Director of Prisons of Rhodesia to 1954, prisons in Southern Rhodesia were administered by the Southern Rhodesia Prison Department (SRPD). On 30 November 1954, the Federal Assembly of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland passed the Prisons Department Act (49/1954), which incorporated the SRPD into the Federal Prison Service (FPS), effective 1 December 1954. This arrangement continued until December 1963, when the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland dissolved and autonomy was returned to the individual colonies of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, the latter two of which gained independence in 1964 as Zambia and Malawi, respectively. From 1963, the service continued as the Southern
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