Under an internal settlement negotiated with Ian Smith's government, Rhodesia held elections that brought Bishop Abel Muzorewa to power as the country's first Black prime minister, briefly renaming the nation Zimbabwe Rhodesia. The arrangement excluded the more radical guerrilla movements led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo and satisfied neither international critics nor the liberation forces still fighting. Full independence as Zimbabwe followed a year later after further negotiations at Lancaster House.
By the late 1970s, Ian Smith's white minority government, having unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965 rather than accept Black majority rule, faced an unwinnable guerrilla war waged by two rival liberation armies. Smith's answer was an "internal settlement": elections open to Black participation but engineered to preserve white control over the security forces, judiciary, and civil service.
Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a moderate cleric untainted by guerrilla warfare, won the resulting vote and became prime minister of a renamed Zimbabwe Rhodesia, a state that pleased almost no one. The guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, whose fighters had actually done the dying in the bush war, denounced the settlement as a sham designed to preserve white privilege under a Black figurehead, and continued fighting.
International recognition never materialized; most governments saw through the arrangement as a stalling tactic. Within a year, mounting military and diplomatic pressure forced all parties to the Lancaster House talks in London, producing a genuine settlement and free elections in 1980 that swept Mugabe to power as prime minister of an internationally recognized Zimbabwe, ending nearly a century of white rule in the territory.