Chou's African Odyssey

...Bourguiba said he had "told him straight" that "accepting your existence does not mean accepting your ideas...

...In proportion to the aid fortune spent to buy France a place as an African power, the achievement has been minuscule...

...We don't like your way of arranging frontier issues...

...Moreover, it has recently called its ambassadors in Africa to a New Delhi conference to discuss improving India's image: Embassy staffs and publicity are to be increased, and Indian envoys are now pushing for a "non-aligned" Afro-Asian-Latin American conference, one which would exclude Pakistan, China and Cuba...

...In Zanzibar, Premier Abdul Kassin Hanga and John Okello, his lord high executioner, are Muscovites...

...In Cairo, Chou listened to a homily on peaceful coexistence and on the different roads to Socialism— both heresies in Peking — from Gamal Abdel Nasser, the same Nasser who is a friend of Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and a debtor of the Aswan Dam-builder, Nikita Khrushchev...

...In all, 16 African states recognize Taiwan exclusively...

...India has reacted to China's advent on the African cold war scene by launching a technical aid plan under the able Rajeshwar Dayal, Special Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs...

...Many Africans also feel it would be difficult for the UN to absorb such a mammoth state without giving it a permanent seat on the Security Council...

...of these, three opposed Peking at the UN in 1963, one abstained and two favored Communist China's entry...

...But to date only Britain and, in a twilight fashion, Senegal have been allowed to maintain a two-Chinas policy...

...In Bamako, a Soviet trade fair originally scheduled at the same time as Chou's visit was highhandedly postponed to mollify the Chinese envoy...

...In an interview afterward, President Habib Bourguiba called it simple realism to try to get China to the conference table at the UN: "Of course, I have few illusions, but it"s worth trying...

...When de Gaulle sounded out French Africa on recognizing Peking last year, he was rebuffed...

...Despite his support for Algeria in its various conflicts with Morocco and Tunisia, Chou was received in both the latter countries...

...During the 1962 border conflict, nearly all the African countries energetically looked the other way, and could be expected to do the same if China wished to extend its gains...

...Senegal recognized Peking, was threatened by Taiwan with a break in relations and agreed not to exchange ambassadors with the Communists...

...Most African leaders have some Marxism in their intellectual baggage, and most African Marxists already support Peking's approach to Communism rather than Moscow's...

...Similarly, Marxists in Mali, Guinea, Ghana and Nigeria for the most part have swung over to Peking in the past year or so...

...French aid still amounts to nearly $8 a head...

...Neither a radical nor a moderate, Bourguiba sums up the present African view of China fairly well: "I told him what shocked us in his manner, style and conceptions...

...As a result, it recognizes both but has an embassy only in Taiwan...

...French aid has been reduced since 1962, and now will fall further under the accepted proposals of the Jeanneney Report...

...When Khrushchev's son-in-law, Alexis Adzhubei, the editor of Pravda, was in the city last year President Ahmed ben Bella told him: "Peaceful coexistence must not be another obstacle to the liberation of dependent nations...

...Despite Bourguiba's words, China's invasion of India was not a great embarrassment to the Chinese Premier in Africa...

...Don't expect to score much in Africa, I said...

...I said: you come to Africa as the enemy of capitalist states, of the West, of the Socialists, of the neutralists and the non-aligned, of India, of Tito, of Khrushchev, of everybody...

...Of these, 15 opposed Peking for UN membership in 1963 and one abstained...

...In many other states, Chou would have little difficulty getting eastern Russia and Israel "de-Asianized" for conference purposes...

...Russell Warren Howe reports from Africa for the Washington Post...

...Uganda and Tanganyika first invited him, then withdrew their invitations after getting reports of China's involvement in Zanzibar...

...As anticipated, only in Somalia and, to a more subdued degree, in Algeria was he given a hero's welcome...

...He knows Africa's sudden interest in him springs from the Continent's need to re-launch the aid competition of the cold war...

...Chou's visit also came at a time of waning French power in Africa...

...Russian embassy staffs are considered "subversive" because, like most other embassy staffs, they cultivate friendships at all levels...

...In some quarters, it has been suggested that Africa might try to use Communist China's "right" to a veto seat to procure a similar seat for Nigeria...

...Kenya snubbed him because of his political and military support for Somalia...

...The Chinese leader's plea for a "second Bandung Conference," either this year or in 1965 (the 10th anniversary of Bandung), drew equivocal responses...

...ironically, the only serious issue on which they followed his lead was support for Nationalist China...

...There, as he strode off into the wings, Chou could not resist the temptation to declaim that Africa was "ripe for revolution.' This, however, was the only public indication of his opinion of the majority of the governments the Africans have elected...

...But France's intervention in Gabon reflects an attempt to regain influence by a different tactic: It was a reminder that some of the regimes France helped install may need French soldiers to survive...

...Tunisia, in fact, extended diplomatic recognition—one of the last Arab states to get around to this...

...In any case, Peking may find that it can only gain entry to the UN if it accepts the two-Chinas policy where Africa is concerned...

...His argument that wealth and non-wealth, rather than ideology, divide the world—with its corollary that a Communist country fails as soon as it becomes successful—is already unorthodox, but presumably it is also insincere...

...Chou knows he cannot have influence in every country in Africa...

...Clearly, Chou did not expect to make any popular impact in Africa in the way that, say, a visiting American President might...

...The states Chou did not visit, the majority of which do not recognize his country (some do not recognize Formosa either,) followed his itinerary with interest...

...Since France's recognition of Communist China, President de Gaulle has been pressuring French Africa, and particularly Senegal, to force Mao and Chiang's acceptance of a "two Chinas" policy—despite the fact that he himself was taken for a ride on this issue by Mao...

...Britain's Hong Kong is useful to both Chinese exports and Taiwanese espionage, not to mention British business...

...In a sense, of course, such a group has actually never really ceased to exist within the Organization of African Unity...

...and Britain have had the courage to abstain...

...In at least four of the capitals he visited—Algiers, Bamako, Conakry and Mogadishu—Chou found his ambassador more strongly entrenched at court than his Soviet competitor...

...How purist will he be on this point, how flexible can this highly orthodox, ascetic Communist militant become...

...Indeed, in Somalia he had some rather unflattering things to say about Morocco...

...France thus frequently has found itself in the truants' corner, voting with Portugal and South Africa—sometimes when the U.S...

...This would mean giving a large expansionist power more authority than any state in Africa...

...Protecting the peace must not be a pretext for not fighting imperialism...

...In French Africa particularly, many would like to recognize both Chinas to get Peking and Taiwanese aid— and thus also provoke further Russian, Western, and perhaps even some Indian aid...

...He knows African students in Peking have come up against the withering Oriental scorn for foreigners, especially those with less than exquisite manners...

...But Hsinhua agent Tu Pe-lin, the chief brain behind the Zanzibar coup, said in Mogadishu that Chou would go there later...

...What is certain at the moment is that as France's influence in the African areas it once dominated diminishes, a vacuum is developing which radical forces will fight to fill...

...Although, like Chou, ill at ease with Africans, de Gaulle counted on swaying the moderate FrenchAfrican vote at the United Nations...

...but powerful Foreign Minister Abdul Rahman Mohamed, better known as "Babu," backs China, as do most of the new ruling order...

...But to those who followed him Chou appeared ill at ease in Africa, a man still assiduously learning his African ABCs...

...Africans feel something in common with the poor Chinese peasant they have never seen, but not with the well-heeled Chinese storekeeper whom they see quite often...

...As French Africa asserts its independence more and more, de Gaulle is the puffing, slowing frontrunner in a one-legged race...

...Chou also exploited race, but once again with some finesse...

...By and large, Chou was probably successful in his argument that Russia now belongs to the ranks of the rich...

...PICKING UP POINTS Chou's African Odyssey By Russell Warren Howe Dakar Chou En-lai, the Chinese Premier, and his Foreign Minister, Marshal Chen-yi, won a mixed reception during the recent showing of their enigmatic unfamiliar faces in 10 African nations...

...Since then cold war aid issues have forced reconsideration, and it looks very much as though de Gaulle's decision was partly influenced by the withdrawal of French Africa's disapproval...

...At present, nine Black African countries have Communist groups of some note, and these as well as other scattered Negro-African Marxists tend to look to Mao Tsetung rather than Khrushchev for inspiration...

...Chou is already well ensconced at Bamako and Conakry and, most recently, Brazzaville...

...Skillfully, he did not visit Zanzibar to avoid the risk of a global branding as a neo-colonialist...

...Any sentimental link with Communist China, then, is one of poverty, not color...

...This is the General's bitter reward for an aid figure which, at its peak in 1962, reached $250 million— more than the rest of the world's aid to Black Africa...

...Some African states, it appears, may now see Communist China's UN membership as a separate issue from recognition...

...Senegal, even though it recognizes both regimes, opposed Peking...

...One reason some African leaders have preferred Peking's embassies to the Soviet Union's is that the Chinese deal only with the top echelon...

...yet along with Algeria, Ghana and Somalia agreed to kicking India out of the Afro-Asian club by approving a plan to hold a conference without Nehru...

...I will —you won't get far on this Continent...

...Ethiopia, however, always a radical in foreign affairs and an arch-conservative at home, overlooked this and received him...

...Being proWestern, their rise to power would theoretically pose no problems for the West...

...These men want regimes of austerity as well as greater independence...

...Although he visited Rabat, Chou is probably not yet prepared to embrace Marxists and Monarchists alike, as Khrushchev does...

...Many African leaders feel the cold war stiuation should make it possible to get aid from China without actually extending recognition and having to put up with possibly dangerous embassies...

...He knows, too, that Africans are aware that the Chinese, while not white, are not black either...

...It attracted some attention in Guinea and Ghana, a little more in Mali, and went down best in Algeria and Somalia...

...Waiting in the wings behind most power-castes are the African generals who, as majors and colonels, helped the French in their struggles against the Algerians and Vietnamese...

...Others won't tell you straight...

...De Gaulle's recent Asian initiatives— the boomerang in Vietnam, the uncomfortable new start in Peking, the big new French aid project in Iran—indicate that the French president is seeking a role in Asia which has constantly eluded him in Africa...

...In addition, the African Independence party of Senegal is on record condemning bourgeois, peaceful-coexisting Russia and approving China...

...His first objective appears to have been to reestablish the old "Casablanca Bloc," or something like it: a faction of states that believe in some sort of totalitarian government as the fastest way to economic development...

...The overture to independent Africa's first real confrontation with an expansionist power was played pianissimo until Mogadishu, in Somalia, the final stop on the Chinese Communists' tour...

...Preserving this advantage, though, will cost him cash, and this means corruption...

...On African issues, French Africa voted resolutely African...

...China's role in Zanzibar may stimulate a reappraisal of this view...

...Perhaps the most interesting feature of the whole Chinese caravan through Africa was its coincidence, if coincidence it was, with de Gaulle's recognition of Peking...

...Kenya's Home Affairs Minister Oginga Odinga and the Marxist fringe of the governing Kenyan African National Union are openly pro-Peking, and the same is true of many members of the Tanganyikan Federation of Labor...

...Twelve African states (including Tunisia, the newcomer) recognize Peking and support it for UN membership...

...French influence exists in 13 of France's 15 former African colonies and trust territories—38 per cent of the UN African bloc, but only 10 per cent of the Continent's population...

...He strongly opposed, however, another "neutralists' " conference—an idea popular in Africa—because this would bring in Yugoslavia and India and disqualify China...

...Britain, which spends 80 cents a head on aid to English-speaking Africa, has a favorable trade balance with that (much richer) area...

...For two years now, France has had an unfavorable trade balance with French Africa, despite the area's membership in the "franc zone" and the Common Market, and the control of the import markets by French trading companies...

...It was in Algiers that Chou's indirect plea for recognition of the cold war's inevitability was most warmly welcomed...

...In Cairo, Chou asked Nasser if he had ever heard of Bhutan and Sikkim...

...Chou is said to regard the Algerians as "model revolutionaries...

...Six African countries recognize neither China...

...What remains of the Communist guerilla movement in Cameroun relies on China for military aid...

...But behind them, more impatient, are the Continent's frustrated young radicals, who see themselves as the wave of the future —and whom Chou probably sees as future allies...

...You have not chosen an easy policy, I'll say that, I told him...

...The ultimate decision about moderate Africa's recognition of Peking may come through joint consultation in the Organization of African Unity...

...Certainly Chou's tour helped him pick up some points in Africa...