Ian Smith (8 April 1919 – 20 November 2007) was Prime Minister of Rhodesia from 13 April 1964 to 1 June 1979, succeeding Winston Field and preceding Abel Muzorewa. He presided over a white minority government that remained in power after independence from Britain, and his racial policies led to the Rhodesian Bush War, which resulted in the end of white minority rule and the expulsion of many whites from the country by Robert Mugabe's African nationalist ZANU rebels.
Biography[]
Ian Smith was born in Selukwe, Southern Rhodesia on 8 April 1919, and he served in the British Royal Air Force from 1941 to 1946. After his return to Rhodesia he joined the United Rhodesia Party and became a member of the South Rhodesian Legislative Assembly, serving from 1948 to 1953. Upon the creation of the Central African Federation he became chief whip of the United Federal Party in the new Federal Parliament in 1953. He broke with the UFP in 1961 and proceeded to co-found the right-wing, segregationist, and racist Rhodesian Front, as whose leader he was elected Prime Minister of Rhodesia. In an effort to preserve racial discrimination despite British hostility, he proclaimed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, declaring Rhodesia a republic in 1970. International pressure, as well as increasingly successful guerrilla organizations led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, forced him to concede the principle of black majority rule from the mid-1970s. However, his obstinate, although ultimately abortive, efforts to esnhrine the predominant position of whites in a new constitution prolonged the civil war until 1979, when an agreement was reached with the black opposition. Succeeded by Abel Muzorewa and then by Mugabe, he led white opposition in Zimbabwe immediately following independence in 1980, though he became increasingly marginalized as the whites came to trust Mugabe. He remained in Zimbabwe until 2005, when he moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he died in 2007 at the age of 88.