AND NOW NYASALAND
SIR,—Your article on Nyasaland (just received) con- tains the following words: 'If Nyasaland cannot sur- vive alone, there is the possibility of federation of a different sort with contiguous Tanganyika, which has lately undergone an almost wholly unnoticed social revolution in the direction of African supremacy under the quiet and skilful leadership of Julius Nyerere.'
This makes good reading to one just arrived to take over the headmastership of one of the leading schools for African boys, and, by your leave, I should like to voice an appeal for help in the pact we here are to play in that 'social revolution' But revolution is too strong a word: schoolmasters like myself mistrust it. Constant change there un- doubtedly is. Whatever the causes (there are many) even I, with only six months' experience here, can detect how urgent is the desire that harmony, not violence, shall prevail. We who have just arrived ought to be very grateful for the wisdom and the restraint of those in places high and low who have made possible this sure and steady development (a better word than revolution) towards stability and mutual confidence. Magnanimity in politics is, still, not seldom the truest wisdom, and we have seen only too clearly elsewhere the fruit of the union between great empires and little minds.
We need, sir, more of the cool yet sympathetic, detached yet concerned reporting which is a feature of the article I refer to. We need the moral support that such wise writing and equally wise reading can supply. We need also money to enable us to furnish our boys with the necessary background to that larger life into which they have to step so suddenly, so dramatically. We must have books and a place of beauty and comfort in which to house them. A library, next to a chapel, is still the finest educational instru- ment. I have in my school a library of five book- shelves holding a mere 700 books, and am luckier than most, probably.
We ask for good reporting on events here. Are we not also right in asking that knowledge (the fruit of the world's best observation and commentary) be made available to these boys of ours now growing up to such a testing, exhilarating and momentous man- hood?—Yours faithfully, R. 0. PENTNEY Headmaster St. Andrew's College, Minaki, Dar-es-Salaam
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