Rhodesia Rhodesia Rhodesia (, ) was an unrecognised state in southern Africa from 1965 to 1979, equivalent in territory to modern Zimbabwe. Rhodesia was the "de facto" successor state to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which had been self-governing since achieving responsible government in 1923. A landlocked nation, Rhodesia was bordered by South Africa to the south, Bechuanaland (later Botswana) to the southwest, Zambia to the northwest, and Mozambique (a Portuguese province until 1975) to the east. In the late 19th century, the territory north of the Transvaal was chartered to the British South Africa Company, led by Cecil Rhodes.
Northern Rhodesia cattle farming in Barotseland, but Northern Rhodesia had attracted little white settlement, in contrast to its southern neighbour. Unlike Southern Rhodesia, which had seen a flood of fortune-seeking prospectors seeking to set up independent mines, Northern Rhodesia's mining policy was to agree large-scale deals with major commercial mining companies. Large-scale mining on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt started after 1924 and was mainly financed from the United States of America and South Africa. Chester Beatty's and Sir Edmund Davis's Selection Trust already had an interest in the fairly small Bwana Mkubwa copper mine, which had opened in 1901 on the site