The following is the text of a lecture delivered at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) by Haskell Ward, one of the UCLA African Studies Center's first master's graduates, examining 50 years of relations between the United States and Africa. For a link to the podcast of the lecture, click here.
Thank you so much Dr. Keller for that gracious and flattering introduction. It is a pleasure to be at UCLA again
As you know, I am currently Senior Vice President of Seacom and Global Aluminum. These are two U.S. managed companies directed by Bruce Wrobel, a visionary businessperson who brought me into his company because he wanted to do business in Africa but understood what he did not understand about Africa and that I could help.
UCLA is celebrating 50 years since the establishment of a formal Center of Scholarship devoted to Africa. At the State Department in Washington, the Africa Bureau just last year celebrated 50 years as an independent bureau within the Department. And in 2007 Ghana celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence. 1960, 50 years ago next year, saw a great wave of independence sweep over the continent.
My first trip to Africa was in 1962 to pre-independent Kenya. As mentioned earlier, my association with UCLA began in 1963. So the past 50 year policy period is one that I know quite well. I have adult and mature memories of Soapy Williams, proclaiming, "Africa was for the Africans!" So you see I have spent most of my adult life either working in matters surrounding Africa or on the Continent...
I believe now, at this very moment in time, that Africa is at the dawn of a great new Era. Economically, it is the only area of the world that is continuing to grow, African music, fine art, fashion and food is being exported like never before...even white girls come up to my wife and, when she's wearing braids, ask her who did her hair.
More Africans are also voluntarily immigrating to the United States and other areas than ever before, and more non Africans are going to Africa. My 25-year-old son, for instance, just left his lucrative job on Wall Street to take a job in finance that is based in Southern Africa. And my 22 year old daughter is joining the Peace Corp when she graduates from Spelman College next month. And, last but certainly not least, we cannot underestimate the "Obama Factor". A son of African is currently the President of the largest stable democracy on earth now.
So despite the daunting task of undertaking a fifty-year U.S. and Africa policy review and analysis in such a short period here today, my starting point must of necessity begin seventy-five years earlier. For even though Africa's first class scholars and policy makers no longer lay blame for today's problems on the continent's colonial past, no serious assessment of current conditions on the continent can ignore the reality of the impact of this history. Therefore, for our purposes, I will begin not with the post colonial period and its policy dynamics. Rather I will start with the traumatic impact on the continent of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 and its consequent scramble for Africa, which resulted in European economic, political and military dominance on the continent.
When reviewing Africa's fifty year post independence period record, one possible reason for the enormous disappointment of so many people is that we have tended in recent decades to minimize the continuing impact of the nineteenth century scramble. Having little or no concern for the continent's natural ethnic boundaries or its historical cultural affinities, Europe carved up Africa with reckless abandon. The inhumane manner and consequences of this balkanization rivals the greatest tragedies ever to beset the continent. The ongoing Congo/Zaire/Congo civil and military cauldron is an excellent illustration of the grotesque results of this Conference. Imagine a country the size of Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and Norway being handed to King Leopold of Belgium as his personal property!
My good friend Basil Davidson has written extensively on the brutal impact of the cultural dispossession of Africans throughout the Diaspora during the period of slavery and its aftermath; however, Africa's role in the world and its plethora of post independence traumas are directly linked to the consequences of the Berlin conference. And in the modern post independence era, U.S. policy is directly tied to this legacy. That is why I had to digress at the outset of this talk today to refer to this event because all which follows in the period of concern to us is causally related to the decisions made at that conference however much we may wish to repress this historical fact.
The Conference is also directly related to our discussion today because African attempts to remedy the effects of Berlin have met with consistent U.S. political opposition. Nowhere is this opposition more apparent than in our efforts to frustrate concerted efforts by African political leaders to unite in addressing, in a pan African manner, the continent's problems.
One might ask why the Berlin Conference is pertinent to an examination of modern U.S./African policy issues. The answer, to some may appear elliptical. And that is because we were not a party to that Conference or to the spoils of its outcome. Put another way, the United States was never a colonial power in Africa. And because of that the U.S. had a great opportunity to shape post independent relations between Africa and the West. Indeed, Africans looked to the United States to play a neutral and constructive role in bridging relations with the West.
When one examines Africa's various independence struggles, references to our own War of Independence with Britain were often cited by Africans as having had profound moral and political impacts on their movements. I will never forget the reference to our own independence struggle by Angolan liberation leaders in their first meeting with President Carter in 1977. Angolan leaders expressed disappointment in this meeting with our political and military support for our Portuguese NATO allies. They mentioned specifically that they, too, were aware of and affected by the shot heard round the world.
In my judgment and experience, one of the greatest lost opportunities in our relations with Africa in the post independence period was our refusal to establish a policy framework with Africa that was free of the European colonial past. In fact, however, our policies in Africa over most of the past fifty years have been identical to those of Africa's former so-called colonial masters and therein lies the rub...the elephant in the room in other words. That is the essential ingredient in our modern-day relationship with Africa and its leaders.
I like to characterize this period, the immediate years following the independence of Ghana in 1957 and Guinea in 1958 as turning points and prime examples of our lost opportunity with the continent. Long before, Nkrumah's policies became overtly hostile to U.S. policies; as such, we did not want to see him succeed in his Pan African aspirations. Moreover, to this day, many see U.S. complicity in his overthrow. Much the same is said of the death and overthrow of Lumumba. The prevailing sentiment, which I have heard for most of the past fifty years, is that a strong charismatic African leader is antithetical to U.S. and African interests and must, therefore be eliminated.
What, in fact, was this great, lost opportunity? In a phrase, it was our failure to differentiate. Differentiate what? The answer, concisely, was the failure to differentiate our policies and values from those of a still resistant and unfriendly Europe. For instance, the United States naively viewed the nature and force of Guinea's break with France as hostile us. And sadly and telling, in 50 years of post independent U.S. engagement with Africa, our government never undertook the basic, independent study and review of what are our national interests really were in Africa. We never really explored how, in the immediate post-independent period in the freshness of warm relations and great expectations, our interests intersected and/or converged with those of Europe. Moreover, on the flip side, we never seriously considered how these interests might diverge.
It was understandable, in the pre independence period, that our relations with Nigeria should rightfully have been conducted through our bilateral relations and diplomatic channels with Great Britain and those with Senegal through our relations with France, etc. However, in the post-independence period, when we began to conduct our relationships with African countries like Nigeria, for example, through their own embassies, it is not at all understandable why our strategic policies toward those countries would continue to be coordinated, until very recently, lock stock and barrel with our kith and kin, the British.
In the strategic arena our political relations with the continent were even more disappointing to Africans. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Empire following Glasnost, our policies in Africa were dictated by something called Soviet Containment. Soviet containment was an effort to reduce Soviet influence in Africa. It is truly fair to say that in the absence of this dynamic, we had no policy interest in Africa that was separate from those of our European allies. To be sure, Africans quickly learned to play this card well and to their own narrow political interests. Many Africans knew that they could get more if they threatened to create an alliance with the Soviet Union and vice versa. The change of partners in Egypt, Ethiopia and Guinea are good examples of this.
More recently, in the post-9/11 period, U.S. policies were formulated with an almost singular preoccupation on antiterrorist strategies and the containment and destruction of Al Qaida cells of influence on the continent.
It is in the areas of development policy, however, that we and others in the West have experienced our greatest failures in Africa. This is so largely because while well intentioned in many instances, we have sought to export our values and ways of doing things to Africa. In both the public and private sectors, NGOs notwithstanding, for fifty years it has been our way or the highway. Our money or no money. For 50 years our aid to Africa has been tied to our own formulations, priorities and institutions. The approaches made by the Bretton Woods financial institutions have not been different. In like manner, the major international financial institutions have dictated the terms of development under the rubrics of partnership and sustainability while excluding Africans from the councils of governance and staff leadership. These institutions, the World Bank, IMF, IFC, and others, have conditioned their aid on structural adjustment and other private sector strategies while shielding themselves from the consequences and accountabilities associated with outcomes and policy failures. Western advisers and planners, with a heavy dose of U.S. and U.S. foundation input, introduced centralized macro policies through devices such as five and ten year centralized macro economic development plans not a feature of private free market systems.
These same free market Western countries, with no such centralized macro systems themselves, sternly criticized socialist African countries for following their policy directives. Yet these stern lectures neglected to point out that it was their mandated "take it or leave it" conditions which were the origin of these centralized systems! Can you imagine the hypocrisy in that.
From their side, Africa and Africans have experienced failed leadership, lack of concerted approaches to problem solving, and rampant corruption in public sector administration.
Given all of this, what exactly has worked in the past 50 years? And where do we go from here?
The first big success, not surprisingly since I was a member of the original teams, has been the Peace Corps! The Peace Corps, though intended to help Africa, has also helped the United States. It has increased our knowledge of Africa, and our reputation as a compassionate and giving society. More importantly, however, it has populated our universities, our policy centers, and the NGO community with first hand Africa experience and expertise. The Corps and its veterans have become lobbyists for more enlightened U.S. policies toward the continent, especially to those countries in which many volunteers have served. And, perhaps of greatest importance, the Peace Corps has increased our meager knowledge of the continent.
In addition, our great universities, like UCLA, have emerged over the past fifty years as true centers of excellence on matters pertaining to the continent. And new global partnerships are beginning to bring the continent's health problems under control. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the vast commitments which we, Americans and Africans, in particular, and others as well, especially UN agencies, have devoted to the pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS and Malaria. In just a few decades, under the leadership of the Carter Center, River blindness has been virtually eradicated from the continent. The vigorous and successful concerted attacks on measles and Polio (in part spearheaded by the Gates Foundation) stand as testaments to what a cooperative international approach can do to solve Africa's problems.
The challenge remains, though, of setting up structures that bring Africans themselves to the table so that they can play the lead role in devising strategies for designing the continent's future. It is no longer acceptable for entertainers like Bono, "BranJolie" and Madonna (as nice as they all are) to carry the policy and conscience torch on behalf of the continent. Viet Nam taught us that the U.S. can never know enough to be able to shoulder the responsibility of running a country other than our own. Our involvement in Iraq in this generation teaches us the same thing. That is to say, we should never, ever, ever, presume to know more about Africa than the African's do. If we do we will not be able to work effectively in partnership with Africans to fulfill the continent's needs. Despite the half century of engagement with the continent, our ignorance in almost every realm remains our greatest challenge.
Not since dawn of the Kennedy presidency have Africans expressed as much hope in the United States as now exists with the emergence of a son of Africa and the United States to guide our policies and relations. Obama's first step in appointing Johnnie Carson as his Assistant Secretary for Africa is a good start. Carson is an experienced diplomatic student of Africa. He knows the continent as well or better than anyone in U.S. government today. And I believe he understands that we no longer live in a bipolar, ideologically driven world. And I also think he knows that U.S. control, in a new international economic order, will not be the last word on how things should necessarily work.
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Within this new context, however our policies are not unimportant. To move from where we have come to where we must go under the conditions of the current global economic meltdown, are critical for us and for Africa.
In the worst economic environment of Africa's post-independence period, of the last 50 years, the continent confronts some of its greatest challenges. The test for the Obama Administration will be to find new ways to respond vigorously to crises in Africa, while celebrating and reinforcing many positive trends of progress on the continent.
It is critical to bear witness to the continuing conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where and this is hard to believe in these days when we assume the world would take note of mass catastrophe some five million people have died in recent years. It is essential to respond to Zimbabwe's descent into destitution, having been the breadbasket of southern Africa just a few short years ago. Our response to the genocide in Darfur, the ongoing crisis of HIV/Aids and the enticement of Africa's health professionals, trained by African taxpayer dollars, to hospitals in the privileged world--how we respond to these will all be measures of our humanity.
At the same time, we must not let the harsh realities obscure the equally real progress and potential that is Africa today. Here is just one telling marker of how little Africa's good news has been told. Three weeks ago the International Monetary Fund warned that Ethiopia's economic growth could slow to six per cent this year, as the international downturn affects it leading foreign exchange earners, such as coffee and tourism. Just think of that one of the poorest countries has been growing so fast that six per cent growth represents a sharp decline! And Ethiopia is not an isolated example in Africa today.
Thanks in large part to the work of the Corporate Council on Africa and the modern website allAfrica.com, which today has millions of hits a year, the Western world now knows that Africa is open for business. The continent has become one of the most reliable generators of profits for investors, both international and local.
All across Africa, energetic entrepreneurs from market women to technology developers, such as SEACOM, the brainchild of Bruce Wrobel and its President Brian Herlihy. Seacom is laying down a fiber optic cable from Mumbai to Capetown designed to dramatically increase broadband capacity in Western.
All these visionaries are building the businesses that will sustain the growth of a middle class and gradually address the problem of extreme poverty. African media are also becoming more skilled and more engaged in demanding transparency and accountability from politicians and businesses alike.
Leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf are exemplifying honest, effective governance in the most difficult situations. In recent days, after a democratically elected president was forced from office in Madagascar, African leaders were quick to denounce the new administration. Time Magazine two weeks ago, cited "Africa as a business destination" as one of ten ideas that are changing the world.
What we are beginning to slowly recognize in this country, and it has come largely from the long and painstaking work of Tami Hultman and Reed Kramer, founders of AllAfrica.com, is that Africa is not so different from everywhere else, except, perhaps, in embodying the extremes. Some of the world's most vexing problems are there combined with a vast, still largely untapped potential. If we can embrace these dual realities and respond creatively, in a spirit of collaboration and mutual respect, the next fifty years of U.S./Africa relations can build a new, prosperous future on the missed opportunities of the past.
