Central Africa: Then There Were Two

"Foul!" roared ex-pugilist Sir Roy We-lensky, all 282 Ibs. of him aquiver with rage. "The British government has ratted on us."

What infuriated "Royboy," Prime Minister of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, was the announcement last week that Britain had decided to permit Nyasaland to secede from his crumbling, nine-year-old federation. Under a black majority headed by Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda (he no longer calls himself Hastings—too British), an urbane onetime London general practitioner, Nyasaland is expected to quit within a year. Northern Rhodesia, whose first black government took over a fortnight ago and likes the idea of keeping the $320 million-a-year copper-mining industry all to itself, would like to follow suit. Even in Southern Rhodesia, once the most enthusiastic of the federation's three members, the newly elected white Rhodesian Front government (TIME, Dec. 21) has declared solemnly that the federation is "finished."

Royboy refused to admit defeat. "I will go on fighting to alter a decision I consider wrong in every way," he thundered before an emergency session of his Federal Parliament in Salisbury. In London, beleaguered R. A. Butler, Deputy Prime Minister who is in charge of Central African affairs, wearily insisted that it was "our duty" to okay Nyasaland's secession. To soothe a strong bloc of pro-Welensky Tories, he said that he would visit Central Africa early next year to look into the chances of preserving a union between the two Rhodesias.

His chances seem slim. Southern Rhodesia's Tobacco Farmer Winston Field, 58, who was sworn in as new Prime Minister last week, intends to divide the land into three "tiers" of racially restricted areas — for whites, Africans and racially mixed families. Though Field insists that his plan is a long way from apartheid, the new black government in Northern Rhodesia will hardly be able to tell the difference. The Northern Rhodesian blacks already have threatened to sever economic ties unless Southern Rhodesia broadens its voting franchise and releases the African nationalists who have been placed under restriction. Otherwise, cried Nationalist Leader Kenneth Kaunda, "we will set up a tariff wall at the Zambezi and let the Southern Rhodesians eat the blankets they manufacture."