POISED BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

Slipping silently through woods and rolling farm lands about to explode with the new growth of the African spring, black guerrillas eluded the hard-pressed patrols along Rhodesia's frontier with Mozambique and posted crude signs on the fences of white farmers. The signs said simply: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES.

A hundred miles to the west in Salisbury, Rhodesia's pleasant, tree-lined capital, a "troopie" wearing the black beret of Prime Minister Ian Smith's security forces looked up from his post on downtown Jameson Avenue as the season's first dark rain clouds came scudding over the rooftops. "Damn," he said, scowling to his partner. "I was hoping it would hold off a bit longer. The 'terrs' [white Rhodesians' shorthand for terrorists] will be tougher than ever in the rains this year."

The high season for guerrilla warfare begins with the November rains. This year, however, the guerrillas' intentions were just one of many new uncertainties facing Rhodesia's 6.1 million blacks and 274,000 whites. Prime Minister Smith, following Henry Kissinger's dazzling diplomatic foray into southern Africa, had agreed to yield power to his country's black majority in two years time. His decision raised the possibility that Rhodesia — as well as much of the rest of southern Africa — might be poised on the brink of peace instead of a race war that was once thought inevitable.

The success — or failure — of the effort to bring about a peaceful transfer to majority rule in the last country in southern Africa ruled by a white colonial regime would directly affect the prospects for racial concord or conflict in another, much more important African tinderbox, South Africa. Already, the emotionally charged issue of the future of southern Africa's two white-ruled regimes was reflected, in varying ways, in passions and politics among the 136 million blacks in all of the 16 states in the tier of black Africa south of the equator (see box page 34).

Inevitably, in an age of global interdependence, southern Africa has emerged as a new battleground — so far mostly verbal — for the superpowers. All through Secretary Kissinger's mobile campaign to try to turn the momentum of race and politics in southern Africa from deepening confrontation to negotiation, the Russians were firing rhetorical broadsides from the sidelines, as if the trauma of another siege of shuttle diplomacy were almost more than they could bear. They accused the U.S. of "gimmickry" and of seeking to preserve "not only racial oppression, but the entire neocolonialist setup in Africa."

Kissinger, who just barely had time to unpack his bags in Washington following his return from his twelve-day mission in southern Africa, journeyed to Manhattan to give the U.S. answer at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. In a solemn, hourlong address, he rejected the Soviet charges in blunt terms. Washington, he said, had become involved diplomatically in southern Africa because it was convinced that "racial injustice and the grudging retreat of colonial power" had raised the possibility that the region could become "a vicious battleground with consequences for every part of the world."