Northern Rhodesia: The Election that Nobody Won

In the Northern Rhodesia railhead of Broken Hill, where he once stoked coal as a locomotive fireman, Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the crumbling Central African Federation, issued a dire warning: "If the wrong people are elected, we will regret it forever and a day."

The wrong people to "Royboy" are the blacks who want to break up his federation, a shaky, nine-year-old union of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Most of its 8,300,000 blacks regard it as a colonial instrument designed to perpetuate rule by 305,000 whites. Nyasaland, already...