page_title: Ian Smith
section_title: Character, reputation and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Ian Smith / Character, reputation and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, in 1975עברית: איאן סמית', הראש הממשלה של רודזיה, בשנת 1975
context_page_description: Ian Douglas Smith GCLM ID was a Rhodesian politician, farmer, and fighter pilot who served as Prime Minister of Rhodesia from 1964 to 1979. He was the country's first premier not born abroad, and led the predominantly white government that unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom in November 1965, following prolonged dispute over the terms. He remained Prime Minister for almost all of the 14 years of international isolation that followed, and oversaw Rhodesia's security forces during most of the Bush War, which pitted the unrecognised administration against communist-backed black nationalist guerrilla groups. Smith, who has been described as personifying white Rhodesia, remains a highly controversial figure—supporters venerate him as a man of integrity and vision "who understood the uncomfortable truths of Africa", while critics describe an unrepentant racist whose policies and actions caused the deaths of thousands and contributed to Zimbabwe's later crises.
  Smith was born to British immigrants in Selukwe, a small town in the Southern Rhodesian Midlands, four years before the colony became self-governing in 1923.
context_section_description: "Smith was a simple man," Graham Boynton wrote soon after his death, "and it was his rather humourless, one-dimensional Rhodesian-ness that at once made him a hero among his own people and a figure of derision among his enemies". As leader of the Rhodesian Front and its successors, he was the foremost figure of his country's white community—a "symbol and father figure", in Mordechai Tamarkin's phrase, who as Prime Minister "personified white Rhodesia". Supporters hailed him as "a political visionary ... who understood the uncomfortable truths of Africa"; detractors denounced him as "an unrepentant racist".
  His determination to preserve the white minority's position in Rhodesia caused many black Africans and others to perceive him as a symbol of iniquitous white rule and racism. Smith always denied being driven by racial prejudice—in a 1987 interview he asserted that he had been defending Western principles and that "it was Marxism I fought, not blacks". Above all, he never expressed regret regarding his actions as Prime Minister; he insisted to the end that the political and economic ruination of Zimbabwe under ZANU–PF had borne out his predictions and proven him right.
  "The key to understanding Smith," Johnson wrote, "was that, like other white Rhodesians, he clung to an almost Victorian view of the world both in moral values and in the easy assumptions of British primacy that characterised the empire." Bill Schwarz took a similar line, writing that Smith and his supporters reacted to the British Empire's demise by imagining white Rhodesians to be "the final survivors of a lost civilisation", charged with "tak[ing] on the mantle of historic Britain" in the imperial power's absence. "He spoke endlessly about how Rhodesians had been more British than the British," Boynton reflected, "and how this small community of decent, fair-minded whites had been betrayed by, well, just about everybody he could think of ... It was easy to mock Ian Smith, but he was right—both about the betrayals and about the quality of most African politicians". Smith's "not in 1,000 years" quote dominated his obituaries, a development that Peter Godwin, despite his critical stance regarding Smith and his policies, considered "unfair and inaccurate": "Over the years it has become shorn of all context and compressed into a free-floating clip that has now become his epitaph ... But there is more than enough for which to quite legitimately criticise Smith, without resorting to fabrication."
  Memories of his travails on the UK's behalf during the Second World War—"undoubtedly the central experience of his life", according to Johnson—were fundamental to the sense of profound betrayal Smith felt when the UK government proved one of his main adversaries as Prime Minister. The wartime plastic surgery that corrected the wounds to his face left its right side paralysed, giving him a crooked smile and a somewhat blank expression, while his bodily injuries gave him a stoop and a slight limp; he also could not sit for long periods without pain. The post-colonial UK Smith encountered as Prime Minister seemed to him "foreign and somewhat effete", to quote Kenneth Young, while Smith was "a foreigner in all but language to most British politicians—a man of convictions so outdated, of tastes so naive, as to make mutual understanding almost impossible." Smith held most of the British politicians he dealt with in extremely low esteem, considering them to have pushed him and his country into an impossible position where, he asserted in 1970, the decision to take unilateral action was "forced upon us".
  In his prime, Smith was widely recognised by both contemporaries and rivals as a formidable negotiator. Hempstone considered him "a man too principled (or short-sighted) to compromise with what he regards as wrong", while Welensky compared dealing with him to "trying to nail jelly to a wall". He had an "iron nerve", to quote his RF colleague P. K. van der Byl, and a reputation for "icy calm"; he almost never got angry or raised his voice. He spoke with "a nasal monologue" as
caption: Smith in 1975, as Prime Minister, wearing his Royal Air Force tie from the Second World War
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