The Foreign Service Journal, June 2012

your initial Foreign Service assignment to Port Elizabeth, South Africa, as a vice consul in 1963 was a good intro- duction to your new career? WLS: Yes, though it certainly did not seem so at the time! Everyone else in my A-100 class was assigned to high-pro- file diplomatic posts such as Paris, Lon- don, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. When my assignment was read out no one, in- cluding me, even knew where it was. Although a two-person consulate might seem a rather odd first posting, Port Elizabeth turned out to be an ex- cellent choice, at least for me. (At 29, I was the oldest member of my A-100 class and had already had a career.) First, within a month of my arrival I found myself in charge of the post for several weeks while the consul was away. Second, it fell to me to do all the re- porting on the heavy U.S. investment in the automobile industry in the East- ern Cape. It was also my good fortune to cover the first two Transkei legisla- tive elections, from which Washington quickly concluded that Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s “Bantustan” pol- icy was inhumane and doomed to fail- ure. That first assignment stood me in unusually good stead when I returned in 1989 as ambassador to find that apartheid and the Bantustans were, sadly, still in place. FSJ: Five of your six U.S. ambas- sadorships were to countries in Africa, and you have continued to be heavily involved there. Do you consider your- self an “Africa hand”? And if so, what about the continent do you find espe- cially intriguing? WLS: It has been my great good fortune, as you note, to be able to serve my government and the American people for nearly five decades in Africa. Whether this makes me an “Africa hand” or not, I don’t really know, especially since I still have more questions than answers about the con- tinent. But I remain optimistic about the future of Africa, not only in terms of its being the “resource continent” of the 21st century and beyond, but also because of its overall evolution. I have never subscribed to “Afro- pessimism,” and I believe that those who do misread developments and J U N E 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 “To refuse to talk to someone is not a policy, and to talk to someone is not a political declaration.”