JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Ian Smith, the last white minority leader of Rhodesia, who vowed that blacks would not rule his country "in a thousand years," died Tuesday in a clinic outside Cape Town, after recently suffering a stroke. He was 88.
To many white Rhodesians, Smith was a savior who vowed to preserve white minority rule and protect their interests against rising African nationalist sentiment. They saw as heroic his unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965, when Britain was pulling out of its African colonies.
But to the blacks who fought a bitter war of independence, many of whom spent years in jail (including President Robert Mugabe), Smith was a ruthless despot who banned black nationalist parties, had leaders arrested and introduced harsh laws curbing civil rights.
In his latter years, Smith believed that he was more popular among black Zimbabweans than Mugabe, who has ruled since blacks won the right to vote in 1980.
With Zimbabwe now in severe economic decline, suffering the world's worst hyperinflation and one of the lowest rates of life expectancy, Smith liked to say that his government had offered blacks better education, housing and healthcare than Mugabe's.
"I was proud of Rhodesia. I have difficulty saying I'm proud of Zimbabwe," Smith said in 2000.
Smith's father was a Scottish butcher who settled in Africa to farm in 1897. Born in 1919 in Shurugwi, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, Smith was educated in South Africa and became a World War II fighter pilot for the British with the Royal Air Force. He fought for five months with Italian partisans in the Ligurian Alps against the Nazis. He was shot down in combat, and the resulting injuries left his face badly scarred. He later had plastic surgery to repair the damage, but the operation left him with a stern and stiff expression.
He became a farmer in southwestern Zimbabwe and married Janet Watt in 1948, the same year he was elected to parliament as a Liberal. In 1953 he joined the ruling United Federal Party but broke away in 1953, forming a party that merged with another to form the Rhodesian Front party. By then he was a staunch opponent of black majority rule.
"When the white man first came here, the blacks couldn't read or write. They didn't even have their own written language. They wouldn't let their children go to school. They hadn't even invented the wheel," Smith said in 2000, expressing views that are still echoed by some white Zimbabweans today.
