* Ho’s paternal charm belied his Stalinist ferocity. Rivals were quietly executed: ‘All those who don’t follow the line I’ve laid down will be broken.’ In North Vietnam, 200,000 innocent well-off peasants were executed by quota, laid down in May 1953 – ‘fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population’.
* In 1957, Paris handed over Morocco to Sultan Muhammad Alawi descendant of the terrifying seventeenth-century monarch Ismail ibn Sharif. Muhammad had resisted Vichy demands to send Moroccan Jews to the death camps, then after the war had demanded the reuniting of Morocco and independence. Paris exiled him to Madagascar. Now he and his son Hassan negotiated the French and Spanish exit from Morocco. As king in 1961, Hassan promoted the dynasty as sherifians, assuming the title Amir al-Muminin, and assuming absolute power while allowing a multi-party parliament. Able, haughty and ruthless, he crushed opposition, often with French help, seized Western Sahara and succeeded in making Morocco a stable hybrid monarchy.
* De Gaulle’s ‘politics of grandeur’ reflected his personality and life. ‘Of course I wouldn’t redo the Second Empire,’ he reflected, ‘because I’m not Napoleon’s nephew and one doesn’t become emperor at my age.’ His view of life was one of struggle: ‘Life is a combat and each of its phases includes both successes and failures … Success contains within it the germs of failure and vice versa.’ His view of humanity was low: ‘There are only two motors to human action, fear and vanity. Either there’s a state of catastrophe and fear dominates. Or calm and then it is vanity.’ De Gaulle won a plebiscite that approved his Fifth Republic, creating a powerful presidency like a republican monarch, successor to the Bourbons and Bonapartes. When he met the young British queen Elizabeth II, she asked his advice and he perfectly defined constitutional monarchy for her: ‘In the place where God has placed you, be who you are, Madam. I mean be that person around whom, thanks to your legitimacy, everything in your kingdom is organized, around whom your people see their patrie and whose presence and dignity contribute to national unity.’
* In 1966, in tiny, oil-rich Gabon – part of France’s central colonial federation, Afrique-Équatoriale française – de Gaulle interviewed a dapper, diminutive ex-officer who spoke beautiful French, Albert-Bernard Bongo. At just thirty, de Gaulle blessed him as vice-president and then backed him as president, in return for favoured access to Gabonese oil and uranium. Bongo, who later converted to Islam, ruled like a monarch for forty-two years, enriched by oil and French subsidies, intimate with every French president up to Sarkozy. His many children were promoted to government. In 1980, his daughter Pascaline had an affair with Bob Marley, the Jamaican Rastafarian singer whom she invited to play in Gabon; later she was promoted to foreign minister. When Bongo died in 2009, his son Ali Bongo succeeded him. The Bongos ruled for over fifty years.
* Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, did not espouse the French embrace of independent Africa. In February 1961, Angolan rebels, spearheaded by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by Moscow and Havana, started to fight for independence, soon followed by the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo) in Mozambique. Salazar regarded the empire as essential to Portugal, embracing the singular theory of ‘Lusotropicalismo’ which held that the Portuguese empire was especially multicultural and multiracial and claiming that an African could in theory become president of Portugal. He encouraged Portuguese settlement in the colonies – between 1960 and 1975, 200,000 Portuguese left for Africa, and soon there were 400,000 colonists in Angola, 350,000 in Mozambique. Now he was the only European leader willing to fight a full-scale war to keep his colonies. Fifty thousand Portuguese troops crushed the African revolts, increasingly aided by units of elite African commandos who by 1970 made up 50 per cent of the Portuguese army (the most decorated officer in the army was Colonel Marcelino da Mata, a Guinean soldier who rose to command the crack Comandos Africanos). Salazar’s dictatorship was showing strain: in 1958, a charismatic opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, almost won the presidency, which would have allowed him to dismiss Salazar. He went into exile, and in 1965 the secret police PIDE murdered him in Spain. Salazar’s African wars were fought brutally – with massacres and beheadings – but within ten years the insurgencies had been almost crushed. US president Kennedy later advised Salazar to give his colonies independence. Salazar refused.
* Afterwards, Macmillan proudly called on the US president Kennedy to back the Upper Volta dam: ‘I’ve risked my queen,’ he said. ‘You must risk your money.’
* As president, Nkrumah invited the ninety-three-year-old Du Bois, who had lost his US passport thanks to McCarthyist investigations into his socialist connections, to compile the Africana encyclopaedia in Ghana. Du Bois arrived in 1961, becoming a Ghanaian and dying in Accra, shortly before the US Civil Rights Act, the culmination of his life’s work.
* Few of the African monarchs became rulers, partly because their prestige had been diminished by decades as figureheads. There were exceptions. In Swaziland and Lesotho, the descendants of the successful warlords of the Mfecane ruled as king, having shrewdly avoided being swallowed by South Africa. In Bechuanaland, Sir Seretse Khama, grandson of King Khama III, heir to another of the kingdoms that had emerged out of the Mfecane, caused a scandal in both his homeland and Britain by marrying in 1948 a white English woman, Ruth Williams – the first prominent mixed-race couple of modern times – but on his return he campaigned for independence, emerging as Botswana’s first president. Khama and later his son dominated a tolerant and orderly Botswanan democracy into the twenty-first century.
* Unbeknown to anyone, undetected in the confusion of Belgian withdrawal, a new disease that attacked the immune system had leaped from monkeys to humans in Congo. The first identified case of the new disease was found there in 1959, probably spread through west and central Africa after the Second World War by unclean vaccinations and sexual contact, often via blood exchanged in anal sex and through the prevalence of genital ulcers during vaginal sex. It probably reached the USA soon afterwards: Richard R, a young man who died of pneumonia in 1969, was the earliest confirmed case. Only identified in 1981, it became a pandemic that killed millions. It was later called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
* ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ he exclaimed, reflecting the danger of self-delusion among isolated potentates. ‘You get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much.’
* It was a moment when modern humans started to glimpse the implications of their total domination of the planet. In 1960, an American scientist, Charles David Keeling, taking temperature measurements in Hawaii, revealed how rising CO2 and ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere, emitted by the burning of coal and oil, as well as deforestation and intense agriculture, the result of industrialization over the last two centuries of human development, were causing the earth to heat up, a process, predicted in his Keeling Curve, that could produce irreversible and catastrophic damage. Simultaneously, Herman Kahn, a systems theorist, was warning of nuclear war, publishing on 1 January 1962 a book entitled Thinking about the Unthinkable, which posited sixteen (later raised to forty-four) stages culminating in ‘Spasm/Insensate War’.