For the last four months a mysterious voice has been heard in Africa. Every afternoon at 18.18 me on the short-wave band, the voice shouts subversion in Swahili, the lingua franca of Negro East and Central Africa. Samples: ¶ "Awake, nationals of Africa; open your eyes and march forward. My brother compatriots, how long will you remain slaves of white settlers? How long will you allow your blood to be sucked by these white pigs? How long will you permit these white pythons to spit in your faces? My brothers, the time has come to be masters of your own countries. The time has come to evict the British from your countries." ¶"The Congo is governed by Occidental thieves who enrich themselves there and suck the nationals' blood." ¶"The nationals of French Cameroons have taken up arms against the French dogs."
¶ "The [British] suckers of blood and squeezers of nationals' lands are determined to impose their policy of overlordship on East, South and Central Africa. The British bwana wants all people who are not white to be slaves." ¶"We would be glad to hear Mr. Eisenhower suggest to the Soviet Union that it join hands with the Americans to fight imperialism. Mr. Eisenhower could not do so because America also is now a state which wishes to have colonies, to oppress and exploit."
At the time of the Suez invasion, when several clandestine radios opened up against Nasser in Arabic, his aides blamed the broadcasts on the British and French, and threatened reprisal. But President Nasser's government has denied all knowledge of the new Voice of Free Africa and professed to be unacquainted with what it was saying. By last week Western officials had tracked down the station, and established that it definitely is Egyptian.
According to one intelligence report, it is located in upper Egypt. Its powerful. Czech-made (50 kw.) transmitter is placed in a bombproof underground shelter against possible renewal of the R.A.F. attacks that knocked out Cairo's Voice of the Arabs during the Suez campaign. Guarded by special police, the station is operated through the office of Nasser's righthand man, Ali Sabri, who is overall boss of Egyptian intelligence, and is manned by a pair of Egyptian engineers who learned their business working with RCA in New York. Its programs are piped from Cairo on a special secret telephone line. The announcer's voice sounds much like the voice of the man who has made Radio Cairo's official broadcasts in Swahili since 1954.
Thus, even as Nasser plunged into the Arab circle that he marked out for an Egyptian sphere of influence in his The Philosophy of the Revolution, he found time to push Egyptian leadership in his "second circle—the continent of Africa.'' Nasser wrote then: "The white man, representing various European nations, is again trying to redivide the map of Africa. We will never in any circumstances be able to relinquish our responsibility to support, with all our might, the spread of enlightenment and civilization to the remotest depths of the jungle."
The Russians could scarcely do better, were apparently content to let Nasser do it for them.