Please learn the meaning of these diplomatic terms

For all practical official purposes, an ambassador’s is exactly the same office as a high commissioner’s.

But in the political commerce known as international diplomacy, it is important to keep reminding Kenya’s newspaper writers and readers of the difference between an ambassador and a high commissioner.

Even I came to know the difference only when, upon Kenya’s independence in 1963, I (and a few other young Kenyans) were hired to be sent for a course at Kabete to prepare us for Kenya’s foreign service.

PROTOCOL OFFICER

Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the Prime Minister, reserved himself the substantive position of Foreign Minister, naming Joseph Murumbi as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Robert Ouko as the Permanent Secretary.

I served as a protocol officer in the Foreign Department under the likes of Chief of Protocol Farid Hinawy and senior secretaries Leonard Kibinge, Mwabili Kisaka, Leo Odero and Bhoi Singh.

I have not seen any of these important Kenyans for decades, though I am told that Hinawy, an ethnic Arab, “defected” to a Gulf state where he was immediately named foreign minister.

TERMINOLOGY
But — apart from the American academic whom Kenya hired to train us at Kabete, these individuals it was who inured in me the difference between the term “high commissioner” and the term “ambassador”.

No, there was no substantive difference. It was a question merely of terminology.

It was that “high commissioner” is reserved for the diplomatic relationship between London and its former colonies and the term “ambassador” for the relationship between those former colonies themselves and countries other than Britain.

ENVOYS

For its part, the term “ambassador” was reserved for the diplomatic relationships between all the other states of our world.

Thus, officially speaking, Kenya’s chefs de mission (“heads of mission”) in both Kampala and New Delhi are high commissioners.

But their counterparts in Moscow and Rome are ambassadors.

But English abounds in other words for each situation.

For one instance alone, both the ambassador and the high commissioner are envoys — a word borrowed from the French verb envoyer, which means “to send”, a word, moreover, which these high officials share with certain subordinates.

An envoy, then, is somebody sent away to take care of his or her country’s official interests there.

HEADS OF MISSION

Ambassador and high commissioner are but synonyms, the latter usually — but not legally — reserved for independent countries that used to be British colonies.

Or you can lump envoys and high commissioners with such other diplomatic echelons as the cultural attaché, the education attaché, the tourism attaché, the trade attaché, whatnot, and dismiss all of them simply as “diplomats”.

A diplomat, we are told, is a “gentleman” or, nowadays, even a “gentlewoman” officially stationed in another country with the mission of securing for his or her country all of its material interests in that other country.

For instance, our heads of mission in both London and Lagos are high commissioners, but our heads of mission in Paris and the District of Columbia are ambassadors. Big deal, isn’t it?

[email protected]