Africa: The Man Who Wasn’t There

Delegates of 46 nations representing nearly one billion people came to flag-festooned Cairo last week to praise neutralism and denounce imperialism in the second conference of nonaligned nations—and virtually nobody paid any attention. The man who stole the show was the man who wasn’t even supposed to be there, Congo’s Premier Moise Tshombe. Though loathed more than ever by most black leaders, Tshombe emerged from the week as almost a hero at home, and the protagonist of a very African episode that made his enemies look utterly foolish.

Splendid Isolation. For months, Host Gamal Abdel Nasser had looked forward to using the conference to stake a claim as Africa’s spokesman, black as well as Arab. Tshombe, whose African peers regard him with distaste as Patrice Lumumba’s accused assassin and as a white-backed agent of “neocolonialism” as well, was sure to disrupt Nasser’s tea party, and Nasser was determined to keep him out. Tshombe was just as determined to get in.

The farce began when the Cairo control tower turned away Tshombe’s special Sabena flight because of “blocked runways.” The Boeing flew on to Athens, where a furious Tshombe booked himself back to Cairo on a commercial Ethiopian airlines plane. The flight got in this time, but Tshombe was greeted by Nasser’s security cops, whisked off to splendid isolation in Uruba Palace, Nasser’s 40-room state guest house, where machine-gun-carrying Egyptian commandos were posted with orders to let no one in or out. “This is the dirtiest trick in history,” howled Tshombe. “It’s unprecedented to imprison a visiting head of government.” Forced to watch the conference on television, he refused to eat for fear of being poisoned, drank Katanga beer he had brought with him, and kept his four secretaries up all night typing protests to all 46 nations at the meeting.

When word reached Leopoldville of Tshombe’s detention, Congolese gendarmes laid siege to the Egyptian and Algerian embassies in the heart of the city by way of retaliation, cutting off food and phone service. All this set off a diplomatic brouhaha that ended only when Tshombe telephoned from Cairo two days later with word that as soon as the Egyptian and Algerian diplomats were released and had reached haven in Brazzaville across the river, Nasser would spring Tshombe. Escorted out of Leopoldville by Nigerian troops under U.N. command, the embassy staffs loaded three car ferries with everything from refrigerators to kitchen pans, sailed away to safety.

The Congolese press and politicians laid plans for a hero’s welcome for Tshombe. They denounced Nasser, playing upon deep-seated black African memories of the Arabs as the continent’s slave traders. Tshombe meanwhile was taken under guard back to the Cairo airport to fly to Athens and a weekend in Paris before going back home.

Mission to Peking. While the prisoner in Cairo was getting the headlines, the conference in Cairo droned on. Nasser made a relatively reasonable plea that “peace in our time is indivisible.” Indonesia’s Sukarno, however, demanded “not coexistence but confrontation against Western imperialism.” Most of the delegates went numbly along with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, who blamed foreign plots rather than his own mismanagement for the fact that independence has not proved paradise.

Indian Premier Shastri made the week’s most sensible speech, among other things chiding the Africans for their own racial discrimination against Indians, pointedly rebutting Sukarno by insisting that “our policy must not be confrontation but cooperation,” causing a stir by suggesting that the conference send a mission to Red China urging them not to test their nuclear bomb. The delegates quickly ducked that idea, but also resisted the more incendiary language of Sukarno & Co. The conference painfully put together a sweeping final communiqué damning “neo-imperialism,” predictably citing South Africa and Angola, but preposterously including even Puerto Rico. The U.S. was told to get out of Guantanamo, Britain out of Aden, France off Martinique, Israel out of Palestine.

Despite this ambitious bill of particulars, the nonaligned really agree on few major issues. What began under Nehru’s leadership in Belgrade as a noninvolved bloc between the two superpowers has disintegrated because of the march of events. At most, what they have in common today is a ritualistic opposition to “imperialism,” shrewdly mixed with a desire to profit from all sides in the cold war to further their own nationalism.

India itself, since attacked by Red China, has had to move closer to both Washington and Moscow. With belligerents like Indonesia and Cuba under the same roof with such placid pro-Western nations as Nigeria and Liberia, the very meaning of the term “nonaligned” is disappearing. As Tshombe remarked acidly, echoing Orwell: “It is curious how some of these states are more nonaligned than others.”