Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*

Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.

Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today.  He also is delusional almost beyond belief.  As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him.  The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians.  He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.

He calls the Rhodesian human rights record “impeccable,” but you will find another perspective from GPT-5.

He loves to inveigh against South African apartheid, which he considered very bad publicity for the broader project of civilizing the southern cone of the African continent.  He insisted that Rhodesia had nothing similar.

Unlike many contemporary writers, he often is willing to tell you what he really thinks, for instance:

Hilgar Muller certainly put on a good performance, full of drama and emotion, the kind of thing these foreign-affairs types have got to perfect if they are going to do their job.  He need not have bothered as far as I was concerned, for I am far too experienced and down to earth to be influenced by such tactics.

The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes:

Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.

Or he writes:

I myself certainly prefer having dealings with some of these honest-to-goodness black people, than with the two-faced liberals of the Labour Party or the Fabian Society.

“Recommended” is not exactly the word I wish to use here, but I can report that I read the whole thing.