Africa: Who Is Safe?

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His solution was to call a special meeting of the Organization for African Unity. This fledgling Pan-African grouping of 33 states was created last May at Addis Ababa, where Emperor Haile Selassie sponsored the latest moves toward continental unity. The O.A.U. is an amalgam of two earlier unity attempts that had failed (the Casablanca Pact and the Monrovia Group), and with its insistence on African solutions to African problems, it listened with sympathy to Nyerere's story, effectively absolved him of his sin. Shaken but still alive, Julius Nyerere set out to rebuild his army and his popularity.

Haven for Rebels. What does Nyerere's experience portend for the future of emerging Africa? One of the few heartening lessons in his brush with disaster was the O.A.U.'s willingness to forgive him. Nyerere, after all, is a leader in African unity, permits his capital to be used as headquarters for the O.A.U.'s Liberation Committee, whose aim is to crack the white grip on southern Africa. This is one of the few issues around which all black Africans can rally. Dar es Salaam (Arabic for "Haven of Peace") further belies its name by serving as the home base for at least seven African insurgent parties dedicated to eradicating colonialism and apartheid from the south. Largest is the Mozambican Liberation Front—Frelimo—which maintains a military training camp 40 miles northwest of Dar, where some 500 young Mozambican refugees receive weapons training with rifles supplied by Algeria.

But it seems clear from the events of recent months that neither these rifles nor any others will be used against white Africa in a major assault for some time to come. The new independent nations have too many problems at home. The war against white Africa will be fought, for the time being, with boycotts and propaganda, and through such limited guerrilla-type actions as Holden Roberto's in Angola. There is, of course, the continuing struggle against Africa's whites in the corridors and debating rooms of the United Nations, where sub-Sahara's independent countries—fully 28% of the General Assembly—bring unrelenting pressure to bear.

Voice of the Mammies. What institutions are emerging from the new Africa? Whether Western political scientists like it or not, the one-party state seems likely to be the pattern in most of Africa for the foreseeable future.

African leaders argue that, to a degree, it provides just the continuity from colonialism that the new nations need.