MUSSOLINI'S CHALLENGE TO AFRICA

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 107, 1 November 1940, Page 6

MUSSOLINI'S CHALLENGE TO AFRICA

General Smuts has long been one of I the Afrikanders who think in African continental terms. He is no believer in isolation of the South African Union. For years he has envisaged the picture of a high-level belt of white settlement connecting South Africa and the Rhodesias with Tanganyika (formerly German East Africa) and with Kenya. He is like Mussolini in one respect and in one respect only—he pictures the white man establishing white leadership up to the African Equator, just as Mussolini dreams of imposing Italian domination down to the Equator. Between the South African Union and the Equatorial Lakes, just as between Italian Libya and those lakes, stretch deserts, malarial regions, and country cursed with cattle pests, all] of which have been regarded as reasons why the cental lands of Africa are for the dark man and not for the white. But General Smuts has pointed out the existence of a belt of high country between South Africa and the lakes, with a climate not unfavourable to white settlement —a possible ribbon of white in a broad dark expanse. So when he speaks, in his broadcast, of the African battlefield, he speaks of interests that do not merely arise with the up-springing of an Italian Caesar, only to disappear at the Caesar's eventual fall. General Smuts sees Africa as a region of increasing world importance, in which the white man must establish his leadership by effective occupation, which implies economic as well as military fitness. At the moment military interests are uppermost, but not always will it be so. With true African instinct, General Smuts sees the importance of taking up Mussolini's challenge, and no other African is better able to intervene at this crucial point in African history.