Danger of Swamping

In Lusaka (pop. 45,500), capital of the copper-rich British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, Tory Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton last week opened a spanking new high school, financed by the British government and built voluntarily by its Negro students. In Lusaka's Government House, whites and blacks mingled at a cocktail party, lining up to pump the visiting minister's hand and to air their grievances.

Such racial amiability, rare in the Rhodesias, was an outward and visible sign of the racial partnership that Britain hopes will one day characterize all British Africa. But it could not disguise the inward spiritual conflict that threatens Rhodesia with chronic black-white strife. Lyttelton had come to make his own reading of that conflict. Its heart is the growing fear of a white minority surrounded by black men who no longer are satisfied to be seen and not heard.

In the new federation, 500,000 Negro children attend school. This is more than double the total white population: 207,000. Rhodesia is dedicated to the motto of its founder, Cecil Rhodes: "Equal rights for every civilized man." But as more and more Negroes reach "civilized" standards (literacy and an income of at least $560 a year) and thereby qualify to vote, the whites are beginning to worry that eventually they will be swamped. "We are financing Negro education so that they can outvote us," complained one white settler.

The whites' solution is to rewrite Rhodes's dictum to read "Equal rights for all responsible men," and themselves judge who is responsible. Last week, sipping orange juice at Government House, Colonial Secretary Lyttelton came close to endorsing their view. "It is quite clear," he said, "that any modern form of franchise here would mean Europeans being swamped by African voters. That would mean a complete arrest of progress ... at worst a reversal. The oversea investor would be chary of risking his money. If we stand still, we get constitutional arthritis and risk losing the cooperation of the African -- and his labor." His solution appeared to be a vague hope that "something constitutionally exotic" would turn up to enable the white minority to keep its head permanently above the rising black tide.

Whites cheered Lyttelton's statement; yet most Negro leaders were smilingly unperturbed. Explained Harry Nkumbula, a classmate of the Gold Coast's Prime Minister Nkrumah and chief of Northern Rhodesia's African National Congress: "The so-called 'swamping' is inevitable . . . Time is on the Negroes' side."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.