The Time of the Africans

One by one, the proud, solemn black men advanced through the murmuring chamber to take their new-won seats. Carrying themselves with graven dignity, often combining ritual facial scars with impeccable European manners, they came from lands of jungle and desert whose very names were scarcely known to the West--Chad, Gabon, Dahomey, Upper Volta. The headlines went to Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. But in the sweep of history, the 15th U.N. Assembly might be regarded as the time of the Africans.

All told, 14 new nations, 13 of them African, were admitted to the U.N. last week. With their acceptance, the African nations (22 members) became the largest geographical group in the U.N., and the combined Afro-Asian bloc jumped to 42--or close to half the U.N.'s total membership of 96 countries.*

The Rivals. From the moment they took their seats, the Africans proclaimed that they were their own men, and nobody else's. One after another, they echoed the neutralist declaration of Togo's Premier Sylvanus Olympio: "Our purpose is not to be drawn into the conflict between the great powers."

In time past, many people, from John Foster Dulles to Nikita Khrushchev, have been inclined to assume that neutralism was the next thing to Communism. In fact, the neutralists are united only by a negative sentiment: Help us, but keep hands off. Rather than a reliable "bloc," the neutralist group is a cluster of ambitious and often impulsive leaders, most of them mutually jealous, many of them open rivals. Few show any practiced moderation in diplomatic maneuver, and most balk at accepting leadership from any self-appointed tutor. Tito dreams of leading the whole neutralist world, but is suspect to Africans and Asians as both a white man and a Communist. Nasser, who cannot even bring the entire Arab world under his wing, flirts with the notion of African leadership--which Ghana's Nkrumah regards as his special province. Even India's Nehru, the senior neutralist of all, is now regarded by the newly self-confident Africans as a purely Asian figure with no more competence in African affairs than any European.

Something New. On questions even remotely connected with the fading chimera of colonialism, these disparate groupings invariably vote together in the U.N. But on major noncolonial issues, such as Hungary, Tibet and the reunification of Korea, they almost always split. In the annual hassle over admission of Red China to the U.N., the Afro-Asians in the past two General Assembly sessions have divided three ways: 13 or 14 nations for admission, eleven opposed and four abstaining.

But for all the neutralists' inexperience and unpredictability, the day of the Africans at the U.N. represented something new and as yet only half realized, something strong and, at bottom, hopeful. For long years, the cold war reduced the U.N. to stale factions divided by a kind of international discomfort-index into those who were proCommunist, antiCommunist, and those who hovered in between. But last week the mold was broken as the holdouts, with the new nations added to their ranks, suddenly became the U.N.'s biggest "bloc" and the U.N. took a startled new look at itself. What it saw was very nearly a portrait of the world--a congress of white, brown, and black, each individual in his own way and many beholden to no one.

What became dramatically clear last week was that though they adhere neither to East nor West, the neutralists in general and the Africans in particular do adhere to something which goes beyond a choice between cold war sides--the belief in orderly international processes.

The Blow. Nikita Khrushchev paid last week for not realizing this. He thought he could play on the Africans' hatred for colonialism as a cloak to take over the Congo and set himself up as the champion of all Africa. When crossed, he turned on the U.N. and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who had thwarted him. As the Baltika neared Manhattan, Khrushchev discovered his error.

The incident seemed undramatic. As the Assembly got ready to vote, Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana--a nation on which Khrushchev was counting heavily--rose from his seat. In clipped British accents, he asked Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin to drop his resolution condemning Hammarskjold for exceeding his powers in the Congo. Stunned, Zorin meekly complied, then sat in frozen silence as the Assembly, by a historic vote of 70 to 0, gave Hammarskjold a ringing endorsement and demanded that no nation ship arms to the Congo except through the U.N.

It was the most stinging rebuke Russia had suffered since the Korean war, and it came from just those nations that Khrushchev was most earnestly courting. Not for the West alone, but for the future of an orderly world, it was a famous victory.

The Floating Vote. Where their self-interest seemed to them to demand it, the Africans would vote against the West, too. But the emergence of the neutralist "floating vote" as the decisive force at the U.N. was something the U.S. could only welcome. (It really had no choice.)

As Dwight Eisenhower made clear, the U.S. has no devious power-politics interests in Africa. In fact he went so far as to propose to clear all propaganda, all educational programs and the bulk of all economic aid through the U.N. The U.S. has, in fact, no fundamental objectives in Africa beyond those of the Africans for themselves--true independence, economic growth and the maintenance of peace.

* By the end of this year, when Nigeria, Senegal and the former French Sudan will have been admitted, the only sizable nations not belonging to the U.N. will be Switzerland (out of devotion to utter neutrality), Red China, Outer Mongolia and the cold-war twins: East and West Germany, North and South Korea, North and South Viet Nam.

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