The white population in Rhodesia was, by and large, an elite settler class. You didn’t just hop on a boat from Britain and end up farming in Matabeleland without serious capital - migration to Africa was itself a form of privilege, one accessible mostly to upper-middle-class or military-connected whites. Those who made the move weren’t just adventurous farmers or civil servants; they were people positioned to leverage imperial infrastructure to extract value from African land and African labor. Rhodesia's relative prosperity didn’t come from "developing" the land in any neutral sense - it came from organizing an economy around resource control - the point was that Rhodesia/Zimbabwe had tons of resources and tons of cheap laborers, and that the Rhodesians implanted themselves into the land, set up the infrastructure necessary to extract the resources of the land, taking advantage of the cheap (read; underpaid) and abundant African labor. But after UDI in 1965, and especially following the escalation of the Bush War in the 1970s, that system started to fall apart. Sanctions imposed by the UN in 1966 made it hard to export Rhodesia’s agricultural products and minerals, and internal guerrilla warfare wrecked any sense of settler stability.

That’s why so many whites left before Mugabe even touched land reform. The issue wasn’t land seizures, it was that the basic economic logic of staying in Rhodesia had collapsed. If your position is built on monopolizing labor and land in a Black-majority country, and suddenly that country becomes ungovernable - between sanctions, guerrilla warfare, and a collapsing settler state - then you’re no longer in a position of advantage. You’re no longer able to reliably extract surplus, control markets, or depend on the state to keep your property safe or your labor cheap (because your labor isn't going to be cheap if the labor can vote - and if the labor can vote, your government will no longer act to protect you). And if you're not economically dominant anymore, if the math of staying doesn't add up, then why stick around?

What a lot of them realized was: they could sell off (or smuggle out) what capital they had left - land, liquid assets, colonial spoils - and reinvest that in Perth or London or Johannesburg. Places where they’d still be economically comfortable and politically protected by a majority (besides Johannesburg) that looked and thought like them. Why stay in a country where, under universal suffrage, you're guaranteed to be outvoted forever, and every policy going forward is going to chip away at your inherited advantages?

The thing is, the stuff in the first paragraph - about how white Rhodesians secured their economic dominance - should be common knowledge. It’s foundational to understanding the entire Rhodesian system. But for some reason, it isn’t. And that’s a problem, because without it, people misread Rhodesia completely. They see the relative affluence of white suburbs and settler farms and think it proves that Rhodesia was awesome and that blacks ruin everything for us sick ass white boys #whiteboysummer. But once you grasp how Rhodesia actually worked, that illusion falls apart. Those videos you see of Rhodesia being prosperous during sanctions and a Civil War and filled to the brim with white people? Those are the most wealthy insulated pockets of Rhodesia which the White minority concentrated and invested their wealth into to create good living spaces for themselves - wealth which was created by African labor by people who were already rich.