A Realist's Minimal U.S. Policy Toward Africa

It bears no repeating that as of mid-2000, the agonies of the African continent were multiplying when its citizens could afford them least. This can be divined from the daily press in the West and in Africa. Ordinary citizens on the continent also confirm it.

Consider central Africa, epicenter of the gravest inter-state conflict in African history, characterized by a series of interlocking wars from the Horn of Africa to Angola. Warring armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe now occupy large sections of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). According to the United Nations High Comission for Refugees (UNHCR) and international relief agencies, the humanitarian tragedy behind the battle lines defies description. Yet through wrongheaded economic policies, the Laurent Kabila regime is doing its best to destroy what is left of DRC's remaining infrastructure after years of pillage by Mobutu Sese Seko and his retinue. In the four key states involved in this maelstrom, Uganda, Rwanda, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, the HIV-AIDS infection rate ranged between 10 and 25 percent of the total adult population in 1999. Poor economic growth rates and anxiety over once-promising states like Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, and Zimbabwe compound these tragedies.

Still, the current African situation consists of more than a list of tragedies. There are promising achievements and prospects, consistently overlooked or trivialized by the "doom scenario" journalism and its academic allies. Such prospects need not be over-dramatized. But for African policymakers and intellectuals genuinely concerned with reversing these appalling trends, African accomplishments constitute a realistic foundation for action that might find common cause with U.S. vital interests in Africa, such as they are. This option, however, is increasingly imperiled by a bipolar contest between the advocates of a comprehensive U.S. policy toward Africa and the champions of U.S. benign neglect of a distant, problem-ridden continent of no vital interest to Washington.

The Risks of A Bipolar Policy Stance

Not surprisingly, the situation in Africa has spawned a growing body in ultra-pessimistic literature on Africa's future, grounded essentially on the supposedly intractable culture of Africans as a people. This literature now traces this perverse African cultural trait back "many centuries" and claims to speak the truth about Africans as a race even at the risk of being politically incorrect. The Economist, for example, in its issue of May 13, 2000, rendered the verdict that Africa was "the hopeless continent." To cite the most poignant contemporary academic examples of this interpretation of Africa's current state, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz go to great lengths to illustrate that, far from being a puzzle, the catastrophic conditions represent an African age-old rationality at its best, using "disorder as a political instrument." In time, according to their analysis, Africa will reorder its own political constitution--violently if need be--putting it on a surer footing than any external aid programs have done so far. Indeed, according to Jeffrey Herbst, centuries of failure in effective state construction in Africa due to its "harsh" geographic and demographic attributes now justify reconstituting of African international boundaries (violently at times) in order to match actual capability of the state to "broadcast power" within genuine national frontiers. Given the current artificial boundaries and low population density, Africa's chaos will multiply within ineffective states bereft of the bold nationalistic institutions that came to Europe with war-making over state frontiers in densely peopled lands. If only "Africans" and their external benefactors would listen.

A close inspection of this stridently pessimistic trend betrays its polemical characteristics. Whereas the "dependency" arguments of the 1970s and 1980s by Walter Rodney and others saw African and Third World underdevelopment as an economic and social tragedy originating primarily, if not entirely, from external sources, present-day cultural determinists consider the source of the problem to be predominantly internal and African-made. They dismiss any African success as miniscule and...