My Father Warned Me. I Listened. South Africa Proved Him Right.

My Father Warned Me. I Listened. South Africa Proved Him Right

A United Nations statesman’s counsel across a Westbury lunch table — and the decades that vindicated every word

By Kio Amachree

Long before South Africa became a cautionary tale for Nigerian investors and a graveyard for pan-African goodwill, my father sat across from me over lunch at the Westbury Hotel in London and delivered a verdict I never forgot.

Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree — Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and one of the most formidable legal and diplomatic minds his generation produced — looked at me with the quiet authority that only a man who has negotiated at the highest levels of world power can command, and said: Never buy property in South Africa or Zimbabwe.

He was not speaking idly. He was speaking from experience.

As the United Nations Under-Secretary-General responsible for all UN Trusteeships, my father had flown to Rhodesia — now Zimbabwe — to negotiate directly with Ian Smith, the white Prime Minister who was then holding Robert Mugabe in prison and resisting the transfer of power to Black Africans. My father went to that meeting ready for confrontation. He left it rattled — not by Smith’s racism, but by his knowledge.

Ian Smith, he told me, was an exceptionally intelligent and logical man who understood Black East Africans, their psychology, their tendencies, and their limitations, better than they understood themselves. He predicted with clinical precision that Mugabe would destroy Zimbabwe the moment power was transferred. He told my father he was not dealing with a West African mind — that East Africans were an entirely different people when it came to accountability and responsibility.

My father, a proud Black man and African of unimpeachable standing, left that room with a profoundly altered view of the man he had come to confront — and a warning he would carry for the rest of his life.

I listened. I remembered the White South African students at Eton who told me they used “Kaffirs for target practice.” The ones who refused to shake my hand. The only people in five years at that school who ever called me a nigger — and who paid dearly for it. I have a temper. I knew myself well enough to know that South Africa was not a country I could enter and remain on the right side of the law.

So when my Nigerian contemporaries stampeded south after the fall of apartheid — chasing opportunity, chasing the rainbow nation myth — I stayed away. My father’s counsel was my compass.

Decades later, the xenophobic pogroms against Nigerians and other Africans in South Africa have confirmed every word he spoke. And in the digital arena, as I have written about South Africa’s betrayal of pan-African solidarity, I have encountered a quality of online response from South African commenters that I can only describe as breathtaking in its ignorance — infantile, ahistorical, void of logic, allergic to evidence, and staggeringly devoid of the basic courtesies that make civic discourse possible.

These are not the responses of a people reckoning seriously with their history or their responsibilities. They are the responses of a mob that has mistaken volume for argument and aggression for intelligence.

I grieve for the Nigerians and other Africans who gave years of their lives to that country, built businesses, raised families, and were stripped of everything and thrown out like strangers in a continent that belongs to all of us.

And I give thanks — profound, abiding thanks — to Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree, who saw all of this coming from a lunch table at the Westbury Hotel in London, long before the rest of the world caught up.

Your son heard you, Father. Your son listened.

Kio Amachree is the founder of Worldview International and writes under The Kio Solution framework. He publishes across Vanguard, Sahara Reporters, Starconnect Media, and his Substack, Letters from Stockholm.

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