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...

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...

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...