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The 20th Century m'zuŋ u Scramble for Independent Africa
"Veni, Vidi, Vici ",Steti - ego adduxit inimici mei"

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The Cold War & the African States
" Lists of diplomatic missions in the new African states make fascinating and somewhat

disturbing reading. There are Nationalist (but not Communist) Chinese embassies in the
Cameroons Federation and in what was once the French Congo (Brazzaville), Communist

(but not Nationalist) Chinese ones in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. South Vietnam has an
embassy in the Ivory Coast, while North Vietnam and Outer Mongolia are represented in
Guinea. Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and most of the other formerly French states still have

no diplomatic relations with Russia, but little Togo has a full-scale Soviet embassy, and
some other states, such as Mali, Ghana, and Guinea, have embassy lists comprising the

entire Eastern bloc in Europe and Asia.

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If these sharp differences in foreign relations confirm suspicions that the cold war is
moving into Africa, other facts point in the same direction. Most of the twenty-eight

independent states of Africa have tended to align themselves with one of two blocs--
African blocs, to be sure, but oriented in many important ways either to East or West. The
so-called "Casablanca" group (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Egypt, and Morocco) call themselves

"neutralists," but one at least among them--Guinea--has sought and received bigger and
better aid from the East than from the West. On the other hand, the so-called "Monrovia"

group--twenty strong at the conference last year which called it into being--takes a
broadly Western view of world politics and depends economically on the West.

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In one instance, the rivalry between Russian and American information services in

Bamako, capital of Mali, became so intense that the government finally issued a
regulation forbidding any foreign information centers at all. There have been loans and
counter-loans. The new governments have signed trade and credit agreements with

Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Hungary, and East Germany on the one hand; with
Scandinavia, Japan, West Germany, Britain, and America on the other. Eastern-bloc

technicians and advisers, including military ones, swarm about in Guinea and are
becoming more numerous in Ghana and Mali; while in Senegal, the French openly and
without marked opposition maintain an important military base. Over the past year, of

course, the intrusion of the cold war has been most clearly seen in the Belgian Congo,
especially in the earlier stages of the crisis. As soon as Lumumba was murdered and the

flag of Lumumbism had to be transferred from Leopoldville to Stanleyville, capital of the