New Left Review I/2, March-April 1960

J. E. Walker

Mr. Brock’s Nyasaland

Dawn in Nyasaland. Guy Clutton-Brock. Hodder & Stoughton. 3/6.

the official policy in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is that of ‘Partnership’. Apart from the fact that this is supposed to be an entirely different concept to the South African policy of apartheid, partnership has never been officially defined. As a consequence individuals are free to define the term almost as they please. Guy Clutton-Brock’s definition obviously deals with people, not abstractions; it is not partnership between Africans as a group and Europeans as a group which he supports, but partnership between individuals who happen to be Africans, Europeans, or Asians. The fact that there is little need for the term ‘partnership’ as a political concept if this definition is used, accounts for Mr. Clutton-Brock’s statement that the “alternatives are integration in a non-racial society or separation in a race conscious society. There is no middle way which has yet been tried or which appears practicable”. The whole purpose of his book is to express opposition to separation, under whatever guise it masquerades, and to express “a belief in ‘the common man’—that he exists, that he is more important than anything else on earth, that he is in fact the point of the whole Creation”.

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