Foreign News: AFRICA: Red Weeds Grow in New Soil

In Moscow last week grinning Ghanaian diplomats gleefully celebrated the signing of a $45 million contract for Soviet development of their nation’s mineral and industrial resources. In the Hotel de France in Guinea’s steaming capital of Conakry, the lingua franca of the lobby has shifted from French to Russian. At Leopoldville and Stanleyville in tne Congo, Soviet Ilyushin transports buzz familiarly in and out, debouching badly needed food -plus intelligence officers, tactical advisers for premier Patrice Lumumba’s army and, according to Western intelligence reports, arms and ammunition.

FIVE years ago, Russians and Eastern Europeans were varity in black Africa, and, though occasional African nationalists turned up in Moscow to study, not one Pravda Page in so mentioned the continent’s name. Last week, everywhere Western diplomats turned. Communist weeds were sprouting in the freshly plowed soil of African nationhood Guinea’s Sekou Toure turned to the East for aid after France responded to his demand for independence by withdrawing everything down to the Government House furniture NOW he has Czechs operating his airports, Poles running his public works and East Germans building him a big new radio station. Ethiopia’s proud Haile Selassie is well nigh awash with Soviet and Czech financial credits and, inevitably with hundreds of Red technicians.

Despite their slow start in Africa, the Soviets moved swiftly once colonial rule began to crumble. Overnight Russia’s rulers created in Moscow a mammoth African research center headed by the Soviet Union’s top African expert, Professor Ivan Potekhin. Top Soviet diplomatic talent was rushed to Africa, including Middle East Ace Daniel Solod, who is Moscow’s Ambassador to Guinea, and hard-driving Ambassador to Congo Mikhail Yakovlev, whose clever footwork has gained him seemingly unrestricted access to Patrice Lumumba’s office. Soviet diplomats have cleared the way for such projects as the African student scheme under which, last week, arrangements were made to send 150 Congolese youths to Moscow’s new Friendship University in the autumn. And at least 1,000 African students have already been installed in schools in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Leningrad under the crash program begun three years ago.

Guerrillas & Acrobats. Following in the master’s foot steps. Russia’s European satellites are also hard at work infiltrating Africa in a carefully planned joint campaign coordinated by the East Germans. Since 1958, more than 800 African students and labor leaders have “matriculated” at both ordinary universities and special institutes in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Leipzig and East Berlin. Simultaneously, East German trade and cultural missions have been estab-lished in Ghana, Guinea, the Sudan, Nigeria, and in the Mali federation and Cameroon, where Communist parties and Red guerrillas (who had made earlier Moscow pilgrimages) already existed. Within two days after the Congo became independent last June, five East German “trade union” adVisers were setting up shop in Leopoldville.

The Red Chinese are on the scene, too: “rice technicians,” i.e coolies, in Guinea, “tea advisers” in Morocco, and such cu|tural-exchange groups as the troupe of Chinese acrobats that toured Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea and Morocco for six months this year. In the past 18 months 54 separate African delegation have gotten the Red carPet treatment in Peking.

And last week Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba glumly predicted that Chinese “volunteers” would be fighting alongside Algeria s Moslem rebels in a matter of months.

But communist effort in Africa by no means assures Communist triumph there. So far, despite all the Red activity only solid foothold on a continent the size of the U.S., China and India combined is in little Guinea, a corner of West Africa no bigger than Oregon. The obstacles ahead are formidable. For one thing, white skin is white skin, as a Russian medical team in the Congo learned last week when it was attacked by natives, who thought the Russians, too. were Belgian. For another, Communism speaks in Africa with two voices, one Chinese, one Russian. The Soviets, keenly aware that Africa’s rising leaders and their supporters are mostly middle-class in origin and purely nationalist in philosophy, two weeks ago proclaimed that it was all right for Communists to cooperate “for quite a long time” with bourgeois leaders “in colonial lands.” To the Red Chinese, this was “a violation of Lenin’s views” and heresy; Peking’s program for Africa is to encourage by every means immediate proletarian revolutions patterned after Mao Tse-tung’s own rise to power.

From Two, Twelve. A more important barrier to sweeping Communist triumph is the what’s-in-it-for-me attitude of the African political leaders, who are not interested in inviting in new outside masters. The Communists may find it as difficult as the West does to come to terms with the fiercely neutralist pattern emerging among Africa’s new nations. In the fashion of Nasser, most African leaders seem hopeful of taking aid from both sides while avoiding domination by either. Haile Selassie refuses to spend any of his $100 million Soviet low-interest credits until the harassed Red technicians in Addis Ababa go along with his own development schemes, some of them involving Western participation.

Where neutralism doesn’t balk the Communists, Africa’s impulse toward fragmentation—a result of Africa’s 800 languages and thousands of local and regional loyalties—should rule out a general Red takeover. In 1950. French Africa was two big land areas, their economies interwoven by the civil servants from Paris; today it has split into twelve nations. In former French Equatorial Africa, efforts to hold the pieces together failed because little Gabon refused to share its wealth with its poorer neighbors. Despite spasmodic efforts at federation. Africa seems certain to drift not toward political unity, Red-inspired or otherwise, but toward a kind of South American-style hodgepodge of small states, mainly poor and endlessly squabbling.

The Price of Turmoil. No matter how clever their diplomacy, the Communists could not hope to harness Africa’s exploding forces to their will completely. The West has in Africa economic and political stakes that will not be lightly surrendered. What the Soviets could do—and presently seem determined to do—is to prolong and enhance the turmoil in Africa to destroy Western influence there, content to settle for chaos where they cannot control.