/u/profrhodes answered a similar question which can be found here.

Ian Smith. (Ian Paisley was a Protestant leader in Northern Ireland.)

​

There isn't really any way to support Rhodesia today without being some form of highly ideological racist. It is a country that ceased to exist almost thirty years ago that was defined by the undemocratic rule of a tiny white minority over an African majority in a territory that was the result of an invasion of whites in 1890 that was funded by Cecil Rhodes.

The historian Luise White has written about the roots of nostalgia for Rhodesia in her book Unpopular Sovereignty, which somewhat provocatively acknowledges that the white supremacist government that took power in Rhodesia in 1965 was as concerned by and interested in ideas of nationality, sovereignty and development as the rulers of new independent nations in Africa; hence, people who feel some tie today to Rhodesia are often still trying to imagine a counter-factual history by which a legitimate Rhodesia could have continued instead of becoming Zimbabwe.

To understand this, you have to back up a little and understand both what was typical and what was unusual about Rhodesia as a European colonial state. Its beginnings were a bit unusual in the sense that from 1890-1923, it was ruled by a company, the British South Africa Company, rather than directly by the authority of the British government. Those beginnings were typical in that they involved the violent conquest of African societies, who fought to retain their independence. The 1890 "Pioneer Column" funded by Rhodes (very consciously borrowing imagery from American history) divided its conquest into three administrative territories: Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, today the countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

The company sought to attract white settlers to all three territories, but they only came in significant numbers to Southern Rhodesia. Originally, the company promised investors and settlers that the new territories would become a "second Witwatersrand", invoking the gold and diamond wealth of South Africa. While both Northern and Southern Rhodesia turned out to have significant mineral reserves, those were developed relatively slowly and gold was not found in plenitude. As a result, many of the settlers who came to Southern Rhodesia turned to large-scale agriculture. In several waves, the Southern Rhodesian administration took large amounts of fertile land from African communities to sell to white farmers while relocating African farmers to poor-quality 'reserve' lands.

From 1923 to 1965, the government was controlled directly by the British, but the white settlers were granted extensive powers of democratic self-rule. E.g., the territory was a part of the British Empire, and the very large African majority, mostly rural, were ruled by British-appointed administrators, but white settlers controlled most of their own domestic affairs.

As the United Kingdom began to grant independence to its African colonies in the late 1950s and 1960s, beginning with Ghana in West Africa, it proposed the creation of a "Central African Federation" that would combine Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in a territory where Africans would have some voting rights that would be limited at first but progressively move towards majority rule. African nationalists in all three territories rejected the idea because of its preservation of the dominance of white settlers, and as a result Zambia and Malawi were granted full independence. The elected Southern Rhodesian leader Garfield Todd gently tried to urge his fellow whites to move towards some form of voting rights for Africans but he was decisively crushed in the next election by the Rhodesian Front party led by Ian Smith.

The tricky thing for the Rhodesian Front, who wanted to continue white control over the country indefinitely, is that they were still a colonial possession of Britain. White self-government had been a voluntary concession by the UK government: they could (in theory) cancel that concession at will or otherwise change the colony's status (say, by making the government one-person, one-vote and then granting it independence.) Smith and his fellow party leaders decided therefore to issue what they called the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, renaming the country Rhodesia.

At the same time, the two main African nationalist parties, ZANU and ZAPU, had created military wings to fight the white government, which led to a civil war between the new white state and two guerilla armies. This conflict became considerably more intense after the independence of Mozambique in 1974, after which both Zambia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east provided bases of operation for the African nationalist forces. This is what the Rhodesians referred to as the "Bush War", and it was an especially ugly example of this kind of conflict, with violations of human rights on all sides.

The Rhodesian whites were a tiny minority who were widely regarded as illegitimate rulers almost everywhere besides apartheid South Africa. This is where White's point kicks in--she observes that the Rhodesians spent an inordinate amount of time trying to argue for the legitimacy of their authority, on the grounds that they had done what other African nationalists had done--declared their independence from imperial rule--and that like other African nationalists, they were using legitimate force to suppress illegitimate internal insurgents (pointing, for example, to the Nigerian government's suppression of Biafran independence and the Congo's suppression of secessionists in Katanga). The Rhodesians maintained that some limited voting rights for Africans would be possible once the threat of Communist subversion by armed guerillas had passed, and argued that they included Africans in government already through state-appointed chiefs.

By the late 1970s, however, it was obvious to even the Rhodesians that they simply couldn't go on. They tried to form a new government that included Africans (and retitled the new state "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia") but all the Africans who participated were seen by most of the populace as illegitimate or as mere puppets of the white rulers. Smith eventually signed an agreement at Lancaster House with the British government and the two nationalist parties to hold free and fair elections under a new constitution that was based on majority rule (but that protected white political power in limited form for ten years). Robert Mugabe won this election and became the ruler of independent Zimbabwe.

People today who pine for Rhodesia often point to Mugabe's disastrous rule as justification. It's certainly true that Mugabe and his party have been an autocratic catastrophe. But for most of the inhabitants of Rhodesia, the Rhodesian Front were little better--it's just as corrupt to reserve most civil service jobs and most of the formal economy for whites, and just as autocratic to restrict the rights of the vast majority of people on a racial basis. Indeed, I think it's pretty fair to say that the Zimbabwean state in its underlying structures preserved a remarkably large amount of the state made by the Rhodesians, including its oppressive security apparatus. That's a tragedy, but insisting today that things would have been better if Rhodesia had survived (which it never could have) can only be premised on the thought that it's better to have a small minority of white people oppressing a black majority than it is for a country to be ruled by people who come from the majority but are also oppressors. No one is going to celebrate the latter as a triumph of justice, but no one can defend the former without being devotedly racist.