U.S. Blacks Will Seek Debt Relief for Africa : Conference: Ending an emotional meeting, the Americans pledge to restore bonds with the continent.

Clasping hands and singing “We Shall Overcome,” black Americans and their African cousins ended an emotional reunion Friday, pledging to rebuild the bonds destroyed by slavery and colonization.

Prominent leaders of the 35 million American blacks promised to press their government to cancel all official debts owed by the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

“We say to Americans: If you can cancel debt for Poland and Egypt, you can cancel it for sub-Saharan Africa,” the Rev. Leon Sullivan told cheering delegates.

The 68-year-old Baptist minister and black-rights campaigner from Philadelphia was the driving force behind the three-day conference in Ivory Coast, billed as the first African-African American summit.

A declaration of objectives adopted by the American and African leaders included a threat of consumer action against U.S. corporations exploiting African resources and labor.

“We don’t have to talk about a boycott, we can call it selective patronage,” Sullivan explained. He singled out African cocoa among the continent’s raw materials that he said are undervalued.

Five African presidents, a vice president, two prime ministers and a host of ministers attended the conference and backed the recommendations.

They promised to eliminate red tape and bureaucracy impeding foreign investors, particularly black Americans.

Sullivan, his voice rising to a shout at times, said the United States should not only let off its African creditors but press other Western nations to do likewise.

Estimating Africa’s government-to-government debt at $100 billion, he said black Americans would see to it that “this millstone around the neck of our nation” is lifted.

“We pay more taxes than any minority of our kind in America. If we can pay $70 billion a year in taxes, we can call for cancellation of the American debt of sub-Saharan African countries,” he said.

The debt proposal, which diplomats said is bound to add to pressure on Washington to be more generous with some of the world’s poorest countries, was the most concrete outcome of the conference.

Implicitly replying to African reproaches in the past that black Americans have failed to deliver on their promises, the meeting created a “follow-up committee.” It was charged with restoring ties severed when Europeans shipped an estimated 20 million Africans to the Americas as slaves before the trade was ended in the 19th Century.

Sullivan, joined by seven members of Congress and much of the black American elite, is seeking to turn his community into as powerful a lobby for Africa as American Jews are for Israel.

“You can be both African and American at the same time,” he said after the conference endorsed calls for dual citizenship for American blacks wanting the passport of an African country.

“As the Jews have some place to go, as the Polish have some place to go, from this day on African Americans are gonna have some place to go,” he said to cries of approval.

Many African participants, while enthusiastic in public about efforts to help their continent, were privately skeptical that the Abidjan meeting had achieved very much.

“Most of them look as though they’re just having a good holiday,” one Ghanaian official remarked, nodding at a group of black American women sporting colorful African fashions.

“We have heard all this before, but their track record is weak.”

Others were less cynical, saying black Americans had built the economic and political base to force the Bush Administration to give the continent higher priority.