Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Attorney Ken Okorie is an Editorial Board member of USAfrica
First, were fifty African heads of state and governments plus delegations from The African Union gathered in Washington, DC. They came on the invitation of the Biden Administration. That was December 13 to 15, 2022. It was the 2022 US Africa Summit.
Barely a month following the Summit, US purse-keeper, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, sprinted across the Atlantic with stops in Senegal, Zambia and South Africa. Her 10-day visit was not to ascertain that Washington’s recent guests got home safely, her mission was to promote the economic possibilities that lie between the U.S. and the world’s second-largest continent.
These back-to-back moves are part of the Biden Administration’s effort to reconnect with Africa. Published goals of the Summit include a hope to reset America’s relations with Africa. More specifically, official State Department sources gave the Summit’s objective as “strengthening ties with African partners based on principles of mutual respect and shared interests and values”. They also described Yellen’s trip as “an opportunity to listen to and collaborate with African counterparts on key areas the United States and Africa define as critical for the future of the continent and our global community”. Further articulating their intent, American officials outlined the following specifics:
• To better foster new economic engagement with Africa
• reinforce the U.S.-Africa commitment to democracy and human rights
• mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and of future pandemics
• work collaboratively to strengthen regional and global health
• promote food security
• advance peace and security
• respond to the climate crisis; and
• amplify diaspora ties.
Lofty and desirable as these may sound, could they amount to a bit too little too late?
Despite their stated goals and objectives, recent America’s overtures toward Africa can better be described as attempt to cut new pathway into a region America once had the most promising of access and thoroughfare.
Against the background of history, these initiatives trigger questions that beg answering. Why is the United States still struggling when it comes to having strong, viable African policy? What put America in the current position of needing to “reengage” Africa? Perhaps even more appropriately, why did the US disengage from Africa in the first place? Why has it taken this long for Washington to appreciate the importance of a continent of nearly 1.5 billion population and harbors most of the world’s precious natural resources? Why now?
Examining these questions is what this two-part opinion will attempt. The first part will review the historical profile of America’s policy toward Africa and the neglect that has led to America now having to retrace its steps in order to reengage. The second installment will proffer ideas on how America can arrest the drift and regain its locus in Africa.
The symbolism that Secretary Yellen kicked off her voyage to rediscover Africa in Senegal is as striking as it is significant. Senegal is home to Goree Island, the exit point of millions of Africans shipped between the 16th and early 19th centuries as slave labor on plantations and to build the new America. It is a fitting reminder for the US of a seemingly forgotten historic non-umbilical, yet irrepressible and irreducible, historic connection with Africa.
No sooner than the victims of the notorious trade in humans were brought to the Americas than they were stripped of their humanity. To Slave owners, the Africans were mere disposable chattels only valued for being milked for raw energy and strength. Totally dehumanized, they perished in their millions. Same as the shipped slaves were stripped of their humanity, their kin and landmass on the continent were similarly and routinely related with in afterthought. A cloak of colonization that came with slavery placed Africa as merely a place for the White man to pillage and freeload. From this ugly beginning America never placed Africa near the front page of its foreign policy.
For reminder, one must note that US-African Summit is nothing new. Successive administrations have organized a few. I recall attending one outing of African leaders in Washington, DC in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president.
Discounting for a moment the unremarkable four years Donald Trump supervised Washington and saw nothing but “shit-hole countries” on the African continent, not much changed in Washington’s attitude toward Africa over the years, including the twenty-four since Clinton. All that has been seen in official policy is tokenism. American media and public pay no attention, only frequently profile Africa as the place of the dead and dying. As an example, Nigeria, the largest African nation ranked 7th by world population, is three weeks from consequential elections. But you cannot hear a thing about it on American media outlets. Yet democracy is billed among the mainstay of America’s outreach. This is a false narrative that keeps America missing the reality of Africa.
After supplying slave labor that built it, America systemically aligned with Europe to myopically value Africa only as source of commodities to be exploited. America’s historic investment and technology transfers that elevated the industrialization and economic development of Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia have never been extended to Africa. Yet through the ages, Africa remained the commodity hub that fueled the West’s post-industrial revolution boom.
Like Europe, America systematically forgets that the humongous possibilities between America and the world’s second-largest continent are worth exploring. To policymakers in Washington, Africa remains a dummy variable that is only good for balancing the numerical equations of international diplomacy. This is precisely why America has lacked meaningful strategic economic or other relationships with Africa. As such, the goal of recurring US-Africa summits has remained dormant with substance deliberately elusive.
A new push by the Biden administration is currently underway. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s 10-day visit was aimed at promoting these economic possibilities. What exactly triggered the timing may not be terribly unclear, but one thing stands out. America faces new competition on the African continent it previously did not have. Having emerged as an economy that is second only to the United States, China is flapping its economic muscle strongly on the continent, ready to displace the US wherever it can, or complete where it cannot.
America’s real challenge is America. Can it muster more substance and seriousness to shore up its new initiative? Will the current effort be sustained or will it be yet another sporadic showing that America exists?
I reach into personally experienced history of 60 years ago when America was the priced endearment to Africans, particularly the young. It was the season of America’s Cold War with Russia. President Kennedy ingeniously struck the masterstroke by sending young Americans to teach in Africa under the Peace Corps Program. The Peace Corps dramatically altered the geopolitical environment and psyche of Africa in America’s favor. The Peace Corps introduced educational curriculum that broadly exposed students to wider areas of general knowledge, unlike the narrower in-depth particularity they inherited from colonial Europe. They learned more about many fields, as different from an European model that delved into detail on fewer subjects. The students loved the American option because it better prepared them for vastly changing variants life and career eventually offer. This soon proved very significant because suddenly every African student hungered more for America.
Perhaps the Peace Corps made more important impact on local culture. They brought an American flair that African youths found exciting and liberating. It was unlike anything previously experienced in colonially supervised Africa. Blue jeans, motorcycles, manner of speech, and overall carefree style of the Peace Corps magnetized Africa’s youth.
Coincidentally, American pop culture was already invading the youth square. A typical secondary school was forum where young people sang pop songs, memorized the lyrics of Millicent Small, Jim Reeves, Chubby Checker, Aretha Franklin, The Everly Brothers and other American artists. They dressed in flowing tight-hipped pants that mimicked James Brown or Elvis. These distant sounds competed vibrantly with Highlife music of Rex Lawson, Stephen Osadebe, Celestine Ukwu, Victor Uwaifo, and other locals whom city boys could enjoy in clubs during holidays. The social scene was a vibrant mix of indigenous and mimicked American culture. America was written all over Africa. By mere presence, the Peace Corps bridged the distance and brought America home to Africans. They did their job, perhaps too well, one might say. But Africa wanted more, more of their flair, more of everything American! America became the aspiration and destination of choice for every young and developing African mind.
A remarkable element of this phenomenon is that America was previously not actively desired by African youth. By virtue of colonial appendages, Africans inclined toward European education, healthcare, and other influence. Families and governments sent their children to study mostly in England, Germany, and France. Cambridge, London and Oxford were Africa’s reference points for quality education. Harvard, MIT and America’s other Ivy League were largely not known. Relatively much fewer braved the language barrier much less consider the Soviet brand. The appetite was hugely not there.
The Peace Corps brought to life imageries of speech and lifestyle African youth had previously only dreamed about. Every child that had a chance for higher education now wanted to end up in America. Through the Peace Corps, President Kennedy practically conquered Africa for America, the only shot being the young Americans every African boy and girl wanted to be like.
Esoteric as these may now seem, they made Africa the ready, willing and able partner America could have desired. An environment and generation of Africans saw everything American as ideal and were ready for taking. Kennedy’s Peace Corps was the huge success that gave root to today’s massive presence of Africans that came to America by choice. Am unaware that American foreign policy found comparable fertile ground elsewhere.
At governmental levels, Nigeria was exemplary. Following a secessionist war with Biafra (which had cut short the educational aspirations of most young people especially in the Eastern part of the country), federal and state governments massively infused scholarship programs that enabled young people to seek American education. They responded in numbers not previously imagined. For its part, America reciprocated with generous visa grants to African students now enabled to afford American training under the scholarships.
It is instructively ironic how the poor state of communication at the time also shaped developments. America was struggling with civil rights crisis, but Africans had very limited access to knowing or appreciating the intensity of the struggles in America or the associated racial divide. The assassinations of President Kennedy, who sent the beloved Peace Corps, and Martin Luther King, Jr, whose global message of peaceful resolution of differences resonated worldwide, depressed the entire African continent. Even with limited insight as to the details, Africa mourned the two heroes like personal family losses.
More so the youth and perhaps to good ends. If we had known the ugly details of racial discrimination in America, many of us students might not have ventured. An experience upon my arrival in the early seventies following the brutal Biafra genocide buttress this point. In March 1974, a group of African students, Osato, Osarieme, Osasuyi (Bini Nigerians) and Kwashi (Ghanaian) and I left University of South Florida in Tampa to Key West on Spring Break. We detoured in Miami where IHOP Restaurant denied us service for being Black. We asked for water but were told that IHOP did not serve water. We were confused, unable to understand that such could happen! That was stunning introduction to America we never knew existed.
On campus, having no prior awareness that skin color made such difference, African students associated freely and made friends with everyone without thinking of color. Several African American students resented this about us. They felt we had no business hobnobbing with Whites. On more personal level, their males were unhappy that African students seemed relatively better off financially thereby attracting the attention of Black American females. African parties became the attraction around campus. Everyone that experienced it brought their friends, especially the girls. Some wondered loudly who the hell we were coming from the jungles of Africa to take their women! Occasionally tension developed but thankfully America had not then dived into its gun culture of today.
On the strategic geopolitical sphere, the period in question was the heat of America’s Cold War with The Soviet Union. Friendship between an African nation placed that African nation on the West’s adversarial column. Some African leaders lost their positions and even lives in the web.
The sum and substance of this picture is that America had boundless upper hand to forge strong ties with Africa. Granted, the ugly aroma of slavery was still somewhat fresh, every ingredient to create strong relations with Africa was present. In particular, the massive leaning of African youths that would shape the future of those relations was extremely positive. Not a single indicum of resistance existed. But America missed the ball and did not follow through.
— part 1 of 2 —
