Red Africa stays black
Richard West The fear of red intervention in black Africa is not the novelty that one might imagine from recent statements on the Angola crisis. As readers of 'Evelyn Waugh's Scoop may recall, the journalists in Addis Ababa during the Abyssinian War were quick to detect a Russian agent in any bearded stranger. At about the same time, the philosopher-doctor Albert Schweitzer blamed the Comintern for the activities in West Africa of Leopard men, who murdered their victims with metal claws.
It now appears that the Soviet Union and the Comintern, between the two world wars, took little interest in black Africa compared with Europe and Asia. The largest and most effective communist Party on the continent was that of South Africa and was almost exclusively white; indeed it supported the anti-black riots during the 1922 strike on the Witwatersrand. The Soviet Union wanted Africa to be proselytised by black American communists, who found it hard to get permits to enter the European colonies and, when they did so, were not much heard.
After the second world war, the Russians were often blamed for troubles in Africa, especially the Mau Mau uprising. Recent research on the subject has thrown up no proof that the Soviet armed, trained or supplied the Mau Mau guerrillas, most of whom were illiterate peasants. The African intellectuals such as Kenyatta, who might have read communist literature, were obviously not impressed since they are now shown to be able and eager capitalists.
Nor has the Soviet Union had much success in influencing independent African countries. They lavished money on Ghana's Dr Nkrumah but must have realised that he was just a demagogue. Although Sekou Toure, the President of the Guinea, was and is a Marxist, he is scarcely a Russian Puppet and well knows how to play the Russians off against rival communist Powers such as China and Yugoslavia. The latter, like Rumania, another maverick communist country, would seem to be interested in black Africa more for its commercial possibilities than to spread any political philosophy. Both countries, for instance, have at times been active in the horrific despotism of General Bokassa's Central African Republic.
Western powers with commercial interests in the continent, especially Great Britain and the United States, have constantly warned of the red menace in countries that threatened their business interests. When I first went to Tanzania in 1964, I had been told by white people in Kenya that I would find goose-stepping
guards at the airport, and downtown Dar-es-Salaam stiff with Russians and Cubans. The same sort of people, even the same people who uttered these crazily false warnings, now admit that President Nyerere has never intended to let either the Russians or Chinese dictate to Tanzania.
Whereas the Chinese are rather admired by Africans for their modesty and lack of racial prejudice, the Russians are often considered arrogant, even compared unfavourably with the colonial rulers. In Mali, soon after a left-wing government had been overthrown. Russian pilots still flew the national airline planes, but ungraciously, complaining of not having been paid for the machines. On one long flight I made, the pilots not only turned up hours later but went to the airport bar during the long stops to drink beer in sight of the nervous passengers. I got to know some Russians up-country in Ethiopia who, although friendly to me, tended to yell abuse at the Africans and were so bored, and so homesick that they thought it a red-letter day when Pravda arrived. The one African state I have visited that was avowedly communist, Congo-Brazzaville, still seemed to be *run by the French in spite of the superabundance of flags and bunting proclaiming proletarian solidarity. The communist Russians, Chinese, Cubans and North Koreans were said to be there in thousands but nobody knew what they did.
A leader of the Angolan left-wing MPLA movement stated last week that just because they accepted Russian and Cuban guns and aid, this did not mean they would later become communist puppets. This statement was greeted in Europe and the United States as an example of communist cunning. To anyone who knows something of African history it has the ring of truth. From the fifteenth century. when the Europeans first came to establish trading posts, they were constantly making treaties with coastal chiefs, who gave them land in exchange for gifts or guns. And almost invariably when the next lot of foreigners came along, the same chief Would forget the previous treaty and make a new one, for more gifts and guns. British and French colonial records are catalogues of complaint at the unscrupulousness of the African and the perfidy of the French or British rival. The African chiefs quite rightly distrusted the white man's professions of friendship and concern, knowing full well that they wanted only slaves, gold and ivory, just ' as today they want oil, copper and diamonds.
Now, as then, the Africans expertly play off the rivalry of the Europeans. A few years ago I was in Mauritius just after a scare that the Russians had built a naval base on the island. The Mauritians announced this shortly before talks with Britain on economic matters. I went to the place on the island where this base was supposed to be and found there was no base, no fuelling depot, no Russians. But Mauritius got more economic aid. In the Nigerian civil war, the French were supposed to have backed Biafra but now their oil company prospers at the expense of the British oil companies which opposed Biafra. And Nigeria is less communist than ever; it was in Lagos during the war that the Russians really revealed themselves as innocents in the African way of life by paying some journalists in advance to produce a pro-communist newspaper. I like to think of those honest fellows smiling their way to a Swiss bank.
Angola's history is perhaps the most tragic in all Africa. It was the part of the continent most pillaged for slaves and then in the twentieth century most exploited by foreign capitalists. The descriptions by H. W. Nevinson in The Spectator of the 1900s of Britain's Angolan cocoa plantations are just as shocking as Roger Casement's book on "red rubber" in the Congo.
Indeed Britain still has an immense investment in copper and the Benguela Railway, as also in the RTZ uranium mine in neighbouring South West Africa, which supplies most of the needs of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. If South West Africans get independence and nationalise the mine (as was threatened) it will not be considered a triumph for Anthony Wedgwood Benn Who signed the RTZ contract during the last Labour government. The pious reproaches made by James Callaghan to the Russians sound all the more sickly when one remembers that it was Britain who gave most arms to Nigeria to destroy Biafra with the excuse that if she didn't Russia would. Yet the Russian siege guns that finally broke Biafra were bought by Nigeria on the advice of the British government.
Of the "new Russian colonialist" I would say, as was once said of neighbouring Congo: "There's less in this than meets the eye".
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