“Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain” – Ecclesiastes 1-18, New American Standard Bible
Not many Kenyans, including academics and journalists, know much of Ambassador Herman Jay “Hank” Cohen of the United States, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1989 to 1993, the turning point years in the struggle for political pluralism on this continent.
Kenyans generally know much more about his predecessor, Chester A Crocker, and one of his successors, Johnnie Carson (he of “choices have consequences” fame in 2013).
Unlike Crocker and Carson though, Cohen has written a memoir of his four decades in the State Department and it has a title and subject(s) that will resonate with reading Africans and other students of the continent for years to come. The Mind of the African Strongman: Conversations with Dictators, Statesmen and Father Figures (New Academia Publishing/VELLUM Books, 2015, 218 pages) will go straight into the required-reading categories on the subject of African studies.
He retired in 1993 and went into the World Bank and then lobbying. His firm, Cohen and Woods International, has represented the governments of Angola and Zimbabwe.
'Our Turn to Eat’
Chapter 4 of The Mind of the African Strongman will be of particular interest to Kenyans. It is entitled “Daniel arap Moi – Kenya”, and subtitled “Now it is our turn to eat”, which is not exactly an echo of Michela Wrong’s book on John Githongo, Our Turn to Eat, as Cohen is quoting a remark uttered by a Kalenjin figure long before the Mwai Kibaki era.
The WikiLeaks dumping of hundreds of thousands of pages of US secret diplomatic files in 2008 made sad reading for the percipient observer as so many of them were based on recycled cocktail circuit and dinner table gossip . Cohen’s book offers invaluable insights into behind-closed-doors diplomacy in staterooms far from the gaze of the media and the public’s eyes and produces the same saddening effect, but for different reasons.
The diplomacy that drives world-shaking and transformative decisions and events often hangs by the thread of bluffing and prurient prying into other people’s business and unguarded moments.
Unguarded, or too frank, remarks can provide openings for action on conflicts and events far removed from the scene. Take, for instance, Ambassador Cohen’s first meeting with President Moi.
“That first meeting with Moi was friendly but very stiff. He had an absolute need to appear presidential. I explained that his good friends in Washington, including influential members of the United States Congress, were becoming nervous of the detention of prominent Kenyan intellectuals merely because they were making public declarations calling for multiparty democracy. They were responding to growing pressure from human rights groups. There was no African nation that was better known in the United States than Kenya.
'They are not worth the food we feed them’
Moi reflected on my statement for a while and then said forcefully, “OK, I will release all of them. They are not worth the food that we feed them.”
This is a line that Moi was certainly fed by a highly placed adviser who had researched Cohen’s bio and place in the scheme of things in Washington. It saved face and expressed the regime’s disdain for the opposition as meddling fools not even worth the price of the detention-without-trial prison rations.
Cohen then tells of a remarkable historical moment, the instant when an impassioned Moi made a remark that gave the American a great idea and opportunity, both of which he seized at once. “Moi said that he knew Dhlakama very well. They were both active evangelical Christians. ‘How can people accuse Dhlakama of being a human rights violator when he goes around giving out Bibles?’ Moi declared rather vehemently. I knew then that Moi would be our channel to Dhlakama. I asked him if he could help us reach out to the RENAMO leader. He agreed instantly, and assigned his foreign minister Bethwel Kipalagat [sic] to be our liaison”.
Such are the byways of diplomacy and the strategists of the superpower. Moi never knew what hit him or indeed that he had been hit. But Cohen also reveals something else, Kenya was never anything but extremely compliant at critically important junctures of US policy and direct action. He says, “In general, Moi was one of our best friends in Africa. He never refused any of our requests, including rights to use the port of Mombasa and the international airport at Nairobi for US military movements in the Indian Ocean”.
The day President Bush met minister Ouko, but would not receive President Moi
Perhaps the greatest surprise of Ambassador Cohen’s behind-the-scenes reminiscences is his unwitting confirmation of one of the oldest rumours in the Kenyan conspiracy theory community. It has always been whispered that John Robert Ouko, Moi’s minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, had private dealings with President Herbert Walker Bush (father of George W) and was caught out in the worst way possible not long before his gruesome assassination in February 1991. Here is Ambassador Cohen’s confirmation.
“As in a number of other countries in Africa until the end of the 1990s, we had the dilemma in Kenya of Moi’s great cooperation in bilateral relations as opposed to his corrupt governance, with occasional sinister overtones. During the second half of 1990, Moi was in Washington for a World Bank meeting. We did not recommend that President Bush receive him, because he was still involved in detaining democracy advocates. He invited me to breakfast at his hotel, where the conversation was about US activities in Africa. We did not talk about Kenyan politics, because he had heard from me so many times on that subject.
“Conspicuous by his absence from that breakfast was Foreign Minister Robert Ouko. We knew he was in Washington and he would normally be expected to accompany President Moi during his diplomatic discussions on foreign countries. On the other hand, he could have been absent for any number of reasons.
“After that breakfast I learned that Robert Ouko was having a private breakfast with President Bush at the White House. When I learned that, I demanded to know how that event could have taken place without my advance knowledge.”
A little later, Cohen remarks, “I did not see Moi after he learned of Ouko’s private breakfast at the White House, but I could imagine his fury”.
Cohen’s recollections about Ouko will speak volumes to many stunned Kenyans and they will reach their own conclusions.
Cohen has many other anecdotes about encounters with all sorts of national leaders in The Mind of the African Strongman, from Nelson Mandela to Muammar Gaddafi and everywhere in-between.
And, as the Good Book says, with knowledge comes pain. Here is part of the African post-Independence story told by an authoritative Washington insider and it will make the attentive reader wince, groan and cringe more than a dozen times, minimum.