THE DILEMMA OF AFRICA

...Some American policy-planners reason that, given Africa's medieval poverty in an age of push-button comfort elsewhere, the extremists are almost certain to win...

...Think you need education and experience to govern a country...

...All these independence movements are going to win out soon, whatever Portugal's Salazar and Southern Rhodesia's Roy Welensky say...

...Conversely, if we discriminate against the totalitarian regimes in aid, and the Casablanca bloc which represents them sweeps Africa, can the unfriendly new regimes afford to be too unfriendly...

...This might sound like tough talk, but I doubt if many Africans would think it unreasonable...

...To be successful, the U.S...

...The East has so far not been generous with aid, though it has made some exciting promises, and we should welcome any comparison between states supported by the West and states entirely reliant on East bloc aid...

...aid is that it takes too long to get projects approved...

...Aid missions would benefit from authority to say yes, on the spot, to small prestige projects—authority Communist aid missions now have...

...Helping the Casablanca powers, moderate African leaders point out, is freeing funds for armed subversion, and for the high-powered radio and other propaganda aimed at toppling all the governments which met at Monrovia in May of last year...

...There is a strong chance that English-speaking eastern and southern Africa will, after independence, either join the Casablanca bloc or form a bloc of its own with similar ideas...

...A frequent complaint about U.S...

...In a continent where most people have nothing to lose except their unawareness that they have nothing to lose, the Madison Avenue approach would fit well the efforts of many to sell the wonderful cure-all of revolution...

...It is helping to build Marxist (or fascistic, pseudo-Marxist) regimes in Africa, with U.S...

...trade fair from Czechoslovakia...

...Army" landing on Angolan villages needs nO explanation...

...aid in Africa could logically be directed to those things Africa needs most—agriculture, education, community development projects, the growth of a free African press, aid to African businessmen...

...U.S...

...He will show you how to go from loincloths to Lincolns in less time than it takes to recite the names of your tribal gods . . ." This sales message, as the jargon goes, has Impact in Africa...

...By constructing Nkrumah's Volta Dam, such neighbors of Ghana as Dahomey's Hubert Maga, Togo's Sylvanus Olym-pio, or Ivory Coast's Felix Hou-phouet-Boigny would argue, America is opening the sluice-gates of propaganda for the attractiveness of the anti-Western, totalitarian state...

...Major aid could be held in abeyance, rather than completely abandoned...

...There is, then, much on which to work, and the moderate Monrovia bloc ought to have unreserved Western support...

...White-man-in-disguise to the African, the Negro envoy often finds his situation intolerably equivocal...

...The Soviet Union can back the more totalitarian regimes and encourage their expansionist aims, for those African leaders whom President Leopold Senghor of Senegal and President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo have called "black imperialists" will further Communist causes in Africa by furthering their own frontiers...

...Any aid and comfort to the Communist cause can only be seen by us as a possible step toward our annihilation...

...If America's representatives abroad are not convinced of this themselves, and if they are not able to win over their African friends, even Shango the thunder god, Osei Tutu in his Ashanti heaven, and Ogun and the water-spirits of the Niger could not make a success of America's role in Africa...

...The level of personnel in the embassies is high...

...The propaganda effect of gasoline bombs marked "Property of the U.S...

...They presumably know that truce lines have a tendency to solidify, and that any country occupied by Russia in a global conflict would probably not be free again, for decades at least...

...Try Revolt...

...Understanding the African does not have to imply approving everything he does, or whitewashing his more obvious defects...

...The twenty Monrovia powers, which include French Africa's "Brazzaville Twelve," may reabsorb Mali, and may attract the Congo, which might be tempted to join the Afro-Malagasy Union (the "Brazzaville Twelve") because it offers considerable economic advantages...

...aid it is necessary first to make a state visit to Peking or play host to a RUSSEU WARREN HOWE ranges over Africa for the Washington Post and several British publications...

...the struggle for survival and respect for the strong leader are woven all through the fabric of African life...

...It makes eminent sense to join the winning side when its basic aim is one we approve, and when this can be clone without alienating any important segments of African opinion...

...Among his five books are two on Africa, "Theirs the Darkness' and "Black Star Rising...

...This, of course, presupposes that Communist infiltration in the Congo is checked, and that economic stability is restored to the Congo by the reabsorption of Katanga, whose flagging international lobby has not yet produced a power prepared to recognize Katanga as an independent state...

...The choice of a diplomat who is also a Negro is often unfortunate...

...The cold war is firmly entrenched in Africa, and we must recognize that not all states will be on our side...

...Aid without a quid pro quo is patronizing and infers that the receiver is not, in human terms, an equal...

...So, it is reasoned, it might be Machiavellian common sense to help preserve the Western world by dropping a few Western principles overboard in Africa, and joining the incipient dictators now...

...the voodoo-it-yourself man will be in your village soon...

...What is needed is something on the scale of a Marshall Plan...

...Do you feel inferior...

...Is it possible to go along with the extremists, whose regimes we deplore but could tolerate for the sake of higher politics, and also with those whose attitude on world problems is reasonably close to ours...

...The financial means now being employed to achieve this goal are woefully inadequate...

...The Soviets nod approvingly in a "whatever-you-do-has-my-bless-ing" manner...

...In any case, say these poor but reasonably honest neighbors, are investments safe in such regimes...

...but the Atlantic Alliance would undoubtedly survive America's wholehearted support for rapid independence in Algeria, a realistic timetable for independence in Angola and Mozambique, and a vigorous campaign for one-man-one-vote government in Southern Rhodesia...

...Nor can America succeed in being all things to all men...

...As a U.S...

...it is refrigerators and cars...

...By-supporting independence movements without reserve, the United States could use its influence to persuade them not to go too far too fast...

...Is dependence on others giving you those independence blues...

...Information Agency has made itself appreciated almost everywhere...

...America's goal in African aid is to move this great continent from its state of instability, poverty, and envy toward one of stability, prosperity, and a satisfying cultural life...

...From indifference toward Africa, the United States now seems to have swung far in the other direction...

...The dilemma is not new, but it can rarely have reached such acuity as in the dilemma of American policy in Afro-Asia, and particularly in Africa...

...Diplomats— and their wives—need to be specially screened...

...They choose...

...W7ould the totalitarian victors we aid remain with the United States, which would have backed them out of self-interest, or prefer the East, which backs them out of both self-interest and conviction...

...Similar unity of viewpoint exists concerning the Republic of South Africa...

...Revolt changes eiu-yything...

...Nigeria's Tafawa Balewa said last year that though no country welcomes outside control, no reasonable regime expects aid without giving something in return...

...Given the considerable and continuing European investment in Africa, Africa's superiority over Europe in mineral resources, and Africa's great economic need for a modern farming system, which requires less capital outlay than industry, this suggested amount of aid would create an enormous transformation relatively quickly...

...Needed too, perhaps, is a more businesslike approach to the question of aiding the underdeveloped world in general...

...Clearly, the United States owes it to itself to support its friends, including its African friends, at the risk of seeing some of them overthrown by extremists who will brand the United States as a major prop for the regime they have thrown from power...

...Is the Peace Corps a valid arm of American aid and diplomacy...

...Many moderate African leaders feel they are being forced to blackmail the United States, that to get attention from those who hold the major purse-strings of U.S...

...Can one help the Kwame Nkrumah regime in Ghana without harming Togo, threatened as it is by anschlussf Can one pump funds into the economy of Guinea, and expect Sierra Leone or Liberia to approve, in the face of mounting police reports of Guinean gunmen trying to sow revolt in their up-country districts...

...It is not John Stuart Mill that Africans want, they say with pertinence...

...It is, indeed, important to the Western cause in Africa that pro-Western African countries should, in a few years' time, have a manifestly higher standard of living than their Casablanca bloc neighbors...

...Few African Marxists would hesitate to accept an American scholarship...

...But since there are few true Marxists in Africa (Nkrumah and Hassan II of Morocco lean more to Fascism than to Communism), and since these regimes are as threatened with instability as any others, the extremist states need not be given up as lost...

...For this, the United States is itself to blame, in some measure, because of its tendency to give the most to those on whom it can count the least...

...Africa is not just one vast problem, but many of varying intensity...

...The principal problem is how to deal with the most difficult nations, since these are potentially the most troublesome—the most self-indulgent and disloyal, the most skilled in the art ol blackmailing mutually unfriendly uncles—and the most sensitive...

...and they have discovered and prescribed for themselves the heady therapy of permissive behavior...

...But the United States, by its nature, finds it hard to be committed to any foreign ideologies...

...They believe that by courting Africa's scornful, faithless Jezebels, he risks alienating his legitimate, not too unfaithful consorts, who keep their tents reasonably neat, and are not too ungrateful for the bounty they can squeeze from him...

...Where the West would be wise to be generous to all states, regardless of their political leanings, is in the field of scholarships...

...The Soviets, however, have no such commitments...

...their attempts to provoke subversion and coups d'etat can only help Communism, which flourishes in the earth of chaos...

...African leaders are well aware that the nuclear threat horrifies both the potential combatants, who might therefore seek to steer a third world war into the more remote battlefields of Africa and Asia...

...Its libraries, English classes, various professional services to African governments, and the quiet, devoted men one usually finds running the various local bureaus deserve the highest commendation...

...Will it not be superficial and misunderstood...

...An alternative policy would be to ditch the Casablanca bloc...

...Don't believe it...

...Think you can't afford it...

...taxpayers' money...

...There seems no pragmatic reason why the United States should not clearly state, for the benefit of the earthy, commonsensical African leaders, that the West is locked in a life and death struggle with the Communist powers, that we are determined to defend our desire to live as we choose...

...policy in Africa today extends beyond the embassy and USIA to the growing field of business investment—and human investment...

...The revolution in South Africa will be a ghastly affair, but there is no avoiding it...

...By all means let us join those movements which are sure to win, and which all African states support...

...Though this policy offers a certain evident logic, it is far from foolproof...

...Just as the United States has commitments to her friends elsewhere, many of whom are colonial powers, so it has commitments to "moderate" African friends with no desire to see either helped or perpetuated those African regimes which are working to bring the moderates down...

...What is the alternative...

...Without hollow boasting, he should be eager to persuade Africans that the imperfect American system offers the greatest hope...

...All are difficult to handle, but some, for the moment, are considerably less difficult than others...

...They have studied the manuals of politics, not so much to find a political as a psychological solution...

...If it is diplomatically impossible to supply Holden Roberto's Angolan rebels with arms, it may not be impossible to prevent Portugal from using American-made and U.S.-supplied NATO arms against the .rebels...

...The U.S...

...And how far can we afford not to go...

...The United States, furthermore, has commitments to friends and partners, some of whom are teachers and supporters of the new African nations...

...Many Africans look to the United States for guidance and leadership, and are astonished to find Americans, conscience-stricken about their own state of advancement, making a virtue of African have-nothingness...

...The responsibilities of leadership are many, and one of them is confidence in one's right to lead, a preparedness to meet envious criticism with equanimity...

...Since the two disbursing agencies, West and East, are anything but united themselves, most African countries will, before long, be paid by the United States not to work for the Soviet Union's interests, and by the Soviets not to work for the United States...

...Not just any efficient administrator in foreign service is suited for the frustrating assignments in Africa...

...and they may well be working for neither with any appreciable degree of loyalty—but on double pay...

...Is not Africa condemned to beg, imitate—and resent—the Western world for still a few generations to come...

...Obliged to prove to Washington his lack of emotional bias, he cannot afford to view an African government with the sympathy a white diplomat can risk, and his inevitably harsher judgment of African affairs is resented by African politicians...

...Indeed, the more scrapes the African nations get into, and the more they alienate the United States and its allies, the more they will depend on the Soviets, who do not like spending money but will do so if neccesary...

...political affairs officer in one of the Casablanca states admitted to me recently, "Who wants to be a diplomat in a country to which we have, for political reasons, nothing to offer...

...diplomat in Africa should be as unashamedly proud of America as Communist diplomats seem to be of their countries...

...Something akin to a tightly closed shop applies in the new African nations' demands for aid...

...Some technicians in Washington suggest a figure of three billion dollars, or just over half what it had cost to rebuild Western Europe—a smaller area than African with none of Africa's problems of education and infrastructure...

...Will not the Peace Corps open the door for the Communist countries to send in their own "peace" groups, more carefully trained in their political objectives...

...In those countries which, unlike West Africa, have found winning independence an arduous task, leaders tend to be violent, unstable, revolutionary types...

...Larger projects require more careful examination and approval in Washington, but delays now seem unreasonably long...

...The Soviets make their compromises too, but rarely to the point of joining both hare and hounds in the same race...

...But the sophisticated regimes of French Africa have proved durable so far, and if they can weather another five years, they may well endure...

...But while it seems politically safe to back independence movements, even if led by extremists, there seems no sense in backing those African states whose ambitions are imperialistic...

...The United States, as President Kennedy pointed out last November, cannot have a solution for all problems...

...In three years' time, Prime Minister Welensky himself will probably be in exile...

...Portugal and South Africa—and to lesser degrees France and Great Britain—may squawk...

...The flush of new states has produced a score of shiny new American ambassadors, all eager for an effective aid program to administer...

...But let us not be too optimistic about the future...

...This school of thought argues that the internationally moderate regimes of French-speaking Africa (Guinea and Mali excepted), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and others, have a reasonable chance of survival, and that the United States should demonstrate its faith in the majority moderate Monrovia bloc by renouncing all but platonic relations with the minority members of Casablanca...

...The United States has the effrontery to hesitate and consider that maybe the teachers, the colonial powers, are not always wrong...

...under sometimes tarnished leadership, their cause is just...

...Already America's critics on the African scene have branded it a form of subtle espionage—why else, they reason, would Americans work so hard under such difficult conditions for so little apparent gain...

...Yet our own ideology cannot be transplanted, for many reasons, into new, relatively small nations with vastly different histories and cultures...

...U.S...

...The Dilemma of Africa by RUSSELL WARREN HOWE Leupoldville In seeking an effective policy for A Africa, the United States has placed itself in the position of a generous, well-meaning, reasonably high-principled uncle competing for influence over a self-indulgent nephew with another, more morally flexible uncle, the Soviet Union, that approves everything the nephew does, however outrageous...

...At the African end of the line that begins in the State Department in Washington, the United States is doing a better job than many nervous doubters imagine...

...If the radical, East-leaning regimes must continue to receive some aid to have elbow-room to maneuver with the Communists (and of course with us), what sort of aid is suitable...

...How far can the United States afford to go in competing with the Soviet Union...

...Those who advise this see present-day America not so much as a puzzled, benign uncle, but as an unreasonably well-meaning chieftain who believes that all the women in the community should have the good fortune to be his brides...

...The most moderate of African leaders support the nationalist movements in dependent countries...