From the Edge of Empire: A Memoir

by Ian Hume

This tells of why and how a young Rhodesian army Captain decided in 1963 not to fight the oncoming war over majority rule. His future unknown, he leaves the country for studies in Cape Town; marries; wins a Beit Fellowship to Oxford; and is recruited to a career at the World Bank. In time he becomes an expert on Eastern Europe. Invited home in 1975 to help prepare Rhodesia's transition to Zimbabwe, he spends three years living through the very war he chose to avoid. Rejoining the Bank, he works on Hungary and, in a unique period after communism fell in 1989, he lives in Poland as Resident Representative. A man of two transitions, he explains how they are separate but ironically linked. His book, a testament to the value of education and the power of family, is written as a memoir to his grandchildren. Now himself a proud American, he offers them a world view-what he calls a moral equilibrium- to harmonize their vexed heritage with today's divided America. Happy with his life, he regrets the outcomes in the country he left. He describes a different path to majority rule his countrymen could have taken, instead of herd-think support of Ian Smith's UDI and war. Had they done so, both the war as well as the brutality, corruption and devastation of Mugabe's Zimbabwe could well have been avoided. As a life's message to his grandchildren, he exhorts them not to make similar mistakes: beware the herd; think for yourself.

512 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2018

Reviews

[S.A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so disappointed by this book. A lovely memoir for his family, perhaps. And that is the arena that the book should have stayed in.
How sad to see Hume try to present himself as a liberal in Rhodesia, when he was far from that. To hear him justify the land grab by the whites on the basis of the supposed "emptiness" of the territory at that time, and then follow that up with the suggestion that the Zulu had themselves grabbed land from the Shona to establish their Ndebele kingdom long before the British arrived, so that exonerated the British! In 2024, these arguments along with his others are quite simply insulting. There were indeed true liberals in Rhodesia before independence, but Hume was not one of them.
Somehow Hume did not find it within his power to protest the injustice shown by a superior officer against a black servant. Martin Luther King talked about this - "he who passively accepts evil without protesting against it is really co-operating with it".
None of this however seems to deter Hume from his quest for absolution. There are too many good books and memoirs coming out of Zimbabwe for this to be anything other than an embarrassment for white Zimbabweans.