Mugabe and Ian Smith

A number of people seem to be having trouble with the logic of Ian Smith's rebellion against the wishes of other people that he turn his country over to black majority rule back in the 1960's when everyone else was doing it. OK, everyone except South Africa. One such article notes that "Few could argue with the logic of redistribution when some 5,000 white commercial farmers owned two-thirds of the best arable land in a country of millions of blacks."

I'm not sure why this is so difficult to argue against. First, prior to white settlement, there weren't millions of blacks. There were fewer than one million, because without white farms, the country did not produce enough food to feed that many people. Second, there simply isn't any evidence that the black farm workers were ready to run the farms, let alone the entire country. They have been in charge for 30 years now. They now have most of the land, and they are producing less and less. They are on track to starve by the millions.

Much has been made of the 30,000 people who died in the bush war, mostly black insurgents. That was over a period of 15 years. Mugabe, not long after coming to power, killed 20,000 Ndebele civilians in one year. The loss of life, when you consider the collapse of the life expectancy, has been in the millions under Mugabe.

It's really hard to make a good argument that Zimbabwe, under any plausible scenario, would have been better had Ian Smith conceded in 1965 that black majority rule was inevitable.