On Thursday Sir Edward Grey made his long-promised statement in
regard to Uganda. We are going to make the railway between the Lakes and the coast, and the work is to be begun at once. The East Africa Company is to be bought out for £250,000, the Sultanate of Zanzibar paying £200,000, and receiving back the concession of the ten-mile coast strip originally made to the Company, and the British Government paying £50,000 and absorbing the Company's interests and improvements in the hinterland. There will
thus be three separate bodies controlling British East Africa. That " transient and embarrassed phantom," the Sultan of Zanzibar—he is a pensioner with £10,000 a year, and no more voice in the Government than the Nuwab of Moorshedabad—will hold the ten-mile coast strip ; but apparently he will immediately lease it out to a Protectorate, formed between Uganda and the coast, which is to be the second East African province. Thirdly, there is to be the separate Uganda Protectorate ; and, fourthly, the Witu Protectorate. The whole scheme appears to us absurdly complicated. Surely the sensible plan would have been to have cut Zanzibar and its satellite islands entirely adrift from the Continent, and to have treated them as, what they are in fact, an East African Malta, the Sultan, of course, being mediatised. Mombassa and Uganda might then have been treated separately or together. We can see no reason for juggling with the Sultan's name, unless it is that the Foreign Office is determined to keep its finger permanently in the East African pie, and thinks that a fictitious Sultan will help to do that. The Government policy was opposed by Mr. Labonchere, but was affirmed by 198 votes (249 to 51).
