Central African Federation

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29339, 19 October 1960, Page 16

Central African Federation

The violent criticism by the Prime Minister of the Central African Federation (Sir Roy Welensky) and by white settlers generally is not likely to blind the United Kingdom Government to the reasonableness of the essential features of the Monckton Commission’s report. The widely representative commission agreed that the federation as now constituted had been a failure because leaders among the Africans felt it was created against their will. The commission concluded that the best hope of maintaining some essentially similar grouping was to loosen the ties holding the Rhodesias and Nyasaland together. The commission might almost have been thinking of an old phrase from the imperial past about “ bonds “as light as air but strong as “ iron bands ”. The only disagreement in the commission is that the majority thought some future stage or date for optional secession should be fixed by the United Kingdom Government The African minority of two believed the right of secession should be given immediately and that a system of economic co-operation should be offered as an alternative to the more tightly organised federation. Since economic co-operation is the only really substantial reason for the federation’s existence their plan might be the better. It is not at all unlikely that the existence of an alternative would lead African leaders to

accept the tidier arrangement of a federation. The white settlers are probably not nearly as intransigent as they seem. Justifiably, they would resent being put at the mercy of an African majority whose future outlook is uncertain. It should not be impossible to provide them with reasonable constitutional safeguards; but in any case African political progress cannot be halted, though it may be guided. Big business, which has considerable influence in Northern Rhodesia, has long taken an enlightened view of African aspirations, economically as well as politically. Nor are relations between white and black as bad as. the Southern Rhodesian disturbances might suggest. The real failure has been in the lack of contact between Europeans and the law-abiding majority of the African people, which has become helpless in defending itself against extremism because it has been taught to leave law and order to the authorities. It is a weakness of paternalism practised too long. The most hopeful factor in repairing the weakness is the prestige that the Colonial Secretary (Mr lain Macleod) has won among the Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, who now have great confidence in him. This, as the “ Daily Telegraph ” has commented, is a good omen for the coming negotiations on the future of the federation, which is as much an African as a European interest.