Sorry for the long break there: not only was I busy with administrative work at the end of last week, but it turns out I was also brewing up a really excellent case of bronchitis with its usual side helping of cough-fueled sleep deprivation.
I see that Biden is trying to convince African leaders of the “renewed commitment” of the US to Africa.
The conventional take in the media is that it’s an uphill battle because of the damage his predecessor did to American engagement with sub-Saharan Africa. That’s a fair point. Much as some people would like to pretend that Trump was just a momentary interruption in business-as-usual, the main asset the US brought to the table in many cases internationally was consistency and predictability. Having a President who ignored or mocked long-standing practices and relationships for basically whimsical or arbitrary reasons doesn’t just do damage during that era of mockery, it strips the US of its reliability for a long time to come. Maybe in certain kinds of negotiations the possibility that you might do almost anything can produce welcome concessions from an unnerved adversary (though evidently not even that in the case of the Worst Dealmaker of All Time, Donald Trump) but going from being a rather dull and paternalistic uncle whose stability is nevertheless reassuring to trying to cope with a volatile stranger who keeps threatening to remove you from the will changes how you feel about the relationship from that point on.
I think, however, that the problem of the relationship between African states and the United States runs rather deeper than 2016. In a nutshell, I’m not sure what basis there even is for the relationship from the perspective of either party.
In its life as a global superpower, the American government’s relationship to independent Africa has largely been defined by security concerns. First and most consistently by competition with the East Bloc in the Cold War and then secondarily by post 9/11 concerns about insurgencies tied to Islamic extremism. Those security concerns have flowed over into various other far more variable kinds of expressed commitments towards economic development, human rights, and encouraging democracy. Most of those commitments have been politely muted, inconsistently applied, and often transacted through global and technocratic intermediaries rather than through direct bilateral engagements between a given African state and the American government.
Other issues where the US arguably has direct interests in sub-Saharan Africa only come up in extremis. Getting the United States to take an interest in major interventions into public health in sub-Saharan Africa is beyond possibility despite the actual and potential importance of African states to global pandemics, but on occasion emergency attention to something like an Ebola epidemic has happened.
It is, in the end, rather odd to expect that somehow the United States government would be more able to pay attention to being a helpful part of dealing with ongoing crises and major issues facing most African states than it is able to pay attention to those same issues at home. Not surprising that a country with the worst-functioning health care system among wealthy democracies can’t help much in helping African states develop effective public health care systems. Most of what African states need help with are things that the United States is floundering with at home, in fact. Including since 2000 or so, having a well-functioning multiparty democracy with well-administered elections. So the US has focused more and more on what it’s good at delivering, which is guns and military advice.
That’s probably for the best too from the perspective of most African heads of state. Paul Kagame doesn’t want to hear anything second-guessing who he puts in jail or orders assassinated; Abiy Ahmed doesn’t want to hear that he needs to live up to the Nobel Peace Prize that he’s so badly tarnished. What at least some of them want from a wealthy global power is a lot of money with no questions asked, but the era when the US flew in bags of cash for Cold War friends is over. The other global hegemons operate on a quid-pro-quo basis, which is at least easy to interpret. Chinese-controlled concerns will build infrastructure in return for allowing fish, crops, oil, minerals and other resources to be extracted and exported. Russia, as far as I can tell, wants a narrower range of similar resources and it wants to earn some rents through providing mercenaries who get to hone their brutal craft in African battlefields. Both China and Russia also want enough bought-and-paid-for African votes in existing global institutions to check any dangerous initiatives coming from the US and EU.
The US right now mostly seems to just want to keep China and Russia from getting what they want from African states. Which maybe some African states are also interested in, given that some heads of state are finding that satisfying China’s interests has a significant price tag and is ultimately no more helpful in pursuing local development than decades of bone-headed dictates like “structural adjustment” from Western-dominated organizations. That applies only to those African heads of state who care two hoots about the welfare of their own societies, mind you. Emmerson Mnangagwa, I am sure, doesn’t care whether Zimbabwe is improved at all by its engagement with any hegemon, only about whether he and his people get paid off.
So while I appreciate the attempted performance of a return to normalcy, it might be better to extend the abnormal a while longer, if in a different direction. Rather than the US promising to once again be the hegemon it once was in Africa—never very usefully or intelligently so—maybe it’s time for the US and those African heads of state with any interest in better outcomes to have an exploratory conversation about what we can all do for one another that we’re actually able and willing to do, without any presumptions about what the outcomes of that conversation have to be.
Image credit: US Department of State, https://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/52560391389/