The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dead. It was buried in January of this year, just ten years old. For its epitaph some would write ‘A Great Experiment That Failed’; others, nearer the truth, ‘The Unwanted Partnership.’

Economically the Federation was a great success. Each of the constituent territories—Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland— benefited much in its own way. Southern Rhodesia enjoyed a remarkable boom, years of extraordinary expansion in industry, commerce and immigrant population, the most striking memorial of which is the present skyline of Salisbury with its soaring buildings. In Northern Rhodesia too there was rapid development and the Copper Belt lived through years of fantastic prosperity. Even Nyasaland, the poor relation, experienced substantial if less spectacular gain. Now all that is over.

Expansion has given way to contraction. This is especially marked in Southern Rhodesia, which is now suffering from an economic recession, unemployment, shortage of overseas investment and a large exodus of valuable white settlers. Worse still, there is great political uncertainty and civil unrest breaking out intermittendy into violence, which occasions more and more Draconian laws.