Week of History

Continents, like men, seem to slow up with age. But not Africa, which seems to be intent on cramming decades of history into the space of months. Not all its news is of racial hate, tribal fury and bitter rivalries.

Last week in Algeria the F.L.N. rebels and France took a giant step closer to the end of 6 1/2 years of wasting war. In Kenya white men voted peacefully alongside their African servants and Africans in the countryside to elect a new legislature certain to be dominated by blacks. In Rhodesia's faltering Central African Federation, where white settlers had even talked angrily of armed rebellion against the British Colonial Office, top leaders decided to negotiate--not fight--the inevitable: some kind of African control of the northern areas.

In mountainous Morocco a respected King died, and a politically uncertain new King succeeded him. Morocco's list of state visitors, past, passing and to come, was a small but significant measure of the new stature of Africa in the world's eyes. Russia's President Leonid Brezhnev had just left; Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito would soon be arriving aboard his state yacht; President Kennedy's personal representative, Averell Harriman, flew in from London; U.S. Special Emissary G. Mennen Williams was slowly working his way up from the heart of Africa.

New men and new states were pushing up like exotic flowers from the jungles and savannas, from the cloud-rimmed mountains and sandy wastes of the last continent to awaken politically. Despite the daily shedding of blood from the Mediterranean littoral to the Cape of Good Hope, independence has come quietly and with peace to most of Africa's 240 million. If Algeria is at last on the way to peace, only the Congo currently remains as a running sore.

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