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...

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...

Since the beginning, most writers about the Peace Corps have either derided it or heaped praise on it, but never understood it. In this book, David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, two former officials of the organization, never mock or gush about it but always understand it. Their work is tough, realistic criticism, so tough and real that it is sometimes cruel and occasionally unfair. But it tells us, as no other book has, what the Peace Corps is all about. In assessing the work of the 30,000 volunteers sent to the Third World since 1961, Hapgood and Bennett conclude that “as a contributor to development in the Third World, the Peace Corps can make no great claims to accomplishment. . . . Volunteers have filled a lot of jobs, but their utility on those jobs, and often the utility of the jobs themselves, is questionable.” The writers do see more hope for the future. “An enormous potential clearly exists in the Peace Corps. ...” they write. “If the Peace Corps can build on the isolated cases of its success that its volunteers have registered, then its help to the Third World could be much greater than it has been to date.” But, even if the potential for development is unrealized, Hapgood and Bennett see a great deal of worth in the project...

Images play as important a roIe as guns in the Nigerian civil war. The Biafran secessionists, among Africa’s most sophisticated peoples, have known from the beginning that their chances for success depended as much on evoking world sympathy as on holding back the federal army. Now, after twenty months of war, it is clear that the Biafrans have been far more adept at propaganda than soldiering. If they survive in some sovereign form, they will owe it to their skill with images. Part of the Biafran success in public relations stems from the federal Nigerian Government’s failure at it. At the beginning, the Nigerians made absolutely no intelligent effort to get their point of view across. In fact, the government’s publicists often hurt the Nigerian case as much as they helped it. Many officials of the Ministry of Information were new at their job. Before the troubles, the top information officers had been Ibos, but they fled to their tribal home in eastern Nigeria soon after thousands of Ibos were massacred in northern Nigeria in September, 1966. When the eastern region seceded and called itself Biafra in May, 1967, these civil servants remained there. Besides lacking experience, the new Nigerian information officers also had the disadvantage of working for a military government...

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...

The aftermath of the murder of Tom Mboya has mocked what he stood for. Mboya, who seemed to represent all that was modern in Africa to the rest of the world, always shunned the appeals to tribal allegiance that have crumbled political stability elsewhere in Africa. His constituents were mainly the urban workers groping for a modern way of life. Yet his assassination on the first Saturday in July unleashed intense tribal hatreds. Kenya faces a long and dangerous period of instability unless the government can somehow placate his grieving Luo people. Mboya was shot and killed in downtown Nairobi on a street crowded with shoppers trying to make their last purchases before stores closed for the weekend. Two weeks later, police charged a young African with the murder. They released no details about him but his name, but that was enough to confirm all the suspicions that had been excited by tribal passions. The name, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, identifies the accused as a member of the dominant Kikuyu tribe, the people of President Jomo Kenyatta. Without a shred of evidence, most Luos, whether educated townspeople or illiterate peasants, had decided from the beginning that the killer must be Kikuyu. Now they had proof...

Walk down the frenzied, color-splashed side streets of Nairobi where most people do their shopping. This is Africa, but for block after block, the signs on the dukas, as the shops are called, evoke India and Pakistan: Ganijee Glass Mart, Indian Emporium, Patel & Co., Shah & Sons, Ghela Manck, Hindustan Boot Co., Bombay Sweet Mart. Most of the shops of downtown Nairobi are in the hands of Indians and Pakistanis. Wearing Benares saris and Punjabi pants and Sikh turbans, these shopkeepers and their families, with their jet black hair, enormous black eyes and pale brown skin, living in a land run by African blacks, are the most visible evidence of the gravest minority problem in East Africa today. There are 350,000 Asians, as the Indians and Pakistanis are called here, among East Africa’s 29 million people. About half of them live in Kenya, a quarter in Tanzania, a quarter in Uganda. They are the shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and foremen of East Africa, resented and often despised by the Africans who feel cut off from the economies of their own countries. The Asians fill just those jobs and places that Africans believe they now have enough experience and training to take...

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...”