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Abstract
Scholars interested in the role played by the U.S. government in the decolonization of Africa have proposed several very different explanations of American policy. However, the number of case studies which might be used to evaluate the validity of these explanations is still quite small. This dissertation examines the development and implementation of U.S., government policy toward the decolonization of British Central Africa (Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland; now the independent states of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) from the end of World War Two in 1945 to Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, and seeks to discover what factors determined the nature of this policy.
This study is based primarily on published U.S. government documents, U.S. government documents held by the U.S. National Archives, the John F. Kennedy Library, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, and U.S. government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency. It focuses on American government analyses of, and actions taken with regard to, British policy toward the region, the role played by the United Nations, and political and economic developments within British Central Africa.
The dissertation concludes that U.S. government policy toward British Central Africa was neither pro-British, nor pro-settler, nor pro-African nationalist. Instead, it was developed and implemented to achieve independent American objectives which did not consistently conform to the objectives pursued by any of these groups. This dissertation also concludes that U.S. government policy was not determined by a single factor, but was instead determined by the combination, and interaction, of American economic interests in strategic raw materials from the region, American geopolitical and ideological interests related to its global rivalry with the Soviet Union, and the impact of the racial attitudes of U.S. government officials on the development and implementation of policy toward a region whose population was predominantly non-white.
