Foreign News: NEW FLAGS OF 1960

Men have marched under many a banner bearing a strange device, from the “Don’t Tread on Me” serpent of the American Revolution to the three-headed elephant of Laos. This year 18 new flags were unfurled by the emergent nations of Africa and the Mediterranean. Cyprus boasts the first national flag bearing a map. Mali is the first to emblazon its colors with a human ideogram, employing an ancient African symbol of a man with arms raised to heaven and feet planted firmly on earth, signifying attachment to religion and the soil.

Most of the former French colonies paid their mother country the compliment of adapting the Tricolor, although eschewing the French red, white and blue. Even the simplest designs caused headaches. In Chad, the Assembly wrangled for two days, and the 85 Deputies suggested 85 separate flags. In making its final choice, the government was careful to eliminate green, which for many Africans symbolizes Islam but in Chad is the color of the opposition party. Cameroun happily prepared to embellish its flag with a shrimp, since the country’s name derives from the Portuguese word for shrimp, camarāo. Western observers hastily advised that world reaction might be derisive, and Cameroun settled for a prosaic tricolor.

Symbolism was rampant. In the hope of aiding African unity, Mali deliberately matched its colors to the red, yellow and green of the flags of Guinea and Ghana. The horizontal black, white and red stripes of Upper Volta stand, appropriately enough, for the three rivers called the Black, White and Red Volta. Tropical Gabon achieved a romantic note: its yellow band represents the equator running between the green of Gabon’s forests and the blue of the sea. Togo touched nearly every base: its green stripes represent agriculture, its gold, wealth; red stands for patriotism, and the single white star for “good understanding.”

In designing their flags, some nations depended on individual inspiration, others on committees and contents. Nigeria held a competition that drew 2,870 entries. The winner: a 22-year-old Nigerian student in Britain who had never designed anything before. The involved banner of the Central African Republic was designed by its Premier Barthélémy Boganda, who was later killed in an air crash (TIME, April 13, 1959). The problems faced by the 18 new nations, and by nations yet unborn, were summed up by an official of the Malagasy Republic. “It was very hard to find a combination that was not already in use,” he said apologetically of his country’s flag. “There have been so many new nations that this is the best we could do.”