RACIAL ISSUE IN AFRICA.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15272, 23 June 1923, Page 11 (Supplement)

RACIAL ISSUE IN AFRICA.

THE * KENYA PROBLEM

(By “Soissibus.")

"Of all the thousand racial squabbles now proceeding in every part of the inhabited globe, the struggle of ten thousand white men in East Africa to maintain the supremacy of their race seems at first sight parochial,” says the Outlook. “Interesting and important, no doubt, to the ten. thousand, but scarcely worthy to claim serious attention from administrators in London who stagger under the burdens of a quarter of tbe human race.

Petty Disputes?

“Mighty and earth-shaking problems have, however, often in human history, focussed themselves in distant wildernesses, and dramas in which the fate of humanity was staked have played themselves out before rude and sparse audiences, unnoticed by indifferent or ignorant rulers in the centres of power of their ages. In sacred history, we have the record of those few years in Palestine. No immediate echo reached Rome of the works and death of an itinerant Judean preacher in llie reign of Tiberius. In secular history, the march of the ten thousand, a change in military tactics in the levies of a barbarian and insignificant State called Macedon, petty disputes over stamp tax and tea duties in New England, were at the outset ignored by, or unknown to, contemporaries. “The North-Eastern provinces of Africa constitute a country greater than the United States of America, where the native population is just under ten millions, about the number of persons who live in Canada. These vast territories include a tract of 277,000 square miles lying at an elevation of more than 4000 feet. This fertile, potentially healthy upland, equivalent to a belt of ninety miles wide stretching across the American Continent from Montreal to Vancouver, can grow two crops a year of wheat, corn, and almost all staples of foodstuffs that the Empire so sorely needs to make us independent of foreign supplies. The climate of these highlands is more equable than that of France.

“ We must visualise a vast, rolling plain, seamed with rivers and dotted with lakes, with here and there great mountains jutting up. The plateau itself is very like an English park, and is populated by myriads af animals. Except for the nomadic savage, it lies empty of mankind, as did the Western prairies of America fifty years ago.’ It is a virgin land, awaiting the coming of the white man, ready to nurture and breed a great race, to rival in wealth and population the Mississippi Valley. This is our heritage, the refuge for our teeming millions whom it is doubtful whether our industrial system at home can much longer support. It is the ‘last white man's country’ yet undeveloped and suitable for Englishmen to conquer.

Kenya White or Brown?

“If we know what East Africa offers, as most Englishmen unhappily do not, we see at once that the dispute now in progress between ten thousand white pioneers in Kenya, and the forty thousand Indian immigrants, for the control of Kenya, involves a principle and issues perhaps no less important to the men of future generations than the dispute with our North American colonies five generations ago.

"Is Kenya lo be white or brown? The Governor of the Colony, Sir Robert Coryndon, surrounded by , his leading citizens, is in London to plead the cause of the ten thousand. Arrayed against him in conference he will find the Agtia Khan and envoys from India, as well as representatives of Kenya’s Indian population. “Tho issue is clearcut. Are Hie Indian immigrants now in the Grdony to be given equal voting rights with the whites? If they are, Kenya apparently passes from the white rnan to the brown. The Immigration Laws will bo at once let down, and not Kenya only, but the whole of East Africa, Tanganyika, later Uganda and perhaps Zanzibar, become Indian. “It is easy to sit comfortably in London and spin plausible and attractive theories about racial equality. Why should not our Indian fellowsubjects be granted the same rights and facilities anywhere in the Empire as we ourselves? We lack space in this article to go into the complicated arguments that will be brought forward; but we most earnestly believe that the claims of the Indians must be withstood, without compromise, in the interests of Hie stability of the Empire itself, and of the whole white race. We know that a formidable agitation lias aroused deep feeling in India itself in favour of equality with the white man in Africa. This explains the attitude of the Government of India. By Force?

“But however embarrassing it may be to give the Kenya white men what they want, our statesmen must look to the future and stand firm. Weakness or compromise will not imperii the future of tho while race in East Africa, but it may result in secession from tho Empire itself. Let there be no mistake here. The British Government lias not the power, if it had the will, to impose Indian equality upon those brave ten thousand while pioneers. The class of Indians now in Kenya are, to put it mildly, not fighters. The rule of a few men of one race over many thousands of another must always, whether we like it or not, depend in the last resort on force. We govern India by force ,and we govern the natives of East Africa by force. “Racial equality may be advocated from arm-chairs in London clubs, or from the sanctums of Fleet Street editors. But to suggest equality between brown and white, in a country where Hie population is overwhelmingly black, is as absurd as to place Ihc black man on a level with the white. Which last proposal the advocates of Indian supremacy in Kenya must, were they logical, adopt."