Alec Smith

Alexander Douglas "Alec" Smith was a Zimbabwe National Army chaplain and son of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith.

Early life and education

Smith grew up on the family farm in Selukwe, a small mining and farming town with a population in the 1950s of around 8,500.
His father Ian Smith had married Janet Watt in late-1948, after returning from war service with a facial disfigurement resulting from crashing his Hurricane whilst taking off from an airfield in Egypt. Watt was a South African school teacher who had previously been married to Piet Duvenage, a South African who had died as the result of a sporting accident while playing rugby. At the time Watt met Smith, she was struggling to support herself and two young children on a modest teacher's salary. Ian Smith brought up Watt's two children, Robert and Jean, from her earlier marriage, as his own, with his son Alec.
In April 1964, one month before his 15th birthday, Smith's father became Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia. The younger Smith later suggested that this had caused his family life to suffer. He attended Chaplin High School, and in 1970, Smith began studying law at Rhodes University in South Africa. On his own for the first time, he became increasingly alienated from his background and neglected his studies, falling into drug and alcohol abuse.
He was expelled from the university at the end of his first year in 1971. Whilst returning from a subsequent holiday in Portuguese-ruled Mozambique, Smith was found to be in possession of 200 grams of cannabis at the Tete/Nyamapanda border post between Mozambique and Rhodesia and taken to Salisbury Central Police Station. He was convicted of drug trafficking, fined and given a suspended prison sentence.
Returning to Rhodesia, Smith held a number of odd jobs. He also served without distinction as a conscript in the Rhodesian Security Forces.
In 1972, Smith declared himself a born-again Christian, stating that God had freed him from his past debauchery and helped him see the injustice of racial discrimination. He aligned himself with the Moral Rearmament group, held public meetings promoting majority rule, and became a close friend of black nationalist leader Rev Arthur Kanodereka. Tragically Kanodereka was assassinated at the end of 1978.

Life abroad

By 1976, the Rhodesian Bush War was escalating and many White soldiers were recalled to active duty.
Smith met Elisabeth Knudsen, a fulltime worker with Moral Re-armament from Norway, at the organization's conference centre in Caux, Switzerland. The couple eventually married in Oslo in June 1979, but his parents, despite being invited, were denied entry to attend the ceremony by the Norwegian government. Ian Smith later related considerable bitterness over the refusal of the international community to recognise Rhodesia, and described the Norway incident as 'the final straw'.

Life in Zimbabwe

After their marriage in Oslo, the couple returned to Zimbabwe in the Autumn of 1979 and became parents of three children, two girls and a boy.
During the 1980s and early-1990s, Smith held a number of jobs including, from 1991 to 1996, managing director of a professional football team, the Black Aces. Although not an ordained priest, he became a reserve chaplain in the new Zimbabwe National Army.
Smith later worked with his father on the farm close to Shurugwi In 1984, he wrote a semi-autobiographical account of the struggle for majority rule in Rhodesia titled Now I Call Him Brother. The book was ghost-written for Alec by the professional writer Rebecca de Saintonge.

Political involvement

During the period 1975 to 1979, Rhodesia descended into an increasingly violent civil war between the white minority government and the two black nationalist armies, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army and Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army.
The Christian Moral Rearmament group became active in trying to bring the conflict to an end. MRA seeks to secure social reform through personal reform and, to this end, promotes relationships between people on different sides in conflict situations. Smith was a prominent member of MRA. The black nationalist party ZANU-PF won the 1980 election outright, but elements in the white ruling class were plotting a military coup to prevent it from taking control of the government.
MRA members sought to prevent a renewal of the war and determined that the only way to do this was to broker a face-to-face meeting between Robert Mugabe and Ian Smith. MRA member Joram Kucherera used contacts inside ZANU-PF to approach Mugabe while Alec Smith approached his father Ian. Eventually, a meeting was arranged. Ian Smith went to Robert Mugabe's house, on the night of 3/4 March 1980, accompanied only by Kucherera. The meeting lasted several hours and was surprisingly friendly. The matter was settled – Ian Smith accepted the verdict of the election while Mugabe agreed to continued white participation in the government and administration.
Alec Smith took no further role in politics, although he remained active in community issues through the development of sport. It is believed that he declined an invitation to participate in the Movement for Democratic Change in the late 1990s.

Death

In January 2006, Smith travelled from Tel Aviv, where his wife was working for the Norwegian Embassy, to Harare. Whilst in the transit lounge at Heathrow Airport, Smith suddenly suffered a heart attack and died almost instantly. He had previously been in good health. His body was cremated in London and returned to Norway for a memorial service in the very church he had been married in, and buried at a local graveyard in Oslo, whilst a memorial service was held at the Anglican cathedral in Harare.
The family assigned the Smiths' eldest daughter, Inger, to break the news to his father who was living at a home with assisted living in Cape Town. Ian Smith was reported to have been devastated by the news not to have recovered from it either mentally or physically.
Alec Smith was described by someone who knew him later in his life as follows: