Gateway to ideas; 18; Past, Present, and Future" with Quincy Howe

Twenty two ideas. I am. I am. I am 22 ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to reading. Today's program Africa past present and future is moderated by Quincy how the editor of Atlas magazine our guests George loft senior vice president of the African American Institute. He's an economist and a managed without expert previously director of the African program of the American Friends Service Committee and head of IT program at the United Nations. The three years most aloft lived in Southern Rhodesia and traveled extensively through all the African continent. Our other guest is George Houser a Methodist clergyman who traveled to Africa every year since 1954.

He is executive director of the American Committee on Africa and he is one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality. Now this is a huge subject Africa's a big continent. I think the best way to get into the subject is to look at it from the way it now appears this African situation. In this year 1964 How about the American attitude toward Africa now as contrasted perhaps with a few years ago and the changing our African attitude toward the United States Mr. loft would you like to start us off along that line. I think Mr. Howe I've been pondering this because we've been going through a period of disillusionment by all rights we ought now to be in the warm glow of the morning after the underdog has slug it through. The country has become independent. We

all ought to be living happily ever after ever after and yet somehow the day after the honeymoon some disillusionment has set in. And I think at bottom has been in recent weeks and months a drawing back of the United States and the American people from Africa and this drawing back has come not only from those who have been on the outside of African developments but in a very peculiar way from those who have been most intimately concerned with Africa itself. I can think of an eminent African ist an academician who's made a real study of Africa recently wrote an indignant letter to one of our leading papers about the events in the Congo and suggesting that this is the way the Africans behave maybe we ought to have nothing to do with them. I recall also a statement made by a businessman friend of mine very intimately involved in Africa for many

years who after paying a visit to that continent toward the end of 964 came back thoroughly disillusioned. I see where I do find the same sort of situation as to how well I was just going to comment on the fact that it seems to me that there has been yes a change in American attitude but I'm wondering if it isn't based on a certain naivete. Maybe this is true not just of the American people but of people anywhere in the world. But I can recall back and say ten years ago in the middle 50s before Ghana became independent. March 57. A number of things that were. Written chapters in books about and trauma. He was put on a pedestal. He was looked upon as another Gandhi or another Nehru. Then Ghana became independent.

And as various African leaders have said we want the right to be independent so that we can make our own mistakes. Now the price you pay for independence is freedom of action and you have to take responsibility for it. But the American people. Have by putting persons like Interim on a pedestal and then seeing it knocked off knocked off as just a man who is subject to mistakes that all men make become disillusioned by events. One party states in Africa I think really there's a beginning of a drastic change in attitude of Americans towards Africa. In 1960 when so many countries became independent and then particularly with the developments that subsequently occurred in the Congo. So I think there's a certain naivete that's involved here and not realizing that when countries become independent they have freedom of choice freedom of

action and they have to take responsibility for their mistakes as well as for the good things they do. Not only is there not even George Houser suggested but a lack of ability to read the calendar. Here are countries some of them literally only weeks old in terms of their independence. And yet we've expected them to behave like highly sophisticated highly experienced almost world powers. I don't know. Not enough of a historian to know what happened in the first weeks of American independence but I sure that our record wasn't entirely mature one. Take a country like Malawi for example with about three and a half million Africans of whom possibly nor more than three dozen have university degrees and you've got a staff. Your government agency you've got a few embassies in various parts of the world and you are projected on to the world not in

the seventeen hundreds but in the year 964 965 with tremendous international forces that work furiously trying to establish your. Own presence as a governing group in your country. Trying to contend with a range of outside pressures. The wonder to me Mr Howe is not that Africa is in such turmoil but that it is a complete shambles because of all the pressures bearing in on the continent. Seems to me based on what Mr. Hauser said and my own feelings that the United States at a very high level is showing not only impatience but lack of maturity in dealing with the new African countries. Of course this raises the question Mr. how I should think that many Americans have. If Africa is sort of a shambles I'm having a great many of these problems I will how does one answer this

question. Did Africa become independent too soon is a relevant question to ask. If I was to give an answer in a sentence I would say certainly not. I think that people who are developing must have the right of of freedom independence to make their own mistakes to learn by their mistakes. And I think there is a maturing process that is taking place in Africa today and one could also say that if Africa had not become independent or those sections of it that now are independent if they had not become independent what kind of strife would have taken place then there would be a real battlefield between the colonial powers. And the nationalist movements in all of the African countries that certainly would be united against the West in this case quite sure.

I was intrigued by one point that George Hauser made quite in passing I'd like to come back to it and that is that the leadership of the African countries are not 10 feet tall certainly not in the sense that a goal is the goal is much more remote. To me for example then a kind of counter adopt a band or a raree or a tomboy and the people that I know knowing that we have tremendous respect for their qualities knowing them however. Has made it very clear to us that they are human beings and that they're going to make mistakes. And somehow we in America have expected that Africa's leaders would be to an extent much more impressively than we are ourselves. Great Democrats great Christians great everything. And when they act like human beings and make mistakes and respond emotionally to emotional

situations somehow were taken aback we don't understand this. Seems to me that we've lost perspective not only in time not only in space but also in terms of the human elements involved in the situation. And I think Mr. Howell that we've got to withdraw and regroup our forces intellectually spiritually and emotionally if we're going to continue to deal creatively with the developing African situation. But what I'd like to ask you both one question. Certainly we are immature and certainly we need to rethink and regroup and all these things you speak up but it is also true that these nations of Africa and it isn't there for all are much further away from us. Remote as you Mr last may feel from general to go. Nevertheless the African society and I'm talking about all the way from North Africa down to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope the out the

continent as a whole is on a so much more primitive economic level even than we were when the United States was founded that there is a tremendous gap between us and all these African peoples. And when we ask them to talk about Believe and act in terms of democracy and political conceptions that have been centuries in the making. I think we are demanding the impossible and that we don't make. We don't make sufficient account and they don't perhaps take sufficient account either of the of the longest distance they have to go where they want independence they want to make as you say their own mistakes. But they can't even make mistakes if they don't have the equipment to make the mistakes with if they they've got to get out of the completely primitive tribal conditions under which so many of them live. MR How you brought up something which I think is quite fundamental

when you've suggested in your remarks that somehow this world and into which the African nations have been born is a club which is run by the old boys we and that the caste of African achievement will be their ability to win our approbation and therefore to be admitted into the club. This may have been all right up until the 1940s early 50s but we've got a new ballgame now. And in a sense part of our agony that we're going through in this country and it's not the agony of the crackpot fringe but a very honestly concern men and women is that we're looking at a world which we are largely financing but which and this is the unkindest cut of all. We're no longer quite controlling. And I think we've got to change our perspective precisely at this point. When we

expect that the rest of the world has got to come our way our way being the white Christian West. As a matter of fact I think we ought to point out here that we if we speak of white America are really a minority. As far as this world is concerned and we started in this discussion by talking about a change of American attitude towards Africa and Africans and I think that it's well to turn that around and just ask a question about the change of attitudes of Africans. And this would apply I think to other peoples of the world as well towards Americans or towards other white Westerners because there has been a definite definite change here and one of them I think has to do with this tremendous economic gap that does exist. If you've got and average income in Africa as you do maybe 50 to 100 dollars a year for a family. And contrast

that with the minimums that exist in the United States. One can see now this is one of the dynamics that forms the attitudes of Africans towards Americans and towards other people who are living in a much more affluent society. And I think the other another very basic part of this attitude of Africans towards Americans is that Americans are so satisfied they have. Not been able to keep up with the dynamics of the movements for freedom and independence in Africa and the United States as a government in its policy towards South Africa or towards the Portuguese in their colonial domination in Africa just have not been acting vigorously enough and the Africans are very critical of the United States for not taking action which really supports movements towards freedom and independence and this is one of the tremendous things we have to face as Americans in this world today there's much more

suspicion towards Americans traveling in Africa now than was true even two or three years ago. Yeah but I just look even take up even take a man like well let the man who's been deeply concerned about world affairs all his life and he and others and he's a he is a he is a. A remarkable example is saying that we are overextended. We are trying to do too many things. Now if Walter Lippmann is writing that way if a man like that is saying we're overextended. How is Barry Goldwater come to be in another four or eight years isn't the danger to us not that we're going to over interfere and bargain too much and make too much trouble but we're going to withdraw too far and too fast. Isn't that going to be. Isn't that the thing we should be concerned about here. When I was in Africa I think that in Africa because we're not essentially overextended in Africa we're we are overextended I think and in some other parts of the world perhaps. But when one examines the

extent of American aid in Africa or the extent of American involvement it's very little. But the most recent example of this where there is I think the danger of overextension is in the Congo situation because here the United States is setting a new precedent of going in with military assistance now this is definitely overextension for a variety of reasons I think. Could you I wonder if either of you could specify any reading matter that you have seen that would that would eliminate this. We've talked at some detail about quite a few things that I think particularly books that you think of recent are not so recent that eliminate these things that we've been talking about. Well I'd like to mention a couple of books that have really been revealing to me. Tom in Boyer's book Freedom and after is interesting not only for the insight it gives into him boy as an individual mr how but also for its articulation of the African

approach where one Africans approach to economic development to his country's relationship to the outside world both within Africa and overseas. Kenneth cound is autobiographical. Zambia shall be free also gives insights into such things as the African attitude on Christian missions and on other aspects so matter of fact if I can interrupt there I was going to suggest some moments ago when we were talking about. American attitudes that one way in which Americans would get a new understanding in a very deep appreciation of Africa would be to read some of these biographies or autobiographies by these African leaders if you take a book like Kenneth colanders Zambia shall be free. I think coming through that book is some of the greatness the simplicity and as some reviewers have said

almost the saintliness of this man who has been thrust into the leadership of his brand new nation and is now the president of former Northern Rhodesia now Zambia. I just thought I would mention that because it seems to me I gain a new appreciation of even some of these persons that I've known. There have been books about Africa I think way back to Olive's shrine a story of the African. I said listeners out of Africa and then more recently some of the best literature are coming from the English speaking world and that has come from from from South Africa and it is it is not in favor of love of white supremacy. Well the shrine a book in the Dynas and book great literature and they evoke the sounds in the colors and the smells of Africa but they are of a bay which is passed never to return and you read these books almost wistfully wishing for the good old days. Africa is no longer like

that. And if you just have your view of Africa through books of that kind worthy as they are you're living in a cocoon. Africa is rougher tougher than that and I can think of books like Carlin Legion's South Africa crisis in chromo South Africa must unite and whose word consciences I'm the smell of after you get from your autobiography down Second Avenue of hairy blooms episode. These are the realities of Africa. You know I like you know as much in the South African sign I think. Today's book Let My People Go certainly is one that gives one a little insight into this great man but wonder what inspiration Africa has been over the centuries for. For writers for literature and of course the African farmers is is as is as dead as the as the Punic Wars. But what an inspiration

that gave and you have mentioned loft some of the people today who are doing what it was 50 75 years again I think it's very interesting that in the last 10 years the amount of literature that would that has been written. If you even go back to the early 1950s if you asked anybody about a book on Africa they were likely to mention Alan pate and Cry the Beloved Country. Of course then after Gunther brought out inside Africa that was mentioned because it was the first largest study of that kind by a man with a reputation of John Gunter. And yet if one looks at Gunter's book today which he visited and studied country by country it's almost there's some background material in it that's still relevant but it's almost irrelevant to the situation in most parts of Africa there's been so many changes that have taken place and

there are books coming out constantly that reflect this which is what our what our course is one of the main causes of these changes of this acceleration of history that we've been witnessing particularly in Africa. How would you work both of your loft in the House how would you work take these off. Well I think the basic cause is that we are caught up in a revolution which is fundamentally a color revolution. And we're seeing the tide of that revolution if I can mix my metaphors are lapping up on our own shores and we're not too comfortable about it. Here it's always easy to give advice to somebody 10000 miles away. And this revolution is not peculiar to Africa. Africa is the latest. Even Africa isn't the latest Little Rock and Birmingham New York are the latest outposts of that revolution. I suggested before that one

of the consequences of that revolution is going to be a loss of some of our initiative and control over the world whether it's at the United Nations and becoming very uneasy about the United Nations because we don't quite control the situation there the way we once did or whether it's in the Congo or Vietnam or wherever we're caught up in this thing. I think it's awfully important to understand these these dynamics that have led to rapid changes in Africa because when we look back in history to this particular era in which we're living and certainly one of the greatest phenomena will be this very rapid change from colonial status to freedom in Africa and. I have usually thought of at least four factors that enter into this that impinge on one another very closely. One the struggle for freedom itself independence the growth of nationalism all a part of this. Second the dynamics which which grew out

of the economic dissatisfaction of the people we've mentioned before the low level on which the African lives and the very high level on which even the Europeans relative to the Africans live on the African continent. And this leads to dissatisfaction struggle. They want change as a result of it. Third the cultural aspect of it. I've seen African students change their names even while they've been in the United States when in chroma studied in the United States he was Francis in Chroma. Nobody would think of calling him Francis now at Lincoln University that's the way he was known. Our Kenyatta changed his name band. Since then who's now in the U.S. used to be Hastings Banda. And then the racial factor that George Loftus pointed to which is not just confined to Africa but the world over these I think are the dynamics which at this period of history have converged somehow or other and have led to what one man might think of as the African revolution. But the thing that concerns me and this is almost the point we started out

is the drawing back of America from Africa and I think this is very dangerous it's understandable but it's dangerous. It was suggested before Lippman feels overextended and I agree with George how is it that we are if we are overextended it's because we're extended into the wrong places. But I'm afraid you're in the wrong way going the wrong way is what I'm afraid of is that in this going back process from Africa we will be creating the intransigent problems of the future just as in a sense we've created the problems in Latin America. But as I look at Latin America there the problems are hard and really almost intractable. Africa still is relatively open it has problems but they have the right kind of problems and the problems of emergency growth of human beings trying to grapple with there are immediate problems. But these problems are malleable. We can make a contribution. I'm afraid if we turn our back on them 10 years from now we're going to have to face up to them again and we'll face

up to a situation which is infinitely less malleable of an adult than they are today. So that by ignoring the problems we don't solve them in some ways we make them worse. One wonders whether there is an element of in in just the whiteness of the United States that makes it back away a little bit at this point as soon as the going gets just a little rough as far as Africa is concerned. I don't think that's altogether the explanation for it but I think there's an element involved and I think that one of the things that many. Push the United States forward a little bit more that we haven't mentioned yet that I think is important however is that increasingly what is generally called the civil rights movement here the movement for racial justice and racial equality have been concerned about Africa because they see the kind of struggle which is taking place in places like South Africa Portuguese territory Southern Rhodesia

as very similar to having many similarities to their struggle for equality and justice here. And I think one of the things which will make it very difficult for the United States to forget Africa and to remove itself completely will be pressures which come primarily from the Negro population in this country. But isn't the real thing that's needed if you want. You want Mr. Houser against military intervention isn't the real thing that's needed massive economic aid on a long term basis and. That's going to cost money and it's not yield very quick or evident returns. I would agree with that Mr. Howard but I would emphasize the long term rather than the massive. There is a point beyond which a new country cannot absorb massive aid. And part of our problem is to learn how to think smaller as well as to think big. I can give you chapter and verse on that from my own experience in Africa. The point is it seems to me that we ought to settle in and reassure Africa that warts and all she exists and we're going to sweat it out with her. The

worst thing that can happen to us is seen in our relations with Africa and other parts of the world is to turn it on and to sit in judgment on them sit in judgment incidentally on problems which we have helped to create ourselves we lose them and we're not dealing with Africa or other parts of the world in a vacuum. They will not sit patiently by until we make up our own sweet mind about coming back. By turning our back on them we can well lose Africa. I want to Africa what do you mean George. I mean that the Gov's will arise which do not now exist. We will lose contacts sympathy understanding that their attitude toward the United States which still is mighty good will become and I raised the question partly because I think it's a little dangerous. Ours Africa is not ours to either lose or gain. And I know what I know what you mean and I certainly agree with it but I think

very frequently all of us make the mistake of saying lose Africa. Are we losing into the communist world this is one kind of a question. The answer to that I think is in the negative. If the United States has a point and a definite policy favoring African freedom and supporting it I think that brings the discussion to a very excellent close that both of you other so much. Mr. Hauser you who spoke the last word and Mr. aloft you spoke the first. You have been listening to gateway to ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to reading today's program Africa past present and future has presented George Hauser the executive director of the American Committee on Africa. And George loft the vice president of the African American Institute. The moderator was Quincy Howe editor of Atlas magazine. To extend the dimensions of today's program for you

a list of the books mentioned in the discussion as well as others relevant to the subject has been prepared. You can obtain a copy from your local library all by writing to gateway to ideas post office box 6 for 1 Time Square Station New York gateway to ideas produced for national educational radio under a grant from the National Home Library Foundation. The programs are prepared by the National Book Committee and the American Library Association in cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters technical production by Riverside radio W. Avianca in New York City. This is the national educational radio network.