The Mail ATTACKS LIBELOUS' REPORTING

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The best reply to tendentions, inflammatory, and libelous reporting is usually silence. But Hyland so unfairly over-indulged his love of (Joe) McCarthite innuendo and scurrilousness that a further look at the fullest dimensions of the Center for International Affairs seems justified.

It is now forgotten that almost from its inception, the Center was interested in movements of anticolonial and anti-imperial liberation. For example, I was specifically invited to the Center nine long years ago in order to undertake a study of anti-British political movements in Africa. Out of that work, which was financed by Center funds derived from non-govermental (and non-conduit) sources, emerged a book. The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa (1965), and a variety of articles-all sponsored by the Center.

The same project also spawned the publication of a critical, hardly imperialist, book written by an African, the late George S. Mwase's Strike a Blow and Die: A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Africa (1967). The Center has indulged, supported, even cossetted this kind of scholarly inquiry: indeed, if Hyland wants to blow his mind, he is welcome to read the galley proofs of a 1500-page book, soon to be on the radicalized newsstands, called Power and Protest in Black Africa. It follows the course of anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial agitation in Africa from 1860 to 1969.

The Center, like the M. I. T. Center, which recently published a brilliant book on The Angolian Revolution, has spent considerable sums on books that make people in Washington uncomfortable. What has been equally impressive, in my view, has been the will-ingness of the Center establishment (to speak in the foolishly fashionable idiom) to sponsor research which by no stretch of any imagination can have policy implications. Will you believe that the Center-our nefarious, war-mongering running dog of capitalism Center-in 1967 sponsored a conference in Kenya on cultural relations between East Africa and Southeast Asia in pre-colonial times? In case Hyland should wonder, pre-colonial here means pre-1500 A. D. And the Ford Foundation paid.