A few streets away at the palatial State House, where Smith used to live, his old nemesis, ‘Comrade President’ Robert Mugabe, was obliged to surround himself with tanks for protection against a seething populace. Yet here was the ageing warhorse of the outvoted white minority not only undefended but totally open to anyone passing by. And come in they did. […]

‘Every day, people come to me because things are so bad and they’ve nowhere to turn,’ he said. ‘I do what I can, which is unfortunately not much.’ […]

Later, I called on a senior veteran of the independence struggle, James Chikerema, to ask him why so many blacks I’d met agreed with Smith that their lives were better under his regime than under Mugabe.

‘To a certain extent, he’s right,’ said Chikerema, who fell out with the regime when Mugabe sooled his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on his political opponents in Matabeleland in the early 1980s. Perhaps 35,000 people were massacred.

‘During Smith’s time, the police did their work professionally but now they’re totally corrupt. It’s a terrible indictment of Mugabe that ordinary people felt safer under Smith than they do now,’ Chikerama ventured. […]

His home happened to be next door to the Cuban embassy and I wondered how he got on with his revolutionary neighbours. Cuba, after all, had sent thousands of troops to Africa to help in the liberation struggle and time was when Fidel Castro’s lieutenants would have seen it as their patriotic duty to eliminate Smith.

“I get on very well with my Cuban friends,” said the old man. “From time to time, they actually pass me cigars through the fence.”

“So the old saying about the only good commie being a dead commie doesn’t apply when they live next door?” I joked.

“Well I know some communists who are better than a lot of so-called capitalists in this free world, so let’s treat people on merit,” Smith replied.”

As Mugabe’s regime became steeped in blood and violence, Africans of all persuasions flocked to Smith’s house to consult him. The (all black) student body of Zimbabwe University gave him a standing ovation for his ringing condemnation of “the gangsters”, as he always called Mugabe’s corrupt ruling mafia.

Visiting him at his house in Harare (next to the Cuban embassy, the hammer and sickle flying) I marvelled at the fact that, after the death of his wife Janet, he lived alone with just a cook and minimal security. When he walked the streets of Harare, Africans would almost queue up to grasp his hand and wish him well. How could this be? […]

Paul Themba Nyathi, a leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who had fought Smith’s regime tooth and nail, told me that in retrospect Smith’s Rhodesia had been “a paradise”.

In material terms that was certainly true: everything then was better for Africans than it is now – education, healthcare, standard of living, life expectancy and employment. But as people saw Mugabe cloistered behind high walls and Kalashnik-ov-toting guards, venturing out only in armoured cars and vast militarised motorcades, they also remembered how Smith had lived a simple, unguarded life.

When he needed to travel abroad he drove himself unescorted to the airport, parked his car and carried his own bag. Just before the last presidential election in 2002, Smith said to me: “If Mugabe and I walk together into a black township, only one of us will come out alive. I’m ready to put that to the test right now. He’s not.”

I never understood the Smith phenomenon properly until I attended the launch of his book, The Great Betrayal, in Durban in 1997. I’d been unsure about going, not wanting to be taken for someone applauding an old white supremacist, but I needn’t have worried. It was a family occasion for old Rhodies and I wasn’t part of the family.

Transparently, they all loved him, hung on his words as he talked about what a fine country Rhodesia had been, how it had been fully worth the fight. As people queued for him to sign their copies you could see big men shaking with tears. “They’re stateless, you see,” an old Rhodie said. “They belong to a country which no longer exists. They’re lost. We all are.”

I was left wondering, why do no South Africans feel like that? For the strange fact is that even people who were hidebound Afrikaner nationalists evince no nostalgia for their old leaders or for the apartheid period, which is now seen as having led the country into a disastrous cul-de-sac.

A month ago I had to meet a high-ranking Afrikaner policeman, a man of the old regime if ever there was one. He insisted we meet in his new home, an ex-serviceman’s “shell-hole”. There on the walls were pictures of the motorcycle escort for the 1947 royal visit, of a youthful Ian Smith, of Hurricanes, Spitfires, Lan-casters and of Jan Smuts.

Amazed, I asked what of Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd? His opinions were unprintable. But why Smuts? Afrikaner nationalists always saw him as a sellout to the English. “He was a fighter, he was a general. In the backroom we’ve got the other Boer generals, De La Rey, Louis Botha and Kruger. All fighters, like Ian Smith. Not sellouts like De Klerk.”

Thus is collective memory reformulated. For black and white alike, Smith is now seen as someone who fought in the last ditch for “white civilisation” and, given how things have turned out, it’s difficult not to respect his fight. […]

His time with the partisans meant he spoke fluent Italian, loved opera and could quote great reams of Shakespeare. […]

When Mugabe gained power in 1980, Smith abandoned all his previous feelings about the man and rolled up every day at Government House to offer his help. He had, after all, run the country and economy surprisingly well in the face of tough international sanctions. He was incorruptible, the country he handed over was in good shape. The only thing that mattered now, he said, was to make a success of the new Zimbabwe.

Mugabe was delighted to accept his help and the two men worked happily together for some time until one day Mugabe announced plans for sweeping nationalisation. Smith told him bluntly he thought this a mistake. Their cooperation ended on the spot. Mugabe, furious at being contradicted, never spoke to him again. From time to time Mugabe made threatening noises, suggesting Smith ought to be locked up and “punished” for his opposition, but Smith’s attitude was contemptuous: “I’d like to see him try.” He never did.

When Smith’s delegation met Harold Wilson’s in their long and fruitless talks, observers were struck by the fact that the white Rhodesians were all older men who had fought for Britain in the war, tough guys who thought their opposite numbers naive. Wilson was taken aback and railed at him as a “tinpot dictator”.

Smith turned his back on him in a long silence before replying: “Look here, Harold, if you and I are to get on you can’t talk to me like that.” It was Wilson who had to retreat. […]

Interviewing Smith in the sitting room of his Harare home a few years ago, I was reminded of how the French left-wing intellectual Régis Debray described being sent by François Mitterrand on a mission to Hanoi. The communist leaders welcomed him with open arms and poured out their devotion to France – but, to his embarrassment, it was the France of Jean Jaurès and Victor Hugo, bearing almost no relationship to the urbane Paris of the 1980s that he had just left.

It was the same with Smith. He had, he told me, been bitterly disappointed by the Britain he had encountered in the permissive 1960s, but he’d just been to London for an RAF reunion and he’d been to the last night of the Proms. “And, my goodness, to see some of those young people sing Land of Hope and Glory – why, I think they have the spirit I thought was gone. Such fine young people, it will all come again, they’ll carry it on,” his bony old hands making emphatic gestures of enthusiasm as he spoke.