War & Peace Quote by Omar Bongo

The line lands like an indictment delivered in plain clothes: the Cold War’s “peace” between superpowers was bought by exporting heat to everyone else. Omar Bongo isn’t romanticizing African victimhood; he’s naming the mechanics. “Not experienced direct military confrontations” evokes the self-congratulatory Western narrative of restraint, then flips it with “on the other hand” into the real ledger: proxy warfare. The blunt repetition - “supported, armed and trained” - reads like a procurement checklist, the kind that turns ideology into logistics.

Bongo’s intent is political clarity with a protective edge. As a long-ruling head of state in a Francophone Africa shaped by coups, patronage, and external tutelage, he’s signaling to multiple audiences at once. To Washington and Moscow: your rivalry didn’t stop at your borders; it metastasized. To African elites: don’t pretend the violence was purely homegrown when money, weapons, and instruction manuals arrived with flags attached. To ordinary citizens: the tragedy wasn’t only that Africans died, but that Africans were positioned as instruments in someone else’s argument.

The subtext is also a warning about moral laundering. Superpowers could claim they avoided “direct” confrontation while outsourcing the ethical cost to African battlefields, where accountability dissolves into “complex local conflicts.” By framing Africans fighting Africans as the outcome, Bongo highlights the most corrosive effect of proxy politics: it reframes imperial competition as internal ethnic or national inevitability, leaving the sponsors clean and the societies fractured.