Serving in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Airforce

AS the country inches towards Unity Day signed on December 22, 1987 when Zanu and Zapu put civil hostilities in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces aside, bringing peace to the country which we enjoy up to this day, Garikai Mazara sat down with Robin Bale Smith, now a farmer in Banket, and spoke about his days serving in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Airforce. The 1987 Unity Accord was not the first time that enemies were coming together on a peace mission as in 1979, the Lancaster House Agreement brought hostilities between the Patriotic Front and Rhodesia to an end after a protracted 15-year-old “bush war”. But what was it like to fight the “bush war” on the Rhodesian front?

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Q: Robin Smith joining and fighting in the Rhodesian air force for Ian Smith, was it brother defending brother?

A: Not really, we were not related. My father was one of the four Smiths that declared Unilateral Day of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965. Ian Smith, David Smith, Phillip Smith and my father Lance Smith. But all these Smiths were not related.

Q: So in short, who is Robin Smith?

A: I was born in Gwelo in 1941. My father was a policeman at that time. He had arrived 20 years before that to join the BSAP, from Britain.

My mother was a Rhodesian and she had been in Rhodesia all her life when she married him. I was born a twin, with my sister Heather.

We moved to Banket in 1944 where my father was the member-in-charge of Banket Police. He really wanted to farm, that is why he came to Banket. We stayed at the police camp for some time and then he got this farm, and that is where I have been all my life.

Q: You have been there, from the 1940s right up to now — what has been the difference between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe?

A: When we came to the farm here it was all unused and we had to draw much of our labour from Nyasaland, now Malawi, to build the barns, grow tobacco which was the most popular cash crop back then. There was a shortage of labour.

It wasn’t just tobacco, there were other things as well as cattle. That is how we started. They would come on a contract, a simple contract. One month they would be paid here and the next month they would go back to Malawi.

But many of them stayed on. There were three types of labourers we could employ: short, medium and tall.

They were paid according to height, the short getting 55 shillings per month, the medium getting 60 shillings and the tall ones getting 65 shillings. It was a national thing, a lot of farmers used that formula.

Q: What was peculiar about these people, the migrant workers from Malawi? You could not get labour from around — the local people?

A: People who move to other countries to look for work are always better or more reliable than those who don’t move because it is quite a move to go to another country. You must be serious with what you want to do.

That is the problem we have here, with our people who go down south, because when they go down south, they are well sought after, wanting to further their lives. They sort of become reliable and unpopular because they are taking jobs from the citizens there.

I think it was the same thing that was happening then.

Q: Take us through the years, the 50s and 60s, when nationalism was growing, how was it in Rhodesia then?

A: We did compulsory military training at Llewellyn Barracks in Bulawayo. It was standard practice that after school you did some military call-ups. This was for white people. I think there was another arrangement for black people for there was the RAR, the Rhodesian African Rifles, and they made a good name for themselves fighting for Britain, fighting for Rhodesia in the Second World War.

The training was for about four or four-and-half months. Then the Bulawayo riots came, led by the likes of Joshua Nkomo.

They saw things differently from what we did and it turned out that they were right and we were wrong in that we didn’t accept majority rule. We didn’t know that, in 1980, that this was the only country in the world that didn’t have majority rule.

I don’t know why it took so long. When Kissinger and Foster came to discuss independence, they emphasised that you must accept majority rule, they didn’t say accept this or that party, but they just said accept majority rule. So that is what we did.

Q: The 60s, what was happening?

A: You have to understand my brain is now old, I cannot remember all these things quickly. In the 60s, things were going on well, there was some nationalist movement, which saw the likes of Nkomo being locked up in WhaWha, all these politicians, the emotions were building up. That is what we had been trained at Llewelyn Barracks, to face people that were demonstrating and causing nonsense, you know.

In 1961, the Rhodesian Front was born. It was called Rhodesian Front because we were worried about was going on with people like Idi Amin. It didn’t do us any good, what he did to Asian people. He didn’t set a good example of what could happen.

In actual fact, he set up a bad example to say, enough, we are putting up a Rhodesian Front. That is what it means, a front.

It started in 1961, my father was involved in that as well. He became a Member of Parliament. He started off as a Speaker of the House to become a Minister. And UDI was declared in 1965.

We went through to the 70s, the war days of call-ups. It started off in Centenary, must be 72, and the war started off in earnest. Freedom fighters on the side of the border there, it became so serious and I am not going to bring up all the atrocities, I think it is quite raw what happened. Politically, it came to a head with the Tiger Talks, and then the Lancaster House agreement talks.

Surely and slowly it became a factor, that we were getting to some form of arrangement and we had Abel Muzorewa. He was sort of the chosen one and the nationalists didn’t want someone chosen. But he did represent quite a bit of black people. We accepted majority rule and Mugabe was swept to power in 1980.

Q: The transition, how was it?

A: My father, Lance Smith, who was one of the Smiths who declared UDI, he was the Minister of Internal Affairs Minister then. He was asked by The Rhodesian Herald what he was going to do.

He said he is going to leave Rhodesia with his family and everything he owned and live in another country. And The Herald reporter asked him further, which country he was going to. He said, I am going to a brand new country and it is starting quite soon and it is called Zimbabwe. That is what we did as a family, we went to Zimbabwe from Rhodesia and in every sense of the word. We accepted one-man, one-vote.

Q: But what was the thinking, in the white community, it took us from UDI to 1980, a good 15 years. What was the thinking? Why couldn’t we have independence earlier on?

A: I don’t know, that is probably an impossible question to answer. What they were trying do is become a Parliament that was open to everybody, to have a franchise qualified vote.

In other words you had to qualify to vote, so this was the sort of thinking, that people had to earn their vote. Like school qualifications, property ownership, etc. There were quite a few black people in Parliament going into Independence and obviously it wasn’t quick enough and they wanted one-man, one-vote, like the rest of the world. It is there now. We joined in and that is where we are.

Q: So at what point did you join the war? You talked of Llewelyn Barracks, what came after that?

A: It just progressed from there, we were in the territorials and then I became a volunteer reserve (VR) in the Air Force and did most of my call-ups at Grand Reef near Mutare. I did get involved in there.

When we got Independence in 1980 and when we practised reconciliation, from 1980 to 1990, we had the best years in this country, not as Zimbabwe or Rhodesia but in the history of this country. Things were going extremely well as we followed up on our promise of reconciliation.

Then things went a bit round later on. We had the MDC coming in, who were toying with some idea as the land issue had not been sorted out properly because the land issue was the reason the war had been fought — and justifiably so because we had different areas in this country, land and housing, that was reserved for different people, whites, coloureds, Indians, Asians. There were areas which were reserved for certain races. If I tried to buy some land in a native purchase area, I could not because I was white.

Q: We are going towards Unity Day, which was signed in 1987. But the first time we saw unity was in 1980, the integration of warring parties, Rhodesian army on one side and the Patriotic Front on the other, to form a new army — how was the integration?

A: That was fantastic because everybody was integrated and the armed forces joined together. The Air Force carried on as normal, only changing badges from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. The armed forces, it was toned down a bit and it carried on. Nkomo and Mugabe came together and called a truce over what was happening during Gukurahundi, a peaceful agreement.

I do think the ZANU PF party name should have been changed to the United Provinces of Zimbabwe, like Mashonaland, Manicaland and Matebeleland as united provinces. I got a feeling the Americans don’t like ZANU PF so they keep on about sanctions, etc.

I feel it should have been United Provinces of Zimbabwe, which divorced itself from Zanu and freedom fighters. Like what happened in Britain — where you got the United Kingdom, where the English, Scots and Welsh, they were fighting each other and they came together and called themselves the United Kingdom.

If you follow that example, the United Provinces of Zimbabwe would have been a new broom, engulfing everybody, not having those names of the war days coming back.

That would have been to me, quite good. If I could, I would have put it in a better way but anyway that is how I would put it. That’s my belief and it could still happen.

Q: Let me take you back a bit, looks like you not too keen on talking about the war — Grand Reef?

A: You know people don’t like talking about those atrocities, all I can say is, that was the frontline and I was there for some years doing call-ups, farming here and call-ups there. I did Mt Darwin as well.

What we saw was not like life-like, it was real live ammunition and people from both sides were being killed, something that you don’t want to talk about often.

Q: But we want our children to learn from our history . . .

A: Shooting other people is not easy, in fact, shooting at any other thing is not easy. So it is not talked about, who did what.

A good friend of mine, Ian Harvey, he is dead now. He was one of the best pilots in the world and he had flown about 5 000 hours in a helicopter. He was a pilot, he was responsible for most of the action but he wasn’t pulling the trigger, someone else was doing that but he was responsible for the action.

He stayed on with the Air Force of Zimbabwe for 10 years. Eventually he retired and he died but he was buried with colours on his coffin, in honour of what he did for the country, even though he might have committed a lot of war-time . . . war is a terrible thing. So I am not going to get into the actual, of what I saw but I could see that a lot of people were dying, and I am talking of white people and black people. I am not going further than that.

Q: But in the Rhodesian army, there were blacks serving with you, how were your relations?

A: They were good. We had Grand Reef, and the army was quite close by and they were worried about their future as well. We had a lot of discussions about these things, you know.

Q: What were their fears?

A: Same, when will this war come to an end. We want to get on with our lives. That was asked often, how is this going to stop. And the answer was very simple, no war goes on forever. There is going to be a crunch and the war stops.