In the summer of 1975, just months after the fall of Saigon, Henry Kissinger was looking for a way to salvage his reputation as secretary of state.
At that moment, Angola, a poor, vast country in sub-Saharan Africa, erupted into civil war.
Mr. Kissinger sensed an opportunity. Embarrassed by the loss of Vietnam, he turned his attention to another developing nation in turmoil. Using some of the same tools he had used in Southeast Asia—covert action, realpolitik analysis, and unwavering confidence in his own intelligence—he pushed the United States into a war about which he knew little.
“Until then, he thought Africa was completely irrelevant,” he said Nancy Mitchellforeign policy historian at North Carolina State.
She rejects the State Department’s Africa experts, Ms. Mitchell said, calling them “missionaries” and “good guys.”
In Angola, Mr. Kissinger worked with the apartheid government of South Africa and one of Africa’s most notorious dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, to defeat Angola’s leftist rebels. But those rebels enjoyed popular support and, soon, the help of thousands of Cuban troops – a reversal that Mr. Kissinger had not foreseen.
“Kissinger thought he could win an easy victory in Angola,” Ms. Mitchell said. “And he lost.”
This began a series of miscalculations that would characterize Mr. Kissinger’s hard-fought efforts to steer events on the African continent. Angola’s war has raged for years, killing at least half a million people. And the same leftist rebels that Mr. Kissinger tried so hard to defeat through African proxies finally won.
The year after this war began, in 1976, Mr. Kissinger was arrested with the idea of ​​bringing peace to Rhodesia, another South African country engaged in a liberation war. It failed there too.
“Kissinger’s diplomatic achievements were quite astonishing,” wrote Peter Weil, a South African scholar, in a piece in East Africa. “But its record in the global south – especially in Africa – is dismal.”
Rhodesia’s failure followed the same path as Angola. Mr. Kissinger simply did not understand the popularity — and power — of the Black liberation movements.
“When Mugabe’s name came up in a meeting, Kissinger asked, ‘Who is he?’ ” said Mrs. Mitchell.
Robert Mugabe would go on to be a legendary and controversial figure across Africa and the longest-serving president of Zimbabwe, the country formed after the end of white rule in Rhodesia.
Mr. Kissinger mostly stayed out of Africa after that. He is now considered to have a narrow-minded view of African affairs and to be too cozy with white racist regimes. In 1969, when he was national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, he effectively put it in writing.
“White people are here to stay,” says a line from a seminal paper his staff prepared for the CIA and other government officials.
Ms. Mitchell said the paper best represented the approach to southern Africa that the Nixon administration had pursued for years.
“Kissinger was arrogantly thinking that this is Africa, it’s a simple situation, that he could dominate it,” he said. “He left an absolute mess.”