Devil's Advocates

What were those noises emanating from the upper right-hand corner of Africa last week? To the aligned, non-African ear, they sounded suspiciously like selfcriticism. The chiefs of state, gathered in Cairo for the second annual summit of the Organization of African Unity, laid their doubts on the line in a manner that would have done credit to a convention of devil's advocates.

Timely Reference. Most forthright was chunky, acerbic Philibert Tsiranana, rightist President of the Malagasy Republic (formerly Madagascar). "All I hear," he told his uneasy listeners, "is blah, blah, blah. We all talk too much, and we must purge ourselves of this disease." In the course of his own 85-minute harangue, President Tsiranana offered purgatives for a few other African diseases.

"Beware of raising armies," Tsiranana warned, "for they can overthrow us. Beware of visiting African delegations that come to enjoy your hospitality and praise you to your face, but stir up insurrection behind your back." To the nervous titters of such practitioners of insurrection as Algeria's Ahmed ben Bella and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, he took a cut at that African holy of holies, nonalignment. "We all say we are neutral, but we all favor anybody who helps us," Tsiranana said. "If you ask me the truth, I'll say mais oui, I am allied." Then he hit home with a telling blow: "We all regret Patrice Lumumba's death, but who amongst us has not executed opponents? Have you never signed an order to execute one of your rivals?" The reference was particularly timely, for vociferous objections advanced by some O.A.U. members had prevented the Congo's embattled Premier Moise Tshombe from attending the Cairo conference, partly on the grounds that he had acquiesced in the murder of Lumumba.

Balkanized Continent. Tsiranana, of course, was denounced as a neocolonialist stooge. Next on the list of outspoken orators was Ghana's leftist Kwame Nkrumah. In a two-hour meander through his customary wood lot, the Redeemer threw some insights into Africa's darker thickets. As it now stands, he said, Africa consists of "economically unviable states, which bear no possibility of real development." Nkrumah warned against the continent's "Balkanized nationalism." All true enough, but Nkrumah's solution was his usual Pan-African panacea--a union government, with guess who as President.

The delegates easily dismissed the Nkrumah proposal of instant union as wholly unrealistic. They reacted more strongly when Nkrumah struck out at the O.A.U.'s "liberation committee"--a nine-man group that coordinates and finances the activities of some 16 separate "freedom fighter" organizations aimed at freeing the African nations still controlled by white minorities. Blasting the committee for its "inexcusable" failure to make effective use of Egyptian and Algerian military experience, Nkrumah cried: "We have worsened the plight of our kinsmen in Angola, Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. We have frightened the imperialists sufficiently to strengthen their defenses, but not enough to make them abandon apartheid and white supremacy."

For the present at least, Kwame Nkrumah was right: Angola's tired rebels have been fought to a standstill after three years by a tough Portuguese force of 40,000 men who are not reluctant to plant mines in manioc fields. South Africa's large, bristling army and hard-handed Special Branch cops make any anti-apartheid activity tantamount to a career in jail. Only in the peanut enclave of Portuguese Guinea is a black nationalist rebellion doing well, but no one really believes that this matters a great deal.

More Practice. Still, Nkrumah's were fighting words, and they drew the rare wrath of Tanganyika's Julius Nyerere. Reading in clipped English, his hands snapping in angry gestures, Nyerere wondered at the "curious imagination" of "the Great Redeemer." Ghana, he pointed out, had paid nothing to the liberation committee. Yet Nkrumah budgets $5,600,000 a year for "African affairs," which is nothing more than a slush fund to finance opposition groups in other African countries. Nkrumah, charged Nyerere, was acting out of "petty peevishness," because Ghana had not been invited to join the liberation committee. Moreover, Nkrumah used his grandiose union scheme merely as a device to block anyone else's more modest but more realistic plans. Delegates began to applaud, and suddenly Nkrumah himself started clapping and kept it up while being tongue-lashed by the Tanganyikan.

In the end, the O.A.U. made a few practical decisions: Addis Ababa, where the organization was founded a year ago, was named as its permanent headquarters, and delegates settled on Guinea's U.N. ambassador, Diallo Telli Boubacar, as their first secretary-general. It was a modest underlining of the conference's most persistent theme. As Nyerere put it: "What we need is not more preaching about unity, but more practicing of unity."

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