AFRICAN PROBLEM

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 137, 7 December 1938, Page 12

AFRICAN PROBLEM

"BLEDISLOE COMMISSION"

REPORT MAY BE DELAYED

(By Air Mail, from "The Post's'- London Representative.) LONDON. November 7. "Clamour about the German colonial demand has whetted interest in the report of the Bledisloe Commission, members of which' spent four months in Africa inquiring into the possibility of closer constitutional union between the two Rhodesias and the Nyasaland Protectorate," says the "Sunday Times." "But that very fact is likely to delay presentation of the report. Tanganyika, in British hands, is not greatlyconcerned with the future of the Rhodesias; its affinities are more with Kenya and Uganda. But even the possibility of its return to Germany is bouud to influence consideration of many questions within the Commission's purview. Very serious problems of defence arise, and much which might have seemed simple when the Commission left Africa—before the European crisis had reached its worst phases—is more or less in the meltingpot now.

"In the circumstances 1 hazard the guess that it may well be another three months before the report sees daylight. This will probably disappoint the white settlers, who have been increasingly restive on the point in recent years, but the issues to be faced and decided now are of wider and deeper import than merely the degree oi' self-government which they are to exercise."