Rhodesia to Redemption: The Measure of a Man and a Nation

By Will Keys

There are two ways to tell the story of Rhodesia. One is the official version: a colonial frontier that overreached, a settler republic that refused to bow to the inevitable, a moral lesson in the folly of defiance. The other is the version lived by those who built it, bled for it, and then watched it collapse — not from internal rot, but from the deliberate betrayal of those who once called themselves Britain’s kith and kin. Rhodesia to Redemption is written from that second vantage point.

I was there: as a young officer in the British South Africa Police, as a husband and father trying to make an honest living, and later as a man who had to rebuild from ashes. My memoir isn’t nostalgia. It’s an autopsy — and a search for meaning after the flags came down.

Rhodesia was not perfect. No nation born of empire is. But it was functional, disciplined, and determined to hold its ground against ideological chaos. For that, it was condemned. What London and Washington labelled “minority rule” was, for those inside it, the defence of order against imported revolution. The sanctions, the propaganda, the moral lectures — they all came from comfortable men who never heard a shot fired in anger, and who could afford the luxury of self-righteousness.

When the war came, it was not the abstract struggle of textbooks. It was fought on farms, in villages, in lonely police camps. It was fought by boys who barely knew what politics meant. And when peace came — if it can be called that — we were told to forget, to move on, to accept that history had been judged. But history, I’ve found, rarely tells the truth the first time around.

The book’s second half traces what came after: exile, adaptation, and ultimately the rediscovery of purpose in Australia. That’s where the word redemption earns its place in the title. Redemption is not absolution. It’s the long, painful process of turning loss into understanding. It means admitting that the Rhodesia we loved could never survive the century, but insisting that the values that sustained it — courage, decency, self-reliance — are still worth defending.

I write for those who served, and for their children who wonder why their fathers went quiet. I write, too, for Africans who have lived through the consequences of what was done in the name of liberation, and who can now compare the promise to the result. You will find no apology here — only context, memory, and the kind of honesty that polite society finds uncomfortable.

If Perfidious Albion exposed the global hypocrisy of power, Rhodesia to Redemption brings it down to the human scale: the policeman, the farmer, the immigrant who carries both guilt and pride in his suitcase. Together they form a ledger of the 20th century’s unfinished business.

History isn’t rewritten by the winners anymore. It’s being reclaimed by those who lived it. That’s what this book attempts — not vindication, but balance. A record against forgetting.

Editor’s Note

Will Keys, retired lawyer and former British South Africa Police officer, is the author of Rhodesia to Redemption and Perfidious Albion. He is currently planning two short YouTube presentations that will introduce both books and explore the intertwined moral, political and historical questions behind them.