Diplomatic Training in the Socialist World

Detail from Soviet-era stamp to mark the 10th anniversary of U.N. Declaration on the Independence of Colonial Peoples (Public Domain)

What training for African diplomats was provided by the Socialist World? This is a question we have been asked several times through the course of our research project, and which we have often asked ourselves, given that the Cold War context is key to understanding the geopolitics of decolonisation in Africa.

Our research has focused on training programmes located in the West, or receiving primarily Western funding, for two reasons. The first is methodological:  we can acknowledge our positionality as a UK-based team of researchers, without language skills beyond English and French, which puts certain sources and literature beyond our reach. Secondly, our focus on programs of diplomatic training excludes formal general degree courses on the one hand, and often secretive revolutionary training on the other. This said, during our project we have come across various examples and mentions of diplomatic training in the Socialist World. This blog shares some of them, and may help contextualise further research in this area.

Frank Gerits’ recent book frames Cold War competition over education as an ‘Ideological Scramble for Africa’. Thousands of African students travelled to socialist and communist states during the late 1950s and 1960s and for many decades afterwards. The Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, set up in 1960 specifically for students from the Third World, was a flagship of Soviet internationalism. Constantin Katsakioris has written several articles on the politics of this educational engagement with Africa, where African students were given scholarships to study the technical skills that were imagined to underpin national development: medicine, engineering and law. Western countries were certainly concerned that students in the East would be radicalised, ideologically aligned to socialist principles and against the capitalist West, and so they monitored such students through their embassies and spy networks.[1]

Training for Revolution

Programmes to train African revolutionaries in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China surfaced in the course of our research. In 1964, Ghanaian officers of the Bureau of African Affairs were being trained at the Nanking Military Academy, hoping “to return to Ghana fully qualified as INSTRUCTORS and assist in the struggle”.[2] In 1966, a letter from the Cameroonian embassy in Moscow related the story of a would-be student there who claimed to have been tricked and taken against his will to train in Marxist-Leninism and revolutionary tactics in support of the outlawed insurgency of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC).[3] The ambassador recommends caution and care with future Soviet bursaries: could they be a cover for training radical revolutionaries? In subsequent years, Cameroonian students would receive a visit by an embassy official, sent to check they were studying where they were meant to be. The report from 1968 includes one student at Kyiv State University studying international law, and needing to do a practical placement of some kind. This is the earliest example of what can be called diplomatic training we have come across in the socialist world during our project.[4]

Later, in the 1980s, Akwasi Agyare of Ghana studied International Law as an undergraduate at Kyiv State University. He recalls being one of “about 17 students” from African countries, mostly Nigeria, Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire, but that the course included students from across the USSR and Eastern Bloc, particularly “those going to man the future missions”. Though he remembered compulsory acceptance of “scientific communism” throughout the course, he was also free to source “International Law books from the West”[5], and debate alternative ideas with his lecturers. On returning to Ghana he would quickly become an important figure within the Foreign Ministry as one of few officers who could speak Russian and understand diplomatic counterparts from the Eastern Bloc.

A Search for Ideological Balance

Though a number of African students did study International Relations in Eastern Europe, and many of these went on to have a career in diplomacy, there is only a little evidence of training comparable to the specialised professional courses in Geneva and New York, Oxford and Paris, or later Yaounde and Nairobi. African diplomats trained in Socialist countries often explained a desire, shared with their sending ministries, to achieve a sense of ideological balance in their training.

Agyare mentioned a colleague who joined the Ghanaian Foreign Ministry at the same time as him, in the late 1980s, having studied in Cuba – potentially at the Instituto Hermanos País (Brother Countries), which according to a declassified CIA report from 1980, had a training programme for Third World diplomats.

Other Ghanaian interviewees remembered a short training course of several months in Sofia, Bulgaria, which ran annually during the 1980s. This training appears to have been exclusively aimed at African diplomats, but interviewees described it as more of an introduction to socialist principles than a university course in diplomacy, with plenty of time for tourism.

East Germany appears to have offered specific training in diplomacy to members of the African National Congress in the late 1980s, which included a focus on intelligence and surveillance. Readiness to train members of liberation movements perhaps made opportunities in the East more attractive to the would-be diplomats of not-yet sovereign states.

It is clear that there are certain examples of training for African diplomats provided by the socialist world, which our study has only touched upon fleetingly. Further research will be required to better understand the ways an ‘Ideological Scramble for Africa’ played out in the provision of external diplomatic training. What is certain is that all the courses taking place during this period operated within a certain ideological neutrality, reflecting a search for an African third way in international relations, and which was reflected in course curricula. Without necessarily playing host to many programmes, the Socialist World remained a significant presence in the training of postcolonial African diplomats.

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[1] See Archives Diplomatiques 1089INVA/282 and /393

[2] George Padmore Research Library 359: E.F. Wilson to The Director, Bureau of African Affairs, 3rd November 1964

[3] Cameroon MINREX 372: Raymond [N’MINPE?] to Cameroon Minister of Foreign Affairs, 23rd March 1966

[4] Cameroon MINREX 372: Report on the tour of visit to Cameroon student centres in the Soviet Union by M.T. Kima, 11th June 1968

[5] Interview with Ambassador Akwasi Agyare, 19th April 2023