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...

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...

For more than a decade, an obscure civil war has ravaged the Sudan. Largely ignored by the rest of the world, it is Africa’s longest war, paralyzing the Sudan’s three southern provinces intermittently from 1955 and continuously from 1963. The war has led to perhaps a half-million deaths and has forced 200,000 southerners to flee for refuge in neighboring countries. All the terror and turmoil have come from cultural hatred. A visitor can catch the meaning of the war on a Saturday night at the dance hall in Juba, the main town of the southern Sudan. As a southern quartet blares out its kinetic jazz, tall, black southerners and their callipygous women leave their opened bottles of “Camel” beer on metal tables and move toward the enormous dance floor, their legs suddenly beating, their rumps shaking with the first step on the floor. A few young northern men, who work in the government offices of Juba, ask southern girls to dance. The northerners, a shade or two lighter in skin color, flail their arms and beat the steps. Their heads bob and their knees shake, but somehow they miss. They seem awkward, ill at ease, out of beat. In the words of the racial cliché, the northerners, though African, don’t have rhythm. Or, to be more accurate, they have a rhythm that is culturally different from that of the black southerners. Northerners look to the Middle East and Arabic culture; southerners to the heart of Africa and black culture...