Central Africa

THE Central African Federation, officially known as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, is an eight-year-old experiment in racial partnership aimed at coordinating the interests of both black and white, as well as its small Asian and mixed-race minorities. It covers a half million square miles of south-central Africa and combines advanced, self-governing Southern Rhodesia with its two northern neighbors, the protectorates of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia.

Ideally, an industrialized south would be fed with minerals from the north and labor from Nyasaland to maintain a high development rate. However, the idealism of 1953 has been largely lost in the cataclysms created by the winds of change bearing down from the equator in the last two years. Now the Federation seems doomed — and with it man’s greatest experiment in race relations — unless vast sums of development capital are poured as soothing oil into the present galedriven seas of racial distrust and unrest.

Sir Roy Welensky, the burly, impatient, and outspoken federal Prime Minister, has repeatedly warned the West, and particularly Britain, of the dangers facing the non-Communist world in Africa. In his own country, he has attacked white settlers for losing faith in the future and black politicians for wanting too much too soon. Lately, his disagreements over London’s Africa policy have brought distinct threats of a Boston Tea Party in the Federation if pressures from white interests become sufficiently violent. Welensky accuses Britain of appeasement on a Munich scale.

Welensky took over the reins from the father of federation, Lord Malvern, six years ago, when there were only breezes of impending change in most of Africa. The two white leaders based their policy of racial partnership on the dictum of Rhodesia’s empire-building founder, the diamond magnate Cecil John Rhodes, that there should be “equal rights for all civilized men.”

Left alone, Sir Roy had seemed to most overseas critics to be too slow in applying the formula of partnership. However, Welensky had no control over many vital factors which remained under the authority of the three territorial governments, including African education and agriculture, the livelihood of most of the Federation’s eight and a half million Africans.

In his own assembly, Welensky has the overwhelming support of the fifty-nine members, including twelve Africans, and has not been faced by divisions on racial lines. But in the three territories, politics are developing on just such lines. The opportunities for Africans to defeat whites at the ballot box are few, except in Nyasaland, because most African leaders, contending that franchise qualifications are too high, have told their people not to register for the vote.

Deeply critical of the Belgian government for its “abdication” in the Congo, Welensky is supported by most of the country’s 310,000 whites when he cites the cowardice of the West in facing up to the moral issues involved in its battle against Communism as being the dominant factor in white grants of premature independence. However, few of the Federation’s whites have faced up to the moral responsibilities involved in their own lands.

The Monckton commission

For half of last year, an august commission under one of Britain’s shrewdest ex-Cabinet ministers, Lord Monckton, studied the Federation under a microscope. The commission’s job was to chart constitutional advances for the Federation and its three constituents. The commission decided that throughout the Federation, and particularly in Southern Rhodesia, there should be a much greater sharing of power between black and white, with the abolition of racial discrimination.

In 1959, severe rioting broke out in Nyasaland, whose people, led by chiefs unable to obtain the usual guidance from British civil servants for the first time, had never accepted federation with the settler-dominated south, despite its economic advantages. Last June, the irresponsible arrest of Southern Rhodesia’s African political leaders led to the destruction of its 74-year-old record of unbroken racial peace. In the aftermath of these demonstrations against white supremacy, Nyasaland last August won a new constitution. In elections next month, secession-demanding politicians will certainly come to power. Later this year, a similarly pro-secessionist party, under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda, is sure to gain the real power in Northern Rhodesia, after a struggle to keep its power-hungry supporters on a course of nonviolence.

Whites versus blacks

The most far-reaching changes in the Federation in the past year have occurred in Southern Rhodesia, largely as a residt of widespread white charges that the Prime Minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead, was badly out of touch with African opinion. In a calculated gamble with the feelings of his more conservative supporters, Whitehead, who, unlike Welensky, has only a bare house majority, agreed with London on a new constitution ior his country that will ensure substantial African representation in his assembly. The issue of the constitution goes before Southern Rhodesian voters this month for approval, and Whitehead may easily receive a setback, because fewer than five thousand nonwhites will have a vote, despite his aggressive campaign to register them and partially offset white domination of the polls.

Southern Rhodesia is the core of the white minority problem, and to prove to whites that he is their guardian, Whitehead pushed through commensurately strong measures to enhance the white sense of security. These included an antivagrancy law, which enabled the police to remove some of the reservoir of 50,000 jobless from the towns, and a new public order act whose sweeping powers were quickly labeled totalitarianism by a surprisingly large body of whites. To enforce these laws, Southern Rhodesians are expecting to bear heavy tax increases for the police reinforcements entailed. The federal government is also recruiting new units for the army. Nearly nine million will be required for the new forces of law and order.

The Federation’s African population is divided almost equally among the three territories, but Southern Rhodesia has two thirds of the whites, 220,000, most of whom are true settlers with a stake in the land. Fifty thousand wandering and scattered primitives in the remote parts of the Zambezi Valley are the country’s sole example of the uninhibited tribal savages of the last century. In varying degrees, all the rest of Southern Rhodesia’s Africans have become Westernized because of the vast extent of the country’s white settlement.

Nyasaland has the lowest white population, ten thousand, and the lowest rate of development, with an average income of only $45 yearly. The handful of white settlers there, however, makes a major contribution to this unbountiful territory’s income through its investments in plantations, mainly tea, coffee, and tobacco. With insufficient opportunities in their own country, Nyasalanders have built up a solid reputation as migrant workers. Today 10 per cent of Nyasaland’s total population works outside its borders.

The copper belt

Since the discovery of Northern Rhodesia’s fabulously rich copper seams forty years ago, the copper belt has become the mecca of Central Africa. Gradually, an affluent group of stable African miners has emerged, with far more interest in the annual copper bonus (sometimes 25 percent of annual wages) than in politics. But their wages, ranging up to $300 monthly, are not even remotely representative of average incomes, which are only slightly higher than in Nyasaland.

The need to think about their own future has made most of the Federation’s whites aware of the attainments of their African charges. In many instances this has resulted in regaining a sense of mission. Some Africans are being offered places in white trade unions, and white artisans are passing on their skills more readily. The main lead in this field has been taken by the two Northern Rhodesian copper giants and the state railways. The greatest risk, as most whites will admit, is that these changes may have come about too late and that the African peoples will accept no compromises.

While this process of adjustment to change is being accelerated among whites, African moderates are having a hard battle to summon enough support to meet changing white opinion halfway. Many African politicians have moved steadily left, and despite the examples of Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika and President Tshombe in Katanga, leaders like Kenneth Kaunda, of Northern Rhodesia’s United National Independence Party, and Joshua Nkomo, head of Southern Rhodesia’s National Democratic Party, are gradually abandoning moderation.

The need for capital

In their annual conference, last year, the Federation’s businessmen called on the governments to borrow money to finance public works schemes to help provide employment for the 75,000 new wage earners coining on the iabor market every year. In Southern Rhodesia, where the government is striving to raise African wages to a minimum of $65 a month, unemployment may well be aggravated as employers discard unproductive workers in an attempt to balance rising wages by an increase in productivity.

Southern Rhodesia’s progressive trade minister wants the federal government to borrow $13 billion over the next ten years to boost the economy, and thereby absorb unemployment with a resultant lessening of tension. Many whites believe that international agencies should help to provide the development funds, since failure of the Federation’s partnership policy might lead to widespread racial conflict.

World Bank, American sources, and independent banks helped provide the capital for the giant mainspring of future industrial expansion, the Kariba hydroelectric scheme, which began sending along power to industry last year. Costing $250 million, the plant will provide all the power the Federation can use for at least twenty years. British government loans and guarantees have helped in many ways, particularly with the creation of vital communications. However, Britain has recently stated that it cannot increase its contributions to Africa, despite the very high standard of living of its own people and its moral obligations to African territories.

It is private industry — mostly British — which has provided the vast majority of the capital used in the Federation to increase the standard of living of Africans, give them a livelihood, and, indirectly, supply the taxes that have financed primary education and safeguarded health. However, not only has private investment from abroad almost dried up, but withdrawals of capital caused such a grave balancc-of-payments position that the federal minister of finance imposed severe restrictions on currency outflow early this year. Although there are prospects of new overseas investments worth some $70 million being established in the Federation shortly, business and government believe that only vast financial aid can really restore confidence in the federal economy.

Against a background of rapidly emerging Africans wanting to combine their growing economic power with political superiority, a wasteful battle is being fought between diehard white settlers and ambitious African politicians. The die-hards cannot forget their fathers’ stories of the black savage of seventy-five years ago, believe they are entitled to what they hold, and refuse to acknowledge the changes brought about by their own educational programs.

The African leaders, some of whom condone violence, consider themselves just as well qualified for independence as their northern neighbors, feel intensely the need to prove themselves, and have learned from neighbors the importance of utilizing the support of the masses. Personalities have inflated values in the Federation, as they do in other parts of Africa. Their frequent trips to London and Washington have made some of them almost as well known as Welensky and Whitehead.

Undoubtedly the best-known African is Nyasaland’s Dr. Hastings Banda, for thirty years a doctor in a London suburb until his country’s African National Congress called for him three years ago to settle a crisis of leadership. An unpredictable mixture of compromise and bitterness, Banda was imprisoned for his part in 1959’s Nyasaland disorders, yet paved the way for his eventual accession to power by accepting a compromise over his country’s future. However, Dr. Banda is sworn to the breakup of the Federation.

Northern Rhodesia’s outstanding African leader is a teacher, Kenneth Kaunda. With a mission upbringing, Kaunda refuses to condone violence and preaches the lessons of Gandhi’s nonviolence. While Kaunda and Nkomo have generally carried out their promises to keep their supporters on the path of nonviolence, extremist white leaders in both Rhodesias have frequently made statements which can only be counted as inflammatory. Perhaps worse, the Sunday edition of a South Africa ncontrollecl press monopoly in the Federation has regularly headlined instances of black disorders, both in and out of the Federation. In contrast, the African press lias been remarkable for its sense of responsibility in educating readers to accept the need for patience.

Integration comes slowly

Widespread white illusions that there are no well-educated, wellmannered blacks are being slowly shattered by the sight of immaculately clad Africans attending meetings in city centers. There have been frequent appointments of Africans to the boards of government commissions and other bodies, and a number of press references to African success stories in business and the professions. Sixty-five per cent of the lucrative transport business in Southern Rhodesia is in African hands, for example, and some black contractors and traders have assets running into the million-dollar class. Thoughtful whites, particularly in business, have seen the urgent need for mutual progress. After last year’s frequent disorders in the south, Rhodesians held an inspiring multiracial meeting, whose liberal resolutions are slowly being put into practice by Whitehead’s government.

If the Federation can stand the internal turmoils of its three member states in mid-1961, Welensky has a date in London this fall to discuss the constitution of the Federation. Most Rhodesians believe the conference will considerably weaken Welensky’s power, in spite of independence threats, and many consider that, in any case, the Federation is virtually finished now.