Africa, African Americans, and the Avuncular Sam

Abstract

This essay investigates U.S. policy toward Africa and highlights the role that African Americans have played in infl uencing this policy. It is inspired by the need for an urgent dialogue between Africans and African Americans on U.S. policy toward the continent. It begins by briefl y assessing the ignominious roots of Africa's relationship with America and pan-Africanist efforts to liberate Africa from alien rule. It then analyzes the destructive effects on Africa of U.S. policies during the era of the Cold War. It criticizes the pernicious effects of stereotypical and simplistic coverage of Africa in the American media, and assesses U.S. policy toward Africa under the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It concludes by offering some policy recommendations for a more enlightened U.S. policy toward Africa. The Ignominious Roots of A Relationship Four centuries of a sordid trade in human cargo of Africans by American slave masters was followed by a century of colonial enslavement of Africa by European imperialists. These defi ning historical events have shaped the relationship of African Americans and Africans with the West, and no serious examination of U.S. policy toward Africa can avoid focusing on the blighted legacy of slavery and colonialism, both of which created a bond between African Americans and their ancestral home, resulting in their efforts to infl uence U.S. policy toward Africa. Fifteen years after 1885, when European imperial cartographers met in Berlin to carve up Africa among themselves, the Pan-African movement was born, as the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams organized the fi rst Pan-African Congress in London. Between 1919 and 1945, Pan-African congresses were held in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, New York, and Manchester. These congresses were at fi rst dominated by African Americans like W. E. B. Du Bois and Afro-Caribbeans like George Padmore, at a time when Liberia and Ethiopia were the only independent African states, and only later did Africans participate in them. The early Pan-Africanists' africaTODAY AFRICA, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE AVUNCULAR SAM 94 demands were mostly limited to trying to secure education, economic development, and racial equality for Africans. Even as the supposedly liberal American president Woodrow Wilson, meeting with European statesmen in Versailles to redraw the map of Europe after World War I, passionately championed the rights of subjugated Central European minorities to national self-determination, Pan-Africanists meeting nearby reminded him of his country's denial of the most fundamental rights to its own African-American citizens. By the time of the fi fth Pan-African congress, in Manchester in 1945, its prophets were boldly demanding African independence from European powers that were exhausted and impoverished by their exertions in repelling Nazi tyranny. Manchester shifted the center of Pan-Africanism from the Diaspora to Africa, as the meeting was dominated by future African leaders, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, Hastings Banda, Jo...