Southern Rhodesia

The settler colony, and the one that would not leave. The British South Africa Company occupied the Shona plateau in 1890 with the Pioneer Column, crushed the Ndebele kingdom in 1893 and put down the Shona and Ndebele risings of 1896-97, then ruled the territory under its charter until 1923. The gold reefs proved disappointing, so the company sold land instead, and the settlement that resulted gave the colony its permanent character. In 1922 the white electorate voted, narrowly, against joining the Union of South Africa; Britain annexed the territory the following year and granted it responsible government, a status that left it self-governing in almost everything except foreign affairs. The white minority thus acquired real state power thirty years before any African colony did. It used that power on land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the country by race and reserved the best-watered half for a population of a few tens of thousands, pushing Africans into crowded reserves and creating the grievance that drove the liberation war and the land seizures seventy years later. The Central African Federation of 1953 was Salisbury's attempt to extend that system north; its collapse in 1963, followed by Zambian and Malawian independence, left the settlers isolated and unwilling to accept the majority rule Britain now required. Ian Smith declared independence unilaterally on 11 November 1965. The rebel state survived sanctions for fourteen years and a guerrilla war for seven, before the Lancaster House settlement produced Zimbabwe in April 1980.Its capital, Salisbury, was renamed Harare at independence. The land question the 1930 Act created was left to a willing-buyer arrangement that moved little in twenty years.

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