The Problem of White Settlement
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 1961
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
African affairs writer and lecturer Margery Perham discusses the effects of colonialism in tropical Africa. In 1939 she became the first female fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University before being appointed as Director of the Oxford Institute of Colonial Studies in 1945. In her Reith series entitled 'The Colonial Reckoning', she highlights problems of colonial rule.
In this lecture entitled 'The Problem of White Settlement', she considers the problem of the European colonists, and the delicate question of race relations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.7 | This lecture in the series The Colonial Reckoning, given by Dame Marjorie Perram, |
| 0:10.0 | was originally broadcast in 1961. |
| 0:14.2 | The Colonial Reckoning. |
| 0:17.1 | The BBC presents the fourth of six wreath lectures, |
| 0:24.9 | given by Marjorie Perram, fellow of Nuffield College Oxford. |
| 0:30.1 | Her subject in today's lecture, the problem of white settlement. |
| 0:38.9 | I must confess that I found it rather difficult to keep back this question of white settlement for this talk. |
| 0:44.3 | Obviously much that I've been saying about African nationalism and British policy applies also to the settled areas of British Africa, but with one fundamental difference. |
| 0:51.3 | After all, a British government can just pack up and go when the moment for abdication arrives. |
| 0:57.0 | But where you've got a hard stratification with a black majority over a white minority, |
| 1:03.0 | and then the black layer begins to heave into political assertion, |
| 1:07.0 | clearly the whole structure threatens to disrupt. |
| 1:14.1 | Consider the map and the areas of conflict in Africa. |
| 1:15.8 | Algeria. |
| 1:19.7 | A million settlers, six years of war. |
| 1:20.7 | The cost? |
| 1:25.7 | Who knows, perhaps 200,000 lives so far. |
| 1:34.3 | Angola, thousands killed, either by African massacre or by Portuguese repression. The Congo, a chaos from which thousands of Belgian settlers have fled. |
| 1:40.3 | Kenya and Central Africa? |
| 1:43.3 | Well, they now face Britain with perhaps her gravest remaining problems. |
| 1:49.3 | It is estimated that Africa's total population is about 230 millions, only estimated. |
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