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For all its potent figures, the Front was hardly a respectable organization—until it won the 1962 election. "They used to look at us at the Salisbury Club as if we'd come out of bad cheese," says Lilford. "They called us everything—cowboys, Nazis, the lot. They don't any longer."
In the interests of prestige, Smith chose a respected tobacco farmer named Winston Field, the best-known of all his candidates, as the Rhodesian Front's first Prime Minister. But Field was not radical enough to suit the party hierarchy. He approved of the Front's demands for independence, but opposed U.D.I. Finally, Smith himself moved into the Dutch-gabled house at 8 Chancellor Avenue, which is the official residence of the Prime Minister.
"My Cook & I." That was 18 months ago, and Smith has done little but prepare for U.D.I, ever since. He seldom entertains, usually eats a sparse lunch at home with his wife, and spends as much time as possible inside guarded gates of No. 8's jacaranda-lined grounds. No major legislation has emerged from his tour as Prime Minister, but to promote independence he has flown to London twice, held a national referendum, an indaba (meeting) of African chiefs (all government-paid) and a full-scale parliamentary election (in which the Front won all 50 white seats but did not even contest the 15 black ones).
Smith makes every effort to dress up Rhodesia's brand of white supremacy in respectable terms. He claims he is governing in the interests of the Africans, who could obviously not govern themselves. He points proudly to the fact that their living standard is higher in Rhodesia than in any of the black nations to the north. He boasts that 85% of all school-age children are actually in school and that there are modern hospitals for the blacks in Bulawayo and Salisbury. Blacks and whites get along just fine, he says; Rhodesia is a sort of "racial partnership." And what does that mean? "When my cook and I put on a dinner and it's a failure, both of us are at fault," explains Boss Lilford's wife Doris. "When my cook and I put on a dinner and it's a success, both of us deserve the credit. That is partnership."
And the Africans do all the cooking. The overwhelming majority of blacks are allowed to go only as far as grammar school—"a waiter's education," as one African puts it. The nation has only three African lawyers, a dozen African doctors and not a single African in a key civil-service post. The few blacks allowed to sit in the legislature are powerless and afraid, for police-state laws allow the regime to confine any suspected troublemaker indefinitely and without explanation. The African congressmen, moreover, were all nominated by essentially white parties: the two major African political organizations have long ago been banned. One is the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), whose burly leader, former Methodist Minister Joshua Nkomo, 48, has been held since April of last year at the steaming Gonakudzingwa "restriction center" near the Mozambique border. At another restriction camp at Wha Wha is the Rev. Ndabaningi ("A Lot of Trouble") Sithole, 45, 'a U.S.-educated Congregationalist