During its high water mark in the UDI era, the entire white population of Rhodesia was comparable in size to the population of Akron, Ohio during the same period. This was furthermore a transient population, with almost as many leaving the country in some years as arriving. Even the oldest families had only been there a few generations. No white person had historic ties to Rhodesia dating back much farther than 1890.
All had arrived when they had arrived for opportunistic reasons. First it was gold, but they kept coming long after tales of King Solomon’s mines were forgotten. Northern Rhodesia attracted a large number of miners and engineers, and also absorbed waves of Jews fleeing the czar, and later Hitler. The flow of white immigrants to Southern Rhodesia was a more general mix of discontents, opportunists, or romantics looking for a better life or at least a more interesting one than what the bureaucratized west was becoming in the twentieth century. After India became independent in 1948, a number of former Anglo-Indians moved to Rhodesia, Umtali in particular. It must have reminded them of Simla.
Over all, they were middle class, although there were a few aristocrats among them. Southern Rhodesia required that immigrants possess capital. Most had some kind of skill. Socioeconomically, it was a sort of Lord of the Flies scenario populated by middle class castaways.
Immigration levels began to fall after the breakup of the federation in 1963, but then picked again after UDI in 1965 and then again after the republic was declared in 1968. A number of foreigners came in the 1970s just to fight in the war, as a sort of Rhodesian “foreign legion” or “Lincoln Brigade” although they did not serve together in any particular regiment.
The growth of the white population began to reverse in 1974 and saw large out-migrations over the remainder of the decade. After 1980, numbers remained constant for a while but then fell steadily. The white population cratered in the early 2000s with the farm invasions, although some white farmers who had fled the country have begun returning in recent years.
The largest white ethnic minority were Afrikaners, probably about 10% of the white population, and by most accounts some of the poorest. There were also smaller Greek and Jewish communities. The Indians and “coloureds” were considered separate racial groups from whites for census purposes just as they were in South Africa. But they both had all the same rights as whites for land apportionment and other legal purposes. And of course most non-black Rhodesians were of English origin.
As Robert Blake has suggested, their culture was essentially South African, but English South African, as opposed to the Afrikaner culture dominant among whites in South Africa. In a way, Rhodesia was more a colony of the British part of South Africa than of Britain.
Kenneth Young contrasted Rhodesians favorably with the English of his own time. “The spirit and courage that made Britain great were not extinct;” he writes, “they had emigrated.” Robert Blake too saw something of the British spirit in Rhodesia, but in a way that he found embarrassing, like a gross caricature of true Englishmen like himself. He described Rhodesian culture as “pickled pieces of the English past.”
The Rhodesian life was stereotypically an outdoor life. Hunting, fishing, and contact sports were the chief forms of entertainment. Horse races, cattle shows, and tobacco auctions were major public events. They had some artists and performing artists, but these were of the popular and folk varieties. They simply didn’t have enough of a market for anyone to be engaged in the fine arts full-time. They had a distinct lack of high art, another reason the British looked down on them.
Rhodesians took naturally to soldiering. They loved military parades and solemn ceremonies full of British pomp and circumstance. Over a ninety year period, they had adopted some traditions of their own.
Even before independence, they had their own holiday, “Founders’ Day,” where they reenacted the raising of the British flag over Fort Salisbury, which became Cecil Square in downtown Salisbury, and is now African Unity Square in Harare. Even during the UDI period, when all other British flags had been replaced by the Rhodesian Green-and-White, the Union Jack still flew over Salisbury every Founders’ Day.
Rhodesians had volunteered in disproportionate numbers to fight in both world wars and in Malaya in the 1950s and were disproportionately likely to be commissioned officers. At the same time, their own small military was unusual, fielding a disproportionately large air force and special forces.
The source of their outsize air force was Southern Rhodesia’s having been a training ground for the RAF in WWII as it had plenty of empty space, favorable weather conditions, and was out of the range of the Luftwaffe. Many young Rhodesians, including a young Ian Smith, had joined the RAF close to home during the war and forged life-long friendships with pilots from all over the empire. Smith later said that one reason Harold Wilson never followed through on threats to use military force against Rhodesia was that by the 1960s, much of the British high command consisted of WWII veterans who counted many Rhodesians among their friends and would have refused orders to attack them. Following UDI, Wilson sent an RAF squadron to Zambia as a symbolic gesture. Legend has it that the British pilots used Salisbury air traffic control instead of Lusaka, and ended their radio communication by wishing Rhodesians a merry Christmas.
Rhodesians also had an outsize role in the Special Air Service formed by the British Army in WWII. The SAS was a highly selective airborne special forces unit. Their motto, “Who dares wins,” reflected their use of initiative to overcome overwhelming odds. An entire SAS squadron, squadron C, consisted of Rhodesian volunteers and after independence this became the Rhodesian SAS regiment.
As the Rhodesian security forces scaled up in the 1960s and 70s, all of their new regiments were special forces of some kind or other primarily because of the acute manpower shortages they faced. They simply did not have enough men to make up a large standing army. They consequently relied on small teams, innovative tactics, and repurposing of obsolete equipment. The basic unit of Rhodesian warfare was not the company or the platoon or even the squad, but the “stick”, a unit of up to four men. Their signature doctrine was “fireforce,” a close air support tactic involving the rapid deployment of Alouette helicopters. They also introduced a mounted unit, Grey’s Scouts, and their final contribution to military history was their most unorthodox unit of all: the Selous Scouts.
The Selous Scouts’ commitment to jungle warfare included proficiency in the Shona language as well as an ability to live off of jungle wildlife for food. Their motto, as well as most of their cadences, were in Shona. Rudyard Kipling and Orde Wingate would have been proud. They were also the first Rhodesian military unit to be fully racially integrated. This too was out of necessity, as their specialty became impersonating guerrillas and often “turning” captives. Like all Rhodesian units, they operated in very small numbers, wore short shorts, and redesigned and rebuilt much of their own vehicles and equipment.
During this period, state security also depended increasingly on civilian readiness, with women and children being instructed in the use of small arms. The army also began inducting women into support roles.
It is ironic that while Rhodesia was a state fighting rebel guerrillas, it was the guerrillas who fought in large formations and used conventional tactics while the Rhodesians, by force of necessity, deployed like guerillas, fighting in small numbers, disappearing into the bush, and surprising the enemy by unorthodox means.
In the United States, the stereotype is that black Americans are the superior athletes. But in Rhodesia, sports were more of a white thing. Rhodesia was banned from participating in the Olympic games. Zimbabwe began sending athletes to the Olympics starting in 1980 and to date, the only Zimbabweans to win Olympic medals have been white women.
Most whites have of course left the country, becoming in a way a typical exile population. While none have become remarkably wealthy, they seem on average to have done fairly well for themselves, particularly as farmers, small businessmen, and professional soldiers. Given their history, they’re surprisingly free of bitterness, revanchism, or race hatred. While no one from Rhodesia has become world-famous, they have produced their own artists, writers, and historians and what might be called an internal culture. They’ve certainly preserved their accent.
Overall they seem proud of their past and of the war effort, even though there is no clear consensus now of what exactly they were fighting for. It is incredible that so few fought so many so hard so effectively for so long for such unclear goals. Perhaps they were trying to prove a point, that they were not colonial opportunists, that they had a place in Africa and had what it took to stake their claims there without help from Britain, and that Africa needed them as much as they needed it. Three points of consensus run through their memoirs: an intense sense of pride in their community, a distinct lack of racial animosity, and a deep sadness about what has happened to Zimbabwe.
At the back of my mind I was always thinking to myself: I wonder what the enemy viewpoint is. Is there another story to this? And, you know, am I sure that I’m on, that I’m doing the right thing being on the side that I’m on? And I did have, I did ask myself that question and I needed some sort of certainty.
And, you know, it wasn’t long in coming my way because once I got into the field and particularly doing what I was doing reacting to incidents where villages were attacked and things happened to villages and stuff. I was going to some of these scenes and seeing what had happened. And I saw what the enemy was doing to their own people. And that really had a profound impact on me. I saw that and I thought, you know, if you’ve got a better plan than we have, I don’t see it here. This doesn’t tell me that you’re going to improve the lot of these people. We might not be perfect and maybe we can do better, but I’m far from persuaded that you have any better options.
And that was quite a pivotal moment in my sort of, in my development, realizing that I really was doing the right thing by my country and the people, and all the people. You know, I never really, and I still don’t believe that we fought a racial war and that I was fighting for white supremacy or to maintain white dominance. I was fighting because I thought that we had the best possible option to offer at the time and that’s something I still stand by.
Zimbabweans, your heritage is much richer than you imagine because it includes Rhodesia. Forgive the Rhodesians their faults, as you would like your faults to be forgiven. Learn from them. No one in west is teaching these things to their children anymore. Learn to do what they could do and the future is yours.