RESTLESS AFRICA

What Place for the White Man?

Since the end of World War II, the biggest news about Africa has been that Africa now makes its own news. In the past two years alone, two new nations have been born and twelve territories have become self-governing. Four more are scheduled to get independence by the end of 1960. Having logged more than 110,000 miles of travel crisscrossing Africa in these two years, TIME Correspondent Curtis Prendergast completed a tour of duty and cabled these impressions of a restless continent:

THE African passengers in the dirty brown coaches of the train chugging north through Bechuanaland were hot, tired, and packed in tight. But they were young and in unusually high spirits. They shouted and whistled. They had just completed their time in the gold mines near Johannesburg. Now they were headed home again to the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, and to points beyond. On their wrists were gaudy new watches. They wore purple shirts, cowboy hats, awkward new shoes.

Africa's whites, watching the trains go by, know well the implications of what the mine trains carry--the white man's fancy goods earned by the black man's new skills. No longer is there a question of where the African is going. The questions now are: Who can hold back the tide? And, what place will there be for the white man?

The questions become more acute the farther south in Africa the visitor travels. In Kenya, barely five years after the Mau Mau terrors, whites now dine with blacks in some of Nairobi's more fashionable hotels and restaurants. In Southern Rhodesia the whites are called "masters"; a government official summons a black clerk and says, "Solomon, show this master where Room 207 is." In Johannesburg there are two separate bus systems, one for the whites and one for the nie blankes. But a black carrying a heavy sack of parcels at the behest of a white mailman automatically becomes white for the duration of their trip together.

"The Only Criterion . . ." Even at his most extreme, the white man is fighting only a delaying action, and any idea that the European in Africa does not know this does him an injustice. Everywhere north of the Limpopo the whites are working for some kind of multiracial solution. In the lakeside town of Bukavu in the Belgian Congo, angry colons recently pelted a Belgian colonial minister with tomatoes because they thought him too liberal. At the same time, a prosperous white merchant in Elisabethville was explaining to a visitor: "We do not want apartheid [segregation]. We wish to share power with the African. The only criterion will be individual capacity."

The phrase "individual capacity" is both the measuring stick and the debating point. Even Southern Rhodesia's liberal ex-Prime Minister Garfield Todd, so reviled by his fellow whites for "pushing the Africans forward," would limit the franchise. After all, it is only eleven years since Britain itself abolished the universities vote, a weighing of the franchise in favor of the educated.

In many African territories illiteracy runs as high as 90%, and everywhere the Dark Continent is, like no other place on earth, dark at night. After the cook fires are out, superstition flourishes. Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah once explained the need for rural electrification by saying, "One electric light drives away the ghosts." The most sophisticated-politicians, graduates of European universities, have solemnly accused their opponents of raising juju against them.

Variations on a Theme. But the whites know that their time of unquestioned domination will soon be over. South Africa's Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd himself--the ruthlessly logical racist who looks so much like a kindly Kris Kringle --has lately added a "positive" side to apartheid. "In the year 2000," he once explained in his high professorial voice, "we should expect the Bantu population to number 19 million. How will they be handled? These people must work, they must live somewhere. There is only one way out--we are faced with the choice of either giving the white man his own area and the Bantu his, or having one state in which the Bantu will govern." Verwoerd's solution: a series of separate and remote tribal "Bantustans" that will, under "white guidance," be granted a degree of self-government. The scarcity of available land and the staggering cost of uprooting millions of unwilling Africans from the glitter of the cities give the scheme an aura of unreality.

What saves South Africa from dire prophecies is the fact that its black middle class--its African traders, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, nurses--are perhaps the most numerous on the continent. They have just enough personal stake to weaken (so far, at any rate) a strong black political movement.

In their more candid moments, the country's ruling Boers admit to a certain uneasiness over their growing isolation from the rest of the continent. In Pretoria, Oom Paul Kruger's old Boer capital, the Minister of External Affairs Eric Louw talks of the eventual need to establish diplomatic relations with 'the independent black nations. "But it will take time to prepare the people," he says. Louw wears a perpetually mournful look.

How Long? The question of time preoccupies everyone. The stark fact is that what might have satisfied the African a few years ago no longer does. In Britain's Central African Federation, the old "Europeans Only" signs have faded from the park benches, but in the wake of all the mass arrests of African nationalists, the interracial bench has little impact even as a token of intention. In South Africa, where the police are strong and the blacks still leaderless, the system may last for years to come. Elsewhere, the chief pastime of the African politician is to draw up timetables.

Uganda, Tanganyika and Sierra Leone are all pressing for time commitments. Back in 1957 a Leopoldville politician kept shouting in my ear over the din of a cafe orchestra: "What we want is justice--the communaute Belgo-Congolaise." Now, only 19 months after the Congo's first municipal elections, the demand is for a wildly impractical schedule calling for territorial elections in December 1959, provincial elections in March 1960, and general elections and a whole parliamentary government by the following June. The dates whiz by in a blur.

"Seek Ye First ..." At its best, the new African leadership has an impressive intellectuality. Kenya's whites are only too conscious of the ability of young Tom Mboya. It is at the second and third levels of leadership that the nationalist movements lack strength. One result is that even the most Western-minded of the African politicians feel that they are operating under crash conditions, and freedom in Africa does not necessarily promise democracy. One Nigerian said to me: "You in America get into a war, and you don't have much democracy either."

As the new governments move into the cool, white villas the colonial officials left behind, the continent is clearly slated for a series of strongman governments. No more pointed advice exists for the African politician than the pseudo-Biblical com mandment inscribed at the bottom of Kwame Nkrumah's statue, which stands outside the Ghana Parliament. "Seek ye first the political kingdom," it says, "and all other things shall be added unto it."

The Tough & the Bible. In the past two years Nkrumah's jailings and deportations of members of the opposition have made the biggest headlines. But in Ghana a kind of opposition at least still does exist. Wily President William V. S. Tubman of Liberia chomps on cigars, quotes the Bible and has no opposition at all. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is an absolute monarch. Cold-eyed, shrewd President Sekou Toure of Guinea, Africa's youngest nation, is Marxist-trained, favors Marxist-length speeches (very long), runs his country through a single Marxist-style party.

But in Africa, the toughest black leadership tends also to be the most capable. President Tubman has pulled Liberia out of a century of backwardness. Haile Selassie personally set up a constitution, decreed Parliament and Ethiopia's first elections. The way that Sekou Toure organized his country in five short years and under the very noses of the French was a masterpiece.

Cold-War Indifference. Guinea aside, the question of Communist influence does not--at least as yet--seriously arise. Though the present African leaders are almost all Western-educated and Western-minded, they are highly indifferent to the struggle between East and West. They seem to be much too possessive about their new position to ally themselves with other powers, even with one another.

The U.S. has declared itself in favor of supporting African political aspirations when "moderate, nonviolent and constructive." Campaigning last year in Rhodesia, the Central African Federation's crotchety little ex-Prime Minister, Lord Malvern, said: "The pushing out of Britain from a lot of countries who were not fit to run their own affairs, largely at the instance of the U.S., has certainly not been in the world's interest." Actually, out of fear of antagonizing London, Paris, Brussels or Lisbon, the U.S. has done little or no pushing in Africa.

"To those who say we are not ready for self-government," declares Kenya's Tom Mboya, "we have one central message. Civilized or not civilized, ignorant or not ignorant, rich or poor, we African states deserve a government of our own choice. Let us make our own mistakes, but at least comforted by the fact that they are our own mistakes." In mixed black and white nations such as Kenya (where the easy solution of all-black Ghana is not relevant), the whites are not so much fighting a last-ditch battle for total white supremacy as seeking to come to working terms with the emerging politically-minded African, so that neither side need make more mistakes than necessary.

The only trouble is that when the black and white goals and timetables get too far apart, the likelihood of a "moderate, nonviolent and constructive" solution becomes more remote than ever. The pat advocacy of "constructive" solutions has hard going in places such as Nyasaland, which a British commission of inquiry recently described as a police state. In Nyasaland, I sat recently having tea and cakes in the cottage of a British-educated African who is a deeply dedicated nationalist. As he talked on, an African woman, tall, fine-featured and very pregnant, sat nodding in agreement. Two days later I heard that at dawn the police had come for my host and his wife, among more than 500 rounded up during the government's desperate search to find evidence that the nationalists were in fact planning a "massacre" of whites (in the end, 50 Africans were killed, but no whites). The police waited a few days for the pregnant woman, until her baby was born. Then she loo was handcuffed, and her baby went to jail with her. The harvest of all this will hardly be "moderation."

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