PROMPTLY at sunrise every Friday, the highest nobles and chiefs of the Mossi tribe gather outside the concrete palace in the capital of Upper Volta to go through a ceremony that has changed not one jot in centuries. Groveling in the dust, the chiefs render homage to the nobles and then in turn take homage from the multitudes around. When all that is done, drums begin to roll, and a plump young man of 28 suddenly appears, dressed in a bright red cap and robe. To 1,700,000 Mossi, the young Moro Naba is the incarnation of the sun on earth, and he rules through a court more rigid in its ritual than that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Each week, after the nobles have abased themselves before him, the Moro Naba heads for a splendidly caparisoned stallion. But just as he is about to mount, his Chief of Eunuchs confronts him and begs him not to ride away. With the same angry gesture he uses every Friday, the Moro Naba protests, but finally yields, saying "I shall not depart."

This ceremony of "The False Departure"--which dates back to the day that one of the Naba's ancestors was persuaded not to desert his people to pursue a favorite runaway wife--is unique to the Upper Volta in the eight territories of French West Africa, but is in a way symbolic of the whole region's inheritance of paradox and anachronism. Next month Premier de Gaulle's new constitution will go before the people, who by choosing white or green cards will decide whether or not to cast their lot permanently with the French. Whether this will prove a false departure, with the Africans refusing to go, depends partly on how eloquent De Gaulle proves in person on a tour of West Africa in the next fortnight. France's colonial record, splotchy elsewhere, is quite good in West Africa. And the French have shown themselves surprisingly adaptable to Africa's growing demands.

Of French West Africa's nearly 19 million people, nine million are Moslems, one million Christians, the rest pagan animists. The Negroes alone speak 120 different languages. Just outside the teeming modern city of Abidjan, villagers still slaughter small children and toss their disemboweled bodies into the river to make sure of a good year's fishing. Until this year, Mauritania, whose Berber people call themselves "whites" (Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after an ancient king who ate his victims, the fiercest warriors were once the Amazons. And among the Tuareg tribes of the Niger, it is the men, not the women, who wear veils.

Frenchman's Burden. To these oddly assorted lands, half the size of Europe, almost seven times the size of Texas, France clings tenaciously, even though much of the land is still poor and only 50,000 Frenchmen live there. Not for years will the $550 million poured in since 1948 begin to pay off--but there are riches to be found, and France seems determined not to let this vast remnant of its empire go by default, or to make the same mistakes that led to Algeria.

So far, the thundering cries of nationalism that rocked North Africa have failed to disrupt the lands to the south and west. Even Mauritania's powerful Emir of Trar-za, absolute ruler of 50,000 warriors, who stunned Paris by swearing allegiance to the King of Morocco last April, has declared: "No one can say that France has exploited Mauritania. On the contrary, it has been for her a burden." Most of French West Africa's present leaders want France to carry the burden for a long time to come--and France willingly does so in the firm belief that, with its deserts irrigated and its veins of wealth open, the territory will someday justify the effort.

With no sizable community of French colons to harass and badger it, the Paris government has been able to conduct a far more consistent policy than it has elsewhere. When Socialist Guy Mollet became Premier in 1956, he appointed as Minister of Overseas Territories the far-sighted mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre. While his colleagues busied themselves with a disastrous Algerian policy that eventually led to rebellion, Defferre drafted a really effective loi-cadre (skeleton law) for French West Africa. Though the chief executive of each territory was to be a Paris-appointed premier, responsible for defense and foreign relations, the domestic power was placed in the hands of elected assemblies, which choose their own cabinet ministers to tax and run each country. Over all these is a Grand Council, which sits in Dakar and coordinates the activities of the entire area.

"Who Is Independent?" Only last month the De Gaulle government decided that henceforth the territorial premiers would be elected Africans, instead of Europeans. As a result of such concessions --and of the obvious fact that French West Africa is wholly dependent on France and the French Union for nearly 80% of its trade--France has a reservoir of good will. French West Africa's most noted political leader is Felix Houphouet-Boigny, sophisticated mayor of the Ivory Coast's capital of Abidjan and a minister of state in De Gaulle's Cabinet. Says he: "We don't want independence. My neighbor Nkrumah in Ghana is independent, and as a result must support an army which is very expensive. Who is really independent, anyway?"

There was a time when Houphouet-Boigny talked quite differently. In 1949 he called an interterritory congress of French West Africa's most powerful political party, the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, and pledged allegiance to the French Communists and their fight against "the forces of imperialism." Thus encouraged, the Communists began to infiltrate the R.D.A., but so incited its members that bloody riots erupted. The following year, African Deputies in the French Assembly broke with the Communists. Today the influence of Communism is negligible in the political hierarchy of French West Africa.

Next to Houphouet-Boigny, the most powerful man in the R.D.A. is a 36-year-old labor leader named Sekou Toure, now the vice premier of Guinea. A onetime Marxist and incorrigible troublemaker for France, he is a ruthless man who used to burn the houses of his enemies, and looks upon the loi-cadre as only one step toward autonomy. But the French regard him benignly as one of the ablest administrators in the whole territory. "I am no socialist," says he, "and neither are my colleagues. We have studied the principles of socialism, Communism, the M.R.P., the European Unionists, and we have adopted principles which correspond to the needs of Africa today." Chief need of Africa: "Lots of capital. But to attract it we must inspire confidence in investors. Our responsibility is to inform the African people of their responsibility in this matter."

Peanuts & Problems. Unfortunately, only Houphouet-Boigny's Ivory Coast and Toure's Guinea have inspired much confidence so far. Though Senegal was the first territory to be colonized, its economy still depends mostly on peanuts--a crop that gradually exhausts the soil. Mauritania, which has only four towns of 3,000 people or more, is a vast desert whose rich deposits of iron and copper ore are still to be exploited. The Upper Volta has as many livestock as people, and its workers must migrate from the territory each year to find jobs. Niger, the largest territory, and Dahomey, the smallest, barely manage to survive.

Throughout these destitute lands, the French have made isolated but highly promising efforts at development. In the French Sudan, the TVA-like Office du Niger, located in a tree-shaded and prosperous town that was once just a cluster of huts, has built a $21 million dam across the Niger River, on top of which lie the tracks for the still nonexistent Trans-Saharan Railroad (the railroad station is currently being used as an office building). The Office has reclaimed more than 108,000 acres of desert where cotton and rice can now grow, hopes eventually to have 2,000,000 acres under cultivation.

"Avion!" With its huge exports of cocoa ($30 million a year) and coffee ($60 million), as well as its dense forests, the Ivory Coast is rich by comparison. By sunrise the people of Abidjan are already on their way to work, the men loping along in giant and graceful strides, bantering in a French laced with local slang, e.g., "Avion!" for "Hurry up!", "Japan" for anything shoddy. The symbol of the Coast's progress is the French-financed Felix Houphouet-Boigny Bridge that stretches across the Ebrie Lagoon and supports a four-lane highway and a two-track railway.

Guinea, the home of the headwaters of the Senegal and Niger Rivers, has plunged into the most ambitious industrial program in French West Africa. Toure has abolished the corruption-ridden French office of cantonal chiefs, is now training a cadre of 106 administrative experts to run the land. French, Swiss, Canadian and U.S. money is backing a $200 million bauxite development program. "In five years," says one French official, "Guinea will be unrecognizable."

The Realists. In their efforts to keep the good will of French West Africa, the French have sent down much more than money. They have also exported a dedicated group of civil servants and army men. Headed by the soldier-doctor General Pierre Richet, a small team of 25 doctors and 1,200 nurses and technicians move constantly about in mobile medical units, ridding the countryside of sleeping sickness, leprosy, syphilis, crippling yaws and blinding trachoma. In some areas sleeping sickness once afflicted as many as 80% to 97% of the population, killed off one in five of its victims. Today the mortality rate is close to zero.

In education there has been no such spectacular progress. Illiteracy is still enormous. Only 13.5% of the children go to school, and the whole area has only one university--the University of Dakar in Senegal, which has fewer than 1,000 students. But the African leaders are opening new schools every day, preparing for a future that seems destined to follow a pattern of its own. Except among a few Berbers in Mauritania, Nasserism has no appeal; and though it is fashionable in Abidjan for ladies to have a picture of Nkrumah's face woven into their dresses, the example of independent Ghana arouses far less excitement than it does in British Africa.

Though young hotheads cry for independence, what the present generation of leaders want is something a good deal more mystical and at the same time more realistic--a kind of proud brotherhood, not only with all of Africa, but also with France. "Our fundamental choice," Toure has said, "resides in the entire decolonization of Africa--its men. its economy, its administrative organization, in order to build a solid Franco-African community. Our heart, our reason, even more than our most evident self-interest, makes us choose, without hesitation, interdependence and liberty in this union, rather than a definition of ourselves without France and against France."

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