BBC NEWS | World | Africa (2024)

During that period, his government illegally declared independence from British rule and fought a guerrilla war against factions of the majority black population.

It was a struggle he eventually lost, paving the way for the country's independence as Zimbabwe.

His supporters considered him a political visionary. His detractors called him a racist who stayed in power for too long.

Behind enemy lines

Born in the then British colony of Rhodesia in 1919, Ian Douglas Smith was educated at Rhodes University in South Africa, a real son of the soil and a crack sportsman.

The colony of Southern Rhodesia was still ruled by a tightly knit white community of fewer that 250,000.

The country's black population, numbering some five million, had no say in its political or economic life. Most white Rhodesians could claim British descent and Rhodesia looked to "the Mother Country" with reverence.

Later in the war he was shot down again, this time over Italy and, for five months, fought alongside the Italian partisans behind German lines.

Rhodesia's independence

At the war's end, Ian Smith returned home and rose to become a government minister in the right-wing Rhodesian Front administration of Winston Field.

By the early 1960s, following Harold Macmillan's watershed speech on the "winds of change" in Africa which presaged Britain's withdrawal from the continent, white Rhodesians thought their hold on their country need never loosen.

On 11 November 1965, he made his Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Rhodesia had cast itself adrift from Britain and the Commonwealth.

The British response was to dismiss the PM and his cabinet, but the illegal regime did not seem to care.

Negotiations in London

The world community refused to recognise Rhodesia and the United Nations applied economic sanctions, but many international companies secretly broke them - and apartheid South Africa seemed especially keen to chip in.

Rhodesia's economy actually strengthened in parts during this time of isolation, and Ian Smith appeared to relish his position.

"I don't believe in black majority rule over Rhodesia," he defiantly proclaimed at the time, "not in a thousand years."

Attacks on white border farms started in 1972. Five years later, the guerrilla war was costing Rhodesia an estimated half a million pounds a day. John Vorster's South African government, distracted by this expensive sideshow, pulled the financial plug on its neighbour.

Forced to the negotiating table, Ian Smith took part in the talks at Lancaster House in London which were to set a new path for what would become Zimbabwe.

Pride in Rhodesia's achievements

Following independence in 1980, Ian Smith remained a key player in Zimbabwean politics.

His presence in parliament, which only ended with the scrapping of white-reserved seats in 1987, was a comfort to the white minority and a source of constant irritation to the government of Robert Mugabe.

When Robert Mugabe threatened to put Smith on trial for genocide, the former Prime Minister welcomed the move. "We had no atrocities," he claimed.

Ian Smith himself felt betrayed, by Britain, by South Africa, by the Commonwealth. And, as Zimbabwe staggered into economic and political crisis, he honestly believed his way was best.

"We had the highest standard of health and education and housing for our black people than any other country on the African continent," he reflected.

"That was what Rhodesians did. I wonder if we shouldn't be given credit for doing that."