Neutralizing Down South

Among traveling statesmen, Africa is the favorite new tourist spot. The latest is Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, who last week was winding up a vast swing around Africa's west coast.

For almost two months, his yacht, the Caleb (Seagull), had hopped from port to port because Tito is afraid of airplanes. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah had a warm hug for the visitor before the two drove down crowd-lined highways to a physical-fitness rally at Accra Stadium. In Conakry, Guinean girls danced in the streets, cheering wildly as Tito waved from his open car; and in Bamako, capital of little neutralist Mali, school children chanted: "We are Tito's. Tito is ours."

Cold Storage. Tito dropped off tokens of his esteem at every stop. Nkrumah got a movie projector and reels of film about Yugoslavia, gave his bemedaled guest a symbolic golden stool in return. More substantial largesse included a promise to help build a naval base for Ghana, plus a $5,000,000 credit for Nkrumah's industrial-expansion program. In little Togo, Tito laid the foundation stone for a hydroelectric plant on which his own Yugoslav engineers had done some work. Even in Monrovia, where Liberia's President William Tubman runs a staunchly pro-Western and capitalist little country, Tito offered a $3,000,000 loan for local projects, including a new slaughterhouse and cold-storage plant.

Marshal Tito also pressed his foreign policy on everyone who would listen. To hear him tell it, the universal enemies are colonialism, the Belgians in the Congo, and Western imperialists in general, while Belgrade-style neutralism is Africa's only salvation. By the time he got up to Morocco, "the struggle of the Algerian people for freedom" was at the top of his list.

Bold Enough. Gratefully, King Hassan organized a big hunting party near Rabat, took the Yugoslav leader for a ride on one of his new superslick yellow-and-red diesel trains, just delivered from France, as thousands of Moroccans cheered. Then Tito steamed off for six days of talks with President Habib Bourguiba in Tunis and with the Algerian F.L.N. rebel leaders. Urging negotiations with France, Tito told F.L.N. Chief Ferhat Abbas: "You must be bold enough to know when to call off a war."

As the Caleb pulled into Alexandria last week for the last stop of the trip, Fellow Neutralist Gamal Abdel Nasser of the U.A.R. greeted Tito warmly and escorted him on a tour of the city, along streets crowded with cheering Egyptians who unspontaneously shouted: "Long live Tito and Nasser, leaders of positive neutralism!" The boss of the U.A.R. beamed as Tito reported that the neutralist doctrine was doing well just about everywhere down south. But it was just possible that Nasser, having his own ambitions in the lands to the south, would have preferred to have the neutralist gospel all to himself.

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