GIVE AND TAKE
Afirst glance it is the African leaders who are being 'unreasonable over the coming constitutional conference—with Hastings Banda brandishing a spear and saying he has come not for give-and-take but simply for take; Kenneth Kaunda indicating his reluctance to attend at all. Sir Roy Welensky, on the other hand, has been stressing his determination to be reason- able: he has come, he insists, to negotiate, not to obstruct. And Sir Roy, when he is in a co- operative frame of mind, is an engaging charac- ter—as well as being, in all probability, the only Federal spokesman who can be taken seriously.
But if Banda and Kaunda are playing hard to get, Sir Roy taught them the rules of the game. It was he who insisted that secession did not come within the terms of 'reference of the Monckton Commission, and who angrily refused to recognise those parts of the Commission's Report in which secession was discussed. He has already made it clear, too, that the negotiations he has in mind will consist of discussions on how much of the Monckton Report is accept- able. But to the Africans, the Report is of relevance only as representing the irreducible minimum they would accept. If there are to be negotiations at all, they argue, it must be over how far the recommendations of the Report can be improved upon from an African viewpoint —certainly not how far it can be modified to assuage the fears of the Whites.
And the Africans have a further excuse for regarding the Conference without enthusiasm.
In Southern Rhodesia several of their leaders are in gaol; savage laws have been passed dis- criminating, in effect, against the nationalist movement; and Sir Edgar Whitehead did his best to break the movement's unity by insisting on the right to nominate African representatives, rather than letting the Africans nominate their own. In Northern Rhodesia the Africans nomi- nated did not enjoy the confidence of their fellow-countrymen. If the authorities in the two Rhodesias had deliberately determined to prevent any agreement .being reached in London, they could hardly have hit on a more effective way of destroying African confidence in it; and only some very effective work by Mr. Sandys and Mr. Macleod has prevented the negotiations from collapsing even before they have begun.
Whoever attends the Conference, and whatever is discussed there, one thing should be clear : there can be no question of going back on the Monckton Report. Its recommendations are already behind the times; that so conservative a body could reach such liberal conclusions was itself an indication that the Central African situation was changing very rapidly, and if the same members undertook the same investigation today they would assuredly be compelled to admit that the situation has altered—partly be- cause of events in the. Congo, which have shown what can happen if African aspirations are left too long to simmer unsatisfied; but even more because of what has happened in Tanganyika, which has given the lie to the argument that Africans in these regions are incapable of orderly transition to self-government. Any at- tempt, therefore, to placate Sir Roy by repudiat- ing some of the Monckton recommendations would be dangerous—as somebody less com- mitted to belief in a Central African Federa- tion than he is would have realised long ago.
A policy based on the Monckton proposals still stands some slight chance of success. The Report may be behind the times, and it may contain obvious errors—such as its impression that the Africans in Southern Rhodesia support Federation. But it happens to be the only avail- able document on which a compromise plan can be based—so long as it is realised that what- ever concessions have to be made to keep pace with changing circumstances will have to be made not to Sir Roy, but to the Africans.
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