Press exposures of starvation wages paid by British firms in South Africa have prompted an official House of Commons inquiry, but one which was dismissed by a columnist in a leading weekly (the New Statesman) as “an exercise, at the lowest, in hypocrisy and, at the highest, in evading an issue. For the issue is surely not what wages firms pay in South Africa but whether the firms should be there at all.” This robust view apart the case for withdrawal of foreign capital investment or its restriction, or the freezing of further flows, gets short shrift in business circles. Yet faced with growing pressures to disinvest, these circles have been casting around for arguments to placate the total-withdrawal lobby. Two initiatives are most frequently cited as proof that left to itself, business will reform apartheid. These are the Polaroid experiment and the Oppenheimer phenomenon.

Travel to many parts of Africa is a complicated undertaking — visas and shots, tickets … delays. A trip to Southern Rhodesia, however, is a breeze. No visa is required, just one or two innoculations, a passport and a confirmed onward reservation. Air travel reservations? Drop by a Pan American ticket counter anywhere in the United States and in seconds the computer will confirm space for you on an Air Rhodesia flight from Johannesburg, South Africa to the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury. It is all very convenient. The trouble is that when Pan Am, TWA, and perhaps other American carriers help make the going great, they apparently do it illegally.

Europeans came to the area that is now Zambia in small numbers during the first four decades of the twentieth century primarily as missionaries, administrators, farmers, or employees of the copper or lead and zinc mines. The most extensive period of European immigration, however, was the decade and a half following World War II. In 1946 there were 22,000 Europeans in the country, while in 1962 the European population reached a peak of 77,000. The overwhelming majority of Europeans came from South Africa, the Rhodesias (Zambia was then Northern Rhodesia), or Britain— in that order of frequency. Most of those born in the Rhodesias had British and/or South African ancestry. In the immediate preindependence period slightly more than a third of the Europeans were citizens of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, into which Northern Rhodesia was incorporated from 1953 to 1963; most of the rest were approximately evenly divided between British and South African citizenship.

Events which took place in June 1967 constitute the focal point of this article. Biafra had proclaimed its existence as an entity separate and independent from Nigeria on May 30; another five weeks were to pass, however, before fighting between General Gowon's forces in Nigeria and Colonel Ojukwu's in Biafra broke out. On reflection, the civil war in Nigeria evokes the fated air of a Greek tragedy; but from the vantage of those June days the probable outcome was much cloudier. Perhaps some accommodation was still possible by which war could be avoided, or if a confrontation did take shape perhaps Biafra would win, or there would be a stalemate.

When the American electorate opted for withdrawal from Vietnam in 1968, the United States crossed an international policy watershed whose dimensions have not yet been fully assessed. The outlines of this policy have since been given the rubric of the Nixon Doctrine. In 1968, however, a substantial number of American citizens (including many vociferous critics of our presence in Vietnam) failed to grasp the significance of the change in Administration thinking as they energetically and often from the purest of motives sought American intervention through humanitarian actions in the Nigerian civil war. To point out to these Americans the contradictions in their behavior only served to irritate them. Other important segments of the public had long held a distorted image of American actions abroad. They continued to view America as the conscience of the world, exercising a kind of police power where such power might be safely exercised.

The “winds of change” had barely swept across Africa when the newly-independent nations felt the chilling gusts of the cold war. Decolonization created a power vacuum in the prevailing bipolar structure and for a time it appeared that the African continent would be one of the areas in which the struggle between capitalism and communism would be resolved. As the center of gravity of the cold war shifted towards the periphery, the USSR became increasingly interested in extending its influence in Africa. This interest was sharpened as Sino-Soviet rivalry intensified. Under Khrushchev, Soviet policy in Africa was expansionist, vigorous and unrealistically optimistic, both in its assessment of African gratitude towards Moscow and in its estimation of the socialist potential of certain regimes. A series of spectacular setbacks in the Congo, Guinea, Ghana, and Mali led Khrushchev's successors to reevaluate their Third World policies and downgrade Africa as an area deserving extensive Russian resources.

The Nigerian civil war is now history. The Republic of Biafra lives in the pages of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. In that form, it is no threat to the people of Nigeria who, in a solemn oath of allegiance in January 1970, pledged to consign Biafra into oblivion and face the task of reconstruction and reconciliation. Biafra is now an issue only for historians who are plagued with the search for an answer to “what might have happened if…” But the war itself has left deep scars not only upon the lives of the survivors, but also on their beliefs and attitudes towards life. Unless he visits the right places in Nigeria, the visitor today may hear nothing and possibly see nothing to remind him of the war.