Rhodesia (region) Rhodesia (region) Rhodesia is a historical region in southern Africa whose formal boundaries evolved between the 1890s and 1980. Demarcated and named by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which governed it until the 1920s, it thereafter saw administration by various authorities. It was bisected by a natural border, the Zambezi. The territory to the north of the Zambezi was officially designated Northern Rhodesia by the Company, and has been Zambia since 1964; that to the south, which the Company dubbed Southern Rhodesia, became Zimbabwe in 1980. Northern and Southern Rhodesia were sometimes informally called "the Rhodesias". The term "Rhodesia"
Northern Rhodesia Ila and plateau Tonga peoples, but the United National Independence Party was dominant elsewhere. Roy Welensky, a Northern Rhodesian settler who was the Federal Prime Minister from November 1956 had convinced Alan Lennox-Boyd, Colonial Secretary from 1954 to 1959, to support Federation and to agree that the pace of African advancement would be gradual. This remained the view of the British cabinet under Harold Macmillan until after the declaration of the States of emergency, when it decided to set up a Royal Commission on the future of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to be held in 1960. This became