Storm Warnings in Capricorn Africa

...The moderate leaders of these countries, Jomo Kenyatta and Haile Selassie, respectively, are over 80, and their deaths will bring difficult, perhaps violent, succession struggles...

...Upon closing the border in January, Smith offered to continue carrying Zambian copper on Rhodesian Railways, which badly needs the revenue...

...By bringing black puppets into the government, they hope to weaken nationalist opposition and reduce the cost of counterin-surgency (at present it consumes over 50 per cent of Portugal's colonial budget...

...In quadrupling Zambian trade through Dar...

...Parallel to it...

...In the meantime, if Zambia were attacked, the base could be used by any African ally...

...It used to be a refueling stop for ships plying the Suez Canal, but since the waterway was closed, shipping traffic has fallen by 80 per cent, and the city now has an unemployment rate of over 30 per cent...

...a Western (mostly American) funded blacktop highway is in service, and another all-weather road will soon join Botswana to Zambia's rail system...

...Alarmed by a mounting number of Portuguese military setbacks, the South African and Rhodesian general staffs met not long ago to discuss the deteriorating situation...

...Indeed, the Rhodesia Herald, Salisbury's major newspaper, says Russell Warren Howe, Africa bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun, is spending the year at the Wood-row Wilson International Center...

...Kaunda cannot afford to take the brakes off his guerrilla guests before completion of the Lusaka-Dar-es-Salaam rail line that China is building...

...Ethiopia's tiny neighbor, the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, is another potential trouble spot...

...An outbreak of full-scale warfare remains unlikely in the immediate future, but there are storms or storm warnings throughout Capricorn Africa today: escalating guerrilla activity in several white-ruled nations, black labor unrest in South Africa, and incipient succession crises in Ethiopia and Kenya...

...A British commission traveled around the country last year, testing popular reaction to an Anglo-Rho-desian draft agreement that would have delayed representative government indefinitely...

...Prime Minister Ian Smith tried to reopen the frontier, but by then Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda had decided to keep it closed...

...Tanks, gunships and French legionnaires are on hand to repress the inhabitants' bid to join independent Somalia, the ancestral home of the Issas...

...Kenya and Ethiopia bear watching for different reasons...

...In addition, their Chinese instructors in neighboring Tanzania are anxious to get thousands of "graduates" out of the quarrelsome boredom of the training camps, if only for a brief baptism of fire...

...Hopes of finishing it earlier dimmed when the first British contractor went bankrupt this year...

...Kaunda, however, opted to reroute his trade through Tanzania, Angola and Zaire...

...A crisis in Kenya or Ethiopia would give comfort to the beleaguered white South, but would not significantly relieve the guerrilla pressure on the settler regimes...

...The American Ambassador to Ethiopia, E. Ross Adair, previously a Republican Congressman from Indiana, noted during a recent trip to Washington that factional strife could start when an anticipated 300,000 peasants come to the 700,000-population capital for the Emperor's funeral...

...The route runs through Mozambique's Tete district, where the strategic Cabora Bassa Dam (bigger than Aswan) is being built...

...President Nixon may get a first-hand view of the tense situation if his feelers for an invitation to address the OAU's lOth-anniversary "summit" at Addis Ababa in May bear fruit...

...State Department official, "The man of the future in South Africa isn't Premier Balthazar Vorster any more, it's Gatsha Buthelezi," leader of the Kwazulu bantustan...

...Tanzania has had to accept import shortages in its own stores, but the pressure on Dar harbor will be relieved when three new berths financed by the World Bank are finished this year...

...By expelling Soma-lis, France had made the colony's 100,000 population predominantly Ethiopian, and under an old treaty Selassie has first claim on the territory if the French depart...

...Some 16,000 city employees participated, crippling municipal services and forcing residents to cart away their own garbage...

...South African freight planes have been overflying Rhodesia to deliver machinery and spare parts to the Zambian copperbelt...

...Meanwhile, South Africa has experienced its most severe black strike in decades...

...Angered by raiding bands of black "freedom fighters," Rhodesia's rebel settler regime closed its rugged 400-mile border with Zambia last January and called up white reservists to counter increased insurgency in the country's north and east...

...Zambia still relies heavily on the Kariba power station, located just inside Rhodesia...

...the Smith government has "lost control of the security situation...

...According to a U.S...

...Dares-Salaam...

...the new Malagasy regime, for example, paid nine years' outstanding dues...

...They will be capable of handling all of Zambia's copper exports, and vegetable oil storage tanks for Zambia are also under construction...

...The 6.000-man liberation force controls rural areas in four huge districts of the Portuguese colony, and it has made Rhodesia's highway link to the coast unsafe for civilian traffic...

...Authorities feared the stoppage might spread to the economically vital minefields, where white workers average $475 a month as opposed to $30 for blacks...

...When Smith's son was arrested for smuggling pot from Mozambique in 1971, he and his young companions said they chose the mine-strewn road for kicks...

...Resistance fighting erupted in the Zambezi Valley west of Lake Kariba the following year and then switched to a less barren district east of the man-made lake...

...Over the past two years the insurgency has actually been heaviest along the Mozambican border, where Zimbabweans—as black Rho-desians call themselves—have coordinated their activities with the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRE-LIMO...

...The 500 miles of track laid so far is currently carrying copper, and the Zambian stretch should be done early next year...

...Besides recording almost universal rejection of the accord, this televised survey gave further impetus to the resistance movement...

...He also closed all telephone, telegraph and telex links with the white settler nations...

...That was the first time the government resorted to collective punishment in its step-ped-up campaign against infiltrators...

...In February, under pressure from South Africa, which has loaned about 8,000 troops and police to his government...

...During President Georges Pompidou's pre-French election visit, colonial authorities imposed stringent security measures to prevent a recurrence of the riots that greeted General Charles de Gaulle in 1966...

...Last February 50,000 Zulu tribesmen walked off their underpaid jobs in Durban, apparently unintimidated by police baton and tear-gas charges...

...Whatever the case, rifts are appearing in the white redoubt...

...The key remaining problem is hydroelectric power...

...If guerrilla activity declines, Lisbon promises to divert more funds to new schools and other development projects...

...Alternatively, a strike from the South might bring the Communist countries to the rescue, for Yugoslavia is providing the training officers at Mumbwa...

...The rebels may be prepared for a sustained drive in Rhodesia, but the springboard countries—Zambia and Botswana—are not: Both must first free themselves from dependence on transport through the hostile South...

...The nation is nearly self-sufficient in coal but, like Zaire, has had to shop around in search of replacements for Rhodesian coke...

...The intensified guerrilla operations are partly attributable to increased financial aid from the Organization of African Unity...

...Portugal, similarly, has been attempting to increase trade with the "enemy...

...Although the workers returned to their jobs within a week, the worst may be yet to come...

...Though southern Africa's liberal press claims the showdown between blacks and whites has already started, observers close to the insurgents are more cautious...

...Traditionally the most flexible of southern Africa's redneck rulers, the administrators of Mozambique and Angola held multiracial elections last month...

...the other half was divided between Tanzania and Angola...

...Should the treaty ever be invoked, it could lead to another Ethiopia-Somalia war...

...Zambia is currently using three Tanzanian ports—Tanga...

...To that end, they may well try to kill or topple Kaunda, who is in political trouble at home for introducing a one-party constitution...

...To curb the flow of unemployable migrants from the countryside, Djibouti is surrounded by a minefield and an electrified barbed-wire fence...

...Kariba North," on the Zambian side of the same dam, is scheduled to become operative in 1975...

...This will enable Botswana to trade at least partly through Zambia and Tanzania, relieving its dependence on South Africa...

...A smaller dam at Kafue, originally scheduled to go into operation next year, is being rushed for December completion...

...South African ships are allowed to unload, too, so lone as the goods are destined for Zambia...

...Another air field is nearing completion at Mbara (formerly Abercorn...

...Nevertheless...

...Contributions to the OAU itself rose by 50 per cent last year, with many countries beginning to make up arrears...

...The rebels are under pressure to show a return on this investment...

...The cry to raise wages is not peculiar to Durban," proclaimed Drake Koka, general secretary of the Black Allied Workers Union, calling for a "total overhaul of the South African labor system...

...With both Kafue and Kariba North, Zambia will have enough electricity for a decade...

...Designed by an American company (Bechtel), constructed by an Italian firm (Torin) with the help of local contractors, and protected by British-built sams, the new facility is meant to help the black-ruled nation defend itself against its white-supremacist neighbors—Rhodesia, South Africa and the Portuguese territories...

...Mtwara and the capital...

...Rebel leaders, fearful that the tactic will succeed, are trying to provoke harsher repression and thereby stiffen popular resistance...

...But both Salisbury and Pretoria oppose Lisbon's maneuvers for a separate peace with its territories...

...Though Ethiopia's air capacity is about equal to Rhodesia's, only Egypt and Algeria are strong enough to defeat South Africa in the sky...

...In Angola, fighting has been stepped up by the veteran of all African guerrillas, Holden Roberto, a pro-Western moderate whose exile government in Kinshasa has absorbed its former rival, the Soviet-subsidized Popular Liberation Front...

...Virtually under seige, the construction site can be reached only by air or armed convoy: the 4.000 whites at the camp live and work behind three barbed-wire fences (one electrified), a minefield, and an array of heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns...

...Confrontation between black and white nations in southern Africa has been growing steadily since Rhodesia's 4 per cent white minority broke with Britain in November 1965...

...The capital, Djibouti, located on the Gulf of Aden just below the entrance to the Red Sea, serves as a railhead-port for Addis Ababa...

...Rhodesia's railroads took about half of Zambia's copper to Beira...

...In short, Capricorn Africa appears to be headed for stormy times indeed...

...An Italian-installed pipeline already links Lusaka to Dar...

...Portuguese officials, who have always separated politics and trade, criticized Smith's border closure: While welcoming more traffic through Angola, they foresaw a loss of $1 million a month for Beira and feared attacks on the Mozambican railroad, spared by guerrillas in the past for Zambia's sake...

...Still, the whites have no guarantee that his successor would not be equally or even more antagonistic...

...on the Mozambican coast...

...It will take several months, however, to train native pilots to fly the Russian-supplied mig-21s that are going to be stationed there...

...After five white farmers were killed and another 17 injured last December in guerrilla attacks near the Chiweshe tribal trust, only 60 miles north of Salisbury, officials imposed a $100 fine on the members of the Chikykwa village for allegedly sheltering black terrorists from Zambia...

...Should Rhodesia cut off Kariba South...

...A guerrilla force I accompanied there in 1969 clearly had broad support in the villages, and recent Rhodesian statements admit that it is now more open...

...Formerly...

...Kafue could supply the copper industry, if distribution to stores and homes were rationed...