Istwa Nou

Britain had spent years worrying that its Central African territories would go the way of South Africa, with a white settler minority dug in for good. Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament that a wind of change was blowing across the continent. Between 1963 and 1964 the Central African Federation came apart. British intervention did much of the work and so did African opposition, which Hastings Banda in Nyasaland and Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia had built. Those two territories emerged as Malawi and Zambia. Southern Rhodesia refused. Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front declared independence on their own authority in 1965, and United Nations sanctions at first helped the economy, since Portuguese Angola and Mozambique and South Africa were willing trading partners. From the early 1970s ZANU built a guerrilla war out of bases across the Mozambican border with FRELIMO support. Falling employment and worsening conditions on the reserves filled its ranks. By 1980 the settlers were beaten in the field, Smith accepted majority rule, and Robert Mugabe took power in a country renamed Zimbabwe.