Most Argentines find it difficult to feel optimistic about their future. This should be a heady, hopeful time. After nearly eight years of military misrule — a contemptible era marked by the military’s murder of thousands of civilians and by its foolish and humiliating adventure in the Falklands — the country is returning to civilian government. Yet, though there were celebrations over the defeat of Peronism and the election of Raul Alfonsin as president, the mood is made sober by the intractability of Argentina’s problems. The feeling of transformation experienced by Spain as it moved step by step from Francoism to democracy does not exist in Argentina. The victory last October of Alfonsin, a fifty-seven-year-old former congressman from the leftist wing of the middle-class Radical Civic Union, marked the first time that the Peronists had lost a presidential election. Many analysts believe that the defeat marks the end of the Peronist movement in Argentine politics. The wonder is not that Peronism may disappear but that it has lingered so long...

For the first time in eleven years, English-speaking Canadians have a prime minister from their own ranks. Hopeful observers feel this will ease the tension between the rest of the country and Quebec; but they may underestimate the strength of the separatist movement. The unity of Canada is threatened as much by indifference as by resentment. On the morning after last May’s elections, when Joe Clark, an unsophisticated and awkward young man from the west, defeated Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the intellectual from Montreal, to become the sixteenth prime minister of Canada, a Toronto taxi driver, overjoyed with the results, boasted, “Trudeau sure got thumped.” Yet Trudeau, I pointed out, had led in the national popular vote. “Oh, yeah,” the taxi driver replied, “but that’s only if you count the French.” Counting the French is not always easy for the people of Toronto and the rest of English-speaking Canada. For many of them, the French-speakers are an annoying and boring segment of national life who, when you bother to think about them, prevent Canada from becoming what everyone knows it ought to be — like Britain or Australia or the United States. In this case, according to the prevailing view, English-speaking Canada, the real Canada, thumped Trudeau, and it was pointless to muddy the issue with French votes. As a result of attitudes like this, which reflect the enormous gulf between the French-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, Canada is more sharply divided along communal lines than it has been in a half-century...

A few months after Francisco Franco died, magazine columnist Antonio Gala used some brutal imagery to insist that it was now time for Spain to rid itself of the old dictator’s institutions. "When a dog dies,” Gala wrote, "the rabies goes with it.” An enraged government confiscated all copies of the magazine left in news kiosks, but the officials were angered more by the metaphor than the meaning. In fact, the post-Franco government of King Juan Carlos is trying to do exactly what Gala suggested: stamp out the rabies and transform Spain from a dictatorship into a democracy. After almost forty years of authoritarianism and repression, Spain probably will have an elected, representative government before summer. The change has been planned by two unlikely reformers — King Juan Carlos, selected and trained by Franco as his successor, and Premier Adolfo Suarez, an exemplary graduate of Franco’s fascist National Movement. Despite their backgrounds, the thirty-nine-year-old king and his forty-four-year-old premier are young enough to understand the inevitability of change, though old enough to understand that change must seem slow for most Spaniards to accept it. Their relative youth also frees them from the memories and bitterness of the Spanish Civil War. Their performance so far has surprised skeptics and united many Spaniards behind them, yet success is not assured. Franco left an enormous legacy to Spain. His decades of dictatorial rule molded an authoritarian bureaucracy and a repressive police force...

On the bridge of a ship moving through the Panama Canal, you can see Gatun Lake high above and then feel the locks by the Atlantic Ocean elevate you up to it and later drop you down from it on the Pacific side. The experience conjures up all the schoolbook stories about the American Army Engineers who succeeded where Ferdinand de Lesseps of the Suez Canal had failed, wiping out the malaria that had slaughtered his men, devising the system of marvelous locks to take the place of his useless ditch. The Canal is the last splinter of Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick. The Canal is an engineering marvel, but it is also a colonial anachronism. To feel that, you must leave the bridge of the ship and sit in magistrate's court in Balboa, capital of the U.S. Canal Zone. I listened one morning to the American judge who, with his white hair and resonant though gentle voice, looked and sounded like Lewis Stone playing the judge in the old Andy Hardy movies. The judge was lecturing a seventeen-year-old Panamanian after convicting him of driving in the Zone without a license...

The most desperate people on the Caribbean island of Jamaica grow their hair in fierce, matted locks, smoke marihuana much of the day, and dream of salvation in Africa. They call themselves Rastafarians. Their response to poverty and rejection is a strange one, but it helps the government. For the poor are not clamoring in the streets; they are sedated in the alleyways. This gives Jamaica time. Prime Minister Michael Manley is trying to use that time to turn Jamaica socialist. Manley’s socialism, however, is rather idiosyncratic. A Marxist would barely recognize it. Manley’s government has defined socialism as “the Christian way of life in action.” A popular singer, Max Romeo, has composed a song that amplifies the definition for Jamaicans: "Socialism is love for your brothers. Socialism is linking hearts and hands. Would you believe it? Poverty and hunger is what we’re fighting. Socialism is sharing with your sister. Socialism is pulling people together. Would you believe it? Love and togetherness — that's what it means." Jamaican socialism is obviously mild stuff. Yet Manley is being attacked bitterly for it. Businessmen are in panic. American diplomats and investors are fretting. One rightist group has condemned Manley’s “recent speeches about socialism being Christianity” as “blasphemous and cheap politics.” The great problem for Manley, however, is that his socialism may be too mild in the long run to relieve Jamaica’s desperation...

As another American and I walked down La Rampa, a street in Havana, three little schoolgirls dressed in blue uniforms called out to us. “Tovarich, ” they said, using the Russian word for “comrade.” I approached one of the Cuban girls, a dark-skinned child of about ten. “Do you think we are Russian?” I asked her in Spanish. She nodded, grinning, her eyes shining in good fun. “But we’re not Russian," I told her. “We’re Americans.” The grin vanished. Her head pulled back. She frowned and tightened her eyes in fright. She was sorry that she had ever called out “tovarich.” It is not a pleasant feeling to frighten a child, but it is a feeling that an American ought to experience, or at least understand, before trying to analyze Cuba and the future of its relations with the United States. Relations will probably get better. Fidel Castro has sent out clear signals that he wants some kind of accommodation. In fact. I was in Cuba only because the Cubans need new channels for those signals...

To understand Mexico, an outsider should put aside his images of cactus and sombreros and even of Oscar Lewis’ Children of Sanchez for a while, and take an evening stroll down Avenida Revolucion or Avenida Insurgentes, or the ancient streets behind the Zocalo, or any of the other frenetic shopping areas of Mexico City. While the snarled and sometimes decrepit cars honk incessantly and puff out black fumes in the streets, the laborers and clerks of the city rush from shop to shop for after-work purchases, perhaps cheap bread, cheap shoes, expensive jeans. Families join for the excursion, mothers carrying blanketed infants, fathers tugging moonfaced children. The crowds are colored gaily by the neon storefronts that occasionally obscure the delightful porfirian or baroque architecture of old buildings. The shoppers wear hip-length sweaters or rebozos or windbreakers. Many wear clothes that are old but rarely tattered, neat and functional but rarely fashionable. By American standards, they are a poor people. Yet it is a poverty with which an American can sympathize, even if he has not experienced it. By all measures, Mexico is a developing country of the Third World, but Mexico City does not have the exotic and incredible, pervasive poverty of Calcutta, with its thousands of human wretches hunting for a piece of sidewalk on which to sleep. Nor does it have the poverty of the African Sahel, with its stick-boned, starving old people and little children. These are miseries so terrible that they blunt the senses and elude the imagination of most Americans. But this is not so in Mexico...

The enormity and horror of it all are exposed by what a visitor does not see in Bujumbura. Bujumbura, a languid, colorless, nondescript town on Lake Tanganyika, is the capital of Burundi, a central African nub of a country in which 85 percent of the population is Hutu. Yet a visitor can find few Hutus in Bujumbura. It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II and looking for Jews. A visitor would not need a tour of Treblinka to know that something terrible had happened. In Burundi, something terrible has happened. A year ago, the government, run by the minority Tutsi tribe, tried to eliminate, in a chilling and systematic way, the entire elite class of the Hutu people -- all those with some education, government jobs, or money. The death toll was perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps as great as two hundred thousand. Since then there has been even more killing, the latest in May and June of this year...

Funerals can confuse a visitor to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Is he on the western coast of Africa. or in New Orleans? First, the big brass band marches down Broad Street on a hot Sunday afternoon, playing rollicking hymns, not exactly "Didn't He Ramble?" but something like it. Then comes the second line, the youngsters singing and waving their open palms high in the air, and a soccer team, in uniform, tossing a ball to the rhythms. The casket follows, carried by a jaunty crowd moving to the beat. Schoolchildren in uniform and college graduates in mortarboards step behind. Finally, a long line of mourners, walking two by two, closes the parade. They wear black dresses and suits made of cloth far too thick for the incessant sun. Some men sport Homburgs. It shouldn't be a shock to come across a New Orleans funeral an ocean away in West Africa, but it is. A few moments' reflection, however, produces the obvious logic for it all. Slaves from Africa, with their traditions of joyous mourning, turned the sedate white man's funeral into a black man's jazzy funeral in Louisiana. Freed slaves then carried it back to Africa. But, despite the logic, it is hard for an American visitor to stifle his surprise...

With his brutality, President Idi Amin has obscured the real problems of the Asians of his country. Amin is a poorly educated man oblivious to the complexities of finance and state. He is the disgrace of Black Africa, and it is easy to be repelled by his ravings. But his expulsion of Uganda’s Asians—inspired, he says, by Allah in a dream—is not the chance blow of a maniacal tyrant. As an African Christian wrote in a church newspaper in East Africa recently, "Amin’s dream, even though the press has been laughing at it, is Africa’s genuine dream .” With or without Amin, the plight of the Asians in Uganda, like that of the many more Asians in the rest of East Africa, always has been precarious and even desperate. By ordering the Asians out in ninety days last August, President Amin acted with a haste and callousness that shocked even those other political leaders in East Africa who share his basic views. But he is not really more racist than they are. East Africans feel an intense and terrible hatred of the Asians who live in their countries. They are a despised minority, like the Jews of old Europe...

Ten years ago, I left New York on a dark, snow-lashed night and stepped down the next day into the morning glare of Dakar, in Senegal. It was an exciting, expectant time for the newly independent countries of Africa. Since that moment in Dakar, I have spent most of the last decade in Africa. Those ten years did not transform a gullible fool into a mean and narrow cynic, but I feel more critical, more doubtful, more skeptical, more pessimistic than I did in 1962. I still feel sympathetic and understanding. But I have learned that sympathy and understanding are not enough. Africa needs to be looked at with cold hardness as well. There have been more disappointments than accomplishments in Africa in the ten years. Two events — the Nigerian civil war and the assassination of Tom Mboya — struck like body blows at the sympathies of an outsider. The war was probably the greatest scourge in black Africa since the slave trade, and it was largely self-made. Murder cut down the man who seemed most to represent all that was modern in new Africa, and it was probably done for the glory of tribal chauvinism. On top of this, the decade has produced a host of other unpleasant events...

Several years ago, high in the medieval fortress city of Gondar, once the capital of Ethiopian emperors, I found myself in a poker game with an unusual assortment of Americans — three Peace Corps volunteers and a pair of U.S. Army Green Berets. Somehow, the game, with its clashing Americans, has always symbolized for me the double, contradictory role of American influence and involvement in the Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie. On one hand, the United States supports the traditional, authoritarian regime of the Emperor. American money helps him suppress a regional rebellion in Eritrea without his worrying about the grievances that cause it; and American money allows him to procrastinate as much as he likes in implementing the reforms that might modernize Ethiopia. At the same time, the United States, largely through its influence in education, has catalyzed revolutionary forces that threaten the authoritarianism of the Emperor, and may someday transform Ethiopia. This second role is largely accidental, and many American officials do not recognize it. Ironically, one immediate sign of it is a periodic outpouring of anti-Americanism from young Ethiopians...

The Republic of Chad has been independent for more than a decade. But its capital still displays a monument to Commandant Lamy, the French officer slain while conquering Chad at the beginning of the century. “He died,” the monument says, “for France and Civilization.” In many ways, that monument in Fort-Lamy tells an outsider almost all there is to know about the relations of France with most of its fifteen former colonies in black Africa. Though independent, most French-speaking African countries still feel an extraordinary kinship with France. Their leaders would never offend their former masters by tearing down a colonial monument, no matter how offensive it might seem. In fact, they probably agree with the sentiments set forth by this particular monument. French Africans are proud to have been colonized by France. The French conquest gave them civilization. An outsider finds numerous examples of common interest. It is no accident that President Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast is trying to lead black Africa into an accommodation with South Africa at the same time that France is trying to increase its trade with South Africa. Nor was it an accident that the Ivory Coast and Gabon recognized Biafra while Charles de Gaulle shipped arms there during the Nigerian civil war...

There are two ways of looking at the Congo. The first is to compare it with the past, and marvel. Once in turmoil, fractured, tearing apart, projecting images of brutality and savagery, the Congo these days is a reasonably calm, quiet, secure, and united country of 20 million people. A visitor can go almost anywhere without fear. The authority of President Joseph Desire Mobutu reaches almost everywhere. Considering the Congo’s history, these are remarkable achievements. The second way of looking at the Congo is to put aside the past, take the Congo for what it is today, and despair. The Congo is exhibiting some of the worst traits of independent black Africa — corruption, waste, elitism, luxury, grandiosity, and neglect. The government can build what the Congolese call the world’s second largest swimming pool, but it refused, for more than a year, to pay the bills to transport to the Eastern Congo U.S. relief food for children afflicted with kwashiorkor, the disease of advanced malnutrition. The public treasury spends millions of dollars for monuments and parades but no money to build a road from the farms of Kivu Province to their port on the Congo River. At a time when other African leaders, like President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, are trying to infuse their people with self-reliance, austerity, and honesty, Mobutu is rushing the Congo the other way...

Professors in South Africa sometimes like to stand in front of a wall map and show a visitor the “natural” sphere of influence of their white supremacist country. Invariably, their pointers sweep as far as Zambia, locked inland with Rhodesia to its south, Angola to its west, and Mozambique and Malawi to its east. The professors’ casual gesture suggests one of the dramatic conflicts in Africa — the struggle of black Zambia to free itself from the economic web of the white regimes in southern Africa. Since gaining independence from Britain six years ago, Zambia has tried to turn from the South and reach the other black African nations. Psychologically, this has worked. Zambians talk and act as if their lines were all out to the rest of black Africa. Economically, at least so far, it has not worked. Zambia’s four million people are still dependent on the white-ruled economies south of them. But this dependence has dwindled recently. The Zambians are trying to open new channels to black Africa. The most important is the thousand mile railway that the Chinese Communists are building from the Zambian copperbelt to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The success of Zambia’s drive to the North probably depends on three factors: the strength of President Kenneth Kaunda, the health of the copper industry, and the acquiescence, no matter how reluctant, of white southern Africa...

African governments are so fragile that they sometimes shatter at the first blow. For much of the last half of 1969, Kenya seemed as if it were due to be an other case in the tradition of the Congo and Nigeria. The gunning down of Tom Mboya on a street in Nairobi last July aroused enough tribal hatred to tear the country apart. Yet somehow, Kenya survived the six months of bitterness. At the start of 1970, it had at least as good a chance for stability as any other country in this volatile, impoverished continent. Kenya’s troubles began with the assassination of Mboya. Mboya, who had been Minister of Economic Planning and Development and the General Secretary of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), was one of the rare African politicians who tried to stand above tribe. He refused to appeal to tribal chauvinism in his election campaigns. Yet, ironically, his murder unleashed Kenya’s greatest surge of tribal hatred since its independence in 1963. The aftermath of Mboya’s death mocked everything he stood for. The members of Mboya’s Luo tribe assumed immediately that the murder was the work of the Kikuyus. The Kikuyus, the tribe of seventy-six-year-old President Jomo Kenyatta, are the dominant and best-educated people of Kenya. Though they number only two million in a population of ten million, the Kikuyus have controlled the major ministries of government and the top civil service positions...

On July 7, 1967, when the Nigerian civil war began, the censors of the federal military government stamped out all use of the phrase “civil war” in news dispatches going overseas. The Nigerians insisted their invasion of Biafra was a “police action.” Major General Yakubu Gowon, the federal military commander, told diplomats the job would be done in six weeks. His army would march into Biafra, string up Colonel C. Odumegwu Ojukwu “and his rebel gang,” and end secession. “Our orders are to get Ojukwu,” a government spokesman said at a news conference the day after the war began. “If we get him today, that’s it.” Now, more than two years later, the Nigerian government has neither captured Ojukwu nor ended secession. More than one million people, mostly Biafrans of the Ibo tribe, have died in the horror. There is no talk of police action now. The Nigerians have dropped pretense. They look on the Ibos of Biafra as a hated enemy people whose secession must be destroyed militarily even if it means destroying them. The specter of millions of starving children fails to dissuade the Nigerians. “All is fair in war,” Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the vice chairman of Nigeria’s federal executive council, told newsmen recently, “and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder...”

The Portuguese believe they have a special kind of colonialism that makes them different from other imperialists. In the Portuguese view, their kind of inspired colonialism gives them the right to stay in Africa during an era of black independence and the duty to stay in the face of African rebellion. They say their colonialism is special because of its tenure and nonracial quality. They believe that five centuries of rule tie their nation to Africa and that Portuguese colonialism creates societies that are color-blind and color-blended. Both beliefs are delusions. The Portuguese like to show visitors the Isle of Mozambique, a crowded, tiny, historic island off the northern coast of Mozambique in East Africa. Vasco da Gama, the great Portuguese explorer, found the island in 1498 while looking for a sea route to India. The island is engulfed in history, almost five centuries of Portuguese history. It was the capital and chief port of the Portuguese in East Africa until late in the nineteenth century...

The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing. The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa. To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa...