It was always inevitable that the new black African governments, insecure and nervous and sensitive to even the shadow of a threat to their authority, would lash out at the Jehovah's Witnesses. After all, this strange, fanatic, fundamentalist sect not only was among the first victims of the Nazis in Germany but was harassed for years by outraged local governments in the United States. Since the independence of most of black Africa, the Witnesses have been banned or restricted in Malawi, Gabon, Cameroun, Zambia, Guinea, Tanzania and Kenya. The sect's most terrible troubles came in Malawi last year and its most recent in Kenya this year. There are relatively few Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa, perhaps 250,000 on a continent of 340 million. They can hardly be called more than a minor irritant. But the threat of their presence has been exaggerated by African leaders unsure of their political power, intolerant of opposition, equipped with fragile institutions, and frustrated by their failure to make nations out of hostile tribes. As ever, the problem stems from the attitude of the Witnesses toward governmental authority. Founded in the United States by Charles Taze Russell in the 1890s, the Witnesses believe that governments are part of "Satan's world.” In their view, therefore, God's authority is always greater than the authority of any government...

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...

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...

LANCE SPEARMAN is a nattily dressed detective who sports a straw hat, bowtie and goatee. He likes Scotch on the rocks, buxom women, El Greco cheroots, and fast cars. He uses reverse karate kicks, his fists, and a hand gun to bring down such enemies as Zollo, the Mermolls, and Countess Scarlett. He is the black James Bond and the most popular fictional character in Africa today. In almost every English-speaking town of Africa, young men, most with no more than five years of schooling, sit on the sidewalks and read the weekly picture magazines that chronicle the adventures of Lance Spearman and other heroes like Fearless Fang, who is the black facsimile of Tarzan, or the Stranger, who is the black Lone Ranger. In Kenya, for example, the adventures of Lance Spearman have a greater circulation than any of the daily newspapers. This phenomenon of popular culture suggests a good deal about the tastes of ordinary semi-educated young men in the African towns — their yearning, their uncertain identification with the fringes of Western culture, their need for fancy in a harsh urban world. The magazines are known in the publishing trade as "look-reads." In effect they are photographed comics that resemble comic books, except that the action is photographed instead of drawn. Little balloons of dialogue appear over the heads of the characters...

When he gets to reviewing American images and interventions abroad, President Nixon might start with the way in which the State Department and other U.S. Government agencies overseas are sometimes upstaged by an old foe of his — American labor. For years, the AFL-CIO has pursued its own foreign policy in Latin America, boasting, among other things, of how it helped to bring down Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (now Guyana). Now it is turning to Africa. Since the AFL-CIO activity there is fairly new, that might be a good place for President Nixon to choke it off. In its foreign operations, American labor sometimes acts, or tries to act, as an arm of the U.S. Government. But it can be an uncontrollable arm. In January, 1968, for example, Vice President Humphrey visited Kenya with a large party that included Irving Brown, executive director of the African American Labor Center, the main agency for AFL-CIO’s activities on that continent. American Ambassador Glenn W. Ferguson thought it unwise to include Brown because he is disliked by many Kenya leaders, who believe he has shown too much favoritism to Minister for Economic Planning Tom Mboya...

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...

I have spent a good deal of the past five years reading reams about Africa, some of it informing, some of it nonsense. David Hapgood’s book has more sense than all the rest. This is not unexpected. Those of us who have met Hapgood, or have read his newsletters and magazine articles, have long known that he leaves all the academicians and other journalists far behind. Few Americans understand Africa the way he does. The university professors who trek through Africa tend to see it through the prism of their own pet theories. The embassy men tend to see it as a giant continent cracked by the cold war into one part that adulates John F. Kennedy and another that cheers Chou En-lai. The newsmen tend to see it through the whispers of the elegant elite, sipping brandy and ginger in the hotel lobbies of the capitals. Hapgood, a former New York Times writer who spent two years in Africa as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, looks at Africa with a cold eye and tough mind. He enjoys Africa, he feels it, even loves it, but he is not taken in...

One night in steaming, gamboling Lagos, a young Nigerian poet leaned forward and whispered, "Nigeria is made up of a caste of corruption on the top and a caste of grumblers on the bottom." A friend joined in. "The grumblers are angry." "No," the poet disagreed. "They are not angry yet. They still have too much." These words caught the mood of a generation in Africa...

The flood of recent writing about Africa has rushed in two directions. One has been the Tarzan-pygmy-Time Magazine-cannibal-witch doctor-Robert Ruark way. The other has been the slide rule and footnote way of the political scientist, studying the twists and turns of Dark Continent politicians as if they were all Lyndon Johnsons. But Africa is not a land of comic-strip characters or of leaders practiced in the fragile art of gentlemanly politics. Either approach ignores the human side of Africa. Anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Hortense Powdermaker, in their new books, try to illuminate just that... In The Human Factor in Changing Africa, Herskovits tries to summarize decades of scholarship, so that the general reader can make something of the mystifying and ever-changing events of the continent. Herskovits concerns himself mostly with how the impact of colonial rule changed African cultures, and with how the cultures themselves changed some of the European innovations... In Copper Town, Miss Powdermaker’s approach is much narrower, though her subject is as broad. She focuses on the town of Luanshya in the copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia and tries to define the moods and tensions of Africans caught in a swiftly changing society. She exploits the particular incident to illustrate the general movements in Africa...

Keepers Of Nationalism - The poverty of tribal, rural hinterlands may be Africa's most despairing problem, but it is in the atmosphere of cities that African leaders tackle the issue. African cities, bustling and impatient, are far away from tribal Africa with its huge and potentially supreme masses. Only 12% of the population between the Sahara Desert and South Africa live in cities. But urban Africa Is vital Africa. The cities are the keepers of nationalism. Their moods create the changes that make headlines and make the new Africa. To understand new Africa, an observer must catch the mood of its cities. Let us catch the mood of three and see three different African ways of adjusting to the modern world...

Niyi Ishola, a 28-year-old government secretary in Nigeria, admires America very much. One of his great heroes, in fact, is the late John Foster Dulles. But Ishola has a complaint. "Soviet cosmonauts Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin give a much better impression than your astronaut John Glenn," he says. "Both Russians wear uniforms in their photographs, and the people respect uniforms. Uniforms show discipline. In his pictures," Ishola continues sadly, "Glenn wears a bowtie." John Glenn's bowtie has not stalled America's drive to win friends and respect In Africa. But this tale of a young Nigerian's concern with astronautical polka dots reflects the difficulty of trying to analyze the impact of U.S. policies on Africa. Africans live in a world remote from the world of Americans. Africans worry about farm plots and factory sites, not Castro and Khrushchev, about building a nation, not building an image. American assumptions about what impresses Africans, or what disturbs them, often lack a true base. The difficult problem of American race relations can illustrate this a bit. Many U.S. policymakers assume that the names Little Rock, New Orleans, Oxford do not endear the United Slates to Africa. The assumption, of course, is true. The treatment of Negroes in the United Slates does bother Africans...