Qualla: Rhodesia (region)

Rhodesia (region): Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cecil Rhodes preferred the name Zambesia. His business partner Leander Starr Jameson wanted Charterland. The settlers themselves, moving into the lands north and south of the Zambezi River in the 1890s, had their own idea, and by 1891 newspapers were already using it: Rhodesia, after the managing director of the British South Africa Company whose profits were paying for the enterprise. The company adopted the name officially in 1895. The British government followed in 1898. For nearly a century afterward, the word Rhodesia attached itself to a territory the size of France and Germany combined, across which white settler rule was imposed on millions of Africans who had never chosen to be called anything of the kind. By 1980, both halves of Rhodesia had shed the name - Zambia in 1964, Zimbabwe in 1980 - and the word now survives mostly as a historical shorthand for a specific and painful chapter in southern African history.

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Rhodesia (region): The Land Before the Name

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before Rhodes and his company arrived, this region was home to distinct polities with their own names and histories. Mashonaland, home to the Shona-speaking peoples, stretched across much of the central highlands. Matabeleland, to the southwest, was the kingdom of the Ndebele und...

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Rhodesia (region): North of the Zambezi

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The territory that would become Zambia went through a tangled sequence of administrative names. North-Western Rhodesia under BSAC administration in 1890, then a protectorate in 1893, then back to BSAC administration. North-Eastern Rhodesia started as a BSAC administration in 1897...

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Rhodesia (region): South of the Zambezi

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The southern territory took a harder road. Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony in 1923, meaning it wrote its own laws under an all-white parliament while the African majority remained disenfranchised. When the federation collapsed in 1963, Southern Rhodesia's...

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Rhodesia (region): What the Name Carried

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Public holidays in Rhodesia - the specifically Southern Rhodesian polity of the 1960s and 70s - celebrated milestones of white settlement: arrival dates, declarations of independence, the 1970 republican proclamation. The calendar itself was engineered to memorialize a minority's...

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