Africa: Who Is Safe?

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Colonial administrators found it easier to make major decisions without consulting the populace. In the same way, one-party leaders like Nyerere and Nkrumah insist that they cannot afford the luxury of dissent and opposition. Many argue, by way of rationalization, that the one-party state is a modern adaptation of traditional tribal society, in which the individual was free to ex press his viewpoint under the baobab tree, but had to accept the tribe's (or chief's) decision once rendered. And indeed a certain amount of discussion filters up from the ranks to the top in parties like TANU, even in Nkrumah's monolithic Convention People's Party. Osagyefo recently told a visitor that he not only listened intently to the dissenting opinions of Ghana's "market mammies" but accepted them with alacrity: after all, the mammies control much of the nation's retail trade, hence hold much of its cash. The situation is familiar to any Madison Avenue man working on a consumer-goods account.

What Nyerere's near disaster demonstrated more pointedly than anything else is that even the leader of a strong one-party state cannot enforce his decisions so long as his army disagrees. For the most part, Africa's armies are small and politically uninformed. But political awareness seems to be developing. Nyerere's solution to the problem has been to rebuild his army with TANU Youth Wingers, and already he has thousands of volunteers. This, he claims, will both keep the nation's youth busy and provide Nyerere with a body of troops that see things through TANU's —and therefore his—eyes. If political awareness must come to his army, he would rather it be his brand of aware ness. The Ivory Coast's President Felix Houphouet-Boigny has perhaps the easiest solution to the problem: since the Ivoriens have no enemies to fight, he has simply taken their guns away. Even the cops in Abidjan carry nothing more deadly than cigarettes and money in their holsters.

An old saying has it that in Africa "there is no past, no future, only the present." For the time being, the present means ambition and anarchy, poverty and political intrigue. Upheaval will follow uhuru for some time to come. Slowly, gradually, economies will harden, a middle class will emerge, political activity will coalesce into forces that can be accommodated by democratic techniques. Then, and only then, will any African be safe.