"Being Stupid"

Over village after village in Nyasaland last week, planes of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force dropped leaflets with a special message for the women "What will happen," they asked, "when your husband is in prison? Where will you get your cloth when all the money is used to pay fines? Tell your men to stop being stupid." By "being stupid" the government meant joining the nationalist agitation for Nyasaland to secede from the British-inspired Central African Federation.

The week before, the government had arrested and exiled Dr. Hastings Banda, the Pied Piper of Nyasa nationalism. To justify its action, the government had hinted at an African plot to massacre the whites. Yet, as of week's end, not one white in Nyasaland had been touched, but 43 blacks had been killed and another 400 detained or exiled.

In what officials euphemistically called a "goodwill mission," troops began moving northward in a nine-day mopping-up operation. At night, soldiers and police swooped down upon scattered villages of mud-walled huts to cart off every male adult for questioning. The "screening process" was admittedly a bit clumsy--"not nearly so well defined," one police officer said, "as in Cyprus or Kenya." But the fact that those two fateful names came up at all was symptomatic of the uneasy mood.

Completed in 1953, the Central African Federation has turned out to be one of the most unfortunate of British colonial experiments--the pasting together, mostly for worthy economic reasons, of two almost wholly black protectorates and self-governing Southern Rhodesia, whose more extreme whites want to turn the country into a miniature Union of South Africa.

Last week the settlers' government of Southern Rhodesia introduced a bill in the legislative assembly that would not only grant the police sweeping power to arrest African nationalists, but would declare those arrested guilty until proved innocent, in most cases by summary courts.

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