in London, and having secured the local services of an agent in South Africa, applying for such or such a specific area of "unalienated" land in Southern Rhodesia. If I am willing to pay the Company's price I can purchase this area, and by making the necessary local arrangements in Africa for the collection of my rent, I can constrain every male native living upon my distant property to hand over annually to my agent the sum of £1. In effect, I buy the human animal as well as the land upon which he dwells, and upon which his ancestors may have dwelt for generations before him.
The net position is this: The native population of Southern Rhodesia possesses to-day no rights in land or water. It is allowed to continue to live upon the land on sufferance and under certain conditions, according to the categories into which the land has been divided. The natives have no secure titles anywhere, not even in the Reserves, which are always liable to be cut up and shifted, and from which they can always be evicted upon "good cause" being shown; the "good cause" being the Company's good pleasure. A "Reserve Commission" was appointed in 1917. This is a supposedly impartial body. Its Chairman figured among the beneficiaries of the "Loot" agreement. Its activities, so far, appear to have resulted in enormously diminishing the Reserves. The attitude of the Company towards the native population living on the "unalienated" lands outside the Reserves, and the position of that population, are tersely summarised in the following extract from one of the Company's reports:
We see no objection to the present system of allowing natives to occupy the unalienated land of the company and pay rent. The occupation is merely a passing phase; the land is being rapidly acquired by settlers, with whom the natives must enter into fresh agreements or leave.
There appears to be no attempt on anyone's part to deny the bed-rock fact that these 700,000 natives have been turned from owners of land into precarious tenants. The defence, such as it is, is merely concerned with points of detail. It is claimed that the Rhodesian Order in Council contains safeguards ensuring a sufficiency of land for the native population, and providing that no evictions shall occur of natives to whom land has been "assigned"
