The story is told of a correspondent for British news agency Reuters who, in 1961, was sent to verify whether then United Nations (UN) secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld had landed at Ndola Airport, in northern Zambia, en route to talks with Moise Tshombe, who, with the backing of former colonial power Belgium, was doing his damnedest to have the province of Katanga secede from the newly independent Congo, which subsequently became Zaire, before being renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.

A plane landed and, on enquiring with the police, the Reuters man and other journos were told the UN head honcho was among those who had disembarked. They duly filed their copy, as we say in journalism. Trouble was, Hammarskjöld was dead by then, his plane having crashed in the dark African night as it approached the airport. The other newsmen and women, who were imbibing at a nearby hotel later that night, heard of the mishap and rushed to correct their earlier dispatches. But by then the fellow from Reuters was far, far away – in lala-land. When he woke up the next morning, his story had been printed in many newspapers across the globe and he and his employers were left with copious quantities of egg on the face.

Moral of the story? As a journalist, you must never put pen to paper unless you are absolutely sure of the facts. Others have said the real lesson is that you must always be the last to leave the pub, for you never know what scoop will break when everyone else is ensconced in bed. Being teetotal, I am not sure if I agree with that.

As I sat down to write this piece – a week-and-a-half ago – I found myself having to disregard the lesson from the Hammarskjöld anecdote – the sober one, that is, not the stuff about pubs and late nights. Theresa May had announced her intention to step down as Conservative Party leader today – June 7 –and subsequently as UK Prime Minister, and Boris Johnson appeared to be bookmakers’ favourite to succeed her. I just could not resist the temptation to give my two pennies worth on what Boris (I will not call him Mr Johnson) taking up residence at Number 10 Downing street spells for Africa.

Boris will be anything but an ally of our continent, if his past statements are anything to go by. He said in 2002: “The African continent may be a blot (dark stain), but it is not a blot (dark stain) upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

When he was still buddy-buddy with May, she appointed him her Foreign Secretary, what we call Minister of International Relations and Cooperation in South Africa. His tenure ran from July 2016 to July 2018, but what he did – and did not do – during those two short years was enough to reinforce the opinion of him that some of us had formed as far back as 2002 – that he is downright racist and patronising.

He proved to be unwilling to engage with Africa. One uncharitable commentator says his very few visits to the continent were nothing more than “ceremonial photo opportunity trips”. Who can fault that view, given that Boris sees Africa as one amorphous land mass and pretends to be oblivious to the existence of the 54 nation States on the continent? In a speech to a Conservative Party conference in October 2016, reflecting on his first three months as Foreign Secretary, he said: “Life expectancy in Africa has risen astonishingly as that country has entered the global economic system”.

The more generous of spirit may say the “that country” utterance was a slip of the tongue and does not really betray his convictions about Africa. I would buy that if, in a column published in 2010, he had not referred to black people as “flag-waving piccaninnies”. That was in black and white.

I have heard one commentator say that, should Boris clinch the UK Premiership, maybe – only maybe – he will try to woo Africa so that it becomes the UK’s trading partner in a post-Brexit world. I would rather his bid crumbles.