On the problems of Africa in general, Bush, ever true to Malthusian form, stressed above
all the overpopulation of the continent. As he told the Congressmen: "Population was one
of the things I worked on when I was in the Congress with many people here in this
room. It is something that the UN should do. It is something where we are better served
to use a multilateral channel, but it has got to be done efficiently and effectively. There
has to be some delivery systems. It should not be studied to death if the American people
are going to see that we are better off to use a multilateral channel and I am convinced we
are. We don't want to be imposing American standards of rate of growth on some
country, but we are saying that if an international community decides it is worth while to
have these programs and education, we want to strongly support it." [fn 30]
On individual African countries, Bush asked the Congressmen to increase US aid to
Chad, making it obliquely clear that his interest in Chad came from the country's "fierce
independence" in a "pressure area vis-a-vis the north," meaning Qaddafi's Libya. Bush
discussed the Middle East crisis at length with Nimeiri of the Sudan, with whom the US
had no diplomatic relations. Bush thought that Nimieri was interested in restoring and
improving relations with the US. These exchanges are historically ironic in the light of
Bush's later role in the coup that overthrew Nimieri in the mid-1980's. By contrast, Bush
said that Somalia, where the US had recently cut off aid, had shown no interest in
improving ties with the US. In Botswana, Bush says he was impressed by the ministers
he met. In Zambia, the big emphasis was on the problems of the front-line states. In all of
the African capitals on his itinerary, Bush was struck by the intensity of the committment
of governments to progress and to sovereignty: "...in whatever part of Africa and
however diverse Africa is, there was always a large amount of time devoted to
development, economics, and, again, independence, nationhood, this kind of thing." It
was clear that Bush would never have much sympathy for the "nationhood thing." But he
was aware that Africa had 42 votes out of 132 UN member states in the General
Assembly.
Two aspects of Bush's testimony on his African trip throw light on the permanent axioms
of his thinking process. In one such revealing incident, Bush describes his "not hostile"
but "very frank" dialogue with "a bunch of the intellectuals in Nigeria." Bush told the
Congressmen that these intellectuals "were inclined to equate our quest for peaceful
change with the status quo, no change at all, and they would state, 'Look, your own
Revolution was a nonpeaceful change.'" This exchange became a way for Bush to state
that the principles of natural law in the struggle against colonialism which were
expressed in the American Revolution had now been superceded by the supernational
principle of the United Nations as a world government which must validate all political
change. Here is the way Bush expressed this idea: "And my answer to that was, one, we
mean both peaceful and change, and two, the United Nations Charter was not in existence
at the time of the US Revolution. We are not going to give up on the United Nations,
which commits itself to peaceful change." [fn 31]
The second revealing exchange involved Bush's relation to the policies that he was
carrying out. Asked by Congressman Diggs to pinpoint where decisions on Rhodesian
policy and related issues were made, Bush replied: "That is something you can never do