Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, a Senegalese civil servant and politician who became the first Black African to head a major international organization when he was elected director general of UNESCO — but whose contested tenure there led the United States and Britain to pull out — died on Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal. He was 103.
His death, at a hospital, was announced on the website of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which was established to promote international cooperation in those domains.
Mr. M’Bow, a rare survivor among the continent’s first generation of independence leaders, had served as Senegal’s education and culture minister when he rose to the top post at UNESCO in 1974. Over the next 13 years he turned the agency into a spearhead for grievances in the developing world and the Soviet bloc, mainly over Western cultural dominance, while entrenching himself behind a phalanx of handpicked bureaucrats at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
His resistance to Western influences, as well as accusations of misspending and nepotism, contributed to decisions by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to pull their countries out of UNESCO in disgust, the U.S. in 1984 and Britain in 1985. Britain rejoined in 1997, the United States in 2003.
The withdrawal by the U.S. was particularly disastrous for UNESCO, as American contributions had provided a quarter of its budget. For years afterward, the agency was seen by critics as the poster child for U.N. bloat and politicization.
Criticism of Mr. M’Bow centered on his promotion of what came to be known as a “new world information order,” a vague body of recommendations that many in the West regarded as a threat to freedom of the press, while its advocates saw it as an attempt to break the perceived Western monopoly on the reporting and dissemination of news.
UNESCO under Mr. M’Bow pushed for an international “code of conduct” for journalists; proposed that they carry identification cards, which governments could withhold if they were unhappy with news coverage; and backed “the notion that governments have a right to control information for their own ends,” as The New York Times reported in December 1983.
The recommendations were advanced in a report written by media figures — all chosen by Mr. M’Bow — some of them from places, like East Germany and Vietnam, without press freedom.
Free-press advocates were horrified. Gerald Long, the managing director of Reuters, called the report “rotten as a whole.”
Mr. M’Bow pushed back. “If the media has the liberty to say what they like, then others have the right to judge what they say,” he told a UNESCO conference in December 1982. The response, The Times reported, was “thunderous applause.”
UNESCO eventually abandoned the proposals. But Mr. M’Bow was still defending his call for press controls nearly 40 years later.
“If you go to any African country, you’ll get news produced by the North,” he said in a long interview published as a book in 2021, “including news that concerns us, and that the North distributes according to its own interests.”
Complaints were also lodged about his management of the agency, which spent 70 percent of its budget on administrative expenses, largely at its gleaming Paris headquarters. He built a penthouse on top of the building for his personal use, and critics saw nepotism in the appointment of a cousin of Mr. M’Bow’s wife as director of personnel, according to testimony at a 1984 congressional hearing on the U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO.
“It is clear that by design and through inattentiveness, the total decision-making authority for all aspects of the organization has been centralized in one person,” Representative James H. Scheuer, Democrat of New York, commented at the time. “With that power must go the responsibility for the results, and the results look disastrous.”
UNESCO’S “chief concern,” the Times foreign affairs columnist Flora Lewis wrote, was to “provide cushy jobs for politicians unwanted at home and a forum for attacking the very concepts UNESCO was supposed to serve — human rights for all, press freedom, unrestricted access to culture.”
Mr. M’Bow tried to run for a third six-year term as director general in 1987. But, faced with opposition from the Western countries that remained in the organization, he was defeated by Federico Mayor of Spain.
On Mr. M’Bow’s death, UNESCO saluted his memory, In 1976, the agency noted, he helped establish the World Heritage Convention, which seeks to identify and protect global natural and cultural landmarks. He also helped form an intergovernmental committee to promote the return of appropriated cultural property and artifacts to their countries of origin.
Under his tenure, UNESCO published the first volumes of “The General History of Africa,” a collective effort to encompass the entire continent’s history by some of Africa’s leading scholars. Mr. M’Bow described its authors as having “inside knowledge of the problems and hopes of Africa.”
In a tribute posted online on Tuesday, UNESCO’s current director general, Audrey Azoulay of France, made no mention of the controversies that had dogged her predecessor. She lauded Mr. M’Bow as “a profound humanist and all-round intellectual” who had “left a lasting impression on our institution by forcefully defending the need for solidarity and equal dignity between peoples and cultures.”
Amadou Mahtar M’Bow was born on March 20, 1921, in Dakar to Fara Ndiaye M’Bow, a farmer and World War I veteran, and Ngoné (Casset) M’Bow. Senegal was a French colony then, but Mr. M’Bow was automatically granted French citizenship because he was born in the nation’s biggest city, which was one of four Senegalese “communes” where such status was conferred; elsewhere, Senegalese people were considered French subjects.
His mother died when he was a boy, and he was raised in Louga, in northwestern Senegal, by one of his father’s three wives, Yoni Sow.
Amadou, whose father was prominent in the local Muslim hierarchy, attended Quranic school in Louga and later, at the urging of Blaise Diagne, Senegal’s deputy in France’s parliament, the local colonial school.
At 17, after passing an exam to enter the colonial administration, he went to work in the mailroom of the colonial governor’s office. At 18, with the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered for the French Air Force and was sent to radio operators’ school in Saint-Malo, on France’s northwest coast.
He was demobilized with the fall of France in 1940, but after the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942, he joined the Free French forces on the continent in 1943 and attended a French Air Force training school in Morocco. He was sent to the South of France after the Allied invasion of Provence in 1944 and assisted with aircraft maintenance.
At war’s end, Mr. M’Bow studied history and geography at the Sorbonne. He then returned to West Africa to teach in the French colony of Mauritania and later taught at schools in Saint Louis, Senegal, and in Dakar. After Senegal achieved independence in 1960, he was a government minister from 1966 to 1970. He stepped down when UNESCO named him its deputy director general for education. He was elected to the organization’s top post four years later.
Mr. M’Bow’s survivors include his wife, Raymonde (Sylvaine) M’Bow, whom he married in 1951; two daughters, Awa M’Bow Kâne and Marie Amy M’Bow; and a son, Fara M’Bow.
In Senegal, Mr. M’Bow was regarded as a national hero and a wise elder. In 2008, at 87, he was made president of a coalition of political parties opposed to the presidency of Abdoulaye Wade, who served until 2012. A new university outside Dakar was named in Mr. M’Bow’s honor.
His funeral on Wednesday, in Dakar, was attended by Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and other government ministers.
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