You Can Go Home Again

Back home to Peking last week, well ahead of schedule, flew Red China's Premier Chou Enlai. His original intention, after a "friendly visit" fortnight ago with Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, had been to spend three weeks visiting other African leaders, ending his tour with a final appearance at the Afro-Asian Conference of nonaligned nations on June 29 in Algiers. Then, at a rally in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital, he declared that "an exceedingly favorable situation for revolution prevails not only in Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America."

That might have been the thing to say a few years ago, but it's not very popular in Africa now. The continent's leaders, once strong for revolution, are now well aware whose heads would roll the next time around. Chinese diplomats in Dar es Salaam, trying discreetly to recruit the Premier's next host, found that Guinea's Sekou Toure felt that a visit from Chou at this time might be "inconvenient." Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah was "too busy." Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Nigeria were also not interested.

Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, who last month intercepted eleven truckloads of Chinese weapons being smuggled from Tanzania to Uganda (TIME, June 4), was least interested of all. In unmistakably tart tones an official Kenya government communique declared: "It is not clear to the Kenya government what type or form of revolution the Chinese Prime Minister has in mind. But the Kenya government wishes it to be known that Kenya intends to avert all revolutions irrespective of their origins or whether they come from inside or are influenced from outside."

Chou's only consolation was that, two days after he left, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya announced that the East African shilling, established when the countries were under British rule, will be abandoned, with the end of the three-nation Common Market expected to follow. Prime instigator of the breakup was Tanzania, which has had its own currency printed for more than a year, and which wants to embargo imports from Kenya and so end the unfavorable trade balance it has traditionally had with its more highly developed neighbor. In order to do so, Tanzania apparently plans to import the bulk of its goods instead from Red China under aid agreements, and shops in Dar es Salaam last week were already displaying Chinese-made bicycles, canned mandarin oranges, and radios.

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