Cooperation, Conflict Involved : U.S. Expanding Role on French Turf in W. Africa

The boulangeries of Senegal are simple roadside kiosks of wooden planks, painted dull by sun and rain, attended by women who peddle warm loaves of bread for a few African francs.

The slender loaf, butter-brown and long as your arm, is French bread and made, naturally, from French wheat. It sells briskly over the boulangerie counters along side streets off avenues honoring the likes of former French Presidents Georges Pompidou and Charles de Gaulle.

But the wheat going into the French loaves of Dakar may soon come from America’s yawning heartland instead of France’s breadbasket. Senegal is negotiating a deal to buy all its wheat from the United States, encouraged by what trade experts might call “favorable terms”--it will be cheaper.

“Just think of it,” an American here says. “You’ll be able to buy French bread, in France’s oldest colony in Africa, made with good ol’ American wheat.”

The willingness of the “spiritual sons of France,” as former Senegal President Leopold Senghor labeled his countrymen, to consider replacing French wheat with American points up an expanding U.S. role in Senegal--and throughout French-speaking West Africa, an area that America once shied away from because of the all-consuming French presence.

Not only is the United States more involved here but French-speaking Africa shows unmistakable signs of a new curiosity about America and Americans.

“It’s like Senegal has opted to diversify,” says Gary Engelberg, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal who now runs a language school with another Peace Corps alumnus. “All of a sudden a lot of Senegalese are going to the United States for training and a lot more AID (U.S. Agency for International Development) workers are coming here.”

So far the French have been, outwardly at least, indifferent to the slowly increasing American presence in France’s former colonies.

“There is a limit to what the French can do here,” a West European diplomat in Senegal says. “They can’t keep throwing money at the place. They’re pleased to share the burden with other people.”

While the two often cooperate, however, sometimes it has been hard this far from home for the United States and France to keep from stepping on each other’s toes.

Both responded with emergency supplies last August, for example, in Cameroon, a former French colony in the crook of Africa’s western bulge, when toxic gas emerging from a volcanic lake killed 1,500 to 2,000 people in isolated villages nearby.

American and French scientists also converged on Cameroon. The American scientists kept a diplomatically low profile, refusing interview requests by saying their findings would go first to their hosts, the Cameroonians. But they grumbled privately when their French counterparts began talking and grabbed the headlines.

The French scientists had no qualms about offering their opinions before, during and after their work--on television, radio and in newspapers.

In the rain forest surrounding Lake Nios, a French volcanologist, dressed smartly in a beige paratrooper suit and carrying a walking stick, asked an American he met on the trail: “Have you seen a television crew around here? French fellows they were. I was supposed to meet them here.”

A few weeks later, the United States and France clashed again behind the scenes. This time the place was Senegal and the disaster was an infestation of grasshoppers.

The government of Senegal had carried an urgent plea for help to Western embassies in Dakar. The Americans came up with a grand plan: send four big American-made airplanes, like those used to battle fruit flies in California, and spray 56,000 gallons of American-made malathion on 2 million infested acres.

French Plan Different

The Senegalese liked the idea. But the French balked. They wanted a smaller-scale spraying operation, like those in France, using a French-made insecticide, Fenitrothion, that is 10 times more toxic than malathion.

“The French fiddled around, saying, ‘We’ve got to study this,’ and ‘Maybe we can find something better,’ ” an American on the scene said. “Meanwhile, we were doing something. And the bugs certainly weren’t waiting.”

A few days later a compromise was reached: The Americans flew their big planes with malathion and the French followed in their small planes with Fenitrothion. That squabble never reached the papers, here or anywhere else. But criticism of the U.S. plan did.

A wealthy French-born farmer, quoted anonymously by the Associated Press, accused the Americans of staging “a grand gesture” that risked irreversible ecological damage. No such damage occurred or is expected to occur.

That kind of head-butting is bound to occur occasionally as the United States becomes a bigger player in French-speaking West Africa, diplomats say. But they say the two countries more often cooperate with each other.

“I’m not going to say they don’t step on each other’s toes from time to time,” says a political analyst attached to a West European embassy in Dakar, “but the partnership works pretty well for the most part. The French are here, have been here and do not intend to leave here.”

Empire’s Founding Point

Senegal was, in fact, the founding point of France’s West African empire, and Dakar for years was the capital of a huge area. The entire French territory, including lands in central and western Africa, encompassed about a third of the continent.

France, alone among the colonizers of Africa, attempted to absorb Africans into the French culture. Africans elected representatives to the French Parliament, served as French government ministers and, in four cities in Senegal, educated French-speaking Africans were allowed for years to vote in French elections.

Eating French food, admiring French writers and, for the wealthy Africans, traveling frequently to Paris were all part of the cultural package.

French was unmistakably the official language of these colonies and Africans were taught it at an early age. By contrast, the British colonizers of East Africa often learned to speak Swahili rather than try to teach Africans to speak English.

Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s president from independence until his retirement in 1981, is not only a respected poet in French but is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on French grammar. He and Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the president of Ivory Coast, held positions in the French government before their countries’ independence.

Currency Tied to Franc

Although the French possessions in Africa became independent more than 25 years ago, the ties with France have remained. For one thing, the currency used by those countries, the African franc, is tied to the French franc (at 50 African francs to one French franc). That link provides an economic stability absent in much of the rest of Africa.

Many ministries in countries such as Ivory Coast, for example, also still have French advisers, and nearly 8,000 French troops are stationed in Africa--the second largest foreign military force on the continent after Cuba’s troops in Angola. French troops have intervened in the former colonies 11 times since independence, most recently a few weeks ago at the request of the government of Togo, following a failed coup attempt.

For years the United States has concentrated its diplomatic efforts elsewhere on the continent, trying to keep the Soviet Union and Cuba out of countries with vulnerable governments. The few American business interests in Africa were in the more stable English-speaking countries.

The early U.S. presence in French West Africa usually amounted to a Peace Corps contingent and a small embassy. But America became more interested when that part of Africa was struck by a severe drought in 1973, and since then the U.S. presence has grown.

Seen as Brash Upstarts

The U.S.-French rivalry, to the extent that it exists in West Africa, is the result of differing styles rather than any geopolitical designs on the region. The Americans are seen as brash upstarts with a get-it-done-now attitude while the French are seen as a more Cartesian, analytical people who prefer to wrap things in mystery and mull them over.

People who live in rural Senegal, where Wolof is the primary language and French is still rarely understood, say they often can tell the difference between American and French visitors simply by their actions.

“Americans are more outgoing and they always try to speak the native language. The French never do,” explained Saaku Sarr, a Senegalese interpreter who speaks Wolof, French and English.

In Ivory Coast, where the French flavor is as unmistakable as the fresh-baked croissants at the sidewalk cafes and copies of Le Monde on the newsstand, an especially close association with France has created the most economically and politically stable country in West Africa, though many would argue not the most independent.

Yet signs are appearing that the United States is gaining an identity in Ivory Coast. More than 1,000 Ivorians have graduated from American universities, which has helped to increase cultural exchanges. About 70 American firms now have offices in the country, and the first chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce in sub-Saharan Africa opened this year.

“The thinking used to be that this was the private hunting ground of the French,” one American businessman in Abidjan said not long ago. “That is less true than it’s ever been.”

Senegal a Favorite

Unlike Ivory Coast, Senegal is one of the poorest countries in the world and not especially attractive to U.S. investors. But the U.S. government likes Senegal because it has an excellent human rights record, a system of multiple political parties and does not loudly criticize the United States in world forums, all rarities in Africa.

Those qualities help make Senegal “everybody’s favorite charity,” as one Western diplomat put it.

Up until a few years ago, however, Canada was Senegal’s second-largest benefactor, followed by West Germany and Saudi Arabia. But now the United States, whose assistance here has tripled to $57 million since 1980, is No. 2, although still well behind France’s annual $250 million in aid.

There are other, more subtle, signs that Senegal wants the United States as a friend. When the United States bombed Libya last April, Senegal President Abdou Diouf, then president of the Organization of African Unity, was under intense pressure from OAU members to denounce the raid. But he refused to criticize the United States.

Children Study in U.S.

Like Senghor before him, Diouf has an abiding relationship with the French. He was Senghor’s premier for 10 years, and his closest government adviser is French-born. But Diouf also is a practical man. He met President Reagan two years ago in Washington and the two got along quite well.

Now Diouf has two sons studying at Georgetown University in Washington and a daughter taking English language courses in the American capital with plans to study computer science at Georgetown next year.

Diouf may in fact have inadvertently triggered the latest fashion here. Sending Senegalese children to university in America rather than France has become le dernier cri in Senegal, even though the parents may not know very much about the United States.

Alioune Ndiaye, a Senegalese official with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Dakar, was telling an American visitor recently that he has a son studying for a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard University.

“They tell me that’s a pretty good school,” he said. “Have you heard of it?”