Rhodesia

Overview

Rhodesia was an unrecognised white-minority-ruled state in Southern Africa, the de facto successor to the self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia, covering roughly 390,580 km² between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, with its capital at Salisbury (now Harare). It existed from the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965 until its transformation into Zimbabwe Rhodesia on 1 June 1979.

History

The territory had been administered by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company from the 1890s, named for him, and became the self-governing Colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923 after white settlers rejected union with South Africa. Its unusually large, skilled European settler population built a diversified economy — tobacco, chrome, gold, beef, manufacturing — unrivalled in sub-Saharan Africa. From 1953 to 1963 it belonged to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. When Britain adopted the policy of "no independence before majority rule" amid rapid African decolonisation, the Rhodesian Front government of Ian Smith declared independence unilaterally to forestall black majority rule.

Britain and the UN denounced UDI as rebellion; UN Security Council Resolution 216 called for non-recognition, and mandatory sanctions followed in 1966, evaded with help from South Africa and Portugal. Rhodesia initially professed loyalty to Elizabeth II but declared itself a republic on 2 March 1970. Black nationalist movements — Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU (Soviet-backed ZIPRA) and the splinter ZANU of Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe (Chinese-backed ZANLA) — waged the escalating Rhodesian Bush War from the late 1960s, intensifying after 1972 and especially after Mozambique's independence in 1975 deprived Rhodesia of its eastern buffer.

Decline and legacy

Facing war exhaustion, sanctions, and diplomatic isolation, Smith conceded the principle of majority rule in the 1978 Internal Settlement, producing the short-lived Zimbabwe Rhodesia under Abel Muzorewa. The Lancaster House Agreement of December 1979 briefly restored British rule, and elections in 1980 brought ZANU's Robert Mugabe to power as the recognised Republic of Zimbabwe. Rhodesia's population in 1978 was about 6.93 million, of whom roughly 6.5% were white; English was the de facto official language, with Shona and Ndebele widely spoken, and Christianity the dominant faith.