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FREEDOMWAYS          FIRST QUARTER 1972

(Kinshasa) and Sudan have real but latent potential in this respect.  Indeed, there are those who seem to think that the potential for Nigeria's emergence as a major world power is more than just latent and have gone so far as to refer to Nigeria as "the Japan of Africa."  However, while Nigeria is without a doubt the most important black country in the world, it is in no real sense comparable to Japan-Nigeria still imports the vast majority of the goods it uses and what productive capacity it has is largely in foreign hands.  Moreover, even if it was desirable to have an African counterpart to Japan (and it is not) , the deepening crisis of U.S. imperialism in Asia and other parts of the world has created conditions which militate strongly against the emergence of an Africa superstate built on the Japanese or Brazil-ian models.  This, of course, is not to argue that such a development is impossible.  For U.S. imperialists are now having serious second thoughts about Japan.  Indeed, Nixon's recent "Ping Pong Diplomacy" was in no small way the beginning of a diplomatic program of rap-prochement with the People's Republic of China.  There is, therefore, little reason to expect that the United States would stand by and watch the development of a strong African state, whether socialist or capitalist, that could foreseeably become a bulwark against, or a com-petitor with, the spread and advancement of American imperialism on the African continent.  This seems especially true when we realize that the need for the development in Africa of a black "fascist" super-state has been pre-empted by the rise of the white fascist Republics of Rhodesia and South Africa in the South which are little more than Anglo-American dependencies.
  In fact, as far as Sub-Saharan African is concern, the implied policies of the western powers have tended, generally, to flow in the opposite direction.  Instead of the creation of large capitalist super-states such as Japan and Brazil which would act as imperialist proxies in the west's desperate struggle against the spread of socialist democ-racy, the capitalist powers of the west have usually opted for a policy of balkanization in tropical Africa.  This means that among the western powers-the U.S., West Germany, South Africa, Portugal, Israel and France in particular-there exists an unstated consensus that a multi-tude of small ministates such as Togo, Dahomey, Gambia and the now demised "Biafra" would render western interest in Africa much more secure than would the emergence of a number of larger territorial entities such as Congo (Kinshasa), Sudan and Nigeria.  It is not sur-prising then that the most vicious wars of "secession" to take place in Africa since independence have occurred in the latter three states and

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