Rhodesia will always have its defenders and apologists. But one country that never seems to be missed is the late “Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland” a.k.a. “The Central African Federation.” The brief history of the Federation is rife with irony. The British policy that led to its creation was actually intended to combat racism, improve the lot of black Africans, and lead to their political empowerment.
It was supposed to have worked in two ways. In the years following WWII, British policymakers still believed in their own system of government and its power for doing good in the world. They just didn’t want to pay for it or be directly responsible for it anymore.
It is hard to believe today, but there was a time when the British Government really did care about black people in Africa. Naïve as it may sound, the historical documents bear this out. The British Government was concerned about the rights of blacks living under white government. The constitution of Southern Rhodesia mandated that all legislation concerning “native affairs” be subject to approval by London so that the interests of the black majority would not be compromised by the white minority. Furthermore, the franchise in the British colonies like Southern Rhodesia had been non-racial. Its requirements were financial and educational. Not surprisingly, few blacks qualified, but more were expected to as the country developed.
By the early 1950s, it was clear that this progress was not happening as rapidly as policymakers desired. At this time, Britain still believed in itself enough to think the solution was to speed up progress to advance black attainment, not to lower franchise requirements. They still thought giving the vote to millions of illiterate and destitute people with little political experience outside the tribal system was a dangerous proposition that would jeopardize all of the region’s accomplishments and so besmirch the British legacy.
Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, not colonies. Therefore blacks there enjoyed greater autonomy. They were not ruled directly by whites. On the other hand, the two protectorates were constantly in debt, which was the responsibility of the British Colonial Office in London.
Robert Blake describes the thinking of British policy-makers at the time:
Southern Rhodesia was regarded with some justice as providing better social services for Africans, whatever the defects of its segregatory policies, than either Northern Rhodesia or Nyasaland.
The federation was intended then to spread economic development from south to north, while spreading civil rights from north to south. It would provide a single economic zone that would benefit all three territories and a federal government which would coordinate foreign policy and infrastructure projects not otherwise feasible to them individually. As the northern territories developed, they would attain self-government under a black majority. In the south, black socioeconomic progress would lead to increased participation in the existing government there.
The other way the federation was supposed to combat racism was to be a counterweight to Apartheid South Africa. The categorical restrictions of the rights of black people had been a policy of the Boer Republics, never of the British colonies. Cecil Rhodes had been prime minister of Cape Colony in the 1890s when he famously promised “Equal rights for all civilized men.” The British subdued the Boer republics in 1902 and granted the Union of South Africa independence in 1910. Apartheid was not implemented until 1948, by newly elected prime minister D. F. Malan of the Afrikaner National Party. Apartheid sent shockwaves throughout the British establishment. South Africa was consequently suspended from the British Commonwealth, which was probably Malan’s intent all along. It also created a siege mentality among white voters in South Africa that kept the National Party in power there until 1994.
The creation of the Central African Federation in 1953 was supposed to stop any territorial expansion of Apartheid to the north. It was also supposed to provide a shining counterexample of how Africa could be better governed on a multi-racial model. The success of CAF would advance British interests in Africa by making life better for Africans while also saving British taxpayers money.
The irony was that the immediate goals of the CAF were a success above and beyond the dreams of its creators. Not only did the economy flourish, but government revenue was used wisely for development and infrastructure, particularly electrification and black education and healthcare. Furthermore, during this time Salisbury was the capital of both the CAF and of Southern Rhodesia and the prevalence of foreign diplomatic and business dignitaries led the parliament of Southern Rhodesia to reverse many of its discriminatory laws. Presumably their new openness to the outside world led them to regard these practices with a sense of embarrassment. These were the same years when in the United States, Jim Crow was coming to an end in the South and in the North, country clubs were derestricting their memberships.
But the effect all this had on black society was the exact opposite of what had been predicted. It turns out that when people become educated, are living better lives, and have more options open to them, they get ideas of their own. From the very beginning in Southern Rhodesia, many blacks who qualified to votehad never actually registered to vote, to a far greater extent than the corresponding non-participation rate among whites. Subsequent increases in the number of blacks who qualified to vote during the Federal period did similarly little to increase the number of registrants. Indeed, it became ever clearer than many of them simply rejected the entire system.
It did not help that Britain was by this time granting independence to other former colonies and protectorates with no strings attached. In county after country, the British and other former colonial powers simply abandoned their holdings, leaving the few white inhabitants to fend for themselves as black majorities took over the levers of government overnight, usually in the form of one-party states led by charismatic strongmen who became presidents for life. Most of these countries were communist in practice if not in name, and became affiliated with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, or Cuba. The momentum of British collapse and one-party takeovers seemed irresistible. In light of all this, why would any black African bother to qualify to register to vote to re-elect Sir Roy Welensky as Federal prime minister so he could ensure that black political participation advanced at a “responsible” pace?
In 1952, a young Joshua Nkomo had been one of two black leaders from Southern Rhodesia who had attended the conference in London to finalize the terms of federation. In contrast, the black leaders of the two northern countries had poignantly refused to attend. On the last day of the conference, Nkomo gave a speech in which he stated, according to Robert Blake “that his own suspicions had been allayed and that he would do his best to expound the case to the Africans in the colony though he was by no means sure of success.” Apparently, he was not successful. A decade later, he himself had given up not only on the Federation, but also on Southern Rhodesia.
In 1961, Southern Rhodesia convened a constitutional conference with the express intention of expanding the franchise and involving more blacks in the political process. The conference included all Southern Rhodesian political parties. For the first time in Southern Rhodesian history, this also included black leaders such as Joshua Nkomo who participated in framing the new constitution and subsequently endorsed the final version, which was approved in referendum by the largely white electorate the same year. Elections under the new franchise were to be held the following year. But during the next two years, Nkomo travelled the world, met with leaders in Britain, the Eastern Bloc countries, and newly independent African countries, and even spoke at the UN. Before the new elections were held, he had denounced the very constitution he had previously endorsed, used his influence to foment a campaign of violence against would-be voters, and announced that there was nothing left but “taking over the country.”
Blacks were more than 90% of the population in Southern Rhodesia, and more than 95% in Northern Rhodesia. But given the existing systems, even in the best-case scenario, whites would remain a majority on the voter rolls for decades to come. Even blacks who were already entitled to vote seemed to prefer black leadership now, even of the dictatorial variety, over building a new black voting block and leadership class that would maybe in a quarter century or more yield a black majority government.
Human nature being what it is, there was probably also a sense of pride in doing things “our way” and not assimilating to someone else’s system. As Kemi Badenoch put it in 2022 in an interview with Bari Weiss’s Common Sense describing what had gone wrong in Nigeria:
One of the things I find frustrating is the ethno-nationalism that you get in many countries like Nigeria: ‘Oh, we’re going to do things our way, we’re not going to do things the Western way.’ People start looking at things like free markets and capitalism as being Western things.
By the early 1960s, few British officeholders believed in these things anymore either. Maybe some farmers and shopkeepers in England still did, but not any politician in any political party. But if they didn’t believe Britain could still do good in the world, at least they could do well. They could outsource the messier aspects of colonialism. The new dictators could get away with doing things that Britain couldn’t. As outside business partners, the British could just skim the profits without being morally responsible for anything. And if the white populations of Africa were murdered or driven out, then let them atone for our sins. It would show everyone our hearts were in the right place.
But behind all the cynicism and the rent-seeking and self-justifying sophistry, there was a sense of guilt and even hatred growing within Britain’s ruling class. It wasn’t so much self-hatred as hatred for their own lower classes, hatred for the kind of British people who still believed Britain was good, hatred for the kind of white people who lived in Rhodesia.
The mentality they so ridiculed was exemplified by Ian Smith. As he put it in his autobiography Bitter Harvest:
So I say to the people of Europe that if their countries were involved in the colonisation of sub-Saharan Africa, they should hold their heads high, be proud of their historical association with forces that brought light to the dark continent, helping its peoples to emerge into modern civilisation.
He wrote those words in 1997. He held these beliefs his entire life, perhaps the last man to truly believe them. Here is how he was perceived by British policymakers:
He is a simple-minded, politically naïve, and uncomprehending character. His political approach has been described as ‘schoolboy’. He possesses a strong vein of schoolboy obstinacy and there is a mixture of schoolboy stubbornness, cunning and imperception about his speeches. Likewise there is a Boy’s Own Paper ring about his patriotic utterances.
And those words were written in 1964, by foreign policy staffers in their briefing notes to British PM Alec Douglas-Home of the Conservative Party.
When Britain granted independence to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland as expected in 1963 on a “one-man-one-vote” model, not only was the Federation finished, but the Southern Rhodesian system became unworkable as well. Black people in Southern Rhodesia, even those who had voted in previous election cycles, probably saw themselves as a laughing stock, the only people in Africa who had to “qualify” for a chance vote in their own country. But white people saw themselves as a laughing stock, too. They were now the only nation in Africa who was not independent. They who had embodied the British system of government more perfectly and effectively than any other nation, who had contributed proportionately more to British war efforts than any other nation, were to be kept behind Britain’s apron-strings while perennially bankrupt basket-cases like Malawi celebrated independence.
With the Federation gone and Northern Rhodesia now the Republic of Zambia, once proud and mighty Southern Rhodesia was overnight simply “Rhodesia,” a small non-state with no friends, no peace, and seemingly no future. The newly independent countries surrounding it now constituted a majority block within the British Commonwealth. They proceeded to use their position there to pressure Britain, Australia, and Canada, Rhodesia’s main trading partners, to boycott it. They also established the Organisation of African Unity to coordinate their agenda at the United Nations. Money flowed in from the USSR and China. Radio transmitters in Zambia and Botswana broadcast pan-African revolutionary calls for disaffected black Rhodesians to take up arms against the government. Training camps for this purpose were established in Tanzania and Zambia. Operatives within Rhodesia took over black neighborhoods and rural communities, extracting protection money and murdering blacks who failed to fall in line.
There was just one small impediment standing in the way of the inevitable: white people still held the keys to power in Rhodesia. They were economically self-sufficient. For the last forty years they had been accustomed to making their own decisions. They had retained the bulk of the federation’s weaponry, including its air force. They prided themselves on being hardy pioneers and they were seasoned combat veterans from Britain’s wars. Most of them had been prepared to integrate black people into their system on their terms, as shown in election and referendum results. But they were not prepared to see their economy and infrastructure, the “way of life” they had spent three quarters of a century building, torn down. Nor did they want to have to flee their country with nothing but the shirts on their backs, to become refugees in the shadow of violence as they had just seen happen to the whites of Kenya and the Belgian Congo. These fears, combined with the growing realization that many of their black fellow countrymen did not look to them as role models, could only harden hearts. The first order of business would be to restore order and national security. The second would be to wrest independence from the British system which they now saw as detrimental to their interests. The advancement of black citizens would be relegated to a distant third place.
The success of the Federation had increased the wealth, power, and prestige of the white population of Rhodesia and made them feel even more entitled to all these things. The final irony of the CAF, which had been established by Britain to use Rhodesia to isolate Apartheid South Africa, was that it ended up isolating Rhodesia and pushing it into the arms of South Africa. After 1965, South Africa became Rhodesians’ closest ally. After 1974, it was their only ally. In the end, South African Apartheid outlived Rhodesia by more than a decade.
Britain had killed not only the multiracial model, but any chance of union in Central Africa, which remains since 1963 disunited and subject to instability and insecurity. The Union of South Africa lives on through its successor country, the Republic of South Africa, which for all its other faults has survived Apartheid and remains united and the most viable country in sub-Saharan Africa.