The following morning, we left the judge’s home for Bulawayo, Wankie and Victoria Falls. This would be the “dangerous” part of our trip as there was daytime terrorist activity on the road to Victoria Falls. About 90 minutes outside of Bulawayo, we would travel in “convoy” the rest of the way. Traveling in convoys of vehicles escorted by soldiers reduced the likelihood of a terrorist ambush.
The “freedom fighters” did not take on well-armed targets. Rather, they preyed on unarmed and defenseless civilians. The last thing the “Terrs” wanted was to run into some of the well-trained citizen soldiers of the Rhodesian armed services.
It was really an adventure now! We roared down the two lane highway, trucks and cars alike at top speed, ignoring posted speed limits. In front and at the rear of our small convoy of 20 vehicles, were camo-painted trucks with four or five soldiers armed with their Fabrique Nationale 7.62 mm automatic weapons and a 30 caliber machine gun on a mount where the canvas roof had been removed.
In addition, each car was also armed. I had my Colt 45 automatic that I had brought from Texas. The other vehicles had an assortment of handguns, locally manufactured Uzi submachine guns and R1 rifles (FNs of South Africa manufacture).
No Terr in his right mind was going to take on a convoy like this! Needless to say, we arrived at our hotel in Wankie without incident.
The hotel looked like something out of Disneyworld. It had obviously been built with the tourist trade in mind just before the onset of sanctions in 1964. It was several miles inside the game preserve and elephants and giraffes would graze a few hundred yards from the balcony in your room. The 1976 tourist season had not gone well and the events that we had planned such as a camera safari had been cancelled. The man to lead the safari had been called up by the BSAP to chase some Terrs who had attacked a rural village just outside the preserve. Since there really wasn’t anything we could do there, we decided to go on to Vic Falls the following morning.
The next morning another convoy took us to the town of Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Rhodesia. In past decades, Zambia had been known as Northern Rhodesia.
When the short-lived Federation of Northern Rhodesia (1953-1963), Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland broke up with independence coming to Northern Rhodesia as Zambia and Nyasaland as Malawi. Southern Rhodesia became known simply as Rhodesia—still a British colony. It was not much later that Rhodesia broke away from the British who refused to allow them independence. In 1964, Rhodesia made its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). The United Kingdom would then lead the UN in declaring trade sanctions against the newly formed republic.
The issue that kept Rhodesia in a colonial status was the number of European and African members of any future Rhodesian Parliament. Rhodesia’s European Prime Minister, Ian Smith, was not opposed to African participation in government. It was the proportion of European Rhodesians and African Rhodesians and the timetable for power sharing that led to the eventual break between Rhodesia and the UK.
After UDI, Smith would harden his stance against African participation, often saying that African rule would come “over my dead body.” But, to me as a newly-minted conservative American, steeped in the soaring idealism of Texas-style Christianity propounded by RB Thieme, Rhodesia’s UDI was analogous to our own American Declaration in 1776. And, I saw the issue of African power analogous to our own history with Native Americans. Indeed, the Rhodesians were much more progressively minded toward Africans than we had ever been toward Native Americans.
For all its detractors, the Rhodesian Army was composed of Europeans and Africans alike, united against a common Communist foe—the terrorist forces under Mugabe, Sithole and Nkomo. In the short time I had been in Rhodesia, I had learned that the volunteer regular army was composed of about 3000 Europeans. There were thousands more African volunteers in the BSAP and the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR). This “all African” force of volunteers was more feared than any other unit of the Rhodesian Army. These were highly motivated African soldiers who were determined to drive the terrorists out of their country. Just after our arrival in Rhodesia, the RAR commissioned its first African officers.
There were also the Selous Scouts, an elite all volunteer mixed race unit. A Selous Scouts force of 70 men had just carried out a raid in Nyadzonya, Mozambique where they had killed a thousand terrorists in less than an hour with no loss of life to themselves. [Many years later, Gen Edgar Tekere who was Mugabe’s defeated commander of these forces, said that Mugabe was so disheartened by this series of raids that he had considered giving up the armed struggle. This explicit interview contains his interview along with Lt Col Reid Daley, the Scouts’ commander.] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs7V_IBQcDg 3/3/26 Note: Unfortunately, this video this is no longer available on YouTube.
The “territorial” forces were similar to what our American National Guard used to be before the Bush administration re-tasked them as frontline combat troops. The Territorial Regiments were composed of draftees. These draftees were all white Rhodesians. Not a single African was ever conscripted into the Rhodesian Army. [By the end of 1977, as many as 100 Africans were volunteering for duty with the Security Forces every day.]
The only African “conscripts” were those who were stolen from their villages and force-marched across the border to Mozambique and Zambia. These schoolboys were co-opted as terrorists, indoctrinated and trained by Chinese, Soviet and North Korean soldiers. Then they were set loose on their own people to rape, pillage and plunder.
The only analogy to these terrorists in American history at the time was to be found in our recent experience with the Viet Cong. In fact, the similarities were striking between the training and tactics of the Viet Cong and the Mugabe/Sithole/Nkomo “freedom fighters.”
Since I had missed my chance to fight the Communist Viet Cong, it made sense to me that fighting these African terrorists was really the same enemy—just a different continent.
