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Blazes Along A Diplomatic Trail

by Gordon Brown

316 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0189; ISBN 1-55212-524-6; US$26.50, C$30.50, EUR22.00, £15.50

Memoirs of four postings in the Canadian foreign service in South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Cyprus.

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About the book      About the author      Reviews      Catalogue info

About the Book BLAZES is divided into four parts. The first part deals with South Africa where the author was the deputy to the High Commissioner from 1958 to 1962. The country's troubled race relations were already under scrutiny in the United Nations and pressure was mounting at home and abroad for reform. All this was resented and resisted by the governing minority of the population represented by the National Party which was supported by most of the Afrikaans-speaking majority of the South African white population. Black African resistance led to the major protests of March 1960 which were suppressed with bloodshed at Sharpeville and led to measures that ended any pretence of democracy in South Africa. Sharpeville resulted in the withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth and set the stage for the events of succeeding decades which eventually resulted in the establishment of a non-racial government under Nelson Mandela in 1991. The second part concerns the Soviet Union where Brown was deputy to the Ambassador, Robert Ford, for a brief 16 months from mid-1964. Ford was a foreign service icon whose career had been marked by bad luck: he had been stationed in Moscow but absent on holidays during all the important Soviet events of the fifties and sixties. That included the coup d'état when Nikita Khruschchev was removed from power and the author was in charge of the embassy. The Russian experience was rich and demanding — and rewarding, for it lead to his first ambassadorial posting. Part three deals with the Congo plus much of central Africa including Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo-Brazzaville: a lot of the dark continent that proved even in that time how dark it could be. Within weeks of Brown's arrival, he had experienced a dramatic coup in the Congo and found himself in charge of the airlift of oil and gasoline to Zambia occasioned by Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence. There was much more ahead as the crisis of Canadian unity led to confrontations in Africa between Canada, on the one side, and France and Quebec on the other. Part four is about Cyprus, divided between Greek and Turk for centuries and kept in peace by the United Nations Force — nonetheless a civilized piece of cake after the Congo. Canada was one of the major contributors of peacekeepers on the island. Then we blew it, closing our diplomatic mission, and abdicating an honourable role in a situation that lingers on. That was the 1968-1970 farewell to the decade of "Blazes". Since those days in South Africa, Russia, the Congo and Cyprus, none of the countries can be said to have solved all of the problems that faced them then. Instability concerns all, making Blazes Along a Diplomatic Trail of contemporary relevance.

About the Author Growing up on the Alberta prairies, Gordon Brown was involved with school- and, later, university-student publications, often as a writer of doggerel but more usually as one confined by the duties of editor. He graduated in history from the University of Alberta in 1942 and spent the next four years in the army, mostly with an Alberta regiment, serving in Canada and overseas. In 1946, on demobilization at the age of 24, he accepted a position at the University of Alberta with responsibility as, among other things, editor of the university quarterly. The latter was a daunting assignment because he took over from a distinguished professor of English, Frederick Milton Salter, who had been the tutor of W.O. Mitchell of Who has seen the Wind fame. In 1947, Brown became a foreign service officer of the Department of External Affairs, with which he remained until 1979. The diplomatic profession is one dedicated to accurate and truthful reporting of events, descriptions of personalities, analyses of situations. External Affairs was then run by people who demanded excellence. Of his 32 years in the service, the most rewarding were a dozen that formed the middle period of his career. From mid-1958 to the beginning of 1970, he served abroad in South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cyprus with only a two-year stint in the early sixties at headquarters in Ottawa. Troubling events took place during his postings in each of the four countries: their situations were of international concern and impinged on Canadian interests. Their problems and the unfolding of our bilateral relations provided this Canadian diplomat with challenges and great job satisfaction. The years marked great changes universally. A few months after the South African posting began, a rocket lifted the chirping Sputnik into orbit. Gagarin became the first man to travel into space. By the end of the 1960s, rocketry would land man on the moon. The wide-bodied jet aircraft superseded the ocean liner, transforming the journey to a foreign post from a period of thoughtful reflection into a physical and spiritual jolt. Colonial powers rushed to rid themselves of empires and, for many former colonies, independence was soon to be tarnished by corruption, ethnic hatred and worse. The nuclear arms race and rocketry development steadily intensified the peril to civilization. Everywhere the Cold War diminished the freedoms that most of this generation of diplomatic practitioners had served in war to defend. From 1958 to 1970, each of the three very different men who were Prime Ministers of Canada reacted in very different ways to foreign affairs and the conduct of foreign policy. All three enter into this story. Seen from South Africa, John Diefenbaker's deep respect for human rights appeared as the motor of both his condemnation of the regime that had brought on the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and his role in the departure of the country from the Commonwealth. There was some truth in his suspicion that Canadian diplomats were "Pearson's old gang", although "Dief" was off base in that as a general assessment. L.B. Pearson's hand at the helm was usually — but not always — comforting to the professionals serving in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. However, his decency would be evident during the Congo years as was his determination when Canada's existence was under attack at home and from abroad. The last year of the sixties exposed the Department of External Affairs to the intellectual arrogance of Pierre Trudeau and his declared preference for the views of The New York Times to those of Canada's professional diplomats.

Reviews

The rising number of memoirs published by Canadian diplomats in recent years strikes a different note from that heard in the memoirs of the preceding generation. The memoirists of the 'golden age' were disposed to recall, expansively, how they had grappled with the great issues of the day, in politics and other areas. The current generation writes more personally, more modestly, more succinctly -- in a lower key. Gordon Brown's memoir is an engaging example of the current school.

This is an admirably selective memoir. The author tells of his twelve best years (1958-70) in four overseas postings. The foreign service is becoming a bureaucracy, the mandarins civil servants. But it is still fun: this account of diplomatic life breathes with Brown's bluff personality, practical, wry, and down to earth. The title itself is fun: blazes are cut prudently to mark a trail but they are also conflagrations - hot spots - encountered on the way.

The hot spots Brown encounters are: the implementation of grand apartheid in South Africa (leading to its departure from the Commomwealth); the last phase of Khrushchev's rule in the Soviet Union and his overthrow; General Mobutu's rise to power in Congo amid great-power rivalry and civil strife (compounded, for the embassy in Kinshasa by a fuel crisis in Zambia and Quebec's effort to play the part of a sovereign state in Africa}; and the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus (together with the Trudeau government's disengagement from it}. Each is of interest in itself, as are the sub-plots. Students of diplomatic history will profit from this close retelling of what happened by a participant and eyewitness.

There are some telling scenes. An ambassador in South Africa - in 1960 - who hedges on apartheid and favours the National Party. A respected undersecretary who bemoans South Africa's departure from the Commonwealth. An ambassador to Moscow who complains, pettishly, about ministerial visitors having used the official residence while he was away. Headquarters readies itself to repudiate Brown's initiatives in Zambia should anything go wrong (early evidence for Jodi White's diagnosis: 'a hotbed of cold feet'}.

While some may question Brown's fix on particular issues, few authors have conveyed half as well as he does what it was like to represent Canada abroad, at difficult posts, during those years. His part as actor and observer gains from a journal, kept throughout the period, which provides close details of crucial interviews. We know that these are not just the Technicolor recollections of a retired officer. His narrative also mingles the personal and the professional - public and private life - in a nicely post-modern manner. This is the texture of diplomatic life and Brown captures it well.

One of the most persistent and disagreeable of the myths relating to the foreign service has it that "diplomats" spend most of their time in various forms of fancy dress at vacuous parties and pointless ceremonies. That the myth is based on more than spite emerged rather clearly during the experiments in budgeting and management by objectives of the 1960s. It was easy enough to describe and quantify the functions of officers such as consuls and foreign trade officers but it proved singularly difficult to define the work and objectives of the "non-specialist" (traditionally considered the quintissential foreign service officer). What did they really do and how did they relate to the interests of the nation? Gordon Brown's refreshing memoir provides one answer to this question and a healthy antedote to the myth.

This book falls into four parts of unequal length, each dealing with one of the posts at which Brown served between 1958 and 1969. At the first two, in the Union of South Africa and the Soviet Union, he was the second in command at the mission, serving for a time as chargé d'affaires. Subsequently, in the Congo (Zaire) and Cyprus, he served as head of mission. At all these posts, he was in a position to appreciate the totality of Canadian interests involved and to exercise some influence over the way in which they were served. Indeed, one of the most interesting implications of the book is the variability in the extent of that influence and the way it was exercised.

One's reactions to the memoir will necessarily be subjective. I found the first and longest section the most eloquent and gripping. Brown, arriving in South Africa with a typically Canadian antipathy for apartheid, found himself working with a Head of Mission, a most amiable gentleman, who was, however, by temperament and social contact strongly biased towards the ruling group. This hurdle was initially compounded by the need, a familiar one for newcomers at a foreign post, to establish that network of contacts, mainly in the international community and political opposition, on which the success of his work would largely depend. He succeeded admirably in doing so and the mission seems to have had an enviable record of accurate political reporting and prediction -- a tribute to his gift for friendship and the remarkable energy and tenacity he deployed in the pursuit of understanding of local political developments and trends. Thus, with him we follow the intricate interplay of forces as South Africa slides progressively into the bog of apartheid, through the Sharpeville crisis, the establishment of the Republic and its departure from the Commonwealth.

The South African memoir can be read as a good yarn with its quota of anecdotes such as the account of the stormy confrontation between the High Commissioner and the South African Foreign Minister over the detention of the Canadian journalist Norman Phillips (page 47). The book also has archival value in that many episodes are recounted in fine detail (drawn from Brown's daily diary) and will serve the ends of future research. Interwoven with this narrative are accounts and comments of a more personal nature. Inevitably the disruptions and pleasures of the diplomatic life are mentioned: the enormous difficulties of providing some stability in the education of two young daughters as the mission shifts seasonally between Cape Town and Pretoria, the effort put into the social activities on which the contact network so importantly depends, the joys of friendship and travel. Some readers may find this personal element distracting, but it is so intrinsically a part of foreign service that to omit it would have turned the memoir into a treatise.

A question raised by Brown's account of the mission's activities is the influence that its evidently exemplary reporting had on the development of the Canadian position as expressed by PM Diefenbaker at the 1961 Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. Unfortunately, there is scant reference to the relations between the mission and headquarters, and it may be that the mission was in effect preaching to the converted. This would appear to be the implication of the possibly abashed comment, on the eve of the Commonwealth Conference, that the mission was not surprised so seldom to be pressed for reports by Ottawa. There is, however, one contrary hint of oversight in Ottawa in the interview between Brown and the Under-Secretary reported on page 67. The other three sections of the memoir differ significantly in style and content. They are, however, complementary in the sense that they show the author living and working under the very different conditions of his next three posts. The Soviet Union was a closed society in which the diplomatic corps lived in relative isolation and where the incumbent Canadian Ambassador enjoyed an unchallenged reputation as a Soviet expert. Under these conditions, Brown's narrative leans rather heavily towards the challenges of life and security under the surveillance of the KGB, the deposition of Khrushchev and the first visit to the USSR of a Canadian Parliamentary delegation, both of which occurred while he was chargé d'affaires, and accounts of several trips he was able to make during the relatively short time before his appointment as Canada's first Ambassador to the Congo (Zaire).

In Leopoldville, Brown by his own account, reacted with vigour to the challenges of charting a course for Canada's first diplomatic mission. The situation, both in the Congo and neighbouring countries, was volatile and Canadian interests, while clear in general terms, needed to be translated into specific objectives and projects. He gives a brief account of the history of the newly independent and troubled country and then devotes himself to the various ways in which the new mission attempted over the next three years to put substance into the bilateral relationship. He recounts the effort to pin down an evasive Congolese government on participation in Expo 67, nurture of the aid programme, cooperation with Air Congo, contraversies relating to la francophonie and, more mundanely, the problems of local administration and security. One is left with the impression of a great deal of constructive activity, undertaken with enthusiasm, to which full justice is perhaps not done in this account.

The memoir ends on a somewhat melancholy note with Brown's closure of the Canadian High Commission in Cyprus at the end of 1969 some 12 months after his posting there as High Commissioner. In three chapters, he discusses his representational work and support for the Canadian contingent of the UN Force in Cyprus and concludes with an acerbic account of the events surrounding the closure of the mission which, at least in the manner of its execution, appears to merit his censure.

It is a pleasure to recommend this perceptive but unpretentious account of the contributions of a mid-career foreign service officer to the good name and material interests of his country.

The end of Apartheid and the collapse of the all-white administration is the tale of one of the greatest rejections of an unacceptable regime in modern history.
Everyone knows the tale of South African rejection of Apartheid, the racist philosophy that had its origin in that country and was finally overthrown by opposition both within the country and beyond its bounds. Not everyone was there to record the events as the country teetered on the brink of bloody rebellion.
Gordon Brown was there!

When the eager eyes of the world were watching the dynamic changes in Moscow with the improvements to Canadian-Soviet relations of 1964 revealed by Foreign Minister Paul Martin, hope was in the hearts of many world-watchers, but few west coast Canadians took a quick trip to the Soviet Union.
But Gordon Brown was there!

And so reads JC Gordon Brown's glance back into recent history, which the former Salt Spring Islander helped to launch.
What was happening in South Africa? In Russia? In the Congo? In Cyprus? These are the four posts held by the retired diplomat which rank highest in his review of a life in the service of Canada.
While the rest of Canada had to be content to gain its awareness of foreign affairs from the press and television and radio, the former Isabella Point resident not only sat close to the key figures in many international negotiations, but contributed to the Canadian role in affairs.
Gordon Brown was not only there: he was filling his role of speaking out for Canada in distant lands.
This book keeps tabs on the movements of governments and ministers in far-off places. The writer examines his own part in world affairs and tells of routine duties as well as the tight corners of diplomacy.
Because Gordon Brown was there.

To those many islanders who were acquainted with Gordon Brown, his reminiscences present a different Brown from the man who served a country seen from the wilds of Isabella Point.
A wag and a wit, he was, indeed, the life of many a party.
In this summary of his experiences in the service of the nation, he reveals not only the details of history, but the other Brown, the man at the hub of affairs in his various postings as one of the voices of Canada.
From diplomat to island farmer, construction worker on his own property, tractor driver when the tractor was on its four wheels, the writer hid his identity behind his constant attention to carving out a niche in the island woods.
For the many Salt Spring Islanders who knew and enjoyed the light-hearted partying of Gordon Brown, this summary of the Canadian contribution to world affairs in four different lands will be particularly revealing.
To those who knew him as a neighbour and an untiring worker on his wooded estate, the book holds that extra interest for its debt to geography.
To anyone looking back on post-war history and affairs, the book is a reminder of what went on in so much less than a lifetime ago.
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