Isolated and tormented, he once said that he was going to murder his paintings, but fortunately they are still with us. When I graduated from the City College of New York in 1952, my Uncle Morris had a heart-to-heart talk with me. He told me to work hard, get a steady job and not spend the rest of my life struggling in a Paris garret like his cousin Soutine. "Chaim Soutine, the painter?" I asked. "You mean you've heard of him?" replied Uncle Morris. My late Uncle Morris' ignorance might seem inexcusable. By 1952, Soutine's paintings graced the collections of the Phillips Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and other museums throughout the United States. MOMA and the Cleveland Museum of Art had recently mounted a major retrospective of his work. His reputation had been set in the art world for many years...

With his bizarre and fearsome images, the enigmatic master of apocalypse still speaks to us across five centuries. A half-millennium ago when Europe was moving out of the Middle Ages, Hieronymus Bosch, a prosperous painter and landowner in the duchy of Brabant in what is now the Netherlands, was widely admired as one of the cleverest, most pious, most perceptive, most apocalyptic masters of his times. He then slipped into several hundred years of obscurity. The symbolism and message of his terrifying masterpieces seemed bizarre and unsavory and even heretical. But he has been rediscovered in the 20th century. American tourists, who have little Bosch at home, now crowd through the museums of Europe to be awed by his great triptychs or to track down his smaller masterpieces...

Riot police swinging truncheons rushed into the Bank of France before dawn Wednesday and forced aside a mass of striking workers to lead two besieged bank officials out of the venerable building. The show of force, which, ironically, came on a day when workers throughout France were electing representatives to traditional courts that try to settle labor disputes peacefully, infuriated French labor unions and seemed to harden the nine-day-old strike. It also reflected the poor state of relations between the labor unions and the conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac. Jacques de Larosiere, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who is now governor of France’s government-run central bank, said he had called on the police because the strikers were holding two bank officials against their will...

When the U.S. and Soviet leaders meet this week in Washington, Western Europe will be looking on like a bashful cheerleader, too nervous to cheer very loudly but too loyal to let the side down. This ambiguity has led to some confusion. In public pronouncements, all the West European leaders welcome the summit meeting and endorse its probable main achievement--the signing of a treaty to eliminate American and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the kind that could strike at the Soviet Union from Europe and at Europe from the Soviet Union. But many European government officials in private, and many newspaper and strategic analysts in public, say they are resigned to the treaty and express worry about where it will lead...

Only one restaurant in all Paris prohibits smoking. Only a handful, mostly American fast-food outlets, have nonsmoking sections. Premier Jacques Chirac rarely talks to reporters without waving a cigarette for emphasis. A stranger can always identify the high school in any Paris neighborhood by the cluster of teen-agers outside puffing awkwardly on cigarettes. The French government spends far more every year on promoting smoking than on discouraging it. There are other countries where smoking is more prevalent. Anyone who has ever listened to the raspy voice of a bartender in Madrid or choked at breakfast in a Polish coffee shop knows that. But few countries are as puzzling as France in their attitude toward smoking...

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia now in rebellion, and Premier Hun Sen, the leader of its Vietnam-supported government, signed an agreement Friday that could lead to a negotiated end of the long civil war in their country. Much depends on whether the Khmer Rouge, the powerful partner in Prince Sihanouk’s rebel coalition, will heed the call of Sihanouk and Hun Sen to join them in future negotiations. The agreement, signed with great ceremony before television cameras, does little more than set the ground rules for future negotiations. But there was an optimistic air in the secluded chateau in Fere-en-Tardenois, 75 miles east of Paris, where the 65-year-old Sihanouk and the 36-year-old Hun Sen signed the document after meeting over the last three days...

Two opponents at war, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia, and Hun Sen, the present premier of Cambodia, met Wednesday in a secluded hotel in eastern France for negotiations aimed at leading their small Southeast Asian nation out of its bloody morass. The talks, which many Cambodians described as historic, were the first such negotiations since Vietnam invaded Cambodia nine years ago. After the session ended almost seven hours later, there was muted optimism. No agreements were announced, but both sides said they will meet again today and perhaps on Friday. They also announced that they will hold another round of negotiations sometime in the future at Sihanouk’s home in Pyongyang in North Korea...

James Baldwin, a renowned writer who spent a lifetime in literature trying to explore his identity as a black and as an American, died Monday night at the age of 63 in his home in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France. His death from cancer was announced Tuesday morning by Bernard Hassalle, a longtime companion and secretary. The eldest son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, a small, slight man, was looked on for much of two decades both as a distinguished young American novelist and as a black essayist with the extraordinary, almost uncanny power of making his black experience meaningful to a white audience. But, after the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation waned, perhaps because he had become too strident a black for white audiences, perhaps because he failed, like other American novelists of the 20th Century, to maintain the excitement and freshness of his earlier work...

Premier Jacques Chirac of France faced bitter condemnation from Britain and growing suspicion within France on Tuesday over his deal with Iran for the release of two French hostages in Lebanon. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, commenting on the French concessions that brought the two hostages home, told the House of Commons in London that “treating with terrorists only leads to more kidnappings and more violence.” “That is the way we will not do it,” she went on. “The best defense against terrorists is to make clear that you will never give in to their demands.” Even before Thatcher spoke to Parliament, an aide to Chirac said in Paris that “we are a little astonished” at reports of the fury of Thatcher and British Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe and at editorials in London newspapers that accused France of “betrayal” and of “a cynical compact with terror...”

The French government allowed Wahid Gordji, the Iranian official suspected of helping terrorists in Paris, to leave the besieged Iranian Embassy and return home to Iran on Sunday as part of an obvious trade for two French hostages released by their captives in Beirut two days ago. The office of Premier Jacques Chirac, in a carefully worded statement, also held out the hope that Iran would now use its influence to help arrange the release of the three other French hostages in Beirut. The departure of Gordji, holed up in the embassy for five months, also appeared to signal an end to what the French press had called “the war of the embassies” and could signal an early resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries...

Premier Jacques Chirac, welcoming two former hostages home to France from Lebanon, acknowledged Saturday that their release represents an improvement in France’s relations with Iran but denied as “a pack of lies” a report that ransom had been paid. The report had appeared only hours earlier in the influential and usually authoritative newspaper, Le Monde. In a front-page story, Le Monde said, “The payment of a ransom contributed to the liberation of the hostages.” But Chirac used strong language in denying the report at a news conference at Paris’ Orly Airport. “I deny as emphatically as I can the pack of lies that claims France paid a ransom,” Chirac said. The controversy over how France gained their release did not dampen the emotional welcome at the airport for Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer...

The region of Burgundy was once an independent state, a powerful rival of France, boasting the most elegant and fashionable court in Europe. But all that power dwindled away half a millennium ago, leaving Burgundy with little more than memories and wine. Since then, Burgundy has had its ups and downs. In his 1934 novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller described Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, as “a hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars.” Its past glories as the seat of a great duchy were lost on him. Today, no one can accuse Burgundy of wielding imperial power. But its wine--prized throughout the world at breathtaking prices--has made Burgundy one of the richest regions of France...

Islamic extremists, citing assurances of an impending change in France’s policy toward the Middle East, freed two French hostages in West Beirut on Friday. Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer, were released from separate cars outside the seaside Summerland Hotel, about 50 yards from waiting French Embassy officials and Syrian secret servicemen. The cars sped away quickly and the two men were rushed to the French Embassy in Christian East Beirut in bulletproof vehicles, with journalists and photographers racing behind. Normandin later told ABC News he was imprisoned with two Americans. “I was with two Americans--Joseph Cicippio and Edward Tracy--since the 12th of February,” he said. He gave no indication as to whether the kidnapers planned to release the Americans...

Hardly a week passes nowadays without a new political scandal in France. The air is charged with accusation. There are so many smears, in fact, that it’s hard for all of them to stick. The sound and fury is actually the unofficial opening of the campaign for next spring’s presidential election. The most serious scandal--or, as the French prefer to call it, affaire-- has echoes of the U.S. Iran-Contra furor because it involves illegal sale of arms to Iran. By all logic, that affair should have damaged the political standing of President Francois Mitterrand. But Mitterrand, a Socialist, seems to have wriggled out of the affair somewhat easily, leaving behind a trap for his conservative arch-rival, Premier Jacques Chirac, who in turn seems to have slipped the trap...

History hangs on most Spaniards in ways Americans can hardly understand. That difference is at the heart of the repeated failure of Spanish and U.S. officials to negotiate a new treaty allowing the United States to keep its military bases in Spain after May, 1988. After the seventh round of talks ended in failure early this month, an American spokesman insisted that U.S. negotiators understood the problems posed for Spain by a treaty dating back to the days of late dictator Francisco Franco. But when pressed by journalists to amplify this understanding, the American protested, “Look, you’re talking about something that happened just two years after I was born.” Americans do not like to look back...

The people of this North African country are quietly proud these days of what seems like a revolution without pain, their ability to end the long reign of elderly Habib Bourguiba without bloodshed, without fanfare and without panic. “It was a great historic event,” Khemais Chamari, long known as an opposition leader, told a group of American journalists Sunday, “but it has passed as if it were no event at all.” “People are very proud,” said an international foreign aid specialist who knows the Tunisians well. “For years, everybody was worried about what would happen to Tunisia after the end of Bourguiba. Now they know, and they are happy...”

Zine Abidine Ben Ali, a 51-year-old army general serving as premier, took over the presidency of Tunisia smoothly and peacefully Saturday after removing an aging President Habib Bourguiba at dawn from the nearly absolute power he had held for 31 years. Citing a report by a medical commission that the octogenarian Bourguiba was senile and ill, Ben Ali, appointed premier by Bourguiba only a month ago, announced to the nation that the politician who had led Tunisia to independence in 1956 was “absolutely incapable of assuming the duties of president of the republic.” A few hours later, Ben Ali was sworn in before Parliament as the new president of Tunisia. The Tunisian constitution provides for the premier to succeed to the presidency upon the death, resignation or physical incapacity of the president, but it lays down no rules for determining that incapacity...

Spanish and U.S. officials failed again Friday to reach agreement on a new treaty to keep U.S. military bases in Spain, sending their negotiations into a critical final phase that will determine the bases’ fate. Both sides sought to minimize their failure and emphasized that they have decided to meet next month for an eighth round of talks on the bases, which grew out of a joint defense agreement signed in 1953, when Gen. Francisco Franco was the chief of state. But Spanish officials said they will formally notify the United States by letter next week that they do not want the present treaty automatically extended for another year when it lapses next May 14. That, in effect, sets a six-month deadline for the two sides to agree on a new treaty...

No one can be sure whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has the will and imagination to quiet the deep, long-standing fears and suspicions that many in the world have about the Soviet Union. But there is little doubt that Gorbachev, with great charm and tact and flair, has managed in a relatively brief time to push Western diplomats and their old assumptions far off balance. Despite protests from the White House that he has done little more than seize old ideas of President Reagan’s on arms control, much of the world sees Gorbachev as an innovator and a pragmatic compromiser, a statesman whose initiative and determination are responsible for the forthcoming treaty that would dismantle and destroy some nuclear weapons for the first time...

A visitor to the Soviet Union these days finds a myriad of voices and images that reflect the headiness of change, the thrill of hope and the fear of failure. The angry, elderly man, a black cap snug on his silvery hair, stared at the painting on a stand in Moscow’s Izmailova Park on a recent Sunday morning and demanded that the artist pull it down. “This is not art,” the elderly man said. The commotion prompted onlookers to crowd around the critic. They laughed at him, jeered at him, thrust their fingers at him to make their point. “Who the hell are you?” someone demanded. The elderly man finally gave up and stormed off...

France called Thursday for an urgent meeting of the finance ministers of the seven leading industrial democracies to keep the dollar from sliding further. In a speech to the French Economic and Social Council, Finance Minister Edouard Balladur said a meeting of the so-called Group of Seven--the United States, Japan, West Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and France--is needed “very soon” to reinforce the accords of last February that had kept the dollar stable until this week. Reagan Administration officials, however, said a meeting was unlikely until budget negotiations with Congress were completed in Washington...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] The Great October Revolution began here in St. Petersburg in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the reins of a battered Russia in a frenetic time that the American journalist John Reed called the “10 days that shook the world.” Leningrad, as St. Petersburg is now known, is thus a kind of holy city in the Soviet Union, the city of the vanguard of the revolution. Yet now, 70 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city hardly seems in the vanguard of anything. Leningrad is, in fact, a little out of date and out of step with the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and thus the founding father of the Soviet Union, died in 1924, his widow, Natalya Krupskaya, implored his followers: “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich find expression in outward veneration of his personality. Do not raise monuments to him or palaces to his name. Do not organize pompous ceremonies in his memory.” The followers turned their backs on the widow’s plea. They turned from her, in fact, like a furious whirlwind and created out of Lenin a prophet or a saint or even a god on earth. No other hero of the 20th Century anywhere is venerated the way Lenin is venerated in the Soviet Union...

Most foreigners believe that the French Revolution has a glorious image in France. After all, July 14, the anniversary of the revolutionary storming of the Bastille, is France’s national day. The revolutionary “Marseillaise” is the national anthem. And France will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the revolution in 1989. Yet, as the celebration nears, it is more and more obvious that a large minority of French has trouble embracing the revolution. Some fret over its bloody excesses and accuse generations of teachers and historians of hiding those stark and frightful realities. Some conservatives accuse leftists of exaggerating the place of the revolution in the mythology of France...

[OPINION] Hugh Capet was crowned king in 987 and the French now look on that date as the birth of France. The country is celebrating the end of its first millennium with religious ceremonies, sound-and-light shows, medieval jousting tournaments, historical symposiums, a bit of monarchist nostalgia and souvenir bric-a-brac decorated with 1,000-year-old designs. There are historical problems; nobody knows much about Hugh Capet. No scholar has ever been able to find a single medieval drawing or written description of him. His kingdom was not much, no more than bits of royal domain around Paris. He was probably more of a kinglet than a king. It is not even clear what he did as monarch aside from persuading a Roman Catholic archbishop to sanctify his son as unchallenged heir to the throne...

But Most Melanesians Boycott S. Pacific Referendum; Paris Hails Outcome. Almost everyone who voted in a special referendum in New Caledonia on Sunday rejected independence from France, but most Melanesians, the largest ethnic group on the South Pacific archipelago, boycotted the polls. Although many analysts had derided the referendum in advance as an exercise that will settle none of the racial and political problems of the territory, the French government hailed the results as a victory for democracy and for France. The results were about the best that the French government of Premier Jacques Chirac could have expected and fell short of the hopes of the main Melanesian independence party, the Socialist Kanak Front for National Liberation. Yet the results did little more than follow the general lines of the ethnic divisions of New Caledonia...

As the old Hapsburg order disintegrated and anti-Semitism grew, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka gave form to their foreboding...

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...

In May 1979, English-speaking Canadians, tired of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the way he badgered them about the threat of Quebec separatism, ousted him from office. That vote, reflecting the English Canadians’ indifference to Quebec, split Canada along dangerous communal lines. On February 18, barely nine months later, many English-speaking Canadians changed their minds about Trudeau and voted him back into office. On the surface, the recall might seem like a new awakening by English-speakers to the gravest crisis facing their country. But, in fact, it represented the same old indifference. Trudeau, the Montreal intellectual who has based his political career on his ability to deal with the awesome problem of Quebec, came back from defeat and near retirement to regain power as Prime Minister with a campaign that made believe the problem did not exist at all. The problem not only exists but must be met in the months and years ahead. There is, in fact, some urgency now. The Parti Québécois Government of Premier René Lévesque has promised a referendum in Quebec this spring, probably in early June, that could nudge the province a step closer to separation...

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...

The question of unity in Canada may be settled in the months ahead. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau has called a general election for May 22. If the latest polls prove prophetic, he could lose, and politics could divide in a dangerous way, with almost all of English Canada voting for the Progressive Conservative Party and only Quebec voting for Trudeau's Liberal Party. On top of this, Premier René Lévesque of Quebec has promised his province a referendum on separation sometime after the federal election, at the latest in early 1980. An outsider might expect Canada, with this kind of calendar ahead, to be engaged in a grand national debate. But, in fact, little debate is going on. Most Canadians, especially English Canadians, seem bored with the whole issue of unity and Quebec. The reason for the ennui is that many Canadians do not take the danger of Quebec secession seriously enough for serious debate. They simply do not believe that Premier Lévesque really intends to take Quebec out. Perhaps they are right. But, if they are not, they are giving him an advantage in tactics...

Nothing has embarrassed the self-proclaimed Spanish democracy of King Juan Carlos and Premier Adolfo Suarez more than the case of Els Joglars, a Catalan mime troupe convicted of insulting the army. Protests have come from the best-known writers and artists of Europe. Paloma Picasso has warned that the Picasso family will never agree to the transfer of her father’s “Guernica” from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Spain until the four imprisoned actors are released. The case is so ludicrous, anachronistic and unjust that many outsiders are convinced the King will find a way soon to free the actors and end the embarrassment. But whether or not the actors leave their prisons in Barcelona before the end of their two-year sentences, the case has revealed some of the flaws in Spain’s remarkable but fragile attempt at transition from the dictatorship of the late Francisco Franco to a parliamentary government. A latent, unhealthy fear of the army still ties the tongues of critics. And, after almost four decades of Francoism, people here feel that injustice to an individual or defilement of a principle are not worth fretting about so long as the outer forms of democracy are intact...

On June 15, 1977, just a year and a half after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Spaniards elected a new, bicameral Cortes with the authority to write a constitution for Spain. It was the first freely contested parliamentary election in Spain since February 15, 1936, and it produced scenes that Franco would have abhorred: Communists brazenly waving red banners, chanting slogans, and singing the Internationale; the young, dynamic leader of the Socialist Workers Party entering rallies with his left hand in a clenched fist salute, his right signaling V for victoria; politicians exhorting Basques in Euskera, Catalans in Catalan, Galicians in Gallego, all forbidden languages a few years before; and newspapers belittling their government and its leader. Following four decades of repression and fear, more than 18 million Spaniards voted in a peaceful campaign that presented all points of view, no matter how repulsive to the king, the government or the memory of Franco. Taking advantage of a system weighted against the Left, Premier Adolfo Suárez led the Union of the Democratic Center, with 35 percent of the votes, to a near majority of seats in the Congress of Deputies. The results promised stability and a budding two-party system and produced a new and attractive political figure, 35-year-old Felipe González, the First Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), who has time now to persuade Spaniards that he is the obvious alternative to Suárez should the Premier falter. The election, however, fulfilled only part of the promise that King Juan Carlos had made in his speech to the U. S. Congress on June 2, 1976...

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...

Americans, when they think of Mexico, see it as a pleasant place for midwinter holidays, a rich source of (perhaps authentic) pre-Columbian treasures, an accommodating provider of divorces, or a more or less permanent refuge from the demands of 20th-century industrial life. However, Mexico presents no problems, and therefore Americans do not think about it very much. But for Mexicans, the United States is the big problem and they think about it all the time. They have been doing so with renewed intensity during the current administration of President Luis Echeverria, a proud, ambitious man in a proud, small country. Mexican relations with the United States have long been founded on humiliation and dependence. Mexicans know that the United States is usually strong enough to work its will - whether conquering all the land from Texas to California or invading in pursuit of bandits or closing the border to punish Mexico for lax drug enforcement. All this is seen by Mexicans as a reflection of their weakness as much as American strength. It is not an easy assessment for them to accept. No matter how urbane he may seem, a Mexican official has trouble keeping resentment out of his feelings when he deals with the United States...

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...

When Generalisimo Francisco Franco executed five revolutionaries in Spain in September, the fiercest reaction came from Mexico. That reaction surprised many outsiders and made some veteran diplomats at the United Nations shake their heads at what seemed like naiveté. But in fact Mexico was behaving consistently. It is the only country in the world that still harbors an embassy of the old Spanish Republic, and perhaps 20,000 aging Spanish Republicans still live in Mexican exile. In his reaction to Franco, President Luis Echeverria Alvarez was powered by his sense of Mexican history. That Mexico still recognizes the Spanish Republic in exile is to some Mexicans diplomacy based on fiction. Journalist José Natividad Rosales once called the policy “a romantic absurdity.” For many other Mexicans, however, the recognition affirms their country’s political ideals. “I do not want to assume dramatic or declamatory tones,” wrote journalist Pedro Gringoire recently, “but some day it will be universally recognized that, in giving aid to the Republic and then taking the defeated to its breast, Mexico lived through one of the purest and most glorious hours of its history." In a sense, by his reaction to the September executions, President Echeverria was trying to recall that hour...

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...

American foreign aid is returning to the scene of one of its greatest disasters - Haiti. In 1963, the Agency for International Development (AID) closed its mission in Port-au-Prince and suspended most American aid there. The U.S. Government was at last fed up with the corruption, repression and harassment of the strange and tyrannical regime of the late President François Duvalier, better known as Papa Doc. Papa Doc died three years ago, and Haiti is now ruled by his 22-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who, like his father, bears the title of President-for-Life. Last year, AID sent a chief of mission down to Haiti for the first time in a decade. Plans have been made, and agreements have been signed. Now Haiti will have an American aid program about as large as it used to be before the United States gave up on Papa Doc. U.S. officials have persuaded themselves that the regime of the son will be easier to work with than that of his father. They believe it is less corrupt and tyrannical and more efficient. Some even insist that Papa Doc's rule wasn't as bad as painted by Graham Greene, the movies and the American press. In any case, they say, something must be done to help the people of Haiti, who are among the poorest in the world...

The difficult negotiations now in process between the United States and Panama over a new Panama Canal treaty are almost certain to ignore the rights of one people: the descendants of the blacks who dug the canal in the first place. “We are just hoping,” said a black who lives in the U.S. Canal Zone, “that whatever happens between the two countries, our position doesn’t become worse.” It probably will. Although Americans look on the Panama Canal as one of their great engineering achievements, it was dug mainly by foreign workers, mostly blacks from the West Indies. Few of these blacks left when the job was finished in 1914. They stayed on to help run the canal or to work in Panama. Their children did the same. As a result, Panama’s two main ports, Panama City and Colón, have urban ghettos of English-speaking blacks in the slums near the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Canal Zone itself has embarrassing communities of virtually segregated blacks. They are a people without power. Although many are America-oriented, they are not American. Although they are now citizens of Panama, they are a distant cultural minority. Their descendants will probably be assimilated, some day into the racially mixed Panamanian culture, but that does not help the present generations...

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...

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...

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...

General Idi Amin of Uganda has laid bare a treacherous weakness of Black Africa that its defenders have either ignored or covered for some time. It is easy to flick aside the fragile political institutions left behind by the colonial powers; the parliaments, the parties, the constitutions, the rules of foreign law have not taken root. The masses are unschooled, timid and ignorant of their rights and potential for power. They are riven by tribal strife. Instead of loyalty to their country, they feel hatred for one another. The quality of statesmanship is low. Leaders are possessed by greed and megalomania. Their promises of the good life have, with few exceptions, collapsed. Most economies are faltering. Life may be getting better for the common man, but not much better. The countries are small; the towns that count are few. A leader only needs a few thousand guns to rule for his lifetime. Thus, the conditions that favor tyranny are many; the checks are few. General Amin’s callous expulsion of the Asians has brought worldwide (though not much African) condemnation upon himself and crippled all those, both black and white, who have spent years trying to focus the attention of outsiders on the injustices of white Southern Africa. But his treatment of the Asians is only the most dramatic of the wrongs inside Uganda...

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...

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...

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...

BEFORE the murder of Tom Mboya in July 1969, Kenya politicians could mute and obscure their country’s tribal tensions. The tensions, of course, were always there, straining the fragile unity of the new country, but they did not pervade every side of political life. Personal rivalry counted; so did ideology. The assassination changed all that. For more than a year, Kenya was torn by a dangerous and blatant tribal conflict that colored all political activity. In a sense, this only followed what had happened elsewhere in Africa, where crisis invariably heightens tribal hatreds and suspicions. The results, as Nigeria showed, can be terrifying. But Kenya is not another Nigeria. In recent months, the fury has diminished, giving Kenya a time of calm to deal with its tribal problem. Its future depends on whether its politicians learn to do so. At stake is a land of 10.5 million people led by pragmatic men who have nursed the old white settler economy so well that Kenya has one of the highest economic growth rates in black Africa. No other black African country has anything to compare with its fertile soil and energetic farmers. Its wildlife and incredible and varied beauty have made it the tourist center of black Africa. But all this is threatened by the instability inherent in tribalism. Before analyzing the tribal problem, it makes sense to recount the excited political events of the country since the death of Mboya.

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 the Federal side of the Nigerian struggle many people seem unaware that a war is going on. There are, of course, minor discomforts — the nightly blackout in Lagos; the unavailability of cars, Scotch whisky and textiles; the increase in prices; and the soldiers, who demand bribes from civilians and push them around. But in general, the discomforts of war are minor. Obese men in enormous robes can still be seen scattering chips across the roulette tables at the Federal Palace Hotel. Nigerian businessmen are getting rich, for the restriction of imports is bolstering local industry and oil production is near prewar level. There are, of course, tensions and economic dislocations within Nigeria, but they are minor compared to conditions in Biafra, and Nigeria should be able to absorb them easily while still carrying on the war. Yet comparing conditions in the two regions may be pointless, for Nigerians may be unwilling to take as much as the Biafrans and may be more hurt by minor dislocations than Biafra is by major dislocations. Since assessing the will of the people and their capacity for discomfort is almost impossible, all one can say is that Nigeria looks very strong to a visitor...

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...”

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

The white mercenaries of the Congo, now in rebellion, have humiliated black men everywhere in Africa, and by doing so shattered some of the self-confidence that Africans need to run their affairs well. Moreover, some Africans have struck out at whites to assuage this humiliation, and the beatings and killings have torn relations between white men and black men over the continent. These are terrible consequences. Yet it is pointless to condemn these confused, aimless and distorted men. Their role in the Congo was created by others. The rebellion of the mercenaries was the legacy of an attempt by the United States Government to stage-manage the unmanageable Congo. Using them worked for a while; then they flew out of hand. Why blame them? The present group of rebellious mercenaries first came to the Congo in 1964 with the support of the United States Government, then as now the most powerful and significant outside influence on the Congo. It was prepared to do whatever it could, even to the point of supporting mercenaries, to help Moise Tshombe, the new Prime Minister, put down a leftist rebellion in the eastern Congo...

Two simple posters explain the civil war in Nigeria. The first, a thin strip, was glued to the walls and windows of most public buildings in Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, a few weeks before the region seceded on May 30 to become the Republic of Biafra. The poster shows four men. Three look alike, obviously Ibos, the dominant tribe of the east. The fourth man is a Hausa from Northern Nigeria. “This Is Your Region,” the poster says, “Report Any Strange Face to the Police.” The second poster, a little larger and more colorful, was slapped all over Lagos, the federal capital of Nigeria, a few weeks before federal troops invaded Biafra on July 6, the beginning of the civil war. This poster shows a monstrous drawing of the severed head of Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ruler of Biafra, lying under the heavy combat boot of a Nigerian soldier. “Crush Rebellion,” the poster says. The first poster reflects the intense tribal feeling of the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria. They are enraged and bitter over the massacre of thousands of Ibos in Northern Nigeria last year. They believe the other tribes of Nigeria would wipe them out if they could. For this reason, the Ibos feel they are fighting for their survival. But in Lagos, just 270 miles from Iboland, the federal military rulers and their civil servants, now mostly from the north, refuse to acknowledge that this emotionalism exists. In their view, as the second poster shows, a gangster named Ojukwu is stirring up the Ibos. Crush them, and all the problems of Nigeria go away...

'Neo-Colonial' Economy Booming - The gross national product of Kenya grew by 10% in 1966, a spectacular rate for developing Africa. It has confounded the country's many critics. Since independence in 1963, Kenya has maintained a western capitalist atmosphere in hopes of attracting foreign capital and keeping many foreigners in technical jobs. Although it is committed to "African socialism" on paper, the government has made it clear that it believes nationalization of foreign enterprises is too costly for a poor country like Kenya. The Kenya way of development seems the most logical one. Because it was an old British settler colony, Kenya had a spirit of pioneering free enterprise, a history of foreign investment and a cadre of non-African managers and technicians. Kenya leaders decided it made more sense to build on this economy than to disrupt or destroy it and start anew. For this, Kenya has been criticized, particularly by Africans in countries that came to independence with economies so weak they could be molded into anything...

For nearly four years, one of the world's least known rebellions has plagued the northern quarter of Kenya near the border of the Somali Republic. Approximately 2,600 persons have died at the hands of the rebels or government forces. Last week, the Kenya government allowed newsmen into the area for the first time on a supervised tour. With an improbable mixture of guns, grenades, schools and clinics, the Kenya government is trying to put down a guerrilla rebellion here in the semidesert of northern Kenya. The government's targets are the disaffected Somalis who want nearly one quarter of Kenya to secede and become part of the neighboring Somali Republic. Kenya officials have a purpose in combining a social revolution with police action. They are convinced they can triumph over the Shifta, as the rebels are called, only if they can end the nomadic life of the Somalis and get them to settle down with villages, schools, health centers, and water wells...

Lack Will to Mold Future - What is a Congo mercenary? In some African lexicons it is the lowest form of humanity - a white man who kills Africans for a dollar. This definition, at least about the dollar, is partly true but it tells us little. A mercenary is a complex, confused, tough man, and no man can be defined, in a lexicon. In some ways, the 160 mercenaries here in Bukavu are surprising. Since July 5, these men and their thousand or so allies from Katanga province have disrupted the eastern Congo, routed the Congolese army and seized this cool picturesque city in the hills alongside Lake Kivu. Yet the first thing that strikes you about them is how passive they seem. They are the kind of men who have been pulled along by events in their past and who lack the will to mold their future. A Rhodesian related the details of his recruitment...

Nation Seems Too Unstable for Control by Mobutu, Mercenaries or Americans - Neither President Joseph D. Mobutu, the white mercenaries nor the U.S. government can save the Congo from more turmoil and bloodletting. The mercenary seizure of Bukavu has made that clear. The lumbering, luxuriant Congo is too big, too cruel, too unnerved to be managed by Mobutu, the mercenaries or the Americans. For Mobutu, the mercenary uprising of the last five weeks has undermined his power and prestige. His position seems a little embarrassing, even comical. Almost all the accusations and boasts broadcast by his government radio have been picked apart and exposed as lies. Hordes of foreign parachutists never invaded the Congo. The white civilians protected by the mercenaries never considered themselves hostages. The Congolese army never surrounded the mercenaries. The mercenaries never fled from them. Mobutu might have won a great deal of sympathy throughout the world by telling the truth...

White Troops, Buoyed by Escapade, Grow Testy From Uncertainty in Congo - The white mercenaries who rule this city in defiance of Congolese President Joseph D. Mobutu and his army are a group of confident and prideful men from many lands who are growing tired these days and testy with each other. Their confidence and pride comes from their extraordinary escapade of the last five weeks in which they have disrupted the eastern Congo and routed the Congolese army. Their fatigue and bickering comes from the pointlessness of it all and the uncertainty of the future. Even mercenaries want to know occasionally where they are going and why. The air of confidence - even cocksureness - strikes you as soon as you walk across the tiny trestle bridge that connects Rwanda with Bukavu, the old Belgian settler city that nestles in the cool green hills along Lake Kivu in the eastern Congo. A Portuguese mercenary, dark, grinning, showing his ice teeth, is waiting. You want to see the commander? He slaps on his bush hat, the wide brims folded up in the dashing way of movie heroes...

Nigeria's Civil War - Africans are dying in Nigeria these days because powerful white men, in an almost playful mood, sat down to draw a few straight lines on a vague map more than half century ago. That is the root cause of the Nigerian civil war. The federal military government of Nigeria is trying to crush the secession of the old eastern region, which calls itself Biafra now, to preserve the territorial integrity of the nation. But what does the territorial integrity of Nigeria mean? At the turn of the century, the British, French and Germans decided to avoid any warring by sharing their colonial spoils in an amicable way. They did it by carving up a map. "In those days we just took a blue pencil and a rule and we put it down at old Calabar and drew that line up to Yola," said a British negotiator who helped set the boundary between eastern Nigeria and the old German Cameroon at that time. While dividing northern Nigeria from French Niger, according to another British official, the British and French "have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were..."

Belgian Says Congo Rebellion Has Roots in Need for Representative Government - Col. Jean Schramme, who has shattered the Congo's fragile political stability by leading white mercenaries to a rout of the Congolese army, is a slight, diffident-seeming Belgian who talks in the idealistic tones of a peace-loving missionary. Here, in the eastern Congo city that he rules, he told a few newsmen, who had walked across the bridge Thursday from neighboring Rwanda, that his five-week rebellion had its roots in the need of the Congo for representative government and economic development. He seemed to want to play down reports that the main aim of his mercenaries was the release of their grand patron, Moise Tshombe, who is in prison in Algiers. Instead, he talked about the place that Tshombe should have in a representative government. "I think Tshombe is the representative of the Katangese people," he said. "But that's just my opinion." Then Schramme had his one truculent moment in the interview...

Irritability Increases With Accusations by New Vice President; Break May Come - Kenya officials are so annoyed with the Chinese Communist Embassy these days that they flare up at any minor move the Chinese make. The irritation of the Kenyans developed after a series of offensive pronouncements by the Chinese during the last few months. Now, relations between the two governments are tenuous; they might even break. The Chinese offended the Kenya government so much that some Western diplomats believe it was done by design. No diplomat, in their view, could really be as gauche as the Chinese have seemed. An example of the Kenyan irritation came a few days ago when Vice President Daniel Arap Moi accused the Chinese Embassy of interference in domestic affairs because it had mailed some Mao Tse-tung buttons and some copies of his "Selected Works" and "Quotations" to a secondary schoolteacher in a small country town. Moi's angry accusation was surprising since the Chinese mailing differed little from what other embassies, including the American, try to do...

Rebellious Whites Take Full Control of Congo City, Show Power by Marching to Rwanda to Release Civilians - Rebellious white mercenary units took full control of the important eastern Congo city of Bukavu and served notice they would keep control until kidnaped Moise Tshombe, former Congo premier, is released and returned to Congo political life. The column of mercenaries demonstrated their control by marching to the Rwanda border and releasing the first of the more than 100 white civilians who had lived with them in the Congolese bush for the last month. The Congolese government radio had called these civilians hostages, but the civilians, as soon as they reached Rwanda, insisted that they had joined the mercenaries for their own protection. No one standing here on Rwanda border could doubt the control and power of the 150 mercenaries and their 700 to 800 allies, the former African gendarmes of the Congo's secessionist Katanga province...

Newsmen Discover - The book charge was simple: "Admiring the light of the moon." Three of us had browsed along the bank of the Congo River at 1:30 a.m. The moon was whole and almost yellow, but no reflection seemed to light upon the river, a vast expanse of brown shadows rushing in the darkness. Some lights from Brazzaville across the river speckled the view on the right, and the lights on top of Mt. Stanley, the home of the president, did the same on the left. The air was cool and quiet. We turned, and a man approached us in the dark. He stopped 30 feet away. He wore a long overcoat that made him seem shapeless. A rifle jutted out from one side of him. He asked us what we were doing, and we told him we had come to admire this beautiful view of the Congo River in the moonlight, and he called out nervously, "Sergeant. Sergeant." Congo lore is full of tales of Congolese soldiers who, fearful and distrustful, suddenly panic and fire away...

Washington Has Kept Reds Out Without a Vietnam - Here in the Congo, it seems natural for U.S. Air Force C-130 transport planes to roar across Congolese skies with Congolese soldiers, ammunition and food. The C-130s may be controversial with some congressmen back home who fear the mission will lead toward entanglement of the United States in Congolese affairs. But the truth of the matter is that, even without C-130s, the United States is entangled in the Congo and has been for almost seven years. The sudden dispatch of three fat planes has not changed a thing. The United States probably has more influence in the Congo than in any other African state. That influence comes from years of involvement. Of course, in Africa, words like entanglement, influence and involvement must be put in perspective...

Congo Trouble Spot - Kisangani, the town they once called Stanleyville is quiet and hot and tranquil. It is stirring feebly and helplessly, like most towns do in the calm and light that follow a hurricane. But no natural disaster wracked this town. The bullet holes that pock the stucco buildings make the difference clear. For eight days after July 5, white mercenaries of the Congolese army controlled the town. The way to control was bloody. Even after they had the town, the mercenaries could not keep peace. After the mercenaries left on July 12, Kisangani was engulfed by anti-white hysteria, and the stores and apartments of whites were smashed for several days. Finally, Red Cross planes and U.S. Air Force C-130s evacuated 290 of the 350 non-Africans in town and law and order was restored...

Lost rootless men sometimes fashion schemes of power and of glory out of their faded memory and their braggadocio. That may lie at the source of the latest crisis in the Congo. The restless men were: the exiled Moise Tshombe, a Congolese living like a suave continental businessman in Madrid, reaching for his memories of lost power, smug in his dreams; the white mercenaries of the Congolese army, self-exiled Europeans living like tribal lords, feeling their power and past slipping away, arrogant in their self-confidence. Their plots and schemes, foiled and then recharged, bloodied the Congo in the past two weeks. The best evidence, both factual and circumstantial, from all sources - diplomatic, Congolese government, academic, private - sketches a strange tale of intrigue and counterintrigue...

Predawn Mutiny Killed Hundreds of Sleeping Soldiers - Armored cars and truckloads of white mercenaries drove into an army camp at Kisangani in the blackness before dawn on July 5 and fired their submachine guns at benumbed African soldiers of the Congolese army. This terrible, sudden strike snapped the thin reins of stability in this massive, strange and luxurious country and let it fall into panic and chaos. It was a typical Congolese spell of confusion, or madness. No outsider really knows why it all happened. But with the help of accounts from onlookers, the story of how it happened is falling into place. In a sense, the mutiny of the white mercenaries was their last romantic and gory moment. The Congolese government intended to end its dependence on them by September. The mercenaries might have had to pack their things, collect their money, and slip quietly away then. Instead, their departure has been dramatic and bloody...

Almost 200 White Mercenaries Believed Hiding in Heavily Forested Lands of East - The Congolese army is reportedly ready to begin pursuit of almost 200 rebellious white mercenaries hiding in the thick forest land of the Eastern Congo. The army, according to reliable sources, is satisfied that it knows the general area where the mercenaries have taken refuge. In a sense, the mercenaries have come home - to the fiefdom of their leader, Maj. Jean Schramm. With the help of three U.S. C-130 transport planes and a squadron of Ethiopian jet fighters, the Congolese hope to move into the Schramm area and defeat the soldiers of fortune, whose bloody rebellion in Kisangani almost two weeks ago engulfed the Congo in yet another crisis and provoked a bitter reaction. In their anger and excitement, Congolese soldiers have beaten and killed innocent white residents and looted their homes and shops...

Congolese army officers tried valiantly and sometimes vainly in the past few days to hold back their own troops from beating whites, looting homes and firing wildly in Kisangani. This report came from several of the more than 300 refugees who arrived in Kinshasa Saturday aboard two Red Cross planes and a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport plane. Friedrich Engel, a German journalist stranded in Kisangani since July 5, told newsmen he believed 10 Europeans had been killed in the rampage of Congolese soldiers who entered the city after mercenaries fled Wednesday night. Engel said the officers made every effort to keep their men under control, but the men broke out from under the discipline and rushed through town from time to time in what has become a typical Congolese army victory celebration...

Transport, Sent in After Reports of Looting and Shooting, Returns With 9 Evacuees - The United States rushed a C-130 transport plane to the crisis-ridden city of Kisangani Friday after widespread reports of looting and shooting by the Congolese army which took over the city after rebel mercenaries fled. But the plane returned here with only nine evacuees, including two U.S. Army sergeants, one of them wounded. Two C-46 planes chartered by the International Red Cross brought in an other 100 refugees, most of them Congolese, including injured women and children. The wounded soldier, Sgt. John Degele of Dallas, a mechanic, and the other, Sgt. Robert Mack of Seattle, a radio operator, made up the U.S. Army Congo Mission team in Kisangani. Degele and Mack were believed captured by the mercenaries who took over the city at the start of the rebellion in the early hours of July 5...

Since modern war is fought and fraught with images as well as guns, the federal government of Nigeria, attempting to put down the secession of Biafra, is busy these days polishing up its own image for the world. The federal government, at least in theory, has entered a new era of public relations, in which it is trying to woo foreign newsmen, instead of harassing them. For months, the old eastern region of Nigeria, which seceded May 30 to become the independent Republic of Biafra, always seemed to have the edge on press play. British and American news stories about Nigeria were filled with interviews with C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the 33-year-old, bearded, brilliant, witty, Oxford educated leader of Biafra. The stories documented the great grievance of his Ibo people who were massacred in northern Nigeria last year, and described at great length the tenacity, skill and intelligence of the Ibos, who make up two-thirds of Biafra's population. On the other hand, there was hardly ever a descriptive phrase about Maj. Gen. Yakubu Gowon, the federal military ruler, or a good analysis of why he believed Ojukwu must be crushed...

The Congolese army took control Thursday of Kisangani, the last rebel stronghold. Immediately after rebel mercenaries fled the big city of the eastern Congo, two International Red Cross planes flew in and picked up about 100 persons who had been stranded there. It was a desolate scene at the airport here when the refugees arrived. One plane carried about 50 Congolese wounded, the great majority of them Congolese army soldiers. In the other plane there were about 50 Europeans and Americans, most of them women and children, who had lived in Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville. The whites were tired, but not injured. One American woman told newsmen that the mercenaries were gentlemen. She said she did not know of a single white person who was held hostage by the mercenaries during the last week. But she added that perhaps the mercenaries had taken two or three hostages with them when they left Kisangani Wednesday night...

Feelings between the United States and Nigeria turned awkward and cold Tuesday as Nigerian officials showed their annoyance over the American refusal to sell them arms for the present civil war. Their displeasure was intensified by what they considered discrimination. They saw the United States sending giant transport planes to the Congo for its military use at the same time that Nigeria was rebuffed on its request for arms. "Apparently," a government spokesman said, "they have one rule for the Congo, and one rule for Nigeria." The sudden displeasure was ironic for, in the past, the United States has been considered one of the staunchest supporters of the federal government in its attempt to crush the secession of the Eastern Region, which now calls itself the Republic of Biafra...

The best indications Sunday were that federal troops continued to move slowly into secessionist Eastern Nigeria, pushing ahead steadily step by step but without any dramatic rout of the eastern forces. But best indications may not be very good in this civil war that is rending Africa's most populous country. The federal government refuses to allow any foreign correspondent anywhere near the battle lines or even the command headquarters. Diplomats say they have received only the sketchiest and vaguest of reports. And there is some hint of less than brisk, communication even between the federal government and its own troops on the remote bushland of the northern border of Biafra - the name that the Eastern Region has taken since its secession. So outsiders can only sift through the rare war communiques of the federal government, the claims made by Biafra Radio and the whispered gossip around town...

Americans were evacuated from the battle zones of Biafra Saturday as two tiny African armies fought in the rain in the Nigerian civil war. Unconfirmed reports indicated that federal troops had continued their advance into the secessionist state of Biafra, which had been the old Eastern Region of Nigeria before it seceded six weeks ago. The reports said that Ogaja, a key town in the northeastern corner of Biafra, had been captured and that the big university town of Nsukka in the northwest had been surrounded. Nsukka, by road, is 41 miles from Enugu, the capital of Biafra. The obvious federal plan is to capture Enugu and bring down its ruler, Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu. "Our orders are to get Ojukwu," a federal military spokesman said Saturday. "If we get him today, that's it..."

Federal troops have attacked the old Eastern Region in an effort to bring down the Biafran government of Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu. According to an announcement by Radio Nigeria Friday night, Maj. Gen. Yakubu Gowon, the federal military ruler, issued his orders for an invasion only after Eastern troops fired at federal troops along the northern border of Biafra. The federal announcement confirmed an earlier broadcast by Radio Biafra that a federal offensive had begun. The Biafrans claimed they had driven the federal troops back across the border. But the federal government, in turn, claimed its troops had penetrated Biafra and inflicted heavy casualties on the secessionist troops. Ironically, the fighting erupted on the eve of two major attempts to bring a peaceful settlement to the Nigerian crisis...

Informed sources revealed Wednesday that oil producers have defied the federal military government of Nigeria and paid royalties to the secessionist state of Biafra. The act provoked immediate retaliation. The sources said the federal government has imposed a total blockade on all oil shipments coming out of Biafra, which was the Eastern Region of Nigeria until it seceded May 30. The payment of the royalties - even though made under the threat of Biafra's military pressure - was a blow to the federal government. The move implied some form of international commercial recognition that the East was under the control of secessionist leader C. Odumegwu Ojukwu and not the federal government. But the blockade was a sharp blow to the oil producers who lose their markets in this period of a worldwide oil shortage caused by the Middle East crisis...

The blockade of the secessionist Republic of Biafra took a dramatic, dangerous turn Tuesday when the Nigerian navy announced it had fired a shell into the empty hold of a small Panamanian freighter found in forbidden waters. The shell was fired by a Nigerian patrol boat trying to prevent goods from entering and leaving the secessionist state of Biafra. The patrol boat fired into the 2,500-ton Rigel, which is registered by the Mara Bierta Shipping Line of Panama City, after the ship ignored four warning shots across its bow. No one was hurt. By the time the final shell struck, the Rigel had cut its engines but still had not stopped. It was reported that the captain, an Italian, was not on the bridge at the time. Naval officials said they fired at the Rigel because they found it leaving the Biafran port of Bonny Monday...

Grim and curious, thousands of Nigerians stood in the rain Monday under incongruous, carnival-colored African umbrellas and stared at the debris of the night of terror in downtown Lagos near police headquarters. The emotions of these bystanders were obviously the real target of the terrorists who set off two explosions on Sunday night, killing four persons and injuring 14. It seemed a classic case of terrorists trying to make the population shudder or even panic in fear. They had a measure of success. Though Nigerians in Lagos did not seem panicky and fearful, they did look quiet and uneasy, worried, even fretful. The explosions came a little more than a month after the old Eastern Region seceded from Nigeria and proclaimed itself the independent Republic of Biafra, which the federal military ruler, Maj. Gen. Yakubu Gowon, has pledged to crush by force...

Tanzania's Guide For Africa - African leaders often fancy exalted titles, like "The Conquering Lion of Judah" or "Osegeyfo, the Redeemer," but Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, allows his followers to call him only "Mwalimu," a simple Swahili word that means teacher. In a way, this illustrates Nyerere's penchant - perhaps his affectation - for simplicity, but it also reveals a good deal about his image of himself as leader. Nyerere sees himself as the teacher guiding, encouraging, gently pushing his impoverished, unskilled, hesitant people to a better life. The success of Tanzania depends at the moment on how well Nyerere does as a teacher, for he is in a sense his country's greatest resource. His brilliant reason and firm but gentle leadership put him several levels above his well-meaning though inexperienced and sometimes bumbling associates and lieutenants. He stands out clean and sharp and bright, like a Bix Beiderbecke solo on an old, routine record. The direction and mood of Tanzania these days is the direction and mood of Nyerere...

Nigeria stripped secessionist leader Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu of all titles, then kicked him out of the federal army, Saturday, crushing hope of a quick settlement between the federal government and the breakaway state of Biafra. "Rapprochement with Ojukwu is not possible," a government spokesman said. The latest action changed the actual state of affairs in Nigeria very little, for all reports from Biafra indicate that Ojukwu is in firm control of the region, with a federal title or without. The move impressed outsiders, however, as another sign of the mounting tension in Nigeria. The country has seemed close to civil war since the old Eastern Region seceded to become the independent republic of Biafra in May. Oil companies caught in this warlike tugging remained silent...

Ojukwu Tells Secessionist Nation Attack by Federal Troops Will Mean 'Total War' - Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, military governor of secessionist Eastern Nigeria, told his people Friday night, "We have come to zero hour" and are about to be attacked by troops of the federal government of Nigeria. In a voice that seemed to quaver in anger, he warned that any federal invasion into the East will provoke him into "total war against Nigeria." Ojukwu's emotional words, broadcast from the Eastern capital of Enugu and monitored here, came exactly one month after the East seceded from the federation of Nigeria and proclaimed itself the independent republic of Biafra. Ojukwu told Biafrans he has conclusive proof that Maj. Gen. Yakubu Gowon, the federal military ruler, "and his northern bandits have now finalized their plans to attack us in our home..."

Peace Efforts of Outsiders Like Britain, Zambia Held Unlikely to Bar Civil War - A few outsiders like Britain and Zambia are trying to prevent civil war in Nigeria by diplomatic persuasion and maneuvering, but the odds seem against them. The federal military government of Nigeria seems determined to crush the secession of Eastern Nigeria by force if need be. But this does not stop the talk about peace. Almost a month has gone by since the Eastern Region seceded on May 30 and proclaimed itself the independent Republic of Biafra. Without war, there is always hope of peace. So the outsiders try - in a hesitant, uncertain way. Britain, for example, has sent Eric Norris, assistant secretary of state in the commonwealth office, to Nigeria this week, hoping he might discover some way to end the crisis without bloodshed...

Trade Pact Aims to Draw Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania Closer by Splitting Them a Bit - The new East African treaty of economic cooperation may bring Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania closer together someday by letting them split a little apart now. Stripped of all its flowery optimism, that is the significance of the treaty, which was signed by Presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Milton Obote of Uganda and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania at a recent conference in Kampala, Uganda. In many ways, the treaty is a remarkable achievement, for it salvages the most it can from the old East African common market and lays down a realistic groundwork for a future market. East Africa has had a common market since British colonial days. But the market always helped Kenya more than the other two countries...