Sir Charles Patrick John Coghlan, KCMG (24 June 1863 – 28 August 1927), was a lawyer and politician who served as Premier of Southern Rhodesia from 1 October 1923 to his death.

Charles Patrick John Coghlan was born on 24 June 1863 in King William's Town, British Kaffraria (part of the Cape Colony from 1866).

[2] After fighting in the Eighth Xhosa War of 1850–53 with the 2nd (The Queen's Royal) Regiment of Foot, James was stationed in the Keiskamma mountains; he settled there with his wife Isabella Mary (née Maclaren), who was originally from Dumbartonshire, Scotland.

[5] He was awarded a bursary to the South African College, Cape Town, where he studied law with the intent of becoming a barrister, but these plans were disrupted by his father's death from dysentery.

Short of money, Charles quit university in 1882 and went to work for Paley and Coghlan, the law firm where his eldest brother James was a partner, in Kimberley.

[7] That same year, Cecil Rhodes incorporated the De Beers Mining Company and in 1883 was elected to the Cape Parliament as Member for the newly enfranchised Diamond Fields.

[17] He disapproved of the policy of the South African Republic government under Paul Kruger of conscripting uitlanders (mostly British settlers) for military service while denying them the electoral franchise.

[19] Around this time Coghlan's friend Percy Ross Frames invited him to join him in Bulawayo, one of the main settlements in Rhodesia, as Matabeleland, Mashonaland and the adjoining areas were now collectively called.

[26] Frames left for Johannesburg in late 1902, citing the poor economic conditions in Southern Rhodesia following the Second Boer War, ending this firm.

[27] Shortly before the 1908 elections to the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Council, Welsh sent a telegram to Coghlan, who was visiting relatives in Pietersburg, advising him to stand.

[32] In November 1909, at a banquet for Lord Selborne, the departing High Commissioner in Cape Town, Coghlan spoke of the BSAC and the people of Southern Rhodesia working together towards entering the Union, though some settlers wished to enjoy what he called "an artificial stage of responsible government" first.

[33] Indeed, the order in council of 1898 had provided Southern Rhodesia with a constitution that resembled that of a Crown Colony with responsible government and the South Africa Act made no changes to the territory's administrative framework.

[30] Botha, who had been asked by the Union's first Governor-General Viscount Gladstone to form a government, began to make policies and speeches that appeared to Coghlan to be unfair to South Africans of British origin.

[34] Coghlan came to the conclusion in 1910 that Southern Rhodesia's joining the Union was much further off than he had previously thought, though he still saw it as the territory's inevitable destiny, whose timing and terms the local electorate must determine.

[38] During the course of the First World War, Rhodesia's white population was split between the Unionists, for amalgamation into the Union of South Africa, and the Responsible Government Association, for independence.

After the war, Coghlan noted that the new Secretary of State, Winston Churchill, was determined to achieve the amalgamation of Southern Rhodesia with South Africa.

Lewis Hastings, reviewing Wallis's book, recalls campaigning with Coghlan and says that he was the undisputed leader of the movement—highly competent, with a clear vision, principled and sincere.

He attributes Coghlan's resolve to his years in Kimberley, where he experienced the autocratic rule of the De Beers mining company, owned by the BSAC.

In a letter to the South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, the Company Administrator Sir Francis Drummond Chaplin cited anti-Afrikaner sentiments, particularly amongst women, as a major factor in the result.

Howard Moffat, his Minister for Mines and Works, had supervised mineral exploration in Northern Rhodesia twenty years earlier and so knew of the rich copper deposits across the Zambezi.

There was also the issue of attracting labour for mines and farms from the far north and this gave impetus to Coghlan's and Moffat's territorial expansionism in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

However, in April 1985, it was changed by the office of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to that of Chaminuka, an ancestral spirit invoked by guerrillas opposing the government of Ian Smith.

[51] In 1925, the rank of KCMG was conferred on him, the warrant having been signed by his friend The Earl Buxton, Chancellor of the Order, who had served as Governor-General of South Africa from 1914 to 1920 and was president of the African Society from 1920 to 1933.