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Hurry, Hurry. In Paris last week the Premiers of twelve former French African territories met with De Gaulle for the first time as heads of autonomous states within the French Community—and everyone present was mindful of the missing man, who had decided to go it alone: Sekou Toure. In Britain's domain, Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky of the Central African Federation (Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias) has been plumping for independence within the Commonwealth by 1960. Even Belgium, which until 1957 denied the vote to both blacks and whites and relied on efficiency and prosperity to keep the natives quiet in the rich Belgian Congo, has promised to move "towards independence without fatal delays but also without inconsiderate haste."
The hard fact is that haste is just what the Africans want. Nyasaland echoes with the fulminations of Dr. Hastings Banda ("To hell with federation!") and the cries of "Kwaca!"', meaning the dawn of freedom. Kenya's smart, articulate young Tom Mboya was not speaking for his country alone when he bluntly told the Europeans to "scram from Africa." There have been riots in Nyasaland, and the recent bloody eruptions in the Belgian Congo tore away the last shred of illusion that economic paternalism is enough to stem the tide.
Today, Black Africa seems to be getting a kind of Mason-Dixon line of its own. Down East Africa and across the bottom of the continent runs a high plateau (4,000 ft. to 6,000 ft.) from Kenya to Cape Town; in this area lives the bulk of Africa's white or "European" population, as well as half a million Asians. Whites, with black labor, have built and settled these lands, and are determined to stay there, and to stay in control. The militancy of their views increases, as does the density of the white population, the farther south the traveler goes, climaxing in the dour and relentless apartheid of the Union of South Africa.
"Poor Sékou." The black men, mainly in the west of Africa, who are leading their illiterate millions to freedom talk mystically of an eventual United States of Africa and of something called the African Personality. Their own personalities range from the demagogic Dr. Banda and the French Congo's Premier Abbé Fulbert Youlou, who is not above "blessing" ballpoint pens and then selling them to gullible schoolboys just before exams, to Senegal's erudite and sophisticated Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet and lion of the Paris salons, who said upon hearing of Sékou Touré's vote of no: "Poor Sékou. Never again will he stroll up the Champs Élysées." Part dedicated idealist and part ruthless organizer—perhaps the best in Black Africa—Guinea's Touré should have problems enough just coping with the disruption that inevitably came with independence. But he, too, has dreams as wide as a continent. "All Africa," says he, "is my problem."