São Tomé and Príncipe was discovered by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. Over the next three hundred years, African workers were imported, mostly from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Cape Verde, to labor on the cacao plantations. Cacao beans, the raw material for chocolate, was the big cash crop for several centuries, and the plantation system generated an elaborate social structure. The Portuguese landowners built hospitals, schools, and housing to meet the needs of their indentured farm laborers. By the end of the nineteenth century, São Tomé cacao was the most highly prized and most expensive on the London commodity exchange.
However, early in the twentieth century, a British inquiry had been launched into allegations of slave labor in the São Tomé plantations. By the time the inquiry was completed several years later, the commercial center for cacao had shifted north to Ghana, yielding a fortune for the Ghanaian economy and striking a blow to São Tomé’s economy, from which it has yet to recover.
Because of the composition of São Tomé’s population, imported from off-island, the traditional African village and tribal structure was not there to provide a safety net in hard times. The society was totally dependent on the plantation owners; when their enterprises failed, there was nothing to turn to. Subsistence farming was unknown on the island, and with no villages to return to and no tribal support to fall back on, workers and their families simply continued to squat on the derelict plantations and eke out an existence with international assistance.
It was the poorest country I had ever visited. People had only rags for clothing, and the telltale signs of malnutrition—bloated stomachs and discolored hair—were everywhere. Yet, for all the hardship they faced daily, crime and violence were very low. The people managed to live peaceably enough, unlike many other countries on the continent where conflict is rampant. As then-President Miguel Trovoada told me, “We understand the need not to resort to violence, because we all have to live here. We have no place to go, surrounded by ocean as we are.”
São Tomé and Príncipe became independent from Portugal in July 1975 and was ruled as a one-party state by the longtime leftist leader of the nationalist independence movement, Manuel Pinto Da Costa, until 1991, when the nation’s first multiparty elections were held. Miguel Trovoada, who had figured prominently in São Tomé’s independence movement in the ’60s and ’70s, lost out in the internal political struggles that accompanied independence. However, after years in exile in Libreville and Paris, he returned to triumph in the presidential elections of 1991. His election marked one of the first instances of an African country moving successfully from a dictatorship to a democracy.
The Portuguese, as the former colonial power, attempted to maintain their primacy as São Tomé’s privileged partner, but the French were aggressively competing for influence. Among other efforts the French were pursuing was the intention to convince São Tomé to adopt the French-backed CFA currency and become part of the CFA monetary zone, a grouping of French Central African countries, all of whom used it. The Portuguese resisted the currency transfer as strenously as they could and were increasingly hostile and resentful of the French encroachment.
One night, at a dinner I attended at the residence of the Portuguese ambassador, on a hill overlooking the city of São Tomé and the bay, this ordinarily extremely courteous and polite man could not contain himself any longer. Over coffee, he began berating the French for what he considered their heavy-handed approach. His attack soon became personal as he singled out the French aid director, who happened to be the brother of the French ambassador to Gabon. The ambassador and his brother were from Corsica, the Portuguese ambassador explained. “We have had experience with Corsicans,” he told me, alluding to that most famous of Corsicans, Napoleon Bonaparte, “and we kept him from taking our country then; and, by God, we will keep these Corsicans from taking over our territory here.”
The following day, I had lunch with the French aid director to discuss French development programs on the islands. After a typically excellent meal, he leaned back in his chair, lit a strong Gauloise cigarette, and snidely commented: “The Portuguese have this long history with São Tomé, but, frankly, they’re just no longer up to the task of providing what’s necessary for the country and its people. They should stop fighting history and let us get on with the job.” I left, amused by the intensity of the feelings between the two men, stuck on a small island and waging a battle—that nobody in their respective capitals cared about—over influence in one of the world’s poorest countries. The relationship between the two men deteriorated to the point where they refused to speak to each other, even refused to attend the same events. Their petty conflicts and bristly egos seemed straight out of a Graham Greene novel.
São Tomé proved to be fertile ground for embassy activities in several important ways. It provided a perfect posting for Peace Corps volunteers, for one. We opened a Peace Corps office and brought about twenty-five volunteers to the islands to work on health, education, and environment projects. The Peace Corps is an ambassador’s dream because of the volunteers’ impact on the lives of the people in villages where Americans otherwise are rarely seen. Volunteers are the human face of our country and consistently represent our values superbly.
São Tomé also provided us with a perfect location for setting up a Voice of America transmitter station. The United States government long had broadcast to Africa from a relay station located in Monrovia, Liberia. After civil war and chronic instability afflicted that country, we were obliged to move our operations elsewhere. We invested almost $60 million developing and building a station in São Tomé to handle the Voice of America programming. The location was ideal. Broadcasting across the water to the continent gave us far greater range than we had anticipated. The water magnified the radio waves coming across, to the point that we found ourselves in pitched battle with the Vatican’s own Africa radio station, as our signal overwhelmed theirs in many countries. Instead of the Holy Father, people heard American pop music, making the Vatican very unhappy. The radio project was so large that the United States became the single largest employer in São Tomé, dwarfing the efforts of the squabbling French and Portuguese.
By contrast to São Tomé, Gabon remained firmly in the French camp, and the French were not going to let anything threaten their position. Gabon, with its oil, gold, and minerals, was a cash cow for the French. Moreover, the Gabonese were inveterate Francophiles. In fact, Gabon had been the only colony that voted to remain part of France in a referendum prior to independence in 1960.
Gabon’s oil had long wedded her to the French petroleum company Elf, which was still a French state-run company in the early nineties. (Considering the corrupt entanglement of French and African elections, when suitcases of money might flow north and south across two continents, which I had first observed in the Congo, I was not surprised when Elf ’s Gabon operations were later implicated in a major financial and political scandal that reached high into the governments of both countries.)
Elf Gabon had established a very tight relationship, an inextricable mix of politics and business, with the republic’s president, Omar Bongo. Elf was interwoven in most aspects of life in Gabon. Its money fueled both the economy and the politics of the country, as it did in neighboring Congo.
The French ambassador to Gabon, Louis Dominici, had been there for twelve years when I arrived. Ambassadors from France generally served in Gabon for many years, reflecting the importance of their assignments there as the power behind the throne. Bongo had been personally selected for the presidency by Charles de Gaulle in 1968, and successive French presidents had supported his hold on power. He was their man.
Bongo was also one of the ablest politicians I had known in Africa, and as adept in using the French for his advantage as they were in using him. His personal relations with the French political establishment were legendary, fueled, no doubt, in part by monetary largess but also by a generation of friendship and personal relations. After the return of
Jacques Chirac’s party to power in the French legislative elections of 1995, I was sitting with Bongo in his ornate presidential office one day overlooking the estuary when he invited me over to his desk, a couple of steps up on a landing. Behind the desk were two doors. Rumor had it that one was an escape route down some hidden corridors to safety, and the other was to a bedroom where he either napped or bedded willing maidens. He was not called the father of his country for nothing.
But this day, he wanted to show me a letter he had sent to his friend “Jacques.” After rummaging through a pile of papers, he found the document he was looking for and proudly showed me how he had recommended to Chirac whom he should put in the cabinet of the new French government. “Twelve of those I suggested are now ministers,” he announced with satisfaction. Such was the relationship between the two countries.
Bongo was a Bateke tribesman from Franceville, in the Gabonese interior, east of the great forests in a savannah zone. He grew up in Brazzaville in the Congo, which was then the capital of the French Central African colonies. He was recognized early on as being very bright, and the French groomed him from a young age for advanced responsibilities. He moved into positions in the French-run bureaucracy and after Gabon’s independence was promoted up the ranks of Gabonese political positions, becoming vice president in 1967. After the death of Gabon’s first president, Leon Mba, in 1968, Bongo became president. He was then thirty-three years old. In the decades that followed, he was elected three more times, and would soon be running again.
In his younger days, Bongo had a keen eye for women and an insatiable yen for champagne. His parties at the presidential palace were legendary. He would have all the doors to the palace locked so that none of his guests could leave before he did, which was usually not before three or four o’clock in the morning. This practice proved to be something of an imposition on the stodgy diplomatic set, which generally retires early. One of my predecessors as American ambassador offered me a valuable tip: there was a bathroom on the ground floor with a window that opened up onto the palace garden and was big enough to climb through and escape. He told me about it conspiratorially, as if he had used it many times.
During my tenure, Bongo’s parties still ran late, but the doors were no longer locked. As a matter of principle and protocol, though, I would stay until the president left. Most of the other diplomats would leave early, so I was usually among the last of the guests Bongo would see as the party broke up. That helped solidify my reputation as someone who enjoyed the Gabonese and Bongo himself. It helped advance American interests in Gabon, and it drove the French nuts. Frankly, I enjoyed Bongo’s parties because they provided an opportunity to socialize with the Gabonese, and I did enjoy him—tremendously.
Bongo and I talked regularly. When I first arrived, we focused principally on bringing more American investment to the petroleum sector in Gabon. We also worked together on the upcoming African, African-American Summit to be convened in Libreville in the middle of 1994. The African, African-American Summit was the brainchild of Philadelphia clergyman and civil rights leader Leon Sullivan, who was best known for having set up guidelines for American companies doing business in South Africa during apartheid. The Sullivan Principles, as they were known, called on corporate America to include social responsibility and human rights in its labor policies by promoting equal opportunity and equal treatment in any country that was discriminating against the majority of its own population. The Sullivan Principles provided a compromise between the absolutist camp that wanted America to disinvest completely in South Africa and the pragmatist camp that wanted to divorce business from politics and human rights.
A larger-than-life man with unbounded self-confidence, Sullivan was a tireless advocate of U.S.-Africa relations. I had first come into contact with his organization in Togo fifteen years earlier and admired his commitment, energy, and creativity. He was a spellbinding orator who could take an audience on a real journey with his use of language. His stem-winding sermons were not to be missed, as once he got on a roll, his orations would be punctuated with regular “amens,” “hallelujahs,” and exhortations of “praise the Lord” from his rapt listeners.
Once, while I was attending a subsequent summit in Harare, Zimbabwe, I was listening to Leon with an old friend of mine, who’d been an early member of Sullivan’s international team. He turned to me and said, “I came just for this. I have a lot to do at home, but I couldn’t not come to be with him here, since, after all, without him I would still be on the mean streets of Philadelphia, or dead.” That said it all about the tremendous impact of Leon Sullivan on people’s lives.
When he came to Libreville for the summit, Sullivan brought with him the luminaries of the American Civil Rights movement, as well as close to 1,200 African-Americans. Many of them were business-people, but most were from African-American churches throughout the United States, visiting Africa for the first time. They were full of goodwill, and thrilled to have a chance to see a part of the continent from which their ancestors had been forcibly removed.
I invited them to attend a reception at the ambassador’s residence, and it turned out to be one of the most moving evenings of my life. After having welcomed my guests in a formal receiving line, I wandered among them, making small talk. My stroll eventually took me back to the house, where I stood in the dining room and looked over the balcony into the living room several steps below. In one corner was Coretta Scott King, chatting with Cicely Tyson and Dorothy Height. A bit further along the wall, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Reverend Joseph Lowery, was trading jokes with former Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson. Some of the most distinguished leaders of perhaps the most important movement since American independence were gathered in my living room.
Assistant Secretary for African Affairs George Moose also attended the summit, lending an even greater American government show of support to the proceedings. There were also eleven African presidents and delegations from many other countries headed by senior ministers. I used the occasion to invite Bongo to my home for a private dinner with Moose on the eve of the opening of the conference. To my surprise and delight, he accepted. Having him in was quite a production, as I soon learned.
The chief of state’s visit was preceded by security to check the house and grounds to make sure he’d be safe, protocol to make sure everyone would be seated properly, food tasters to make sure that nobody was going to poison him, and other precautions. No detail could be overlooked, but it was well worth it. Bongo told Moose that it marked the first time in more than twenty-six years in power that he had dined at the residence of an ambassador—from any country. In his toast, Bongo said that he had come not solely to meet the assistant secretary but also “because Wilson and I get along just fine; we have this good working relationship and we are friends.”
Our relationship was beginning to bear fruit. American oil companies had shown a renewed interest in Gabon. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) had been invited to work with the Gabonese on the planning of the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for December 1993. Things were moving forward quickly, and this was making French Ambassador Dominici nervous. I spoke French fluently and had been in French-speaking Africa for a long time, so I was not intimidated either by the language or by French attitudes. For his part, Dominici saw our presence as a zero-sum game; he acted as if the U.S. could only make positive progress at the expense of French interests. And he was not going to stand by meekly while inroads were being made in one of the few remaining crown jewels of France’s African empire.
At the same time, several other formerly French Central African countries were going through presidential elections. In Cameroon and the Central African Republic, the United States had activist ambassadors committed to seeing that the electoral process was free, fair, and transparent. This meant that the French government’s handpicked candidate did not ge
t a free pass to the palace. In Cameroon, my former boss from Burundi, Frances Cook, was now the ambassador. She was giving the French fits, as it looked like the Anglo-phone candidate in that bilingual nation might wind up defeating the long-serving President Biya. In the Central African Republic, another colleague of mine, Dan Simpson, to the consternation of the host government, had made himself so popular with the political opposition that when he left the country, the streets were lined with supporters cheering him on his way. Even in Congo, where elections had already resulted in the departure of the French favorite, Sassou Nguesso, his successor, Pascal Lissouba, was actively working against the interests of Elf.
Elections in Gabon came about later than in the neighboring countries, so by the time the Gabonese started planning to hold one, people wondered if Bongo would be able to hold on. The opposition was well organized and had already shown an ability to disrupt things in a series of riots in Libreville and the oil capital along the coast, Port-Gentil.
Apart from the perceived threats to their commercial interests in Africa, which they would defend enthusiastically even though they represented only three percent of France’s overall foreign trade, the problem for the French lay in their concern that democratization leads to instability.
It is a legitimate concern, for while the French may embrace democracy as a concept, they do not want to further undermine the fragile security situation in many of the countries where they have important interests. The French have large expatriate populations living in many of these countries who would be endangered by civil unrest. When these societies collapse into strife, the troubles generate refugees, who then cross borders, destabilizing neighboring French-speaking countries; many of the frightened and displaced people may end up in France itself. France also has to deploy troops in the event of instability, as they ultimately did in the Central African Republic and several years later in the Côte d’Ivoire.
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