The Election that Nobody Won

In the Northern Rhodesia railhead of Broken Hill, where he once stoked coal as a locomotive fireman, Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the crumbling Central African Federation, issued a dire warning: "If the wrong people are elected, we will regret it forever and a day."

The wrong people to "Royboy" are the blacks who want to break up his federation, a shaky, nine-year-old union of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Most of its 8,300,000 blacks regard it as a colonial instrument designed to perpetuate rule by 305,000 whites. Nyasaland, already under local black rule, is sending a delegation to London next week to demand a new constitution from the British, which would probably lead to withdrawal from the federation. In Northern Rhodesia, the blacks feel the same way. In last week's election for the 45-seat Legislative Council, they overwhelmingly supported African parties that also want to pull out.

But that does not mean that they won the elections. Under the weirdly complex constitution worked out by Britain last February, nobody really could have won.

Two Rolls. Aptly dubbed "the slide-rule constitution," it divides voters into two rolls, a predominantly white upper roll of some 37,000 voters who must earn at least -L-700 ($1,960) a year, and a largely black lower roll of 92,000 with incomes of -L-120 or more. Each roll elects 15 members of the Council. One Asian member is chosen by a separate roll of Asian and colored voters. The remaining 14 are elected by both groups under a system that requires white candidates to get 10% of the black votes in their constituency, and vice versa.

On election day, voters had to dip their left thumb in a bottle of indelible red ink to prevent repeat performances. Even without repeats, the popular winner by far was Nationalist Kenneth Kaunda, 38, whose United National Independence Party drew 65,000 votes with its slogan, "Kwacha!" (Dawn), and its appeal for more black power. But Kaunda won only 14 seats, and Welensky's United Federal Party, with one-third of the votes, won 15. The African National Congress of roisterous Harry Nkumbula, Kaunda's ex-mentor, won five seats. Ten seats were left vacant because too few voters crossed racial lines to give them the required 10% of ballots from both upper and lower rolls.

Long Run. With no majority, British-appointed Governor Sir Evelyn Hone refused to form a government, preferring to wait until a special election for the empty seats is held Dec. 10. But in the long run, the big winner will probably be Kaunda, a teetotaling advocate of Gandhian nonviolence whose straight-up hairdo gives him the look of a man permanently frightened by a ghost. With his huge plurality, he can legitimately claim a mandate for a new constitution guaranteeing more power to the blacks, and he aims to do just that. "Our first goal," he says, "is stable government. Then we can press for constitutionalized changes and ending the federation."

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