Washington, D.C. — This past spring a new organization - Africa Action - was formed through the merger of three of the oldest Africa advocacy groups in the United States. The oldest of these three groups, the American Committee on Africa, was formed in 1953 when South African ANC leader Walter Sisulu asked for the creation of an organization to educate Americans about the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The other two groups - The Washington Office on Africa and the Africa Policy Information Center - pioneered the use of information and communications technology to support advocacy work on behalf of Africa.
Announcing the formation of the group, Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, president of Africa Action's Board of Directors and former executive director of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, declared that more support than ever was needed for "Africa's real liberation." The continent, Reverend Walker said, "is central to the global and national struggle against racism and injustice."
Global economic arrangements enable a wealthy white minority to rule a world that's largely populated by people of color, says Africa Action executive director Salih Booker. In the first of what will be a continuing series of occasional interviews with Africa advocacy groups and NGOs in the United States, allAfrica's Charles Cobb Jr. spoke with Booker about the new organization.
Why was Africa Action created?
Africa Action is a new name for a really old organization. In fact, Africa Action represents the merger of the United States' three oldest organizations that are exclusively concerned with advocacy on African affairs, explicitly to promote the full spectrum of human rights in Africa - and that's political and civil as well as economic and social rights. The organizations started with the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) in 1953, organized as a vehicle for educating Americans about the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. This was a multi-racial group of individuals who were also political activists. And it was the premier organization in providing a platform for Africans to speak to Americans about their independence struggles, to try and rally American support, and to try and change American policy to be more supportive of the decolonization process in Africa and the anti-apartheid struggle in Africa. The ACOA was headquartered in New York and it gave birth to the Africa Fund in 1966, which was the education and research arm and sort of focused on providing publications and research for the campaigns to educate Americans about African liberation struggles. At this point a lot of African governments had achieved their independence and these organizations continued to work with the new governments, with the remaining independence and liberation movements on the continent. And in 1972 they created something called the Washington Office on Africa, which was basically to replicate in Washington, what you had in New York. But being in Washington the organization would be more responsible for focusing on monitoring the U.S. government - the Congress and federal branch agencies. That organization gave birth to what became APIC - The Africa Policy Information Center in 1978. And again, it's focus was information - how to gather and disseminate information that could be used by activists who were trying to change American policies.
So we've been negotiating this merger of the three organizations for a year, and finally at the beginning of 2001 we finished the negotiation of the merger and chose the name of 'Africa Action' to emphasize the continuity with the past; that we will continue to educate the American public and to advocate new policies, but that we are also an activist organization that saw it as important to help mobilize public actions aimed at changing existing U.S. policies, and also to mobilize public actions aimed at changing international policies because it's those larger international institutions that are even more influential in Africa than the U.S. government - institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization.
Why did you have merge? Why couldn't you continue as three separate organizations?
The work of the three organizations was always complementary. The strength of the New York operation was really in people - its relationships with networks of people. The primary networks were faith community leaders - primarily a network of over 200 mainly African-American churches as well as mainstream denominational offices. The second major network was state and local elected officials - city council people, state assembly people, mayors of cities around the country. And third was a youth network that rose and fell according to the levels of political activism among that younger generation of which we think there is now a new rise that we are hope to work with. These relationships were the strength of the New York office. AGOA was a vehicle for mobilizing major civic leaders at the local level around the United States who were really interested in Africa. And these networks were critical in the victory of the anti-apartheid movement. They are still looking for vehicles for playing a role and influencing American relations with Africa.
But to mobilize people you must have information. You have got to have good information and analysis of what's happening in Africa and what's happening in U.S. policy. Being in the United States most people don't learn anything about Africa in the education system or in popular culture or in mainstream media. And so the strength of the Washington operation was always taking advantage of the new information and communications technology to make more and better information available on developments in Africa and U.S. and international policies toward Africa. So the merger is really a marriage of these strengths - the information with the mobilization, the capacity through electronic distribution, website, publications, other media work to help educate the public but to marry that with a capacity to really mobilize churches, local elected officials, youth activists to take creative actions designed to change Americans policy. So marrying these two talents was seen as something we have always wanted to do. It became possible because suddenly all three organizations didn't have an executive director and it became possible to consider merging them into one. And the final reason also is that these organizations have always been part of the same family and have had the same values and politics and we realized that we were often competing with each other for the same scarce sources of funding whether its individual contributions from loyal supporters around the country or soliciting contributions that support this kind of work.
Are funds getting scarcer for advocacy groups, for Africa interested groups?
I would say yes, certainly in terms of the larger actors in the philanthropical community. While they would say they are still active on African affairs their focus tends to be in Africa. Very few of them of them are willing to provide significant support to organization in the U.S. whose focus really is advocacy and really is supporting human rights in Africa, both political as well as economic. There has always been a limited amount of support in the mainstream philanthropic community. A lot of our support, certainly since 1953, came from very small progressive foundations - a lot of them New York based; some of them based on the west coast - and from prominent, wealthy individuals who had progressive politics and were strong supporters of decolonization and following that were strong opponents of neocolonialism. And there is still a lot of support there. There is still a strong community of progressive individuals who provide significant individual support and then there are still strong connections we have with small foundations. But in terms of accessing very large amounts of funding, that is becoming even more difficult, particularly in the aftermath of the National Summit on Africa project which was a very costly project largely bankrolled b y two major foundations that was seen as not succeeding and accomplishing its objectives and yet costing a great deal of money. That's money that perhaps could have been better spent providing direct support to the more effective advocacy organizations.
What advocacy organizations are advocating for has shifted. Is there a relationship between this shift and the ability of organizations like yours to get resources?
That's absolutely true and it is also historically true in terms of the advocacy organizations that were most strongly advocating decolonization, anti-imperialism, anti-apartheid politics always had difficulty in accessing mainstream foundation money. Organizations that focused their advocacy on gaining greater training for Africans, for greater government commitment to human resource development in Africa tended to fare better with mainstream foundations because they weren't seen as addressing controversial political issues. And that was true all the way through the anti-apartheid years. It was very difficult to raise money for anti-apartheid education and mobilization campaigns. With the end of apartheid, however, everyone, including those in the foundation community likes to think of themselves as having been on the right side of that struggle and having supported the anti-apartheid struggle. Now if our political agenda continues to be human rights but also increasingly emphasizing economic rights and social rights of which we think the right to health should be a burning priority in light of the AIDS pandemic, you have a split where the philanthropic community is probably more predisposed to supporting organizations that are sort of private sector free market friendly.
For example?
Organizations like the National Summit on Africa itself at one point; it was very favorably disposed toward promoting the free trade agenda of the then Clinton Administration. Organizations that are less aggressive in criticizing institutions like the World Bank, the IMF or the World Trade Organization, which have far greater sway and negative impact on African development. Some of them are directly aligned with the private sector, like the Corporate Council on Africa. And some sort of take support from the private sector and avoid a sort of aggressive critique of existing economic relations with Africa. Then there are organizations like the African-American Institute or the Constituency for Africa who do some advocacy work but I think are reluctant to be critical of the existing order of economic relations with Africa. In part some of that may flow from their desire to continue to access funding from sources that are aggressively pro free trade as defined by the private sector. Because of our focus - it being very much a human rights approach - we're really challenging the state of relations between Africa and the rich countries. We're trying to describe a political economy as it exists today as a form of global apartheid, where you have global minority rule where you have a small number of wealthy, primarily white countries that rule a world that's populated primarily by people of color of whom 800 million Africans are a significant part. We're focusing on the need to democratize the institutions that currently serve global apartheid like the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. Power is exercised in those institutions by a small handful of countries, making those institutions very much minority rule institutions. So, we feel being honest to our history our values our politics we end up having to advocate a new approach in terms of U.S. and international relations with Africa that seeks to address the past 500 years of slavery, of colonialism that requires that we call for a cancellations of all of Africa's debt to rich countries and creditor institutions but also that we go beyond that and promote a public discourse about reparations. What is it that the wealthy countries owe Africa for all the wealth they have sucked out of Africa? It requires that our current work - even around AIDS - focus not only on the disease, but the larger structural causes of the spread of that disease and its relationship to poverty, and its relationship to the fact that African governments don't have the freedom to address the AIDS pandemic as they may wish - they can't spend much on health care if they are spending their money repaying debts. They can't have access to more affordable medicines unless they are willing to do battle with the World Trade Organization or some of the richer countries that don't want to see poor countries finding ways around current patent laws or intellectual property rights.
Let me ask you right here then, whom do you enter into that discussion with? At the WTO in Seattle it seemed to me that African nations specifically, and third world nations generally, were on the other side of the issue as you describe it, looking for ways to become more involved with the globalization that is taking place although they are quite concerned about the debt issue? Is this a discussion that a group like Africa Action engages in with western powers and western nations or is this a discussion that Africa Action engages in with other African nations with the idea they will pick up this ball and run with it?
Well one of the things that has happened with the evolution of Africa Action in almost over fifty years is the nature of our relationships with Africa partners. In the early days those Africa partners were independence movements and political activists and liberation movements and then the early governments of independent African nations. But over time I would say there has been a real shift in terms of who are really the major actors that represent the most significant forces for positive change in Africa. And unfortunately, many African governments became after independence, less representative of the interests of their full citizenry. Many of them were overthrown by military dictatorships. Many of them pursued a form of one party rule that in the end stifled democratic participation. And during that period the organizations that we began developing stronger relations with were the civil society actors in Africa - human rights organizations, trade unionists, activist scholars and intellectuals, women's organizations, development organizations. And these became - I would say today they are our principal partners in terms of African organizations with whom we share values and political views. So it is a dialogue very much among like-minded actors but it is also a discourse we have with African governments and western governments.
With regard to Africa governments we think to some degree they are at a disadvantage in the sense that the international system as it exists today - this global apartheid - rewards governments who are more loyal to the interests of the predominant forces in the international system than they are to their own citizens' aspirations. So if you're a government official from South Africa or Nigeria at these international trade talks there's a lot of pressure on you, not just from rich country governments but from huge multi-national corporations, from the World Bank, from the IMF to go along with the agenda established by those forces as opposed to representing the poor majorities of your country at those kinds of gatherings. But even so, there are still sources of friction. The African governments represented at the last WTO major talks in Seattle where there were major demonstrations found themselves more in line many of the protestors mainly because they found themselves excluded from the real talks that were going on at the WTO which was among a small group of seven guys essentially, who represented the G7 countries. So even officials from African governments have been clamoring for more transparency and more democratic participation by poor countries even within the context of the WTO or similar organizations. However, you're right, many of them are mainly focused on how to get as much as they can out of globalization and particularly increase foreign direct investment. And what kind of compromises does that force them to make in order to attract those benefits?
In terms of our dialogue with western governments, the U.S. government in particular, I would say that AIDS pandemic - because of the scale of it; this emergency across the continent - is somewhat of a wake-up call and is forcing a lot of policymakers in the west to reconsider the conventional wisdom about how to finance development in poor countries and I think there is an opening there.
Why is it forcing such a reconsideration?
In part because of the pure toll taken on human life. In two decades this disease has claimed the life of 22 million people. It's soon going to be the worse plague in human history, outstripping the bubonic plague of the 14th century. It is clear that poor countries which is where the epidemic is most concentrated will not be able to survive this crisis without major cooperation and interventions by the wealthy countries. And this forces the wealthy countries to raise the question of how much inequality in the world is acceptable, whether it's on a moral basis or whether the concern is about political stability in the world order. So I think this crisis is to some degree forcing a rethinking. For example it forces rich countries to say, 'Should we really be asking these countries to pay back these old debts when they're sending more money to Washington in terms of debt repayment - out of Africa some thirteen and a half billion a year - than African countries receive in new loans, new aid and new foreign direct investment?' and in the last five years there's been a decrease in official development assistance in Africa. So, it's the sheer magnitude of this health crisis can no longer be ignored - because of the death to toll and because, of course, it knows no boundaries ultimately. If it is not defeated in Africa it will continue to spread the world over. That kind of a wake-up call has allowed us to have a discourse with policymakers in the U.S. who think we ought to change the nature of our relations with African countries, to have a different approach towards financing development that includes canceling debt. It also includes looking at no more loans, but grant financing for development from bilateral sources as well as multilateral sources. And that also looks at issues of historical responsibility as in cases like Zaire, now Congo, or Liberia, or Sudan where arguably the United States has played a direct contributing role to the economic and political crises that some of these countries face.
Do you think this is driving the somewhat surprising, and somewhat energetic Bush overtures toward Africa?
I think there are several things. One is the Bush administration learned something from the Clinton administration: Public perceptions will be greatly influenced by high-level rhetoric and by symbolic overtures to Africa. So trips to Africa, visits by African leaders, ceremonies that that give higher visibility to African items on the legislative agenda or other agenda can go a long way toward dispelling the belief - strongly held - that Africa is really not important to the Bush administration which is what candidate Bush more or less said during the campaign. Secondly, you have the first African-American Secretary of State in U.S. history who is a very savvy soldier-politician and who knows that his own legacy to some degree will be also measured by the development of U.S.-Africa relations during his tenure. He also realizes that he must be seen as caring about Africa's future and American relations with Africa. And being seenas caring may be more important than actual policy, unfortunately. Thus he was the first secretary of state to visit any number of African nations so early in his tenure. He takes every opportunity to meet with visiting African heads of state. He's becoming a point person on the U.S. response to the global AIDS pandemic. I think we will continue to see this kind of symbolic and rhetorical commitment to Africa and to developing a 'realistic' - as they would put it - U.S. relationship with Africa. But I don't think the substance is there. I think it completely fails to address the severity of Africa's immediate challenges.
Well, this was exactly the criticism that was made of the Clinton administration. Are you saying that with regard to Africa, all we are seeing is a continuation of the Clinton administration?
At present what we are seeing is in fact the continuation of the Clinton administration's rhetoric and symbolism. And symbolism and rhetoric are significant at a certain moment in history. I would argue that while I was a critic of the Clinton administration, the president's two trips to Africa, particularly the first and longer trip in 1998, along with the fact that every cabinet member was forced to visit Africa at least once, put Africa on the agenda of each major agency in the U.S. government in a way it had not been before - at least forcing senior policymakers to know something about Africa, to think about Africa and to think about how their own agencies would related to priority challenges in Africa. The Clinton administration was unwilling to commit significant resources to Africa in terms of financial resources, greater diplomatic resources beyond these trips. And I think the Bush administration picks up right there with the same high commitment for rhetoric and symbolic acts but really unwillingness to commit significant financial or other security or political resources that are necessary to address the challenges Africa faces. AIDS is the best example. The Bush administration only announced a contribution of 200 million dollars to Kofi Annan's effort to raise a 10 billiondollar global AIDS fund. That's a figure that is so small it's insulting. And yet the Bush administration will end up spending more Global AIDS than the Clinton administration did in its first year in office perhaps by twice as much. But that's just an indicator of how low the expenditures are as opposed to a true measure of whether the United States is paying its fair share.
Which brings us full circle back to then to the role of advocacy. Can we assume then that a key role of a group like Africa Action is to target the Bush administration seeking to transform symbolism into substance? And are there a set of priorities that you can outline?
Very much so. We believe that that U.S. - Africa policy in the foreseeable future - and I would argue that this was true in the past - will be largely determined by the strength of public advocacy efforts on the part of concerned citizens who really do care about U.S. relations with Africa. This concern exists for any host of reasons: ancestry, political values, world view, experiences working and traveling or living in Africa, human rights concerns, etcetera. There are a lot of Americans - diverse groups of Americans - who really do care and think that the United States should have an entirely different relationship with Africa. So we have a wide community to mobilize. The Bush administration is only going to do as much as it is forced to do by two things. One is developments in Africa itself that will force certain responses, or will require certain responses on the part of Washington. This has always been true; even if an administration wants to ignore Africa, Africa countries have a way of putting themselves on the global agenda because of developments in their own countries for better or for worse. Secondly, they will respond to the pressure of American citizens if it reaches a critical mass. That can influence the Congress and well as the executive branch - and the media. That's what happened during the anti-apartheid movement; a critical mass was reached whereby it was simply seen as un-American and as against U.S. interests to be seen as supporting a white minority, racist apartheid regime. And that critical mass really changed the picture and allowed advocacy groups who had been working on this for years to suddenly mobilize a larger number of people and to convince policymakers that the consensus among American public opinion was in favor of freedom and democracy in South Africa and opposed to white minority rule. And that kind of movement forced government policy to change. We believe that the AIDS pandemic - this public health crisis - offers a similar transformative moment whereby an American consensus is emerging which says that it's unacceptable to write off the lives of 25 million people infected with HIV or AIDS in Africa today and to say we're prepared to sit back and watch them die because we're not willing to contribute the maybe twenty five dollars per person that's necessary to financing an adequate international vehicle for funding prevention, care and treatment in Africa. It's the same transformative moment that as education increases people will say 'And it makes no sense to tell these African governments they should be paying money back to Washington when they need to spend that on clinics and hospitals at home.' So we're optimistic that this focus on health and the pandemic will help create this new consensus to change a number of specific policies.
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While the campaign around Africa's right to health focusing on the structural obstacles preventing Africans from realizing the right to health absorbs a lot of our work. We have other important work divided into several big thematic priorities. One is a focus on 'key' countries. Countries like South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan and Algeria, simply because we think they're such large actors both economically, politically and militarily that they are going to be major influences for better or for worse in their regions and that the U.S. should be devoting more attention to these particular relations.
A third major emphasis is on refugee and immigration issues. Africa is home to the largest number of refugees for any continent but it's also a matter of immigration issues in the United States. There's a real need to raise the ceiling and numbers of African immigrants to the United States. The African immigrant community in the U.S. is one of the most vibrant, dynamic - the most highly educated of all immigrant communities and we think a very important force for change in U.S. relations with Africa and very important community that we work with.
And there is peacemaking.
Peacemaking?
Africans have made serious efforts to resolve their conflicts but there is a real lack of support and commitment from the larger international community to support Africa efforts and to provide the kind of resources that would be necessary to consummate these peace deals. Take Angola. When the major accords were reached in the early 90s to bring the war to an end, to have elections, and a UN mission was established, they didn't follow-through with the resources necessary to ensure that there really was disarmament and demobilization of the requisite number of troops on both sides before the elections. So elections take place, Savimbi looses and he was able to go right back to war because he never demobilized or disarmed.
The Congo crisis has a very ambitious settlement plan, but it needed to be ambitious given the number of countries involved in that conflict. And it made perfect sense in terms of the sequencing of what must happen in order for a withdrawal of all foreign forces and the establishment of a Congolese government accountable to the Congolese people. But after they signed it you can't leave it to the warring sides to honor every piece of the peace agreement. They always going to try and exploit it to their own advantages to the point were it undermines the peace agreements. There really needs to be another a neutral vehicle that is pushing all sides to the conflict to implement what they have agreed on and that pressure has to be positive and negative in terms of economic and other incentives and sanctions where necessary.
The Lome Accords for Sierra Leone again achieved a ceasefire, which was very significant. And provided a framework for the demobilizing and disarming of all the Revolutionary United Front soldiers and other militias, many of these being child soldiers. And it offered a plan for reintegrating them into civil life, which is something that has to happen and requires resources and training and skills. But once the parties signed the accords it was like the international community walked away and expected them to implement this on their own and of course that didn't happen despite the presence of a sort of B-string UN peacekeeping operation because the most advanced militaries of the western countries weren't prepared to contribute any troops and only contributed some transportation. So you ended up with poorer country soldiers who lacked the requisite weaponry and communications systems and very often the necessary training for this kind of operation.
We are trying to argue that it is possible to resolve these conflicts in Africa with greater cooperation and resources from the international community and the U.S. should provide leadership here. It will be an uphill battle.
