When US President Reagan called Tanzanians at UN meeting ‘those monkeys’

Dar es Salaam. Tanzania is at the centre of a newly unearthed racial conversation between two former American presidents, in which a Tanzanian delegation to the UN is referred to as “monkeys”.

In an audio clip, unearthed from the President Richard Nixon Library, former President Ronald Reagan is heard disparaging Tanzanians as ‘monkeys’ during a telephone call with the then incumbent President Nixon.

The long-hidden racist conversation between the two American leaders has just been published in The Atlantic, following years of attempts to block its release in a bid to protect the former US president’s privacy.

It was October 1971 when the UN a took its vote to seat a delegation from the People’s Republic of China, instead of from Taiwan.

After the vote, which was spearheaded by the Tanzanian delegation under the tutelage of the then Tanzania Permanent Representative to the UN, Dr Salim Ahmed Salim, there was jubilation in the UN headquarters corridors by members of African delegations. Africans had overwhelmingly supported chasing Taiwan and admitting the People’s Republic of China to the UN.

The Western media reported that the delegations danced, a claim refuted by Dr Salim in an interview with The Citizen in 2014. “We were happy but we didn’t dance. But had there been drums, we would have beat them in joy,” Dr Salim said.

But Reagan, a devoted defender of Taiwan, was incensed. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan could be heard telling Nixon in a telephone conversation.

Nixon replied with a big laugh.

“Well and then they — the tail wags the dog, doesn’t it? The tail wags the dog.” Nixon said.

Back then, George W.H Bush, the 41st US President and father of George W. Bush (the 43rd US President), was the US ambassador to the UN.

What generally angered Reagan and Nixon was that delegations from Africa did not align themselves with the US position — that the UN should recognise Taiwan as an independent.

But it was, apparently, the claims of a Tanzanian delegation dancing on the floor in the “kangaroo court” that touched a raw nerve.

“As you can imagine,” Nixon confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”

A history professor at New York University, Tim Naftali, and the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, worked to get the tape released and wrote the subsequent article for The Atlantic.

The National Archives withheld the racist comments in the recording’s first release in 2000, which Naftali says was apparently in protection of Reagan’s privacy.

But after Reagan’s death in 2004, and amid continued review process by the National Archives, Naftali was successful in getting the full conversation released.

The newly unearthed audio comes weeks after US President Donald Trump used racist language to attack four black Democratic congresswomen, implying they weren’t American and suggesting they “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

A few days ago, he also attacked a majority-black Baltimore district in the US a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess”.

His recent attack on blacks echoed similar language he had used in the past to describe African countries, which he reportedly called “shitholes”.