Foreign News: The Sightseer

It took all of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s urbane skill at talking through, past and around any subject to make his way through the capitals of British Africa. He had from the first conceived his mission as a journey to “look and learn,” but people everywhere expected to hear something about their problems and prospects from the first British Prime Minister ever to visit them. The London Spectator, watching the P.M. straddle one controversial subject after another, began to call the Mr. Macwonder of yore by a new nickname, MacJanus.*

In three out of the four states he visited—Nigeria is virtually independent, and Ghana and the Union of South Africa are wholly so—he could be no more than a senior member of what he delights in calling “the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Club.” But London still exerts power over the troubled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Federal Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky hoped that Macmillan might promise more independence soon for his white-dominated government. The Africans wanted him to hold firm while encouraging them in their own search for independence outside the federation.

What’s It All About? In his first public statement in the Southern Rhodesia capital of Salisbury, a busy modern city (pop. 260,000) that boasts of racial “partnership” while practicing a segregation almost as complete as South Africa’s, Macmillan did a quick knee bend in the direction of the Africans. Britain, he said, would not remove its “protection” until all the people had a chance to say whether they wanted federation or not. Sir Roy Welensky was visibly disgruntled. But during his entire stay in Southern Rhodesia, Macmillan did not interview a single African leader.

By the time Macmillan got to Nyasaland, where the blacks outnumber the whites 485 to 1, the Africans were getting disgruntled too. Macmillan made no attempt to see, let alone to set free, the imprisoned black “Messiah,” Dr. Hastings Banda. Orton Chirwa, the territory’s only black barrister, bluntly demanded to know why Britain was so afraid of Sir Roy. Macmillan testily replied: “Britain has never been frightened of anyone — not even Hitler.” Finally, at the Ryalls Hotel in Blantyre, Macmillan ran into his first hostile crowd.

Funny, Aren’t They? At a civic luncheon, he sought to discourage the nationalist’s desire to secede from the federation, while assuring all concerned that he had deep sympathy for their “aspirations for self-government.” As loudspeakers carried his words outside, 2,000 Africans bearing antifederation placards began to grow restless. Finally, a black policeman snatched one of the placards, and the trouble began. It quickly became a scene out of Evelyn Waugh: below, the blacks screamed and police flailed; on the hotel veranda above, Europeans calmly went on sipping their gins and whiskies.

The correspondent of London Conservative Daily Mail melodramatically reported: “I watched a sickening spectacle. I watched a leading Blantyre policeman do these things to Africans who never hit back: strike them across the stomachs with stout black canes, knee Africans who were pleading for symbolic arrest, strike women . . .” Added the London Daily Telegraph of the watching Europeans: “I heard one remark, ‘Funny little monkeys, aren’t they?’ ” “

Think of It!” True to his original premise that the real fact finding in the federation would have to be done later by a special commission headed by Lord Monckton, Macmillan departed from a thoroughly confused Nyasaland for the Union of South Africa, where a few Africans in the streets tried to attract his attention with homemade placards: MONTY CLOSED HIS EYES OPEN YOURS, MAC! Asked whether he would see any “non-white leaders,” he blandly declared that this would be up to “my hosts.” Finally, at a reception given by the mayor of Johannesburg, Macmillan found something to say that fitted in with what he considered a proper discretion. Looking out over a park filled with 1,000 white guests toward the looming skyline of the city (pop. 884,000), Supermac intoned: ” The great romance of this city! Think of it! Only 73 years ago — nothing. And now — all this. Think how it was made — we two races, the British and the Dutch!”

* The Mac nicknames began with Supermac, coined by Cartoonist Vicky. Macmillan has since become known in times of budget cutting as Mac the Knife, during the trouble in Cyprus as Macblunder, and during a highway fuss as Macadam. For the great fur cap he wore to Moscow and odd gear he favors on other occasions, he also became Macmilliner.