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¶ Northern Rhodesia's underpaid black miners recently struck back at their startled employers with a 20th century weapon: a strike that lasted for months.
¶ In Jim Crow South Africa, Africans and Indians have united in a Passive Resistance Movement that has frightened the whites to the point where Prime Minister Daniel Malan seeks powers of dictatorship.
Land of Surprise. Black Africa's awakening is spotty and inconclusive—more a blind, biological ferment than a self-conscious surge of nationalism. Africa is still a land of weirdness and surprise: of seven-foot giants like the Watussi, the world's champion high jumpers; dwarf antelopes no bigger than a terrier, and goliath beetles the size of a dove; Pygmy hunters with humplike buttocks, and the society of Leopardmen, whose ferocious devotees riutilate their victims with tiny knives that leave marks like a leopard's claws. Across Africa's unplowed ranges roam herds of big game, more numerous even than the buffalo that fed the North American Indians.
Education in Tragedy. But though the face of Africa has changed but little, its people are changing fast. The white man's 20th century has shattered the crude, tribal world which once gave meaning and sanction to the black man's life. In forests where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of slaves dig for the raw material (copper, uranium, vanadium) of the Atomic Age.
The tragedy is that the educated few who climb from darkness to light are, at this point, more of a problem to the white man than are the jungle savages. Seeing for the first time the glitter of the white man's world, stirred by his literature (the Bible, Rousseau, Jefferson) but stunned by the gap between precept and practice, often shunned because of their color, impulsive and impatient, they are likely to become the dupes of Communism. Writing from South Africa recently, Michael Ardizzone, a British journalist, reported a conversation with his Negro office messenger—a grown man named Cigarette, who had managed to pass his Junior Certificate examination, roughly the equivalent of graduating from junior high school.
"What are you going to do now, Cigarette?"
"Study for Matriculation."
"And after you get that?"
"I shall do what I do now. What else is there for me?"
Weeks later, wrote Ardizzone, "I found Cigarette absorbed in a translation of Karl Marx . . ."