Letters to the Editor
A POLICY - FOR EAST AFRICA
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] [In view of the great importance of this subject, we thought that the views of Lord Lugard, on the policy outlined in our issue of March 29th, would interest our readers.—En. Spectator.] Sut,—I find some difficulty in complying with your request that I should write to the Spectator to express my opinion on the "New Scheme" put_ forward by The Times of East Africa, and by writers in the Spectator and Manchester Guardian, because a half-statement of a case inevitably gives rise to misunderstanding, and a full statement of a priffilem which occupies 354 pages of "The Closer Union" Report is beyond the compass of a letter.
The scheme proposed in the article in the Spectator of March 29th, and in that in the Manchester Guardian of April 16th is more or less the same as that suggested by me seven years ago in "The Dual Mandate in Africa," as being the only one which, in my opinion, could afford a prospect of a permanent solution of the difficulties of Government in Kenya. It was more fully elaborated in a booklet entitled Representative Forms of Government and Indirect Rule in British Africa, published by Blackwood (Edinburgh, 1928), which was referred to on pages 80 and 85 of the Hilton-Young Report.
The Commission did not adopt the suggestion as it stood but in recommending "the creation of homogenous native and non-native areas of sufficient size to become units of self-government" (pp. 49 and 84), in which "each (race) pursued its own distinctive and natural line of development" (pp. 180 and 285), they accepted the principle. General Smuts, in his Oxford lectures, endorsed it, and I have reason to believe that his opinion did not differ materially from my own.
The view that I have consistently held is that parliamentary institutions are unsuited for the government of African races, at any rate in their present stage of development ; that the method of government adopted for them should be based on their own institutions, and gradually adapted to the inevit- able changes which are taking place in Africa ; that their interests should be entrusted to the direct care of His Majesty's representative, and not to the majority vote of a Legislative Council in which they have no adequate representation. It seems to me that it is only by such methods that the policy formally announced by His Majesty's Government "to create machinery whereby native self-government at first purely local, and later over larger areas" can be effected.
If it is out of the question, as the late Secretary of State (Mr. Amery) declared (and I believe Lord Passfield shares this view), that all political power should reside in the hands of a small minority, there must be, as the Commissioners say, "two parallel forms of Government," and the progress of the White community towards self-government under its own representative institutions would, therefore, not be retarded by a backward race.
Space does not admit of discussion of possible alternatives to the main principle, or of the subsidiary problems which it
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