Cradle of Tomorrow

VIRTUALLY unknown to the civilized world a century ago, Middle Africa sprawls forbiddingly across a full two-thirds of the earth's second largest continent, an area big enough to contain the entire U.S. with room to spare. On one side the hot Arab lands of North Africa are linked to Europe by more than 2,000 years of common history. At the other end descendants of 17th century Dutch settlers in the Union of South Africa boast a colonial past nearly as long as that of North America. But until the mid-19th century, Middle Africa was only a coastline to the rest of the world.

Between the Sahara Desert's ocean of drifting sands on the north and Kipling's "great, grey-green, greasy" Limpopo River in this land unknown were geographical wonders to rival any in the world: great lakes as large as those in North America, rivers challenging in majesty the Amazon and Mississippi, crashing waterfalls higher and wider than Niagara, and snow-clad mountains on the equator's rim soaring skyward beyond any in Europe. And there today, in the limitless stretches of land over which these giants stood silent sentinel for centuries, is a whole new world of men suddenly awakened after generations of torpor and submission.

Rush to the Future. In a babel of 300 or more languages and dialects ranging from the clipped accents of the Oxford graduate to the grunts and tongue-clicks of the most backward Bantu tribesman, the 130 million-odd natives of Middle Africa are demanding a voice in the determination of their own future--and getting it at a pace that would have been thought absurd and impossible a generation ago.

In London this month Britons and Africans will sit down together to comb out the last snarls lying in the path of independence for the 31 million Africans of Nigeria. Their conversations have been speeded by the creation four months ago of the all-Negro Republic of Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast), whose U.S.-educated Premier Nkrunah has already moved into the residence of the departed British Governor General, leaving his old place to the Queen's new emissary.

Far to the east in race-conscious Kenya, elected Africans are taking their seats for the first time in the governing councils of the white man, though only as a minority. In central Africa, just to the south, in a desperate race against time, the blacks, whites and Asians of British Rhodesia and Nyasaland are trying to learn how to submerge their differences in a common federation, and experimenting with graduated extension of the franchise so that the outnumbered whites can maintain their dominance. Paced by the British, with the frightening memory of yesterday's Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya to spur them on, the white masters in the remaining territories of Middle Africa are plunging headlong into an uncertain future, making concessions usually a step behind the demands--and sometimes a step ahead of the capacity--of their once submissive but now impatient peoples.

Four Ways. Of all the European nations that gathered in Berlin in 1884 to divvy up the then still largely unknown and unexplored heart of Africa, the four principal powers now remaining have each pursued a different, and often faltering, path to the inevitable future. Pragmatic Britain, whose colonies range from the dense, forbidding forests of the west, where few whites live, to the Scottish-like highlands of the European settlers in the east, has tried to shape its policy to the complexities of each situation. With frequent glaring mistakes, often hastily rectified (e.g., the highhanded exile of Uganda's Cambridge-educated Kabaka, "King Freddie," three years ago), the Colonial Office has sought, against opposition from both blacks and local whites alike, to hasten native self-government in the all-black areas where it was possible, to promote racial equality in the multicolored zones where it was not.

Like corporation directors, the paternalistic Belgian masters of the mineral-rich Congo have tried to avoid politics altogether, keeping the vote from black and white alike and striving to give each an equal opportunity to enjoy the highest standard of living in Middle Africa. It has worked well. France's policy, in the great sweep of its Middle Africa territories, Equatorial Africa and the Western Sudan, has been that of education and assimilation--the idealistic if not always practicable notion that once Africans think of themselves as Frenchmen, everything will be all right. In Mozambique and Angola, Portugal, the poorest and least progressive of the white masters, offers an approximation of social equality but little else.

Whether or not the African is ready for what he demands is no longer a question. After centuries of exploitation by his own people as well as those from other lands, the Middle African has learned the uses of freedom from the white man himself, and he means to have a try for it.

Carcasses & Calico. To the adventuring sailors of Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, the idea of freedom for the African was as unheard of as the 20th century minerals germanium and uranium now being mined in the Congo. Slavery and servitude were the African's way of life, and in the first west coast trading posts established at the malarial edge of jungles as dark and green and impenetrable as the ocean bottom, native chieftains were only too glad to exchange the surplus humanity of their fiefs for the trinkets and calicoes of the newcomers. The human life that the Europeans bought on Africa's west coast, and sold mostly in the slave markets of America, was the same commodity that centuries before had attracted Moorish raiders from the north and Arabs from the east. But few, if any, of the early traders who came to Africa's edges in search of booty and plunder were tempted to penetrate the inhospitable land.

Running north and south from the Red Sea to Mozambique is one vast fissure, the Great Rift Valley. Along one side the molten center of the earth itself spewed upward to form the great volcanic peaks of Kilimanjaro (elevation: 19,565 ft.), Mt. Kenya and the other volcanoes of the east. In its deepest clefts lie Africa's great lakes: Nyasa, Tanganyika and Lake Albert, with Lake Victoria, second in size only to North America's Lake Superior, on the high plateau near by. On either side of the great central rift, Middle Africa's land stretches out in vast monotonous terraces that drop in sudden sharp steps from 6,000 ft. to the level of the sea like the tiered bastions of some huge island fortress. Its rivers meander in wide swings and detours on their path to the sea, now rushing at breakneck speed through some narrow gorge, now cascading in a sheer drop of 350 ft. or more to the level below as does the Zambezi at Victoria Falls, now widening their banks to flow in lazy indolence over the flat plateau in depths too shallow for navigation.

Village & Bush. Africa's riches, such as they were, flowed down effortlessly to the traders on the coast. But the fact that, beyond a trickle of gold and ivory, the marauding chieftains of the interior had only human bodies to offer in trade was evidence of the real poverty of the people within--an ill-fed, disease-and fear-ridden race. To the African tribesman, whatever his ancestry or point of origin, the realities of life were pretty much the same all over the land. They consisted primarily of the village and the bush--the clearing in the forest where the tribal family had pitched its camp for a week or a day or a season, and the dark and hostile world beyond. In the tribal organization, a man's security lay in his tribal brothers, his wealth in his cattle and women, and his faith in the witch doctor whose juju alone could ward off the infinite peril that beset him on every side. Preoccupied always with the cruel day-to-day realities of getting enough to eat himself and keeping himself from being eaten, the Middle African man-in-the-bush was for the most part unaware of the rich potential of the land beneath his feet. There, waiting to be found by the white man, were some of the earth's greatest stores of precious gems, iron, coal, gold, tin, copper and tungsten for the dawning age of electricity, pitchblende from which the minerals of the atomic age would one day be refined, and scores of other metals. "

It took a new breed of adventurer-explorer to bring the world to Middle Africa and to unfold its wonders for the world --men prompted not by simple greed but by human compassion and scientific curiosity, drawn onward by the land itself. There was the discoverer of Victoria Falls, David Livingstone, the gentle Scottish medical missionary who went to Africa because an opium war in China kept him from achieving his ambition to go there. There was Henry Stanley, a British-born U.S. reporter, who went to Africa in search of a feature story for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and stayed to open up the whole Belgian Congo for King Leopold II. Through the doors opened by the explorers came a stream of colonizers and empire builders like Cecil Rhodes, bringing with them armies of semiskilled labor from India to help build today's Middle Africa, and to complicate its racial patterns.

Great areas of the land they settled in are the same today as when they found them. In the whole vast area, there are less than 400 miles of asphalt roads. Such railroads as exist bull their way through the bush in short, fitful spurts. But with startling frequency, in what was yesterday only a wilderness, such modern cities as Salisbury, Lusaka, Nairobi and Accra hive and hum in a fury of 20th century commerce.

White Man's Ways. Middle Africa is still a black man's land where even in the most populous areas of white colonization the Negro outnumbers the European by 12 to 1, but though life in the bush goes on as it has for centuries, the white man's way has filtered in some measure into every corner.

In the few years since World War II, half a dozen new universities have sprung into being to provide training in arts and sciences to the sons of illiterate bushmen. In one of the largest of them, at Ibadan, an all-black Nigerian city of 459,000, eager young Africans full of ideas on how to remake the world adopt the manners and academic costumes of their distant white cousins at Oxford and Cambridge. The white man's faith has also come with him to temper with Christian mercy the harsh superstitions of native paganism: Catholicism in the Congo, Anglicanism in British East Africa, isolated settlements of other Protestant religions elsewhere. Numerically, Christian conversions are few, and in most areas Islam is proving a more dynamic creed.

Prejudice, distrust and intolerance lurk everywhere like the lions and leopards in the still dark forests, between the educated and uneducated, between tribe and tribe, between black, white and Asian. Proud white settlers in Rhodesia, who now consider themselves more African than European, refer contemptuously to their advanced black partners as "Fags," short for Federated African Gentlemen. The Moslem Fulani of Nigeria's north consider the energetic Ibos of the nationalistic, Christian and pagan east no better than barbarians.

Clothes & Shoes. But the breathless sense of urgency and the inward knowledge that in undermanned, underfed, underdeveloped Middle Africa today each needs the other has infected all races. Each jealously watchful of its own fancied prerogatives, the multicolored people of Africa are learning, often faster than they want to, how to live and work together. Those who proclaim that the white man's day is done, and are convinced that the African is ready to take over without help, speak too quickly. Without British aid and guidance, Ghana's ambitious Twi Tribesman Nkrumah could never have founded his nation, and he is the first to admit it. "If the British were to leave tomorrow," says a leader of the Nigerian independence movement, "I would be the first one down on the docks asking them to leave their clothes and their shoes behind."

"Patience," says seasoned Colonial Hand Lord Malvern, former Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, "is essential; gradualness is absolutely necessary." But in newly awakened Middle Africa, there is little desire for patience. Of the many lessons the African has learned from his white masters, some.good, some bad, one at least is that of the excitement of hurry. Today, in a continent-wide parody of the threatening game of childhood, encouraged by his masters, egged on by his more intemperate playmates, the African child is standing up in his cradle and shouting aloud to the world: "Coming, ready or not."

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