The facts (bare version):

Roy Welensky was born in 1907 in Salisbury, capital of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (today the city is Harare, capital of the independent nation of Zimbabwe). Though Welensky lived virtually his entire life in British colonies or in Britain itself, there is nothing remotely British about his background. His father was a Jew from near the Russian/Polish town of Vilna; his mother an Afrikaner--that is, a white South African of mainly Dutch descent--who converted to Judaism. By 1907 his parents were running a bar and hotel in Salisbury, where Welensky was born, their thirteenth child. After a fifth-grade education and various shop keeping jobs, Welensky caught on with Rhodesian Rail­ways as a fireman in 1924. He was seventeen, technically a year too young to join the railways, but he was passed by the examini­ng physician because of his unusual size and strength (he weighed about 280 pounds at this point). Indeed it was shortly after starting to work that he enjoyed a short stint as heavyweight boxing champion of Southern Rhodesia (whites-only competition). He was promoted to the elite job of steam locomotive driver in 1928, and retained that position until his retirement from the railways in 1954, although in later years his involvement in politics often precluded active railway service.

Early on Welensky joined the trade union of white workers on the rails, the Rhodesia Railways Workers Union. After playing a role in a failed strike in 1929, he was moved around by manage-merit, eventually winding up in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia), in 1933. (The Rhodesia Railways was a single system serving both Southern and Northern Rhodesia.) Here he quickly became head of the union branch, thoroughly reorganiz­ing and reinvigorating it. This became his political base. He founded the Northern Rhodesia Labour Party and was elected to the territory's Legislative Council in 1938 (the Council was all white at the time, although whites were a tiny minority of the territory's population). In 1940 he served on an official com­mission investigating a serious and bloody strike by black copper miners. During the Second World War he served the government in the important post of Director of Manpower, essentially coordinating the white workforce's contribution to the Allied war effort.

Welensky rose to prominence as an advocate of "amalgamation,'' that is, the linking of Northern Rhodesia with Southern Rhodesia,
where there were more white settlers. The idea was to create a large bloc of the British Empire in central Africa which would be less white-supremacist than South Africa, where the apartheid system was emerging, but definitely opposed to black majority rule. The Central African Federation was created in 1953, and Welensky became its Prime Minister in 1956. By then the tide of African nationalism was running strong in the region. The Federation broke apart in 1963, effectively ending Welensky's political career. Although Southern Rhodesia, which was Welensky's home again, remained under white settler domina­tion for another 17 years, Welensky grew increasingly critical of the white settler intransigence and its symbol, Ian Smith, who became a bitter personal enemy. He emigrated to Britain in 1981, where he died a decade later.

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