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"We have our will, our arms and legs, and we know how to work," declared Toure grandly—but arms and legs were not enough. And so one day last November the President of Guinea flew off to pay a state visit to Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The two men soon had both Paris and London gasping.
"Inspired by the example of the 13 American colonies," they announced, they were forming a union of their two countries. The French press saw the whole deal as a British plot to undermine France's prestige in Africa. The London Daily Express asked just as indignantly: "Is Dr. Nkrumah planning to bring a foreign territory into the British family of nations?" Toure flew home with the promise of $28 million from Nkrumah.
Snuggle Up. Since then, surprisingly little has been heard about the union. So far the two countries have not even set up the constitutional and economic commissions they promised. Instead, Guinea has been snuggling up to France, which has gradually swallowed its indignation over the man who said no. Last month Guinea negotiated a series of agreements which to a considerable extent place the country squarely back in the French Community. It will stay in the franc zone, keep its foreign exchange in the Banque de France, and it will once again get technical assistance from France. In lands where it has no diplomatic representation, France—not Ghana—will speak for it.
In four short months Guinea has apparently learned that independence is a relative thing. It will not be easy for Africa to be completely itself, for no other continent has been so swept by foreign influence. Islam stretches not only across its top, but deep into the south—as far as the lower reaches of the Belgian Congo. Northern Nigeria is as rigidly Moslem as Saudi Arabia, and political meetings in Guinea come to a halt at sundown, when everyone troops out, shucks shoes, and bows to Mecca. Throughout most of Africa the ubiquitous East Indian minority, tirelessly busy at trade and commerce, has also left its mark: the "European" towns of East Africa take more after Bombay than after any city in Europe. In Kenya a member of the Legislative Council may rise to speak, dressed in a skirt shaped after his Luo tribal costume of skins, but a flunky in knee britches and silver buckles carries a mace, as in the Mother of Parliaments.
"Ghanocracy Does Not Interest." The African leaders who cry so loudly for independence have also learned that, beyond a certain point, Africa's problems become not so much those between blacks and whites as between Africans themselves. For generations French West Africans have feared the Senegalese, who were among the first to join the French in subduing them. The Senegalese in turn fear the lean, desert-dwelling Moors, who are fighting men with a long tradition of trading in slaves. In Houphouet-Boigny's Ivory Coast there have been recent race riots against African immigrants from Togoland and Dahomey.