From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980 (review)

An outlaw regime, hoping to resist the rampant tide of African nationalism, declared Rhodesia unilaterally independent from Britain, its nominal colonial sovereign, in 1965. During the ensuing fifteen years, a few hundred-thousand white Rhodesians retreated into successful autarkic economic self-sufficiency to sustain their independence against a worldwide (albeit porous) boycott. For much of the same period, they fought an increasingly tough and punishing war against African guerillas. They also battled mightily in the court of public opinion, wooing racists, anti Africans, and anti-communists all over the world.

Horne's book is not at all about the struggle to keep Rhodesia white, the war against Africans, the economic battlefront, the all-important and ultimately fatal alliances with fascist Portugal and apartheid South Africa, or the diplomatic endgame (including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's eventual realization that only Africans could run Zimbabwe) that ultimately transferred power in Zimbabwe to Africans in 1980. Instead, it is a thorough, almost obsessive, account of how individual Americans assisted Rhodesia's rearguard contest for white supremacy. Harry Byrd, James Eastland, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond-U.S. senators or future senators-espoused Rhodesia's cause. So did newspaper editors from South Carolina and California, a cast of corporate moguls (many with obvious mineral interests in Rhodesia), African American apologists, fellow-traveling academic collaborators, and a kaleidoscopic array of mercenary soldiers.

Horne's contribution is all to the good. The study of southern-African nationalism needs a thoroughly researched account of the external, as well as the internal, opposition to a freedom struggle like this one. But Horne's is almost entirely anecdotal, heavy on innuendo and long on hearsay. As history, much less interdisciplinary history, Horne's book is a disturbing model. Individuals are reviled without any substantiation more than off-handed allegation. Statements by mercenaries are taken at face value. This reviewer stopped counting the number of inaccuracies, half-truths, and near-truths well before the end. Moreover, at no place in the book do quantitative measures appear, such as the proportion of mercenaries who were Americans, the number of Americans who raised funds in the United States for the Rhodesians, the amounts that they raised for various purposes, and so on.

This is a book without a thesis or a conclusion. Some Americans were indeed segregationists and racists; other misguided men and women may have sympathized with Rhodesia and tried to help. But did any of them make a difference? Was the course of the war in Zimbabwe influenced by racist Americans in any discernible way? We still do not know.