This is a new edition with additional chapters including a recent interview with Mr. Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia and a chapter on political assassinations.
Douglas Reed is the author of Insanity Fair, a prognostic book and autobiography which in 1939 foretold the invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the resultant Second World War. In a second book he foresaw the Hitler-Stalin partnership of 1939.
He discontinued writing some years ago and gave himself (as he says) to other things. For the last nineteen years he has lived in Southern Africa (with intervals in America and Canada) and thus finds himself today for a second time at the centre of the world events, the focus of which has become Africa and particularly, today, Southern Africa.
He sees the situation now as similar, in its essential shape and possible consequences, to that which moved him, after eighteen years in Europe, to write Insanity Fair.
After UDI, he decided to write on more book, he thinks of it privately as Insanity Fair 1966-7, but relates it to the present situation in his title. The Battle for Rhodesia. He wrote it in Rhodesia. The picture he gives of that country will be different from that which most readers may have received from political speeches, newspapers, radio and television.
It is, however the true picture, as Insanity Fair proved to be, which was also held to be surprising and provoking in its day. It is based on personal knowledge of Southern Africa and life there, on authentic information, and on contacts with all manner of people, white and black.
It aims to put the Battle for Rhodesia in its world context and historical perspective, something which his somewhat exceptional experience qualifies him to do.