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) See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you, and I mean you, my friend, are listening to right now. Unless you're the not the you 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're gonna come back later, make sure that you're back in time to hear from our guest in this episode today. That's not really a very clean way to go to-

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Becca Ramos is here, everybody!

• 0:35Robert Evans?

  To introduce Becca Ramos?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Hello!

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  I'm sorry, I don't know, I didn't have a good intro planned out, and I just started talking and letting the words follow. But yes, Becca Ramos, welcome to the show. Do you wanna plug your plugables better than I did?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I am a producer here at iHeart, but I also have my own show called Welcome to El Barrio, which is a podcast about all things Puerto Rican history, news, culture. I interview really amazing Puerto Ricans that are redefining what it means to be Puerto Rican, all in hopes that by the end of every episode, you feel a little closer to Puerto Rican, 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? It'll be Chewy, babe. If you are a fan of Bad Bunny, you're a fan of Chewy, probably. So, tune in, it's gonna be a great episode.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That rocks. That rocks. And this is my first episode back after, I mean, it's not the first episode you'll hear me on, it's my first episode back-

• 1:41Robert Evans?

  Sophie was sick.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  But, you guys on the Reddit, Ian's a real person.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Oh yes, Ian is very much real.

• 1:49Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, we have one episode with our producer Ian instead of Sophie, and I forgot to do a separate introduction, but like, Ian's been on episodes before.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ian Johnson is a supervising 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've said that.

• 2:10Robert Evans?

  Introduced separately our producer, yeah, that was my bad.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  But to the subreddit, I'm safe, and that was Ian.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  I fucked up. But you know who did, well, actually, we're gonna talk about people who fucked up today, absolutely. We're talking about, Becca, what do you know about Rhodesia?

• 2:29Speaker 01

  You know, I'm, I'm gonna say not much.

• 2:32Robert Evans?

  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. 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 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 for the Rhodesian army. We've talked about, we've talked around Rhodesia a bunch, but

• 3:15Robert Evans?

  this week we're talking about Ian Smith, who was the prime minister of Rhodesia for its entire existence as 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 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 20th century and fought like a 20-year war against the black majority of the country, which was fought by like the white colonists who owned all of the guns. And eventually they failed and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

• 3:57Robert Evans?

  And that's like the long story, short version, right? So we're gonna talk about how all of that happened this week. Are you excited, Becca?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Woo, let's get into it.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you should be. You should be.

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• 4:14Robert Evans?

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• 5:47Robert Evans?

  So in the early 1880s, that's where we're going to start our tale, because that's kind of where the origins of Rhodesia come from, right? You've got this period of time in which the great powers of Europe are all caught up in what was, it became called the scramble for Africa, right? Near the end of the 1880s, kind of, all of these different European powers that had gotten rich by setting up colonies 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. Now, those had never really been blank spots on the map,

• 6:31Robert Evans?

  but as far as white people were concerned, there used to be a lot of those. And now there 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, there's this widespread 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.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  So there's this real panic, 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 Empire is like, wait a second, other guys are going to try to like swoop in and grab enough Africa that they can, they can uh uh get bigger than this? 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 possession of other Europeans, right? This all this gets sparked when the Belgians take the Congo, but it it it goes on for decades. And it's a it winds up causing most of the problems in Africa that we're going to be dealing with in the 20th and 21st centuries, right?

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  Weirdly enough, if you look back at like and read how a lot of these imperial thinkers talked about African colonization during 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're they believe that like we have, we've got a we've got a couple of years to to 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?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I love 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.

• 8:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're the civilizing power.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:42Robert Evans?

  And if we don't get enough of Africa, maybe those those dastardly krauts will get to do, you know, more of the 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 that don't fully graft to even how we understand stuff like capitalism today. But part of the 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 free land was running out and that put a ceiling on how wealthy and powerful any European nation could get. In 1889, the Crown granted a royal charter to the British South Africa Company, which allowed it to expropriate land in the vast chunk of Southern Africa that the Brits felt was ours, basically, and exploit its resources, right?

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  So, the Crown gives this guy Cecil Rhodes, who's the founder of the BSAC. Ah, Cecil. Yes, Cecil. We've done episodes on Cecil. Bastard. Fuck Cecil. 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 Company. And Rhodes goes in to this area and he signs some treaties with local leaders, including the big local leader, this guy named King Lobengula of the Ndebele, right? 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.

• 10:09Robert Evans?

  Then you're like helping the locals govern, you know, this territory with their consent and it doesn't seem as gross. Not for Ben. This is always a lie. 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 farmer in Rhodesia. Just pick up a gun and join the Pioneer Column, right? Like, that's the idea here. We're gonna clear these locals out and we're gonna take land and I'm gonna give anyone who fights for me a big chunk of land. You know?

• 10:50Robert Evans?

  So, he sends this column up, the locals get really pissed, there's a war. We've already covered the first Matabele War in our Cecil Rhodes episodes. It's very bloody and it ends in 1893 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 Chimoranga breaks out in 1896. That name came from a warrior who led the Moranga people in a rebellion against the British a few years earlier, and the Chimoranga becomes the Shona people's term for a revolutionary struggle. When we eventually cover Robert Mugabe, that term will be really like meaningful because that's one that he uses a lot.

• 11:33Robert Evans?

  But the First Chimoranga is this rebellion of all these peoples and what becomes Rhodesia against Rhodes and his like pioneer settlers. And it starts when a religious leader, a guy named Malimo convinces a bunch of Nibelé and Shona people that white settlers in the area, who were numbered about 4,000 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 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 consider

• 12:17Robert Evans?

  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. 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 300 white settlers have been killed. So this really pisses off, you know, the British South African Company and it provides 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 Nibelé people, they don't really have the firepower to contrast like any of these sort of pioneer armies.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  And they get, they get wiped out in pretty bloody fashion after this point. So this is like 1896, 1897 that you have this, this war. And none of the white colonial leaders who were on the ground and what becomes Rhodesia 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 involves, you know, pretty regular war and violence. So their, their plan after this 1896, seven war is let's create a bunch of changes that will make it impossible for the locals to resist en masse ever again. Right? We're going to, as we set up the governing for what's going to be a colony and then

• 13:45Robert Evans?

  a country, our entire legal system is going to be based around making sure black people can't organize and resist white people. Right? Like, that's the foundation of Rhodesian political society. As an article in The Conversation summarizes, "The British South African 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 1898, it encouraged expropriation for commercial agricultural production of tobacco, maize, and corn. It also set up a reserve system, which aimed to move and concentrate Shona and Nabele populations into so-called native reserve lands." So they're doing the, in America, and this is very consciously, they're kind of looking

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  at what, I mean, this is also based on other things the British have done elsewhere, but they're influenced by what the US is doing with reservations, you know, of the native people of, of North America. And that's kind of what Rhodesia starts by doing, is we need the best farmland, 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 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 1895, when they're still fighting these wars,

• 15:13Robert Evans?

  and it's kind of adopted unofficially before it's adopted. Adopted officially as the name of this colony. As Charlton Cussens wrote for a 2024 article in the journal Historical Research, "Its purpose was both to line the coffers of Rhodes and his backers in the Cape and 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 settled yet. But it's a way to deal with the fact that this, the South Africans are not, they're under like control of the British Empire, but they're not British, right? 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."

• 15:56Robert Evans?

  It would be really helpful if we had like a polity, like 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 both of those things at once.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  It's Great Britain. They love to colonize. It's their vibe.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Historically.

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  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. Right? Or wound up in charge of earlier.

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  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 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 1922, white, yeah, classic white people in Africa.

• 17:02Robert Evans?

  In 1922, white people in Rhodesia have a referendum on whether or not to join South Africa. You know, in the early 1900s, 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, 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 really hideous conflict. And so not long after that, after, you know, South Africa has been kind of beaten back into 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, we're

• 17:43Robert Evans?

  British people. We're part of of Britain. We want to be part of the British Empire. We want to be part of South Africa. Like, that's not, 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. 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 there a little too racist to be friendly to

• 18:25Robert Evans?

  South Africans? Until they really need it. Which is very funny. You have to be super racist to be like, oh, South Africans, not the right kind of white. Sorry, guys. Like,

• 18:36Speaker 02

  That is a new level.

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  It's not white enough.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  It's like, they had apartheid.

• 18:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. And we have our own apartheid from them.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Them.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  From the Boers. Yeah.

• 18:48Robert Evans?

  So one of these early Rhodesians, these British Rhodesians, is a guy named Jock Smith. Jock is originally a Scotsman. He immigrates to Rhodesia in 1898, not long after it becomes a thing. And he settles in a small town called Salukwe, where he comes to own and operate a farm and a mine. He's like, got a butcher 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 of what makes him 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 miner, mine owner, or a farmer, I mean, he does a little bit of both, but he primarily sells things to miners

• 19:28Robert Evans?

  and farm owners to allow them to like, do their bit, jobs. And that's really the smart play.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  My question is, is Jock Smith

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  the right kind of white for them?

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Jock Smith is, is, is the British kind of white.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Jock?

• 19:44Robert Evans?

  Well, he's Scottish, but that's close enough. Yeah. Josh Smith. So, Jacque, yeah, Jacque 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, Ian Smith, is born in 1919, just three years before Rhodesia would vote in that referendum. And Ian Smith is, this is the guy, he's gonna 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. His family background is pretty standard for this sort of thing.

• 20:28Robert Evans?

  His mom's family came from some money back in England and Jacque had been, you know, he was the Scotsman 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 is like, hey, I'm successful here, why don't you send your fancy daughter 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 colony, 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 a country

• 21:12Robert Evans?

  like Great Britain in this time, is that it gives something for your hungry young men to do and 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's, that's a big part of the appeal. And so colonialism is gonna kind of work perfectly for Ian Smith and his family for his entire early life. Like, he is, these are some of 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.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  As those who benefit do.

• 21:52Robert Evans?

  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 is like the Members of the British Empire, right? For their, um, their various contributions to civic life in Sulukwe 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

• 22:36Robert Evans?

  this to themselves, right? Is like, we're the first generation of, of people who are, like, making a civilization out of this, like, wilderness. Um, 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 of the country, and the blacks are entitled to theirs." Right? And Ian is gonna 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-

• 23:12Speaker 01

  I will say that is insane as people who came into that space. You know what I'm saying? Like, they were there first.

• 23:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like, they were there first. And also, at the time he's born, there's like 200-something thousand Rhodesians, and there's like 4 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?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  That's, that's not called being fair, but it's called being entitled.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  Definitionally, you know?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's entitlement.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But that's like, that's the big Rhodesian thing is entitlement. This like sense of like, we are here, like, we own this in a special way because like, we came and stole it very recently.

• 23:57Robert Evans?

  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 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 we don't, 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 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 gonna quote Charlton Cussens again, writing in the journal Historical Research.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  Carl Bridge and Kent Federwich 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. 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, Ian is 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

• 25:24Robert Evans?

  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 people who are British, like citizens of the British Empire in this period, too. Which again, doesn't mean that it's not white supremacist and not racist, it's just not white nationalist, 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, is a little piece of Britain. So you can- Pick up and move from Scotland to Africa to, you know, Myanmar or Burma that they're guys they're calling at the time. And you're you're still a citizen of the British world or or India and you're still in the British world. And that's really cool to a lot of people.

• 26:06Robert Evans?

  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 outnumbered, but there's also in other different 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 worldwide thing. But also, we're really badly outnumbered here by black people like 10 to one or more by the time Ian comes up. And so there's also this kind of bunker mentality that merges 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 this sense of egalitarianism.

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  Everyone who's white is equal, which is not a factor in like England, right? There's a lot of class stratification, whereas in Rhodesia, it 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? And that's a big pull to a lot of people.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Why do why do they think, why do they think that it's out egalitarianism? Like, what, what forces them?

• 27:13Robert Evans?

  White people are equal. For white people, it's equal, right? As 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 in England because they need you, because we all have to band together to hold the terror, the line, right? So that's it's a lot that 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?

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  There's 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 cult, we're civilizing this chunk of the world too. So there's this, this part of like, I'm not just seeking benefit to myself, I'm helping to like, 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 the inequalities of daily life in Rhodesia make sense, right? The fact that you're viewing it all this way. And so by the early 20th century, Rhodesians have developed a reputation among colonial

• 28:37Robert Evans?

  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, and if you moved, there would be a restraining hand on your shoulder." Right? This is intense propaganda. These kids, white kids like Ian are being... Lies. 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, but also like, you're a part

• 29:22Robert Evans?

  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, of, of the British world, right? And this 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 gonna, who 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 ads. Yay.

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• 31:36Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, I want to read 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 in the final analysis, it may even be necessary to die for your cause. Those were the conditions under which you lived, under which, as 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?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pathological propaganda.

• 32:19Robert Evans?

  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 to take away what's mine, which I, you know, 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 autobiography with two full pages talking about how badass and amazing

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  his parents were, like listing all of the awards his mommy 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 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 through 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

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  how amazing his mom and dad were and how he has to live up to their example. That's kind of what I catch at least, my analysis of his work.

• 33:57Robert Evans?

  So he is not really gonna 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 that I'm not gonna 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 the only detail he gives.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Probably overcompensating. Most of you are, you know who you are.

• 34:20Robert Evans?

  I, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I'm sure he was good in fucking colonial sports in his class of like 10 other white kids, right? It's also not all that hard to be the best at sports in that situation.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Sports looked very different then.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  We only have his word for it, and you know what?

• 34:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  I don't trust Ian Smith.

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  But you know, I bet it is easier to be like the best kid in your school at basketball when your school is like 12 other rich white kids. Like.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah. Robert, you would be the LeBron James of that high school.

• 34:51Robert Evans?

  I would be, I would have been the LeBron, yes. Um, cuz I'm taller than most of these Rhodesian kids were.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  So, and yet, there's, this is though, one of the things I noticed, cuz I thought it was weird at first going through Ian Smith's autobiography and being like, he only talks about the sports he played as a kid. We don't get anything about like, we don't, 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 a black person working in a field. We don't get any of that from Ian Smith. What we do get is him talking about sports, and you see that in a lot of memoirs by 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 about like sporting. They'll just talk about polo and hunting.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  That's like every Rhodesian account of life in Rhodesia is like polo and hunting and being served by servants. And I found that kinda weird until I read a piece in City Journal by a guy named Theodore Dalrymple, who moved to Rhodesia in like the 60s or 70s and worked as a doctor there, right? And he's working there as a doctor while the country is falling apart. So he's a foreigner who comes- Comes there to work as like in 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 worked hard. I have never worked harder. The luxury of our life was this, that, once our work was done,

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  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 an existence that was opaque to us, 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 Rhodesians only write about like playing sports and hunting, makes sense? That their life isn't anything else? They don't have to do anything else?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  The way he writes it, though, is so like dissonant of the experience they're putting on to 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've robbed them of their dreams because they have to do all the hard work for you.

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  Dalrymple is saying that, 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 is saying.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yes, I guess I was saying the dissonance was coming from his wording of the use of opaque, I guess.

• 37:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's deliberately made opaque because we're 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 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 then, people were so much nicer and more genteel in the Old South.

• 38:42Robert Evans?

  It's like, well, because they didn't have to do stuff. It's because other people did all the work for them.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way that you were, not to be Bravo-pilled, but the way you were reading that text was very Southern Charm-esque.

• 38:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  It is very much that where these very rich, old socialites refuse to acknowledge the land that they're on. And then also speaking that way where like, I love art and culture and these things, but it's like on the backs of the slave labor that is this land.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  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 whatever?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:20Robert Evans?

  If that's the reason you're cultured, is that really cultured? Or are you just a blood-drenched demagogue, right? You know?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:28Robert Evans?

  So, uh, yeah, and that's, that's the thing because I think Dalrymple is kind of like recognizing that as an outsider. 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.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Of course he does.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  He wins awards for rugby and the 100-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 Rhodesian family raises their children. His only detailed recollections of his childhood involve 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 1939, World War II rears its ugly head and Great Britain is going to be one of the first powers to get involved.

• 40:25Robert Evans?

  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? 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, 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 and at war and I want a chance to fight for it too. That's another part, thing, part of what's going on for Ian.

• 41:06Robert Evans?

  So because he's a special boy, he's not going to join the regular military. He's like 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 1940, he travels to the Rhodesian capital Salisbury to meet with a contact at the 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.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:44Robert Evans?

  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 wear at 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 II, he was shot down twice in combat, the first time in North

• 42:29Robert Evans?

  Africa, and he was badly injured in this first crash.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  It's incredible he survived twice being shot down.

• 42:35Robert Evans?

  Twice, twice. Real Harrison Ford levels of luck here, yes.

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  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, his like, especially when he gets 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 a plane crash. Um, it's 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, this time over Italy. And he winds up, he has like a very cool World War II.

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  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 II story, right? You know, he does his bit, uh, no real notes there. And he returns home to Africa after the war and finishes his degree at Rhodes University. So he, he, 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 who had to go away to fight World War II. And he becomes their spokesman at Rhodes University. And this is going to be like his first experience in politics. Like he has to get basically elected to this job. And so he realizes from that, like, I kind of like campaigning.

• 44:08Robert Evans?

  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 life.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  He's giving Connor Roy from Succession. He's like, Ian Smith was interested in politics at an early age.

• 44:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  What experience does he have? My family's rich. That sounds like a job for me.

• 44:31Robert Evans?

  And I got, I was, I got shot down.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's like, I

• 44:35Robert Evans?

  Crashed a couple of planes.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  He's, that's, and like low key, I looked them up. They kind of look the same.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  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 6,200 white farming families who employed some 350,000 black laborers to work their fields. Jesus Christ. 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 50 to 60 black laborers, right? They're not doing real farming work. They're telling

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  people what to do while they wear white linen suits and drink juleps, you know? Like, absolutely not. Yeah. I cannot exaggerate the degree to which Rhodesians are not farmers. White Rhodesians are not farmers. Um, now, in his autobiography, Ian doesn't discuss black workers on his farm at all. He 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 on the main section of Aberfoyle

• 46:09Robert Evans?

  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 pole and dagger system." And that's like, his issue is, "Oh, these squatters, who were like workers for this nearby farm, have been plowing 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 they're squatters. They're these workers who are like wrongly on my land damaging it as opposed to like, but like, before the Aberfoyle Ranch, they just lived there and they probably got kicked off of wherever their village was because a white guy wanted a ranch, which-

• 46:52Robert Evans?

  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 you're like, oh, these guys are bad for the, bad for the environment. 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 own this beautiful land and these people are making it ugly. They're bad for the, the land, right? The people who live here. That's the Rhodesian attitude in a nutshell.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sucks.

• 47:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So that's pretty cool. Uh, he does, he doesn't like acknowledge, you know, the fact that the people needed houses or needed to live there. And he doesn't mention what happens to these people who had 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 in sound natural condition. And the important fact was we were able to arrest further deterioration. So again, he doesn't talk about how did you make these people leave? What happened to them later? Where did they go? 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.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  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 grandchildren. And each generation is honor bound to pass it on in better condition than it was when it was received.

• 48:23Robert Evans?

  I didn't inherit, we didn't steal our land from the people who owned it before. I'm borrowing it from my kids.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And they're, and those people are never gonna get it back.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. We have to pass off 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 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 wasn't just like a farm forever for one white guy. Like, this was like a community, and he forced them 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. Um, and a lot of Rhodesia works this way, right? You can find all manner of lovely Rhodesian childhood memoirs

• 49:19Robert Evans?

  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, 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. 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 of Oxford has a population of about 160,000 people. In 1890, the native

• 50:04Robert Evans?

  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 the people of Oxford as 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, 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 twice as many as the number of white people who existed at the height of Rhodesia.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Also, just because there weren't enough people in your mind, what makes you think having more people on that land is good for the environment?

• 50:56Robert Evans?

  It was empty. We're good.

• 50:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In fact, it seems like Rhodesians 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 300,000 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 that's what you're judging it by. Um, so yeah, there's a lot that's flawed about this, this attitude. Um, speaking of things that are flawed.

• 51:33Robert Evans?

  My sponsors aren't, they've never made a mistake. Ever. Except for sponsoring me, I guess. Fuck. I don't know.

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• 53:17Robert Evans?

  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 territory from the earliest days. They never just ceded this land. It was never empty. And as the territory grew more populated, it always had way more black 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.

• 54:02Robert Evans?

  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 founding of Rhodesia 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 mines. 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 people had their labor supply,

• 54:47Robert Evans?

  in 1896, 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's house, you have to pay a tax on your hut. 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 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 the how the Rhodesian state is constructed. In 1902, this, there's a pass law that gets added.

• 55:32Robert Evans?

  So in 1896, black people started having to pay this tax for their houses. And in 1902, 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 pass law is then you can tell people if we know, oh, I need, we need more workers in this region. 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 the area where we need more of them. That's why the pass system comes into effect.

• 56:09Robert Evans?

  It's to destroy and break up communities and create artificially a labor force who have no ability to resist or agitate for better conditions. The pass 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 Rhodesia builds up over the years with all of these different laws. In 1904, the tax has increased to about a pound sterling per native home. Since workers made about four to 12 pounds a year, this was like a 30% income tax that you're paying just for the home you already own.

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  A legal study published by the International Commission of Jurists in 1976 summarizes how the Rhodesian system developed from here. From these early policies favoring land expropriation and 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 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?

• 57:32Robert Evans?

  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 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 1922, Rhodesia had become an official colony, but British law gave it a unique disposition. It's a self-governing colony, which they don't 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

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  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 period that the Rhodesian Parliament would ask British Parliament, basically before we passed it, 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, 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 a tax on huts because they're

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  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 pass system to make sure that they're not like becoming, you know, just lazy or homeless or like filling up the streets in some area. That's why we have the pass system. It's not meant to limit what they can do. And that's how all of these laws are kind of justified and stop from sounding like embarrassingly racist to the mother of government. Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Questions. How, so, so they think they have this like illusion of autonomy, but yet they're crying back to Daddy Britain. On everything? Is that kind of a thing?

• 59:38Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, they have to get, like, that's the deal, is the Crown won't stop them from governing their own society. But they have to ask, like, hey, we've, 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, the British government in London doesn't want to hear Rhodesia 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 pass 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 Rhodesia do what they want to do, but doesn't want to deal with

• 1:00:23Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  So we'll help you be racist, but like, we're not with you.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  We're not with you, and you've got to, like, walk it past us, right? You got to let us, like, pencil in, like, no, no, no, we got to change some wording. We don't want to get in trouble over this, right?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  They're word, they're fucking wordsmithing their racism.

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, that's a tale as old as time, right? I mean, if you think about everywhere.

• 1:00:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's especially British racism. And there's this, there's this expectation in Rhodesia that because the Crown has given us everything we've wanted, eventually we'll be allowed to get our full independence and we'll gain dominion status, right? And so there's this understanding by white Rhodesians that Britain 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 this thing where you're basically your own country, but the queen is still your sovereign, yada, yada. Like, there's some stuff like that.

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  Rhodesians think they're going to get that, and they're not going to have to give black people the vote, right? That is the understanding of white Rhodesians. Coming into like the 60s 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 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 did want to make it really clear, and this doesn't really change much of what I've said. Technically, there was like a vote that black citizens in Rhodesia could get.

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  And that franchise had expanded a tiny bit over the amount of time that Rhodesia existed. But at the peak of like the black franchise in Rhodesia, you were talking about like 11 or 12,000 people who were able to vote out of a population 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?

• 1:02:39Robert Evans?

  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. He's very bullish on the coming of 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 10 or 20 years of being a colony.

• 1:03:22Robert Evans?

  And if I make myself a top man 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? So that's what Smith is looking at. That's how he sees his future by the end of the 1940s. And by the end of the 40s, start of the 50s, Rhodesia has become, this is, if you want to know, had the Confederacy, if had the US Civil War either not happened, or had the Confederacy somehow survived into the 20th century, what would it have looked like? That's Rhodesia, right? Like that, that's your best guess for how it would have looked is. Rhodesia. For roughly 50 years, the colonial government of Rhodesia had sold or awarded all of the best growing land to white men. Rhodesian defenders will often

• 1:04:05Robert Evans?

  point out that Rhodesia'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 1976 dispatch, quote, "Whites live 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 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 family seems par for the course. 14% of the total black labor force is in domestic employment, a huge proportion." So, you have this, number one, they've kind of recreated like the dream American suburb

• 1:04:49Robert Evans?

  society. All the white people drive. The only people on buses are black or other, like, non-white people and 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 11 times as much as their black counterparts, and even that statistic underplays 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, like, skilled labor is like

• 1:05:30Robert Evans?

  the most shameful thing to do as a white person in Rhodesia, because you, 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.

• 1:05:57Robert Evans?

  The fact that there are people 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 1948, he's elected to the Southern Rhodesian Assembly, becoming a minister of the Rhodesian Parliament at age 29. And initially, he backs the Liberal Party, which is the party in opposition at the time. That's not going to last long. But the same year, he gets into Parliament, he meets a South African schoolteacher named Janet Watt, and the two were soon wed. Over the following years, Ian Smith and his wife will have two sons and a daughter, as 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 us to say, we

• 1:06:42Robert Evans?

  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, there's this other British colony, Nyasaland, which is like Malawi today, and they're all governed by this tiny number of white people at the top. And the tiny number of the white people at the top in 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 the, that's what they're going to

• 1:07:25Robert Evans?

  try for a few years, from like, the mid 50s to 1960. They're going to be like, what if we pretend we're trying to start our own Central African Federation, as opposed to, well, 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 50s, decolonization is coming. White rule is ending in 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

• 1:08:05Robert Evans?

  country in Africa? That's not a popular thing over in like, the general, like, the rest of the world. And so, they're trying to figure out how to like, dress this up, how to hide what they intend to do. And Ian Smith is going to back the Central African Federation as 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. In part two, we'll talk about what happens with that 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 plug holes before we roll out?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yes. So, uh, 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 El Barrio. You can find us on all streaming platforms for podcasts. And you can find our socials at Welcome to El Barrio on Instagram. And you can find me at B E C C S Ramos on all platforms.

• 1:09:05Robert Evans?

  Excellent. We'll check that out. Find her on all those platforms and find us in part two. We'll keep talking.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  See ya.

• 1:09:14Robert Evans?

  We'll keep talking. Bye.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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