CENTRAL AFRICA: The Visitors

In the old days, London and Paris were headquarters for the hot-eyed young African nationalists in search of learning, eager audiences and cash for the worthy cause back home. Today they still stop off in such European capitals long enough to present their independence demands to colonial ministers, but more often than not, they are headed westward to a new mecca of funds and sympathy: the U.S.

More than 1.700 African students are enrolled at American colleges and schools, and rare is the week that a black man with a name newly famous but hard to pronounce does not show up at New York's Idlewild Airport in a neat black suit. In the past two years the list has included Guinea's Sékou Touré, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Ivory Coast's Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Nigeria's Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kenya's Tom Mboya, Nyasaland's Kanyama Chiume, Southern Rhodesia's Joshua Nkomo, and most recently Tanganyika's Julius Nyerere.

Three from One. Newest arrivals: Dr. Hastings Banda, 55, of Nyasaland, and Kenneth Kaunda, 36, of Northern Rhodesia, two African leaders who are united in the determination to destroy the Central African Federation, a nation tacked together by Britain in 1953 in a desperate effort to make a stable, viable country out of three dissimilar territories carved out of the bush by Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes. The Federation consists of Nyasaland, copper-rich Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia, the last being the only one of the three that includes a large (211,000) white settler population. It is Southern Rhodesia's whites, who are sentimentally linked to the South Africans in race policy, that Dr. Banda and Kaunda want to escape. Each is fresh from jail, released by Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod in the wind-through-Africa spirit, after serving sentences as political troublemakers. Each will probably become a Prime Minister within five years.

Cheers & Tactics. Last week an audience of 1,500 Americans in Manhattan's Town Hall chanted "NOW, NOW, NOW," as Spellbinder Kaunda yelled, "FREEDOM, Africa!", and cheered stumpy Hastings Banda (who spent 15 years in the U.S. before the war, studied at the University of Chicago and Nashville's Meharry Medical College) as he proclaimed: "We are not anti-white or anti-British; we are anti-domination!"

Then they set off on a barnstorming tour sponsored by Manhattan's American Committee on Africa, a liberal pressure group that is headed by the Rev. (Methodist) George M. Houser. Next week Banda flies back to London to continue his negotiations with the British government, but Kaunda has a month-long schedule of visits to Washington, the Mid-West, and the South. High point: a meeting with some young U.S. Negro leaders of the lunch-counter campaign in the South, to compare notes on tactics.