BELAFONTE: A NEW ROLE AS DIPLOMAT

It’s been more than 20 years since the king of “Day-O” has had a hit in his native United States--but Harry Belafonte is still something of a living legend in Africa. The Harlem-born high school dropout has become a kind of calypso statesman who seems to carry more clout around with him in places like Ethiopia and Tanzania than a Soviet foreign minister or an American secretary of state.

From Nairobi to Khartoum, his recognition factor alone is probably 10 times that of Andrei Gromyko and George Shultz put together.

(Interestingly, in the official Ethiopian press--which diligently tries not to credit the United States for the aid that makes up about 40% of Ethiopia’s total relief imports--Belafonte is characterized as a “Caribbean” singer.)

During Kenya’s independence celebration in 1963, Belafonte and singer Miriam Makeba were invited to sing, but they weren’t relegated to some obscure corner of the room after their performances. Kenya President Jomo Kenyatta sat Belafonte down at the head table, right next to Prince Philip. The singer watched Philip fold up the Union Jack that once flew over the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and take it home to his wife in Buckingham Palace as a memento of a British colonialism that was in its final throes in Africa.

Twenty-three years later, during these diseased days of African famine and pestilence, Belafonte’s early ties to an independent Africa are turning out to be curiously important. Belafonte, who finishes up his own diplomatic mission to Africa this week, is emerging as a leading figure in a new kind of foreign policy that circumvents both Washington and Moscow.

“If we had struck an honorable treaty with a lot of these countries at the end of the colonial era, a lot of these troubles we are facing with them today would be non-existent,” Belafonte told Calendar during a break last week in his USA for Africa tour of Eastern Africa.

But Belafonte said that he believes the United States was responsible for upheavals, perhaps even assassinations, “thinking we could have our own way.

“So a lot of moderate guys are killed off in the beginning of African independence and we just polarized everything. In come the Soviets and they find this situation where they can push their thing. A lot of the loyalties you find in a lot of these countries can be traced back to the rebels who fought against the colonialist onslaught. The only really friendly persons around for a lot of these guys--especially young minds caught up in the fever of independence--were the Marxist forces.”

Though carefully reasoned, Belafonte diplomacy certainly isn’t the kind of policy analysis issued by State Department pundits. He doesn’t always go through channels. He tolerates, sidesteps, even ignores government bureaucracy. Instead, he croons his apolitical call to aid crippled populations, regardless of their politics, directly to the people.

Two weeks ago, the 57-year-old singer led the ubiquitous USA for Africa delegation into the oft-times medieval world of East Africa. Belafonte’s breakneck pace in covering four drought-plagued countries in 16 days wore out several members of his entourage, but there seems to be little question that it has been effective.

“He’s like something of a god over here,” said Ken Kragen, the manager of Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie who co-founded and runs the fledgling USA for Africa Foundation. “Mention Harry’s name and people fall down in front of you. They’ll do anything.”

“There’s no question of its importance,” one American official of an Addis Ababa-based private relief agency told Calendar. “He and this USA for Africa thing are keeping the famine problem high in everybody’s minds.”

Indeed, since USA for Africa and the British Band Aid project began singing for Africa six months ago, Ethiopia grain relief shipments into Assab Harbor have doubled. The only fear in Ethiopia is that the public will lose interest and the shipments will fall off at a time when it appears this poverty-stricken, starving nation appears about to make a temporary recovery.

USA for Africa is spending $1.1 million on its maiden field trip. The foundation brought food, medicine and 5,000 pounds of used rock-concert T-shirts, donated by MTV viewers to the USA for Africa cause. This initial contribution, valued at $3.15 million, was split in two shipments, half left in Khartoum, the rest in Ethiopia.

USA for Africa Executive Director Marty Rogol said the supplies only cost the foundation about $618,000 because he had been able to get most of the food, medicine, tents, clothing and farm supplies donated by their manufacturers.

Added in was $293,000 paid to lease a Boeing 747 to airlift in the supplies plus commercial airfare for Belafonte et al.

It looks as though there will be at least two more trips to Central and Western Africa before the year is out. Soon, the foundation will be making its first grants-in-aid to relief and welfare agencies working in Africa. And, of course, the drive for more contributions to USA for Africa continues unabated at home.

On his second day in Ethiopia, the graying, gravel-voiced Belafonte visited a famine-relief refugee camp, alternately hugging malnourished babies with Modigliani eyes and crooning “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with a pair of Irish nuns who work in the camp’s medical clinic. The previous day, he was closeted with United Nations and Ethiopian officials and local leaders of the Red Cross, World Vision, UNICEF, Oxfam and Save the Children.

He scolded and praised them, depending upon how often they put aside quarrels over Marxism, democracy and other political rhetoric in favor of getting food and medicine to starving children.

There were Soviet hospitals to visit and a revolutionary orphanage. There was a provisional military resettlement camp that looked suspiciously like a collective farm. It was all caught on camera and will all be brought to television, once the USA for Africa crews can get it edited down to its most dramatic documentary footage.

And always there were more meetings with more government officials, every one of whom seems to want Belafonte’s autograph.

Where career diplomats have frequently failed to obtain presidential audiences, Belafonte and friends have been ushered in on the simple strength of his mythical name. Both Ethiopian Marxist Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam and Tanzanian Socialist President Julius Nyerere--chairman of the Organization of African Unity--welcomed the chance to chat with the man who indelibly etched such immortal lines as “Come mister tally man, tally me banana” forever into the American consciousness.

And Belafonte still had time to take Julie, his wife of 28 years, to a command performance (by Belafonte’s command, as it turned out) of “Othello,” acted by the Ethiopian National Theater troupe in Ethiopia’s Amharic tongue.

If Belafonte had indeed been from the Caribbean, he might never have become Hollywood’s unofficial ambassador to Black Africa.

“As a kid growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, most of my perceptions of Africa were really like what the movies said,” Belafonte told Calendar. “It was what Johnny Weissmuller did in the trees and all of these frightened natives who stumbled through their own environment, who were afraid of their own shadows.

“So, as a kid, if you are psychologically bombarded with this--when you grow up you begin to believe that blacks are inferior, blacks are stupid--you somehow feel that you are legitimately the cursed race.”

When he joined the Navy during World War II, Belafonte’s segregated all-black division exposed him for the first time to black intellectuals and gave him his first taste of the 1940s and ‘50s Back-to-Africa movement, spurred on by Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, an educator and founder of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

“I ran into a bunch of guys who were much older than me who went to college at Tuskegee or Howard University. And they were talking very politically, about the war and about Ethiopia when the Italians did their invading.

“I didn’t understand all that much what they were talking about. But one of them gave me a book called ‘The World and Africa’ by Dr. DuBois, and it was my first major exposure to anything other than the Tarzan concept of Africa.”

He made up his own bibliography of African source texts from DuBois’ footnotes and went to the Chicago Public Library to check them out. The librarian told him the list was too long, so. . . .

“I told her just to give me everything by this fellow ibid because his name showed more than anyone else’s in the footnotes,” Belafonte recalled.

Perhaps his own ignorance and the humiliation it bred made him all the more sensitive to the needs of both individuals and nations who haven’t had the twin breaks of affluence and education.

“My family was peasants. They cut bananas and harvested sugar cane for rich British landowners on a farm in Jamaica before they came to New York.

“So, a lot of times, I have to make the observation that if I were ground under somebody’s boot and somebody told me I had a choice between going to the hills and fighting for my independence or sitting down and waiting patiently for the boot to be removed from my neck, I’d take independence every time.”

That same nationalistic fervor among the underclasses from Jamaica to most of Africa came with the end of World War II, according to Belafonte.

“At the end of the war, I think most of the countries thought they could go back to business as usual. But they discovered something that had not existed before: wars of liberation.

“The French found out when the Vietnamese said, ‘Uhn uh, we fought the Japanese as allies, we had a taste of independence, and we want it too.’

“The British found the same thing in Kenya. The Belgians found it in the Congo. All over the globe, there was this massive eruption of people whose appetite was whetted with a new desire for independence and self-determination.”

Ethiopia is a textbook case of how U.S. policy failed, according to Belafonte. There, Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled with an iron hand until he was overthrown by Mengistu in 1974. Despite the gross inequities of his government, rewarding a tiny ruling elite while most of the country lived in abject poverty, the United States supported and recognized his regime for almost 50 years.

“I don’t know if the West gave the Ethiopians a lot of options. They chose Marxism. But no matter what I think about an ideology, I have to put it into a context.

“I find Marxism and communism as diverse as Christianity. You got your Roman Catholics, you got your Mormons, you got your Episcopalians, you got your evangelical groups. So I can’t come to a place like Ethiopia with so simplistic a point of view as Marxism is bad or good.

“As China has visibly displayed, there is a very different line between what they want to do and what the Soviets want to do. Maybe there’s a different line with Ethiopia too.”

Belafonte diplomacy doesn’t always go through channels. He tolerates, sidesteps, even ignores government bureaucracy. Instead, he croons his apolitical call to aid crippled populations directly to the people.