CLAIM FOR COLONIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 52, Issue 3750, 1 May 1936, Page 8

CLAIM FOR COLONIES

“I happen to he interested in tropical and semi-tropical Africa,” said Sir Henry Page Croft in the House of Commons. “I have grown fifteen different crops in East Africa and I say that no one who has made a study of the question could possibly accept the suggestion that it is possible to satisfy Germanys’ economic and population needs by handing over to her part of East Africa. Take the case of Tanganyika before the war. Kenya is a much more populous colony with white people, and four years ago the white population there was 10,000. I do not know what the white population of Tankanyika is, but I should say that it is much less than that of Kenya. I ask whether that is going to solve Germany’s population problem. Can anyone who has studied Kenya, Nyasaland, the Rhodesias, Tanganyika and Uganda say that such proposals as we have heard are going to solve any population problem? I go so far as to say that in the next 10 years the whole of tropical and ■ semi-tropical Africa could not absorb more than 100,000 white, set tiers. Are we not unwise then to encourage false hopes and to lead the people of this country and people elsewhere to imagine that such proposals as these are going to provide a solution of the problem, either with regard to territory or with regard to raw materials?”