serf. When the Indians asked rights, the whites replied that
this would injure the rights of the natives. Immediately the natives began to awake. Few of them were educated but they began to form societies and formulate grievances. A black political consciousness arose for the first time in Kenya. Immediately the Indians made a bid for the support of this new force and asked rights and privileges for all British subjects—white, brown and black. As the Indian pressed his case, white South Africa rose in alarm. If the Indian became a recognized man, landholder and voter in Kenya, what of Natal?
The British Government speculated and procrastinated and then announced its decision: East Africa was primarily a trusteeship” for the Africans and not for the Indians. The Indians, then, must be satisfied with limited industrial and political rights, while for the black native—the white Englishman spoke! A conservative Indian leader, speaking in England after this decision, said that if the Indian problem in South Africa were allowed to fester much longer it would pass beyond the bounds of domestic issue and would become a question of foreign policy upon which the unity of the Empire might founder irretrievably. The Empire could never keep its colored races within it by force, he said, but only by preserving and safeguarding their sentiments.
Perhaps this shrewd Kenya decision was too shrewd. It preserved white control of Kenya but it said in effect: “Africa for the Africans!” What then about Uganda and the Sudan, where a black leadership exists under ancient forms; and, above all, what about the educated black leadership in the West Indies and West Africa? Why should black West Africa with its industrial triumphs like Nigeria be content forever with a Crown Government, if Africa is for the Africans?
The result has been a yielding by England to the darker world—not a yielding of much, but yielding. India is to have a revision of the impossible "diarachy”; all West Africa is to have a small elective element in its governing councils; and even the far West Indies have been visited by a colonial undersecretary and parliamentary committee, the first of its kind in
