Africa Today

...A recent general election in South Africa has just returned Prime Minister Johannes G. Strijdom's Nationalist government to power for a further five years...

...In the space of a few vears, its 200 million people—notably in Negro Africa, south of the Sahara Desert—have been hit by the concentrated impact of centuries of Western skill, evolution and civilization...

...Political development, too, is impressive...

...On the eve of the recent election for representatives of the country's 3 million whites, the ANC attempted to stage a national stay-at-home strike of non-white workers...

...France, which is attempting to rule French Equatorial and French West Africa as an integral part of the motherland...

...In the face of Soviet notice that Africa is to be a major arena of their future anti-Western penetrating activity, the free world must not falter in its determination and its ability to show steady progress in the solution of Africa's major problems...

...Thus Strijdom won a striking dual victory —first among the white electorate, and second by quelling (for the moment at least) the prime organ of African opposition...

...Although much of colonial Africa is historically linked with Britain, France and Belgium, once these ties are shed with the freeing of erstwhile colonies, there is no guarantee that Africa as a whole will remain oriented toward the West...

...Some of them have accumulated impressive lists of academic degrees from study in American and British universities...

...One outcome of these warnings appears to be the realistic program which has just been announced by the International Cooperation Administration for the West African nation of Ghana...

...Britain has already freed Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast...

...All this is bringing pressure to bear on other African territories— even the Belgian Congo...

...Meanwhile, if there is an over riding movement toward self-government in colonial Africa, where black Africans are only recently beginning to shed their primitive tradition, here in the Union of South Africa, where the African has been longest in contact with the white man, there appears little prospect of independence...

...Meanwhile, South Africa's northern neighbor, the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, has rejected the lead of the former Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, R. S. Garfield Todd, as being too liberal on the issue of African advancement...

...Prime Minister Nkrumah of Ghana has indicated to date that he hopes to persuade other emerging African states to follow his policy of "non-alignment...

...Recently, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Joseph Palmer told the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "The risks of inadequate action have never been so alarming as now...

...Some 30 ICA experts will speed Ghana's agricultural development in an initial five-year project...

...In Ghana, Africans are learning to sail sea-going cargo ships, fly airplanes, and take over the telegraph department, the police force, and the army...

...Belgium, which controls the rich Congo...

...Soon to follow will be Nigeria and then Uganda...

...In Angola and Nigeria, they are helping man the rigs drawing oil from beneath Africa's sun-baked crust...

...The massive continent is discovering new, modern resources, capacities and concepts — and inevitably, too, the new challenges and problems which attend their development...

...Although South Africa's 9 million Africans have virtually no voice in the all-white parliament, they have nevertheless made themselves heard through their African National Congress...

...However, whether the African's rapid development is or is not proceeding at the pace the white man thinks best, or along the lines the white man would prefer, there is about the African's emergence an air of inevitability which few can challenge...

...In the past, the Belgians have offered virtually unlimited economic opportunity to many Congolese Africans but have soft-pedaled the question of political advancement...

...Even 50 years ago, the wheel was unknown in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa...

...All this, coupled with stepped-up African study programs behind the Iron Curtain, appears to support the view that the Communists now are presenting a distinct challenge in Africa...

...Soviet diplomats have been wooing both the Sudan and Ghana —• apparently without much success to date...

...A factor favorable to the West, however, is the attachment which numbers of these intellectuals have to countries such as the United States and Britain through study in their universities...

...It is, in fact, an uncommitted continent...

...One of them, Kwame Nkrumah, sits in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, in West Africa, as the first African Prime Minister in the British Commonwealth...

...But, although much of black Africa still is subject to colonial rule, there is an impressive movement toward independence...

...Meanwhile, the Communists have gained a foothold through membership in the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee set up in Cairo by last year's Afro-Asian conference there...

...One of Africa's major drawbacks is the lack of an African middle class of any size...

...Meanwhile, Africans dominate the local organs of government in such territories as Nigeria...

...and Italy, which still has a nominal stake in the United Nations trust territory of Italian Somaliland, due for independence in 1960...

...Now, in the Belgian Congo, Africans are working in the uranium plants which help keep America's atomic program rolling...

...The Soviet Union recently made a determined bid to win a seat on the new United Nations Economic Commission for Africa...

...With no money, press or trade unions, and in the face of overwhelming force mobilized by the Government, the strike failed...

...Africans have vastly increased their representation in the Legislative Council of Kenya —no mean achievement against a background of the not-so-distant Mau Mau rebellion which spurred considerable anti-African feeling among Kenya's white settlers...

...Slick Communist propaganda—classical Russian literature, sprinkled with political pamphlets explaining the Soviet stand in Hungary and on nuclear warfare —has been making its appearance in bookshops in Nigeria...

...After his 1957 African tour, Vice President Richard Nixon told President Eisenhower that the United States must give "higher priority" to its relations with Africa...

...Eventually, the United Nations trust territory of Tanganyika will follow suit, as must the British East African colony of Kenya...

...This is perhaps largely due to the leadership of a young Kenya Luo tribesman and former trade union organizer, Tom Mboya, who enjoys considerable sympathy in certain organized labor circles in the United States...

...Lately, however, there are signs that the ever-realistic Belgians are preparing to make concessions in the political sphere...

...From Kenya, African athletes go to compete in the Olympic Games...

...It is still uncertain whether Rhodesia's white settlers, in a critical general election due early in June, will hold to their goal of racial partnership or join with South Africa in a reactionary stand against the steady march of African independence from the north...

...There are indications that the United States is also adopting a more active role...

...Thus, Africans reared in primitive mud-and-dung huts, clustered deep in the shimmering African bush, are today becoming doctors of divinity and medicine, politicians, artists, engineers, accomplished lawyers, even bewigged and red-robed judges...

...The latest development is Moscow Radio's announcement that it is beaming a new daily radio program at Africa in English and French, soon to be followed by broadcasts in African languages...

...In Tanganyika, an African chief runs his coffee estate from a modern office via a battery of stenographers, recording machines and an inter-office telephone communication system...

...Thus, the large mass of the native African people—still poor and underprivileged by most Western standards—are influenced by an elite group of African intellectuals exercising power out of all proportion to their numbers...

...Most of sub-Saharan Africa is still controlled by colonial powers such as Britain, which has interests in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tangan-lika and the Central African Federation (Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) ; Portugal, which governs Angola and Mozambique...