Rhodesia

At a glance

What was Rhodesia?

Rhodesia was a self-governing British settler colony whose white-minority government broke away from Britain rather than accept a path to majority rule. From 1923 Southern Rhodesia had run its own internal affairs under a parliament elected overwhelmingly by white voters, while Britain kept formal responsibility for the colony. When Britain's other African colonies became independent under majority rule in the early 1960s, the Rhodesian Front government of Ian Smith demanded independence on its own terms. When it could not get it, it declared independence unilaterally.

Rhodesia then existed for fourteen years as a de facto state with its own government, army, courts, flag and currency, but without international recognition. Its white population never exceeded about one in twenty of its inhabitants. A US State Department paper of January 1967 estimated the colony's population at 4,350,000: "about 4,105,000 Africans, 224,000 Europeans (white), and 21,000 of other ethnic groups—or a ratio of almost 20 Africans to 1 European" (FRUS 1964–68, vol. XXIV, doc. 553).

Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia: which is which?

The names cause endless confusion:

• Rhodesia was first a general name for the lands north of the Limpopo run by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. It was in use from the mid-1890s.
• Southern Rhodesia was the colony south of the Zambezi, today's Zimbabwe. It was self-governing from 1923.
• Northern Rhodesia was the territory north of the Zambezi. It became independent as Zambia on 24 October 1964.
• The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–1963) joined Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi).
• Rhodesia, in the narrow sense of this entry, is the name Southern Rhodesia's government used after Zambia's independence, from 1964–65. Britain never passed a law to change the name, so Hansard and the UN went on saying "Southern Rhodesia".
• Zimbabwe Rhodesia was the short-lived state of June–December 1979.

How did Rhodesia come about?

The British South Africa Company received its royal charter on 29 October 1889. Its Pioneer Column arrived at the site of Fort Salisbury on 12 September 1890 and raised the Union Jack the next day. The company's forces occupied Bulawayo, the Ndebele capital, in November 1893. Ndebele and Shona risings in 1896–97, remembered in Zimbabwe as the First Chimurenga, were suppressed.

Company rule ended in 1923. In a referendum in October 1922, the settler electorate chose responsible government over joining South Africa by about 59 per cent to 41 per cent. On 1 October 1923 Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 then divided the country by race. About 49 million acres were set aside as the European Area, against about 21.6 million acres of Native Reserves, at a time when white people made up less than 2 per cent of the population.

Between 1953 and 1963 the colony belonged to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which broke up as African nationalism rose in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In Southern Rhodesia the new Rhodesian Front won the December 1962 election on a platform of independence without majority rule. Winston Field became Prime Minister, and in April 1964 he was replaced by Ian Smith, the colony's first locally born Prime Minister.

What was UDI?

UDI, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, was the proclamation by which Smith's cabinet declared Rhodesia independent of Britain on 11 November 1965. Britain had made independence conditional on progress towards majority rule. The Rhodesian Front wanted independence under the 1961 constitution, which kept power with the white electorate.

The proclamation deliberately echoed the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. It opens: "Whereas in the course of human affairs history has shown that it may become necessary for a people to resolve the political affiliations which have connected them with another people and to assume amongst other nations the separate and equal status to which they are entitled". It complains that "the people of Rhodesia have witnessed a process which is destructive of those very precepts upon which civilization in a primitive country has been built". Yet it also professes "unswerving loyalty and devotion to Her Majesty the Queen" and ends "God Save The Queen". The twelve members of the cabinet signed it, led by Smith and his deputy Clifford Dupont.

Harold Wilson told the House of Commons the same day that the British government "condemn the purported declaration of Independence by the former Government of Rhodesia as an illegal act and one which is ineffective in law. It is an act of rebellion against the Crown". He added that the proclamation had "borrowed for the purposes of small and frightened men the words of one of the historic documents of human freedom" (HC Deb 11 November 1965, vol. 720, cc. 349–64).

Did Britain send troops?

No. Wilson ruled out military force on the first day: "we do not contemplate … any national action, and may I say any international action, for the purpose of coercing even the illegal Government of Rhodesia into a constitutional posture" (HC Deb 11 November 1965, c. 361). Britain withdrew its High Commissioner, stopped arms exports and aid, removed Rhodesia from the sterling area and barred it from the London capital market. The only force ever authorised was naval. In April 1966 the UN Security Council asked Britain to stop oil tankers reaching the port of Beira in Mozambique, "by the use of force if necessary" (Resolution 221). This became the Beira Patrol.

Did any country recognise Rhodesia?

No. The UN Security Council condemned UDI on 12 November 1965 as a declaration "made by a racist minority in Southern Rhodesia". It called on all states "not to recognize this illegal racist minority régime" (Resolution 216). South Africa and Portugal, which then ruled Mozambique, traded with Rhodesia and helped it survive sanctions, but neither recognised it formally. Zimbabwe Rhodesia in 1979 was not recognised either.

The British courts took the same view. In Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke (Privy Council, 23 July 1968), the case of a man detained under the post-UDI emergency regulations, the court held that the regime's measures had no legal validity. Sovereignty, it held, still lay with the Crown and the UK Parliament. Lord Reid wrote that the convention restraining Parliament from legislating for Southern Rhodesia was "a very important convention but it had no legal effect in limiting the legal power of Parliament". Rhodesia's own courts went the other way and came to accept the post-UDI government as lawful. Two legal orders thus existed side by side until 1979.

What sanctions were imposed on Rhodesia?

Rhodesia was the first target of mandatory UN sanctions. The Security Council moved in steps:

Sanctions hurt, but they leaked. At a Commonwealth conference in Lagos in January 1966, Wilson predicted that they might end the rebellion "within a matter of weeks rather than months". The phrase later became a byword for misjudgement. South Africa and Portuguese Mozambique kept the routes open. In 1978 the Bingham inquiry, set up by the British government, showed that oil had kept reaching Rhodesia through Mozambique and South Africa. Supplies went through subsidiaries of Shell and BP under an "exchange" arrangement. The scheme followed meetings between the British government and the oil companies in February 1968 and February 1969, which the companies took as giving them "tacit, if not express, approval" for the scheme. In December 1979 the Attorney-General announced that there would be no prosecutions (HC Deb 19 December 1979, vol. 976, cc. 627–39).

The United States openly broke the embargo on chrome. From 1972 the Byrd Amendment allowed imports of Rhodesian chrome. In February 1977 a Washington Post editorial called it "the symbol of lingering American support for white minority rule". President Carter restored the ban by signing H.R. 1746 on 18 March 1977.

How did Britain try to settle with Rhodesia?

Britain's conditions for independence were the Five Principles, set out in 1964–65:

1. unimpeded progress to majority rule;
2. guarantees against retrogressive amendment of the constitution;
3. immediate improvement in the political status of Africans;
4. progress towards ending racial discrimination;
5. a settlement acceptable to "the people of Rhodesia as a whole".

A sixth principle was added in January 1966: "no oppression of the majority by the minority or of the minority by the majority". At the Commonwealth conference in September 1966, Britain went further and committed itself to NIBMAR, "no independence before majority rule".

Wilson and Smith met twice on Royal Navy ships at Gibraltar, on HMS Tiger in December 1966 and on HMS Fearless in October 1968. Both times the proposals failed. Smith's government moved the other way. A referendum on 20 June 1969, held on the largely white roll, approved a republic and a new constitution. The House of Assembly would have 66 members: 50 elected by Europeans, Asians and Coloureds and 16 Africans, only 8 of them directly elected. African seats could grow "to ultimate parity with the Europeans" as African income-tax payments rose, but never to a majority. At the time, Africans paid an estimated "one half of one per cent" of personal income tax (FRUS 1969–76, vol. XXVIII, doc. 3). Rhodesia became a republic on 2 March 1970, with Clifford Dupont as its first President.

In 1971 Smith and the Conservative Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home agreed terms. Britain sent a commission under Lord Pearce to test whether Rhodesians as a whole accepted them. Its 1972 report found that European, Coloured and Asian opinion was broadly in favour but that African opinion was against. Its conclusion, debated in the Commons on 15 June 1972, was that "the people of Rhodesia as a whole do not regard the proposals as acceptable". The settlement lapsed.

How was Rhodesia governed?

Rhodesia had a parliament, regular elections, courts and a press, though newspapers were censored for much of the period. But land, the vote and much of daily life were divided by race in law.

Land. Under the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and the Land Tenure Act of 1969, the country was divided into racial areas. The 1969 Act gave about 45 million acres each to the European and African areas, splitting the country roughly in half between a white population of a few hundred thousand and an African population of several million (Cary and Mitchell, African Nationalist Leaders). The European area also held most of the best-watered farmland. But much of it went unused. By the mid-1970s only about 1.5 million of 9 million cultivable hectares in the commercial farming area were under effective cultivation (Michigan State University, Exploring Africa).

The vote. The 1961 constitution created a qualified franchise with income, property and education requirements. Africans could qualify in principle, but few did, and the African nationalist parties boycotted elections. The 1969 constitution replaced this with separate racial rolls, described above.

Daily life. Rhodesia had no apartheid-style population register or ban on mixed marriages, as South Africa did. But residential areas, schools, hospitals and much social life were segregated by law or practice. Nationalist parties were repeatedly banned and their leaders detained, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe among them, for most of the decade after 1964.

People. The white population was small and mobile. The historian Josiah Brownell argues that high emigration, the "chicken run" of the late 1970s, was a decisive weakness of the state (The Collapse of Rhodesia, 2011). It left the white minority unable to sustain a long war.

What was the Rhodesian Bush War?

The Rhodesian Bush War, called the Second Chimurenga or liberation war in Zimbabwe, was the guerrilla war fought between Rhodesia's security forces and the armed wings of the two main nationalist movements:

• ZANLA, the army of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) of Ndabaningi Sithole and later Robert Mugabe, backed by China and based in Mozambique after 1975;
• ZIPRA, the army of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), backed by the Soviet Union and based in Zambia.

Zimbabwe dates the start of the war to a clash near Sinoia (now Chinhoyi) on 28 April 1966, in which seven ZANLA fighters were killed. The day is commemorated as Chimurenga Day. The war widened after a ZANLA attack in the north-east in December 1972. After Mozambique became independent in 1975 under the FRELIMO government, ZANLA could operate along the whole eastern border.

The Rhodesian security forces included the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the Special Air Service, the Selous Scouts, the British South Africa Police and the Rhodesian African Rifles. Most of their soldiers and police were Black. White men faced ever longer call-ups. By the late 1970s martial law covered most of the country, and rural people were moved into fenced "protected villages" to cut them off from the guerrillas. Rhodesian forces raided camps in Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana. The best-known raids, on Nyadzonya in August 1976 and Chimoio in November 1977, killed hundreds of people. Rhodesia called the camps guerrilla bases, while ZANU said many of the dead were refugees, and the death tolls remain disputed.

Civilians suffered on all sides. On 3 September 1978 ZIPRA guerrillas shot down Air Rhodesia Flight 825, the Viscount Hunyani, with a Strela surface-to-air missile, "killing 38 passengers on board, while 10 of the 18 survivors were shot dead" by ZIPRA. On 12 February 1979 a second Viscount, the Umniati, was downed, "killing all 59 passengers and crew on board" (Chakawa, Southern Journal for Contemporary History, 2025).

How many died is uncertain. Figures most often cited run from about 20,000 to 30,000, most of them Black civilians and guerrillas. Some obituaries of Smith give 30,000 to 40,000 (Daily Telegraph, 2007). Many of the figures go back to Rhodesian official statistics, which counted guerrillas and civilians in ways that are hard to check.

How did Rhodesia end?

Rhodesia ended through a combination of war, diplomacy and the loss of its allies. Portugal's revolution of April 1974 led to Mozambique's independence in 1975, which opened Rhodesia's long eastern border to ZANLA. South Africa, pursuing détente with its neighbours, pressed Smith to settle.

1976: majority rule accepted. In March 1976 Smith had famously said that he did not believe in black majority rule "ever in Rhodesia – not in a thousand years". In September 1976 the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met him in Pretoria. Kissinger reported that after "seven painful hours" Smith had "substantially accepted our proposals", beginning with "Majority rule within two years" (FRUS 1969–76, vol. XXVIII, doc. 206). In a broadcast on 24 September 1976, Smith read out the terms, "Rhodesia agrees to majority rule within two years". He added: "we support majority rule, provided that it is responsible rule" (doc. 209). A conference in Geneva later that year failed.

1978–79: the Internal Settlement. On 3 March 1978 Smith signed an agreement with three African leaders who had renounced armed struggle: Bishop Abel Muzorewa of the United African National Council (UANC), Ndabaningi Sithole and Chief Jeremiah Chirau. The Patriotic Front of Nkomo and Mugabe rejected it and fought on. In an election held on 17–21 April 1979, Muzorewa's UANC won 51 of the 100 seats with 1,212,639 votes, about 67 per cent. Turnout was given as 64.5 per cent of an estimated electorate of about 2.9 million (Heritage Foundation, 1979). Twenty-eight seats were reserved for whites. On 1 June 1979 the country became Zimbabwe Rhodesia, with Muzorewa as Prime Minister. The UN Security Council called the April elections "null and void". Britain and the United States did not recognise the new state, and the war continued.

1979: Lancaster House. After the Commonwealth conference at Lusaka in August 1979, Britain called all parties to a constitutional conference at Lancaster House in London. It ran from September to December 1979. Zimbabwe Rhodesia returned to the status of a British colony. The new Governor, Lord Soames, took office in Salisbury on 12 December 1979, and the agreement was signed later that month. A ceasefire followed, monitored by a Commonwealth force.

1980: Zimbabwe. In the common-roll election of February 1980, Mugabe's ZANU(PF) won 57 seats, Nkomo's Patriotic Front 20 and Muzorewa's UANC 3. The Election Commissioner concluded that "despite some distortion of voting as a result of intimidation in certain areas the overall result would broadly reflect the wishes of the people" (HC Deb 4 March 1980). Zimbabwe became independent on 18 April 1980, with Mugabe as Prime Minister.

Historians disagree: why did Rhodesia fall?

Older accounts sympathetic to Salisbury blame Western "betrayal", above all South African and American pressure in 1976. Most historians see deeper causes: a white minority of roughly one in twenty could not hold out against a growing guerrilla war once Mozambique fell, sanctions raised the cost of everything, and emigration drained manpower. Brownell stresses demography, while Carl Watts and others stress the international diplomacy. Verdict: pressure from South Africa and the US decided the timing, but the military, economic and demographic position had been weakening for years.

What is the Rhodesian flag?

Rhodesia flew a light-blue British ensign with the colony's arms until 11 November 1968, the third anniversary of UDI. It was then replaced by a vertical green-white-green flag with the coat of arms in the centre. That flag was used until September 1979 and replaced by the flag of Zimbabwe at independence. From 1974 the national anthem was "Rise, O Voices of Rhodesia", sung to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".

The flag has had a second life. The Anti-Defamation League lists it among hate symbols used by white supremacists. In 2015 Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, posted photos of himself wearing the flag as a patch on a website he called "The Last Rhodesian". The ADL notes that Rhodesia has become a white-supremacist "lost cause", just as the flag of apartheid-era South Africa has. The ADL also notes far-right use of the slogans "Rhodesians never die" and "Be a Man Among Men", "originally used as a recruitment slogan for the Rhodesian armed forces".

Common myths about Rhodesia

Timeline of Rhodesia

What the map shows next

On our map Rhodesia is drawn from 1967 to 1978. At 1973 on the map it sits between Zambia to the north and South Africa to the south. Mozambique, still Portuguese, appears as an independent state only from 1976, when its border became the front line of the war. Step on to 1979 to see Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Our border data draws that name until 1982 and labels the country Zimbabwe only from 1983, although the name changed with independence in 1980.