by Susan Rice
About five minutes into the conversation, Abiola started to cough, at first mildly and intermittently, and then wrackingly with consistency. He said he was hot, so I asked his dutiful minder, “Please turn up the air-conditioning.” Noticing a tea service on the table between us, I offered Abiola, “Would you like some tea to help calm your cough?”
“Yes,” he said, with appreciation, and I poured him a cup. He sipped it, but continued coughing. Increasingly uncomfortable, Abiola removed his outer layer, leaving one layer on top. I shot Pickering a worried glance.
The coughing became dramatic. I told the assembled men, “I think we better call for a doctor.” No one argued. The minder immediately placed the call.
Abiola asked to be excused and went into the bathroom off our meeting room. When he emerged, he was bare-chested and sweating profusely, barely able to talk. He lay down on the couch writhing and then rolled facedown onto the floor. The doctor arrived promptly, took a quick look at him, and declared that Abiola was having a heart attack and must be transported to the hospital immediately. The men labored to lift the heavy Abiola into a small car, and we rushed to the nearby, rudimentary presidential hospital. I grabbed his eyeglasses off of a side table where he had left them, his only belonging, thinking of his daughter Hafsat in the U.S., whom I’d met before we left.
The doctors worked on him furiously, but within an hour they pronounced him dead.
We braced for violence. Abiola’s sudden and mysterious death would hit like a bombshell in Nigeria’s political tinderbox. Conspiracy theories would spread like metastatic cancer. Serious unrest throughout Nigeria was possible. Washington would hyperventilate, since it’s not every day that a major figure drops dead in a meeting with senior U.S. officials. His family would need to be told. And, urgently, Nigeria’s acting president would have to hear directly from us, even though his minister was present at the hospital and knew how it went down.
Ambassador Twaddell panicked and urged me and Pickering to rush to the airport and leave the country immediately. “Hell no,” we said. This delicate situation required deft management, not a hurried exit in a cloud of suspicion.
Right away, I called National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, my former boss, briefed him, and dictated a White House press release. Then we went to the Nigerian presidential palace to relay the entire drama to the acting president. We urged him to issue a careful statement and to announce the establishment of an independent autopsy by international experts, in order to quell rife speculation and limit the potential for violence. The acting president did both.
Next, Pickering, Twaddell, and I went with former Nigerian foreign minister Baba Kingibe to see Abiola’s wives and daughters. All of us walked in together, but soon I realized that I was effectively alone in the room with these distraught women. The men had hung far back and left the job to me—just like the pouring of the tea. I proceeded to explain that their husband/father was dead. He had died of an apparent heart attack that began in our meeting. The doctors did all they could to save him but could not. The ladies’ wailing was so intense, it haunts me to this day.
We briefed the press, and I returned to the U.S. embassy to write the official cable to report exactly what had happened. As a senior official, I almost never wrote up cables summarizing meetings, but in this case there was no more efficient way to ensure we got this very important history straight.
As I was typing, I heard in the distance on CNN a familiar voice of indignation. It was none other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson, then serving as President Clinton’s special envoy for the promotion of democracy in Africa. Reverend Jackson served capably in this role, and with good intentions; but on this occasion, I could have throttled him. He was riffing about how Abiola died under suspicious circumstances in a meeting with U.S. officials. I could not believe my ears—our own guy implying we were killers! Immediately, I placed a call to his longtime aide Yuri and asked him to shut the Reverend down. “Please, just get him off the set.” That happened, even as I was still watching the segment.
We stayed overnight in Nigeria to try to calm things, offer any needed assistance to the government, and make an orderly departure. Fortunately, despite deep public upset, no significant violence occurred. The autopsy eventually confirmed the cause of death as a heart attack. Nonetheless, it was Nigeria where conspiracy theories abound. The most popular, which still has currency over twenty years later, is that I killed Abiola by pouring him poisoned tea.
From that experience, I found that being a woman policymaker comes with unique hazards. The men would not have offered, much less thought, to pour the tea. They may not have swiftly called for a doctor. They may not have been able to break the bad news to the wives. Not for the last time, it was I, not they, who took the public fall for a crime nobody committed.
At the time of our ill-fated meeting with Abiola in Nigeria, I had been assistant secretary of state for African affairs for just under nine months. Even before settling into my spacious, wood-paneled sixth-floor office at the State Department, my first order of business had been to assemble a top-quality team of senior and experienced deputies, including Ambassadors Johnnie Carson and Vicki Huddleston, and Witney Schneidman, the only other political appointee. I had received invaluable advice from Ambassador Prudence “Pru” Bushnell, a smart, intuitive, straight-shooting career diplomat, whose toughness was belied by her slight stature and unassuming manner. Pru had served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Africa Bureau before being dispatched to Kenya as ambassador. She warned me unsparingly of the skepticism I would face as a young female political appointee in the pinstriped culture of the State Department. She counseled me to focus on policy outcomes and not to let the bureaucracy weigh me down.
Yet the best gift Pru gave me was the recommendation to hire Annette Bushelle as my personal assistant, a veteran of the office and Pru’s former secretary. Annette was a godsend, not only an extremely competent administrator, but an ever-attentive mother to me at work, who advised and protected me like my own mom, but without any of the attendant friction or frustration.
From the start, the AF Front Office, as it was known, was welcoming and supportive, but the rest of the bureau seemed to have been less certain what to expect.
The forty-three ambassadors and half dozen office directors who reported directly to me were mostly white, male, career Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) who ranged in age from roughly fifty to sixty-five. They were experienced Africa hands, mainly cautious, conservative in temperament and style, who viewed me as inexperienced, way too young for the job, and perhaps especially unsuited as a new mother. Some were silently dismissive. Many were passive-aggressive. A few were open-minded. Among the handful of female and African American ambassadors there was a slightly greater degree of acceptance, but they too were taking a wait-and-see approach.
My reputation from the NSC, as I was about to discover, had preceded me. From what I was eventually told by close colleagues, I was perceived as smart, dynamic, decisive, bureaucratically skilled, and tough, but also brash, demanding, impatient, hardheaded, and unafraid of confrontation. Some had also dubbed me imperious, autocratic, micromanaging, and intolerant of dissent. Though it was clear (and probably resented) that I had strong backing and top cover from the White House and the seventh floor (the secretary’s suite) at State, the open question was whether I could translate my access and relationships into policy success and increased respect and affection from the veterans of the Africa Bureau. At the outset, I estimated that about two-thirds of my direct reports were hostile or leaning negative toward me, and about one-third were open or leaning favorable. My aim was to flip that balance over the course of my tenure, fully recognizing that there were some who would never be fans.
Like many political appointees, I felt from the start that I was playing beat-the-clock. We had just over three more years in which to advance and entrench the president’s agenda, and I was not one to waste time. I came in with a clear vision of what I w
anted to focus on. Within my first weeks on the job, I convened a conference of all the Chiefs of Mission serving in Africa. Each of our ambassadors returned from their posts to gather on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to discuss our priorities. In addition to the staples of conflict prevention and resolution, promotion of democracy, and human rights, I championed a “New Partnership with Africa for the 21st Century,” grounded in spurring economic growth and development through increased trade, aid, and investment.
Another theme I consistently stressed was that U.S. policymakers need to better understand and address the range of transnational security threats that incubate in and can emanate from Africa, including terrorism, international crime and drug flows, and infectious disease. To deepen our collective knowledge, I asked the Intelligence Community to provide two briefings to the ambassadors on international criminal flows and the terrorist threat in Africa; obliging, they noted it was the first time they had been asked to compile that information for senior policymakers. In 1997, I was surprised to discover that the terrorist threat in Africa was underappreciated by many; I made it a top priority to heighten awareness—especially among these ambassadors.
That first Chiefs of Mission conference was somewhat awkward. In substance, it went well enough, but I felt the weight of the ambassadors sizing me up. Not there to make friends or win a popularity contest, I refused to apologize for having my baby at the conference so I could breast-feed him. My direct style did not endear me to every one of those seasoned diplomats. What I cared about was that I was granted the respect and cooperation necessary to “get shit done.” And, if I did, I knew those many who cared foremost about outcomes might eventually accept me on the merits.
The other potentially tough audience I was mindful to try to tame was the African leaders—ambassadors, ministers, and heads of state—with whom I would work directly as their principal interlocutor. Secretary of State Albright talked to African leaders when the stakes were especially high, or she was visiting their country. The president would engage African leaders when he traveled, they visited the White House, or if the stakes were huge. But I was the official who, on a daily basis, needed to be able to pick up the phone and talk to President X or travel to meet with him. Most African leaders accepted that disparity in rank, understanding that dealing with the United States was unique and especially important. A few older, very long-serving and corrupt leaders, like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and José dos Santos of Angola, would sometimes play hard to get and occasionally make themselves unavailable at the last minute. Mostly, however, I was easily able to represent the U.S. at the highest levels of government in Africa and get the audiences I needed.
Interestingly, if the African leaders had reservations about my youth or gender, they hid them well. On occasion, I would encounter someone whose jaw dropped when they first met me. One civil society leader in Nigeria blurted out something like: “We thought you were sixty years old, two hundred and fifty pounds, and six feet tall,” based on media impressions. When the Sudanese ambassador to the U.N., Elfatih Erwa, with whom I had tussled remotely, first met me at the General Assembly, he exclaimed, “Oops, you’re beautiful, I always thought you were a monster.” By contrast, some journalists, especially a few retrograde, white South African writers, like Simon Barber, were fixated on the length of my skirts.
Still, I never had any African leader balk at dealing with me. Soon I realized that it was because they had no choice: I represented the USA whether they liked it or not, and they had to deal with the USA whether they liked it or not. Nonetheless, over time, I formed excellent working relationships with many leaders across the continent, including Meles of Ethiopia, Kagame of Rwanda, Museveni of Uganda, Obasanjo of Nigeria, Chissano of Mozambique, Mogae of Botswana, and Rawlings of Ghana, all of whom were unfailingly respectful and appropriate in their dealings with me.
Within six weeks of my arrival at State, in December 1997, I accompanied Secretary Albright on the first of her four trips to Africa as secretary of state. She visited Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Secretarial trips are grueling, complex enterprises that require careful design of the itinerary down to each meeting, and massive preparation of briefing memos, speeches, and press materials. The embassies and support staff in Washington handle the logistical feat of smoothly and safely transporting the secretary, staff, security detail, secure communications gear, and traveling press corps via a U.S. Air Force plane.
Albright’s first secretarial trip to Africa was largely successful, but for one unfortunate and unauthorized comment by a traveling staffer to the press. The staffer was quoted as saying, “We don’t do Mary Robinson,” a reference to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, which suggested we were disinclined to press the African leaders with whom we met on human rights. Understandably, Secretary Albright was furious and unloaded on a small group of us senior staff as we flew between stops on her plane, demanding to know, “Who on this plane, who among us could be so stupid and tone-deaf to say such a thing?”
We never did learn who the culprit was. Not only was this a damaging leak, but it played into an unwelcome critique that we were prepared to give the so-called “new African leaders” something of a pass on democracy and human rights, if they advanced our shared security agenda. Albright personally was offended, as she has always been an ardent defender of democracy. Plus, Mary Robinson was the respected former president of Ireland and an important interlocutor for the secretary.
Apart from this incident, for me the trip was most memorable as my first extended period away from Jake. He was barely five months old, and I was still breast-feeding. While traveling, I frequently became engorged, as I struggled to find time in the intense schedule to pump and dump my milk so that my supply could be sustained while I was away. In my absence, Jake drew down my stored reserves and drank formula as needed to supplement.
In Uganda, we traveled to the far north in Gulu to bear witness to the ravages of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the mystical, bizarre Sudanese-backed rebel group that terrorized the region, stealing children and torching villages. We visited a hospital where children camped at night, hoping that strength in numbers would shield them from being kidnapped in rebel raids, and a rehabilitation center run by the NGO World Vision for those who managed to escape their abductors. World Vision introduced us to a young, roughly three-year-old boy whose family had recently been slaughtered on the side of a dirt road by the LRA. The boy and his one-month-old baby sister had been shielded by their mother who lay on top of them in the ditch. The mother was killed but the boy managed to climb out from under her and realized that his sister was also alive. He carried her for a full day as he walked to Gulu to seek assistance.
Looking into that little boy’s eyes cut me to my core. I will never forget him or his sister, Charity, that beautiful baby girl who was younger even than Jake. As Secretary Albright cradled fragile Charity in her arms, I felt at once deeply grateful to be fortunate enough to raise a child in security, yet maddeningly powerless to help the orphaned child in front of me. As we left, my sense of guilt and betrayal was overwhelming.
Our last stop in Africa was Zimbabwe, a country I knew well from my doctoral dissertation. In the years since I studied there as a graduate student, Mugabe had become increasingly authoritarian and corrupt, wrecking the economy and allowing the country’s once excellent infrastructure to deteriorate. On our final day, as we prepared to leave the hotel, I plugged my breast pump into the socket, using my normal AC/DC converter. The apparatus first sparked and then fizzled. Dead.
I was mortified. We were forty-eight hours from returning to the U.S., with a final stop on the way back in Brussels. My milk supply was reduced already due to the infrequency with which I had been able to pump. I was far from ready to give up breast-feeding, which was my unique and most intimate connection to Jake, one that neither his father nor his nanny could replace. It made me feel vital to his existence, wh
en I was wrestling with my own insecurities about whether I could (and should) be trying to succeed simultaneously at my demanding job and as a first-time mother. Feeling prematurely defeated in that struggle and just exhausted, I broke down and cried. (Note to mothers: always bring a manual pump overseas as a backup.)
Before leaving Zimbabwe, I called Ian and asked him to order a new pump. I consulted older women, seeking advice on what to do. Someone said, “I’ve heard that drinking lots of beer and hot chocolate is good for your milk supply.” It sounded like an old wives’ tale, but who doesn’t like beer or hot chocolate? In Belgium, I was blessed to be able to consume both in ample supply. Miraculously, it worked, and I was able to make it home in time to resume pumping and feeding before my supply totally evaporated.
I managed to continue breast-feeding Jake for another four months—until I had to join President Clinton on his first trip to Africa as president. Then I gave up, reluctantly conceding that if pumping on a secretarial trip had nearly done me in, the pace and unpredictability of a presidential tour with only a few hours of sleep every night would make pumping completely unsustainable.
Clinton’s first Africa trip was alternatively a buoyant, somber, and jubilant wild ride. With his easy charm, gently graying full head of hair, and long-fingered, almost regal hands warmly greeting all he encountered, President Clinton bounded energetically through the twelve-day, six-nation tour. The trip was an unprecedented multi-region, extended presidential visit to Africa. Clinton brought with him much of his cabinet (though as she often did, Secretary Albright stayed back, enabling me to take her place as the senior State Department official to join the president in every meeting and on every site visit). There were dozens of members of Congress, a huge traveling press corps, and ample staff support.