’Bad Boys’: Infiltration and Sedition in the African Military Units of the Central African Federation (Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe) 1953–63

New evidence reveals that some African soldiers in Britain’s Central African Federation―today’s Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe ―developed African nationalist sympathies in the 1950s and early 1960s because of nationalist infiltration and the increasing unpopularity of colonialism. Discontent was also linked to participation in British counter-insurgency in Malaya, and news of Kenya’s Mau Mau Uprising and the Congo Crisis. African soldiers questioned European officers, demanded commissions, wrote complaint letters, met secretly, circulated nationalist propaganda, joined nationalist organizations, made abortive plots and engaged in “subversive talk.” With independence for Zambia and Malawi, white officers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) doubted black soldiers’ dependability in future operations against nationalist insurgents but had to rely on them because of limited white manpower.