Ian Smith’s memoir of the handover of Rhodesia to Soviet-backed Mugabe is a depressing account. It also strikes a little too close to home to read about a naively pro-Western country being handed over by Kissinger and Co to Russians and their North Korean toadies. Maybe I should have waited to read the book to avoid being haunted by the similarities.
After reading Bitter Harvest, I’m not sure to what extent there actually was a Cold War. The British and the Americans seemed hell-bent on handing large swatches of the world into Soviet control. But at least I now have an answer to a question that puzzled me for years. The USSR I grew up in was mismanaged, bumbling and inept. Having physically eliminated most people with well-functioning brains and terrorized the rest into submission, it was led by geriatric morons who couldn’t tell their ass from their elbow even in their better years. How, then, could a country of glorified mediocrity end up controlling half of the world?
Well, now I know. Everything was done by the supposed opponents of the Soviets to strengthen the Soviet cause.
Ian Smith’s book is very long and extremely detailed. Often, it’s a little too detailed, making it hard to follow all the intricacies of the Rhodesian political scene. It’s a commonplace that history is written by the winners. Yet, even though Smith lost every single battle, from huge to minuscule, in his efforts to keep his country livable, his opponents have no defensible position. There’s no narrative of why Mugabe was a better leader than Smith and why the entire free world needed to work so hard to install Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s dictator.
I regularly try to read something about Africa. This, of course, lies on the very periphery of my interests, and time is scarce. Still, I believe one could do worse than acquire at least some basic knowledge about the continent. What I find paradoxical, however, is that our reigning system of morality finds me, a person who only wants to read about Africa out of sporadic curiosity and have nothing else to do with it, to be superior to Smith who loved it, understood it, belonged to it and wanted to make it better. We have accepted that the apartheid of “us here and Africans way over there” is superior to Smith’s belief that apartheid was wrong. He’s the bugbear, the evil racist, and we are good and virtuous.
Clarissa's Blog 
A significant reason why the fascists were able to gain power in SA (after Hitler had been safely defeated) was because they were anti-communist and anti-Britain, which became an advantage once it became clear that Britain was no longer interested in defending the empire.
https://sacp.org.za/docs/history/fifty4.html
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