The Effectiveness of American Libraries in Promoting American Values and Diplomacy, by Christopher Datta
In 1994 I was assigned to be the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at our new embassy in the new nation of Eritrea, in east Africa. There were many things about Eritrea that made it different from anywhere else I had served.
One clue about this is that it was a place where we had a U.S. embassy library, even though the U.S. Consulate had been ordered closed in Asmara by the Ethiopian government almost twenty years before my arrival. The man who ran it was Kefela Kokobu, a former Consulate employee, and he ran it as an American Library at great personal risk. But first, a little background on how all this came to be.
Background on Eritrea
In the great colonial land grabs in Africa, Eritrea wound up as an Italian possession until after World War II, when the victorious British army took it over. When the British let it go, it was annexed to Ethiopia by the United Nations, very much against the will of the Eritrean people. The U.N. mandated that Eritrea should maintain a semi-autonomous status inside the Ethiopian federal system, as a sop to the Eritreans, but no one was surprised when Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, abolished the Eritrean legislature and ended its special status in the empire.
The Eritreans simply refused to be annexed, and they fought a thirty-year war for independence, beginning around 1960.
In the comic-opera political maneuvering of the Cold War, we started out supporting Haile Selassie and the Ethiopians. This was partly because the Emperor allowed the U.S. Army to build a large U.S. listening post in Eritrea, enabling us to eavesdrop on all Soviet military activity moving through or near the Red Sea, a strategic choke point for the shipment of oil from the Persian Gulf through the Suez Canal.
Haile Selassie is an all-too-typical example of a leader who starts out with the potential for greatness, and often does great things early on, but then forever hangs on to power until he becomes so corrupt, out of touch, and often simply crazy that even Mother Teresa would shoot him dead.
Emperor Selassie was forced aside (and reportedly later suffocated in his bed to make it appear he had died in his sleep) by a particularly nasty piece of work named Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Although several groups were involved in the overthrow, Mengistu assumed power as head of state after murdering his competitors, and he was just getting warmed up. Mengistu did not bother to start out good; he jumped straight into the homicidal lunatic category of leadership.
One clue about this is that it was a place where we had a U.S. embassy library, even though the U.S. Consulate had been ordered closed in Asmara by the Ethiopian government almost twenty years before my arrival. The man who ran it was Kefela Kokobu, a former Consulate employee, and he ran it as an American Library at great personal risk. But first, a little background on how all this came to be.
Background on Eritrea
In the great colonial land grabs in Africa, Eritrea wound up as an Italian possession until after World War II, when the victorious British army took it over. When the British let it go, it was annexed to Ethiopia by the United Nations, very much against the will of the Eritrean people. The U.N. mandated that Eritrea should maintain a semi-autonomous status inside the Ethiopian federal system, as a sop to the Eritreans, but no one was surprised when Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, abolished the Eritrean legislature and ended its special status in the empire.
The Eritreans simply refused to be annexed, and they fought a thirty-year war for independence, beginning around 1960.
In the comic-opera political maneuvering of the Cold War, we started out supporting Haile Selassie and the Ethiopians. This was partly because the Emperor allowed the U.S. Army to build a large U.S. listening post in Eritrea, enabling us to eavesdrop on all Soviet military activity moving through or near the Red Sea, a strategic choke point for the shipment of oil from the Persian Gulf through the Suez Canal.
Haile Selassie is an all-too-typical example of a leader who starts out with the potential for greatness, and often does great things early on, but then forever hangs on to power until he becomes so corrupt, out of touch, and often simply crazy that even Mother Teresa would shoot him dead.
Emperor Selassie was forced aside (and reportedly later suffocated in his bed to make it appear he had died in his sleep) by a particularly nasty piece of work named Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Although several groups were involved in the overthrow, Mengistu assumed power as head of state after murdering his competitors, and he was just getting warmed up. Mengistu did not bother to start out good; he jumped straight into the homicidal lunatic category of leadership.
Mengistu decided early on to be a Communist, and so naturally Ethiopia ceased to be an ally of the U.S. and became an ally of the Soviet Union.
In reality, Mengistu was not a Communist, he was just a brutal, paranoid, psychopathic freak who nationalized all foreign-owned and most domestic companies without compensation so that he could own it all himself. It used to be called being an absolute monarch, but he wanted Soviet support so he called it Communism.
Mengistu is probably most famous for the period in Ethiopia known as the “red terror,” during which thousands of his suspected enemies (and it did not take much to be suspected) were tortured and killed. When students rioted in protest, many were shot and their parents sent bills ordering them to pay for the bullets that killed their children.
The Eritreans did very well militarily against the Ethiopian army, which, as you can imagine, was not a highly motivated fighting force. The rebels were on the verge of winning their independence when Mengistu became a “Communist.” The Soviets then propped him up with massive amounts of military assistance, resulting in the war dragging on for another fifteen years, with all the death, misery, and destruction that so needlessly went along with it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Ethiopia, Somalia, which had been a Soviet ally, switched sides in the Cold War and became our good friend. We took over the old Soviet naval base in Somalia, allowing us to keep our military window on the region until Somalia fell apart and essentially ceased to be a nation state, although by then the Cold War was over and military listening posts no longer much mattered anymore to the Russians or to us.
In May of 1991, the Mengistu government finally collapsed. Mengistu later bitterly blamed this on Mikhail Gorbachev because he was responsible, according to Mengistu, for letting the Soviet Union collapse, which ended Soviet funding for his government, without which he could not survive.
Unfortunately, Mengistu was not imprisoned when his government fell, as he so richly deserved. He fled and was granted asylum in Zimbabwe by that other great African lunatic and leader for life, President Robert Mugabe. Mengistu still resides there despite past attempts by Ethiopia to extradite him to face trial for war crimes. President Mugabe said the accusations against him were a fabrication of the Western powers. According to Mugabe, everything bad always was.
In reality, Mengistu was not a Communist, he was just a brutal, paranoid, psychopathic freak who nationalized all foreign-owned and most domestic companies without compensation so that he could own it all himself. It used to be called being an absolute monarch, but he wanted Soviet support so he called it Communism.
Mengistu is probably most famous for the period in Ethiopia known as the “red terror,” during which thousands of his suspected enemies (and it did not take much to be suspected) were tortured and killed. When students rioted in protest, many were shot and their parents sent bills ordering them to pay for the bullets that killed their children.
The Eritreans did very well militarily against the Ethiopian army, which, as you can imagine, was not a highly motivated fighting force. The rebels were on the verge of winning their independence when Mengistu became a “Communist.” The Soviets then propped him up with massive amounts of military assistance, resulting in the war dragging on for another fifteen years, with all the death, misery, and destruction that so needlessly went along with it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Ethiopia, Somalia, which had been a Soviet ally, switched sides in the Cold War and became our good friend. We took over the old Soviet naval base in Somalia, allowing us to keep our military window on the region until Somalia fell apart and essentially ceased to be a nation state, although by then the Cold War was over and military listening posts no longer much mattered anymore to the Russians or to us.
In May of 1991, the Mengistu government finally collapsed. Mengistu later bitterly blamed this on Mikhail Gorbachev because he was responsible, according to Mengistu, for letting the Soviet Union collapse, which ended Soviet funding for his government, without which he could not survive.
Unfortunately, Mengistu was not imprisoned when his government fell, as he so richly deserved. He fled and was granted asylum in Zimbabwe by that other great African lunatic and leader for life, President Robert Mugabe. Mengistu still resides there despite past attempts by Ethiopia to extradite him to face trial for war crimes. President Mugabe said the accusations against him were a fabrication of the Western powers. According to Mugabe, everything bad always was.
Another unique feature of the Eritreans when I arrived was that, despite having a long coastline on the Red Sea, the Eritreans had forgotten how to fish. The reason was that the Ethiopians banned fishing during the long war to stop Eritrean rebels from smuggling arms into the country on fishing boats. The Eritreans did it anyway, but the ban made it harder. The only real result was that the Eritreans forgot how to fish and had to learn again after the war.
How an American library came to be in Asmara
And now we get to the odd situation of how there was an American government library in Asmara, even after Mengistu ordered the American Consulate there closed in 1976.
When the Consulate closed, the American director of the library handed the library keys to Kefela Kokobu, a local employee, and told him to take care of the books. He did exactly that for seventeen years until I arrived in 1994, after Eritrean independence, when we opened our U.S. embassy in Asmara.
Now here is a lesson in what American public diplomacy is all about and its impact on local foreign communities. When I arrived in Asmara, one of the first things I did was to visit what was still called the American Library, even though there had been no American there for seventeen years and we had not contributed a penny to its support in all that time. Kefela took me on a tour of the facility.
The library was a time capsule of what a U.S. embassy library had been seventeen years earlier. It was a circulating library, and all of the books were still there, nearly every single one of them. They were dog-eared, worn and very, very used from being read by thousands of Eritreans, but almost none had been lost or stolen.
In order not to be executed by Mengistu’s government for keeping the American presence alive, Kefela had invited the Soviets to donate any books that they wanted, and he added them to the collection.
They gave him many books, and Kefela showed them to me. They were in pristine condition. That was because, Kefela explained, they had not been touched or opened. Nobody wanted to read them.
What they wanted to read was Huckleberry Finn and the Norton Anthology of American Short Stories. They wanted to read about American history and American social sciences and American political thinking and American business practices and American education. They drank it up.
When Mengistu’s henchmen came through and ordered Kefela to take books off the shelf that they deemed corrupting, Kefela took them off the shelves until they left, and then he put them back.
He could have been shot for it, but he kept that library going, that American library, year after lonely year, without pay or support from the American government. For seventeen years he “took care of those books.”
When I arrived in 1994, there was no reason why the Eritreans should have welcomed me. The Americans had supported the Ethiopians until Mengistu took over. Even after that, we never lifted a finger to help the Eritreans, although they were the enemy of our enemy. No one much helped the Eritreans at all, and perhaps that was a blessing in the end, because if the Eritreans had become anything after all that time, they were self-reliant, even to a fault.
But I am convinced one of the reasons we were welcomed and were well thought of and remembered was because of Kefela and the American Library he kept open all of those years. It was my great honor to get to know and work with him. He was the first person I hired on to my new public diplomacy staff.
I thought we owed it to him.
Christopher Datta began his career as a Foreign Service Officer working in USIA and was first assigned to southern India for two years. From there he went to Jordan where he was the Cultural Affairs Officer. He went to Sudan as the Public Affairs Officer in 1993, and was assigned as the first Public Affairs Officer to Eritrea in 1994 where he served for three years. He was the desk officer for Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon at USIA from 1996 to 1998.
He had a Congressional Fellowship in 1999 and worked on the Hill in the office of Congressman Steve Rothman from New Jersey. In late 1999 he went to Senegal as the Public Affairs Officer and for six months was also the acting Deputy Chief of Mission. From 2001 to 2003 he joined the State Department and was the Deputy Director in the Office of West African Affairs when he was sent out to be Chargé d’Affaires at the embassy in Sierra Leone for a month in 2002 at the end of the civil war there, and then went to Liberia in 2003 to be Chargé when the ambassador had to leave for several weeks. He took on the assignment as the Consul General in Juba in Southern Sudan in 2008, and returned again as the Chargé and then Deputy Chief of Mission in 2011 when, again as Chargé, he helped to end a war between Sudan and South Sudan.
He is the author of four novels and has written two movie scripts, and his memoir, Guardians of the Grail: A Life of Diplomacy on the Edge, from which this is excerpted, was published in 2018. He wrote another memoir, Run Scout Run (2020), a loving tribute to the dog he brought back from South Sudan.