Black Partner

Conspicuous among Premier Guy Mollet's new Cabinet members was a short, stocky, black-skinned man from French West Africa. Felix Houphouet-Boigny is the first Negro ever to hold Cabinet rank in France. His job: to rewrite the clause in France's 1946 constitution establishing the French Union. His purpose: to save "Black Africa" for France.

Houphouet-Boigny is an avowed enemy turned avowed friend. Ten years ago he had denounced the new postwar constitution as a "betrayal" of De Gaulle's wartime promise of full equality for Black Africa, and launched the Rassemblement Democratique Africain with the slogan, "Battle to death against the European exploiters!" Formally and brazenly, he allied the R.D.A. with the Communists, conducted a two-year campaign of terrorism in the Ivory Coast, in which hundreds of fellow natives who dared support the French were massacred.

Late in 1950 Houphouet-Boigny had a change of heart. He called off the terrorism, and broke with the Communists. "Our movement, which aspired to promote prosperity and happiness, was engendering destruction and fear," he explained. "One dies for a goal, an ideal, but not for a means. Communist alliance was only a means to help our cause, but instead it became an obstacle." In the next years Houphouet-Boigny built the R.D.A. into French Black Africa's first mass party, crisscrossed deserts and jungles from Dakar to Brazzaville to orate at native assemblages, organized party committees in nearly every one of Black Africa's 1,000 tribes. His new creed: "Independence is an easy slogan, but no solution for the African people. Even America cannot stand alone in the modern world. We need equal partnership with France."

Man of Destiny. Houphouet-Boigny* has his share of early and bitter memories of French overlordship. He inherited the chieftaincy of the Akwe tribe when he was five. This did not deter a minor French functionary from peremptorily requisitioning him out of the local mission school to be his houseboy. "It did not matter whether I was a chief's son or a slave. I was black," he remembers bitterly. He studied medicine at Dakar, but spent twelve years in native dispensaries serving as a medical "assistant" because only white men could be doctors.

His first taste of political leadership came when he returned to his family plantation and set to work organizing a farmers' union among the native coffee growers. "Traditional chieftains trusted me because I was one of them. So did the educated, modern-minded elite, because I was one of them, too."

At 50, Houphouet-Boigny feels himself a man of destiny. "When my people are free I will return to my plantation, like Washington," he says. A Roman Catholic in a family whose other members still believe in black magic, he is a self-styled ascetic, gave up mangoes at the age of 13 because he liked them too much, has since given up tobacco, alcohol, sports, music, movies, even the coffee which he grows on his plantation. "Every year I force myself to give up something I like." This still leaves him a good deal. In Paris he wears expensive European suits, is driven around town in his black Cadillac by a white French chauffeur, lives in a luxurious apartment. In Abidjan he wears cotton native robes, keeps a black Chrysler, maintains a house there and in his native village of Yamoussoukio, where he has torn down the straw huts and replaced them with 500 new concrete houses.

People Without Patience. Houphouet-Boigny's idea of a new French Union is some variety of federation, and his model is Britain's neighboring Gold Coast, run by his fellow tribesman Kwame Nkrumah. But Houphouet-Boigny is well aware of the difficulties of providing "freedom" for a territory that is 13 times the size of France, divided among more than 1,000 tribes speaking 600 different tongues, many of them still so primitive that only five years ago a native elected to the French Senate was murdered and eaten by his Ivory Coast constituents. (Most tactless wisecrack of the week: outgoing Premier Edgar Faure's quip that Guy Mollet had included seven Senators in his government "to keep Houphouet-Boigny well fed.")

With the lessons of Morocco and Algeria before them, the French are gradually becoming aware that 97,000 white men cannot indefinitely rule Black Africa's 25 million natives in the old way. And they have had warning. Last May Day, Communist-led nationalists touched off weeks-long rioting in the Cameroons; their exiled leader Um Nhobe is already claiming the title of "The Cameroonian Ho Chi Minh."

"People have confidence in me, but they don't have patience to wait," said Houphouet-Boigny last week. "Unless the French act quickly, I will lose control of our people--and blood will flow in Africa."

* "Houphouet" is a Baule word meaning "pit for excrement." His father's parents, desperate when their first four children died in infancy, adopted the tribal custom of giving the fifth child a name indicating that he was unloved, unlovable and worthless, to divert the evil spirits that had taken the first four. The local sorcerer recommended Houphouet. "It worked," says Houphouet-Boigny, who. like all his descendants, must forever bear the name which saved his father.

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