FUTURE OF AFRICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20521, 24 March 1930, Page 9

FUTURE OF AFRICA.

ITALIA# AMBITIONS. great empire envisaged. STRUGGLE PREDICTED. DESTINY OF TRIPOLI. ' / RIVALRY OF POWERS. By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright-. (Received March 23, 5.5 p.m.) Times Cable. LONDON, March 22. The Home correspondent of the Times savs the seriousness of the Italian ambitions in Africa was emphasised in a debate in the Chamber of Deputies on the Colonial estimates.

Signer Pace insisted that the Italian occupation of Fezzan had not been pushed to the limit of territorial rights. He said: "It aly cannot accept a boundary which does not leave Bardlai and Aingalakka far to the northward, and does not give'her control of the important Fezzan-Chad and Kufra-Undai caravan routes." Signer Fera said the African Continent would eventually be dominated by the Fower which/most rapidly attacked it from the Mediterranean. Therefore, it would be a struggle between Britain, France and Italy, Britain, with her great lines of communication and the possession of former German colonies, had a formidable base.

France, by the trans-saharan railway, and the existing roads, could tap the fertile Chad and Congo regions. But Italy, through Libya, had the shortest communications to Equatorial Africa by the Mediterranean, and Tripoli was destined to be one of the master lines of the world's commerce. Signor Fera added: "The star of the ■world's greatest colonial Empire is declining, because it lacks ideas. The light that once came from Rome is now again burning in Signor Mussolini's enunciation of the principles of authority, order and justice."

Signor Bono, the Colonial Minister, made an optimistic speech, but he corrected certain exuberances in Signor Fera's speech.;/