The Diplomacy of Marien Ngouabi: The Rhetoric of a Unity Revolutionary Foreign Policy (1969–1977)

Abstract

This article analyzes the diplomatic discourse of Marien Ngouabi, president of the People's Republic of the Congo from 1969 to 1977, drawing on the collection of his speeches and writings Vers la construction d'une société socialiste en Afrique (Présence Africaine, 1975). Rather than reconstructing the factual history of Congolese foreign policy, the article identifies its underlying rhetoric: the enunciative categories, figures, and speech acts through which a young state, born of an internal revolutionary rupture, constructs its place among nations. The study distinguishes four interlocking discursive regimes the diplomacy of rupture, the ethos of Third-World and pan-African solidarity, socialist alignment tempered by an assertive non-alignment, and pragmatic ambivalence toward the former colonial power before examining how pronominal enunciation, particularly the diplomatic "we", constructs a collective ethos of spokesmanship. The analysis shows that Ngouabi's diplomacy, far from being a mechanical application of Marxism-Leninism, operates as a rhetoric of coherence, continually reconciling the radicalism of anti-imperialist discourse with the material constraints of a small dependent state through an enunciative labor of compensation this article seeks to typologize.