Lists of diplomatic missions in the new African states make fascinating and somewhat disturbing reading. There are Nationalist (but not Communist) Chinese embassies in the Cameroons Federation and in what was once the French Congo (Brazzaville), Communist (but not Nationalist) Chinese ones in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. South Vietnam has an embassy in the Ivory Coast, while North Vietnam and Outer Mongolia are represented in Guinea. Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and most of the other formerly French states still have no diplomatic relations with Russia, but little Togo has a full-scale Soviet embassy, and some other states, such as Mali, Ghana, and Guinea, have embassy lists comprising the entire Eastern bloc in Europe and Asia.

If these sharp differences in foreign relations confirm suspicions that the cold war is moving into Africa, other facts point in the same direction. Most of the twenty-eight independent states of Africa have tended to align themselves with one of two blocs—African blocs, to be sure, but oriented in many important ways either to East or West. The so-called “Casablanca” group (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Egypt, and Morocco) call themselves “neutralists,” but one at least among them—Guinea—has sought and received bigger and better aid from the East than from the West. On the other hand, the so-called “Monrovia” group—twenty strong at the conference last year which called it into being—takes a broadly Western view of world politics and depends economically on the West.

Thus, Africa has already seen a great deal of the spectacle, long familiar in Asia, of East competing against West. In one instance the rivalry between Russian and American information services in Bamako, capital of Mali, became so intense that the government finally issued a regulation forbidding any foreign information centers at all. There have been loans and counter-loans. The new governments have signed trade and credit agreements with Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Hungary, and East Germany on the one hand; with Scandinavia, Japan, West Germany, Britain, and America on the other. Eastern-bloc technicians and advisers, including military ones, swarm about in Guinea and are becoming more numerous in Ghana and Mali; while in Senegal the French openly and without marked opposition maintain an important military base. Over the past year, of course, the intrusion of the cold war has been most clearly see n in the Belgian Congo, especially in the earlier stages of the crisis. As soon as Lumumba was murdered and the flag of Lumumbism had to be transferred from Leopoldville to Stanleyville, capital of the Congo’s Eastern province, the well-oiled cold war wheels began turning at once: Eastern bloc missions mushroomed in Stanleyville, while the West entrenched itself at Leo-poldville, where the UN has at last established its authority.

How deep does all this go? In countries so new, so poor, and so rapidly developing, appearance and reality are often more startlingly at variance than usual. Diplomatic politics and rhetoric impinge less on African actualities than they seem to do. Independence cannot alter overnight the basic economic facts of life, nor the economic habits and alignments on which the very existence of the government machine depends. In this context, words like “socialism” and “Communism” have to be redefined. Indeed it would be misleading to write off Africa as another split-down-the-middle victim of the cold war. Seen from the inside, the “Monrovia” and “Casablanca” groups are not as divided as they seem, though they do represent different answers to the problems of independence.

What keeps up the diplomatic and, to a decreasing extent, economic divisions between these groups is a set of mutual reproaches. The “Casablancans” accuse the “Monrovians” of being content with sham independence, while closely dependent on Western aid, trade, and defense. The “Monrovians” accuse the Casablancans of exaggerating the dangers inherent in cooperation with Europe and America, thereby making themselves vulnerable to the Soviet brand of imperialism.

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The “Split” Between the two groups came into the open in May 1960 when the “Casablancans” refused to attend the Monrovia conference of formerly French territories and some others—Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Cameroun, Togo, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Lybia, Madagascar, and Somalia. It was deepened when the two organizations began building up separate instruments in defense, trade, and information—and when the “Casablancans” again declined to attend the successor to the Monrovia conference, held at Lagos in January of this year.

But there are inevitably many openings in this African “iron curtain.” The barriers are weakest where they separate French-speaking neighbors. Such countries as Guinea (in the one group) and Senegal (in the other), or Mali and the Ivory Coast, were until recently all members of a single political and economic unit: French West Africa. The very moves toward independence were taken within the framework of a single political party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, whose founder-leader was Houphouet-Boigny, now the Ivory Coast’s president, and whose leading members included Modibo Keita, now Mali’s president, and Sekou Touré of Guinea. The new ruling groups are the product of a single mold, the politicians and high officials in “rival” capitals are former friends and even, in many cases, relatives.

One effort to improve relations was recently made by Houphouet-Boigny. He paid a cordial visit to Mali in an open attempt to get the “Casablancans” to attend the Lagos conference which was due to take place shortly, and he succeeded to the extent that the group agreed to send its respective foreign ministers. In addition to the grounds for accord already mentioned, Houphouet-Boigny had a trump card to play in these talks: Mali is landlocked. It became independent originally as part of a federation which also included Senegal, with its port of Dakar where Mali’s groundnuts and cotton could be shipped. But, because its leaders wanted to pursue a radical policy and Senegal’s wanted to proceed cautiously, the federation broke up amid great bitterness in 1960. Modibo Keita has insisted ever since on maintaining a clean break, refusing even to re-open the railway link between his inland capital and the port of Dakar. His nearest alternative outlet to the sea is not provided by Mali’s partner in the Casablanca group—Ghana—but by the country of Keita’s former chief in the Rassemblement Démocratique—the Ivory Coast. Mali’s trade now flows smoothly, if somewhat expensively, through the Ivory Coast’s capital and port of Abidjan—and steps are being taken (with Soviet aid) to improve the road and rail communications between these two countries.

There are other chinks in the curtain. Upper Volta, whose President Maurice Yameogo is as fiery and independent as his country is landlocked and poor, made a break with the past by signing a trade agreement with Ghana. Senegal, the bastion of French wealth and influence, has concluded a customs and financial agreement with Guinea. The prime minister of Nigeria (formerly British) has paid a visit to Guinea. Ghana has welcomed the head of Mauritania, a country which Morocco, one of Ghana’s Casablanca partners, refuses to recognize.

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At the lagos conference, held after much fanfare and expectation last January, it was expected that these developments would culminate in a grand reunion of the two groups. But at the last moment hopes of reunion were dashed when the foreign ministers of the “Casablancans” refused to come because the Algerian Provisional Government had not been invited. Radical opinion throughout Africa assumed that the ex-French countries had insisted on leaving out the Algerians in order not to displease General de Gaulle, but their delegates pointed out quite reasonably that it was hardly appropriate for the government of a country not yet independent to attend.

At the conference, Nigeria’s Governor General, the veteran Dr. Azikiwe, attempted to define the positions of the two groups. He stressed that both had declared the same objectives and set up basically the same kind of machinery for cooperation, but he singled out one important difference : “It is the conspicuous absence of a specific declaration on the part of the Casablanca states of their inflexible belief in the fundamental principle enunciated at Monrovia regarding the inalienable right of African states, as at present constituted, to legal equality, irrespective of their area and population; the right of African states to self-determination; the right of African states to safety from interference in their internal affairs through subversive activities engineered by supposedly friendly states.” This was a reference to Ghanaian policy in recent years—a policy of aggressive pan-Africanism which does not stop at giving support to insurgent refugees from states which in the eyes of Nkrumah have no right to exist.

There are some signs that Ghanaian foreign policy is changing, following a realization that aggressive expansionism is making more enemies than friends. On the eve of the Lagos conference, Nkrumah, speaking at the inauguration of the Volta project, observed that in Africa today “no-one seeks a revision of present boundaries unnecessarily.” Confirming the impression that Ghanaian policy has “softened,” official circles in Accra now deny that they are giving active support to opponents of neighboring governments. Ghana’s bitterest quarrel, that with her tiny neighbor, Togo, is in the process of being mended, and there are talks about the formation of a local union which would cut right across the “bloc” divisions: one between Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, and Ghana.

In more ways than one, Africans are getting tired of their blocs. The intermingling of ideological and genuine policy differences with personal antagonisms is becoming painfully obvious to all. (At the time of writing, the chief obstacle to a Ghana-Togo reconciliation is that the Ghanaians have proposed a meeting on Ghanaian soil which is unacceptable to the dignity of Togo’s president, who is asking for a meeting on neutral soil.) Now that some of the bloc barriers are beginning to appear absurd, it is perhaps not too optimistic to predict a growing realization that in the big argument between “reformist” and “revolutionary” Africa, the right answer lies somewhere in between. Just as the “radicals” cannot escape the need for Western capital and markets, so the “moderates” are no longer very far behind in new-style planning. Senegal, for all her dependence on French purchases of her crops, has recently produced a five-year plan which is unmistakably the product of a government that takes planning seriously. Instead of talking in spectacular (and commercially frightening) terms about outright nationalization and thus depriving herself of foreign investment (as is happening in Ghana) or actually carrying out such nationalization (as has happened in Guinea), the Senegalese are quietly proceeding with the establishment of industries in which the government has a share. And they are at last following the lead of Ghana and Nigeria in setting up cooperative marketing boards to handle their export crops.

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This blurring of the frontiers between the “blocs” within Africa necessarily complicates the cold war picture. Only a year ago it seemed that in Ghana, Mali, and Guinea, the Russians had a promising bridgehead, while in the rest of Africa their prospects were dim. Even then this was a superficial view; now, as the logic of events forces a certain reshuffling of African alignments, the prospects of East and West are more obscure. Most dramatic of all, perhaps, was the setback Russia experienced in Guinea, culminating in the expulsion of the Soviet ambassador last December. The background to this startling event is formed by the circumstances of Guinea’s achievement of independence in 1958, when Touré said “Non” to de Gaulle’s new-style Community and the General determined to make an example of him by cutting all links and by letting him solve his own problems. As a result, Guinea was driven further East than she actually wanted to go. Sekou Touré and the other Guinean leaders have never wearied in their protestation that the only “ism” they are interested in is Africanism. But was de Gaulle’s policy really as shortsighted as it seemed? If his object was to teach Guinea a lesson, he has largely succeeded. Guinea’s revolution relied on a centralized and skilled civil service. This was lacking when the French suddenly pulled out, and no amount of Czech, Chinese, and East German technicians could remedy the deficiency. The result was a breakdown in distribution of goods and the collapse of the nationalized import and export organization, the Comptoir Guinéen du Commerce Extérieur et Intérieur. In a remarkably frank speech last March, Sekou Touré acknowledged that “economic and commercial activities are so infinitely varied that no single organization, even when staffed by experts, can possibly act for the whole of the nation when it comes to visualizing the needs of that nation.” There had been widespread corruption, with the result “that instead of the number of middlemen being reduced there has grown up a set of new middlemen, a whole host of dishonest traffickers exploiting one aspect or another of our life.”

Sekou Touré was addressing a chamber of commerce meeting, but his real audience was all of Africa, startled at the prospect of the most Eastward-looking state on the continent denouncing all-out state control practice after giving it a trial. In a statement of principles to govern his new measures, Touré voiced ideas which would be as acceptable in Dakar and Abidjan as they would in Accra or Bamako. Certain things had to be controlled by the state: the currency, the export trade, and the broad direction of internal trade. However, “state control of the direction of foreign trade must not be regarded as a state monopoly of trade.” The private trader—even if he were a foreigner—was essential in providing an accurate and reliable gauge of economic demand and insuring its effective satisfaction.

Not surprisingly the kind of economic malaise described by Touré translated itself into political terms. Political pressure did not come from the right, since there is virtually no bourgeoisie in Guinea. It came from the left. The government began to be pressured by Communist elements in the unions and among the teachers. The expulsion of the Soviet ambassador followed a “teachers’ plot” which resulted in five union leaders being imprisoned last November. The “plot” itself was typical of the climate of Guinean political life. The Communist-dominated teachers’ union distributed a memorandum demanding that the teachers should receive equal pay for equal work, regardless of qualifications. East European embassies were among the recipients of the memorandum, which had been drawn up without consultation with the ruling Parti Démocratique Guinéen leaders. The demands were turned down by the government and the teachers began to agitate. Their cause was taken up by mobs of angry students and there were noisy meetings. The government, operating in its characteristic way, called a meeting of two hundred delegates from all the schools in Conakry, who were persuaded to pass a vote of confidence. On their return to the schools, however, they found even angrier mobs of their colleagues waiting to denounce them as betrayers. As soon as the dust had settled and the leaders were imprisoned, Sekou Touré came out into the open. He told the second annual congress of his party that recent efforts to overthrow the regime were the work of “a Marxist-Leninist group, based in Moscow, Paris, and Dakar, whose Machiavellian plan was to unleash a Marxist revolution in Guinea.” He then went on to accuse the French ambassador in Conakry of having participated in the plot.

Seen from Moscow, these developments could hardly be more disconcerting, as was proved by the prompt dispatch to Guinea of Mikoyan, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister. The visit was followed by the appointment of a new Soviet ambassador and the incident was closed.

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How seriously does Moscow take Africa? It is noteworthy that at the World Congress of Communist Parties in Moscow in 1960, out of a world total of forty million Communist party members, only some fifty thousand came from Africa. A mere handful of African Communist parties—six in all—were recognized, out of a global total of eighty-one and these were in North Africa and South Africa—none in independent Black Africa. True, representatives of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali were present as fraternal delegates and addressed the conference, but their presence seemed more like a portent than an immediate factor. Soviet aims in Africa have not been able to focus on precise political objectives. The best they have been able to do is make the fullest possible use of their principal psychological weapon: the reaction against Western colonialism. In the psychological East-West competition for allegiances, this advantage may be coupled with the series of blows that Western prestige has suffered, including the Suez and Cuban fiascoes. And though America has shared with Russia the benefit of being relatively free from colonial associations, her internal race problems have also been a handicap.

The picture of Africa that Russians have formed differs markedly, and often rather comically, from that of the West. Soviet journalists writing on the parts of Africa in their sphere of influence produce largely dry, factual analyses of problems, while the bulk of independent Africa makes an easy target for them. A recent report on the Ivory Coast in Moscow New Times by M. Azembski says:

What is happening within the stone fastness of colonialism is unlike developments in the other independent states of Africa. In the Ivory Coast, where “natives” have been ruling almost “independently” for some time now, there has begun a new political game of Africans against Africans. The Ivory Coast is becoming a capitalist state. . . . The French administration gave the “black elite” the possibility of owning Lincolns and living in Mansions. . . .

Of Senegal, V. Sidenko writes in the same paper:

The economy of the whole country is dominated by two or three foreign firms, who buy groundnuts—the country’s staple export—at rock-bottom prices, selling third-rate products made by them in exchange, and making large profits. Most of the industry catered to the Europeans, and when independence came the market for goods became so small that several of the concerns had to shut down, causing unemployment. However, French control of the territory has remained; military agreements were signed whereby the French retained their base in Dakar. Even Senegal’s own army is not yet emancipated; all the officers are white, but there are no whites in the ranks. . . .

These descriptions are partly a venomous mixture of platitude and falsehood. The description of the Ivory Coast (which later develops into an attack on the attitudes of that ex-revolutionary, President Houphouet-Boigny) is more or less accurate. Of Senegal, it is true to say that the advent of independence has caused the market for Dakar’s industries to shrink. But the reason is that these industries were meant to supply the whole of French West and Equatorial Africa, and their products now face customs barriers erected by other states equally anxious to protect their own industries. The picture of groundnuts buying is a travesty of a situation in which the state is now energetically taking over the purchase and sale of groundnuts. The Senegal army, which has four battalions commanded by a Senegalese general, has only Senegalese officers. However, there are still French units with technical duties stationed in Senegal, and the big base at Dakar remains French.

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Any over-all attempt to assess the achievements of the Russians in terms of trade and aid would be premature, for their campaign is just beginning. While Guinea appears, in the matter of Soviet aid, to have come to the end of a rather depressing chapter, Ghana is just opening a new one, having embarked on a “new economic policy” aimed at using political neutrality to solve two pressing economic problems: the disposal of cocoa and industrialization. The government has abolished the traditional cocoa-selling agencies in London and New York, centralizing all selling at Accra, where big barter deals can more easily be made with the East. While last year the Eastern bloc bought only some 10,000 tons out of a record crop of about 450,000, it is hoped that this year’s purchases will reach 70,000. The Russians are paying for 55 per cent of the cocoa’s cost in hard currency (sterling) and 45 per cent in goods and services. Accordingly, the Eastern bloc recently granted Ghana the equivalent of 300 million dollars in the form of credits for new industries to be planned and eventually built by her own technicians. These funds are granted almost entirely on 2½ per cent interest terms, as against the 6 per cent normally charged by Western sources, and are repayable in varying periods up to ten years—in Ghana currency. That is, the factories are in effect to be provided on barter terms in exchange for cocoa and other produce. In addition there is a series of trade agreements which also provide for a two-way flow of goods.

Ghana is gearing its whole economy to these arrangements. It has recently abolished all open general-import licenses—chiefly to help control the growing trade deficit—but with the important subsidiary objective of enabling the country to buy enough goods in the Eastern market to meet the new obligations. These moves must be seen in perspective. The preponderance of Ghana’s trade is still with the West (only £12 million out of some £245 million was with the East in 1960). For the Volta project alone (kingpin of Ghana’s industrialization program) some £93 million is coming from Western sources for the hydro-electric dam and the aluminum shelter. Moreover, the validity of the “cocoa for factories” equation has yet to be proved. Russia’s cocoa purchases are notoriously erratic. As the Russians are not habitual chocolate eaters or drinkers, it is true to say that in the East (including China as well as the East European bloc) there is a far larger potential market than in the saturated West. But no assurances have been forthcoming that the Russians really intend to develop a chocolate industry. What purchases they make may well be for strategic stockpiling or merely for political reasons. Worse still, these exports may find their way back to the world market, thus further depressing the already rock-bottom prices. (This has been known to happen in the past.) Another doubt about the industrial credits is whether they are really as attractive as they seem. They have not been put out to tender, as most Western projects, thus raising the question whether the Russians are not recouping themselves for the loss of interest by merely charging higher prices for their factories.

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If the russians are still at an early stage in their African efforts, the same applies even more forcefully to the Chinese. Not only are they now multiplying their economic and, where possible, diplomatic missions and aid programs (they have advanced £7 million to Ghana), but they appear prepared to carry into Africa their current ideological quarrel with the Russians. Observers at the recent Afro-Asian writers conference in Cairo concluded that the Chinese have emerged as open rivals to the Russians in Africa. Their delegation, led by the chairman of the Union of Chinese Writers, tried to make the Russians appear lukewarm in their militancy in championing liberation movements. While in private contact with African leaders the Chinese have been adopting an openly “racist” line—to the effect that “these Europeans are all the same, French, Americans, Russians, or Poles; we non-whites must get together”—the Chinese appear readier than the Russians to provide arms, money, and training to “liberation fighters.” They are giving full backing to a long-standing revolt in the Cameroun and have offered aid to Angolan “resistance groups.”

If Eastern bloc plans in Africa are still tentative, the West’s position is the subject of much re-thinking, both among Africans and Europeans. On the economic side, the underlying debate is being conducted over the future of the Common Market. This year the sixteen African states associated with the “Six” of Europe are due to renew the terms of their association. The resulting heart-searching is complicated by Britain’s imminent entry, and the prospect that the Commonwealth countries of Africa must also in some way be associated. Africans are divided on the very principle of the association. At a Eurafrican parliamentary meeting on the subject last year, they heard Professor Hallstein, the Common Market’s president, declare that “the ultimate motive and the most important effects of our association are political.” The thought was echoed by the Ivory Coast’s delegate, who added: “It is not merely mercantile considerations which motivate our efforts here: what is at stake is the very safeguarding of our persons and our liberty.” That is one view. Another was expressed by Nkrumah soon afterward, when he called the Common Market “the greatest danger for Africa today.”

Under the 1957 Treaty of Rome which established the Common Market, the sixteen overseas territories then colonies of the Six were associated on special terms. The idea was that special arrangements (tariff preferences, bulk buying of produce, and development aid) should in future be made jointly with all of the Six. The fundamental debate now in progress is whether this is as much in the Africans’ interest as it seems on the surface. The essence of Nkrumah’s thesis is that the association is bound to retard industrialization in the African countries, which will continue to serve as protected overseas markets for European manufacturers and sources of cheap raw materials. The subsidy they will obtain in return for assuming these obligations will be small compared with the losses they will suffer if they deprive themselves of the advantages of meeting their own requirements in the world market. To these criticisms Nkrumah’s African opponents reply that the Rome Treaty gives them adequate safeguards and, when they have used their present opportunity to strengthen these still further, the advantages of the association will outweigh any drawbacks.

In reality, the sixteen states have as yet little choice. Most of the former French territories are still dependent on France, if not for actual budgetary aid, at least on French-guaranteed purchases of their crops at prices well above world levels. In addition there is the dilemma about the Commonwealth countries—rivals on the world market who may now be admitted into the “club” to share its fruits. Feelings of solidarity and the ideal of pan-Africanism impel the associated states to welcome the disappearance of an artificial economic barrier. On the other hand, each government is painfully afraid lest fresh competition injure its economy. The answer to these problems will currently be a continuation of the association between the European Six and the African Sixteen—and the admission of Ghana and Nigeria to its essential advantages. In the long run, however, the pattern may change. Taking the plunge from the warm banks of protectionism into the cold and bracing water of economic freedom is a prospect that gains popularity in Africa as the years go by.

Not only in this matter of the Common Market is the tide flowing toward radicalism. Another leading impulse derives from the unequal progress of enlightenment on the one hand and of actual welfare on the other, and has nothing directly to do with the cold war. In all the new African states, including Ghana and Guinea, where radical experiments have scarcely yet begun to change the lot of the ordinary citizen, there is a growing realization that the benefits of independence have so far been restricted to a narrow circle. The splitting up of the old colonial groupings and the consequent economic and political Balkanization of Africa has been far more striking in its effects than have been the results of any steps toward unity. It has meant that each country, however impoverished, must shoulder for itself all the burdens of statehood, including diplomatic representation and the financing of development projects. There has been little left for immediate and tangible distribution. The idea of progress gains ground, but in the absence of visible improvements in the standard of living, its effect will be to make people aware of a misery they previously took for granted. This constitutes a basic, though distant, threat to every African regime. However, for the moment there is no visible link between this threat and Africa’s alignments in the cold-war struggle.

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