HARARE (Sapa-DPA) - When Ian Smith, a lanky farmer from the small white minority-ruled British colony of Rhodesia in Central Africa, led an illegal and non-violent rebellion in the sixties against British control, they said it would be over in weeks.

Instead, the former World War II fighter pilot and the country's prime minister, for nearly 14 years defied a campaign of almost total isolation by the rest of the world and a long guerilla war meant to force him to allow black Zimbabweans the right to rule themselves.

In the face of United Nations trade sanctions that tried to starve the country of fuel and bring about the collapse of the government, Smith spurred an economy that boomed dramatically under sanctions- busting operations and a hugely successful import-substitution policy and became the second most developed in Africa.

The seven-year guerRilla campaign mounted by black nationalist fighters almost became the only liberation war in Africa to fail in the face of the highly mobile, lightly armed commando-type Rhodesian force that developed counter-insurgency tactics that were adopted around the world.

In the end, his vow that "never in a thousand years" would there be black majority rule in Rhodesia was undone, ironically, not by the war or sanctions, but by the country's neighbour and closest ally, apartheid ruled South Africa.

Twenty-seven years after Smith's Rhodesia became President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, historians argue that it is a misnomer to portray Smith as a crude white supremacist. They point out that he was driven by a determination to get the British government to agree to promises dating back to the early 60s to grant the country complete independence.

At the time, white Rhodesians were watching from close by as a bloodbath unfolded in the immediate aftermath of independence in the Congo, followed by economic ruin in neighbouring Zambia. Smith clung to his aim of "evolutionary, not revolutionary change." Ian Douglas Smith was born on April 8, 1919, in the central Rhodesian village of Selukwe, and grew up a talented sportsman and intelligent student.

At the outbreak of World War II, he flew high-speed Hurricane and Spitfire fighters for the Royal Air Force over North Africa and Italy.

He received severe facial, back and leg injuries in a crash in 1943, and had to have his face reconstructed in the first experiments in plastic surgery, leaving him with a wide-open, impassive left eye.

A year later he was shot down over the Po Valley, and was rescued by Italian partisani with whom he lived for five months. He later walked over the Maritime Alps - at one time walking through a Wermacht checkpoint - to the safety of advancing Allied forces.

He became an MP for his home area in 1948, the youngest ever elected in the Rhodesian parliament. He was chief whip of the ruling Federal Party when British prime minister Harold MacMillan made his epoch-marking "winds of change" speech about the need to acknowledge the striving for self-rule in European colonies all over the world.

Smith rejected the advice, and in 1964, when he became prime minister, he had the entire leadership of the increasingly defiant black nationalist movement arrested and imprisoned.

On November 11, 1965, having just imposed a state of emergency, he declared Rhodesia's unilateral independence from Britain, becoming the first British colony to rebel against the Crown since America's declaration of independence in 1767.

The Rhodesian constitution was modelLed on the American document - except that the sentence "all men are created equal" was deleted.

International outrage took the form of a total United Nations trade embargo, but it was rendered almost useless by neighbours South Africa and Portuguese-ruled Mozambique who provided international transport routes.

He stubbornly repelled tried repeated British attempts to persuade him to soften his stance. However, the launching of a murderous new guerilla incursion in 1972, the toppling of the right-wing Portuguese government two years later and South African prime minister John Vorster's short-lived rapprochement with black Africa cut the ground from under Smith.

Vorster withdrew South African security forces backing the Rhodesians and then clamped down on the railway route to Rhodesia, forcing Smith in late 1974 to free thousands of detained black leaders.

The pressure culminated in 1976 with Smith being summoned to South Africa to meet US president Richard Nixon's extraordinary diplomat, Henry Kissinger. The American presented an ultimatum to Smith to accede to black majority rule immediately or face far worse options later.

Smith described the occasion as "the coup de grace," and returned home in deep dejection.

Talks with the militant black movements running incursions from outside Rhodesia failed, and in 1979 he made an alliance with compliant black leaders inside the country. Elections that year produced the first black government, which was recognised only by South Africa, and the war escalated sharply.

New British prime minister Margaret Thatcher broke 14 years of logjammed talks at the end of the year and drew all the parties in the dispute to constitutional talks in London, where Smith, now sidelined by his colleagues, was the only one to refuse to sign the final agreement that led to elections and independence under Mugabe.

Smith at first was consulted by the new black leader, but the relationship broke down when Smith criticised Mugabe's plans for a one-party state. His continued presence in the new black-dominated parliament was assured by a clause in the British-brokered constitution that provided a set number of seats for white MPs, which were abolished in 1987.

He continued openly to denounce Mugabe as a dictator, despite threats by the president to have him tried for genocide and have his head chopped off. Smith was left alone and quietly slipped out of his public profile.

He managed to continue running much his farm, Gwenoro, which he bought in 1948, during Mugabe's mass illegal land seizures that started in 2000.

By 2005, ill-health had forced him to move to Cape Town, South Africa, where his two surviving step-children, Jean and Robert, were able to care for him until his death.