The Devlin Report

It is one of the strengths of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that a government-appointed commission can frequently put the government itself in the dock and block its course. Last week a four-man British commission, headed by respected High Court Justice Sir Patrick Devlin, brought in a report on its six-week investigation of the nationalist uprisings last March in Nyasaland, the African territory run by London's Colonial Office. The report flatly called Nyasaland a "police state," and its findings may jeopardize the merger of black Nyasaland with the black and white Rhodesias into a Central African Federation, which is plumping for self-government in 1960. The findings were one more direct slap at Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's harried Colonial Office.

According to the 75,000-word Devlin report, Nyasaland's London-appointed governor, Sir Robert Armitage, was justified in declaring an emergency last March: "The government had to act or abdicate." But the report condemned the excesses of police and special constables for what followed: 51 Africans killed, 79 more injured, hundreds clapped into jail without trial. Furthermore, Devlin and his fellow investigators found no evidence of a murder plot against thousands of Europeans, as the Colonial Office had alleged, and pointed out that not one single European was killed. "When the time came to prepare the justification for government policy," said the report, "the murder plot began to play a larger part." Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd used the prospects of a "blood bath" against Europeans as excuse for cracking down on Nyasaland's black African National Congress.

No Hyde Park. The commission also found scant grounds for Armitage's jailing of Dr. Hastings Banda, fiery leader of the Congress Party. Dr. Banda had not advocated disobedience, but he was blamed for disregarding "the political immaturity of his followers," for "disobedience was the inevitable consequence of what he was saying and doing," and "there is no room for a Hyde Park in Nyasaland." Concluded the report: "Nyasaland is--no doubt only temporarily--a police state where it is not safe for anyone to express approval of the policies of the Congress Party, to which, before March 3, 1959, the vast majority of politically minded Africans belonged, and where it is unwise to express any but the most restrained criticism of government policy."

Reaction in the Central African Federation was swift and predictable. Africans celebrated by drinking maize beer around log fires, began agitation for Dr. Banda's release from prison. But the Federation government showed no disposition to free either Dr. Banda or some 500 "hard core" followers, and began taking precautions against another African upheaval in Nyasaland. Ammunition stockpiles were checked. Special constables were alerted in Blantyre-Limbe and other Nyasaland towns, and two mobile platoons of the Northern Rhodesian Police were moved to the Nyasaland border.

The Devlin report outraged Federation officials. Federation Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky was angry at the report, but even angrier at British Labor Party criticism of him in the House of Commons. Nyasaland's Governor Armitage, summoned hurriedly to London, met with Lennox-Boyd and issued a 16-page denial of all allegations in the report.

No Resignation. Coming, as it did, on top of another official report that upbraided a Colonial Office prison superintendent for condoning police brutality in the murder of eleven Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya's Hola detention camp last March, the Devlin findings put Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd in an awkward spot. Not only the Labor Party but half the newspapers of London were demanding his resignation. Lennox-Boyd was in no mood to resign, and Prime Minister Macmillan was in no mood to ask him to. It is an election year in Britain, and the resignation of the Colonial Secretary would be a confession of failure. Macmillan decided to brazen it through, counting on the 50-vote Tory majority in Commons to defeat a Labor motion of censure.

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