CENTRAL AFRICA: The Ibiam Affair

Pulling into the neat new mining town of Chingola (pop. 23,000) in Northern Rhodesia’s booming copper belt fortnight ago, the white chauffeur turned to his three passengers—two white, one black—and cheerfully asked: “How about a beer?” Shaking his head, courtly, white-haired Sir Francis Akanu Ibiam, famed Nigerian physician and president of the University College of Ibadan, turned to his white companions and said smilingly: “As a churchman, I’d love a cup of tea.” Together with the driver the three men got out of their car and entered a nearby cafe. And there the proprietor promptly ordered Sir Francis out with the curt statement: “We do not serve Africans.”

Across the Central African Federation, an uneasy amalgam of the British territories of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and overwhelmingly black Nyasaland, news of the “Ibiam Affair” (first reported not by Sir Francis but by his indignant chauffeur) spread swiftly. It was the latest and most dramatic in a series of racial incidents produced by the Central Africa government’s campaign to win admittance to restaurants, hotels and cafes for “civilized” Africans. Unwilling to accept the political unpopularity that would come with legislation against discrimination, the government has confined its action to public appeals to hotels and cafe owners. These have failed, because the proprietors, whose trade is mainly white, hold that voluntarily serving Africans would be economic suicide.

Last week signs were that the snub delivered to Sir Francis, knighted in 1951 for his outstanding career as a medical missionary of the Church of Scotland, was likely to do more to undermine discrimination in Central Africa’s public establishments than all the government’s appeals. Said the Salisbury Evening Standard: “Sir Francis is one of Africa’s most noted sons. There are few in this country who should not raise their hats to him. The incident is a disgrace.” And from the Federation’s Premier, burly Sir Roy Welensky, came a personal apology to Sir Francis and a pointed reminder to his race-conscious fellow whites: “We cannot expect the world to treat us with any great respect so long as we hand out this kind of treatment to our visitors.”