War & Peace Quote by Omar Bongo

Bongo’s line has the bluntness of someone who watched the Non-Aligned Movement become, in practice, a diplomatic costume change. The phrasing matters: “in fact” is doing heavy work, puncturing the official story of principled neutrality. He concedes the theater of non-alignment (“a considerable number”), then pivots to the realpolitik punchline: in the Cold War’s global economy of weapons, aid, and recognition, abstention was rarely an option.

As a statesman who built longevity inside that system, Bongo isn’t merely diagnosing history; he’s normalizing a survival strategy. The subtext is transactional: alignment wasn’t always ideological devotion to capitalism or communism, but a bargaining posture in a world where superpowers treated African sovereignty as an arena for influence. “Everyone” is an intentionally sweeping word, less a statistical claim than a reminder of the structural squeeze. Newly independent states inherited borders, militaries, and economies that made them vulnerable to coercion and temptation alike; choosing a patron often meant choosing budget support, security guarantees, and a seat at certain tables.

Context sharpens the edge. Post-independence Africa was courted, pressured, and sometimes punished by Washington and Moscow, and by their proxies. Non-alignment offered rhetoric of dignity, but the Cold War priced neutrality as a luxury. Bongo’s realism also doubles as self-justification: if alignment was inevitable, then the moral scrutiny of which side you leaned toward - and what you accepted in return - starts to look like naive hindsight rather than a political choice.