in towns and the Masters and Servants Act all
ensured black subservience. A ban on black
workers forming trade unions, separate schools,
hospitals, clubs and swimming pools for black
people were all just part of an extensive structure
of discrimination. Black Africans were in practice
deprived of the vote as the settlers made sure that
the black citizens would not be able to meet the
franchise qualification.
But Southern Rhodesia appeared to be pros-
perous and orderly. There were a few strikes but
they were easily dealt with. With the army and air
force under white command, the position of the
settlers seemed impregnable in the 1950s. White
immigrants poured in, attracted by the new life in
the beautiful highlands away from overcrowded
Europe. Southern Rhodesia seemed to have
advanced to the stage of gaining independent
Dominion status. The prospects were enhanced
when the white settlers persuaded the British gov-
ernment to permit all three territories, Northern
Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to
form a federation in 1953, with a federal govern-
ment in Salisbury. The African majority were
granted a few parliamentary seats in the new
federal parliament, some civil service posts, even a
black minister to make the transfer to independ-
ence more acceptable. There was some genuine
but limited progress, such as a multiracial univer-
sity in Salisbury where black students could qualify
as doctors, their degrees being authenticated by
the University of Birmingham in England. These
gestures to black Africans merely revealed the con-
fidence with which the white settlers felt that they
would continue to rule the country for at least
another hundred years. It went about as far as the
white settlers were ready to go. Few at the time
foresaw how rapidly the tide was turning. Indeed,
black majority rule would have come much sooner
than the twenty-seven years it took to achieve. It
was delayed after 1963 because of the armed resis-
tance of the white settlers.
Black political stirrings had come relatively
late, so powerfully entrenched did the white posi-
tion appear to be to black Africans. The first black
nationalist target was the Federation, with its
offer of an unequal partnership. Joshua Nkomo
was the elder statesman among black African
politicians, although only forty-five years old.
As general secretary of the Railway Workers’
Association he had become known as an African
leader. He was also a Methodist lay preacher who
did not believe in violence and worked for com-
promise and gradual reform. Nkomo led the
Southern Rhodesian African National Congress.
It won support from the African masses deprived
of land and a fair share of the country’s wealth.
The reaction of the Rhodesian government
was repression. In 1954 several hundred black
Africans were arrested. The African National
Congress was banned and harsh laws against ‘sub-
version’ were enacted. In the hope of reducing
support for radical black policies the discrimina-
tion laws were modified. Would this be sufficient
to satisfy the black people and persuade Britain to
give up its suzerain right, which included protec-
tion of the black population? London had done
little to help black Rhodesians anyway. Black
West Africa was being granted independence;
it surely could not now be denied to white
Rhodesia. But times had changed, passing most
white Rhodesians by. In London black national-
ist views were no longer ignored: 1960 was the
year of Harold Macmillan’s famous ‘wind of
change’ speech.
In Southern Rhodesia a new black political
party was formed, the National Democratic Party,
led by Ndabaningi Sithole, Robert Mugabe and
Herbert Chitepo. Joshua Nkomo acted first as the
NDP’s spokesman in London, and later as its
president. With black West Africa and East Africa
either independent or on the road to independ-
ence on the constitutional basis of one man one
vote, black African nationalist leaders saw no just
reason why the same principle should not apply
to the three territories of the Federation. Since
the white-settler population in Nyasaland of
72,000 in 1960 was much smaller than the white
population in Southern Rhodesia black national-
ists calculated that progress towards majority
black rule would be easier to achieve in the north.
In the federal parliament, with its overwhelming
white Southern Rhodesian influence black nation-
alism would find the struggle harder. They there-
fore launched a campaign to break up the Central
African Federation as a necessary step towards
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