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Perpetrators of political evil come mainly in two shapes and sizes. They are either extremely intelligent and wise or they are spectacularly idiotic. Their bottom line is the political evil that eventually becomes their identity and legacy. Henry Kissinger, who died on 29 November 2023 at the mature age of a hundred years, was, in my view, an evil genius.
The former Secretary of State of the United States of America, a scholar and diplomat, was in the view of many observers a war criminal who drove American foreign policy beyond the limits of ethics and justice. On behalf of the USA and in the interest of the country he gave truth to Realpolitik. I can say without being cynical that it might be true that every other country that is worth its name and the label of a country must have its own Kissinger. It might be a hard but real truism that every country, if it is to matter in world affairs, needs its own influentials such as Kissinger.
Kissinger was influential in thought and in deed and his influence furthered the global dominance of the Unites States of America. His book of 1994, Diplomacy, remains in the top drawer of books on international affairs. He was a monstrous intellectual for the USA, his ethics and justice of intellection for the rest of the world, especially Africa, will be debated for a long time to come. His dissertation that he wrote at Harvard was based on one Klemens Von Metternich, a politician who invented the infamous idea of the ‘concert of Europe’ where European countries would learn to avoid conflict with each other and further their economic and political interests in the globe as a united force. Kissinger was an Americanist first and a Eurocentric next, and nothing more.
Kissinger personified what came to be called ‘shuttle diplomacy’ where the United States has systematised the idea of sending envoys and travelling diplomats to the trouble spots of the world to represent the interests of the USA. Under the Nixon and the Ford administrations, Kissinger became the name and the face of American global interests. His intervention in the Middle East, especially the achievement of a ceasefire after Egypt and Syria carried out a surprise attack on Israel during the Yom Kippur festival has gone to the front pages of international relations and diplomacy textbooks. Kissinger’s role in the US war in Vietnam will not be easily forgotten. So will not his role in getting the Nixon administration to open up to China economically and politically. The genocide of the Khmer Rouge and the bombing of Cambodia have the fingerprints of Kissinger.
Kissinger and Africa
On 23 June in 1976, a bunch of powerful men sat in the Hotel Bodenmas in West Germany. In attendance were many, including John Voster of apartheid South Africa and Ian Smith of colonial Rhodesia. The discussion was how Rhodesia would be moved to black majority rule without jeopardising Euro-American economic interests in the country and in Southern Africa at large. The man at the centre of the dialogue was Henry Kissinger the political schemer and plotter, a supposed Machiavellian of Empire. He is accused of causing the war in Angola, elongating the life of apartheid in South Africa. His name is embedded in the history of almost every other African country. In Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Angola especially, the history of the countries cannot be truly and fully written without reference to Kissinger and his mind and works.
What will be remembered most is how Kissinger did not take black African leaders seriously in his American proselytising in the continent. Black people were data and not participants in his diplomatic engineering. He talked at them and did not talk to them or with them. He treated them as objects and not subjects of the history of the world. When he met with them, the meetings were spectacularly short in form and dramatically patronising in content. Blacks, even if they were leaders, were children to Kissinger. Africa was a subtext for Kissinger who understood and lived the United States of America not just as the centre of the world but the world itself. Kissinger was in America a patriot of the country and in Africa an American jingoist.
Kissinger: The left and the right
It is not a joke that in the Zulu and the Ndebele languages, and all Nguni languages, the sound of the name Kissinger refers to the vulgar act of kissing a dog. As a metaphor the act captures Kissinger’s embrace of evil dictators of the world in the name of American interests. In that way, in his diplomatic life, Kissinger kissed many dogs of the world.
In the left side of the ideological divide, he was accused of being a dog of war. In the right flank he was the traitor and the sell-out who preferred disarmament ahead of war. He was lambasted by many American right wingers for his public view that Ukraine should give up territories to Russia and make peace. He condemned the US and Nato arming of Ukraine and predicted Russian victory that, these days, Nato spokespersons are shyly but publicly admitting, not in so many words.
Kissinger died at a time when the world most needed influential diplomats, without his evil but his influence. A time when the world needed spokespersons for peace and not the national interests that Kissinger lived for. The world most needs philosophers of liberation and diplomats for peace and equal justice and rights. Not leftists or right wingers are needed but humanists. In the words of Dambudzo Marechera, the world needs those who are against war, and against those who are against war. These are powerful diplomats that do not fall under any ideological divides but are partial to peace and justice. Kissinger, perhaps, died as an example of how power and intelligence should not be used, and how diplomacy and foreign affairs should not be narrowed to one country but be extended to humanity equitably.
l Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
Bongani Ndlovu