Edward Kissi, USF, Dept. of Africana Studies
I have read the summary of the US experts' Africa Report produced
under the sponsorship of the National Intelligence Council. I have
printed out the report to peruse it in detail later. We have been on
this road before and the so-called experts always get it wrong. On
Africa, they have been twice as wrong as they are more likely to be
now. I do not know who those experts were. But a little knowledge of
the diplomatic history of Africa, most especially the history of US
expert reports on Africa could have helped the experts to put their
doomsday perceptions in historical context. But I don't blame them.
They may have derived their prognosis and predictions from some of
the doomsday prophets in our midst.
In a US Intelligence Report of 3 January 1956 entitled "Africa: a
special assessment" [to be found in Record Group 273: Records of the
National Security Council, Meeting Minute File 335, Tab D, in the US
National Archives], similar doomsday predictions were made about an
Africa that was emerging out of colonialism. It was a period when
Washington warned African nationalists not to seek "premature
independence." The fear was that an independent Africa disgusted with
foreign control might not be submissive to Washington's dictates and
might align itself with Cold War enemies. The 1956 report was a sad
and sullen assessment of the strategic value of Africa for US
policymakers, and even the political potential and intellectual
ability of Africa's new leaders to build viable nation-states. As it
is today in Washington, so was it in 1956 that the only place US
officials held some hope OR RESPECT for an Africa that could be like
the West was South Africa. The grounds for the experts' hopes were
not so much the economic viability of South Africa, but rather its
peculiar social history. In the 1956 report, the hopeful prospect the
Washington experts on Africa held for South Africa was rooted in
their nuanced admiration for an Africa ruled by people with
historical and institutional ties to the West. This observation was
supposed to shape a positive Washington attitude towards the
apartheid regime and to discourage official Washington statements in
support of decolonization in Africa. We all know that decolonization
was not stopped by observations in a report.
Many of the predictions contained in the 1956 report were based on
game theories and policy predictions and strategic calculations. None
of the document's key predictions came true----a sober realization
that human actions cannot be accurately predicted and those who
predict human behavior for a living ought to worship at the altars of
modesty and caution.
I plan to read this newly-issued US expert mapping of sub-Saharan
Africa in its entirety. When I am done, I plan to write a "dialogue"
comparing some of the conclusions and observations of this new report
with the January 3, 1956 report, which I have mentioned above, and
another CONFIDENTIAL US expert report on Africa prepared on 27 July
1966 for the Johnson Administration entitled "Review of Development
Policies and Programs As Directed by the President." That
comparative study of US intelligence reporting on Africa might reveal
some enduring patterns, obscured motives, continuing cultural
assumptions and other things when Africa is discussed at the halls of
diplomacy in Washington.
Many of the assessments of the 1956 and 1966 reports were based on
faulty intelligence, lame analysis and pure emotional disgust with
particular leaders and developments on the African continent. A
pattern that emerges from both reports is that some of the
ingredients of the 1956 and 1966 reports were provided by African
experts on Africa living in the United States. I should think that
the same may apply to the 2005 report.
The 1956 Intelligence Report, for instance, concluded, among other
conclusions, that:
"Expanded economic development programs [SUPPORTED BY THE WEST AND
US caps mine], however, can enlarge the opportunities for
constructive action; without such expansion, it is certain that
extremist groups seeking shortcuts to security through violence will
increasingly dominate the African scene."
Any serious and objective analyst of political developments in Africa
since 1956 will conclude that that expanded economic development
programs from the US did not come to Africa as statistics on US Aid
programs in Africa, from 1956 to the present, indicate. And yet,
without such economic aid, "extremist groups"---whatever manner one
may define such groups---have not and do not dominate Africa. The
report was based, in part, on a fantastic chaos theory. The chaos
predicted in that report was far more extreme and disheartening that
what actually happened or has happened. In the 1950s, "extremist
group" was the phrase for what one would call "terrorists" today.
Yet, in this January 2005 Intelligence Report, the US experts on
Africa discount the possibility of an Africa dominated by terrorist
groups, organizations or such extremist bodies. So in 1956, they made
a false prediction. Furthermore, the 1956 report was not hopeful
about strategic partnerships with Africa. The report dismissed the
entire continent as marginal to US concerns. Africa's importance to
the United States was seen, as some continue to see it today, as
mainly "humanitarian." Of course Washington did not want to disclose
the important strategic partnership that Washington had with
Ethiopia, then, at Kagnew, now part of Eritrea. That strategic
partnership did not merit disclosure in an evolving Cold War period
in an Intelligence Report.
The Confidential US Report on Africa of 27 July 1966 reveals what
official Washington has always thought about Africa:
"Our relations with Africa are not of the same nature as our intimate
historic ties with Latin America, our significant strategic interests
in Asia or our concentrated oil investment in the Near East. Africa,
for the most part, has been outside the main arenas of U.S. attention
and actions in the world. Our concern with Africa has been: a) to lay
the groundwork for a future viable Western relationship commensurate
with the potential of the continent; and b) to prevent events in
Africa from complicating a search, largely conducted elsewhere, for
solutions to the problems of war and peace, or from interfering with
our central strategic preoccupations on other regions."
So the idea of Africa as a sideshow to overall US foreign policy and
an irritant in American strategic conceptions of war and peace
continue to preoccupy some minds in Washington. But that idea is
often overstated out of arrogance or pure ignorance. When one reads
the 1966 Report, one can conclude, with the benefit of hindsight,
that either the analysts could not foresee the strategic industrial
resources and the oil that the Congo and Nigeria later provided the
United States or, for some ideological reasons, they refused to state
the fact. Today, some analysts even claim that Nigeria provides more
oil to the United States than Kuwait does. And, today, the fact
remains that Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, is a key strategic
partner to the US on the War on Terrorism.
So I am not worried about the contents of the 2005 report. It is
good that we know about it. But there is a diplomatic history of US
expert predictions and reports on Africa, although not well-known to
many. Many of them have turned out to be wrong---an indication that
their writers never paused to assess the history of such predictions.
Perhaps, Washington may have to change the body of experts it
consults on Africa because those experts since 1956 have not often
served Washington well.
I hope to write again about the Report. Until then:
Be Not Afraid
For this path hath we trod before
Be of Good Cheer
And May thy Enterprises Thrive!