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By Root 958 0

remember, the white settlers have been agitating for mass white immigration, so as to strengthen them against the Africans. This heart-cry is perennial; it is never absent from sundowner talk or newspaper column. But there never has been mass white immigration. Nor can there be. Having reached, since the war, a figure of twenty thousand a year, the Government has had to peg the figure there, because the existing facilities are so over-strained they can’t feed more people: not only the black men’s towns, but the white, are short of schools and hospitals, let alone housing. And that figure of twenty thousand is itself a defeat, for at last the Government has given up the dream of ‘sound Nordic stock’—meaning Britishers, Germans and other Northern Europeans, the arguments in favour of which are the same as those used by Hitler and Goebbels—to import quantities of Italians and Greeks, peoples who, to the average white settler, seem not far removed from the Africans. These people are already undermining ‘white supremacy’ since they are a cheerful and happy-go-lucky lot, who do not take easily to the neurotic rigidities of white settlerdom.

And a great many of the recent immigrants promptly left again. According to figures recently published, fifty thousand white people have left the Federation in the last five years. Why? Because accommodation is hard to find; because everything is overcrowded; because it is a boring and provincial life; because if you are not prepared to talk about the colour bar there is nothing else to talk about; and because the place is as insecure and explosive as South Africa, which is also losing its white citizens in large numbers.

In short, these two powerful fantasies, of being killed off by the whites, and of mass white immigration, are absolute nonsense, economic and political nonsense. Yet they are all-powerful and likely to remain so.

The arguments of the Congress people are very simple, the same whether one listens to a Nyasaland man or a Northern Rhodesian. We were free men, we Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. We made voluntary treaties with your Queen Victoria, and became British-protected persons. We opposed Federation with Southern Rhodesia; yet your Government forced it on us. We have been tricked and betrayed by the British Government; and now we are in the same position as our brothers in Southern Rhodesia, who were physically conquered by force of arms. Yes, now we know that the whites of the Federation will force on us apartheid, the South African system. Why, we already have apartheid, although they call it Partnership. It creeps north from Southern Rhodesia already; already they begin to enforce pass laws here, and to take away more and more of our land. No, we shall have nothing to do with any Federal Government project. No, we do not understand this argument you use, that economic development will benefit the Africans—when has development benefited us? On the contrary, it is the whites who gain, who always gain, and everything that is good is taken away from us. No; when you speak like that, you speak as a white person; you are against us. The simplest child in the village knows that Federation made a dupe of him. But he will not understand what you call tactics. Tactics are immoral. For an African, a thing is good or it is bad. Federation is bad, and we will have nothing to do with it. We will fight to get Nyasaland out of the Federation if we can. And besides, even if it were true that we would earn more money if factories and industries came to the Federation, we would have lost our freedom, we would be slaves. No. We know only one thing, that the white people want our land. They will take our land, as they have in Southern Rhodesia. How can we support Kariba when thousands of our people are being moved off their good, rich, fertile land, where they have lived for generations, to bad distant soil, which has never been theirs and which does not know them and their ancestors? No, no. We will not listen. Now we know only one thing—we are black men. You are white. Therefore