Capricorn. (Books).

DAVID STIRLING'S SECOND AFRICAN CAMPAIGN

BY RICHARD HUGHES 

[pounds sterling] 24.50 The Radcliffe Press

ISBN 1-86064-919-X

David Stirling is said to have founded the Capricorn Africa Society in 1949, three years after his arrival in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. It comprised of a small number of individuals who believed that the millions of Africans, tens of thousands of Asians and thousands of Europeans who lived in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and the DRC, could together develop a system of government that would allow them to live together and prosper in Africa.

In some ways you could describe this philosophy 'a third way'. While it stemmed from Stirling's original vision, worthy of Cecil Rhodes himself, that the British colonies of East and Central Africa might form a single economic union, this original vision gradually evolved to become something of an alternative to the attitudes of the diehard racist element of European settlers on the one hand, and the African nationalist movement on the other.

This book is the story of the small band of idealists who formed the Capricorn Africa Society. What they sought to define and implement was a formula that, without racial discrimination, would allow all the peoples of the countries of East and Central Africa to share a common future and prosperity.

The Society's high-point was a convention in Salima in 1956, a small village in present day Malawi on the western shore of Lake Nyasa. It attracted around 250 participants - men and women, black, white and brown. As one of the white delegates put it, "to someone like me who had spent 20 years in the carefully segregated world of Africa, the spectacle was almost incredible. I was so conditioned to white exclusiveness that the situation seemed at first entirely incongruous, as if certain inviolable rules were being broken..."

DIFFERENT RACES, ONE DESTINY

One of Capricorn's Central Africa executive committee, Herbert Chitepo, could not attend in person but his speech was read for him. It reflected a common concern, that time was running out, and running Out fast. Prophetically, he stated..." if we cannot succeed together, Africans will be driven to adopt open racialist nationalism...for the first time in the history of the three races in Africa, members of each race have come together to declare to the world the terms of their co-existence and to pledge themselves to preserve those terms to eternity".

The intention of the Salima convention was to draw up a formal statement of the Society's principals, which the Society termed its Contract. After three days, the Contract was finalised and signed. Outlawing racial discrimination, it set out detailed proposals for land reform, education, immigration and employment, including the constitutional cornerstone - a common voter's role with qualified multiple voting.

If Salima was the Capricorn Society's high-point, it did not take long for the participant's euphoria to dissipate. Indeed Hughes makes the point that the resounding success of the conference obscured one vital question. Now that the Contract was signed, what were they to do with it?

In fact, the Contract's proposals were doomed. They were swept away by white-settler opposition and the rising tide of African nationalism. For the former, the common voters' roll was absolutely unacceptable - it simply meant that an African government was inevitable. For the later it was too little too late. Similarly, the majority of the Asian community seemed opposed to the Contract, fearing that it would provide an opening for African nationalist hegemony. After a decade of unremitting effort, David Stirling resigned as president of Capricorn and within a few years the society closed down in Africa.

Yet the Capricorn idealism did and does live on. After its ambitions failed in Africa some of Capricorn's members in London raised funding to form the Zebra Trust, later to become the Zebra Housing Association, to provide affordable housing for African students, particularly those with families, who came to Britain to study.