Remembering Africa

Michael Chege

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1991/92

Article preview: first 500 of 6,318 words total.

Summary:  The end of the Cold War and of apartheid have "undermined the logic that once drove America's alliances of expediency on the continent, which were so inimical to expanding civil liberties in Africa". The West should develop a selective foreign policy, favouring states showing pro-market and pro-democracy traits, and showing "equal-opportunity hostility" to remaining despots.

Michael Chege is Program Officer in Governance and International Affairs for the Ford Foundation in Harare, Zimbabwe.

In 1991, resurgent democratic movements in sub-Saharan Africa sensed a surprising shift in Bush administration policy. African political reformers were caught on the rebound and the continent’s aging despots were stunned. U.S. foreign policy toward Africa had edged closer than ever before to the timeworn position of its congressional critics. For the first time since the Kennedy administration’s support for anticolonial African nationalism, crowds yearning for freedom, this time from domestic tyranny, cheered statements from the U.S. State Department as it distanced itself from the autocratic and unpopular leaders it once supported.

The demise of the Cold War and the steady though incomplete dismantling of apartheid have undermined the logic that once drove America’s alliances of expediency on the continent, which were so inimical to expanding civil liberties in Africa. While attitudes in the West may have changed, the policies of the United States and its European allies toward Africa are still not the supportive pillars of stable market-driven democracies they could be. But much also depends on Africa itself. African political reformers must now discard the old ideological shibboleths that have helped keep their countries shackled in poverty, communal violence and political repression. The pace of their own reform, how quickly they can devise new development policies and institutions more consonant with the march of history toward economic and political liberalism, will help determine the full impact of external support for change.

Only with the emergence of African states that foster individual freedoms and market economies with complementary public sectors will the continent receive the attention it deserves. African societies might then graduate from being passive recipients of charity to full actors in global politics and economics. Amid the flood of problems that still exist in Africa, its surging tide of democracy is barely visible, especially to a world whose eyes are keenly focused on events elsewhere.

II

Until the Persian Gulf crisis media coverage of world affairs was dominated by the drama of the democratic revolutions in eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the slow evolution of 1992’s united Europe, the unfolding economic power of Japan and the Pacific Rim and even the emergence of new democracies in Latin America. Africa was for all purposes dropped from the cast. For much of the world Africa remained little more than an unfailing source of bad news: famine, dictatorship and economic collapse; blatant violations of human rights and gross carnage wreaked by merciless warlords; a region where unashamed autocrats still tightened the screws of their despotism while their counterparts around the globe were being hounded out of presidential palaces by popular revolts.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s natural catastrophes and political mismanagement combined to produce human and economic tragedy in Africa of unprecedented proportions. Regressive statist economic policies aggravated drought in the Sahel (1973), famine in Ethiopia (1985) and a succession of calamities of biblical proportions elsewhere: locusts in Sudan (1988), floods in Tanzania (1989) and the AIDS pandemic, which the World Health Organization now predicts ...

End of preview: first 500 of 6,318 words total.