Placing African diplomatic training in Nairobi
University of Nairobi accommodation for Diplomatic Training Programme (author’s photo)
“Famed for its flowers and sunshine, Nairobi is one of the most modern cities in Africa. Its hotels are up to the best international standards, it has excellent shopping facilities and for entertainment there are nightclubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas and a variety of sporting facilities, including horse and motor racing tracks. There is even an international casino. With all these attractions it is not surprising that Nairobi is becoming increasingly popular as an international conference centre.”
The words above, chosen to preface the handbook of the University of Nairobi’s Diplomatic Training Program (DTP) in 1975-76, give an attractive image of the city. Nairobi was the final site for our fieldwork related to the project, and this image was recognisable when I visited almost fifty years after the handbook was published. But these words do more than describe the city - appearing where they do, they frame Nairobi as the ideal place to host diplomatic training into the spotlight. This blog post, which gives an overview of the DTP’s history from its beginnings in 1973 to its transformation into the Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies (IDIS) in 1989, pays close attention to the role of place in the construction and transmission of diplomatic knowledge.
Nairobi: Diplomatic Capital
Like IRIC in Cameroon, the Nairobi DTP emerged following a series of Carnegie training 'institutes' in the 1960s. However, these were run at Makerere in Uganda - an older and more developed higher education institution - and led by charismatic African political theorist Ali Mazrui.
Nairobi eclipsed Makerere, partly because of the political instability of Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda. Partly, though, Nairobi cosmopolitanism and the presence there of international institutions - first of the East African Community and secondly of the United Nations - instilled more confidence for the DTP’s Carnegie Endowment and Swiss Government funders. In our interview, former DTP director Michael Chege recalled the Kenyan government's critical “decision to make Nairobi a centre for international activities for the region, if not the world”. The DTP’s funders therefore estimated that the material and representational qualities of a ‘diplomatic capital’, explored by Laurence Badel in her recent keynote to the New Diplomatic History Network conference, were present in Nairobi.
The DTP, in its own way, contributed to the material construction of the ‘diplomatic capital’. Similarly to the Oxford Foreign Service Programme, a key function of the Nairobi DTP centred on performing hospitality. Ten years into the course, while the course itself had little dedicated space within the university, the Swiss Government funded the construction of a purpose-build accommodation block just for the DTP, which remains in service today (see image above). Students visiting from abroad were housed together, and alumni hold fond memories of the hostel as a place of sociability and intercultural exchange.
Excursions
From 1978, an annual European tour for DTP students took place, centred on a commercial attaché training seminar in Berlin. In some years, this included a visit to the USA. Kappeler would later reflect on the usefulness of these European excursions, questioning the wisdom of attending the seminar in Berlin when the group could instead spend more time visiting other capitals with more international institutions. Indeed, it was the excursions and visits, and the sociability associated with them, that appear to have made an impression on the DTP trainees. One reflected on the impact of crossing the border in 1981 into East Berlin, and seeing first-hand the stark differences between the ‘capitalist’ West and ‘socialist’ East, after having spent most of the year debating each system as a model for development in Africa.
Such visits were not allowed to drift into tourism, however. In 1979, the group visited Geneva for the first time. The value of visiting the city, for Chege, was the presence there of international institutions and programmes that were specifically directed to Africa, particularly UNCTAD. However, Chege recalled a “totally botched” programme that “put a visit to the cheese country of Lausanne at the top of the agenda”. He immediately objected and succeeded in reorienting the programme towards informational visits to the international institutions:
“we were not going to get a flimsy kind of semi-entertainment, Swiss countryside, cheeses and wine afternoons. And I told them, “I can actually get the students all the best cheese in the world back in Nairobi, if it came to that!”
Elsa Bugnon has written about an earlier version of these tours, for Carnegie fellows during the 1960s, highlighting their mediatisation and instrumentalization in the service of building soft power. Though trainees overall enjoyed these experiences, they also expressed frustration that they were confined to a programme and a set of spaces in which they were required to perform a passive role. As one former trainee put it, “they showed us Switzerland, but we didn’t discover it for ourselves”.
Simulations
The sense that place mattered to the construction and transmission of diplomatic knowledge on the course can further be seen in the way that simulation exercises were developed and executed. Organised by Kappeler, the simulations pioneered a commitment to realism that went further than earlier iterations of this pedagogical approach.
Firstly, they simulated real negotiations between African governments that related to contemporary issues. An example of a bilateral negotiation was between Uganda and Sudan, “preliminary to the conclusion of a normalization treaty between the two countries”, encompassing the situation of refugees, road links, trade and questions relation to the Nile waters. One multilateral example simulated a ‘Special Committee’ of the Organisation of African Unity, set up to “consider means and ways to assist Frontline States” following “economic and military measures South Africa threatens to take up against her neighbours”.[1] A Kenyan student who took part recalled: “It was so useful for me because after I finished this, I went to work in Addis Ababa at the OAU, and I saw it live, you know, actually what we were discussing: the frontline states”.
Kappeler later wrote that using African examples “allowed the students to negotiate in a relatively familiar context and made identification with the country represented easy”. Simulating a Special Committee of the OAU “had the additional advantage of familiarizing students with the rules of procedure applicable within the organs of that continental body”.[2]
Secondly, the very local setting for the simulations was given careful consideration. Kappeler reported that holding the simulations in the imposing Kenyatta International Conference Centre (below), where many real diplomatic conferences were held, “allowed for negotiating in a very realistic atmosphere. As a result the exercise proved rather more successful than preceding ones held either at the University or the Foreign Ministry’s own conference room (which is only meant for internal meetings)”.[3] Part of this success, Kappeler ascribes to the effect the unfamiliar, formal space had on the students, making them take their performances seriously, and preventing them from giggling during the performances of their peers. Such formal negotiating spaces also provided students with an experience of handling microphones, and were tape recorded to allow for assessment and recapitulation.
Kenyatta International Conference Center (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The examples above point to the importance of place to the operation of the DTP. The qualities of these places - the hospitality of the host city, the offices of international institutions, the conference rooms of multilateral negotiation - and their importance to the training of diplomats adds, to paraphrase Merje Kuus, to our understanding of where of diplomatic practice as well as the what and how.
References:
[1] HEI 792 - Report on a simulation exercise of a multilateral negotiation held at Kenyatta International Conference Centre on February 25- 27, 1986
[2] HEI 791 - Simulated Negotiations: The Experience of Ten Years (paper presented to the Seminar on the Training of Third World Diplomats organized by the DTP in April 1988)
[3] HEI 792 - Report on the simulation exercise of a bilateral negotiation, March 5-7, 1981