Rhodesia
Rhodesia was a sun-drenched country in southern Africa. Its Central Plateau and Easter Highlands were high, full of flowers and trees and rocks and wide horizons. It was a land with sunsets, rivers, restaurants and railways; it had people, black , brown, white, good, bad and indifferent; it had farms, factories and offices; a parliament, civil servants, judges and army. The capital city was Salisbury (total population: European, African, Asian and Colured, 313,700). The vast land had been overrun for centuries by many races with many languages.
Rhodesia had been a British Colony from 1923 and before that was ruled by a commercial company under a Royal Charter. But at no time had she been ruled by the Colonial Office, been administered by British Government Officials or been occupied by British troops.
Early in 1888 Lobengula, King of Matabeleland, entered into a treaty with Great Britain and on 30 October of the same year he granted to Rhodes's agents "the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals" in his dominions. On 28 October, 1889, the British South Africa Company was formed under a royal charter. In September, 1890, an expeditionary column occupied that country and, in the next four years, much was done to develop its resources.
In 1893 the company came to blows with King Lobengula. Five weeks of active operations and the death of the king, probably by self-administered poison, brought the whole of Southern Rhodesia under the absolute control of the company. After the war, the settlement and opening up of the country was carried on under the direction of Mr. Rhodes who built Government House.
In 1923 with the demise of the company, the colony of Southern Rhodesia passed under Crown rule with responsible government.
In 1962 the Rhodesia Front had taken over government and quickly replaced Prime Minister Winston Field with the more authoritarian Ian Smith who introduced one repressive law after another. The black people started making more radical demands which resulted in the formation of nationalist political parties. Ian Douglas Smith became Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia in 1964 and renewed correspondence on independence with British Government. He declared the independence of Rhodesia from British, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. Britain and the rest of the world imposed sanctions on Rhodesia which worsened the living conditions of the blacks both in the rural and the urban areas. These developments further strained relationships between blacks and whites, making an armed struggle for independence almost inevitable.
In 1980, Rhodesia's independence
became internationally recognized.
