2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 147the Times as the ‘East African dinner’. At the dinner, Amery, after hav-
ing ‘proposed the toast “East Africa,”’ observed that concern had arisen
that ‘our tenure’ in Tanganyika was ‘temporary and uncertain.’ He
stated that this was a ‘mistaken notion’ which had arisen because of ‘a
misunderstanding of what was meant by the term “Mandate.”’ To cheers
from the audience he declared that Britain ‘held Tanganyika under our
obligations to the League of Nations, but we held it in our own right
under the Treaty of Versailles’; thus, he added, the ‘foundations of the
East Africa of the future were as sure and as permanent in Tanganyika as
they were in any other East African territory’.^207 The claim that Britain
held Tanganyika in its own right, a claim which, it should be noted, was
vulnerable to the objection of the United States that the right to dis-
pose of Germany’s former colonies was vested in the Principal Allied and
Associated Powers, and the claim that British tenure in Tanganyika was
in no sense ‘a lease’ from the League had the following basis according
to Amery: ‘We are in Tanganyika by plain right of conquest and formal
surrender, and shall remain there until someone stronger than ourselves
takes it from us.’^208
The Reichstag’s Inter-Party Colonial Association and Schnee immedi-
ately issued objections to the views expressed by Amery at the dinner at
the Savoy, charging that Amery was ‘placing British tenure before British
duties to the League’ and pointing to ‘the recognition at Locarno of
Germany’s mandatory eligibility, [thereby] indicating the importance to
Germany of the new status.’^209 Despite the indignation Amery’s state-
ments aroused in certain quarters, in the view of the Times, the German
colonial campaign was not of real significance and was largely driven
by Schnee who had been the prime mover behind the formation of the
Inter-Party Colonial Association. Most Germans at the time, while keen
to be free of the taint of Kolonialschuldlüge, were not so anxious for
(^207) ‘A United East Africa: Mr. Amery on Recent Progress,’ Times, June 12, 1926. See
also Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 66.
(^208) L. S. Amery, The Forward View (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935), 250. The United
States ‘claims and emphasizes an interest in the disposition of all mandates on the ground
that by the peace settlement title to them was vested in the Principal Allied and Associated
Powers of which it was one.’ Malcolm W. Davis, ‘Peaceful Change: An Analysis of Some
Current Proposals,’ Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the Drift Towards War
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 157.
(^209) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 66.