Where are memories of Africa’s diplomats

‘’The mind of the African strongman: Conversations with dictators, statesman, and father figures’’ is the title of Herman Cohen’s book which covers his career as an American diplomat who covered America’s exploits in Africa’s affairs. It is a book whose value lies in its strength; its crude errors and in inciting us to rebuke retired […]

‘’The mind of the African strongman: Conversations with dictators, statesman, and father figures’’ is the title of Herman Cohen’s book which covers his career as an American diplomat who covered America’s exploits in Africa’s affairs. It is a book whose value lies in its strength; its crude errors and in inciting us to rebuke retired and serving Africa’s diplomats for not telling Africa’s own story from their own memories.
It is not that African diplomats have always been shy. Quason-Sackey, Ghana’s colourful ambassador to the United Nation while Kwame Nkrumah’s black star lit the world’s diplomatic sky published a book which grabbed the drama of his new job. The cruel starvation to death of Boubacar Diallo Telli, Guinea’s first ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity, almost certainly denied Africa a narrative from a brilliant and energetic mind.  The long run of military dictatorships which derailed the trajectory of colourful and fecund minds ranging from Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella; Nigeria’s Tafawa Balewa; Congo’s Patrice Lumumba to Central Africa’s Braganza, are partly to blame for this drought.
Cohen’s work sacrifices simple accuracies and restraint from splashing blinding bile against President Robert Mugabe. He mistakes Martinique’s poet, politician and Leopold Senghor’s contemporary as students in colonial Paris, Aime Cesaire, for Franz Fanon, also from Martinique. Fanon was a medical soldier of France who defected to become a fighter of Algeria’s National Liberation Front. While Cesaire and Senghor invented ‘’Negritude’’, Fanon’s classic ‘’The Wretched of the Earth’’ warned of Africa’s politicians betraying the welfare of the masses of their peoples.
Cohen’s narrative opens some interesting windows.  The first concerns Mobutu Sese Seko who assassinated Patrice Lumumba and later cynically stooped in prayer inside a Catholic Church during official rituals in memory of his victim. Mobutu grew up being mocked as the ‘’son of a prostitute’’. Cohen ignores the narrative of his expulsion from school for absconding with a sensuous girl; being punished by the Catholic priests tending his school enrolling him as a military cadet. His brilliant mind fed on reading Belgian newspapers in the library for Belgian officers. Coming from the ‘’bush’’ in north-western Congo, his lack of education would feed contempt for him by Bakongo of urban Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).
These disadvantages explain his resentment of better educated leaders, notably: Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda. Cohen quotes him complaining bitterly as follows:
‘’The international community, especially you Americans, loves Nyerere. He pretends to be a great intellectual. He translated Shakespeare’s play ‘’Julius Ceaser’’ into Swahili. But how many political prisoners does he have? Human rights activists are always attacking me. Nyerere has over 1,500 political prisoners. I don’t have any. I co-opt my political opponents’’.
Mobutu does not mention opponents thrown from helicopters into jungles bellow; or invited for dinners and fed with delicious poison. Scores of students were massacred by his troops for demonstrating against his policies. Paradoxically, in 1972 Mobutu did echo some of Nyerere’s policies.  Nyerere’s socialist policy of ‘’Ujamaa’’ (or familyhood), became Mobutu’s ‘’Authenticity’’. Nationalised properties were distributed to leaders of Mubutu’s political party. He avoided Nyerere’s ‘’Arusha Declaration’’ which prohibited leaders and their families from owning houses for rent and commercial ventures.
Cohen also reports on Omar Bongo of Gabon; a man of short stature at ‘’five feet and two inches’’. He wore platform shoes; and had a rabid hunger for being petted by French and American presidents. During dinner with President Reagan, he joked that an American Youth Corp volunteer who lived in his village was giving him much trouble. ‘’He speaks our tribal language better than me. He is making me look stupid’’, Bongo complained. Reagan may well have swallowed a silent endorsement.
Cohen was, surprisingly, bitter that Bongo ruled for forty-four years while selling 250,000 barrels of oil a day – ‘’combined with significant earnings from uranium, iron ore,, manganese and lumber’’ – yet did not finance ‘’a modern education system, advanced infrastructure, and highly productive tropical agriculture’’. He left cash in ‘’a number of private banks’’ and ‘’significant private property in Paris’s wealthiest residential areas’’. Cohen did not have the moral courage to rebuke Bongo. After retirement, he won a consultancy job from Bongo.
Kenya’s much celebrated woman writer Grace Akinyi Ogot’s autobiography: Days of my life, demonstrates the merit of combining a tradition of telling oral stories with that of literacy. Her generation among Africa’s diplomats would enrich Africa’s intellectual culture by complementing her escapades into diplomacy as a  globally celebrated novelist. Teachers of International Relations to students in African universities find themselves being orphans fed by Euro-American crooks and revisionists.  The African Union Commission must liberate our diplomats from the virus of silence.