Farewell to a Senegalese cultural warrior

United Nations (UN) agencies are autonomous fiefdoms controlled by powerful Lords of the Manor. One of these potentates was Senegal’s Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow who recently died (24 September) in Dakar at the age of 103. The “sacred drama” that erupted around the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) which M’Bow led as director-general between 1974 and 1987, remains one of the UN’s causes célèbres that combined power, politics, race, and culture.

The shaping of a Polyglot Pan-Africanist Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow was born in Dakar on 20 March 1921 to Fara Ndiaye (and mother, Ngoné Casset), a farmer who later fought for France in the First World War, helping to inspire Amadou to join the French air force in 1940, and later the French free forces resisting Nazi occupation. His polygamous father was a prominent Muslim preacher who sent his son to Koranic school before enrolling him in the French école primaire. A brilliant student with a photographic memory built on reciting Koranic verses, Amadou would later study history and geography at France’s Sorbonne University, also engaging in political activism.
 

M’Bow returned to Africa from France to teach in Mauritania and Senegal, before joining his country’s anti-colonial struggle, seeking to teach the Mother Country the practice of the liberty that had led him to back the anti-Nazi cause. Under poet-president, Léopold Senghor, M’Bow served as Senegal’s first minister of Education (1966-1968) championing the “Africanisation” of the University of Dakar, and later of Youth and Culture (1968-1970). UNESCO recruited him to become its assistant director-general for education in 1970, and four years later, he ascended to the leadership of the organisation.

A Prophet in Paris
Before 1974, UNESCO had done some good work in running literacy programmes, supporting higher education, and promoting scientific cooperation. The first African director-general of the organisation, the workaholic M’Bow, noted before taking office: “I am a little wary of a universalistic humanism which often masks Eurocentrism. I prefer pluralism, which accepts the distinctive identity of each people.” He therefore embraced the radical calls of the epoch for a “New International Economic Order” involving greater socio-economic equity. M’Bow commissioned a report backing calls from Third World delegates for a “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO) to match the far-reaching transformations demanded in the economic field.
 
The idea was to reduce the dominance of Western media agencies in global news reporting (five major U.S. and European  press agencies monopolised dissemination of international news), as well as the often culturally insensitive, stereotypical, and negative portrayal of the global South. The media was also to be mobilised to take part in reporting on, and supporting decolonisation struggles in, Palestine and Southern Africa. Many Western governments and journalists (as well as apartheid South Africa and Israel), were appalled at what they complained were more attempts to curb press freedom, arguing that most of the Southern and pro-Soviet countries supporting the NWICO were themselves censoring and harassing journalists.

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M’Bow was visionary in pushing the 1978 “Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation”: actions which European governments would begin to take by the 2010s. Under his watch, many African historical sites – the Great Zimbabwe; Egypt’s Giza pyramids;   Benin’s Abomey royal palace; Ghana’s forts and castles; Senegal’s Gorée island; Tunisia’s Site of Carthage; Ethiopia’s ancient churches; and Morocco’s Medina of Fez – benefitted greatly from being declared UNESCO World Heritage sites.   

The Western witch-hunt
Though he attracted many powerful enemies among much of the Western media and governments who baselessly accused him of being tyrannically anti-Western and anti-Semitic, M’Bow behaved no differently from many of the other powerful barons that ran similar UN bodies. However, the Senegalese was falsely accused of initiating the building of a lavish official penthouse in Paris (approved a decade earlier), to which M’Bow retorted: “Am I supposed to live in a hut in the middle of Paris just because I am an African?” He was further accused of acting like an autocratic African chief and “bureaucratic tyrant”, and Western governments and publications like the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Sunday Times (London) charged him with nepotism and mismanagement. Le Monde went further in ridiculing his Senegalese grand boubou (African flowing robes): a culturally insensitive depiction of an emperor without proper clothes.
 
The U.S. government – backed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and a compliant corporate media – then launched a coordinated witch-hunt against M’Bow which had the same level of veracity as the 17th century Salem witch trials. The Senegalese was erroneously accused of corruption: a charge that even the U.S. General Accounting Office failed to confirm. The accusation that he hired his brother-in-law as UNESCO personnel director remained unproven.

Typically, 61 per cent of sources for the negative mainstream U.S. media articles were obtained from official Washington sources, 14.5 per cent from hostile “anonymous” Western sources, and only 21.1 per cent from UNESCO itself. Soviet sources were often preferred to largely ignored (1.4 per cent) global South ones. As American scholar, Douglas Yates, noted: “This major transformation of international public opinion had been accomplished by distortion, misrepresentation and other sinister methods of disinformation, including outright lies and fabrication.”
 

The Senegalese thus suffered a similar bureaucratic high-tech lynching that the first African UN secretary-general and his fellow Sorbonne alumnus, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali, would endure in his bid for re-election in 1996 following a similar American-led smear campaign enthusiastically supported by many Western journalists and scholars. London and Washington eventually returned to UNESCO after M’Bow had been replaced by Spaniard, Federico Mayor.

Legend and legacy
One of M’Bow’s most notable legacies is an eight-volume, magnificently produced history of Africa from the seventh to the twentieth century based largely on contributions from African scholars and editors like Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Adu Boahen, and Ade Ajayi.

As the Senegalese cultural warrior noted: “the efforts of the peoples of Africa to conquer or strengthen their independence, secure their development and assert their cultural characteristics must be rooted in historical awareness renewed, keenly felt and taken up by each succeeding generation.”
 
M’Bow was a prophet with honour in his homeland: he chaired Senegal’s National Dialogue in 2008/2009; a new university outside Dakar was named after him; and his funeral was attended by the current prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, and several government ministers. Another prominent African, Nigeria’s Adebayo Adedeji, headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa between 1975 and 1991, launching the most sustained assault on the destructive structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and IMF.

The gladiatorial era of M’Bow, Adedeji, and Boutros-Ghali would spawn the current age of Africa’s “glorified nobodies” at the UN: often dull, extremely cautious, and politically conservative bureaucratic arrivistes more interested in the prestige, perks, and per diems of office than in speaking truth to power. 

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.