44 Capricorn Africa " Dream and Reality
By CYRIL RAY Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia
ED on the map, from the head-waters of the White Nile to
the banks of the Limpopo, stretch the six colonies and protectorates of British East and Central Africa. They lie in an unbroken group—Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika ; Nyasaland and the Rhodesias—from the equator to the Tropic of Capricorn, and visionaries see them, federated perhaps with Portuguese East and West Africa and the Belgian Congo, as a vast united " Capricorn Africa," able to absorb Europe's surplus people, able to support a white population of 150 millions and a black population as great, able to buttress the Western democracies against a Communist drive south-east from the Caspian or southwards from China.
That is the dream, as you can hear it from settlers in Nairobi, or read it in pamphlets and magazine articles in Salisbury. So far, yet, is the dream from coming true that to make the long but simple journey between those two British capitals, from Kenya to Southern Rhodesia, through British territory all the way, the British traveller must fill in one currency declaration and submit to two customs examinations. He must not take more than five pounds from any East African territory into Northern Rhodesia—where in any case he must change what money he has into a different currency—and he is liable to pay duty on what he carries from Northern into Southern Rhodesia, whose own home-produced cigarettes cost half as much again as they do after they have been exported to the neighbouring British territory to the north.
The three East African territories—Kenya, Uganda and Tangan- yika ; one colony, one protectorate and one mandated territory— enjoy a common currency and some measure of co-ordination of common services through the East African High Commission. For the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, one self-governing colony and two protectorates, also with a common currency, the Central African Council provides such relatively trifling common services as a meteorological office, a statistical bureau, an archivist and a docu- mentary film unit. Yet it is here, in the Central African territories, that there has been the strongest urge towards a federation or an amalgamation, and there seems little doubt that it ever there is to be a Capricorn dominion it will grow from a Rhodesian centre.
But it is equally clear at present that progress towards a federation even of the two Rhodesias has suffered a set-back. It is a dozen years since the Bledisloe Commission expressed its belief that the eventual amalgamation of the three Central African territories was not only desirable but inevitable. It is only twelve months since delegates from the three territories agreed unanimously at the Victoria Falls Conference to a federal constitution, and set up committees to work on it. But the committees, faced with con- stitutional problems beyond their power to answer, have downed tools and been forgotten, and Sir Godfrey Huggins, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, has stated that federation has reached deadlock. Here in Salisbury the sights are trained on dominion status for Southern Rhodesia alone ; in Northern Rhodesia only such ardent spirits as Mr. Roy Welensky, leader of the non-official members of the Legislative Council at Lusaka, keep the idea of Rhodesian unity alive.
The chief reasons for the present deadlock are the differences of constitution between the territories, the differences in social and economic structure, the differences between their native policies. Southern Rhodesia is " white-man's country "—a country in which the grandchildren of original settlers, the second generation to be Rhodesians born, are themselves grown-up, and have roots in the country far deeper than those of the tobacco plants out of which they build their handsome homes and run their big cars. They are jealous of their quarter of a century of self-government, quicker to resent and repudiate interference from Whitehall than are the white inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia, only 30,000 strong to Southern Rhodesia's 120.000, half of them Colonial-Office admini-
strators or miners in the copper-belt, many born in Britain or in South Africa and promising themselves to die there. Unlike self-governing Southern Rhodesia, Noithern Rhodesia and small, under-developed Nyasaland, with its tiny white popula- tion, are protectorates, their native peoples regarded by the Colonial Office as its wards, whose views must be heard before federation can be approved, and who must be represented in any central government that is formed. What is odd, but revealing, is that, while the expressed views of the Africans of the two northern territories show a fear of Southern Rhodesia's native policy—a fear that racial discrimination and repression are spreading north- wards from the Union of South Africa and would prevail in any . federation of which Southern Rhodesia is the senior partner— those of Southern Rhodesia's own Africans are that their higher standard of living must be safeguarded, and that they " do not want," in the words of a delegate to the recent African Native Congress in Salisbury, " to be held back for thirty or forty years while the Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland try to catch up." Although there are certain limitations as to native affairs in Southern Rhodesia's rights of self-government, the colony has developed a native policy that is as clearly different from the Colonial Office's policy of trusteeship in the protectorates as it is claimed by Southern Rhodesians to differ from the " horizontal colour-bar " of the Union.
Defined by Lord Bledisloe's Commission of 1938 as the policy of " parallel development," it is now referred to as that of the " vertical colour-bar " or " the twin pyramids." Briefly, the theory is that, while in South Africa the African can never rise above being a helot of the white man, in Southern Rhodesia he can rise to the top of the tree, a tree as high as the white man's—but a separate tree. It is a policy of apartheid, but of apartheid applied more logically and, no doubt, more humanely than that of Dr. Malan. It is a policy that has not until now been as clearly defined as it is clearly understood, but which is to appear specifically stated in a pamphlet due from Salisbury in the course of the next month, with a commendatory foreword from Sir Godfrey Huggins. The Africans of the northern protectorates, it is already obvious, will regard it as simply a politer form of Dr. Malan's racialism, and it may be a confirmation of their view that what has killed any sugges- tion, in recent years, of Southern Rhodesia's federating southwards instead of to the north—and there was a time when it might have become a province of the Union—is not so much any widely-felt detestation of South Africa's attitude towards the African as its bilingualism and the promise of a republic.
Meanwhile, although it is true that amalgamation of the Central African territories seems as far off as ever, it is important, too, to remember that it has never been as far off as all that. Southern Rhodesia's immediate goal would seem to be dominion status for herself alone ; Northern Rhodesia's is self-government on the present Southern Rhodesia pattern. The latter is possibly the nearer. Already the Governor's Executive Council has to carry the same weight of " unofficial " opinion—that is of the opinion of the elected and nominated members of the Legislative Council— as does the Legislative Council itself, where the official members are outnumbered by " unofficials," and one of its members has recently been turned off at the behest of the leader of the Legislative Council's non-official members. It was the same leader as persuaded the British South Africa Company to part with twenty per cent. of its annual revenue from the copper mines—a tax that the Colonial Office had said it could not levy—and to give up its rights altogether in thirty-seven years' time.
It would be easier for two self-governing Rhodesias to amal- gamate than it is for amalgamation to be engineered at present between a self-governing colony and a protectorate. Nyasaland's coming-in would seem to be a matter of indifference to everybody but its own native population. With its increasing wealth from copper, Northern Rhodesia's revenue has grown in five years from a quarter of Southern Rhodesia's to more than half—a telling argument to present to the Southern Rhodesian tax-payer. What is surprising in these territories that dream of Capricorn Africa is how small compared with the vastness of the dream are the arguments that tell for and against the smallest of amalgamations.
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