"Crisis in Africa"

In Tunisia, Algeria and French Morocco widespread but small-scale native uprisings and riots (TIME, Nov. 1) last week kept the Colonial Ministry in Paris on the qui vive. General Charles Nogues, the French Resident General of French Morocco, found it necessary to send troops for the first time in history into the Medina or Moslem quarter of Fez. Four hundred natives were arrested.

"Our prompt action wrecked plans for a revolt," declared General Nogues, who tells the puppet Sultan of Morocco what to do. "Our troops will stay in the Medina as long as necessary. The French Government unanimously supports what I have done and all France is behind me."

When a colonial ruler like General Nogues finds it necessary thus to explain to natives that his home Government is not split and his white brethren are really with him, significant fat is obviously on the fire. To see it sputter, Mrs. Anne O'Hare Mc-Cormick of the New York Times touched at Algiers last week, and upon her ever sympathetic shoulder French colonists who are bearing the white man's burden in North Africa in effect sobbed their fears.

The "multiplying battles" and outbreaks of Arab nationalism are "more like a contagion than a directed movement," decided Mrs. McCormick. "The aggravating factor in the French colonies, according to the French residents, is the policy of the Popular Front Government (in Paris). . . . French merchants interviewed by this correspondent complain bitterly that agitators from France, representing the Government in power, are inciting the natives to throw off the yoke of France. . . . Mayor Rozis of Algiers, a colonial administrator for 30 years and a consistent friend of the Arabs . . . declared ... in an open letter to Premier Chautemps that the weakness and demagogy of the home Government were responsible for the crisis in Africa."

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