
of white people in charge of like a whole country.
In Africa. That's not a popular thing over in like

(01:03:37):
the general like the rest of the world, and so
they're trying to figure out how to like dress this
up at a hide what they attend to do. And
Ian Smith is going to back the Central African Federation
is the best way to kind of obscure and hide
their real goals in order to gain power. And so
that's the story. That's what we've got for part one,
and part two we'll talk about what happens with that

(01:03:59):
and the Rhodesian bush War that starts as a result
of this, and how the global far right gets pulled
into all of it. But that's part two. You want
to plug your pluggles before we roll out.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
Yes, so thank you for having me you guys, I
will see you in part two. But you know, after
you listen to part two, after you listen to this,
please go check out Welcome to a Barrio. You can
find us on all streaming platforms for podcasts, and you
can find our socials at Welcome to a Barrio on
Instagram and you can find me at bexb ECCS, Ramos

(01:04:31):
on all platforms.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Excellent, We'll check that out. Find her on all those
platforms and find us in part two. We'll keep talking,
see you, We'll keep talking. Bye.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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