THE COMMONWEALTH: Africa Emerges

"This is my dream—all British," Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes once said, placing the palm of his hand across the map of Africa. Rhodes spoke 75 years ago, and in the following half-century his countrymen came close to fulfilling his dream. In West Africa's jungles, they founded two great river colonies: the Gold Coast, which is bigger than Minnesota, and Nigeria, which dwarfs Texas and Oklahoma combined, and is Britain's most populous (25 million) African possession. Following Explorer David Livingstone in his search for the source of the Nile, they filtered into East Africa, crossed the Mountains of the Moon, established Kenya Colony and Uganda Protectorate. Farther south, other Britons followed Rhodes, carved out Northern and Southern Rhodesia in his name, and planted the Union Jack in a dozen native kingdoms, e.g., Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Nyasaland.

To round out its empire, Britain got Texas-sized Tanganyika as a League of Nations mandate from Germany, took over British Somaliland to the north, the Cameroons in the West, the tiny island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. When it was all over, Britain's African Empire stretched from Cape to Cairo, spanning a rich, fertile area as large as the U.S.

A Place in the Sun. Now both Cape and Cairo are out of British control. The Union of South Africa severed all but the most tenuous connection with Britain; today its fierce "Boer" Nationalists, led by Prime Minister Daniel Malan, cast envious eyes at the unplowed ranges and abundant black labor in the colonies north of the Limpopo River.* In booming West Africa, which produces 45% of the world's cocoa, 8% of its tin, the black man has emerged from the jungle and demands his place in the sun.

Last week, to safeguard its hold on the remaining British Africa, Britain's Colonial Office took two big conciliatory steps. Most ambitious was a plan to amalgamate the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia with the adjoining protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (see map). Together, the three territories would form a 475,000 sq. mi. Central African Federation, which might one day become Britain's eighth dominion.

In the House of Commons last week, Tory Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton announced: "There are massive economic reasons for federation ... A single port serves all three. There is a need for Nyasaland labor in Northern and Southern Rhodesia . . . Coal from Wankie in Southern Rhodesia is required for the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia."

Even more important in British eyes is the need to build a strong bulwark of British power and civilization in Central Africa. Afrikaners are flocking into the Rhodesias at the rate of 2,000 a month; many of them are anti-British and determined to bring the Rhodesias into the Union of South Africa. Warned Laborite Jim Griffiths, Lyttelton's predecessor as Colonial Secretary (see above): "Unless there is created and sustained in these three territories a stronger political association looking to [Britain] for its inspiration . . . other principles and other traditions might prevail . . . which come from the Union of South Africa. I think the House and the country ought to know that the policy of Apartheid [racial segregation] is casting a sinister shadow over Africa."