Blundering on

At no time during the first seven years of federation did its political leaders appear even to realize privately the vital necessity of obtaining African support for it. To judge from their public utterances they appeared to live in a dream world marred only by a ‘handful of agitators’, manipulated by some vague subversive, if not communist, elements in Britain, and also by some colonial civil servants in the north who had the temerity to stand up for their own territories. The Federal Government therefore pursued its course of raising matters that should have been left alone, of not raising those that should have been raised, and of attempting to gain more and more power to itself in the hope of becoming so strong that nothing that the people which it governed could do need worry it. Lord Malvern made no attempt to disguise this last objective in his speech in the debate on Higher Status for the Federation in August, 1956, after he had been to London on this issue and returned empty-handed.