Raja was launching Singapore's charm offensive in Africa with virtually no diplomatic ties or trade links with any of the countries. From the moment he stepped onto African soil on 28 September 1965, he knew it would take all the collective strength of the team to pull it off. Not for one second did the foreign minister think that their island – a mere dwarf in international affairs – could command the attention of the African giants without extraordinary effort. Nothing would be handed to Singapore on a platter.

In pursuing his foreign policy goals, Raja found Toh a resolute partner, willing to go well above and beyond. By protocol, the DPM was the official leader of the Singapore delegation. In reality, however, “it was not really Toh's show”, as Herman Hochstadt, the secretary of the mission, said. “It was very much Raja’s. It was about diplomacy.”

Raja had a clear vision for what they needed to achieve: to build Singapore's image and reputation as an Afro-Asian partner. He considered it vital for Singapore to be accepted into the Afro-Asian bloc and represented in the forthcoming Afro-Asian conference at Algiers. It was a kind of preventive security policy, placing the small state in a multifaceted relationship with large and potentially aggressive members. There was reason to believe that Communist China and Indonesia – both non-UN members at the time – wanted to turn the Afro-Asian conference into a permanent assembly of the Third World nations, one that could exist independently from the UN. Singapore could not afford to be isolated.

Yet lurking at the back of his mind was the failure of Malaysia, cast by Indonesia as a British neo-colonialist plot, to obtain invitations to the October 1964 Cairo summit conference of Non-Aligned countries as well as the abortive June 1965 Algiers Afro-Asian summit conference – despite its lobbying efforts.

The Singapore mission's basic challenge was clear: to explain the anomaly of having a foreign base on the island and the apparent contradiction between Singapore's earlier advocacy of merger with Malaysia with its acceptance of Separation. While the African leaders might have regard for Lee, few would have forgotten the arguments for Malaysia that he had made so fervently before them in early 1964 during his African tour.