Part One: Ian Smith: The Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Summary

Behind the Bastards: "Part One: Ian Smith – The Prime Minister of Rhodesia"
Release Date: June 23, 2026
Host: Brett (Cool Zone Media), Robert Evans
Guest: Becca Ramos

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the rise of Ian Smith — the infamous Prime Minister of unrecognized Rhodesia — and the white colonial society that underpinned his rule. The hosts unpack the deep-rooted white supremacy, violent settler colonialism, and the manufactured mythologies that allowed Smith and his ilk to sustain minority rule. The conversation follows Rhodesia’s bloody birth, Smith’s privileged upbringing, and the legal machinations used to create a racist, exploitative state in southern Africa.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Rhodesia: The Specter of White Supremacy (06:56–09:31)

• Rhodesia’s continuing symbolic power: Brett notes how Rhodesia haunts the white supremacist imagination in the US and abroad and recounts how US racists were recruited to fight for the Rhodesian Army.
• Illegal independence: Rhodesia, a breakaway British colony, was never internationally recognized, waging a nearly 20-year war to uphold white minority rule until it became Zimbabwe.

2. Colonial Origins: The Scramble for Africa (06:56–17:25)

• European land grab: The episode explains the late 1800s “scramble for Africa,” driven by European fears over dwindling unclaimed resources. Parallels are drawn between the logic of colonialism and the rhetoric around AI and tech today.
  • “If we fuck up and don't get enough Africa, then that's the game plan, obviously.” — Brett [09:20]
• Britain and Cecil Rhodes: Cecil Rhodes, notorious imperialist, receives a royal charter to colonize southern Africa, using mercenary “Pioneer Columns” to seize land, form treaties under false pretenses, and break indigenous resistance in brutal wars.
  • First Matabele War (1893): Paved way for white settlers.
  • First Chimurenga (1896): An indigenous uprising crushed with superior firepower.
• Structural oppression: Early laws took best land from Africans, confined them to reserves, and built a society engineered to suppress Black resistance.
• American parallels: The reserve system consciously modeled on U.S. reservations, concentrating indigenous Africans into poor, controllable areas.

3. The White Rhodesian Identity and Social Structure (17:25–28:15)

• Hierarchy among colonizers: Despite being settlers, British Rhodesians looked down on Boers (Afrikaans-speaking South Africans). Early referenda refused South African union out of British chauvinism — white supremacists, but loyal above all to empire.
  • “You have to be super racist to be like, oh, South Africans. Not the right kind of white.” — Brett [19:45]
• Jock Smith and family: Smith’s father exemplified the upwardly mobile colonist: from Scotland, becomes local elite by selling goods to miners/farmers, then cementing status through marriage and club life.

4. Ian Smith’s Formative Years (20:43–31:10)

• Smith’s privileged upbringing: Born into a family emblematic of Rhodesia’s first-generation white aristocracy. Raised to see himself as “civilizing” Africa, schooled in Empire-first values.
• Ideological training: Smith recalled in his autobiography the values instilled in him — loyalty to the British Empire, law and order, and a “fairness” defined by splitting land equally between a tiny white population and millions of Africans.
  • “We're entitled to our half of the country, and the blacks are entitled to theirs.” — Ian Smith recalling his father [24:21]
  • Brett notes, “That’s not called being fair, that’s called being entitled.” [24:44]
• The British World: The ‘British World’ concept gave settlers a sense of privilege and global citizenship, combining both white supremacist and (to a degree) pluralistic modes, but always privileging whiteness at home in Rhodesia.

5. Leisure, Labor, and Inequality (31:10–42:10)

• Everyday life for white Rhodesians: The white elite played sports and lived lives of leisure, abetted by a subjugated Black workforce.
• Dalrymple’s outsider view: Only foreigners like Dr. Theodore Dalrymple seemed to recognize the “pyramid of startling inequality.”
  • “Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling inequality... their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours… their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us.” — Dalrymple (read by Brett) [38:18]
• Contrast and critique: The hosts liken this attitude to “Lost Cause” mythologies in the U.S. South and the modern “Southern Charm” mindset — genteel culture built on stolen labor.
• Smith’s autobiography: Notably lacking reflection on race or labor; focuses only on sports and family accolades, exposing blindspots and privilege.

6. Early Adulthood: War and Return to Power (42:10–47:25)

• WWII service: Smith joins the Air Force (RAF), gets shot down twice. Suffering lasting facial disfigurement — compared to a Bond villain origin story.
• Post-war: Becomes a war hero, finishes education, politically active as “veteran students’ spokesman,” quickly aimed at leadership in Rhodesia.

7. The White Farmer Myth and Land Expropriation (47:25–53:28)

• Smith as ‘farmer’: On returning, Smith buys a tobacco farm; like most whites, employs labor from a large Black workforce (6,200 white families overseeing 350,000 Black workers).
• Land theft: Smith’s only mention of Black presence is to complain about supposed environmental destruction by squatters — never addressing whose land it was or the fate of those expelled.
  • “Our land had been utilized over decades as a squatting camp for workers... there had been indiscriminate plowing... uncontrolled wood-cutting... and self-serving policies.” — Ian Smith [47:18]
  • “We didn’t steal our land from the people who owned it before, I’m borrowing it from my kids.” — Smith paraphrased [51:13]
• Whitewashed history: Rhodesians justified colonization claiming the land was “empty,” denying centuries of African habitation and resistance.

8. Legalized Dispossession: Laws for Apartheid (57:30–65:00)

• How to create a labor force: Legal systems deliberately impoverished Africans, forced them off their land, and engineered dependency on white farms and mines.
  • Hut tax: All non-white households taxed, ensuring economic pressure to enter wage labor.
  • Pass laws: Controlled where Africans could live and work, breaking up communities and eliminating opportunities for resistance.
  • Parliamentary exclusion: Nearly all Black citizens were denied the vote — at peak, just 12,000 out of millions were enfranchised.
• British complicity: While Rhodesia was a “self-governing colony,” laws were couched in technical or environmental terms to avoid overt international or imperial condemnation. The British government regularly reviewed and refined racist policies to maintain plausible deniability.
  • “So they think they have this illusion of autonomy, but yet they're crying back to Daddy Britain on everything.” — Robert Evans [63:38]

9. White Supremacy and its Defenses (65:00–71:00)

• The dream of Dominion: Smith and other white Rhodesians believed they would one day gain independence as a “dominion” like Canada — with minority rule intact.
  • “The animating 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.” — Brett [65:00+]
• Land and labor inequities: White families not only monopolized the best land, their lives were built around Black domestic labor; even the poorest whites enjoyed privileges unavailable to any Black worker.

10. Early Political Career of Ian Smith (71:00–73:27)

• Entry into politics: At age 29 (1948), Smith joined the Rhodesian assembly, supporting the Liberal Party and becoming a political figurehead, soon marrying and starting a family.
• “Central African Federation” ruse: As decolonization loomed, white elites attempted to disguise white minority rule by joining Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi) in a federation. Smith initially supported this attempt to preserve control through political sleight-of-hand.
  • “What if we put all of these three things together and pretend we're an independent nation, and try to get independence as a federation... and we just kind of pretend that it's not just white people in charge?” — Brett [71:30]

To Be Continued…

The episode closes with a teaser for Part Two: the collapse of the federation plan, the start of the Rhodesian Bush War, and the role Rhodesia would play in far-right mythologies worldwide.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We're entitled to our half of the country, and the blacks are entitled to theirs." — Ian Smith quoting his father [24:21]
• "That's not called being fair, that's called being entitled." — Robert Evans [24:44]
• "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... I had no idea what they wanted because they're not even allowed to talk to us." — Brett, paraphrasing Dalrymple [40:13]
• "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.” — Brett [41:06]
• "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..." — Ian Smith [51:04]
• “The animating... belief of their society is... 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 civilization in a nutshell.” — Brett [65:00+]
• “You have to be super racist to be like, oh, South Africans. Not the right kind of white.” — Brett [19:45]
• “They're fucking wordsmithing their racism.” — Robert Evans [65:00]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–06:56: Introductions, advertisements, setting up the episode focus.
• 06:56–17:25: Colonial conquest, bloody beginnings, the scramble for Africa.
• 17:25–28:15: Rhodesian identity, settler hierarchy, Smith family context.
• 28:15–42:10: Ian Smith's upbringing, the mindset of white Rhodesians, lifestyle dependence on Black labor.
• 42:10–47:25: WWII and Smith’s return as war hero.
• 47:25–53:28: The myth of white “farmers”, land theft, erasure of Black history.
• 53:28–57:30: Law and labor; manufacturing subjugation post-conquest.
• 57:30–65:00: Structure of apartheid; legalizing segregation through ‘neutral’ laws.
• 65:00–71:00: The dream of “dominion” status; the reality of white supremacy.
• 71:00–73:27: Ian Smith’s political rise, the Central African Federation gambit.
• 73:27–end: Closing remarks, preview of Part Two, credits.

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Overall Tone and Style

The hosts’ tone is irreverent but sharp, applying dark humor to expose hypocrisy and brutality. They critique the self-serving narratives of Rhodesian whites, repeatedly returning to the theme of willful blindness, manufactured myth, and calculated oppression.

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For Next Time:
Part Two promises to cover the unraveling of Rhodesia, the bush war, and the international far-right’s romanticization of the doomed white state.

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Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media.

[Brett]

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. 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. Becca Ramos is here to introduce Becca Ramos.

[Becca Ramos]

Hello, Becca.

[Brett]

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 want to plug your pluggables better than I did?

[Becca Ramos]

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 of. By the end of every episode, you feel a little closer to Pinkin, 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 Day. If you are a fan of Bad Bunny, you're a fan of Chewie, probably. So tune in. It's gonna be a great episode.

[Robert Evans]

That rocks. That rocks. Cool. 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. Sophie was sick, but you guys on the Reddit, Ian's a real person. Ian Johnson.

[Becca Ramos]

Ian is very much real, babe.

[Brett]

We have one episode with our producer Ian instead of Sophie, and I forgot to do a separate introduction, but because I wasn't there to.

[Robert Evans]

Mine do.

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Ian Johnston 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 have introduced separately.

[Brett]

Our producer. Yeah, that was. That was.

[Robert Evans]

To the subreddit, I'm safe. And that was Ian. Yeah, well done.

[Brett]

I fucked up. But you know who did? Well, actually, we're going to talk about people who fucked up today. Absolutely. We're talking about Becca. What do you know about Rhodesia?

[Becca Ramos]

You know, I'm gonna say not much.

[Brett]

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 Rhod 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 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 TL doctor 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. And that's like the long story, short version. Right? So we're going to talk about, about how all of that happened this week. Are you excited, Becca?

[Becca Ramos]

Woo. Let's get into it.

[Brett]

Yeah, you should be. You should be. This is an I heart podcast, guaranteed human.

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[Brett]

So in the early 1880s, that's where we're going to start our tale because that's, that's kind of where the origins of Rhodesia come from, right? You've got this, this period of time in which the great powers of Europe are all caught up in what was 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, 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 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 wide spread 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. 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 get bigger than us. 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 goes on for decades and 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. 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 believe that like, we have, we've got a couple of years 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.

[Becca Ramos]

I love about 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.

[Brett]

Yeah. We're the civilizing power.

[Becca Ramos]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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 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? So the Crown gives this guy Cecil Rhodes, who's the founder of the bsac. Yes, Cecil. We've done episodes on Cecil.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck Cecil.

[Brett]

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 Country Company. And Rhodes goes in to this area and he signed some treaties with local leaders, including the big local leader, this guy named King Lobengula of the Nebele. 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. Then you're, like, helping the locals govern this territory with their consent. And it doesn't seem as gross. This is always a lie. And the light of this is made 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 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 going to clear these locals out and we're going to take land, and I'm going to give anyone who fights for me a big chunk of land, you know? 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 colonizers about three years of peace before another war called the First Chimorenga breaks out in 1896. That name came from a warrior who led the Moringa people in a rebellion against the British a few years earlier. And the Chimarenga becomes the Shonas 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. But the first Chimarenga is this rebellion of all these peoples in what becomes Rhod against Rhodes and his, like, pioneer settlers. And it starts when a religious leader, a guy named Malimo, convinces a bunch of Nibele and Shona people that white settlers in the area, who are 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 considered 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 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 Nebele people, they don't really have the firepower to contrast like any of these sort of pioneer armies. And they get wiped out in pretty bloody fashion after this point. So this is like 1896, 1897, that you have this war and none of the white colonial leaders who are on the ground in what becomes Rhodesia at the time are stupid enough to believe that 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 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 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, that's the foundation of Rhodesian political society. As an article in the Conversation summarizes, the British South Africa 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 Nebele populations to into so called native reserve lands. So they're doing the. In America and this is very consciously, they're kind of looking 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 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. And it's kind of adopted unofficially before it's adopted officially is the name of this colony. As Charlton Cousins 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, it's a way to deal with the fact that this, this, the south, like 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 going to have to fight these fuckers at some point. 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, yeah. It's both of those things at once.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Brett]

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, yeah. Or wound up in charge of earlier. 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. 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 British people. We're part of Britain. We want to be part of the British Empire. We don't want to be part of South Africa. That's not our kind of thing. And it's interesting because 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 bowers is kind of like a big factor in Rhodesian politics, is they're a little too racist to be friendly to 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.

[Becca Ramos]

Like, that is a new level.

[Brett]

It's not white.

[Becca Ramos]

It's like they had a peptide.

[Brett]

Yeah, yeah. And we have our own apartheid from them. From the Boers. Yeah. 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 Saluque, 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 mine owner or a farmer, I mean, he does a little bit of both. But he primarily sells things to miners and farm owners to allow them to, like, do their bit jobs. And that's really the smart play.

[Robert Evans]

My question is, is Jock Smith the right kind of white for them?

[Brett]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Jock Smith is the British kind of white. Well, he's Scottish, but that's close enough.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, sorry.

[Brett]

Yeah, Jock Smith. So Jock, yeah, Jock 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. His mom's family came from some money back in England, and Jock had been, you know, he was the Scotsman who was hungry for success. So 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 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 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 reason why you want colonies if you're a country like Great Britain in this time, is that it gives something for your hungry young men to do in 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 a big part of the appeal. And so colonialism is going to 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 wading in. He never knows any other way to be right. He loves colonialism as those who benefit do 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. Their various contributions to civic life in solo and in Rhodesia as a whole. And they see this as, again, like, we're creat 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 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. 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.

[Becca Ramos]

I will say that is insane. As people who came into that space, you know what I'm saying?

[Brett]

Like, it's like, they were there first. 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?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Brett]

Definitionally, you know, it's entitlement. 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. 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. Cause 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 going to quote Charlton Cousins again, writing in the journal Historical Research, 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, in Ian, as 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 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 Myanmar or Burma, as they're calling at the time. And you're still a citizen of the British world, or India, and you're still in the British world. And that's really cool to a lot of people. 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 1 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. 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? We're just not. And that's a big pull to a lot of people.

[Robert Evans]

Why do. Why do they think. Why do they think that it's egalitarianism? Like what.

[Brett]

What forces white people are equal for white people, it's equal, right? 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. To band together to hold the line, right? So it's a lot 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? 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. 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 makes makes 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 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. 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 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 want to go out and push the frontier. And that's grows up. That's how he describes himself as a child. Right, we'll talk more about that, but first, here's some ads.

[Robert Evans]

Yay.

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we're back.

[Brett]

So I want to read a little 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?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's pathological propaganda.

[Brett]

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 by 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 gonna 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 his parents were, like, listing all of the awards his mummy 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 classes. 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 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. So he is not really gonna talk at all about his own childhood until he starts playing sports in high school. And then 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.

[Robert Evans]

That's probably overcompensating. Most of you are, you know, who you Are.

[Becca Ramos]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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 a lot hard to be the best sports in that situation.

[Becca Ramos]

Yeah, exactly. Sports looked very different then.

[Robert Evans]

We only have his word for it. And you know what?

[Matt Altmix]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't trust Ian Smith, but, you

[Brett]

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.

[Becca Ramos]

Of course.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Brett]

I would be. I would have been the LeBron. Yes. Because I'm taller than most of these Rhodesian kids were.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, sir.

[Brett]

So. And yet this is, though, one of the things I noticed. Cause 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. He doesn't give us any specific details of, like. 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. Like. And nearly all of those anecdotes are just about, like, sporting. They'll just talk about polo and hunting. That's like, every Rhodesian account of life in Rhodesia is like, polo and hunting and being served by servants. And I found that kind of 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 there to work as, like, an. 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 we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves. The rest of our time in our most beautiful surroundings was given over to friendship, sports, 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?

[Robert Evans]

What.

[Brett]

What. 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, like, their life isn't anything else. They don't have to do that.

[Becca Ramos]

The way he writes it, though, is so, like, dissonant of the experience they're putting onto 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.

[Brett]

Dalrymple is saying that because he's not a Rhodesian, he's saying, like. Cause 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, 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.

[Becca Ramos]

Yes. I guess I was saying the dissonance was coming from his.

[Jennie Garth]

His.

[Becca Ramos]

His wording of the use of opaque, I guess.

[Brett]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's. It's. It's deliberately made opaque because they're. 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. It's like, well, because they didn't have to do stuff. It's because other people did all the work. Yeah.

[Becca Ramos]

The way that you were not to be Bravo pilled, but the way you were reading that text was very Southern charm esque. Yes, it is very much that. Where these very rich old socialites refuse to acknowledge the land that they're on and then also speak in that way where like, I love art and culture and these things, but it's like off the backs of the slave labor that is this land.

[Brett]

Yeah. Are you really cultured if you're able to like fucking learn to play the piano? Cause you never have to cook your own food or whatever.

[Becca Ramos]

Exactly.

[Brett]

Right. If that's the reason you're cultured, is that really cultured or are you just. Just a blood drenched demagogue? Right. You know.

[Becca Ramos]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So.

[Brett]

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, 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 gonna be one of the first powers to get involved. 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, 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. Cause 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. 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. 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, right? 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 of. 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 Africa. And he was badly injured in this first crash.

[Robert Evans]

Incredible. He survived twice being shot down twice.

[Brett]

Twice. Real Harrison Ford levels of luck here. Yes, yes. 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. It's a 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. 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. No real notes there. And he returns home to Africa after the war and finishes his degree at Rhodes University. So 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 gonna 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. 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 gonna do the rest of my life.

[Robert Evans]

Giving Conor Roy from succession. He's like, Ian Smith was interested in politics at an early age.

[Brett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What experience does he have? My family's rich. That sounds rich.

[Brett]

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

[Ian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Brett]

He's like, I crashed a couple planes.

[Robert Evans]

He's. That's. That. And, like, low key. I look them up, they kind of look the same.

[Brett]

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. 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 people what to do while they wear white linen suits and Drink, Julie, you know, like, absolutely not. Yeah. I cannot exaggerate the degree to which Rhodesians are not farmers. White Rhodesians are not farmers. 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 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 Poland Daga 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 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 land. Right. The people who live here. That's the Rhodesian attitude in a nutshell.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he sucks.

[Brett]

Yeah. So that's pretty cool. 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 and sound natural conditions. And the important fact was we were able to arrest Further deterioration. So again, it 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. 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. I didn't inherit, we didn't steal our land from the people who owned it before. I'm borrowing it from my kids.

[Becca Ramos]

And those people are never gonna get it back.

[Brett]

No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. We have to pass off the 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 being 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 him 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. And a lot of Rhodesia works this way, right? You can find all manner of lovely Rhodesian childhood memoirs 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 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 Collins 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 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 is 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, 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.

[Becca Ramos]

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?

[Brett]

Resemp to. It was empty. It was empty. 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 in and killing them, and then by the time the 70s 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.

[Becca Ramos]

Exactly right.

[Brett]

If that's what you're judging it by. So, yeah, there's a lot that's flawed about this, this attitude. Speaking of things that are flawed, my sponsors aren't. They've never made a mistake ever. Except for sponsoring me, I guess. I don't know.

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[Brett]

And we're back. Okay, so 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. 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 minds. 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, 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 house, you have to pay a tax on your hut. That's what they, 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 gonna 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 how the Rhodesian state is constructed. In 1902, there's a pass law that gets added. So in 1896, black people start 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, 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 an area where we need more of them. That's why the past system comes into effect. 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 in 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 4 to 12 pounds a year. This was like a 30% income tax tax that you're paying just for the home you already own. 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 70s, right. Why are there more than half a million people living here and why are like the entire black population so impoverished? It's because the legal system was created to make them slaves. 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. Grant anyone else. Right. 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 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, we passed 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 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 stopped from sounding, like, embarrassingly racist to the mother government.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So they think they have this illusion of autonomy, but yet they're crying back to Daddy Britain on everything. Is that kind of.

[Brett]

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, hey, 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.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Great.

[Brett]

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, 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 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.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Brett]

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.

[Robert Evans]

They're fucking wordsmithing their racism.

[Brett]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Becca Ramos]

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

[Brett]

Yeah. That's especially British racism. And 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, 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. 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. Right. 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. Hey, 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, and that franchise did expand 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 4 or 5 million. So I think it's just more accurate to say that they essentially did not have the vote. Right. 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 is very bullish on becoming a dominion. When he returns home from the war, 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. 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, had the U.S. 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'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. Men. Rhodesian defenders will often 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 the 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 society. All the white people drive. The only people on buses are black or other, like non white people and a handful of poor white 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 it, like skilled labor is like the most shameful thing to do as a white person in Rhodesia because most of them don't have to. And even Ian, you can tell this is not a guy. As much as he brags about being a successful farmer, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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 gonna last long. But the same year he gets into Parliament, he meets a South African schoolteacher named Janet Watt, and the two are 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 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. And 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 what they're going to 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 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. 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?

[Becca Ramos]

Yes. So 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.

[Brett]

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

[Robert Evans]

See you.

[Brett]

We'll keep talking. Bye.

[Robert Evans]

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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com BehindTheBastards we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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This is an iHeart podcast.

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