A Tale of Two Africas

Last week, Washington was forced to turn its attention back to Africa, a continent that many U.S. policy-makers believe should not be a major U.S. concern. As has so often been the case, the pressure on officialdom came from stark and poignant pictures. This time, however, the pictures carried a mixed message.

From South Africa, aerial photographs of whites and blacks standing together patiently waiting to vote, in lines that seemed to twist and turn for miles, conveyed hope and the promise of a new era. From Rwanda, scenes of a sea of brutalized and terrified refugees fleeing from genocidal violence spread despair and fear of an unfolding apocalypse that could engulf much of the continent.

Responding to the democratic triumph in South Africa, the Clinton Administration more than doubled U.S. aid, to $200 million next year. Reacting to the tragedy in Rwanda, it stepped up its humanitarian efforts and began searching for ways to support an African peacekeeping force that could end the carnage. These moves boosted the behind-the-scenes campaign of a handful of officials who care deeply about the continent, including National Security Adviser W. Anthony Lake, to get the Administration to think seriously about Africa. But given history, there is good reason to question whether these tentative moves will bring about a much-needed revolution in U.S. relations with the continent.

Since the late 1950s, when most African states began to gain their independence, U.S. policy has moved with depressing regularity through cycles of calculated neglect and event-driven activism. During the Cold War, the catalyst for action was fear that Moscow would profit from civil unrest and conflict. That was the case in the Belgium Congo (now Zaire) in the 1960s, in Angola in 1975-76 and throughout the 1980s, and in the Horn of Africa in 1978, to name a few. Beginning with the Biafran civil war in 1967-69, another recurring force for intervention has been the specter of starving children, which prompted large-scale relief efforts in the Sahel in the early 1970s, Ethiopia in 1974-75 and, more recently, in Somalia. A final factor has been racial conflict, as illustrated by the U.S. reaction to the protests against white rule that began with the Soweto uprising in 1975 and escalated exponen-tially in the early 1980s.

As a result of such pressures, every President since Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the exception of Richard M. Nixon, ended up reluctantly mounting at least one high-profile intervention in Africa. Only Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter seriously attempted to deal with the underlying causes of Africa’s crises--and neither achieved many lasting successes.

Why has Washington failed so miserably? One of the most important reasons is the way in which the foreign-policy Establishment conceives “the national interest.” For them, it is mostly a matter of protecting economic and security interests against foreign threats. Where interests are not threatened, they argue, there is little cause for involvement.

But with the passing of the Cold War, this approach to the national interest takes on dangerous risks. It blocks policy-makers from recognizing the deeper human interests and psychological impulses that are compelling them to get involved in areas of Africa that they would prefer to ignore. In today’s world, the gravity of threats to U.S. interests is increasingly difficult to discern. Most important, the revolution in information, communications and transportation, coupled with the emergence of a host of globally oriented movements and organizations, have changed the policy-making equation. Public attitudes are determined more by personal and group relationships than by calculations of interests.

For a small but influential segment of American society, the election in South Africa was not a distant event. For the millions who supported the anti-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela’s victory is a personal triumph. Many helped to raise funds for his political campaign, while others traveled to South Africa to help educate voters and monitor the elections. That two of Bill Clinton’s chief campaign advisers, pollster Stanley B. Greenberg and media consultant Frank Greer, worked on the Mandela campaign, that one American lawyer-activist, Gay McDougall, was appointed to South Africa’s Independent Election Monitoring Board, that former New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins was at Bishop Desmond M. Tutu’s side when the latter went to the polls and that many of America’s leading news celebrities were on hand for the elections--all demonstrate the degree to which U.S. and South African politics have become intertwined.

In the case of Rwanda, the changing realities are best reflected in the personal drama that took place when Alison Des Forges, an American historian and human-rights activist, desperately attempted to rescue a prominent Rwandan human-rights activist, Monique Mujawamariya, trapped in Kigali. The personal bonds linking the two women are symbolic of the close connections that now exist between many Americans in the human-rights movement and their foreign counterparts.

The events in South Africa and Rwanda, therefore, matter for reasons that have little to do with narrow national interests. They matter because they strike a chord deep in our souls. Americans are heartened by the triumph of racial justice in South Africa because they see it as part of a larger struggle involving many of them. Their sympathies are aroused by the horrors of Rwanda because they comprehend the humanity and have the ability to share the pain reflected in the eyes of Rwandans.

Because they underestimate the power of these kinds of forces to generate pressures for responses to crises in places where no discernible U.S. interests appear endangered, Washington policy-makers are less and less able to predict where and when they will respond to foreign developments. As a result, they are increasingly finding themselves in the position of being urged to intervene in situations they have neither anticipated nor prepared for. For example, thinking in terms of strict strategic interests encouraged the Bush Administration to believe it could disengage from Somalia, after the Soviet threat had receded. Consequently, it failed to take early action to avert the political and humanitarian crisis that developed in the early 1990s--and the United States ended up paying a high price for its mistake.

But the foreign-policy Establishment’s attempt to demean, or ignore, Africa’s current plight involves more than high-sounding rationalizations about where the national interest lies. It is also highly irresponsible and immoral. The United States and other major powers have played a critical role in creating the circumstances that spark the continent’s crises. The persistent effort to attribute conflicts in Africa to deeply seeded tribal animosities is a convenient way to deflect blame for policies that aided and protected dictators.

Keeping Africa off the global agenda is going to get more difficult. Demography alone dictates that Washington and the rest of the world’s major powers take African developments into account. For example, as of 1991, the population of Sub-saharan Africa was less than 500 million, while the total population of all advanced industrial countries was about 800 million. By 2025, this balance will change radically. The African population is projected to be more than 1.2 billion, while the population of the advanced industrial countries will be 10% higher than where it is today. If Africa remains impoverished and conflict-ridden, its troubles will inevitably be exported.

Washington’s only real choice is to begin a serious attempt to learn from such tragedies as Rwanda and Somalia to head off the impending tragedies in Kenya and Zaire, all the while strengthening and building on the triumph represented by the South African election.*