ANGOLA COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS George B. High 1959-1961 Economic Officer, Luanda 1962-1965 Africa Bureau, Washington, DC Edward Marks 1963-1966 Consular Officer, Luanda G. Harvey Summ 1965-1969 Consul General, Luanda Mark Lore 1966-1968 Consular Officer, Luanda Kenneth N. Rogers 1966-1968 Deputy Principal Officer, Luanda Richard St. F. Post 1969-1972 Consul General, Luanda Kenneth N. Rogers 1974-1975 Consul General, Luanda Donald B. Easum 1975-1979 Ambassador, Lagos, Nigeria Chester Arthur Crocker 1981-1989 Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Washington, DC Herman W. Nickel 1982-1986 Ambassador, Pretoria, South Africa Claudia Anyaso 1997-1999 Desk Officer, Anglophone West Africa, USIA, Washington, DC Joseph G. Sullivan 1998-2001 Ambassador, Angola GEORGE B. HIGH Economic Officer Luanda (1959-1961) Africa Bureau Washington, DC (1961-1962) George B. High was born in Chicago in 1931 and was raised in Blue Island on the far south side of Chicago. He majored in economics at Dartmouth College and went on to study law at Columbia Law School in 1953. In June 1956 he entered the Foreign Service. High served in Angola, Lebanon, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico before he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in 1985. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy on August 26, 1993. Q: At that time I remember being told that Iraq was the great hope of the Middle East. It was one place that was going to make it due to a small population which was well-educated and there were good resources, not only oil but the Tigris/Euphrates area. But, it has just gone down hill since. HIGH: For me personally, it was really part of the formative years of observing, learning, participating tangentially on the edge of a crisis and seeing some of the players at a distance. At the time it gave me the feeling, "Gee, wouldn't this be a terrific part of the world to specialize in. It has petroleum. It has all these internal clashes between ancient society and modern society, and personalities and different cliques and intrigues of the Muslim world." My assignment to the task force was a very brief eight or ten months exposure, but it demonstrated that foreign affairs were fascinating and challenging, especially in the Middle East. It led to a misstep a little later in my career that subsequently required a course correction. Let me digress at this point. As a typical American, I entered the service as a language probationer. Despite high school and college Spanish, and having a mother who taught Spanish, I did not pass the written language exam. For a number of those early years, I trudged over to FSI for Early Morning Spanish. The teachers were great, and especially one, Vicente Arbeliez, who remained at the language school for years. As testing time approached, he would even call me at home in the evening and we'd talk Spanish for 10 or 15 minutes. Thanks to considerate help like that, I passed the exam -- finally! At this stage of my career, we were ready for our first assignment overseas Initially, we were to be assigned to Bogota, Colombia. I have forgotten what I was to be there, probably a consular officer. However, in the course of taking medical exams for clearance to go overseas, we discovered that my young son Mark, age one, had a heart murmur. That wouldn't work out at Bogota's altitude. Actually, I think the ending of the assignment to Colombia may have been what projected me into the Middle East task force. That temporary work carried me to the next assignment cycle. In late 1958, we discovered suddenly that we were going to Luanda, Angola where I would be the economic officer in a three person consular post. Formally, the consulate came under Embassy Lisbon, in the field; but it worked more closely with the new African Bureau in Washington. In a real sense, the consulate was caught between the European orientation of the embassy and the European Bureau, on the one hand, and the African Bureau in Washington on the other. There were policy differences from time to time that were difficult to bridge or were unbridgeable. As the years went on, in too many instances, the national policy interest came down to protecting our Azores bases (vital parts of NATO) and US support for independence in Africa, peaceful transitions there, and access to African resources. All of a sudden, after all the language training in Spanish, we were going to a Portuguese- speaking country. There wasn't time for taking any new language class, much less an area studies class. We were in Luanda, Angola in a matter of weeks. I hadn't even had the time to pick up a phrase or two, really, even to say, "Hello. How are you?" in Portuguese. We just arrived by way of a nice ship voyage from New York to Naples and a couple of days in Rome to catch our breath, and then on by air to Leopoldville. In Luanda we had a three man post. On our arrival, it was headed by Dick Fisher, the consul, an old African hand who had served in Ghana and some other territories. My position in the consulate was new. Fisher lasted about a year and was then transferred out and replaced by Bill Gibson, who had not had previous African experience. He was a very good writer. Bill Simmons was the other vice consul; he did the administrative and consular work and reported some. Actually, most of the reporting was done by Bill Simmons and me. Bill Gibson went out and made contacts and did his thing, and left a lot of the reporting work to us. I enjoyed the work because African independence was in full swing and I knew that Washington was dying for information. Independence sentiments were also beginning to reach the Portuguese territories. We were also beginning to get visitors at this remote post. John Foster Dulles' sister, Eleanor, even visited us. We understood that she was encouraged to make this trip by her brother to give him her views on the continent. She was a renowned German expert. She asked very good questions of us, even if she lacked Africa experience, and she listened. One of my memories of that visit was Bill Gibson trying to ply her with martinis. He didn't have success with Miss Dulles; the potted palm beside her chair bore the brunt of Bill's cocktails. Bill liked to drink and seemed to feel that a test of friendship and of people was whether or not they drank. He professed not to understand missionaries partly, it seemed, because they didn't drink. That proved to be a double weakness because missionaries were prime observers of what was happening in Angola and some of them were very astute. Angola was a fascinating country. There were major tribal differences between the north and the center and the south. It is a beautiful country with all kinds of potential, at least it had in 1960 -- minerals, including petroleum, agriculture, and fisheries. Luanda was changing overnight. Modern buildings were going up, trade was developing. There were diamonds up in the northeast. The Portuguese were paying more attention to it finally, after centuries of neglect, thinking mistakenly that Mozambique on the east coast of Africa was the colony that held the real potential. And, of course, the Portuguese were blind to what was happening elsewhere on the continent. In their view, that couldn't happen in Angola because they understood the Africans and knew how to work with them. Bill Gibson was influenced by some of that wishful thinking, and so was Dick Fisher, his predecessor. The people in the Africa bureau in Washington were very keen to get a sense of what was happening in Angola; they didn't believe they were receiving very perceptive reporting. It was rather difficult for us to have contact with Africans because the Portuguese police and authorities weren't keen on seeing foreign diplomats talking to them, and there really weren't very many opportunities to do that. For that reason, one of our main sources of information was simply talking to the different missionary groups. The missionaries had many different nationalities -- British, Canadian, and American, not to mention the Portuguese. Some of the missionaries were politically astute and some of them were very naive and really disinterested in politics. The latter were there to teach religion. We made good friends with a number of the Methodists and others who did not involve themselves in politics but were knowledgeable. Q: What was the situation, were there blacks in the government? HIGH: There were no blacks to speak of in the government. There were a few mulattos and the differences in treatment between blacks and mulattoes (and whites) were very substantial, the mulattoes having had a better chance to get at least some kind of education. The blacks had virtually none. Protestant missionaries sent some of their promising black church goers to Brazil and to Portugal to study. Once in a while one would go to the United States, but language often inhibited that. Needless to say, the Portuguese authorities were very suspicious of the foreign missionary groups. The fact that foreigners were involved and religious differences made the missionaries problematic for them. I saw no indication that foreign missionaries were "conspiring" against the Portuguese, but of course they were helping to educate Africans, and the Portuguese saw this as a threat to their integrity.