Condoleezza Rice was in Libya in 2008 when Moammar Gaddafi brought her into his personal kitchen and said he had a video to show her. Rice, then the U.S. secretary of state, braced herself. The video was a montage of photographs of Rice with world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao. Then came the song Gaddafi said Libya’s most famous composer had written for her: “Black Flower in the White House.”[1][2]

Moammar Gaddafi’s fixation on Condoleezza Rice was real enough that Rice later called it “weird,” “creepy,” and “eerie.” The strangest documented moment was the 2008 meeting in Libya, where he played her a commissioned song called “Black Flower in the White House.”[1][3]

Rice later told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that when Gaddafi announced the video, her first thought was, “Oh my goodness, what is this going to be?”[1] What followed was not ordinary diplomacy. It was a collection of images of her, then a kind of serenade, a song written in her honor and given a title that sounded both flattering and unsettling.[1][2]

The setting made the moment stranger. Rice was not standing in a receiving line with an eccentric admirer. She was meeting a ruler the United States had spent years trying to pull out of diplomatic isolation. Her Libya visit came after Gaddafi gave up weapons of mass destruction programs and sought to be welcomed back into the international community.[1] Rice later described the policy as an attempt to get Libya away from terrorism and dangerous weapons, and to open a country that had long been closed.[1]

The Scrapbook in Tripoli

In 2011, after anti-Gaddafi fighters entered his Tripoli compound, they found an album of photographs of Rice.[3] Asked about it on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Rice called the scrapbook “quite extraordinary, weird and a bit creepy.”[3]

In the ABC interview, Rice used similar language for the earlier encounter, calling Gaddafi’s scrapbook and fixation “eerie.”[1] She remembered sitting there and thinking, “How long do I have to sit here and how quickly can I get out of here?”[1] Mediaite’s account of the interview put the ending in plainer terms: Rice ate quickly and left.[2]

The song then escaped the room. News accounts repeated the title, “Black Flower in the White House,” and clips circulated online under that name.[1][4][5] Rice remembered it as “a really, really strange moment” in her time as secretary of state.[1]

Her reaction keeps the story from becoming a harmless anecdote about an odd gift. Rice did not describe the episode as charming. She described herself calculating the quickest polite exit from a ruler who had collected her photographs and commissioned music in her honor.[1] The fixation became physical: a video, a scrapbook, a song title.

Years later, the image that remains is not a treaty table or a podium. It is Rice in Gaddafi’s kitchen, watching pictures of herself pass across a screen while a song written for her played in the room.

Sources

  1. Talking Points Memo: Qaddafi Wrote Song For Rice, “Black Flower in the White House”
  2. Mediaite: Condoleezza Rice, Moammar Gaddafi’s “Black Flower in the White House”
  3. CNN: Condoleezza Rice says Gadhafi crush was “weird and a bit creepy”
  4. YouTube: Gaddafi DVD and song to Condi Rice, “Black Flower in the White House”
  5. YouTube: Qaddafi Song For Rice, “Black Flower in the White House”