Activists Hope Crisis in Somalia Will Put Spotlight on African Issues

Mel Foote used to have trouble attracting attention, but Somalia changed all that. Now, a radio station from Baltimore is on the line, a reporter from a national newspaper is stationed outside his office and the calls keep coming in.

“I’ve gotten more attention in the last three months than I’ve gotten in the last three years,” said Foote, coordinator of a Washington-based coalition called Constituency for Africa. “We have a real opportunity here, but a lot will depend on how we build and sustain it.”

Foote is one of a small but earnest band of African-American foreign policy activists who have long argued that the United States needs to pay more attention to the problems of the African continent. Apart from the priority given to high-profile issues such as apartheid in South Africa, and now famine in Somalia, it has been a decidedly uphill effort.

But with the Somali crisis now commanding the nation’s attention because U.S. troops are over there, and with more blacks taking seats in the next Congress than ever before, Foote and other foreign policy activists believe that the road ahead finally may be leveling off.

“We’ve been working on a range of issues for years, but sadly the American media pay little attention to Africa,” said Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, the country’s only African-American think tank devoted exclusively to African and Caribbean affairs. “Were it not for the American intervention, the coverage of Somalia would be as poor as it is on other issues like Zaire, Liberia, Haiti and Kenya.”

The neglect has not been confined to the media. With the exception of the major role played by the civil rights movement in getting the United States to impose sanctions on South Africa, the black community at large has been mostly indifferent to African affairs.

“Outside of a few congressmen and national figures like Jesse Jackson, the African-American community historically has shown very little interest in foreign policy,” said an African affairs expert who serves on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “There was a strong movement around South Africa, but once things started to change there, African-American groups lost interest and turned back to their domestic agenda.”

While it is too soon to predict with certainty that this will change, activists say they are encouraged by signs that the black community is becoming more concerned not only about Somalia but about African issues in general.

Foote, whose Constituency for Africa was formed two years ago to coordinate the lobbying and constituency-building activities of its member groups, reports that contributions by black business, social and church groups are rising. Fifteen years after its founding, TransAfrica, Robinson’s Washington-based think tank, is about to move into a new 18,000-square-foot headquarters built with $3.5 million in contributions from the black community.

And while the post has not been filled yet, there are widespread expectations that the next assistant secretary of state for African affairs will for the first time be an African-American.

One of the candidates for that job, Vivian Derryck, president of the African-American Institute, attributes the new interest in part to a “growing awareness that the United States has a special responsibility” to serve as a role model for racial and ethnic diversity.

With Somalia now dominating foreign news, Foote said groups like his have a “unique opportunity” to use the intensive media coverage to generate more interest in Africa.

“It’s just like the Persian Gulf. Until Desert Storm, we thought the Middle East was just about the Arabs and Israel hating each other, but then we found out a lot more about the Middle East and learned it was more complicated,” he said. “I think the same thing is going to come out of Somalia . . . and I see a much greater interest in Africa in the years to come.”

Rep. Donald M. Payne (D-N.J.), a black lawmaker who serves on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, said Desert Storm had another impact on American blacks who traditionally have been more concerned with domestic issues such as jobs, health care and poverty than with foreign policy. “In the Persian Gulf, people saw that 30% of the ground troops were African-Americans, that they were the people who were in harm’s way,” Payne said.

The effect, he said, is that his black constituents have become “more focused on foreign policy and especially on Africa. . . . They are starting to say that if we can send our boys over to free the property of some oil sheik, then we have got to take a closer look at foreign policy.”

Payne and Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) are among a growing number of foreign policy activists in the Congressional Black Caucus who lobbied for the U.S. intervention in Somalia and who are pressing the incoming Clinton Administration to pay more attention to Africa by giving the continent a larger slice of next year’s foreign aid pie.

“Eighteen of the 20 poorest countries of the world are still in Africa, and we have suggested that (Clinton) take another look at how we distribute foreign aid,” said Payne, who with Dellums met with Clinton transition chairman Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and other officials to discuss the new Administration’s Africa policies.

While most lawmakers are less enthusiastic about the prospects for increasing foreign aid at a time when America’s priorities are turned inward, Payne and others expect that the Black Caucus will have greater access and more influence on the formulation of African policies with Clinton.

“President (Ronald) Reagan met once with the Black Caucus during his eight years in office and never requested a second meeting,” Payne said. “President Bush met once with us in his four years. We have already met four times with Clinton and he hasn’t even taken office yet, so we expect to have access and we expect to have an Administration that is interested in our views on both Africa and other issues.”

Robinson is less sanguine about the prospects for a new Africa policy under Clinton, saying that he is both “alarmed and distressed” by the fact that there are no blacks on the President-elect’s transition team who are involved in the formulation of foreign policy. But he is optimistic about interest in Congress, saying that the increase in the number of black lawmakers--from 26 last year to 40 after the November elections--”should give us considerably more clout.”

For these efforts to succeed, however, Foote cautioned that black groups will have to coordinate their advocacy of foreign policy issues more closely than they have done to date. “So far, there has been a lot of talk about organizing a constituency but little action. To put it in a Somali context, the groups have all been acting like separate clans,” he said.

“It has taken us 400 years to get to this point,” Foote said. “We won’t be able to do it all in one more year, but at last I am convinced we are on the right track.”