The Transition to Independence (March-April 1980) 145

Mozambican support.

As Governor, Christopher Soames showed great courage in accepting his near impossible task. Cartoonists enjoyed depicting him having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of Government House, as the Americans had been in Saigon. We passed some of the worst hours of our lives as small contingents of British soldiers were sent into remote and extremely dangerous rural areas to set up assembly places for the guerrilla forces. The cease-fire came within a hair’s breadth of breaking down on several occasions and Ian Smith attempted to stage a revolt, only to be over-ruled by the Rhodesian commander, General Walls, and the head of intelligence, Ken Flower. We spent our days with one or other, or both of them. For Walls came under intense pressure from his troops and some of his colleagues to kick over the traces, but never did so, while Flower understood that the only alternative would be a disastrous end to the war.

Walls protested that half the numbers Mugabe had delivered to the assembly places were youths armed only with sticks. ‘Any self respecting terrorist has an AK47!’, he observed to me. Mugabe had kept back thousands of his troops to ensure that the villagers voted the right way. They engaged in a lot of intimidation, causing us to threaten to disqualify the worst affected areas from voting unless it diminished, which it then did. But the Rhodesian special forces had engaged in plenty of dirty tricks of their own, while South African military intelligence tried to blow up Mugabe.

When it came to the election, the UN representative, Perez de Cuellar, later Secretary General, was sufficiently impressed by the sight of British policeman in their shirt sleeves supervising the polling for him to declare the elections free and fair before the results were known, which few others were willing to do.

The result showed Nkomo winning all the seats in Matabeleland and Mugabe winning a massive majority against Muzorewa in all the Shona speaking provinces. We had expected Mugabe to win more votes than anyone else, though not to the extent he did.

The world press had more than half convinced themselves that we had been hoping to establish a government without Mugabe, though that would have led to an immediate resumption of the war. In reality our objective had to be to form a coalition government incorporating representatives of the Rhodesians, Nkomo and Mugabe, which was what we did. As Christopher Soames had promised him if he won the election, Mugabe was designated Prime Minister.

An appeal from General Walls to Thatcher to invalidate the election was dismissed forthwith. Duff and I were summoned to a crisis meeting with the Rhodesian commanders, at which Walls declared ‘The enemy is

about to become our government.’

We said that they would never have accepted our plan if they had not been losing the war. They could no longer protect the farmers. They had lost control of all the rural areas at night. Many of their own troops must have voted for Mugabe.

Turning to his colleagues, Walls said: ‘You know that they are right.’ The Rhodesian Light Infantry, which had been awaiting an order to revolt, were stood down. British troops started training the guerrillas to form the bulk of the Zimbabwe army.

I did not enjoy, any more than Margaret Thatcher did, handing Zimbabwe over to Robert Mugabe. But she was justifiably proud that, through what she described as ‘muscular diplomacy’’, we had stopped the war and brought Zimbabwe to legal independence and majority rule following an election under our supervision in far better circumstances than had looked remotely possible a year before.

Peter Carrington, rightly, has received much of the credit for the outcome, but this high wire performance would never have been possible without Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to accept all the risks associated with it. Throughout the Conference, she flatly refused to meet Ian Smith because, unlike his supporters in her party, she did not forgive him his rebellion against the Crown and its disastrous consequences.

But at Lancaster House, Mugabe had kept telling me that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and ‘I have a PhD in terrorism’. Having crushed a pseudo rebellion by Nkomo’s supporters, he governed with relative moderation for two decades until his hold on power started to be threatened, at which point he reverted to the tactics of terror that he had relied on throughout the war. The white-owned farms were invaded by so-called war veterans and distributed to Mugabe associates, as were the proceeds of the diamond mines. The people of Zimbabwe were subjected to tyranny and a state of economic misery that has lasted ever since. It was Grace Mugabe’s attempt to poison his successor, Emerson Mnangagwa, that led eventually to Mugabe’s downfall in a military coup, but not to any relief for the people of Zimbabwe.

Years later, as I waited in Downing Street with the Prime Minister for the arrival of Nelson Mandela, she asked me if he was anything like Mugabe. I was able to assure her that I had never met two human beings less like each other than Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela.

ROBIN RENWICK