By Alan Cowell, NY Times, March 19, 2015
LONDON—It was a tragedy that resonated far from its time and its place.
When Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations, perished in an air crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia in September 1961, his death laid a first layer in a palimpsest of conflicting narratives that the United Nations this week pledged to revisit with a new review by a panel of experts.
Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane went down eight miles from the airport at Ndola on the Copperbelt of what is now Zambia. He had planned a meeting there with Moise Tshombe, leader of a secession in the neighboring Congolese region of Katanga that was backed by many Western interests. His mission was to end the fighting.
It was a story of Cold War rivalry and human idealism pitted against greed and realpolitik. As the Congo sought to emerge from Belgian rule, Mr. Hammarskjold, a 56-year-old Swede, was a messenger of peace flying into a war zone where United Nations forces fought secessionist troops backed by foreign mercenaries. Did the plane simply crash or was it brought down? Was it simply an accident, the result of human error—or the fruit of human design signaling a gigantic loss of innocence for a continent?
For many Swedes, looking back from today’s vantage, Mr. Hammarskjold’s death was part of a catalog of loss among their elite, from the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg in 1945 to the death of Anna Lindh in 2003, from the assassination of Folke Bernadotte in 1948 to the murder of Olof Palme in 1986. For all of them, high office and idealism exacted the highest price.
When Mr. Hammarskjold died, Africa stood at a crossroads. Only a year earlier, Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, had declared that the “wind of change” was blowing through the continent. In 1964, Zambia itself declared its independence—part of a process that scored a trail through Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere toward the biggest prize of all, South Africa.
The fear of those geopolitical dominoes infused colonial thinking.
Already, Belgians fleeing the Congo brought with them tales of mayhem that seemed only to confirm the worst nightmares of white minorities farther south.
Katanga, said Roy Welensky, head of the colonial-era Central African Federation, which grouped together what are now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, was “an ideal buffer between ourselves and the wilder forms of pan-Africanism to the north of us.” Without that shield, he said, “the alternatives are too frightful to contemplate.”
Such was the alarm that, as the conflict worsened in Katanga, Mr. Welensky deployed elite troops to the border area and a detachment of warplanes to the city of Ndola. Far to the north of Africa, electronic listening posts in the Mediterranean run by the United States National Security Agency monitored frequencies on the ground.
But this was not just about geopolitics or even the toxic cocktail of race and ideology that drove regional rivalries. The fighting that Mr. Hammarskjold sought to end also posed a familiar question in Africa: Who should benefit from the continent’s riches? That was particularly apt across a swath of Africa where Western mining concerns controlled a trove of uranium, cobalt and other resources.
For centuries, it had been axiomatic in the West that Africa’s resources belonged to outsiders, just as Africa’s markets belonged to those same foreigners who processed raw cotton into cloth or rough diamonds into jewelry.
But the wave of independence, swollen by the Congo’s emancipation from Belgium, traded colonial exploitation for, at best, an ambiguous economic legacy. And today, where Westerners once strutted on an African stage, building roads and bridges to ease their access, China is the dominant player.
All that seemed remote in 1961. But students of modern Africa exploring the dramas of the postcolonial era might start their quest for clues and pointers in the period surrounding that September night, when Transair DC-6B, registration SE-BDY, went down near Ndola.
Where the quest leads, of course, is as laden with unknowables as the crash itself.
LONDON—It was a tragedy that resonated far from its time and its place.
When Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations, perished in an air crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia in September 1961, his death laid a first layer in a palimpsest of conflicting narratives that the United Nations this week pledged to revisit with a new review by a panel of experts.
Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane went down eight miles from the airport at Ndola on the Copperbelt of what is now Zambia. He had planned a meeting there with Moise Tshombe, leader of a secession in the neighboring Congolese region of Katanga that was backed by many Western interests. His mission was to end the fighting.
It was a story of Cold War rivalry and human idealism pitted against greed and realpolitik. As the Congo sought to emerge from Belgian rule, Mr. Hammarskjold, a 56-year-old Swede, was a messenger of peace flying into a war zone where United Nations forces fought secessionist troops backed by foreign mercenaries. Did the plane simply crash or was it brought down? Was it simply an accident, the result of human error—or the fruit of human design signaling a gigantic loss of innocence for a continent?
For many Swedes, looking back from today’s vantage, Mr. Hammarskjold’s death was part of a catalog of loss among their elite, from the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg in 1945 to the death of Anna Lindh in 2003, from the assassination of Folke Bernadotte in 1948 to the murder of Olof Palme in 1986. For all of them, high office and idealism exacted the highest price.
When Mr. Hammarskjold died, Africa stood at a crossroads. Only a year earlier, Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, had declared that the “wind of change” was blowing through the continent. In 1964, Zambia itself declared its independence—part of a process that scored a trail through Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere toward the biggest prize of all, South Africa.
The fear of those geopolitical dominoes infused colonial thinking.
Already, Belgians fleeing the Congo brought with them tales of mayhem that seemed only to confirm the worst nightmares of white minorities farther south.
Katanga, said Roy Welensky, head of the colonial-era Central African Federation, which grouped together what are now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, was “an ideal buffer between ourselves and the wilder forms of pan-Africanism to the north of us.” Without that shield, he said, “the alternatives are too frightful to contemplate.”
Such was the alarm that, as the conflict worsened in Katanga, Mr. Welensky deployed elite troops to the border area and a detachment of warplanes to the city of Ndola. Far to the north of Africa, electronic listening posts in the Mediterranean run by the United States National Security Agency monitored frequencies on the ground.
But this was not just about geopolitics or even the toxic cocktail of race and ideology that drove regional rivalries. The fighting that Mr. Hammarskjold sought to end also posed a familiar question in Africa: Who should benefit from the continent’s riches? That was particularly apt across a swath of Africa where Western mining concerns controlled a trove of uranium, cobalt and other resources.
For centuries, it had been axiomatic in the West that Africa’s resources belonged to outsiders, just as Africa’s markets belonged to those same foreigners who processed raw cotton into cloth or rough diamonds into jewelry.
But the wave of independence, swollen by the Congo’s emancipation from Belgium, traded colonial exploitation for, at best, an ambiguous economic legacy. And today, where Westerners once strutted on an African stage, building roads and bridges to ease their access, China is the dominant player.
All that seemed remote in 1961. But students of modern Africa exploring the dramas of the postcolonial era might start their quest for clues and pointers in the period surrounding that September night, when Transair DC-6B, registration SE-BDY, went down near Ndola.
Where the quest leads, of course, is as laden with unknowables as the crash itself.
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