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FREEDOMWAYS          THIRD QUARTER 1972

given by the United Kingdom for such an openly brazen policy of support for racist South Africa was the presence of the Soviet Fleet in the Indian Ocean.  One could add to his rearks the growing linkages, political, military, and economic, of the Socialist camp with all pro-gressive forces in Africa as attested by the following statement of the great revolutionary democratic Amilcar Cabral: "We are not in any way belittling the importance of African solidarity and the solidarity of the other anti-colonial forces when we frankly say that it is from the Soviet Union that we receive the bulk of the aid to our struggle."
  Following Ambassador Farah, Congressman Diggs's keynote speech attacked institutionalized racism at home and abroad.  He called for unity of the whole black world against degenerate white politics which expresses itself in the fact that the same politicians who sabotage child care and welfare programs at home also sabotage aid programs for Africa.  Representative Diggs saw a direct interconnection between the maintenance of free viable black communities in the United States and free viable nations abroad.  He thought that the dynamism for such linkages was the ideology of Pan-Africanism.  In the Caribbean, Congressman Diggs saw the following countries in the vanguard of decolonization:  Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti.
  Congressman Diggs bemoaned the low level of priority that Africa holds in U.S. politics and expressed the feeling that Afro-Americans should augment their activity in this area and in the area of peace.  Congressman Diggs felt that Afro-Americans should have played a vanguard role in the peace movement as we have always played in the democratic movement in this country.  Diggs called for the birth of a new international black strategy as a broad-based force for change embodied in a permanent organizational framework.  He called for the opening of a new front in the battle for liberation. 
  This author had mixed emotions regarding Digg's speech.  Although recognizing the general democratic character of the thrust, there were elements in in that lacked clarity.  One cannot help but have mixed feelings on the question of the increase of U.S. economic aid to Africa, since the historical record of other Third World countries manifests an inverse relation between the amount of foreign aid re-ceived and the rate of economic development:  e.g., Latin America grew at the rate of about 6 percent a year before the Alliance for Progress of the 60's (The Latin Americans call it the Alliance against Progress) , and grew at the rate of 3 per cent after receiving "bounteous aid" from the United States.  We would not wish to impose such

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INTERNATIONALISM & SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS          RHODES

"good will" on our African brothers.  They are calling for fair trade based on equivalent exchange, rather than aid to facilitate the export of capital, the material basis of neo-colonialism.  Our African brothers, along with our Asian and Latin American brothers, are calling for accessions to the agreement on tariff preferences for industrial prod-ucts from developing areas and for the sovereignty over their national wealth, not acquisitions of property by U.S. investors.  Our African brothers, notably President Boumedienne of Algeria, are calling for compensation for previous plunder through a program of evening out the development of the world.  We black Americans should support the demands of our African brothers in these areas.
  Congressman Diggs's call for the opening of a new front in the battle for black liberation is long overdue.  We support this, provided that this front is not in lieu of the anti-imperialist front that the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans have already opened in the struggle for peace, democracy, and independence.  We should strengthen our linkage with these fronts who fight against colonialism and neo-colonialism, a disguised form of colonialism.
  The highlight of the two-day workshop was the panel on economic development and aid, wherein the focal point of discussion was the question of the role of aid in African development and "models" of economic development.  The panel aired these questions thoroughly, since there were divergent views as to how African development should be undertaken.  Africans and other Third World peoples are vacillat-ing between two paths of development, the capitalist road and the non-capitalist road of development.  The ones who have pursued the capitalist path of development have, without exception, all failed in developing viable independent economies.  Ten years after inde-pendence such countries as Senegal, the home of "Negritude," the Ivory Coast, and Malawi have populations whose average life spans are half that of developed countries.  None of them has developed an all-sided national economy with burgeoning industries interrelated to the rest of the economy.  None of them has sizeably reduced illiteracy and disease.  The most successful countries in Africa and other parts of the Third World have chosen the path of non-capitalist development; viz., Guinea, Tanzania, Somalia, the Arab Republic of Egypt, Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Chile, Iraq, Syria, Burma, North Korea, North Vietnam, and even fitfully, India and China.  It was not clear to many young progressive Afro-Americans that the non-capitalist road of development is the road of development for the majority of the world's peoples.  It is not the road of development for progressive peo-

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