The Road to Union Is Paved with Good Intentions

The President arrived at ten in the afternoon. At the airport to greet him were his able Vice President (who combines the baleful glare of Sonny Listen with a Groucho Marx mustache) and the fat, 5-ft.-tall head of the Youth League (who wears mammoth gold stars and carries his money in bulging sacks). During his stay the President was entertained by native dancers who balanced pickaxes, shovels and barrels of mortar on their heads. He supped on cherry pop and sponge cake while solemnly touring a gallery hung with photographs of Mao Tse-tung, Lenin and Lyndon Johnson. He visited a poultry farm, later addressed a mass rally while cows grazed on a nearby golf course and goats gamboled on a cricket field.

Though the script read like a rejected passage from an Evelyn Waugh novel of black Africa, it did indeed happen-to Julius Nyerere, last week in Zanzibar.

Imperfect Merger. Eight months ago. President Nyerere signed the articles of confederation that united his mainland nation of Tanganyika with the tiny, troublesome offshore island state of Zanzibar. At the time, Zanzibar had just gone through a far-left coup against the ruling Arab minority. African Leader Abeid Karume had been installed as President, and his regime seemed about to slide under Peking domination. The union forestalled that, and Karume reluctantly agreed to serve under Nyerere as a mere Vice President of the newly formed nation known as Tanzania. Last week, as Nyerere paid his first state visit to the territories he had hoped to assimilate, it must have struck him that Tanzania could scarcely be zanier.

The island runs on Swahili time-a full six hours behind the mainland-hence it was still morning on the afternoon Nyerere landed. Vice President Karume is still known as President on Zanzibar. Island officials obstinately control their own customs and immigration affairs, maintain and jealously censor an independent cable and wireless network, and conduct external trade and finances through their own ministries. The tough, green-uniformed troopers of the People's Liberation Army-composed mostly of Communist-leaning hoodlums who had led the anti-Arab coup-still stalk the streets armed with Russian burp guns. They are backed by the 30-man Revolutionary council, a gang of malcontents led by Peking's pal Abdul Rahman Mohamed, better known as "Babu," probably East Africa's ugliest and brightest politician.

Delicate Balance. If the union's two components are having trouble balancing each other, Nyerere and Karume apparently are trying hard to balance East and West. In the receiving line welcoming Nyerere, U.S. Consul General Frank Carlucci was neatly played off against East German Ambassador Guenther Fritsch. To demonstrate their nonalignment, Nyerere and Karume spoke Swahili with both the American and the East German; Carlucci answered them fluently, while Fritsch, wincing behind his sunglasses, used an interpreter.

After a round of dances, speeches and inspections, Nyerere visited a $1,500,000 housing block that the East Germans have been building since last June. In Karume's eyes, the project is a fiasco: the East Germans insisted on importing all building materials-including sand and lime, which Zanzibar has in abundance. They refused to pay the going workmen's wage of 70-c- a day. wound up with a wildcat strike that threw the project far behind schedule.

Next day Nyerere visited the site of a $785,000 secondary school being built by the U.S. Carlucci showed off his Swahili once more, explaining that the school was being built strictly with local materials, by local laborers and contractors, and although started only three months ago, would be open by late February. Nyerere flicked his toothbrush mustache and allowed as how "you are going upesi, upesi [very fast]."

An Admission. All told, it was a good show from the Western point of view. Karume was even moved to declare that "America is not evil"-quite an admission tor a man who not a year earlier had personally expelled the U.S. charge d'affaires and ordered the removal of an innocuous American Mercury tracking station. Karume has proved to be a tough, instinctive politician who is slowly divorcing himself from the Communist-packed Revolutionary Council. But Tanzania's gravest question remains whether he and Nyerere-faced with pro-Communist Ministers and a continent torn by the chaos of the Congo-will be able to hold their precarious balance between East and West, moderation and violence.

In November Nyerere's right-hand man. Foreign Minister Oscar Kambona. produced a set of forged "communications" that purported to show Washington in league with Portugal in a planned invasion of Tanzania. On Zanzibar, Babu's boys laid bare an ostensible Arab "plot" that brought an ebulliently brutal crackdown by the People's Revolutionary Army in which some 300 Arabs were arrested. Five were later executed- allegedly, their hands were lopped off and they bled to death. Even though at present the Red Chinese are not finding it too easy to conduct the Tanzanian combo, the top tune on Zanzibar's Red hit parade remains My Motherland Is in Black Africa, composed-perhaps symbolically-by a pair of Chinese songwriters named Yuan Ying and Wang Chen-ya.

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