America.gov (Washington, DC)
Gregory L. Garland
25 June 2008
The Eisenhower administration's creation of the Bureau of African Affairs half a century ago signaled a bold step away from what had been a Eurocentric, quasi-colonial policy view of Africa.
Far from being a decision made in a bureaucratic vacuum, the birth of the State Department's Africa Bureau resulted from the interplay of three of the great forces of the mid-20th century: the civil rights movement, the Cold War and decolonization.
Ralph Johnson Bunche of the State Department and Richard Nixon, who served two terms as Eisenhower's vice president before becoming president, exemplified these forces and, in a very important sense, are the intellectual godfathers of the Africa Bureau. These towering and very different men of the mid-20th century embodied the many, often contradictory threads of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Their paths rarely crossed, but the power of the ideas and interests they personified to a large extent determined and help explain the course of America's relationship with the continent for decades to come.
Interestingly, both men hailed from early 20th-century Southern California, a kind of post-frontier open society far from the racial castes of the segregated South and the class tensions of the industrial North. Both rose from humble backgrounds with the aid of academic scholarships to college.
A PROFESSIONAL AFRICANIST
By the 1940s, Ralph Bunche had established himself as a pre-eminent political scientist, a Harvard doctorate who built an African studies program at Howard University in Washington. He grasped acutely the intimate connection between institutionalized racism in the United States and colonialism in Africa. "As African-Americans," he wrote, "we are not permitted to share in the full fruit of democracy, but we are given some of the peelings from the fruit."
This professional Africanist had a far broader outlook, however. In 1941, he joined Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's team as it conducted a Carnegie Endowment-funded study of American race relations. Bunche wrote much of the groundbreaking work that study would produce, An American Dilemma (1944), which provided the blueprint for the next two decades of the civil rights struggle. He also understood the full implications of the Atlantic Charter, the 1941 U.S. and British document that proclaimed the freedom of all peoples as a central objective of the allied war cause.
After Pearl Harbor, Bunche briefly worked for the Office of Strategic Services -- precursor to the CIA -- as an Africa specialist. He then joined State's Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs as the resident Africanist, before moving to the newly established United Nations in 1945. There he focused on decolonization when he wasn't inventing international peacekeeping or serving as the U.N.'s premier troubleshooter, winning the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the 1948 Israeli-Arab cease-fire.
In 1949, President Truman offered Bunche a job as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern, South Asian and African affairs, but Bunche turned it down. After having taught at Howard University and served in the U.S. government in World War II, he refused to ever again live in a Washington ruled by Jim Crow, or to work in a department where Africa was, at best, a professional afterthought. As he explained at the time, "It is well known that there is Jim Crow in Washington. It is equally well known that no Negro finds Jim Crow congenial. I am a Negro." (Jim Crow refers to Jim Crow laws enacted in the United States between 1876 and 1965 that established segregation in public facilities based on race with supposedly "separate but equal" treatment for African-Americans.)
He spent the rest of his career and life at the United Nations, where he deserves considerable credit for the organization's leadership in pushing ahead with an early timetable for decolonization in Africa. As the organization's ranking American, he provided crucial behind-the-scenes encouragement to Washington to pressure Europeans to accelerate the independence of their African colonies. And it is here that Bunche's career intersected with that of Nixon.
AND A HARD-NOSED REALIST
A decade younger than Bunche, Richard Nixon was a member of the Greatest Generation, a Navy veteran from World War II. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he built a reputation as a Cold War attack dog. His most famous target was Alger Hiss, who had worked at the State Department from 1936 to 1946 in a variety of jobs focusing on post-World War II planning. Showing a genius for publicity, Nixon pressed a HUAC investigation of Hiss's links to the American Communist Party, which led to a conviction for perjury and 44 months in prison. His anticommunist credentials burnished, Nixon went on to the Senate, and then won a place alongside Eisenhower on the 1952 ticket.
Africa did not rank high on the White House's list of favored parts of the world in the 1950s. As for the State Department, it treated Africa functionally as an adjunct of Europe -- which, politically, it was. The Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs encompassed not only the African continent but the whole colonial world. Until Ghana gained its independence in 1957, there were only three sovereign countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Liberia, Ethiopia and South Africa.
The rest of the continent consisted of colonies possessed by our Western European allies. There were U.S. consulates scattered around what would eventually become national capitals but, as such, they reported to and took instructions from U.S. embassies in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon. These colonial powers were the heart of NATO, and it was the security and reconstruction of Western Europe that mattered most to them and to Washington. No ambassador to a NATO member-state was going to advocate placing support for African decolonization ahead of completing reconstruction and containing communism.
Ever the realist, Nixon saw the stakes differently, particularly after a 1957 trip to Africa awoke his strategic imagination. There he witnessed firsthand the dynamic changes under way and recognized Africa's potential: support for decolonization meant cultivating potential allies against communism, or at least deterring communist expansion.
Vice President Richard Nixon, center, with his wife Patricia, attends independence ceremonies in Accra, Ghana, on March 6, 1957.
It was during that trip that he and Bunche literally crossed paths for the first time. Nixon was representing the United States, and Bunche the United Nations, at the ceremonies marking the independence of Ghana, the first British colony in sub-Saharan Africa to win full independence. However, there is no record of any conversation between the two high-ranking Americans. A charismatic third American, Martin Luther King Jr., attracted the lion's share of attention from both the media and Ghanaians themselves.
Nixon's trip report recommended a new and assertive Africa policy of universal presence, economic development assistance, support for education, vibrant and visible cultural and information programs, and the creation of a Bureau of African Affairs headed by an assistant secretary. His approach offered a coherent vision of partnership with the region, a vision that today has become the hallmark of U.S.-Africa policy.
Nixon pressured the Senate in subsequent months to move forward with the creation of the new bureau. Historian Jonathan Helmreich has concluded that Nixon's aggressive needling was crucial in pushing the department's bureaucracy to follow through quickly on what was already a widely supported objective. In fact, Nixon's report dovetailed with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' well-established view that an orderly decolonization process was in the American interest to minimize Soviet influence. It is also clear that the ambitious Nixon was moving to beef up his foreign policy resume for a presidential run, and Africa offered a non-controversial opening that neither Eisenhower nor Dulles opposed.
All that said, Nixon's legacy is more than a bureaucratic reorganization. Over the ensuing years, the Africa Bureau would succeed in nurturing a corps of Africanists. The bureau's first assistant secretary, career foreign service officer Joseph Satterthwaite, set this process in motion, taking full advantage of the positions at all ranks suddenly being offered in dozens of new embassies. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, former Michigan Governor G. Mennon Williams raised the bureau's public profile in Washington and around the country with his campaign skills and political access.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
