A TINY country like Rhodesia seldom gets the world's attention unless it is in serious trouble. And then, too often, the scream of the headlines and the rattle of the bulletins tend to obscure the more basic story of what the country is like, how it got that way, and how it relates to the wider pattern in its part of the world. It was the pressing need for that kind of essential story to be told that brought to the cover of TIME this week the Prime Minister of a country with a population of not much more than 4,000,000.

The larger story, of course, is that of the white man in black Africa--a story that had to be reported from such places as Uganda, the Congo, Nigeria and Kenya as well as London and Rhodesia. Our man in Salisbury is Eric Robins, who has written four books on Africa, has been a TIME stringer for nine years, and has worked on major assignments that have taken him from South Africa to the Congo, from Mozambique to the Seychelles. Because such a reporting job is too much for one man (to say nothing of the special difficulties faced by a locally based reporter on this kind of story), we sent to Salisbury East Africa Correspondent Dean Fischer, whose base is Nairobi. Then London Bureau Chief Murray Gart, who not long ago was covering another aspect of the race struggle as our Chicago bureau chief, flew to Salisbury well ahead of Prime Minister Harold Wilson to deal with the general aspects of the story.

Out of the Gart-Fischer-Robins report to Writer John Blashill in New York came the cover story edited by Edward Hughes, who, on the way to his present chair as senior editor of THE WORLD section, spent more than two years as a TIME correspondent based in Africa. What this highly knowledgeable team produced is a story that not only deals with the essential character of Rhodesia and the black-white confrontation in Africa, but also has implications bearing on the larger issue of race relations all over the world.

FOR 20 years, TIME-LIFE International, a division of Time Inc., has maintained advertising sales offices abroad. These branch offices--there are today 17 around the world --solicit and sell space in the six international editions of TIME (in which the ads differ but the editorial content is the same as at home), as well as LIFE International and LIFE en Espanol.

This week TIME'S advertising department opens its first European branch, which will be exclusively concerned with selling advertising for the U.S. editions. Until now, European clients of the home edition placed their ads through their U.S. subsidiaries. The man who will head TIME'S first European ad office, which will be located in Zurich and operate Europe-wide, is Hermann Hirzel who, being a Swiss, is fluent in several languages. The new office will provide advice and counsel to new accounts, especially those without representation in the U.S., and solicit advertising for the national and regional editions of TIME U.S.

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