Times Series on Africa

Charles T. Powers’ series on Africa (Nov. 16 to 19) was written with both passion and insight, and it had a kind of straightforwardness and frankness one does not often find among newspaper pages. But that very straightforwardness and frankness raises certain questions.

Could it have been that there was a certain unconscious racism at work in the piece--not in the writing itself, but in your editorial willingness to run it as it was written?

This was, after all, black Africa he was writing about, and though I do not doubt that the conditions and forms of behavior Powers described actually exist, I cannot remember your having published similarly frank pieces about other nations, continents or peoples.

For instance, one might well have published similar pieces about conditions in Mexico, especially in relations to the corruption within government circles and the ultimate cost of such corruption to the people. But I cannot remember, in any of your pieces about Mexico, any kind of unrestrained criticism to rival what one finds in Powers’ piece.

Nor do I recall similarly hard-written pieces about Chicago or New York or parts of the American South, where conditions are in many ways similar to those you find in Africa. The gentrification of New York, for instance, has divided the city so clearly into classes of rich and poor, upper and invisible castes, that certainly conditions there deserve the same kind of passionate denunciation you reserve for black nations.

Finally, Powers mentions in passing that the reason governments in Africa collapse under the strain of need and demand is that most businesses of any size remain in the hands of whites. But he mentions this only in passing. Surely this plays a part in the economic woes of these nations, and surely this too has a demoralizing and political effect on the citizens of such nations. Why was this aspect of life not explored with the same vehemence, the same critical disdain?

Do not mistake me. I like to see such vehemence on the page. And I do not think it was unfair to bring it to bear on the crisis in Africa. But I nonetheless find it odd that you seem to see fit to level such open contemptuousness at black officials, black corruption and black failure, while treating the same kinds of corruption in other nations, and where skins are other colors, in very different terms and tones.

PETER MARIN

Santa Barbara