The Black Majority

In the fertile and congenial parts of Africa where Europeans have established colonies and built cities, the news from Algeria was a warning of what it might be like in their own countries if conditions worsened. For the Algerian parallel was often present--a minority of white settlers, economically dominant but numerically outnumbered, who found themselves out of tune with a distant capital (London or Paris) which recognizes that the days of old-style colonialism are over. Nobody mentioned Algeria around the table under the glittering chandelier of London's Lancaster House last week, as the Kenya Constitutional Conference entered its second week. But in a way, the 48 Africans, Asians, Arabs and Europeans had been called into session by Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod to prevent any Algerias in Kenya.

While the delegates engulfed each other with long speeches, U.S. Lawyer Thurgood Marshall was hard at work behind the scenes. On leave from the N.A.A.C.P. as special adviser to the 14 elected African members of the conference, Marshall had taken on the task of drafting constitutional safeguards that will convince Kenya's 270,000 Asians, Arabs and Europeans that they will not lose their rights when the country passes into the control of its 6,000,000 Africans.

Arming himself with "almost anything I can get my hands on," Marshall sat in his cheerless Piccadilly Hotel room poring over the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the constitutions of Nigeria, Uganda and Tanganyika. Although he has appeared often and successfully to argue Negro causes before the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall is faced with one difficulty: he has had no experience of British law. His solution: to draft the constitution in U.S. legal terms and then consult the Colonial Office, which will "translate" it into the proper British terminology.

One of the provisions Marshall will stress is an independent judiciary; knowing that there are no more than five qualified Negro lawyers in Kenya, he suggests that for an unspecified transitional period the Kenya Ministry of Justice shall be run by an appointee of the Colonial Office. To prevent the new constitution from being arbitrarily and easily amended by an African parliamentary majority, he will require each amendment to gain a three-fourths majority in a nationwide referendum. Safeguarding a white minority is certainly a new experience to the U.S.'s No. 1 Negro courtroom lawyer, but Marshall says drily that he hopes to devise a constitution that will give the individual European and Asian in Kenya at least "the same rights as a Negro has in Indiana." And he adds: "After this experience, I'm going to understand our own problem in the U.S. a damn sight better than before."

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