US-Africa relations over the last century: an African perspective

Social Research, Winter, 2005 by Sulayman S. Nyang

OVER THE LAST CENTURY, RELATIONS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND Africa have undergone many changes. The relationship between these two geographic zones has been defined primarily by the slave trade and the Cold War. Although historians familiar with the details of the two zones could come up with a number of events that to some degree characterize the unique nature of this relationship, the fact remains that Africa and the United States of America have come to be associated in the minds of most people around the world only in terms of their black populations and their political and military connections during the Cold War. The presence of millions of people of African descent, and their growing power and self-assertiveness in the American political process, have combined to make US-Africa relations an issue of greater scholarly interest.

No one who is a student of Africa over the last century can deny the impact of European people on the face and history of this continent. If Africa was not a major theater during the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and its ravages in Africa can still be seen after the Cold War's conclusion in 1989. The presence of Cuban troops in Angola, the hazards of land mines in that country, the thousands of Africans who lost their lives in the ideologically charged civil wars in Ethiopia, and the large number of Africans who became refugees around the world, are all definite signs of the Cold War and its aftermath. What is being said here is that US-Africa relations, like all things within nature, are ongoing. There have been moments of conflict and moments of reconciliation.

The purpose of this brief essay is threefold. First, I intend to demonstrate that African opinions on and attitudes toward the United States are affected by the question of slavery, America's support for colonialism, America's attitudes toward the apartheid regime in South Africa, and America's positions during the Cold War. The second objective of this paper is to identify the concept and movement of Pan-Africanism as a source of value for African opinions on and attitudes toward the United States. Here I will show how this idea and the movement that grew out of it have combined to define the view of America and the West held by black intellectuals who embraced such a position. The third objective is to offer a set of conclusions summarizing and emphasizing the points of convergence and divergence between the United States and the countries of Africa.

AFRICAN OPINIONS ON AND ATTITUDES TOWARD THE UNITED STATES

It needs to be made categorically clear that, although the slave trade is not the overriding fact in the minds of most Africans today, no African can enter the United States and ignore the black presence in this country. Second, even those Africans still living on the continent of Africa cannot deny that their people were captured and ferried over the Atlantic Ocean to serve as slaves in the Americas. This phenomenon--which I have described elsewhere as the Josephite and anti-Josephite tendencies in black history--is a painful remind to all blacks that the stigma associated with blackness among most white peoples of the world goes back to that original sin of betraying one's brother. Just as in the biblical story of Joseph, here too the Africans have the same moral and psychological dilemma that captured the attention and imagination of his brothers as well as those of Moses and the ancient Hebrews in the land of pharaoh. This analogy is not lost to modern historians, for one of them has described Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader of a mass movement in the United States, in the early part of the twentieth century, as "Black Moses." Garvey, it should be noted, was a fervent advocate of Pan-Africanism. Committed to the liberation of his people and determined to see it through by all means available to him then, he did everything within his power to ferry them back to their homeland. Unlike the ancient Hebrews going to a Promised Land, these blacks under the leadership of Garvey were pressing their claims to a land that was being rapidly taken over by rapacious European imperialists. The European powers, whose struggles for African land was described as the "Scramble for Africa" by many historians of the last century, were bent on remaking Africa and its children. These colonial and imperial ventures would not only affect the relationship between blacks and whites around the world, but would also add insult to injury. The resulting scarring of the African mind would be the subject of discourse by many black intellectuals, the most prominent among them Frantz Fanon. This man from Martinique in the French Caribbean would symbolize and embody the realities and the contradictions that are clearly associated with the colonial question among blacks around the world.

When Fanon wrote his book, Black Skin, White Mask, he described the colonial condition and its intended and unintended consequences for both France and its colonial subjects. The problem analyzed by Fanon is inextricably linked to the relationship between whites and blacks. The American experience cannot be discussed objectively without bringing in the race question. This is why in analyzing the relationship between the United States and Africa, the racial question becomes paramount. Time and space does not allow me to go into details about the question, but we can state briefly and in passing that the relationship between these two geographic zones will always revolve around the race question, which is an extension of the slave trade and its consequences for Americans and Africans. The writings of Fanon, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Leon Damas, C. L. R. James and countless other blacks from the diaspora seem to articulate publicly what is felt privately by millions of people of African descent, whose lives and destinies have now been inextricably tied to the many states of North and South America.