AFRICANS EXCLUDED

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29390, 17 December 1960, Page 13

AFRICANS EXCLUDED

Talks On S. Rhodesia

(Rec. 10.30 p.m.) LONDON, December 15.

Mr Joshua Nkomo, the African nationalist leader from Southern Rhodesia, tonight angrily denounced as “wicked political blackmail” his exclusion from Constitutional talks tomorrow on the Central African territory’s Constitution. He told a press conference that he was going home to organise his people “to crush white supremacy.” ' Mr Nkomo had joined the two other African nationalist leaders, Dr. Hastings Banda, of Nyasaland, and Mr Kenneth Kaunda, of Northern Rhodesia, in a walkout and boycott last Monday of the current London conference on the future of the Central African Federation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. But today, the Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister (Sir Edgar Whitehead) put his own boycott on Mr Nkomo by banning him and his National Democratic Party delegates from participating in tomorrow’s talks because of their earlier walk-out.

He achieved this by excluding Mr Nkomo and his party colleagues from the official Southern Rhodesian delegation to the Federal conference and to the related territorial conference. Mr Nkomo and his party had been particularly anxious to participate in the territorial talks to put the African case for constitutional advance in Southern Rhodesia, where there are no African members of Parliament.