Anatomy of a Rebel
Peter Joyce
Other titles:
SMITH OF RHODESIA
GREAT BETRAYAL
THE QUIET MAN
When I first began to think about writing this book, it seemed I had two choices: either to produce a highly personalised account of the making of a rebel and of the drama of rebellion seen, as it were, through the eyes of the play's principal character, or to present, as dispassionately as I could, the wider picture.
That the first alternative wasn't feasible very soon became apparent. In the first place, and for a number of sound reasons. Mr. Smith felt unable to co-operate in the project. Nor would a high percentage of his past and present friends, colleagues and associates - perhaps for reasons less valid - offer me the benefit of their recollections and opinions. Thirdly, Mr. Smith is a quiet man who values his privacy, and it would have been neither profitable nor polite to have attempted to enter areas in which one was not welcome.
Finally -- and this was the decisive factor - one simply cannot write about Ian Smith in isolation. The political Smith (and for biographical purposes there really is no other - his private world is unexceptional) is a child of history and circumstance. His character has been shaped and his actions pre-ordained by events often remote and beyond his control. and by pressures which he could not discount. It is his more-orless involuntary reactions to these influences, not his wilfulness, which has determined the course of modern Rhodesian history.
I have therefore tried, in this book, to describe the many and various forces, within Rhodesia and elsewhere, which combined to create Prime Minister Smith and his rebellion, and the end result is a landscape rather than a portrait, a somewhat complex political narrative rather than a biography in the traditional sense of the word.
1974 1st Edition Hardback SMITH OF RHODESIA DVD series
IAN SMITH THE MAN Audio CD series
THE GREAT BETRAYAL
THE QUIET MAN
SMITH OF RHODESIA Pictorial Biography
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