The Munt Lover

If there is one thing a white settler in British Africa despises more than an "insolent" black, it is a troublesome member of the British Labor Party. When red-haired Barbara Castle, a member of the British House of Commons, had the presumption to dine with a black M.P. in Salisbury's topflight Meikle's Hotel, Southern Rhodesians were scandalized at her bringing along a "munt" (from a Bantu word for man, used by Rhodesians as a rough equivalent of the U.S.'s "nigger"). Last week Southern Rhodesia was hard at it again with Labor, this time over a tall, aggressive, 33-year-old M.P. from England named John Thomson Stonehouse.

The son of a trade unionist and the Socialist lady sheriff of Southampton, Stonehouse sat at the feet of Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, is a great man for causes. No sooner had he landed in Salisbury on a five-week tour of Africa than the whites were up in arms.

At the invitation of the African National Congress, he gave a speech to 1,500 blacks. All things considered, it was moderate enough: the British Labor Party, he said,' was absolutely against an independent federation that would be run for and by the whites, but "I am speaking for the whole Labor movement when I tell you to be patient. I ask you particularly not to use violence. I ask you to have pride in your country. Hold your heads high and behave as though this country belonged to you. Do not do anything of which you might be ashamed."

Every daily and Sunday newspaper in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is in the hands of a monopoly--the Argus South African Newspapers Ltd.--which has no love for visiting Labor politicians. Headlined the Sunday Mail: M.P. TELLS AFRICANS "WE ARE WITH YOU!" There followed the kind of story which stirs up indignant letters from settlers. To make matters worse, Stonehouse invited three Africans to dine with him in the very dining room that Barbara Castle had made memorable. Finally, one midnight, an immigration officer got Stonehouse out of bed to warn him that he could be declared a "prohibited immigrant." Next morning, after a "token struggle," Stonehouse found himself on a plane bound for Tanganyika.

In London, angry Laborites tried to censure the Macmillan government for allowing a British protectorate to manhandle one of their own. Never before had such a thing happened to a British M.P. After a white-lipped debate, Labor lost, 237 to 293, partly because the Speaker ruled that an M.P. does not carry parliamentary privilege about with him, as a Foreign Office man does his diplomatic immunity. But if Stonehouse himself was not particularly popular on either side of the House, the temper of the mother of parliaments showed during the debate that it was very worried about the direction one of its children, the Central Africa Federation, is taking.

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