Home › Political & Historical › Former Countries
Rhodesia
A self-declared state in southern Africa that no country formally recognized
For almost 15 years, a government in Salisbury ran a functioning state that every other government considered legally nonexistent. On November 11, 1965, the cabinet of Southern Rhodesia, a self-governing British colony, issued a unilateral declaration of independence rather than accept London's condition of a path to majority rule. Voters and officeholders were overwhelmingly drawn from the white minority, about one resident in twenty. Britain called the declaration illegal, the United Nations imposed the first mandatory sanctions in its history, and no country extended formal recognition. The state ended in 1980, when the territory became independent as Zimbabwe, but its record still shapes arguments in southern Africa over land, race, and memory.
Rhodesia was a landlocked country of 390,580 square kilometers on a high plateau between two great rivers, the Zambezi to the north, with Victoria Falls and the Kariba Dam, and the Limpopo to the south. A broad ridge of highveld, mostly 1,200 to 1,500 meters above sea level, runs across the center, carrying the main cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo and the best farmland, while the Eastern Highlands rise to Inyangani at 2,592 meters along the Mozambique border. Tobacco, maize, and cattle farms shared the economy with mines of chrome, gold, and asbestos. Neighbors were Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa, and Botswana. Its borders were identical to those of present-day Zimbabwe, and Salisbury is today Harare.
The British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes occupied the territory from 1890, and it became a self-governing colony in 1923 and part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1953 to 1963. After the 1965 declaration, the government proclaimed a republic in 1970. A guerrilla war, called the Rhodesian Bush War by the government side and the Second Chimurenga by the nationalist movements ZANU and ZAPU, intensified through the 1970s. A 1978 internal settlement produced Zimbabwe Rhodesia in 1979, which also went unrecognized. The Lancaster House Agreement of December 1979 briefly restored British authority, elections were held in February 1980, and Zimbabwe became independent on April 18, 1980, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister.