The End of Apartheid

by Robin Renwick

  I met Robert Mugabe in a broken-down office block in the dilapidated city of Maputo, capital of Mozambique. I did not take, then or later, to his coldly dislikable personality or the extreme aggression of his views. The best course, he declared, was to get on with the war. Negotiations were a waste of time. He was confident that his forces would win in due course. They were doing far more of the fighting than those of Nkomo.

  In the Zambian capital of Lusaka, Joshua Nkomo lived in much grander style in a house next to that of his friend and mentor, President Kenneth Kaunda. Nkomo was a mixture of bluster and attempts at charm, with bluster at the time predominating. As he complained bitterly about the failure of the Callaghan government to deliver him to power in Salisbury, I warned that he had better get used to the idea of dealing with the Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher. A few days later, the Rhodesians razed to the ground the villa in which I had met him in Lusaka.

  May 1979

  On the eve of the general election in Britain, the Conservative Party sent a mission to observe the elections in Rhodesia. It reported positively on the turn-out and clear victory for Muzorewa. At this time, I had never met Margaret Thatcher. But it seemed to me that the argument that we should not recognise the outcome of the elections in Rhodesia because that would annoy the UN and the Commonwealth had not the faintest chance of being accepted by her. But to recognise a Muzorewa government that attracted no other support and then went under would be a fiasco. Margaret Thatcher just might be prepared to consider a much bolder plan. This would mean Britain playing a far more direct and adventurous role than any previous government had been prepared to contemplate.

  Following the Conservative victory, the Foreign Office had greeted with a sigh of relief the appointment of Lord Carrington as Foreign Secretary, after a sometimes turbulent relationship with David Owen. The very patrician Carrington detested the Rhodesian Front and their right-wing supporters in his own party, who regarded Ian Smith (who still bore the scars of the injuries he had suffered while serving as an RAF pilot in Italy during the Second World War) as a kindred spirit and the rebellion he had led against the Crown as a mere peccadillo.

  Peter Carrington, who had an even more distinguished war record himself, had no more time for Smith than he did for the bluster of Nkomo and the intransigence of Mugabe, or for the means by which they were seeking to liberate their country. Carrington suspected, as I did, that the former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home might well be correct in suggesting that what they wanted was ‘one person, one vote – once’.

  With a war in progress, the Foreign Office view had been that it would be unwise for Britain to get more directly involved. But, if the situation deteriorated to the point of collapse, we faced the prospect of having to evacuate large numbers of British citizens from Rhodesia in circumstances reminiscent of France’s exit from Algeria in 1962. There was, I was convinced, no low-risk policy in relation to Rhodesia.

  Margaret Thatcher was surprised to find the Foreign Office advocating a far more muscular approach, which was the opposite of what she had been expecting. The first major decision she was asked to take was that this was going to be a purely British initiative and not an Anglo-American one.

  What attracted the Prime Minister most about our plan was its boldness. President Jimmy Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, agreed with undisguised relief that we should take the lead. In the debate on the Queen’s speech, the Prime Minister said that ‘we intend to proceed with vigour to resolve the issue’. It was a promise not many believed her capable of keeping.

  We told her that the constitution of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (as it was called under the internal settlement) was unlike that on the basis of which we had granted independence to any other former colony, as the real power remained in the hands of the Rhodesian military commanders. She agreed that this must be remedied before the country could be brought to independence.

  We then sought to persuade her that bringing the country to independence would not be of much avail, nor would a Muzorewa government survive, if we could not get support from the neighbouring countries and find a way to wind down the war. For this very nasty small war was getting steadily worse. To counter the incursions by Mugabe’s guerrillas from Mozambique and Nkomo’s from Zambia, the Rhodesians were launching ferocious cross-border raids to disrupt infiltration and destroy the neighbouring countries’ infrastructure. They also were arming groups opposed to the Frelimo government in Mozambique, notably the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo), fuelling a full-scale civil war in that country. As for Mugabe’s tactics, one of the principal methods used to bring areas of the country under his forces’ control was the torture, mutilation and execution of village headmen in front of the villagers.

  June 1979

  At this point the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, descended on us in London. Pik Botha was one of the most verligte (enlightened) members of the South African government, but that was not saying much at the time. He gave Peter Carrington and his deputy, Ian Gilmour, a forty-five-minute lecture on the iniquity of Western policy in southern Africa, alleging constant moving of the goalposts, and allowing precious little time for reply. Bent on revenge, I telephoned 10 Downing Street to ensure that, when Pik Botha saw Margaret Thatcher, he did not get a word in edgeways.

  Our next visitor was Bishop Muzorewa. A decent man, he always seemed small and insignificant in meetings, lacking Nkomo’s vast girth and bluster and Mugabe’s viperish intelligence. Margaret Thatcher told him that there would have to be a new constitution for Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, comparable to those for our former colonies.

  July 1979

  Our plans for the Commonwealth conference in Lusaka depended on taking the other heads of government by surprise. They were convinced that the Prime Minister planned to recognise Muzorewa.

  Zambia, including its capital, had been treated as a free-fire zone by the Rhodesian army and air force for many months. As the RAF VC10 neared Lusaka airport, Peter Carrington asked the Prime Minister why she was donning dark glasses. Mrs Thatcher feared that, on arrival, acid might be thrown in her eyes.3 There was a sharp exchange with Carrington when he suggested that the meeting was going to be a damage limitation exercise, an expression she claimed never to have heard before! It was completely alien to her thinking.

  The discussion on Rhodesia, expected to be stormy, was opened by Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. What was needed, he said, was a genuinely democratic constitution and elections in which all parties could participate. The Prime Minister, as we had planned, upstaged him by agreeing. Commonwealth leaders, she said, had never failed to remind us that it was Britain’s responsibility to bring Rhodesia to legal independence. That was exactly what we were now intending to do. We would be proposing a new constitution and elections to be held under British control.

  The conference ended with the improbable sight of Margaret Thatcher dancing with Kenneth Kaunda. She was far too polite to mention that, on her return to her accommodation one evening, the ceiling had collapsed and there was no running water.

  She told the press that the problem was to find a solution that would bring an end to the war. But she added, to my dismay, that she had no plans to send British troops to Rhodesia. This was a decision we were going to have to get reversed.

  August 1979

  The British government invited Muzorewa and the leaders of the Patriotic Front to a constitutional conference, to be held in London at Lancaster House, that would decide the independence constitution and lay the groundwork for new elections. In the run-up to the conference, Margaret Thatcher agreed that she must not seek to play any part in it, otherwise the participants would constantly be appealing against Carrington to her. This included having nothing whatever to do with Ian Smith, who had been greeted with applause by airport workers on his arrival in Britain and fêted by some right-wing members of her party. Ian Smith could not understand the Prime Minister’s refusal to meet him, forgetting that he had led a rebellion a
gainst the Queen, which, to Margaret Thatcher, was a capital offence.

  A note from Number Ten recorded that Peter Carrington and Thatcher were approaching the conference in ‘rather different ways’. The Prime Minister wanted to do everything possible to enable it to succeed. The more worldly-wise Carrington regarded an agreement as ‘virtually inconceivable’.4

  September 1979

  Beneath the chandeliers at Lancaster House, Carrington said that the people in the room had it in their power to end the war. After uncompromising statements by Nkomo and Mugabe, the proceedings were interrupted for tea, to force the delegations to mingle with one another. The participants were surprised to see Josiah Tongogara, commander of Mugabe’s Zanla forces, greeting Ian Smith and asking about his mother. Tongogara had grown up on Smith’s mother’s farm: she had given him sweets as a child. This had not, however, had much effect on his political opinions.

  We presented a classic decolonising constitution to both sides, providing for genuine majority rule with protections for minority rights. Muzorewa was overshadowed by the brooding and sardonic presence of Ian Smith, who had driven his country full tilt into an increasingly bloody cul-de-sac. When Smith complained, in his grating voice, that we were dragging out the conference while people were being killed in Rhodesia, the normally imperturbable Carrington lost his temper completely. Purple with anger, he told Smith that the responsibility for the war, which they were losing, rested squarely with him.

  Ian Smith’s plan was to push the government up against the deadline for the renewal of sanctions in November. Urged by Carrington to find a way to outmanoeuvre him, I told the Rhodesians that not all sanctions depended on the Southern Rhodesia Act, passed in response to UDI, which they knew was unlikely to be renewed in November. A lot of measures existed under other legislation, and these required positive, not merely negative, action to terminate them.

  October 1979

  This (the threat to continue sanctions) was regarded by Smith as an example of British perfidy. But it had the intended effect. The Muzorewa delegation accepted the proposed constitution, overruling Ian Smith. Nkomo and Mugabe still were holding out, though. To get their attention, we announced that, to organise the elections, we would be sending a British Governor to Rhodesia with full powers, dissolving the Rhodesian government and parliament. As Nkomo and Mugabe’s henchmen said to me, they now realised that, this time, we were serious, which they had never believed we were before.

  With extreme reluctance, Muzorewa agreed to stand aside as Prime Minister; a more power-hungry politician would have refused to do so. Nkomo and especially Mugabe, however, still were bent on stringing out the conference while they pushed more of their troops across the border. In the course of many discussions with me at Lancaster House, Mugabe kept telling me that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and that he had a PhD in terrorism. The Rhodesians were responding by launching ferocious cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique. As Mugabe demanded that we must ensure the release of all political prisoners, I told him that this would have to include his own dissidents, held in a detention camp in Mozambique.

  November 1979

  Carrington and I were summoned to see the Prime Minister in her room in the House of Commons. We had presented her with a bill providing for Britain to assume direct control of Rhodesia through a Governor with full legislative and executive powers. Reminding us that she was a lawyer, she insisted on going through every line of it.

  Next, in the Foreign Office, I spent the mornings with our military representatives negotiating with Ken Flower and Peter Walls and the afternoons with Tongogara and Nkomo’s commander, Dumiso Dabengwa, brokering a ceasefire. This required the guerrilla commanders to concentrate their forces in the rural areas in designated assembly places, under the protection of a Commonwealth monitoring force, which, Margaret Thatcher now accepted, would have to be led by the British military. We found an unexpected, invaluable ally in Tongogara, who proved to be far more interested in a peaceful outcome than his political leader, Mugabe. At my suggestion, Christopher Soames, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law and Leader of the House of Lords, was persuaded by Carrington to serve as Governor.

  Following a series of secret meetings with him in a hotel under the motorway on the Edgware Road, in which he received us clad, bizarrely, in a raincoat, Nkomo told us that he wanted to agree. Mugabe, however, was not going to agree to anything until cornered into doing so.

  We warned the Prime Minister that the conference would be dragged out indefinitely unless we took decisive action to bring it to a conclusion. With her approval, we now took the risky step of despatching Christopher Soames to Rhodesia – despite his own misgivings – and lifting sanctions before a ceasefire was agreed.

  December 1979

  The conference ended with Mugabe still holding out. Through the Mozambican special representative, Fernando Honwana, we were able to persuade President Samora Machel, whose country was suffering desperately from the war, to tell Mugabe that, unless he signed the agreement, there would be no further support from Mozambique. Agreement was announced in time for it to be greeted with applause at the state banquet President Carter was holding for Margaret Thatcher at the White House.

  Before our departure from Lancaster House, Tongogara told me that he was taking serious risks in committing to the agreement. Shortly before the ceasefire was due to be implemented, Mugabe told the British ambassador in Maputo that Tongogara had been killed in a road accident on 26 December as he drove from Maputo to give orders to his forces. His death at this crucial moment gave rise to all sorts of suspicions, the more so as he was known to have had a private meeting with Nkomo before leaving London. His injuries were declared to be consistent with death in a car crash, but, as ‘car crashes’ have turned out to be a favourite method for the Mugabe regime to maintain itself in power, the jury still is out on what really happened to Tongogara.

  On day one of the ceasefire in Rhodesia, those of us who had negotiated the agreement at Lancaster House passed through some of the worst hours of our lives. The monitoring force teams were deployed in remote, guerrilla-infested areas, with the Rhodesians speculating as to how many of them would return. Having put up their flags, they waited for the guerrillas to emerge from the bush. They did so at first in a trickle, which then became a flood, with fifteen thousand men moving into the camps without a single major clash. Mugabe, however, had delivered thousands of lightly armed young mujibas (scouts) to the assembly places, while keeping large sections of his forces outside them. As General Walls protested to me, ‘Any self-respecting terrorist has an AK-47!’

  January 1980

  There followed two months of extreme tension in Rhodesia, with an ever-present risk of a breakdown in the ceasefire, as Mugabe used his forces outside the assembly areas to intimidate the villagers and the Rhodesian special forces contributed their own atrocities, including an attempt to assassinate Mugabe. Ian Smith engineered a meeting with Muzorewa and the military commanders to demand that they should renege on the agreement and go back to the war. This was rejected by General Walls and Ken Flower. We had got round this corner with screaming tyres.

  February 1980

  As the elections approached, we received a deluge of international observers, with a great deal of advice and concerns about the turbulent nature of the process. This caused Christopher Soames untactfully to observe: ‘This is not Little Puddington in the Marsh. These people think nothing of sticking tent poles up one another’s whatnots!’

  The CIO chief, Ken Flower, was a legendary figure in Salisbury. Whenever I had dinner with him at Meikles Hotel, the band would play ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ I was reassured by him of my own impartiality as he informed me that I was on two death lists, that of some rogue elements of the Selous Scouts, who felt that I was a bad influence on General Walls, and that of Mugabe and his associates, should they lose the election.

  We challenged the observer teams to predict the result, which n
one of them proved able to do. The Rhodesians to the end were overconfident of Muzorewa’s support. Nkomo, who knew that his support was confined to Matabeleland, kept urging us to ban Mugabe! Our assessment was that Mugabe would win the largest number of votes, but we did not know how many.

  We had asked all the observer missions to declare whether the elections were free and fair before the results were declared. Most were reluctant, but the UN representative, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, showing political courage, declared the election to have been fairly conducted before the outcome was known. He found reassuring, he told us, the sight of shirtsleeved British policemen in their helmets at every polling booth. Even Julius Nyerere acknowledged that ‘The British do not know how to rig an election!’

  2 March 1980

  As the election results came in, but had not yet been announced, and it became clear that Mugabe was going to win, Soames’s deputy, Sir Antony Duff, and I set off to Combined Operations Headquarters for what we knew was likely to be a decisive confrontation with the Rhodesian military commanders, with Walls in great distress saying that ‘The enemy is about to become our government’. They demanded that we invalidate the elections, with Walls appealing directly to Margaret Thatcher to do so, an approach that was summarily rejected by her. They regretted, they said, ever having gone to Lancaster House.

  I reminded them that they had done so only because they were losing the war. Walls, turning to his colleagues, said: ‘You know that is true.’ He blocked plans by elements of the Rhodesian military to try to stage a coup. Mugabe in turn was persuaded to form a coalition government including Nkomo and Ian Smith’s deputy, David Smith, and the British military set about integrating the Patriotic Front and Rhodesian forces. Ken Flower, less surprised at the outcome than his fellow commanders, got himself appointed as Mugabe’s head of intelligence. I was presented by Nkomo with an AK-47, which was promptly confiscated by the British military.