K.C., to represent the rights of the native population. Under the judgment the Company lost its claim to ownership of the 73 million acres of "unalienated" land, which was declared to be vested in the British Crown as trustee for the native population, together with its "commercial" claim to the Reserves.
So far so good. But is that judgment to govern policy? And how does the British Crown propose to interpret its trusteeship? Nothing appears to have been changed in the actual position of the natives, which is typically portrayed in a petition recently presented to King George by the family of Lobengula, in the course of which the petitioners say:
The members of the late King (Lobengula's) family, your petitioners, and several members of the tribe are now scattered about on farms so parcelled out to white settlers, and are practically created a nomadic people living in this scattered condition, under a veiled form of slavery, they being not allowed individually to cross from one farm to another, or from place to place except under a system of permit or pass and are practically forced to do labour on these private farms as a condition of their occupying land in Matabeleland.
•••••••
No such abominable scandal as this story reveals has stained British Colonial records since Burke thundered against the misfeasance of the East India Company. Englishmen have reason to be proud of much that has been done in many parts of Africa by their countrymen in the last quarter of a century. In Nigeria and on the Gold Coast, especially, British Administration has earned, and deserved, great praise. But the perpetuation of the Rhodesian outrage is an intolerable national disgrace.
The very least that can be clone in extenuation of the wrongs inflicted upon the natives of Southern Rhodesia is to confer upon the native population living in the Reserves a secure title; to make the Reserves inalienable save for public works of indispensable utility, and then only on the same conditions as those which apply to lands in white occupation; to make the "unalienated" land outside the Reserves equally inalienable wherever native communities are in occupation—such occupation to embrace villages, cultivated fields, grazing lands and water; and to give to those native communities an equally secure title.
