Africa-u.s. Relations

Africa significantly influenced the Americas from the sixteenth century, when slaves from West Africa began to be transported first to Spain's colonies and then to Portuguese Brazil from Zaire and Angola. English slavers soon joined in the business, carrying tens of thousands of slaves to the West Indies and, subsequently, to the English mainland colonies. By 1800 nearly one million black slaves from Africa lived in the new American nation.

Seagoing merchants from New England, and later from the Mid-Atlantic colonies, were acquainted with West Africa from the early eighteenth century. As time passed, a brisk trade developed. African slaves, gold, copper, and ivory were exchanged for textiles, tobacco, rum, sugar, canned meat, guns, and hatchets. After the slave trade was outlawed by Congress, the mills of Massachusetts continued to supply parts of Africa as distant as Kenya and Tanzania with the rough cotton cloth that is still known, in up-country East Africa, as amerikani. The first U.S. consulate south of the Sahara was established in Zanzibar in 1837 to foster trade. It was followed by consulates in Cape Town, Gabon, and Liberia.

Americans knew the coasts of Africa well by the nineteenth century, and a few helped make inner Africa better known to the West. Paul Belloni du Chaillu was responsible for mapping the interior of Gabon and bringing gorillas to the attention of Europeans and Americans. The most famous American of this era was Sir Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born orphan who fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil War and went to Africa as a journalist for the New York Herald. He covered the British punitive expedition to Ethiopia in 1868 and then "found" the great Scottish explorer David Livingstone in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871. These journalistic coups were followed in 1874-1877 by his epic journey from Zanzibar to Lake Victoria and westward to the mouth of the Congo River. In so doing, he inaugurated the last phase of Europe's imperial conquest of Africa.

Although the United States took no other direct part in the scramble for Africa, slavery involved America inextricably with the fate of the continent. As early as 1714, Americans interested in the "Negro question" and opposed to slavery suggested that all "men of color" should be removed beyond the borders of the colonies. Nearly a century later, Thomas Jefferson favored a similar scheme. In 1816 the American Colonization Society was formed to help slaves resettle in Africa. From 1820 to 1847 the society repatriated slave volunteers, in the process conquering the small portion of coastal West Africa that became the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Under an octoroon émigré from Virginia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia became almost an unofficial colony of the United States. Its constitution denied indigenous Africans equal rights with the mostly lighter-skinned ex-slaves.

Representatives of the United States attended the conference in Berlin in 1884-1885 that sanctioned the occupation of sub-Saharan Africa by the powers of Europe, but Americanterritorial and commercial ambitions were focused then on the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Asia.

The United States was again active regarding Africa after World War I. The creation of the League of Nations and its mandatory system owed much to President Woodrow Wilson; at the Versailles conference, he prevented the outright annexation of the former German colonies in Africa by Britain, France, and South Africa. After World War II, the United States again came to play an important role in Africa. Its representatives to the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations were among those responsible for accelerating the independence of former mandates like Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Togo, and Cameroun.

But America's greatest impact on black Africa throughout the first half of the twentieth century was made by private missionaries and educators. No other nation sent so many denominations and orders to evangelize and teach Africans. Black Americans were often in the forefront of this movement, their influence penetrating deep into the interior of southern and central Africa. Mainstream groups like the Baptists and millennial sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses were important.

Many Africans who later led their own independent nations were trained in American seminaries and universities. When the African National Congress (anc) was formed in South Africa in 1912, several of its leaders were lawyers, ministers, and physicians who had studied in the United States. John Chilembwe, an American-educated churchman, fomented a rebellion against British-controlled Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1915, and other American-linked religious separatists were blamed for disturbances elsewhere in Africa.

America's official consciousness of black Africa began with the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Colonialism was in flight, and Ken- nedy was squarely behind those who had won or were about to win their freedom. Washington during this period was wide-eyed in its hopes for democracy in Africa. It was generous in its grants of aid and technical assistance and engaged in covert intervention to prevent the new nations from tying themselves to the Soviet Union.

During this period the independence of black African nations emboldened the black power movement in the United States. The example and the rhetoric of the new governments encouraged black Americans, just as black power in the United States subsequently helped stimulate the rise of a black consciousness movement in apartheid-ridden South Africa. In many ways the ideological forebears of the African movements of independence and black power were the same: both Marcus Garvey's back to Africa crusade of the 1920s and the Pan-African Congresses of the 1920s to 1940s. Many of the Africans who led the Congresses and later became national leaders in West Africa had been schooled in the United States and had incorporated its social and political values.

No greater contribution to strengthening the bonds between America and Africa was crafted than by Kennedy's Peace Corps, which from its inception forged strong people-to-people ties between two very different cultures. By 1989, three thousand volunteers were living in twenty-seven African countries.

Since the Kennedy era, U.S. aid levels have dropped dramatically, to $850 million of nonmilitary aid in 1989. Some of Kennedy's successors, like Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, aligned the United States with Portugal (which had colonies in Africa until 1974-1975) and South Africa. Although major efforts were made during the presidency of Jimmy Carter to wrest Namibia from South Africa and assist Rhodesia's transition to independence as Zimbabwe (in 1980), President Ronald Reagan's administration had markedly cool relations with black Africa. Nearly all the nations on the continent perceived the United States during this period as pro-South Africa and at best ambivalent about the freedom struggle there.

"Constructive engagement," as the American policy was known, depended more on friendship with the apartheid rulers of South Africa than on backing the anc. Only at the very end of the Reagan administration was this policy reversed, with the passage of legislative sanctions against South Africa. Such pressure and the military stalemate in Angola between Cuban and South African combatants also led, by 1988, to a long-sought, U.S.-brokered agreement to end South African intervention in Angola and withdraw thirty-five thousand Cuban soldiers and technicians from that country. In 1989 this agreement permitted South Africa to begin giving up control over Namibia, and for the United Nations to begin overseeing Namibia's transition to independence, which became a reality in March 1990.

Bibliography:

Peter Duignan and Lewis H. Gann, The United States and Africa: A History (1984); Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (1985).

Author:

Robert I. Rotberg

See also American Colonization Society; Black Nationalism; Garvey, Marcus; Missionaries; Peace Corps; Slavery; Triangular Trade.