Roy Welensky

Sir Raphael " Roy " Welensky KCMG ( born January 20, 1907 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia; † 5 December 1991 in Blandford, Dorset, UK ) was a Rhodesian politician. He was from 1956 to 1963 second and last Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Welensky, born in 1907 in poverty as the son of a Lithuanian father and an Afrikaner mother, worked from 1927 as a firefighter and later. Than train drivers in the Rhodesian Railways In 1933 he was transferred to Northern Rhodesia, where he quickly rose to become an influential trade union official and in 1938 was elected to the Legislative Council there. Along with Godfrey Huggins, he was one of the most ardent proponents of the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. From 1925 to 1927 he was also national champion in heavyweight boxing.

After the founding of the Federation, he was elected to the Federal Parliament in December 1953 and was in the Cabinet Huggins first transport minister, then deputy prime minister and took over Huggins withdrawal in 1956 finally even the prime minister. He turned against activities of the British colonial power, to hand over the responsibility of government in the Federation to the black majority, and entered for the country's independence as a Dominion within the Commonwealth of Nations, while maintaining the existing electoral law one, which with a high census, the black population of political participation almost completely excluded. However, the introduction of universal suffrage in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the independence of these territories and the consequent dissolution of the federation in 1963, he could not prevent.

After the failed attempt in 1964 to gain a seat in the Southern Rhodesian Parliament, he retired from politics. The unilateral declaration of independence of Southern Rhodesia in 1965 while maintaining white supremacy he refused with reference to the lack of consent of the colonial power. In 1981, he moved to Britain, where he died ten years later.