webGuinée
Diplomatie. Guinée — Etats-Unis d'Amérique

William Attwood
Second American Ambassador to Guinea.

A Message to the Reader

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. … The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions-a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love-the human experiences of this earth and of oneself and other men.
Adlai Stevenson at Princeton, June, 1954

I'm not yet fifty, and you're probably over twenty, but what Stevenson was telling the Princeton seniors has some relevance to this book. For it will be about some of the things I learned in Africa, and in our government, during more than five years as an American ambassador working for two Presidents. When a man reaches middle age and then learns something really new about the world, the people in it and himself, he needs to write about it even though so much of it seems, as Stevenson said, incommunicable.
I said “needs to write” because there are other things I'd rather be doing for the next couple of months. Writing a book is hard, lonely work, and you don't do it unless you have to. Either you need the money or you feet you have such a good story to tell that you can't keep it to yourself any longer. In my case, it's the story.
The reason for this introduction is to tell the reader what to
expect in the pages that follow. Anybody who buys a book these days is, I think, entitled to a personal word from the author before spending the kind of money books cost. The blurb on the cover gives some idea of what's inside, but it's actually a commercial. Anyone who reads this introduction will really know what I intend to do and whether he wants to go along on this safari through Africa's political bush and Washington's bureaucratic jungles. At the end of these few pages he may decide to put the book back on the shelf, but at least he'll know what he's missing.
As the title suggests, this book is essentially about what I saw of Soviet and Chinese efforts to penetrate and subvert Africa and what we and the Africans and others did to counter these efforts. In both Guinea and Kenya I was up against the opposition at close enough range to understand why it has so far failed. Those who are interested in an eyewitness account of Communist tactics in a vast, turbulent and largely unreported continent won't be disappointed.
However, as the subtitle suggests, this book is not only about cold warfare in a hot climate. I went from journalism to diplomacy via the politics of the 1960 campaign, working for Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy, so I hope to tell something of how our government works, how power is acquired and exercised and what has to be done in Washington to get results.
Africa is a big place, more than three times the size of the United States, and I traveled through twenty-one of its thirty-eight countries; readers who like to visit strange places and hear the noises of tom-toms and wild animals will not be short-changed. But statistics will be kept to a minimum. There are reference books galore about Africa these days, and I don't want to clutter up a personal narrative with the kind of data you can find in your local library.
Impressions and opinions, yes—about people and policies and the conduct of our foreign affairs, not just in Africa but in Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere; for I've acquired some strona views in these five years. Some of these views will surprise my liberal friends, who may not understand how an old Stevenson Democrat can have such admiration for Lyndon Johnson; some will seem disloyal—such as the harsh things I'll be saying, as a journalist, about the press; and some will appear paradoxical—such as my conviction that we must dismantle the Agency for International Development if we are to save and strengthen our vitally important foreign assistance program. Yet all the views and conclusions will be based on the hard and illuminating experience you get only from struggling with real problems in the real world, and from lying
awake at night in faraway places.
There will be a good many heroes but no real villains in this book, not human ones anyway. There's the System, but I won't go into that now. If I have to knock somebody, I'll omit his name.
He prepared to shed some illusions. Did you know that walking around city streets at night is safer in Africa than in America? I hat Nairobi's automated parking facilities are more modern than New York's? That one encounters less race feeling, as a white man, in black Africa than in multiracial America? That it's possible to be a U.S. ambassador for more than five years without ever wearing a hat or a pair of striped pants'? This book will, I hope, cast some new light on the world of modern diplomacy and on this African continent which, as President Johnson recently said, “has never been so dark as our ignorance of it.”
I wondered how to start and especially how to structure the cryptic and random jottings of a long diary. With a summary of African political history? With a chapter on Communist objectives in the underdeveloped world? Or should I first explain how the State Department functions and how ambassadors are chosen? Thinking about it, I decided that the best way to write a story like this—a story of six years in a man's life—was to start at the heginning and tell what happened, more or less the way the old explorers used to write about their expeditions from the moment they disappeared into the jungle until the day they staggered out, gaunt but happy, months or years later.
The conclusions and the strong views come at the end. You may or may not agree with me, but at least you will understand how I came to feel as I do. For you will share quite a few adventures with me, as well as some frustrations. I have run out of inner tubes in the forests of central Guinea, ridden zebroids through a blizzard on the equatorial slops of' Mount Kenya and spent Christmas in Timbuktu.
I met all kinds of interesting people-Soviet intelligence agents, Congolese confidence men; Masai warriors whose favorite cocktail is a blend of blood, milk and urine; itinerant Congressmen and whisky-drinking missionaries; even a Mongolian ambassador's secretary who used to read Kafka in French. I went swimming every afternoon for a year with eleven Chinese Communists—and was never greeted. I had long, lively talks with passionate ideologists like President Sékou Touré and wise old men like President Jorno Kenyatta (Ruark fans are in for a shock). I sweated out the Stanleyville air drop and, two days later, stood at an embassy window, more in sorrow than in anger, to watch a mob brandishing anti-American signs and setting fire to parked cars.
In Washington, I conferred with the tweedy pipe-smokers who inhabit the air-conditioned grottoes of the CIA building. I went to Georgetown parties and watched the New Frontiersmen at play. From time to time, I walked into the Oval Room of the White House to be greeted by two different Presidents, and noted the changes. I was sitting with Adlai Stevenson looking at the television screen on that terrible afternoon when one of them was shot.
Except for a permanent limp (mine) and some temporary amoebas (my son's), our family came through this long adventure relatively unscathed. We even added a daughter to the family roster. And we came away with an abiding affection for Africa and its people, a deep respect for the overworked and underpaid men and women who staff our Foreign Service, a backlog of indignation at public ignorance and crippling bureaucratic foolishness, a renewed pride in being Americans in this century, and a wonderful hand-lettered sign, snatched from some well-wishers as I left Nairobi airport, reading ”Yankee Don't Go Home.”
But this really belongs at the end of the story. The beginning, for me, was flying from Washington to New York on an Eastern Airlines shuttle one evening in December, 1959, with Adlai Stevenson as my seatmate.