Black Temper

For months, the blacks and whites of Central Africa have been squabbling over control of Northern Rhodesia, a sprawling African territory containing 2,400,000 people above ground and 700 million tons of copper reserves below. Racing in and out of London, African Leader Kenneth Kaunda insisted that nothing short of majority control for the blacks would be acceptable in the new constitution being drafted. Portly Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky fought back with stern threats; fearful that black control of Northern Rhodesia would destroy his Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, he hinted darkly of secession from British control unless the reins remained in the hands of Northern Rhodesia's 75,000 whites. Caught in the middle, Britain's hard-pressed Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod last week finally produced a labyrinthine new constitutional proposal that left everything up in the air. So complex was the scheme that neither blacks nor whites could say for certain who had won.

"A dog's breakfast," cried Laborite M.P. James Callaghan. "I say frankly that I do not begin to understand it." But Welensky seemed happy enough at the outcome. Not so Kaunda, whose blacks--95% of the population--would have a large voice in the legislature for the first time, but no guaranteed, clear-cut majority. Kaunda, 37, is normally a mild-mannered man and conspicuously dedicated to the ways of moderation. But he returned from London shaking with fury. Angrily declaring that Macleod had given the blacks advance assurance of a "small majority," he announced: "The British government has completely betrayed us, and is treating us like pieces of dirt."

Putting his party on an emergency footing, Kaunda declared that a massive passive resistance campaign would soon begin. "We control the kitchens, the mines, the shops, the airways--everything," he cried. Kaunda insisted that the "master plan" would be peaceful: "We will not lift a stone, a panga, a club, a spear." But next day he was off again on another trip, this time to Accra and talks with Ghana's rambunctious Kwame Nkrumah, who not only advocates violence, if necessary, to sweep the white man out of Africa, but has received hundreds of tons of Soviet arms to help achieve the purpose.

In the knowledge that any resistance campaign might quickly lead to mass violence in Northern Rhodesia's explosive atmosphere, Welensky grimly ordered the federation's white troops to prepare for trouble, handed the legislature an emergency bill allowing the government to create a 50,000-man citizen army by drafting every able-bodie white male between 18 and 50.

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