What Can Americans Learn from the Rhodesian Bush War?

A Great Deal, In Fact

Welcome back, and thanks for reading. I planned on writing about a major American company’s connections to the PRC and CCP today, but I want to be more thorough in my research for that, so instead I am reviewing my friend Don Shift’s book on the Rhodesian Bush War. It was quite an interesting read, and is, I think, full of lessons very relevant for Americans as we head into what is coming. Part of this post is for paid subscribers only; if you can afford to subscribe for just a few dollars a month, I’d really appreciate your support, and think it will be worth it given the depth and effort that goes into these articles. And as always, please tap the heart to like this post so the algorithm knows to promote it! Thanks again!

If there is one war that has captured the minds of today’s right-wing youth, it’s the Rhodesian Bush War.

The optics of healthy-looking, vibrant, and vitalistic young men using the so-called “right arm of the free world” (the FN FAL) to “slot floppies” (shoot communist terrorists) in a life or death struggle between the last, battered remnants of true Western civilization¹ and the most noxious form of race communism² are understandably appealing.

So too are the general aesthetics of the Rhodesian state, its similarities to America’s early history,³ and the spiritual connections between Rhodesia’s defeat and our modern woes.⁴ So, fun clips and photos showing footage from the war and Rhodesian society periodically dominate our sphere of X. Two of my favorites are:

But it is not just that the conflict is aesthetically and spiritually appealing, though it is. The conflict is also relevant to modern Americans, as the problems the Rhodesians faced during the Bush War are variations of problems that we too could face if things continue down their present path of anarcho-tyranny, race communism, and violent disorder.⁵

Such, at least, is the case made by Don Shift in his excellent Lessons From the Rhodesian Bush War: A Study in Survival, Rural Defense, and Collapse (hereafter: Lesssons), an in-depth and engrossing take—though one with an issue of political framing I’ll need to cover—on the relevant lessons of the Bush War.

In this review, I’ll first cover some of the topics and lessons from Shift’s book that I found most interesting, then cover which of them are relevant for Americans and why, and what I thought of the work as a book.

As this study of the war, its lessons, and the book review is ~10,000 words, you may wish to listen to the audio version of this article rather than reading it. You can do so here:

[AUDIO] The Relevant Lessons for Americans from the Rhodesian Bush War

The Bush War Story

Why The War Is So Interesting

Part of what makes the Bush War so interesting is that it was, in many ways, the last colonial conflict that felt like a colonial conflict. Rather than featuring heavy armored vehicles, large mechanized divisions, overwhelming air power, massed artillery, and all the like aspects of Western warfare that have dominated the battlespace since the early 20th century, it featured mainly light infantry on light infantry combat.

Yes, air power provided by the excellent Rhodesian Air Force played a role in the war, and was cleverly innovative in its use.⁶ But, that small exception aside, the war was largely one that saw Rhodesian light infantry troopers and civilians armed with small arms taking on similarly armed communist rebels in small-scale engagements.

That gives it a sort of cultural cachet. Though modern weapons were used, it feels far more like The River War, James Brooke’s fight against the pirates of Sarawak,⁷ or skirmishes against the Indians in the Wild West than it does a modern conflict.

That’s not all. Given the dynamics of the conflict, it feels less like a war and more like the sort of Götterdämmerung-style struggle with internal forces of evil that many imagine when they see the disastrously mismanaged state of much of America and count the enemies within. It is King Alfred’s last-ditch stand from the Athelney marshes of the Somerset Levels against an overwhelming Viking menace, though with modern weapons and sadly without the titanic victory at Egbert’s Stone.⁸

That framing—picturing the Bush War as a totalizing but sporadic fight for home and hearth at the ground level against an invading menace—is what makes the war so interesting and is how Shift frames it in the opening to his Lessons:

The Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970s wasn't fought on battlefields between armies. Instead, it was fought on front porches, down dirt roads, and at the gates of isolated farms. It was a war that came for the farmer, the rural African, and city boy serving his country. It's the closest real-world example of what happens when a small, outnumbered population has to defend its land, its home, and its way of life against a ruthless, mobile enemy. Rhodesia teaches what it really means to survive when no one is coming to help and when the fight finds you whether you want it or not.

That last line is important: the Bush War played out as it did because, for those in the country, it always found them in the end. As Rory Duncan described when he came on my podcast,⁹ life as a child on even the most established of Rhodesia’s farms meant living in a fortress and ready to do battle with the invading communist terrorists at the drop of a hat, often in the dead of night.

Such is what makes it an important font of knowledge for those who would prepare for the American anarcho-tyranny situation getting all the worse, or some other crisis—such as the 2021 riots in South Africa¹⁰ or war with the cartels¹¹—sparking mass unrest that pits the various enemy forces in America against each other and us. In such a situation as the Rhodesians saw, no one is safe because no area is safe. You are always a potential combatant, however much you might prefer to just ride it out. As Shift notes in his Lessons:

And this is where Rhodesia's hard lessons become indispensable for the American prepper who dreams of riding out chaos in a quiet rural cabin, hoping to be left alone. That fantasy of being left alone? Rhodesia teaches that in a real collapse, it doesn't happen. The Rhodesians tried that. Their farmers and homesteaders wanted nothing more than to work their land in peace, but war came to them anyway. In a true breakdown, no one gets to sit on the sidelines.

Further, the war was an existential one that, much like the fights between cowboys and Indians in the old American West, saw outnumbered bands of settlers fighting as families in isolated outposts of civilization to hold off the barbaric hordes, scraping by only thanks to their bravery and innovation:

The Bush War has captured the imagination of those with tactical and survival mindsets because it represents a dramatic case of a small, isolated, and outnumbered population holding out against overwhelming odds through sheer skill, grit, and innovation.

What Happened During the Bush War

So, that’s why the Bush War has risen back to the fore as a cultural touchpoint, at least online. The nature of the fighting and impulses behind it make it seem relevant.

But what happened during the war? How was it fought? Why did the Rhodesians lose it, if they were a people characterized by their excellence?¹²

Such is the story Shift spends most of Lessons telling, picking up essentially where JRT Wood’s So Far and No Further!: Rhodesia's Bid for Independence During the Retreat from Empire 1959-1965 ends:¹³ in 1965, with the Rhodesians beginning to fight communist rebels after declaring independence from Britain.

Shift characterizes the Rhodesian leadership and its aims well: the Rhodesian Front was a party of men who didn’t want their country to turn into the hellish Congo¹⁴ and so seceded and fought in the hope they could forestall their British-chosen fate of death via decolonization. So, the heroes and titans that they were, the Rhodesian people decided to fight the whole world with that objective rather than give in:

The Rhodesian Front was not a party of extremists or racial ideologues like apartheid's National Party in South Africa. Instead, it represented the conservative, pragmatic mindset of most white Rhodesians. Men and women who saw themselves as custodians of stability, order, and prosperity in a land they had built from scratch. Smith and the party were determined to resist what they saw as Britain's betrayal and to forestall what they feared would be national collapse under majority rule. This conviction led directly to UDI in 1965 and set Rhodesia on its collision course with the world.

That decision was a brave one, particularly as it did have severe consequences for ordinary Rhodesians, namely the stolid Rhodesian farmers. The dynamics of the war, with terrorists pouring in first from Zambia and later from Mozambique as well, meant that all of the countryside was a front line.¹⁵

The Communist Terrorist Tactics

The rebel strategy was to delegitimize and weaken the Rhodesian state by showing the farmers and Africans that the central government could not always keep them safe.

In so doing, they aimed not just to subvert the Rhodesian government’s legitimacy, but also to chase the whites from the countryside to weaken the Rhodesian economic base while controlling the African-dominated territory and using it as a base of in-country communist political and economic support.¹⁶ All the while, they hoped the attacks on everything from farms to traveling vehicles would exhaust the Rhodesians by overwhelming the state’s capacity to govern and frustrating the populace.¹⁷

The communists were aided in that strategy by most of the world. Red China armed, trained, and funded Mugabe’s primarily Shona terrorists. The USSR did the same for Nkomo’s primarily Ndebele terrorists. Both groups were aided by the United States, Britain, and their allies, who ignored the communist connections of the rebels¹⁸ and imposed a sanctions regime on Rhodesia that blocked it from exporting its cash crops or importing the goods and weapons it needed. While the sanctions were not the silver bullet that socialist Labour PM Harold Wilson claimed they would be, they still gave the rebels a great deal of aid.

What that rebel strategy and world aid for it meant for the Rhodesians is that the cities were mostly safe and the countryside—including white commercial farms, African tribal trust areas, and the roads that crisscrossed the country—bore the brunt of terrorist pressure and attacks. Thus, the symbol of the war became the Rhodesian commercial planter and his family, armed to the teeth and living in fortresses while trying to keep the nation’s economic engine running:

In the war, no civilian group bore the brunt of the violence like the white farmer. While most white Rhodesians lived in the relative safety of cities like Salisbury and Bulawayo, where war felt like distant thunder, the farmer lived in the storm itself. He worked land that guerrilla forces claimed as stolen. He was wealthier than most and crucial to the economic engine of the country. He became a symbol, not just a soldier of the soil but a lightning rod of the nationalist strategy.

If you are interested, the video below shows some interesting footage of farmers increasing their security measures as the war significantly increased in intensity after the fall of Mozambique to the communists:

How the Rhodesians Fought Back

And in striking at the farms, namely the primarily white-owned commercial farms, the terrorists did succeed at striking Rhodesia’s economic engine and backbone. The nation had a profitable and innovative industrial sector and mineral resources that powered a thriving mining sector. However, at its core, Rhodesia was an agrarian country in an updated version of the old British countryside mold that needed its commercial farms to feed itself and earn foreign exchange with what exports it could manage under the sanctions regime.¹⁹

So, the state did what it could to aid the farmers in their fight. State subsidies helped farmers pay for putting up rocket-defeating chain link fences, floodlights, and the like. Patrols (generally ineffectively, as Shift notes) crisscrossed the countryside. Scout planes, most of which were privately owned and operated on a volunteer basis, worked with the Grey’s Scouts to hunt for terrorist trails and camps. RLI and SAS troopers ambushed and fought large battles with what concentrations of terrorists they could find, and second-tier police and militia units responded to raids on farmsteads.

But it was rarely enough to completely mitigate the damage and keep the farms thriving. Attacks on livestock—such as hamstringing cattle in the middle of the night²⁰—caused the farmers financial pain and wracked them emotionally. Setting fires in the tobacco and wheat fields caused chaos and large losses, while being nearly impossible to prevent. Raids on farm houses, even when fought off, often caused trauma and carnage that chased the farmers out of the country, emotionally and financially exhausted. The farmers bravely fought on, but the war had a way of wringing every last drop out of them, even when they won a given engagement.²¹

Those farmers who stayed tended to respond in one of two ways.

The first, and most common, was to harden themselves to attack and try to scare the guerrillas off. Chain-link fencing could defeat RPGs. Shutters and berms protected against grenade attacks. Firing platforms provided clear fields of fire, dogs alerted families to attackers, spotlights illuminated the terrorists for families that fought back, and the general impression of having “hardened” the house against attack was generally enough to scare off the terrorists.²² As one Rhodesian put it: "The people who get killed more often than not are the people who don't make the time and effort to defend themselves adequately in the first place. They're blatantly, obviously soft targets... They won't go for the person they know will be prepared and will fight back."

The other option was to try and strike some deal with the rebels in the vicinity, in the hope that collaboration or a private ceasefire would mean both parties could be left be and the fighting occur elsewhere. As is usual with hoping the crocodile eats you last, those who tried such a course rarely saw it work for them:

Tim Peech, a farmer near Macheke known for his liberal views and support for moderate Africans, believed he had reached an understanding with local ZANLA forces. As leader of a local defense unit, in exchange for peace on the area farms, he wouldn't lead operations against them.

Though not a collaborator, he wasn't a hardliner either. Despite this attempt at neutrality, he disappeared and was later found murdered, his body in a burned-out vehicle, stripped of his watch and wedding ring, a stark reminder that goodwill offered no guarantee of safety.

In addition to the white commercial farms, Rhodesia had a great deal of small-scale, near-subsistence farms owned and operated by its black citizens. Most of these were in tribal trust lands, which were large blocks of farmland set aside for the exclusive use of the blacks, who owned and administered them generally in line with old tribal ways of life.

How The Terrorists Gained a Key Advantage

The terrorists attacked such areas as well, gradually turning them into the war’s primary battlegrounds and setting up bases within them. It was the wars over this territory that showed the clear difference in how far each side was willing to go, with the brutality of the communist terrorists eventually proving quite effective. As Shift tells it:

The Rhodesians, for all their flaws, generally adhered to these norms, especially within the Security Forces. Civilians who were uncooperative but not directly involved in combat were rarely subjected to torture or summary execution. While captured guerrillas might be interrogated harshly, Special Branch was known to use torture and kill recalcitrant captured terrorists by throwing them down mine shafts, noncombatants were typically spared such treatment. It was a line the Rhodesians, at least officially, tried not to cross.

The problem was, the enemy had no such line. The nationalist guerrillas relied on fear, and it worked. They terrorized villages into silence with mutilations, executions, and reprisals that left no room for neutrality. If a villager was suspected of aiding the government, they might lose their tongue, their family, or their life. As BSAP officer Ivan Smith admitted, "my own inclination was to beat information out of someone; that was not done but should have been. Terror can be fought with terror but was not done." Terrorists could stomach what the policemen and soldiers couldn't.

Strategic Hamlets in Rhodesia

The Rhodesians, rather than resorting to terrorist-tier brutality, tried to counter the rebels’ Maoist guerrilla strategy with the use of “strategic hamlets” style villages of the sort that worked reasonably well for the British during the Malayan Emergency.

But, like the American use of such society-rending villages in the Vietnam War, this strategy proved less than effective and tended towards alienating the blacks, who had been broadly supportive of the Rhodesian government.²³

While lives were undoubtedly saved by the villages, they were too disruptive to the lives of ordinary blacks and not built with the requisite level of investment or sensitivity to African norms to work particularly well.²⁴

Further, the bungling attempts of the Rhodesians to coerce the fence-sitters into supporting them did little but alienate the affected populations, as the terrorists remained the most brutal faction.²⁵

Road Attacks: Mad Max in Africa

Adding to the problems the Rhodesians suffered is that the road network became gradually near-unusable except in convoys.

Car passengers had to be armed to the teeth and ready to use small arms and on-car ambush-response devices, such as preloaded shotguns and machine guns on the roof that sprayed lead over a wide arc with the pull of a string. Minesweeping vehicles had to be constantly on the alert, V-shaped MRAP hulls invented, and broken-down vehicles left behind for fear of attacks coming as the convoy waited for mechanics to fix what was broken.

Naturally, such a state of things paralyzed much of the country, as few roads could be guarded with the requisite degree of intensity to keep mines and ambushes away. Paired with the farm attacks, this aspect of the terror campaign caused heavy economic losses for the Rhodesians, and was exhausting to deal with.²⁶

Why the Rhodesians Lost the Bush War

Altogether, that caused the main crisis that—along with Kissinger pressuring the South Africans into betraying Rhodesia—cost the Rhodesians the war: starting in 1975, the white population started falling, and was soon dropping like a rock. As whites composed the majority of troops in the elite units, such as the RLI and SAS, this was disastrous for the war effort. Further, as they ran and owned the large commercial farms, many of which were left behind to fall fallow when they fled, this meant intense economic pain for the state. So, they left, particularly the immigrant newcomers, and the country lost the war.

For many, especially recent immigrants, their connection to Rhodesia was shallow. They had come for the easy life, the low cost of living, good jobs, cheap land, warm weather, not for any deep-rooted loyalty to the country. When that easy life vanished and the going got hard, they saw no reason to stay. Those without significant landholdings or long-standing family ties to the early settler generations were often the first to leave, their attachment proving as fair-weather as their reasons for coming.

Thus did the war end, with Mugabe coming to power and wrecking the country over the ensuing decades. All the Rhodesians had fought so hard to protect was lost, and all they attempted to avert was inflicted upon them.

How Is this Relevant for Americans?