The Lancaster House Conference opened on the 10th of September 1979 in the conference rooms of Lancaster House, a Stuart-era mansion on the Mall in central London. Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, was the chairman. The three delegations were: the Salisbury delegation (Bishop Muzorewa as nominal head, with Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front represented as part of it, the National Council of Chiefs, and Muzorewa's UANC), and the two Patriotic Front delegations — ZANU-PF under Robert Mugabe (with a small Mozambican advisory team) and ZAPU under Joshua Nkomo (with a small Zambian team). The total negotiating party was about fifty people. The talks would last until the 21st of December — fourteen weeks of continuous negotiation, during which the bush war continued in Rhodesia and the British government progressively narrowed the constitutional options available to all parties.
The three documents
The Lancaster House Agreement consisted of three substantive documents, agreed sequentially. The first was the Independence Constitution, which provided for: full majority rule on a one-person-one-vote franchise; a 100-seat Parliament with 20 reserved seats for white voters for the first seven years (a substantial reduction from the internal settlement's 28); a bill of rights protecting property rights including (crucially) "willing-buyer-willing-seller" provisions on land reform for the first ten years; a parliamentary system with an executive Prime Minister; and a Senate. The second was the Pre-Independence Arrangements, providing for a British Governor (Lord Soames) to take over the country during a transition period, the assembly of all guerrilla forces at sixteen "assembly points" under Commonwealth military supervision, and the disbanding of the Rhodesian armed forces and their reorganisation into a new integrated national army. The third was the Ceasefire Agreement and election arrangements, providing for an election under universal suffrage to be conducted in February 1980 under Commonwealth observation.
Each document was negotiated separately and signed only when complete. The Patriotic Front delegations repeatedly walked out of the talks and had to be brought back, several times under significant diplomatic pressure from the front-line state Presidents (Machel of Mozambique and Kaunda of Zambia were particularly important in pressuring Mugabe to accept the final terms). The Rhodesia Front delegation, conversely, was pressed by South African and white Rhodesian business interests to accept terms they would otherwise have refused. The British government's drafting team — particularly Carrington's deputy, the diplomat Sir Antony Duff — was, by most contemporary accounts, the principal author of the eventual constitutional text.
The 1980 election
The election was held from the 27th of February to the 4th of March 1980 under the supervision of about 500 Commonwealth observers. The franchise was universal adult suffrage, the first such election the country had ever held. The Patriotic Front ran as two separate parties: ZANU-PF under Mugabe (whose Shona-language regional base was the more populous, mainly eastern and central Rhodesia) and the Patriotic Front-ZAPU under Nkomo (whose Ndebele-language base was Matabeleland in the west). Bishop Muzorewa's UANC ran on its existing internal-settlement platform; Ian Smith's Rhodesia Front contested the 20 white-roll seats.
The result was a clear ZANU-PF victory: Mugabe won 57 of the 80 contested African-roll seats; Nkomo's PF-ZAPU won 20; Muzorewa won 3. The 20 white-roll seats went almost entirely to the Rhodesia Front (now renamed the Republican Front, later the Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe). The total number of votes cast was about 2.6 million out of an electorate of about 2.9 million — turnout of approximately 90%. International observers reported the election as substantially free and fair, although they noted persistent intimidation by both Rhodesian security forces (which still controlled large parts of the country) and ZANLA cadres in the rural areas.
Robert Mugabe was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe on the 18th of April 1980. The Union Jack was lowered for the last time on the night of the 17th; the new flag of Zimbabwe — the green, gold, red and black stripes with the Zimbabwe Bird at the centre — was raised at midnight. Bob Marley performed at the independence concert at Rufaro Stadium in Salisbury (renamed Harare the following year). Prince Charles and Lord Soames presided over the formal handover ceremony. The country called Rhodesia had, in formal international law, ceased to exist.
The transitional period — what worked
The transitional period from December 1979 to April 1980 is, by any measure, one of the better-conducted decolonisations of the late twentieth century. The bush war ended; the guerrilla forces assembled at the assembly points without major incident; the Rhodesian armed forces did not mutiny; the white-minority constitutional protections held for their full seven-year duration; the property-rights protections held for their full ten-year duration; the election was held on schedule and was substantially free and fair. The contrast with the contemporaneous Angolan and Mozambican transitions — both of which produced extended civil wars — is striking. The Lancaster House Agreement is therefore one of the genuine successes of late-twentieth-century British diplomacy, and Lord Carrington's reputation as the negotiator who delivered it is fully justified.
The transition was also, however, fragile in ways that became apparent only later. The land question was deferred rather than resolved: the willing-buyer-willing-seller provisions of the Independence Constitution effectively prevented substantial land reform during the first ten years of Zimbabwe's existence, leaving the Land Apportionment Act's racial geography substantially in place. The economic structure was also deferred: the Rhodesian-era industrial and agricultural system continued substantially intact, with white commercial farmers (about 4,500 of them in 1980) producing the bulk of the country's foreign-exchange earnings. The political settlement involved a power-sharing arrangement between ZANU-PF and ZAPU that broke down in 1982 over alleged ZAPU arms caches, leading to the Gukurahundi campaign in Matabeleland between 1983 and 1987, in which a Mugabe-loyal North Korean-trained brigade killed perhaps twenty thousand Ndebele civilians. The unhealed wounds of this period continue to shape Zimbabwean politics today.
Zimbabwe since 1980
The history of Zimbabwe since 1980 is not, formally, the subject of this volume — that is a different country with a different history, and an extensive literature in its own right. Briefly: Mugabe was Prime Minister 1980–1987, then constitutional changes converted the position to Executive President, which he held until November 2017, when he was forced from office by an internal ZANU-PF coup. He died in 2019. Land reform proceeded gradually through the 1980s and 1990s, then accelerated dramatically with the Fast Track Land Reform programme of 2000–2003, which removed most of the remaining white commercial farms in often-violent operations. The economy collapsed through the 2000s, with hyperinflation reaching catastrophic levels in 2008. Recovery has been partial. The country's politics remain dominated by ZANU-PF.
What remains of Rhodesia
Rhodesia survives, in modern Zimbabwe, in three principal forms. First, the physical infrastructure: the colonial-era buildings of central Harare and Bulawayo, the road and rail networks built by Rhodes and the BSAC, the railway stations, the older hotels, the agricultural research stations, the Kariba Dam. Second, the legal and administrative system: the Roman-Dutch common law inherited via South Africa, the civil-service structures, the parliamentary procedure, the police uniforms (modified but recognisable), the school curriculum (substantially Anglophone). Third, in the diaspora: the white Rhodesian population that emigrated between 1965 and 1985 — substantially to South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand — produced a sustained cultural and political memory of the country, sometimes nostalgic and politically problematic, sometimes more nuanced. The "Rhodesian" online communities of the present-day diaspora continue to debate, mostly in English, the meaning of the country they remember.
The country itself is gone. The country called Zimbabwe is its physical successor. The interpretive task of weighing the two — what Rhodesia was, what it did, what it accomplished, what it cost, what it should be remembered for — is the subject of the next sections: the travel guide, the routes, the mythbusters, and the bibliography. The conclusions can be your own.
End of Chapter VIII · End of the Book