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He weighed nearly 300 Ibs.. and supplemented his meager income by boxing professionally for "a pound a round." At 18 he won the heavyweight championship of Rhodesia, lost it two years later (a low blow, claims Royboy) and quit the ring for good. After a two-year courtship in which he scared off all her other suitors with his fists, he finally married Elizabeth Henderson, a waitress in a Bulawayo cafe; today Liz Welensky bans politics from her home in Salisbury, banishes Sir Roy to the rose garden if he wants to talk shop with his political cronies.
The White Elephant. Promoted to engineer by the railroad. Royboy revived the moribund railroaders' trade union and became its leader. He then set out on a self-education program, broke railroad rules on his trips by turning the throttle over to the fireman; by the light of the firebox, he devoured books from Karl Marx to Sherlock Holmes.
Taking the short step from union to politics, Welensky was elected to Northern Rhodesia's territorial Legislative Council in 1938. An early champion of federation. Welensky believed in the gradual growth of "racial partnership" with the Africans. Though such gradualism made sense, it was outpaced by events and emotions. From the start. Sir Roy (he was knighted in 1953) failed to realize that he would have to come to terms with African nationalism. He forced Southern Rhodesia's black leader. Joshua Nkomo. into exile, threw Nyasaland's Dr. Hastings Banda and Northern Rhodesia's Kenneth
Kaunda into jail. (Recalling the tribulations of his people at the U.N. last week.
Kaunda burst into tears.) Nationalist leaders nicknamed Welensky "the Elephant"; in their eyes, he was almost literally a white elephant in modern Africa.
Welensky is assured of winning this week's election, but it will be a meaning less victory. The contest is being fought under existing federal election rules, in which only a small number of blacks have the vote; whites, though increasingly crit ical of Royboy. will overwhelmingly sup port him. In the long run. Welensky can not stop the dissolution of the Federation.
Nyasaland has already said that it will secede, and Northern Rhodesia will al most certainly follow if, as expected un der its new constitution, political control passes to the blacks. White extremists in Southern Rhodesia would rather go it alone than remain in a federation that would ultimately be black-dominated.
Says Nyasaland's Hastings Banda : "We will soon write the Elephant's epitaph."