When I began initially working on what was planned to be my Rhodesia video (before it morphed into something much larger and I began writing a book of my own), I was greatly surprised to find that since the fall of Rhodesia no one had written a biography of Ian Smith. As Berlyn writes in the beginning of her Smith biography, published in 1978, ‘Ian Douglas Smith must be the most written about Prime Minister of any country in the world during the past decade; yet much of what is written is speculative. Unlike the accepted image of the politician, Smith is publicity shy, a quiet person who does not seek the limelight. It took me five years to acquire his co-operation in writing about him, and then it was only because the request came from the National Historical Society and not from me personally, that permission was given. Which is why so many people write about him without a personal knowledge of their subject.’1
Still, though, Smith has allowed authors like JRT Wood to have full access to his papers, and plenty is known of his World War II and Rhodesia years. It’s bizarre in the extreme that no one took up the task of finishing the job and writing a modern biography, covering his years in Zimbabwe and then his final years in South Africa leading up to his death. As of the time of writing all we’ve been left with is Anatomy of a Rebel by Peter Joyce, published in the early 1970s and this work by Phillippa Berlyn, published in the late 1970s. The former work by Joyce painted a defiant picture of Smith and, indeed, there was no other way to really view Smith in the early 1970s, Rhodesia had seemingly already put down the terrorist threat and it seemed as if there was nothing but better times on the horizon. I’m interested to see, and I believe my audience would also be interested to see, how Smith was painted in 1978 when the game was very clearly almost up as the PM had already conceded to majority rule.
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