Foreign News: Black Partner

Conspicuous among Premier Guy Mollet's new Cabinet members was a short, stocky, black-skinned man from French West Africa. Félix Houphouet-Boigny is the first Negro ever to hold Cabinet rank in France. His job: to rewrite the clause in France's 1946 constitution establishing the French Union. His purpose: to save "Black Africa" for France.

Houphouet-Boigny is an avowed enemy turned avowed friend. Ten years ago he had denounced the new postwar constitution as a "betrayal" of De Gaulle's wartime promise of full equality for Black Africa, and launched the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain with the slogan, "Battle to death against the European exploiters!" Formally and brazenly, he allied the R.D.A. with the Communists, conducted a two-year campaign of terrorism in the Ivory Coast, in which hundreds of fellow natives who dared support the French were massacred.

Late in 1950 Houphouet-Boigny had a change of heart. He called off the terrorism, and broke with the Communists. "Our movement, which aspired to promote prosperity and happiness, was engendering destruction and fear," he explained. "One dies for a goal, an ideal, but not for a means. Communist alliance was only a means to help our cause, but instead it became an obstacle." In the next years Houphouet-Boigny built the R.D.A. into French Black Africa's first mass party, crisscrossed deserts and jungles from Dakar to Brazzaville to orate at native assemblages, organized party committees in nearly every one of Black Africa's 1,000 tribes. His new creed: "Independence is an easy slogan, but no solution for the African people. Even America cannot stand alone in the modern world. We need equal partnership with France."

Man of Destiny. Houphouet-Boigny* has his share of early and bitter memories of French overlordship. He inherited the chieftaincy of the Akwe tribe when he was five. This did not deter a minor French functionary from peremptorily requisitioning him out of the local mission school to be his houseboy. "It did not matter whether I was a chief's son or a slave. I was black," he remembers bitterly. He studied medicine at Dakar, but spent twelve years in native dispensaries serving as a medical "assistant" because only white men could be doctors.

His first taste of political leadership came when he returned to his family plantation and set to work organizing a farmers' union among the native coffee growers. "Traditional chieftains trusted me because I was one of them. So did the educated, modern-minded elite, because I was one of them, too."