The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland

The Central African Federation, which lasted from 1 August 1953 to 31 December 1963, was one of the most expensive mistakes in the late British Empire. Conceived by settlers and approved by London as a federation of three Rhodesias that would become a “multiracial” dominion on the model of Canada or Australia, it was in practice an arrangement for transferring wealth from the African majority to a white minority. The Africans knew it. The settlers knew it. The Colonial Office, when it bothered to look, knew it. The federation collapsed within ten years, and the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1965, the worst direct consequence, dragged Britain into a fifteen-year guerrilla war it had not wanted and could not win.

The Background to the Federation

The idea of a Central African federation dated back to the late nineteenth century, when Cecil Rhodes had promoted a vision of a single British dominion in Africa “from the Cape to Cairo.” The immediate background was the post-war debate about the future of the three territories — Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi) — all of which had been under British control since 1923. The 1939 Hilton Young Commission had proposed a measure of closer association, but the Second World War delayed the project.

The post-war period re-opened the question under less favourable conditions. The election of the National Party government in South Africa in 1948 and the introduction of apartheid there made Southern Rhodesia’s white electorate nervous about being absorbed into a black Africa. The 1953 federal scheme was, in the judgment of the historian Richard Hodder-Williams, “a defensive act by Southern Rhodesian settlers in a continent turning against them.” The British government, exhausted and in a hurry, agreed.

The 1953 Federal Scheme

The federation was formally established on 1 August 1953, with Sir Godfrey Huggins as the first prime minister. Huggins had been prime minister of Southern Rhodesia since 1933, and the political weight of the Southern Rhodesian settlers — who controlled most of the wealth of the federation, including the copperbelt and the tobacco and gold industries — gave them disproportionate power. The constitutional arrangements made Southern Rhodesia the dominant partner, and the African populations of the three territories were given no share in the federal government. The capital of the federation was Salisbury, in Southern Rhodesia.

The federal scheme was promoted as a partnership between the races. In a speech at the federal assembly in 1953, Huggins declared that “we are building here a multi-racial state, and we shall build it well.” African political leaders rejected the federation from the start. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who had returned from practice in Britain and the United States to lead the Nyasaland African Congress, denounced the federation as “a monstrous conspiracy.” The judgment was, in retrospect, the correct one.

African Nationalist Movements

The African nationalist movements in the three territories were strongly opposed to the federation, which they saw as a means of entrenching white minority rule. In Nyasaland, Banda led the Malawi Congress Party; in Northern Rhodesia, Kenneth Kaunda led the United National Independence Party; and in Southern Rhodesia, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, was founded in 1961. The British government’s refusal to allow an African share in the federal government radicalised African political opinion, and the federation became one of the central grievances of the independence movement.

In March 1959, Banda and other leaders were arrested during the Nyasaland Emergency, and the Devlin Commission was appointed to investigate the resulting disturbances. Justice Patrick Devlin’s report, published in July 1959, concluded that the colonial government had, in effect, provoked the disturbances by arresting the nationalist leadership without proper cause. The report, as the historian Colin Baker has shown, marked the moment at which the British government accepted that the federation could not last.

The Devlin and Monckton Commissions

The Monckton Commission, appointed in 1959 under Sir Walter Monckton, was charged with considering the future of the federation itself. The Monckton Report, published in October 1960, concluded that the federation was not viable and recommended a measure of African representation. The British government accepted the principle of African majority rule in 1960, although it took several more years to negotiate the dissolution of the federation. The Nyasaland Emergency of March 1959, in which the colonial government detained Banda and several other African leaders, was, in the judgment of the Devlin Commission, both a miscarriage of justice and a strategic blunder.

The Dissolution of the Federation

The federation was dissolved on 31 December 1963, and the three territories moved toward separate independence. The 1961 Nyasaland emergency had demonstrated the depth of African opposition, and the 1962 Northern Rhodesian crisis forced the British government to concede African majority rule. Southern Rhodesia, however, refused to accept African majority government, and the white minority government of Ian Smith declared unilateral independence on 11 November 1965. The Rhodesian Bush War, which followed, lasted until the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 and the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980.

The dissolution of the federation was therefore the immediate cause of the Rhodesian crisis. The British government had hoped that granting Southern Rhodesia the right to opt out of African majority rule would satisfy the settlers; it had, in fact, made the confrontation unavoidable. The war that followed killed an estimated 20,000 people and produced a Zimbabwe that, by 2000, was in the hands of a government that had fought its way to power through the very war the federation had helped to make inevitable.

The Independence of Malawi and Zambia

Malawi became independent on 6 July 1964, with Hastings Banda as the first prime minister, and Zambia became independent on 24 October 1964, with Kenneth Kaunda as the first president. The two new states inherited the institutions and infrastructure of the former federation, and the transition was relatively peaceful, in marked contrast to Rhodesia. Banda governed Malawi in an increasingly authoritarian manner until 1994, and Kaunda governed Zambia until 1991, when he was defeated in an election by the Movement for Multiparty Democracy.

The Central African Federation had failed in its ambition to create a multiracial state, but it left behind an important legacy of regional infrastructure, including the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River and the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe). The federation also left behind a generation of African politicians who had learned, in the campaigns of the early 1960s, that Britain could be moved by determined opposition — a lesson that shaped the politics of decolonisation elsewhere on the continent.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the federation is divided between the settler perspective — represented in the work of Philip Mason and the more critical work of the Southern Rhodesian historians of the 1970s — and the African nationalist account, which the Malawi Congress Party and the Zambian African National Congress produced in pamphlets and memoirs during the 1960s. The revisionist literature, led by Richard Hodder-Williams’s White Farmers and Rhodesian Politics (1983) and Colin Baker’s Revolt of the Ministers (1971), has shown that the British government was not so much complicit in settler rule as unable to think of an alternative. Jane Parpart’s Capital and Labour in Southern Rhodesia (1984) and more recent work by Diana Wylie have made the African side of the story more visible.

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