“What do you think of America?” No visitor to the United States can escape this question. From the moment he debarks, the foreigner is confronted by a question that will follow him throughout his stay in the U.S. At first he seems bewildered. But he soon gathers from the questioner’s tone that he is expected to respond favorably. “Great! I like it very much,” he answers. Indeed America is great, but the perplexed visitor has had no time to make even the most superficial observation of his own.

African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

In most countries ordinary people do not appreciate the sheer guile of their political leaders. Rhodesia is no exception. The dealings between the government and the African National Council confirm it. The government interrupted its dialogue with the ANC by detaining thirty-three senior ANC officials without trial, effectively destroying the cohesion of the only black political organization in the country. To the white voter, who sees no further than the surface of events, the detentions represented a simple exercise of executive power. In fact the government could not act in as sudden and arbitrary a fashion as that. It had to choose the time for its action with care, and to some extent it had to prepare the white electorate to accept what happened without question. The government also had to conceal its true intentions from the ANC without resorting to outright falsehood. Finally, it had to leave itself free to make a flexible response to the sort of unpredictable events which inevitably occur in political life and which often wreck the most carefully drafted plans. Formulating a policy to meet these contradictory objectives without giving the appearance of bad faith required much guile. The outcome, in the short term at least, was success.

Portugal’s occupation of Africa began with violence, it was maintained by violence, and after five hundred years it is coming to an end through violence.

The story of Inhaminga, the bloody events of resistance and reprisal in the war in Mozambique, is the last chapter of the longest and most useless colonial ordeal in Africa’s history. It is one more measurement of the lives which were lost, the bodies which were sold, and the destruction which was wrought in the course of Portugal’s pursuit of gain and imperial dignity in Guinea, Angola, Mozambique.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

When I took on the job as local arrangements chairman (what we would now call chairperson) for the 1969 annual meeting of our association, held in Montreal, I did not expect to cater for the largest meeting in our history. Nor was I really prepared for the historic occasion that it was. Of course there had been rumblings the previous year, for after all that was the time when we were still involved with various confrontations. Today the excitement has gone, we are now all very inward looking, and it is rather difficult to tell what, if anything, lingers from those days. But historic occasion it was, of that there is no doubt. Almost eighteen hundred people registered, and the program we published for the occasion is now a collector’s item. I was recently offered twenty-five dollars for a copy!

In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

It is both a pleasure and an honor for me to address you tonight, just a few hours after one of our nation’s most important elections and at a time when we are at the threshold of fundamental new choices of policies for the African continent.

In evaluating the consequences of the $1.7 billion currently invested by U.S. corporations in South Africa, the issue is distinctly not whether or not the U.S. firms involved have adopted the Sullivan Principles. Those principles, purportedly designed to ensure upgrading and equal pay for blacks, are in reality little more than a smokescreen. Behind their rhetoric, U.S. transnational corporations continue to help South Africa build up its military-industry machinery to perpetuate oppression of the majority of black workers.