Just as American race relations are unravelling, with the odious New York Times running editorials just about excusing the murders of five white police officers in Dallas by a black hoodlum, let’s take it from the top where the battle for Rhodesia is concerned. As I write, public anger has brought Zimbabwe to a standstill. Ninety-two-year-old Mugabe’s 36-year rule has been celebrated at a cost of $1 million while the country is totally broke and unable to pay its civil servants.

Evelyn Waugh had it right. In 1932 he wrote that the unthinkable had come to pass. Europeans were departing Africa, leaving the benighted natives to fend for themselves. How prescient was Waugh? Here’s our own Theodore Dalrymple writing about his arrival in Rhodesia in about 1975. ‘Rhodesia was being condemned loudly and insistently as if it were the greatest threat to world peace and the security of the planet …I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England …The large hospital in which I was to work was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency.’

Here’s Stephen Glover on the death of Ian Smith: ‘The BBC yesterday gave his corpse a final kick. If the insane Robert Mugabe has ruined Zimbabwe, where there is starvation and an inflation rate of several thousand per cent, the fault is Mr Smith’s, whose reactionary policies allegedly paved the way for this monster…’ The good Mr Glover goes on to say how he had believed much of the anti-Smith propaganda before seeing the real Rhodesia for himself. Once in Salisbury, he found a well-ordered society which, despite having been subjected to13 years of international sanctions, was much richer than any of the independent African states he had visited. In his hotel there were many black guests and no evidence of apartheid. He went on to write that however flawed Ian Smith might have been, his sins paled beside Mugabe’s.

Many African countries are poorer now than when they received their independence, despite the billions they received from a guilt-ridden Europe, yet it’s Europeans who turn a blind eye to the war and genocide practised by African leaders, and to this day condemn the whites of Rhodesia and South Africa for no other reason than the colour of their skin.

Rhodesia