The World

Africa was fertile territory for the Soviets, but western rivalry and political instability were a challenge. Nkrumah the Redeemer travelled frequently to Moscow, Havana and North Vietnam, but Papa Houphouët, coordinating with de Gaulle’s African mastermind Foccart, backed a conspiracy against the Redeemer, who was redeemed by his own army and deposed, sending Ghana into a spiral of dictatorship and corruption. Houphouët was one of many inclined towards the west. On 12 December 1964, the sixty-six-year-old Kenyatta, only recently freed from house arrest, was elected president. Genial, pleasure-loving and theatrical, Burning Spear was polygamous, marrying four times, lastly to Ngina, thirty-four years younger, who was as extrovert as he was but shamelessly amassed a fortune. Ultimately forging a one-party state, hailed as the mzee – elder master – brandishing his flywhisk and often sporting head-to-foot leopard-skin robes, he dominated Kenya

^* through a court of Kikuyu henchmen, carving up the spoils of government, making his own family the country’s largest landowners and clashing with his ally, Tom Mboya, the Luo minister of finance.

At the same time, Mboya’s protégé, Barack Obama, returned from Harvard to join the elite. As his ex-wife Ann, now a qualified anthropologist, lived with her new Indonesian husband in Jakarta, accompanied by his son Barack junior, senior was joined in Nairobi by his new wife, Ruth Baker, white and Jewish. Dr Obama became a senior economist at Mboya’s Finance Ministry. He was set to thrive. Yet he did not – and he would meet Barack junior only one more time.

Kenyatta kept the Soviets out of Kenya; Egypt was more receptive. Brezhnev backed Nasser with Soviet arms, advisers and intelligence in order to confront the western ally, Israel. Nasser prepared for war, promoting his long-serving crony Abdel Hakim Amer to war minister and marshal. Amer, lean and raffish but contumacious, resisted Nasser’s attempts to control the army. He partied heavily with girls and drugs, while Nasser, diabetic with heart problems, suffered from stress and insomnia. At home, his favourite daughter fell in love with a flashy young engineer, a general’s son called Ashraf Marwan, whom the dictator distrusted. But Mona got her way and his new son-in-law joined the presidential office, living for a time in London luxury until Nasser, furious about their extravagance, humiliated Marwan: he would take his revenge.

Darling of the crowds, Nasser escalated the threats of annihilation against Israel, encouraged by Amer’s promises of military power. The dictator who believes his own myth will be consumed by it. In early 1967, as Israel struck back against raids by militias of Palestinian exiles, and duelled with the Syrian army, Nasser dismissed UN peacekeepers from Sinai and heralded the liquidation of Israel. Brezhnev forwarded to Nasser intelligence that claimed Israel planned to attack Syria. The intelligence was flawed, but Nasser used it to stoke the Syrians for war.

On the central front in Jordan, the diminutive Hashemite king Hussein, still only thirty-two, had already been denounced by Nasser as an ‘imperialist lackey’ and was stalked by Nasserite assassins. Named after his great-grandfather, the amir of Mecca, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, Hussein was cunning, jaunty and sporty, with an eye for beautiful women. He prided himself on his guardianship of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, but his survival was doubtful. He still mourned his gibleted cousin Faisal of Iraq. While Hussein ruled the West Bank, Nasser endorsed the newly founded Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), dominated by a young radical named Yasser Arafat, born in Cairo but partly brought up in the Maghrebi Quarter of Jerusalem, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians.

Now Nasser summoned the little king. Nasser might arrest or kill him in Cairo, but Hussein acquiesced. Nasser, towering over him, joked ominously that he was not arresting him but demanded command of Jordanian forces. Hussein submitted. ‘Our basic objective,’ said Nasser, ‘will be to destroy Israel.’

Across the border, the Israelis were in a fever of panic. Their premier Levi Eshkol was indecisive, elderly and unnerved. The chain-smoking, laconic, fair-haired chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, special forces commander in 1948, was close to breakdown. Surrounded by popular existential anxiety, Eshkol bowed to public demand and appointed the piratically eye-patched Moshe Dayan as defence minister. ‘Original, handsome’, in Peres’s words, ‘and a brilliant mind’, Dayan was a kibbutznik born in Israel, a compulsive lover of women, amateur archaeologist and fluent Arab-speaker with many Arab friends. He had been trained by British commandos during the Arab revolt. Dayan and Rabin devised a pre-emptive strike to hit Egypt, then Syria, warning Hussein to keep out of the conflict.