Africa: Who Is Safe?

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The Congo's pathetic struggle to build some kind of parliamentary government has been a miserable failure. Last September, confusion was so great in the Parliament that it was prorogued. This spring the Congolese hope to vote for a new Parliament—with no great expectation of improvement. After the election, the United Nations troops that have held Premier Cyrille Adoula's government together will pull out. Already the vultures (including Mulele) are circling, and many feel that Adoula may be the Kerensky of Africa.

Victim to Dry Rot. Another source of African unrest has been the extravagance and economic naivete of some of its new leaders. The Brazzaville Congo's Abbe Fulbert Youlou, a Roman Catholic priest turned President, ordered mauve cassocks from Dior, quaffed champagne and built himself a luxury hotel. Meanwhile, his country's timber-based economy fell victim to dry rot. Crowds of New Class labor union members, with the aid of the army, politically defrocked him last August. A similar fate befell Dahomey's President Hubert Maga, who built himself a $3,000,000 palace and shrugged off charges of "squandermania" until his countrymen last December gave him the boot.

But austerity can be just as dangerous. No West African leader was more reluctant to part with a franc than Togo's strapping Sylvanus Olympio. Then one night he woke to find his house aswarm with mutinous soldiers. Next morning he was found dead near the U.S. embassy, with lizards scuttling near his body. The soldier who shot him said he had not meant to kill. It was just that the troops wanted a bigger army.

The happiest combination of political freedom and national progress on the continent so far has occurred in Nigeria. There, three clearly defined and potentially antagonistic tribal regions have been melded into a smoothly working two-party federal government under stolid Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Since 1950, Nigeria's gross national product has grown steadily. It now has five universities where it had none in 1947, and its primary-school enrollment has more than tripled (from 820,000 to 2,600,000) in the same time. But Sir Abubakar has his problems. Nigeria's last official census was in 1952, and since not only political but economic power hangs on the numerical balance between the feudal north and the more progressive south,

Nigerians want desperately to know how many of which are where. Two weeks ago, "preliminary" results of last fall's census were released, showing an astounding 64% jump, to 55.6 million people. Since the main "increase" came in the politically dominant north, suspicious southerners cried foul. Riots broke out, and more than a thousand students in Ibadan chartered buses and headed for Lagos to demonstrate. They were turned back by steel-helmeted cops with tear gas.

That sort of regional trouble is perhaps only to be expected in a huge, tribally fragmented nation like Nigeria. But what happened earlier this year in Tanganyika, blessed by a minimum of tribal conflict, came as a jolt to all the world.