Africa: Who Is Safe?

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Unless I can meet at least some of these aspirations, my head will roll just as surely as the tickbird follows the rhino.

—Julius Nyerere (1961)

The aspirations that accompanied African independence were great indeed and, to an extent, some of them have been realized. From Dakar to Dar es Salaam, gleaming office buildings rise where rust-roofed shantytowns once stood. Hydroelectric dams now hum where only the crocodile hunter passed ten years ago. Africans who a short time ago ran drugstores or taught elementary school debate eloquently with their former colonial rulers in the United Nations, or struggle manfully with the problems of nonalignment in a world increasingly complicated by shifts of temperature in the cold war.

But the tickbird still follows the rhino, and to the extent that Africa's new leadership has not met Africa's aspirations, or avoided the pitfalls left by its colonial past, heads have been rolling. The headlines of the past two months testify that Africa is still a continent of chaos and contradiction. Since the year began, crises have erupted at a rate of one a week, and it seems that in the alphabet of independent Africa, A is for anarchy, B is for bedlam, and C is for coup.

The Fragile Societies. Zanzibar's month-old government fell to a savage anti-Arab coup. A flash fire of mutinies singed the wings of three fledgling East African nations. Border warfare exploded between Ethiopa and Somalia.

Hatreds rooted in a tribal past bloomed into butchery as the Bahutu of Rwanda set out to eliminate their former Watutsi masters. Poisoned arrows zipped through the Congo's Kwilu province in the latest chapter of that sad nation's four-year history. In the Sudan, black secessionists battled the Arab government of Dictator Ibrahim Abboud. And last week, in Gabon, mobs hurled stones and bottles at the French troops who had restored bold, autocratic President Leon Mba to power last month after an abortive, 42-hour coup.

The fragility of Africa's new societies was nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in President Julius Nyerere's Tanganyika. Long considered Africa's most sensible and sensitive statesman, Nyerere had assiduously cultivated unity in his own country, preached it to the continent at large. His immense popularity at home had been based not on wild promises of a golden future but on a clear-eyed appraisal of the hard work that lay ahead. His own sober determination to get on with the job of building a nation seemed to have communicated itself to his people, largely through his motto, "Uhuru na kazi"—"Independence and work." Then, in a sudden, senseless instant, Nyerere's carefully woven fabric of stability ripped down the middle. His army rose against him; riots exploded in the streets of Dar es Salaam. Only by calling in British troops did Nyerere survive. When the smoke cleared, a frightening question remained: If Julius Nyerere could be shaken to the verge of destruction, who in all Africa was safe?