The Myth of Smith: Rhodesia Revealed

Offered an opportunity to join a Rhodesian death squad dealing in germ warfare and other nasties, and faced with the torture and murder of his close staff, Douglas Schorr resigned from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a refugee of a brutal war at the age of 28. Today, 30 years later, he has sat down to write out the tale of his involvement in that war, told from the experience of another lifetime’s worth of living and learning. ‘The Myth of Smith’ pierces the dark heart of Zimbabwe’s Bush War and offers an alternate telling of that tale. It is an autobiography with a mission: to explode the fable of the ‘Breadbasket of Africa’ just as surely as a landmine beneath a Land Rover, and to send shrapnel from that explosion hurtling into the past, present and future. “I am a white man bred under the African sun. I am a white man who fought for Smith. I fought for a dream, my dream couched in his dream of a thousand years of white rule, a dream many, many of us Rhodesians shared. Today I am sitting down to write a book about that dream, principally about how that dream never was.”