[Image: Government House, Zomba, Nyasaland. National Archives of Malawi. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Download PDFs: Central Africa, in two parts

Part One: Closer Association, 1945-1958 [2MB]

Part Two: Crisis and Dissolution, 1959-1965 [2MB]

Volume Details: Series B Volume 9. First published by The Stationary Office in 2005. Electronic version reproduced with permission of the editor under an Open Government Licence.

Editor Details: PHILIP MURPHY is Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British and Commonwealth History in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is author of Party Politics and Decolonization: the Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951-1964 (1995), Alan Lennox-Boyd: A Biography (1999) and Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government and the Postwar Commonwealth (2013).

Selection from Introduction:

This volume traces British policy towards Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Nyasaland (Malawi) from the end of the Second World War to Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in November 1965. The principal focus of the volume is the rise and fall of the Central African Federation, which from 1953-1963 brought these three territories together in an unhappy and ill-fated marriage.” (Part 1, p.xxvii)