Page 198 - Afrika Must Unite

NEO-COLONIALISM IN AFRICA
economic weakness, a weakness which can be corrected through
unity of action between the different raw m aterial producing
countries, and not through exclusive trading arrangements
between the strong and the weak. The case of Daniel and the
lions may occasionally come out right, but it is not a safe basis
for economic planning.
The pattern of imperialist aid to Africa is set not only to draw
the unwary back into the neo-colonialist relationship but to tie
them into cold-war politics. This has been amply explained by
M r W alt W hitm an Rostow, Counsellor and Chairm an of the
Policy Planning Council of the U.S. State Departm ent, in an
interview given to the weekly journal, U.S. News and World
Report.1 Asked what America is doing about the underdeveloped
areas, M r Rostow refers to the ‘gradual creation of a pattern to
succeed the colonial period. We helped pioneer this pattern in
our relationship with the Philippines’. After commenting upon
the new relationships established with their former colonies by
Britain, France and Belgium, who ‘is making an im portant con­
tinuing contribution to the Congo,’ he states th a t: ‘As the residual
problems are solved we look, as I say, to a new partnership
based on the common interests of the northern and southern
parts of the free world.’ This M r Rostow admits is a long-term
process. ‘In playing the game in the underdeveloped areas you
must be prepared to play for a long tim e,’ and hence, in some of
the underdeveloped countries, ‘as in most of Africa, we have to
start from a very low level - with specific projects, not national plans
of a sophisticated kind'2 For, says M r Rostow, using the examples
of Italy and Greece in the M arshall Plan period, ‘we are buying
time to protect crucial pieces of real estate - and the possibility
of hum an freedom for those who lived there. And in the end we
sweated it out and won. . . . Buying time is one of the most
expensive and thankless things we do with our money - as in
South Korea.’
This is perhaps one of the most cynical but clear-cut summings
up that has ever appeared in print of the approach of a rich
power to the needs and hopes of the new nations of the world.
1 Dated 7 May 1962. This journal is published in W ashington by the United
States News Publishing Corporation.
2 Italics added.