The Passing Show: The Devlin Report (1959)

The Passing Show column from the September 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Devlin Report

The Devlin Report was in line with the opinions of those who see the future of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland lying in the creation of a multi-racial, capitalist society. This strand of thought sees the Africans as being the wage-workers of this society, and wants them treated as wage-workers are treated here, with (ultimately) votes and "free speech" and the rest of the paraphernalia of capitalist democracy. This, in effect, would delude the Africans into believing that they are the real rulers of the country, just as the capitalist class tries to delude the workers in Britain. The result of this would be to turn the Africans (so this school believes) into respectable wage-workers, labouring as steadily for the profit of their employers as the wage-workers do in this country.

It seems likely that this trend of thought will prevail in the counsels of the ruling class, although for the present the British Government, and British officialdom in Nyasaland, seem to have been won over to the “settler" views of the white Rhodesian landowners, who regard the Africans merely as labourers on the land who must be kept in submission at all costs. But whatever the ruling class thinks and does, the view of the Socialist Party is clear. The only way to bring about a sound society, and to secure the free development of the human personality, in Nyasaland as elsewhere, is to establish Socialism.

Beating and Killing

The Devlin Commission allowed the Government one or two crumbs of comfort. It found that at the famous meeting of Congress leaders on January 25th “there was talk of beating and killing Europeans," and that when the trouble started “the Government of Nyasaland had to act or abdicate" The Observer (26-7-59). As to that, those of us who have frequently come into contact with white settlers from Kenya and Southern Africa can only say this: that if every settler who talked of beating and killing Africans were put in jail without trial, then the Africans would have to govern themselves, for there would be too few whites left to do it.

Religious Wars

A recent television broadcast of Bertolt Brecht's play “Mother Courage and Her Children" elicited this information in the Radio Times (30-6-59):

The Thirty Years’ War 1618-1648 was a religious war waged by the King of Sweden and the Protestant Princes of Northern Germany against the Catholics under the Emperor of Austria, aided by Poland and France. It ravaged the whole of Europe and killed half its population on the battlefields or by plague and famine. It brought no advantage to either side.

Socialists, in the light of the materialist conception of history, realise that the Thirty Years’ War was not a religious war, and that men do not murder each other merely because they are of different religions—or we should have civil war in this country between the Anglicans and Catholics, who now dwell peaceably together. The Thirty Years’ War was fought, like other wars, because the ruling classes of the countries taking part believed that they would get something out of it—either an increase of their wealth, or at least the safeguarding of the wealth they already had. But the Christians hold up their hands in horror when they hear the theory that the Thirty Years’ War (and others like it) was not a religious war. Such beliefs, they cry, are atheistic and blasphemous, and people who hold them are merely encouraging the spread of materialism.

How the Christians love to claim the slaughter and the devastation for their own!

Sidney Webb

The spate of speeches about Sidney Webb on his centenary mostly contained some sad, head-shaking references to the praise given by the Webbs to the Stalinist system in their book “Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?" (This was the title of the first edition: the Webbs even went so far as to remove the question mark in subsequent issues.) For example, Lord Attlee’s speech, reported in the Manchester Guardian (14-7-59):

Webb tended to deal too much with institutions and not enough with people, and that may have accounted, Lord Attlee thought, for the extraordinary aberration towards the aid of his life of' his admiration for the Soviet Union.

But why arc these Labour Party men, these Fabians, so surprised? Sidney Webb spent his life working for Fabianism, the slow conversion of private capitalism into state capitalism. Then he and his wife went to Russia, and found their ideal system, state capitalism, in full operation; so, being honest if misguided people, they wrote a book praising it. What is so surprising in that?

Alwyn Edgar

The Passing Show: Another Colonial Plot (1959)

The Passing Show column from the April 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Colonial Plot

In Nyasaland the Governor proclaims a state of emergency because, he says, a plot by. the Africans to massacre the whites has been discovered. Southern Rhodesian security forces have been drafted into the country. There are three million Africans in Nyasaland, a sea of Negroes in which are scattered a handful of whites, no more than eight thousand all told. Despite this enormous disparity of numbers, the number of whiles so far killed as a result of the “massacre plot” is—none. But more than forty Africans have up to now been slain by the security forces.

The disturbances in Nyasaland originated in the desire of the Southern Rhodesian ruling class for aggrandisement. In Southern Rhodesia, the situation is much like that in South Africa. The white farmers and planters insist on "apartheid’’--although they don’t call it that. Hotels, restaurants, schools, are run strictly on racial lines. Political power lies in the hands of the whites. Theoretically anyone can vote, but the great majority of Africans are barred because they must pass a means test before they can exercise the franchise. If too many Africans apply for enfranchisement, then the means test can be stiffened—this, says a writer to the Manchester Guardian (March 11th, 1959) has been done twice in the past.

The devil they know

But the parallel with South Africa goes further than this. Successive governments of the Union, while pressing the desirability of keeping whites and blacks apart, nevertheless regularly, demand the handing over of Bechuanaland. Basutoland, and Swaziland—although these three territories together would add nearly a million Negroes to the population of South Africa. What the white South Africans want is not separation, but white domination: and so it is in Southern Rhodesia. Fcderation—which is in fact rule by Southern Rhodesia—was imposed on Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland against the wishes of the great majority of the Africans living in those countries. Many Nyasas travel far afield to find work: they have seen the subjection of the Africans of Southern. Rhodesia to the whites, and they don’t like it.

Not British

These developments have aroused much uneasiness in Britain. Modern capitalism demands educated workers; at school the worker learns enough arithmetic and English to labour at his employer’s bench or keep his employer’s books. Capitalism also demands enfranchised workers; the worker who votes from time to time —whether in Britain. America or Russia believes he is ruling himself, and this encourages him to think that the prevailing economic system is fashioned in his interests, fhc Southern Rhodesian ruling class, whose power is based not on industry but land, has shown itself hostile to both of these requirements. Hence the divergence of views between Britain and Southern Rhodesia. Sir Robert Armitage, the British-appointed Governor of Nyasalund, has been markedly less active in the latest developments than Sir Roy Welensky, the Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister of the Federation, and Sir Edgar Whitehead, the Premier of Southern Rhodesia itself. In Southern Rhodesia, where there had been hardly any civil disorder reported except some stone-throwing by strikers, a state of emergency was declared on February 26th. On the same day in Nyasaland, where the trouble was, a spokesman of the Government "said, “there was no question of a situation requiring a state of emergency in the protectorate" (Manchester Guardian, February 27th, 1959): the Nyasaland state of emergency was not in fact declared until March 3rd.

As in South Africa, the inevitable industrialisation of the country will settle these problems as capitalism wants them to be settled.. Socialists can leave capitalism to get over its own difficulties, and concentrate on the spread of Socialist ideas.

Never

In 1954 Mr. Henry Hopkinson, then a Conservative Minister, stood up in the House of Commons and said that there were some British colonies which could never hope to achieve independence: as an example he cited Cyprus. For the next four years the island was torn with violence: hundreds of human beings—British, Greek, Turkish—died: repeatedly British Governors announced that they could not bargain with violence, and that law and order must be restored before any constitutional advance could be made. Last month, with the terrorist groups still at large in the hills, Cyprus was granted its virtual independence. But do not expect the Ministers of the Crown to be at all abashed at having done what they said could never be done. To make a meal of their own words is no new experience for our present political leaders. They seem to thrive on the diet.

And Mr. Henry Hopkinson, whose use of the word “never” started it all? Like many another unsuccessful politician before him, he has been rewarded with a peerage. The costly struggle of the British ruling class to keep Cyprus has, at least for Mr. Hopkinson, not been entirely fruitless.

Freedom from the oppressor

The Cypriot workers, who have now exchanged their British musters for a home-grown variety, and the Nyasa people, who arc trying to do the same, might ponder an item of news from Pakistan. The long light against the British with its killings on both sides, its violence, its long jail sentences, its executions — which is only now ending in Cyprus, and seems to be getting under way in Nyasaland, has long been over in Pakistan. A decade and more ago, the British handed over authority to the new Pakistani rulers, and withdrew. The Pakistani workers expected their long struggle to result in a new and better era. How disappointed they must be now..

A letter to the Editor of the Manchester Guardian (March 12th, 1959) runs in part as follows

   "A little less than a month ago you briefly reported a large strike at the largest jute mill centre in the world at Narayanganj, East Pakistan. This involved some twenty thousand workers, and the dispute resulted worn a demand for the continuance of Sunday as a day of rest, instead of staggering holidays throughout the week as ordered by the managements on alleged technical grounds.
   "On the following day there was a partial return to work, and a large cavalcade of officers descended on the mills, led by Major-General Umrao Khan, the East Pakistan Martial Law Administrator.
    "Addressing the workers, he proclaimed that 'the strike being illegal, everyone who had absented himself from work had committed an offence, and was liable to punishment under the Martial Law Regulations. He made it clear that the ringleaders who had been arrested, would not in any circumstances be released and those who continued to play into their hands would not escape punishment.'
    "That this was intelligent anticipation has since become clear by an announcement that Lieutenant-Colonel S. A. Zaman Khan, President of the Special Military Court trying the ten employees of the Adamjee Jute Mills under the Martial Law Regulations, had sentenced them to between five and six years' rigorous imprisonment and flogging for resorting to an illegal strike.

Five years’ jail, and a flogging, for going on strike to keep Sunday as a day off! The British themselves could hardly have been worse than the new rulers of Pakistan. What a lesson this is on the futility of those who mislead the workers into fighting for the removal of one ruling class, and its replacement by another. If only the Nyasa workers could learn this lesson now, instead of when they have firmly saddled a new Nyasa ruling class on their own backs, what years of useless strife could they save themselves. Even if the fight for “independence” is won quickly, the real battle will still have to be faced: the struggle for an end to all ruling classes, the struggle for Socialism.

Alwyn Edgar