Mr Chitepo appeared to feel that from the African viewpoint things were getting worse not better. He was particularly bitter over the British Government’s approval of the Constitution Amendment Bill (enlarging the Fed Assembly) over the objections of the African Affairs Board. This action, he said, eliminated any remaining faith the Africans may have had in the effectiveness of constitutional safeguards of African interests. It had, he said, made thinking Africans realize that from now on they must depend wholly on their own efforts to achieve equality. He could see nothing ahead but a long “struggle,” with the Africans seeking to wrest their rights from Europeans. He refused to say what form he thought the struggle might take, although there was no doubt in his mind that the Africans would win it.
After the interview Mrs. Yergan commented, “What an angry young man!” Dr Yergan wondered if he were not expressing somewhat more extreme views than he actually felt, evidencing the impatience and frustration of youth rather than his considered opinions. While Mr Chitepo is not a member of Congress (at least so far as is known) and while he does work hard on constructive activities, e.g. serving as a member of the Urban Areas Board, he does appear to the reporting officer to have developed an increasingly pessimistic outlook during the past 2 and 1/2 years since he established himself in Salisbury.
Mr Vambe, who is considered a “moderate” by Europeans and a stooge by extreme African nationalists, is nevertheless respected by many in both groups as a man of independence and principle. He and his wife were the Acting Consul General’s dinner guests, with the Yergans. Mr Vambe said he had returned from America “inspired” by the accomplishment of the American negro and progress made in integrating him into American life. What he saw in America made him more determined than ever to continue to press for the raising of African standards on a wide front before demanding full political rights. He was particularly impressed that negroes had accomplished so much through their own efforts and recognizes that the basis for their successful efforts has been the increasingly high standard of education that they have achieved. Increasing the number of educated Africans here is, he feels, the only way to provide a solid basis for the political claims now being advanced by African nationalists. He was also impressed by the fact that negro accomplishments in such fields as sports, entertainment, education, business and science has frequently been responsible for breaking down the color bar—rather than direct political action. He would advise African nationalists not to concentrate so exclusively on political agitation but to encourage and work for African advancement in all fields.
He was pleased to hear Dr Yergan express hopefulness about the possibilities of racial cooperation in the Federation, as well as agreement with his (Vambe’s) views on the sterility of pure political agitation unrelated to accomplishments, and the dangers of nationalist intolerance of other opinions. He said he hoped Dr Yergan was expressing such views to African nationalist leaders. Dr Yergan said he had done so in conversations with Mr Kenneth Kaunda, General Secretary of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, and the 6 African Federation MPs, whom he met twice as a group.71
In fact, these discourses may also be read as a long soliloquy, with the militant Chitepo standing for the younger Yergan and the moderate Vambe representing his older alter ego. Both sides of the coin represent stages in Yergan’s thinking about Africa, about political change and social progress, and about democracy, and even if the elder eschewed Chitepo’s approach, it was in no sense entirely foreign to him even then, in this rigidly segregated polity.
During the final years of the 1950s Yergan seems to have withdrawn for a time from public view, for reasons that are not altogether certain, though they may have been influenced by a suicide attempt of a close relative in 1958 that received considerable news coverage. It may also be that his plans for a new career did not find favor in the quarters where they were directed, leaving him uncertain where and how to proceed. He was by now approaching seventy, and retirement would not have been an unrealistic possibility. Yet retirement would not afford him access to the limelight, which he sought once again when Africa was back in the news. By 1960, when British prime minister Harold MacMillan proclaimed that “the winds of change” were sweeping Africa, Yergan responded like a phoenix from the ashes, resurfacing a year later, in another conspicuous and seemingly stagnant locality, Angola.
Full Circle: The American African Affairs Association
The final fifteen years of Max Yergan’s life were taken up with a new organization superficially resembling the International Committee on African Affairs and its successor, the now defunct Council on African Affairs. Like them it bore “African Affairs” in its title, under a mast-head of readily recognizable personalities; unlike its left-liberal predecessor, however, this group was inclined to the far Right. It represented ultraconservative ideologues, key members of whom coalesced around the National Review and the Conservative Book Club, and was libertarian, Republican, heavily Christian (especially Catholic), and committed to contesting and combating procommunist influence domestically and internationally. Beyond these common features, it is not always easy to determine, much less state, what the men in this organization had in common. They tended to be members of the financial and educational elite and were frequently Anglo-, Franco-, or more generically Europhile in orientation. Outsiders, they were disdainful of government intervention in private affairs, including income taxes used to finance excessive social spending, as well as what they typically saw as an effete, flaccid, permissive society, lacking order and morals. A cross-section was foreign born, more apt to be Germanic than Slavic, Gentiles than Jews. Beyond Yergan and George S. Schuyler, few were nonwhites, and there were few nonsecretarial females. How then would Max Yergan have gained access to this cohort, and how would it approach Africa?
The answer to this question lies in Yergan’s geopolitical perspective vis-à-vis “the Communist conspiracy.” By the late fifties, Yergan’s major South African support would have come from the pro-apartheid, government-funded South Africa Foundation, closely allied to the ultra-Right inside North America. American conservatives by and large looked at South Africa as a flawed NATO ally in the furious mortal combat against communism, but one nonetheless worthy of steadfast U.S. support, since it was doing a dirty job that no one else could, would, or should do for them by rooting out leftist and pro-Soviet agitators and domestic dupes unwilling or unable to see that the agitators’ ostensible support for African and “non-European” rights was merely a cynical cover to cloak their real imperial designs. This attitude was the logical extension of the positions taken by Max in his return trips to South Africa, and would have made him a sought-after public figure in South African and conservative U.S. circles, since not many American Negro “leaders” would dare sit on the same side of the fence as South Africa, even ancient anti-Communists like the now late Walter White or his successor, Roy Wilkins, who each supported majoritarian Southern African liberation.
By contrast, Yergan, having lost credibility with the Left, left-liberals, and the center, could only cultivate a conservative constituency, closing himself off to domestic “colored” colleagues, particularly those within the civil rights community, who saw their struggles as linked to those of the opponents of White minority rule in the same way as had the radical-left Yergan in the thirties and forties. Now, Max Yergan, like Marx’s Louis Napoleon, stood in his Eighteenth Brumaire. He had rededicated himself to religion and had rejoined Africa’s battle for democracy; but the way he did so, and the particular soldiers and weapons he chose, were out of phase with the tenor of the times in which he used them. Thus, several saw him as a shadow of his former self and sadly shook their heads at his present publicism.
The American African Affairs Association owed its existence to the decisions of four unpopular African White minority regimes to undergo systematic propaganda facelifts by successively engaging a retinue of seasoned overseas public relations specialists in the twilight of European-set
tler rule, starting around the year 1960. Although this PR campaign was undertaken separately by four different regimes, the political economy of Southern Africa, with its interlocking companies and labor boards, made cross-border communications a practical necessity for capital. Once one concession knew where to find a capable image polisher, it tended to pass the word along to others.
The year 1960, popularly called “Africa year” to honor the dizzying pace at which former colonial territories were outwardly throwing off the trappings of alien rule, was a watershed, moving Britain’s prime minister Harold MacMillan to proclaim that “winds of change” were sweeping the continent. This turn of events not only empowered the colonized; it was also a spur to the business allies of possibly soon-to-be-former colonizers to seek methods of derailing or delaying a seemingly inevitable march toward flag independence that could mean an end to a profitable and luxurious existence they could never replicate in Europe.
In August 1960, Moise Tshombe, a well-fed, Belgian-backed, rightist Congolese, pushing a program of ethnically and regionally rooted subnationalism, led a secessionist movement of the minerally rich Katanga province, claiming to champion democracy in its battle against the allegedly “pro-Soviet” rule of the charismatic nationalist prime minister Patrice Emery Lumumba. Nothing about the Congo crisis of that year had been simple, because of the hasty circumstances leading to the downfall of eighty-odd years of outwardly benevolent “platonist” despotism in a corporatist state whose ruling paternalism neglected to prepare more than a handful of its African subjects for the inevitable day of freedom.
While most of the beneficiaries of Congo’s status quo ante had been Belgian, by the fifties the exigencies of the Cold War had brought the strategically vital mineral endowment of the Congo to the attention of gregarious American speculators and their allies. When the Republican Eisenhower administration was succeeded by that of liberal Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a politician never favored by conservatives, his fellow party man, the Connecticut conservative Thomas Dodd, caught their attention and consequently came to the aid of Katanga’s anticommunist contra clique. Corporate sponsorship behind that effort had come from Marvin Liebman, a China Lobby member, and Max Yergan, who joined Liebman in forming an American Committee to Aid Katanga Freedom Fighters.72
The rise of party politics in the Congo had been extremely recent, dating only from the premiere elections in 1957. Preceding this poll, Congolese nationalist expression had been deeply fragmented, wracked by ethnic, regional, linguistic, and class strife. Prior to the 1950s, the mass response to earthly oppression typically took the form of syncretic Afro-Christian millennialism, exemplified most explosively in chiliastic outbursts like the one identified with catechist Simon Kimbangu in 1921, close to Thysville. Soon followed the Southern Rhodesia–based Mwana Lesa (“Song of God”) trend that entered Katanga around 1935, and the Kitawala movement, first appearing around 1930. Secular politics, while regionally and ethnically rooted, tended to be more urban, beginning with World War Two, typically motivated by laborite responses to the conditions in mining compounds, such as those of the extractive behemoth Union Miniére. It was within such a context that ABAKO (an ethnic association centering around the powerful Bakongo group, who had led the great Kongo kingdom in the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries) became the pioneer nationalist party between 1954–1960, under the guidance of Joseph Kasavubu, victor in the 1957 Leopoldville elections. In short order, ABAKO was joined by the centrally based Lulua Frères, piloted by Chief Kalamba. But by 1960, Congolese were swept up in Lumumba’s meteoric rise. A modest, brilliant mission product with untapped skills, Lumumba had painstakingly built a national base from 1953 on, sparking the Mouvement Nationale Congolaise (MNC/L).73
Lumumba emerged as a territory-wide figure in the late fifties, and his popularity peaked when he appeared in 1958 at an Accra meeting of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, from which he emerged as a protégé of Pan-Africanist prophet and first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. At this point Lumumba became a favorite among nationalists both within and beyond the Congo. He gained a reputation as an indefatigable worker, an incomparable debater, and an all-around magnetic personality. While ABAKO and then Lulua Frères (later to run in alliance with Lumumba under the title of Union Congolaise) broadened their ethnic bases, Lumumba galvanized the electorate. By July 1960, the Belgian colony had been granted independence. As soon as this became evident to the overseas-based mining interests controlling Katanga, however, they engineered several schemes to ensure that they would not be a party to independence, the most significant idea being a provincial, ethnically based secession, which first had been attempted in December 1959 and would recur on July 11, 1960. This plan was designed to counter Lumumba, who had fought for national independence.
In six months, Lumumba’s star had risen and fallen, as he had become ensnared in Cold War rivalries among the USSR, the United States, and the UN that led to foreign intervention, with a charismatic Lumumba and countless other Congolese being compelled to pay the ultimate price. Witnesses put Tshombe and cohort, Katanga interior minister Godefroid Munongo, on the scene when Lumumba was dispatched. These men handed Lumumba over on January 17 to Colonel Joseph Desiré Mobutu in Elizabethville, where he was tortured and killed; his demise was revealed February 13, 1961.74
Also by the beginning of 1961, Max Yergan would become identified with a campaign engineered by the colonial government of Portugal, which was ruled by the iron fist of the long-lived fascist dictator Antonio Salazar. Salazar urged a consortium of sixty enterprises, known as the Overseas Companies of Portugal, to retain the services of a North American public relations firm, Selvage and Lee (later Manning, Selvage, and Lee) in order to help sanitize the notorious image of this colonial government.75
At the time gruesome and graphic tales of Portuguese atrocities in Angola had been given ample space in the Washington Post and Harpers, among other periodicals, and had even received attention at the United Nations, where they sparked vigorous protests. As Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott later revealed in their muckraking exposé of Washington lobbyists, The Power Peddlers, one of the participants in this process to refurbish Lusitania’s tarnished finish was Pittsburgh Courier publisher, columnist, and Yergan crony, George Schuyler. He sent his like-minded daughter, piano prodigy and author, Philippa, to the scene as a stringer, courtesy of Selvage and Lee, where she yielded pro-Portuguese stories for the New York Daily Mirror that did not reveal the sources financing her trip. A conspicuous feature of this state campaign was its use of high-profile American Negro publicists to buttress strongman Salazar’s increasingly infamous fascistic regime.76
Midway through February, American officials in Dakar, Senegal, sent this cable:
Embassy received brief visit February 6 from a Dr. MAX YERGAN (and his wife) whose card describes him as an “Africa Consultant” residing at Pinesbridge Road, Ossining, N.Y. (Tel. Wilson 1-1030). Dr. Yergan was referred to the Embassy by M. Le Mire, Diplomatic Counselor of the French High Representation, who stated Yergans were recommended by French Information Service, New York.77
Dr. Yergan was not particularly communicative regarding purpose or aegis his present trip to West Africa other than to state he planned visit Abidjan, Cotonou, Brazzaville, and Luanda, Angola, returning to U.S. about mid-March. Said he had called at ConGen Dakar in 1958, but Embassy Files show no record this visit. Expressed interest in Embassy getting him an appointment with Mamadou DIA (in Senghor’s absence), but did not press point when told this would be difficult.
Then the embassy official, H. S. V. Villard, with whom Yergan had met in a highly publicized delegation concerned with U.S. policy toward Africa during 1944, commented,
Ambassador recalls that Max Yergan enjoyed somewhat questionable reputation around 1940–45 as Commie-line anti-colonialist. Embassy does not know what evolution of Yergan’s political outlook in intervening years may have been but presumes Dept. may have more informa
tion. [line deleted] Dept. may wish notify Luanda.78
It was a small world indeed. And many of its inhabitants had painfully long memories.
In early March 1961, at much the same time that President John Kennedy had directed UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson to cast a vote favoring a resolution to censure Salazar, Yergan and Lena Halpern flew into Luanda, Angola, from Lisbon. An American consular official wired the secretary of state that Yergan was “described by airline representative as UN official,” adding that Yergan denied this, “claiming to be ‘consultant’ on Africa.” The American functionary further informed the secretary that “his remarks [were] guarded as to his employers.”79
Yergan’s Angolan trip lasted some six days from touchdown to departure. Yet there was a further twist to this sojourn. Following his exit flight on March 8, he made a follow-up visit to Luanda on April 29, this time accompanied by Pittsburgh Courier associate editor and ex-Congress of Cultural Freedom collaborator, George Schuyler. Together Yergan and Schuyler undertook an oddly timed scenic tour. Consular officers in the American Embassy revealingly reported its highlights:
Visited mixed race homes Sunday, local industries Monday, Cambambe Dam Tuesday. Apparently being hospitably treated Portuguese, whose policies he seems in main to uphold. In conversation yesterday he seemed reasonable, knowledgeable and tolerant. Believe Portuguese kindness to American Negro at this moment highly significant and encouraging.80
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