[Webstral]

I agree that Croukamp's work isn't what it was billed to be. I, too, wondered about the details of anti-tracking and so forth.

I'm nearing the end of The Rhodesian War. A few ideas stick out. The first is that the white Rhodesians made their own mess. By the end of the war, the entire train was coming off the rails. Schools and medical facilities were closed throughout the countryside. Disease that had been under control in the 1960's was running rampant because the management infrastructure was systematically destroyed. The white population was fleeing in droves. The economy was in a tailspin. All of this came to pass because the white Rhodesian government refused to create the conditions for lasting peace, preferring to rely instead upon violence as a means of dealing with discontent. Had the white Rhodesians eased up on their racism and enabled a more meritorious approach to universal citizenship, support for ZANU might have been so minimal that the Maoist ZANLA guerillas might never had found any metaphorical water in which to swim.

One can claim with justification that the support of the USSR and China and the border states of Zambia and Mozambique (after 1975) gave ZAPU and ZANU, respectively, strength they might never have had. Fair enough. But Rhodesia wouldn't have gotten very far without South Africa and other outside support. Material support was secondary. The Rhodesians fought a very effective bush war with a fraction of the manpower and equipment available to the Americans in Vietnam. ZANLA suffered years of lopsided losses, and yet they kept coming back for more. Clearly, there was more to the matter than just the hardware.

The guerillas placed a heavy emphasis on political indoctrination. They knew what they were trying to achieve, and they saw themselves as having a place in history. The Rhodesians, on the other hand, didn't seem to see the need for a guiding philosophy. Their ideas were negative at worst and preservationist of a blatantly racist society at best. They didn't want things to change. They were opposed to communism. But what were they trying to accomplish, other than not have things be different? I'm not advocating for the communist guerillas. Far from it. Mugabe has turned out to be one of the world's foremost kleptocrats. But the guerillas were fighting for something. They wanted change that they perceived to be better for the majority of Rhodesians. The white Rhodesians, on the other hand, didn't have much to offer the black majority except more of the same. They didn't have much to offer themselves except preservation of their life style based on an openly unequal distribution of and access to resources and economic opportunity. If they had done a better job of co-opting the most motivated and capable of the black Rhodesians, then the white Rhodesians at least could have offered the idea that their was a meritocratic society in which upward mobility was possible for anyone. Of course, this would have meant opening the doors on political power to the black Rhodesians. Obviously, this was not acceptable option until the only choices were moderate reform or radical reform.