CENTRAL AFRICA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20930, 21 January 1930, Page 9

CENTRAL AFRICA

IMMENSE POSSIBILITIES.

THE NEED OF A RAILWAY. (United Press Association.) (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.) LONDON, January 18. “ If you see a successful man in South Africa, probably he is an Australian, a New Zealander, or a Scot,” so Mr A. J. Siggins, formerly of Wellington, who is visiting London after 27 years in East and Central Africa, told an interviewer. Mr Siggins went from Melbourne to the Boer war, and did not return to Australia. He is now visiting London in an endeavour to interest the Government in a scheme to build a transafrican railway costing £15,000,000, connecting Walfish Bay with Mtwara Bay in Tanganyika. Mr Siggins states: “Britain has undertaken to pay £3,000,000 for the construction of a bridge across the Zambesi, in Portuguese territory. There is no reason why she cannot guarantee debentures, for a transafrican railroad, which is important economically and politically. (Rhodesia, is a great country, at present hemmed in by the Portuguese, whose attitude is unfriendly, and growing worse. Growth, is seriously retarded by a lack of proper outlet. A railway would open millions of miles. of British country in Central Africa. Tanganyika is suitable for white settlement, and would provide wprk for the natives, whose growing unrest presents a grave problem. If Rhodesia could establish connection with Mtwara, which is unknown, hut has a harbour a,s good as that of Sydney, it would help trade* to Australia, to which Rhodesia is turning since the breakdown of the Customs negotiations with South Africa. “ The country which the proposed railroad would traverse is healthy and suitable for whites. It is wrong to imagine that Central Africa is a fever-ridden, inhospitable jungle, given over to wild beasts. The future prosperity of the Empire is not bound up in wild schemes of big business to make Britain the manufacturing centre' of the Empire, but in building up the dominions.”