Emergent Africa
Lens, Sidney
Emergent Africa The Death of Africa, by Peter Ritner. Macmillan. 300 pp. $4.95. The Afro-Asian States and Their Problems, by K. M. Panikkar. John Day. 96 pp. $3. Toward Unity in Africa, by Donald...
...We have failed, he says, to "buy security with the arms race...
...Consider the question of democracy...
...Ours is a simple good-and-bad-guy world in which Model Americanus is, and by right ought to be, the model for everyone else...
...Taken together or separately, they are meaty additions to an intelligent study of Africa...
...The Standpattism which ties our hands abroad ties them at home as well...
...Panikkar's thesis of "balanced" development is particularly incisive...
...It involves a subordination of the armed forces to parliament, an enlargement of education, and the bringing of people out of their tribal-ist and ethnic shells into the national political arena...
...Toward Unity in Africa, by Donald Rothchild...
...He is appalled by the racism of South Africa, heartened by the independence movements...
...Specifically, Ritner favors establishing an Institute of African Affairs as a United States agency to make available $6 to $8 billion a year for African development...
...Rimer's The Death of Africa and Panikkar's The Afro-Asian States and Their Problems are solid and ennobling books...
...Why don't they set up democratic governments, build some dams and factories, and be done with it...
...Panikkar writes with the quiet poise of an Indian, condensing deep insight into a few pages...
...The new states have, in most cases, adopted democratic forms...
...Ritner is an author to be read...
...Ritner manifests the healthy passion of an outraged American...
...Our "creative genius has not been able to find itself in this Era of Standpattism...
...Panikkar probes into the problems of administration, education, economic life, and science...
...Ritner, a former writer for the Saturday Review, gives us a bird's-eye view of the continent...
...Panikkar writes from the other end of the subject—not the external obligations of countries like the United States, but the internal difficulties of the new Afro-Asian states themselves...
...Donald Rothchild's book, Toward Unity in Africa, may be dismissed as ponderous and thin...
...The fifty-odd countries will win their independence, but they will remain "pauperized" without outside help...
...But democratic content is much more difficult to achieve...
...While this seems remote from the problem of Africa, he feels that the two are interrelated, that Africa is a test of whether the United States can survive...
...Whatever the shortcomings of his book on isolated points, the dedication with which he propounds his views is rare...
...193 pp...
...He is preoccupied with the question of how federalism should work in British Africa...
...Here two of three authors dissect the problems with rare insight...
...He wants to relate aid with "socio-economic reformation...
...Public Affairs Press...
...In ninety-six short pages Panikkar delves into the monumental complexity of social change, and he does it with both dignity and depth...
...it offers insight into the reasons some new countries, using "unbalanced" plans, must resort to severe compulsion and dictatorship...
...Economically, there is the task of industrialization along with the need to transform rural life along modern lines...
...The administrative apparatus of the new countries is badly handicapped by withdrawal of the top cadre of administrators...
...A few diplomats of the British foreign office may find this book of some value, but to this reviewer it seems an overburdened and vegetarian discussion...
...In each area he throws light on aspects seldom discussed in the West...
...We are unprepared for the "inevitable half-maddened eruptions of China...
...The cliches around which we ourselves orbit—"free world," "private enterprise," "two-party system"—seem to us to be fitted for the whole universe...
...In didactic terms he relates the history of previous attempts, during the reign of the white man, without indicating that the social revolution now going on creates a fundamentally new problem...
...We are fortunate therefore that the discussion of Africa is zeroing into our national consciousness...
...Though he never says it, one gets the impression that he looks at the process of federation into larger economic and political units as a panacea...
...This might appear like flinging dollars to the winds, but the author is conscious of the problem...
...Reviewed by Sidney Lens To the hermetically-sealed patriot, the mystery of nations-in-revolu-tion seems imponderable...
...These two books—The Death of Africa and The Afro-Asian States and Their Problems—are excellent supplements to each other...
...Beyond that, he favors a boycott of Portugal and Portuguese Africa, an invasion of South West Africa—now held illegally by South Africa—and a boycott of South Africa itself until it enters the democratic age...
...Ritner questions the validity of an American approach that includes a $40 billion military budget as against a $3 billion aid program...
...But he sees no hope for emergent Africa unless we in the United States propel ourselves into its problems...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
