1960 - YEAR OF THE GREAT TURN IN AFRICA
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At the beginning of 1958, there was only one really independent African country: Ghana (Liberia being in fact an American protectorate, and Ethiopia a British one). In the beginning of 1959, Guinea joined Ghana. But in 1960, it will be a landslide. Nigeria, Somaliland, the Mali Federation (Senegal and Soudan), the Belgian Congo, will each attain independence in one form or another; Tanganyika will get self-government with a single voters' roll, which means government by the Africans. In Kenya, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, the pressure of the African masses for an application of universal franchise, which will place political power in the hands of their organizations, will become irresistible.
As the British weekly The Economist bluntly stated in its issue of December 19, 1959, from 1960 on the overwhelming majority of the Afri-
180 million out of a total of 240 million inhabitants, against only 70 millions today, will rule themselves.
For several years we have noted the penetration of the colonial revolution into Africa. Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya was a sign of the coming storm; the revolution in the Arab countries has been its main motor. From the Maghreb in revolt, the sparks of the revolution have spread throughout the French and Belgian empires, combining in British East and Central Africa with sparks from independent Asia.
The movement towards political independence of all nations thereby becomes universal. Hardly ten years ago, Africa was still considered the last bastion of colonialism. To-day this bastion is attacked on all sides and starts to crumble. Already the Afro-Asian and Latin-American countries represent the absolute majority of the independent member states of the United Nations; very soon, the majority of the sovereign nations of the earth will be colored.
The first result of this gigantic transformation is to undermine still further the last positions of colonialism and racialism in Africa, i e the Portuguese colonies, the Central African Federation, Kenya, South Africa. The Central African Federation will not be able to resist for long the internal and external blows which will provoke its disintegration. Only Southern Rhodesia could remain for some period a state with "white predominance," this is to say a second South Africa. As for the "Franco-African Community," it will dislocate more and more under the pressure of the examples of Guinea and the Mali Federation.
The independence of the Belgian Congo, and especially of its province of Lower-Congo, will have powerful echoes in Angola, where part of
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the population has the same nationality as the Jakongo people. 1960 will theretore be a year ot crisis for Salazar's Atrican empire. It will threaten to overthrow the whole of that Empire as well as the fascist dictatorship of Portugal, stimulating in the same way a new upsurge of mass action against the Franco régime in Spain.
The progress of the colonial revolution in Africa thereby contributes powerfully to mining the two last fascist dictatorships in Europe. It contributes also powerfully to the development of the Negro people's struggles against racial and social discrimination in the US A, undermining thereby one of the pillars of American imperialism's political stability, and assisting also in the revival of the trade union movement, faced with an overall attack by Big Business.
As for the infamous apartheid régime in South Africa, the progress of the African revolution renders its survival more and more precarious. South Africa is slowly being transformed into a tremendous powderkeg. The myth of the white man's superiority and of the black man's socalled incapacity in building modern civilized nations is everyday contradicted by developments all over Africa. The self-confidence of the South African masses will thereby constantly increase; they will answer more and more courageously the bloody provocations and reprisals of the Afrikaaner masters. By maintaining themselves more and more exclusively by open terror, these masters can only prepare a terrible explosion and a civil war which will be all the more violent as the humiliations, oppression, exploitation and violence imposed on the African masses become unbearable.
In 1960, the majority of the African nations will arrive at some status of political independence. One should not, however, misunderstand the situation: for them it will be a change from the status of colonial to the status of semi-colonial country. There will be no genuine liberation from all the economic chains of imperialism.
As before, Unilever remains the real master of Ghana's economy; Péchiney hasn't lost any strength in independent Guinea; the Société Général will continue to dictate the law on a broad scale in the independent Congo; and when Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Kenya will pass under African rule, four big British companies will remain there, the real masters of the economic situation.
For in general, the conquest of political independence takes the form of a compromise between imperialism and the national bourgeoisie (or layers of educated functionaries and intellect-
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL uals, who become a hotbed for breeding a native bourgeoisie, e g by systematic pillage of the public oudget, as has occurred for ten years in Indonesia). The national bourgeoisie gets bigger resources and the possibility to bargain from a more favorable position for a major part of the colonial companies incomes. But these companies conserve a big part of their profits. Their exploitation of the African wage earners becomes even more stable than during the troubled period which generally precedes the conquest of political independence.
The new independent states lack the necessary resources and especially the favorable social conditions for a big upsurge in the fight against poverty, ignorance and bad health. Independence, struction of the Black Continent which, for four centuries, has been really martyrized by capitalist exploitation.
Such a broad scale reconstruction implies tirst of all an end to the balkanisation of Africa, boundaries do not correspond to any ethnic reality whatsoever. The Socialist United States of Africa will constitute the real framework of industrialization of the African continent.
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This reconstruction needs in the second place a real banding together of all existing economi resources and planned development. If the international working class is able to safeguard large financial and technical help to the young African states, without political conditions o1 strings, this development could become very rapid. Africa could jump directly from the iron age to the age of electronics, of automation and of nuclear energy. But even if this help remains insufficient, planned economy, investment in the country itself of all the colonial companies' incomes as a result of their nationalization, and the coöperative development of agriculture, will be indispensable trump cards for tomorrow's inlo pass from purely political independence to real independence from imperialism, the development of an autonomous labour movement will show itself to be indispensable. The African trade-union movement has undergone a tumultuous upsurge for several years. Three international confederations vie with each other for regrouping the young African trade union movement. Whether it appears out of this union movement or whether it differentiates itself as the extreme Left-wing of the national movement, a political labor movement basing itself on the ancient collectivist tradition of Black Africa will be able to play a more and more important rôle in the young African states, and will stake its claim to lead the African nation into being.