"I have swum bare-arsed in the Maka-busi River with many piccanins in my poorer days," Sir Roy Welensky once roared on television. He obviously thought his statement was enough to disprove the charge that he is antiblack. But as Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, jumbo-sized (6 ft. 2 in., 282 Ibs.) Roy Welensky stands as the biggest and most powerful symbol of white supremacy in the largest and richest white colonial bastion still left in Africa.
The Federation (Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) has been kept by Britain's steadying influence from falling into the turmoil of the Congo, and its native population has not been so riven by tribal savagery as Kenya's. But the 8,300,000 blacks resent being dominated by 305,000 whites, and under the proposed new British constitution for Northern Rhodesia, the largely disenfranchised blacks would have a chance to win control —and to break up the Federation. That is what Welensky is trying to ward off; in federal parliamentary elections this week, he is seeking a new white, pro-Federation mandate from all three territories. Says he: "If the Federation were to go under, you would see the lights go out in this part of Africa."
False Teeth. On the hustings. Sir Roy ("Royboy" to his jovial white audiences) is a shouting, sweating but engaging demagogue, his inevitable red suspenders maintaining a tenuous hold on his tentlike trousers. When his speech grows indistinct, he merrily apologizes for his badly fitting false teeth. He accuses Britain of "pandering to pan-Africanism." has called London's Lancaster House, where the Rhodesian constitutional conferences took place, "that place of infamy."
"The British government has sat on the fence for so long. I'm surprised it hasn't been cut in two." he sneered. He also lashed out at Adlai Stevenson, who had said that the white settlers added "an extra edge of trouble and bitterness" to the African scene. Replied Sir Roy: it is in fact the "white Africans who have brought skill, progress, and light to Africa." while such African-controlled countries as Guinea and Ghana are "dictatorships."
The Champ. Royboy's loud and stubborn convictions were shaped in a career that is typical of yesterday's Africa. He was born in 1907 in a seedy flophouse in Salisbury. Southern Rhodesia, run by his parents. Michael and Leah Welensky. A huge, hard-drinking Jewish immigrant from Russian Poland. Michael Welensky cut off his trigger finger to avoid conscription by the Czar's army, sought his fortune as a fur trader in the U.S. before settling in Salisbury after the diamond rush. Son Roy (his real first name is Raphael) quit school at 14; after a series of odd jobs ranging from baker to bartender, he became a railroad fireman.