AXIS AMBITIONS IN AFRICA

Southland Times, Issue 24242, 27 September 1940, Page 5

AXIS AMBITIONS IN AFRICA

The events at Dakar, says The Yorkshire Post, must be viewed as part of a wide web of strategic manoeuvre stretching from Africa through the Mediterranean to Indo-China. In view of the Axis Powers and Japan the French Colonial Empire is ripe for dissolution. Germany and Italy mean to use some of it for establishing a new order in Africa and the Near East and Japan dreams of a new order in Asia which will include the Dutch East Indies and perhaps the Philippines. The privileges she is trying to secure in Indo-China are not required merely to help her war on the Chinese. These far-reaching prospects are hidden from the people of France, who are told that the Vichy Government is determined to kep the French Empire intact. All the men of Vichy are in fact doing is to preserve all they can for the convenience of the aggressor countries, whose intrigues they are powerless to restrain. ROLE FOR SPAIN The visit to Rome of the Nazi Foreign Minister (Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop) was concerned with Axis plans for action throughout a vast area from Syria to Dakar and Senor Serrano Suner, Spanish Minister of the Interior, is in Berlin receiving instructions as to the role mapped out for Spain in these ambitious undertakings. She is to be given territory in French Morocco in return for assisting in the

assault on Gibraltar. Mussolini wants Tunis and Syria from France, together with Egypt and the Sudan. West Africa is to be preserved for Hitler. He would be able to look across the Atlantic towards the Americas, a prospect which The New York Times, writing on Dakar, has not overlooked. He would be well placed also to set about “liberating” South Africa, with General J. B. M. Hertzog’s aid.

PURCHASE OF FRENCH COLONIAL GOODS

(British Official Wireless) (Received September 26, 6.30 p.m.) RUGBY, September 25. The Colonial Office announces the purchase by Britain of the whole of the forthcoming cocoa crops of the Gold Coast, Nigeria and West Africa. A Cocoa Control Board is being set up to administer the scheme. Equal treatment will be extended to producers in the French colonies which have adhered to the Free French movement, and while the plans are being settled the British Government, to provide an immediate resumption of trade in the French Cameroons, is buying 12,000 tons of cocoa, as far as is possible from the stocks of the past crop, 4500 tons being shipped to Britain immediately.