No Flowers for Welensky’s Baby Elspeth Huxley

ELSPETH HUXLEY

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was born with high hopes in September 1953. It brought together three African territories mustering between them, at the time, some eight million Africans and rather under 300,000 Europeans. The smallest and weakest was Nyasaland, a British Protectorate of African peasants with a sprinkling of European-owned tea and tobacco plantations that propped up the economy. Much the richest was Northern Rhodesia, also a Protectorate: in the main a flat, unprepossessing wilderness of bush in which probably the richest deposits of copper in the world lay buried. Here the output of a string of mines belonging to two giant companies, the Anglo-American and the Rhodesian Selection Trust, provided about 70 per cent of the Protectorate’s revenues and kept the Federation on its financial feet.

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ELSPETH HUXLEY

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was born with high hopes in September 1953. It brought together three African territories mustering between them, at the time, some eight million Africans and rather under 300,000 Europeans. The smallest and weakest was Nyasaland, a British Protectorate of African peasants with a sprinkling of European-owned tea and tobacco plantations that propped up the economy. Much the richest was Northern Rhodesia, also a Protectorate: in the main a flat, unprepossessing wilderness of bush in which probably the richest deposits of copper in the world lay buried. Here the output of a string of mines belonging to two giant companies, the Anglo-American and the Rhodesian Selection Trust, provided about 70 per cent of the Protectorate’s revenues and kept the Federation on its financial feet.