Abstract

This article will analyse the support given to Rhodesia by France and certain Francophone African states following the White settler government’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. These external actors, crossing national and imperial boundaries, shaped the transition to majority rule in Rhodesia. Furthermore, the end of empire in Francophone Africa and the wider international context informed this outside influence over Rhodesian decolonisation. This article will demonstrate, therefore, that the end of empire in Rhodesia was shaped by numerous external connections, thus revealing the possibilities available to historians of twentieth-century decolonisation when employing a connected global history approach.

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