UN agencies are fiefdoms controlled by powerful lords of the manor. One of these potentates was Senegal’s Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, who recently died at the age of 103.

The “sacred drama” that erupted around the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation (Unesco), which M’Bow led as director-general between 1974 and 1987, remains one of the UN’s causes célèbre.

M’Bow was born in Dakar on March 20 1921. He joined the French air force to resist the Nazi occupation, before studying history and geography at the Sorbonne. A staunch pan-Africanist, he married fellow Haitian student Raymonde Sylvaine, with whom he had two daughters and a son.

M’Bow served as Senegal’s first education minister (1966-1968), championing the “Africanisation” of the University of Dakar, and later as youth & culture minister (1968-1970). Unesco recruited him to become its assistant director-general of education in 1970, and four years later he ascended to the leadership of the organisation.    

M’Bow enthusiastically embraced the epoch’s radical calls for a “new international economic order”, backing demands for a “new world information and communication order” to reduce the dominance of Western media agencies in global reporting, as well as their often stereotypical portrayal of the Global South. He also urged the media to back decolonisation struggles in Southern Africa and Palestine. Many Western governments and journalists were appalled at what they complained were attempts to curb press freedom.

M’Bow was visionary in pushing the 1978 “Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation”, actions European governments would begin to take by the 2010s. On his watch Great Zimbabwe, Egypt’s Giza pyramids and Ghana’s slave castles were declared Unesco World Heritage sites.

M’Bow behaved no differently from other powerful barons who ran similar UN bodies. However, the Senegalese was accused of acting like an autocratic African chief and “bureaucratic tyrant”, and Western governments and publications such as The Economist, The Washington Post, and The Sunday Times (London) charged him with nepotism and mismanagement. The US government — backed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and a compliant corporate media — then launched a co-ordinated witch-hunt against M’Bow, erroneously accusing him of corruption: a charge even the US general accounting office failed to confirm.

Washington and London withdrew from the agency by 1985, and the collapse of communist bloc support after Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival in the Kremlin ultimately scuttled M’Bow’s chances of re-election for a third term. The Senegalese thus suffered a similar bureaucratic hi-tech lynching as the first African UN secretary-general, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali, would endure in his bid for re-election in 1996 after a similar American-led smear campaign enthusiastically supported by many Western journalists and scholars.

One of M’Bow’s most notable legacies is an eight-volume history of Africa from the seventh to the 20th century, based largely on contributions from African scholars. As he noted: “The efforts of the peoples of Africa to conquer or strengthen their independence, secure their development and assert their cultural characteristics must be rooted in historical awareness renewed, keenly felt and taken up by each succeeding generation.”

M’Bow was a prophet with honour in his homeland: a new university outside Dakar was named after him, and his funeral was attended by Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and several government ministers. Another prominent African, Nigeria’s Adebayo Adedeji, headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa from 1975 to 1991, launching the most sustained assault on the destructive structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and IMF.

The gladiatorial era of M’Bow, Adedeji and Boutros-Ghali would spawn the current age of Africa’s “glorified nobodies” at the UN: often dull, extremely cautious and politically conservative bureaucratic arrivistes more interested in the prestige, perks and per diems of office than in speaking truth to power. 

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

This article was first published by the Business Day South Africa on 14 October 2024.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pretoria.