Resistance to ‘Winds of Change’: The Emergence of the ‘Unholy Alliance’ between Southern Rhodesia, Portugal and South Africa, 1964–5

Abstract

Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in November 1965 is rightly seen as one of the quintessential manifestations of resistance to Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’.2 The defiance of the Rhodesian Front, led by Ian Douglas Smith, to the British Government’s wish to see an acceleration of black political and economic rights in Southern Rhodesia following the break-up of the Central African Federation in 1963, was supported in Britain by a Conservative alliance (in the parliamentary party and in the country), ‘the Friends of Rhodesia’. This political lobby group, comprising prominent peers and backbench Conservative MPs, was credited at the time with having given crucial backing to the white minority government’s pursuit of UDI in 1964–5.3 However, despite popular assumptions that this well-placed and privately influential pressure group was the vital political enabler of UDI, the true key clandestine ‘enabling factor’ was abroad, namely the emergence of an unholy alliance between Southern Rhodesia, Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s autocratic regime in Portugal and Dr Henrik Verwoerd’s South Africa. There was an awareness in Whitehall of the importance of these two powers — given the geographic proximity of Mozambique and South Africa, and the communications network in Southern Africa. But the limitations exercised by British economic and strategic vulnerability undercut London’s ability to lean on the RSA and Portugal and its empire.