In East Africa

Stretching back into Africa from Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean are four British areas* which Premier James Barry Munnik Hertzog of the Union of South Africa has long urged should achieve unity as the Federation of East Africa.

Last week a conference of the executives of British non-self-governing areas convened in London to discuss this and other projects. Most of those present were, of course, Governors of Crown Colonies. To them spoke their Chief, Right Honorable Leopold Charles Maurice Stennet Amery, His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Secretary Amery, brusque, direct, arch-imperialist, uttered on this occasion bland words: "I deal in this office with 36 different governments, each entirely separate from the rest, each administratively, financially and legislatively self-contained. The whole system with its haphazard complexity and lack of coordination of any structural basis would not for a moment, I fancy, be tolerated by any of our more logical neighbors across the Channel. For all that I believe our system, or lack of system, has certain great advantages. It would be a profound mistake to scrap the essentially local and individual basis of our system in favor of some uniform logical scheme."

He then went on to say that at present the chief new imperial activity contemplated by His Majesty's Government among the non-self-governing areas is to establish a technical and scientific bureau whose experts will be at the disposal of business enterprises in all lands administered from the Colonial office.

The Conference later adjourned into committees where such contentious matters as the proposed new Federation of East Africa will be thrashed out behind closed doors.

* Tanganyika, held as a Mandate from the League of Nations; Uganda, a protectorate ; and the Crown Colonies, Kenya and Northern Rhodesia.