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.
Serving under Secretary of State James A. Baker III a generation later, Herman Cohen seized the opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War to achieve a remarkable series of policy successes in southern Africa that helped pave the way to majority rule in South Africa itself. (For a full chronology of AF assistant secretaries, visit the State Department Web site.)
These and other assistant secretaries, and the professionals they led, have become what one renowned Africanist, Professor Emeritus Crawford Young of the University of Wisconsin, describes as "regionalists within the system." These advocates did not often win the big policy battles with other regions and with what Young called "globalists," but they generated the kind of well-informed perspective that had been missing.
ENGAGING WITH AFRICA, FACING RACISM AT HOME
In the 1950s, Eisenhower and Nixon also faced the changing landscape of racism back home. They saw clearly that segregationist policies were undermining America's credibility as the world leader for freedom and democracy. Those policies stood in stark opposition to the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the seminal human rights document of the post-World War II era.
Africans perceived this contradiction more acutely than anyone. As the rhetoric of the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Union took full advantage of segregationist laws to win African hearts and minds. Africans didn't have to be reminded that white Europeans had built up their empires on the backs of black men, leveling or co-opting their pre-European institutions in the interest of imperial stability and profit while keeping them subordinate within the colonial system. Soviet propaganda had only to add that white Americans had built their own prosperity on the back of black descendants of Africans, and kept them subservient under Jim Crow laws. Marxism offered the easy answer of an ideology that categorized racism as capitalistic, promising that the dictatorship of the proletariat would eliminate all such prejudices.
At the same time, it is not commonly known that the State Department, beginning during the Truman administration, had encouraged civil rights efforts to defeat legally based racial discrimination. In a landmark 1948 case, the Justice Department filed a brief before the Supreme Court that used State Department language asserting the damage to foreign relations of racial discrimination at home. A similar brief was filed in support of what became Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled racially segregated public schools were unequal and therefore unconstitutional. That decision was a classic example of the diplomacy of deeds, actions speaking louder than words: America was living up to its ideals.
Three years later, in 1957, Eisenhower faced another civil rights crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. The White House took account of official embassy reports from Africa and elsewhere about how foreign publics were closely following the crisis as a test of American intentions to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Eisenhower's decisive handling of the crisis further strengthened the image of an America living up to its creed. It was in the immediate aftermath of Little Rock that the Bureau of African Affairs was born.
To be sure, as with so much else in his career, political opportunism played a role in Nixon's support of civil rights -- the backing of African-Americans in the pivotal northern industrial states. Still, there's a consensus that his position at this point in his career was driven as much by morality and Cold War strategy as by ambition. In 1960, Jackie Robinson, the gifted second baseman of the Dodgers who had integrated professional baseball, wrote a favorable commentary about Nixon. Then a presidential candidate, Nixon thanked Robinson in a letter, noting that "I have consistently taken a strong position on civil rights, not only for the clear-cut moral considerations involved, but for other reasons which reach beyond our nation's borders." Without strong action on civil rights, Nixon continued, "we will suffer in the eyes of the emerging nations and uncommitted peoples. Beyond this, our present struggle with the forces of atheistic communism is an economic as well as an ideological battle. To deny ourselves the full talent and energies of 17 million Negro Americans in this struggle would be stupidity of the greatest magnitude."
FORGING CLOSER TIES WITH AFRICA
Ralph Bunche's legacy epitomized the profound interest of African-Americans in Africa. Decades before Vice President Nixon called for cultural exchange programs to help educate future African leaders, a handful of colleges and universities (many of them historically black) were already performing the task, largely unnoticed by white America. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, a graduate of Pennsylvania's Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, led Ghana to independence. Mozambique's Eduardo Mondlane, founder of the FRELIMO liberation movement, graduated from Oberlin College and received a doctorate from Northwestern University.
Starting in the 19th century, American missions operated schools that brought primary education to Africans where none had existed. These schools -- open to all -- educated generations of African leadership and in many countries have bequeathed a heritage of goodwill toward Americans. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the current president of Liberia, attend a United Methodist high school. President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola has said that he learned to play basketball in a Methodist mission.
Today, historically black colleges and universities and the Protestant missionary community remain the core constituencies for African affairs in the United States. This base has expanded to take in a broad swath of universities who have developed their own African studies curricula and have benefited from grants conferred by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other federal agencies. Clemson University and UCLA (Bunche's alma mater) are just as likely to weigh in on African issues as Howard University or Fisk University.
One crucial African legacy of the civil rights movement is the current U.S. immigration regime. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 scuttled the national quotas that had long favored European countries, opening the doors to large-scale immigration from the developing world. Africans lagged at first, but by the 1970s, the first influx of Ethiopians reached the United States. Nixon, the politician, would have appreciated the fact that Ethiopian-Americans now constitute a sophisticated, well-organized ethnic community, following in the pattern of Armenian, Polish and other powerful ethnic lobbies. Somalis, Eritreans, Kenyans, Cameroonians and Nigerians have all settled in the United States in large numbers, and are wielding influence in the foreign policy debate.
Another legacy of the civil rights movement is the generational change in attitude toward Africa on this side of the Atlantic. Bunche would have been proud to behold the engagement that Americans are conducting with Africans and vice versa. The Peace Corps has remained active since 1961, with thousands of alumni maintaining a lifelong commitment to Africa.
Celebrities ranging from Bono and Danny Glover to Mia Farrow have carried the banner for African causes and, most important, drawn the attention of young people to the continent. A series of commercially and critically successful Hollywood films such as "Blood Diamond" and "Hotel Rwanda" have featured serious African themes, starred African actors, and been made in Africa. U.S. business is beginning to pay closer attention to Africa, as well, with the Corporate Council on Africa and Business Council for International Understanding serving as voices of the private sector.
Over the past half-century, the U.S.-Africa relationship has grown as deep as it has become wide. African-Americans not only make up a significant part of the U.S. population, but have spent four centuries building America and defining socially, culturally and morally what it really is. As Bunche implicitly assumed, Africa is a part of who we are as Americans. Nixon's realistic acknowledgment was simpler: Africa matters geopolitically. American ignores that fact at its own peril. Today, a half century after the creation of the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department, U.S. engagement with Africa is more important than ever, for both Africans and Americans.
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