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French colonial policy is unabashedly mercantilist. The colonies supply France with raw materials and protected markets; in return, a native elite is eligible for "assimilation," or at least "association," with French culture. The most attractive feature: no color bar. The French tap their colonies, notably Senegal, for military manpower. They hope that the overseas territories will one day make France "a nation of 100 million," able to overmatch the Germans. That this is impracticable is tragically apparent in war-torn Indo-China and in French North Africa, where Arab nationalism and the slow wrath of peasant peoples threaten to whisk away all alien forms.
France's Negro colonies, e.g., Equatorial Africa, are ruled by governors whose favorite maxim is: "What we have we hold." They fear, with good reason, that the loss of its African empire could reduce, France to military insignificance. One result is that Paris still stubbornly adheres to the ruling laid down in World War II by General Charles de Gaulle's government: "The eventual creation, even in the distant future, of autonomy for the French colonies must be ruled out."
THE BELGIAN EMPIRE
In the 19th century scramble for Africa, Belgians took the Congo, an equatorial treasure chest 80 times the size of Belgium. Much of it still looks like a scene from The African Queen. The Congo's11 million blacks are ruled by 70,000 whites whose motto is "Dominer pour servir" (Rule to serve).
Congo cities are booming, Congolese Negroes by the thousand earn 'what is for them fat pay packets, build comfortable homes, send their children to good vocational schools and a Congo college which soon will be expanded into a university. Most of the credit goes to a tough Belgian administration that puts business before politics. No Congolese (black or white) has any political rights, and self-government is unlikely for many years. Yet, unlike many British colonies where black Oxonians denounce their British tutors in the name of Karl Marx, the Congo seems content with bread and no votes. If Belgium got out, the free world and Africa would be the losers.
Glory That Was. The three smaller empires are remnants of vaster realms that once were glorious: ¶ The Netherlands empire, once flowing with Sumatra oil, Bali spices and Java tea, is left with only Dutch Guiana (pop. 225,000), oil-refining Curacao and the western half of untamed New Guinea.
¶ Spain controls the debris of the vast imperium whose bold conquistadores once seized the Western Hemisphere, from Buenos Aires to San Francisco. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a bull dividing the overseas world between Spain and Portugal; today Spain holds Spanish Morocco, and such fruitless African enclaves as Rio de Oro.
¶Portugal's empire was Western Europe's first. Soldiers, missionaries and traders built it, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. Today the Portuguese empire is in effect an empire in the way, impeding communication along Africa's only east-west railroad. Angola (pop. 3,700,000) has some good settler country, but most of it belongs to the flies. Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) lives off its landlocked British neighbors, but with U.S. Point Four aid, Portugal hopes that one day it will pay its way.