It was as though the thousands of young Americans John F. Kennedy sent to Africa in the early 1960s on his Peace Corps initiative followed a biblical injunction: ‘Go forth into the world and be of good cheer.’ In good cheer they came. In like manner they were received. Africa loves visitors. Visitors at times took advantage.

The young people that trooped to Africa in the early 1960s knew – they must have known – that they played a role on the world stage. They were without exception highly educated people, some of them men and women of great talents. They had skills to offer. There were certainly other considerations.

Under the departing empires, Africa had been largely denied higher education and the skills the continent needed to prosper in a modern world. Suddenly there came along the glamorous 1960s and with them the scramble for decolonisation. The wind of change was here.

The 1960s came on the wings of the soviet Sputnik. The period saw the high point of the Cold War. Decolonisation and the Cold War were but Siamese twins. The Cold War hastened decolonisation; decolonisation in turn inflamed the Cold War. Between imperial powers this made for a bitter struggle.

Who shall replace the departing colonials? Who shall sit as the right hand of the new African prince? The Peace Corps initiative was a spanner in the equation of global power. When they realised it, the departing colonials rued the day they consigned Africa to backwardness. Had we known! Had they known! But the Americans were at the front door, it was too late for the old empire to turn the clock back. The Kennedys in all their glamour represented the new American surge.

The Americans and the Kennedys were unlike the British. They were unlike the French, the Belgians or the Portuguese. In their staid bush jackets, the British, the French, the Belgians and the Portuguese were the old order whose time was coming to an end.

Despite the spectacle of Tarzan on Hollywood celluloid, the Americans appeared untouched by the syndrome of the white man’s burden. Paul Theroux, himself a peace corper, could in the 1960s write in the magazine Transition, as though Tarzan were exclusively a British thing, as though America had nothing to do with it.

The Americans appeared different in the eyes of Africans. Africans mourned the death of John F. Kennedy in a way they probably would not have mourned the death of a European monarch. Kennedy appeared the man who was more or less like them, a man of the New World, free of old colonial stains. But Africans knew about the Congo. And they held America responsible for the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba.

The Russians knew the depth of African feelings. The smart men that they were, they built a new college in Moscow and named it for Lumumba and filled it with young African students – those people that they knew had been denied education and good things in life under the empire.

Moses Isegawa is a Ugandan novelist. In his 'Abyssinian Chronicles', a novel primarily about Idi Amin, we encounter the bitterness of a man the British denied a college education on account of his colour. It mattered a hell of a lot then if you were black or white.

When the only son of the late President Kennedy died in a plane crash, Africans mourned for him. Africans love sons who look and act like their fathers. And John Kennedy Jr did. Africans saw in the young Kennedy the reincarnation of the late president. ‘One day, one day, maybe’, but that was the end of their hope.

Today Africa mourns the death of Senator Edward Kennedy because he is a Kennedy, because the Kennedys represented, no matter how dim it appeared, a glimmer of hope in a still colonial world. There is a new empire now, led by America. But Africans are confident players in the new global order, come what may.

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* John Otim is a Ugandan teacher at Nigeria's Ahmadu Bello University.
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