THESE ARE THE AFRICANS

...Let us face a fact, however much it disturbs our desires to blame everything on ourselves: could slavery have existed if African materialism had not been of the most venal kind...

...This will not destroy their personalities...

...We are also a materialistic society...

...We must expect to be treated a little less than justly by these African leaders—whether we live in their countries or merely trade goods or pacts with them...

...As for leadercults, we either collect royal families or Presidential handshakes...

...We have to accept that the most Westernized leaders with whom we deal are, in most cases,'abominably venal men...

...These, of course, are generalizations, and the first reaction of a reader may well be to see how these characteristics appear in peoples of other countries—of the West in particular...

...For the last five or ten years, most African countries have been undergoing a program of African promotion which makes it not only easier for the African to get a degree and a responsible post than it would be for a European (in Africa or Europe), but also tends to encourage him to exercise his inferiority feelings by pretending he is more "equal" than a number of factors will permit...

...Although Africans admire positive thought, and love to cite proverbs which show evidence of this quality, most Africans are negative thinkers, at least as much as other people: they are more readily against something than for something...

...The leader's awareness of these characteristics has tov dictate his policies...

...Let us not take too much comfort, either: the world in which Africans are forced to live is a world of our making, not theirs...

...Let us not be paternalistic: all is not well along the African shore, and the abolition of colonialism is not the whole solution...

...I n Africa, almost no one feels strongly about promoting honesty in public office, and what resentment there is at the considerable amount of corruption is jealousy more often than shock...

...Corruption is an enormous issue in Africa...

...No one can seriously doubt that all peoples are potentially equal, and an African brought up in Paris will have nothing to hold him back except the unjust stigma about his color: he will, in fact, be French, just as the ex-Nigerians and exSomalis of Tiger Bay are indubitably Welsh...

...This is a general pattern...

...There are even extremes of inadequacy, in a situation as fluid and dangerous as this...

...Sierra Leone and perhaps Tanganyika can be added to the list this year...

...He can only rely on his lieutenants if he pays them handsome bribes for being his supporters...

...The tribal quarrels which historically divide Africa, the distrust for persons who do not speak your African language and whose own language you do not understand, develop to an alarming degree when the previous colonial administration has not done what it could to unify the country—when it has failed in the creation of a professional and business middle class, whose common interests outweigh the old tribal differences, and the creation of a nationwide political system in which party loyalties cross tribal lines...

...After all, can those they will send to work in Africa refuse to go...

...The West Africatrained jurist son of an illiterate Ashanti farmer, surrounded, from his childhood on, with the tribal reality, will never 'be an Earl Warren, or even a Philadelphia lawyer...

...It is a defect less marked in Ghana than anywhere else, and relatively subdued in French Africa...

...Some tyrants are better than others, but we must know that we are dealing with tyrants, with all that this involves...

...What can we do to help our own selfish, laudable desire to bring democracy to Africa, to save ourselves from a third world war, and to save the Africans from themselves until they produce the generation that can see their own condition, and the world, more clearly...

...The Congo, by its dramatic exaggerations, puts this and other defects under the microscope...

...Although we proudly boast that we drive a hard bargain, most of us are slightly ashamed of the fact...

...and it is the better educated, most qualified Africans, the ones who surpass the "averages" of the rest of the world, who run government departments and teach at universities, who are most aware—tragically so—of their limitations...

...Though Ethiopians and Congolese and Tunisians and Nigerians are as different from one another as Swedes and Poles and Italians and Irish, their ways of thinking, their principles—or lack of them—and their political vices and virtues bear uncanny similarities, with the differences being more in degree than in substance...

...Add the infallible leader, the one who can do everything for his followers, and what Africans seem to expect from independence is a negative opportunity, not so much to rise to Nobel Prize-winning heights—though of course a few do have such positive ambitions—as to wreak revenge on that white tribe that does carry off these prizes, and which does produce better engineers and accountants and rubber-planters...

...The other grievance is poverty...

...The leaders with whom we deal know their people well...

...In Africa, one lives with extremes of everything—of poverty, of absurdity, of violence...

...we fight harder in defense than attack...

...But while we must pay at least lip-service to the need to preserve African traditions—a country must have tradition if it is to build something else—we should, perhaps, be less modest about the advantages of Westernization...

...This feature will be worst where preparation for independence has been most neglected...

...In Africa, the leader is surrounded by a charisma which is close to being religious: Caesar can do no wrong...

...that he is at least as ruthless in dealing with his opposition as is Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana...

...But much is simply Africa: attitudes here, after sixty years of colonial rule, are considerably more "complexed" than in India, which had 300 years of submission to the British Crown...

...This may be just a lack of protein, but whatever it is we have to remember that it is there...

...In the great majority of cases, they have voted to gain independence...

...Moderation and reflection temper decisions in the Sudan, and when Ethiopia acquires a more democratic government it will probably be one of the best in Africa...

...As for "drive," most people, in our society, do not have the push to get their dreams off the ground...

...Others on the list for nationhood before long are: Algeria, Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland, the Rhodesias, and eventually the Spanish and Portuguese territories...

...African peoples, like all peoples who accept authoritarian rule, unwittingly encourage their leaders to go too far, until finally the lid boils off...

...Most leaders in most countries do...

...The French-African leaders, with a political polish acquired in long years as legislators in France's own Assembly, are less expedientseeking and less anti-white—in other words, more self-confident...

...This is carrying the dangers to the furthest extremes, but extremes are common here...

...The types of government prevalent in Africa correspond to the nature of their electorates...

...The Congo is the best example of what goes wrong when tribalism is left unchecked, but most of Capricorn Africa will demonstrate this characteristic—which is far from dead in the more advanced societies of West Africa...

...Perhaps the best that we in the rich "advanced" world can do for the African states is to give them as many scholarships and training grants as possible—thousands upon thousands of them—to enable . their elites to be trained among us...

...The leaders who control the destinies of these countries may bicker wildly among themselves, and usually do, but they have certain features in common with which other governments must learn to live...

...President Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast is a realistic man and gives his country as good an administration as is possible with the material available...

...What have Africans elected governments for, over the past five years...

...This begs the question as to what Africans expect from independence...

...But the African admires a successful profiteer...

...But it is a motive force in Nigeria—which in most ways is more politically advanced than Ghana or French Africa—and it is almost a religion in the Congo and in other countries in the Capricorn half of Africa...

...No one here ever refuses a scholarship, and the most convinced antiAmerican African will willingly study at Cornell...

...The jump from the dark ages to the nuclear era is more than can be made by the lonely mind, working more or less unaided...

...They cannot conceive of the effort involved in getting where those they envy get—nor, alas, are they capable of making it...

...This truth does not abolish the other—that racism is an aspect of the African mind, and particularly of the south-of-Equator African mind, which we must take into consideration in our dealings with this continent...

...One thing we can be sure of— they will welcome such a move...

...In our Western societies, many people are positive enough to devote their lives to constructive causes...

...Moreover, while other continents have ceased to yield new nations, Africa is still producing...

...If this drives the European investor, technician, and even missionary out, where can the cash and know-how come from, except from the Communist countries...

...Next year will be the turn of Ruanda-Urundi—which may split into two nations...

...A country usually has the government it deserves, even if it does not always have the government it wants...

...Most Africans in the colonial condition are deeply conscious of two grievances: a sense of inferiority to the colonial master which the master, until recent years, did nothing much to diminish and in many cases sought to encourage...

...Exaggerated materialism is the second most dominant characteristic, and this seems to be universal...

...But as tyrannical as the African president can allow himself to be, he has to deliver the psychological consolation which racism gives, and he has to talk—and if possible act—in terms of easy money...

...The white-baiting which is perhaps the most dramatic feature of the Congolese provincial scene, must be expected elsewhere...

...he is the embodiment of the soul of the tribe, the nation, and to smite him is to smite yourself...

...We are more anti-Nazi than pro-democratic...

...But what can go wrong, in a situation like Africa today, with such— dare one say it?—primitively-motivated electors, and leaders with such tarnished psyches, is more apparent than what might, with a little luck, go right...

...Sober French-African leaders who inspire confidence in their Western interlocutors rule their electorates with an iron hand...

...This is true...

...Much of what has gone wrong— and the worse that surely is still to come in certain areas—can be imputed to colonialism, with its sometimes brutal, and always frustrating, racist philosophy...

...The educated African child of educated parents starts off with a far better chance...

...T h e leader they want should give them this opportunity of revenge, this opportunity to solve the individual's material problems without his putting in much effort of his own...

...The counter-balances are missing, and in Africa these vices or weaknesses consequently go to extremes...

...There is little in African ethics which reproves illicit gain, or invokes—except in matters of life and death—an ideal of social responsibility...

...The need to respond to his electorate's characteristics, and the fact that he shares them himself, produces an archetype of African leader who is racist himself in varying degrees, usually corrupt, believes in his own semi-sacredness, and is sensitive, to a morbid pitch, to anything that dims its shine...

...Sekou Toure of Guinea is a shining exception, a man with an ideology...

...But at least we could—and should—give them something with which to make their originality a positive and creative thing, not a reason for a great angry feeling of isolatedness in a galloping world which has left them behind in every field...

...They do not have to have television, or twin beds, or stamp collections...

...At the modest intellectual levels at which the African peasant lives, his 'conception of independence is far less noble than we would like to think...

...The African leader is very much aware of the rage d'infieriorite, and of the buyableness of a people who feel a burning need for Chevrolets more than they feel a burning need for, say, a wife to love or an achievement to leave behind them...

...The difference with Africa is one of degree...

...The Africa of tomorrow will be "sophisticated"—as colonials say of Africans who resemble Europeans more than their cousins out in the bush—or it will not be anything...

...Our cult of leaders may prompt us to give rather too much attention to the Kennedy children, and pictures of British royalty may be the easiest story to sell to readers of Paris-Match, but our leaders are anything but above criticism, and when they fall from grace they fall hard...

...African chiefs have always been despots, in some degree, and the African mind has been conditioned for centuries to respect a tyrant...

...A fourth is an inability to "carry things through"—a lack of really driving ambition...

...All African leaders, of course, do not share these defects to the same degree...

...frustrated, they finally are forced into arid searches for a storied and cultural past which Africa, unfortunately, does not have...

...Another cardinal weakness of the African is materialism...

...he acquires the outer, academic patina of a culture, but finds the door to its inner realities is permanently locked...

...There is not likely to be an all-African bloc, but there are already some African political archetypes...

...Tunisia's President Bourguiba is a statesman by any standards...

...It is quite possible that if, by some miracle of history, Africa had been swept out of its backwater and into the Twentieth Century without a colonial period, things would be greatly different...

...Given the charisma he inherits by heading a party which can win elections, he can be almost as authoritarian as he likes...

...Only the modest size of present-day African armies is delaying this development...

...On this issue, the liberal will say that the poor have a reason to be materialistic...

...All except one, Mauritania, has a voice in the United Nations, which now has ninetynine members...

...The African nations will not speak the same French and English we speak...

...But the African child brought up in the old, primitive Africa—as most African children are—learns his lessons by rote...

...they will not make the same films, or write the same books, or produce the same styles of architecture...

...and poverty...

...A third characteristic is the leader cult...

...But the Sicilian peasant or the Irish fisherman will hesitate strongly to improve his lot by dishonesty...

...Revenge on whites is the dominant characteristic in many Africans' attitude to the world...

...He is a seeker of expedients— Lumumba went from Detwiler to Khrushchev in seven days—with little basic ideology except the determination to remain in power...

...But for his people to question him is so unthinkable (does one question God...

...Those of us who love Africa must love it, as we love individuals, for what it is, and not for the illusion that it seeks to present to itself and to the outside world...

...but in Africa, where society is relatively more leveled, former Paramount Chief Houphouet-Boigny, now president of the Ivory Coast, has a good deal more in common with the laborers on his home plantation than General de Gaulle has with his palace servants...

...The lynching and even rape of a few hundred of these new colons would be a small price to pay for a Communist empire in Africa...

...These are, of course, generalizations again, and most liberals will hasten to say that if Capricorn Africa is more anti-white than Africa north of the Equator it is because Africans there had a rougher time from their white governments...

...Revolutions, therefore, on the old South American pattern, are liable to be features of the new Africa...

...There are so many checks on our Western materialism that they are hardly worth mentioning...

...The Communists are white also—the Chinese would be white in Africa— but they will probably take the risk...

...With ten per cent of the world's population, and twentyfive per cent of the power in the United Nations, Africa is today the new element in global politics...

...Life, like art, is based on the experience of others, and there can be no rich society or culture if it lives on itself, without influences...

...As for the "push" quality, our weakest-willed, most unambitious citizens are dynamos compared to their counterparts in Africa...

...Perhaps nothing can be done, and perhaps in the eyes of the oracle the great battle is already lost and already won...

...Given the relative lack of drive, most Africans conceive of the answer to poverty in terms of easy money...

...The holocaust apparently awaiting South Africa is an obvious product of colonialism in its most excessive form...

...He is a tyrant, but an honest one—honest, too, in politics, according to his lights and his political beliefs, which he was led to because we—the white Western face that once dominated Guinea— are opposed to them...