President Bill Clinton's historic trip to sub-Saharan Africa this March heralded the advent of a more committed and better-informed American engagement with the continent. Improved growth rates, continued democratic reform, and the end of many long-standing conflicts have also given rise to a new, if cautious, optimism about Africa's prospects. These trends are increasingly cited as evidence of an African renaissance. While the continent's challenges should not be understated, the optimists are not far off the mark: Africa is experiencing a second independence.
United States policymakers and the private sector have taken notice and are beginning to reassess America's interests in trade, investment, security, and political change in Africa. The academic community and other constituencies concerned with human rights, development, and environmental issues are also speaking of Africa in terms of renewal. And the African-American community, politically strategic for the future of United States policy, is experiencing a revival of interest in and engagement with its ancestral homeland.
Bedeviling this acknowledgment of Africa's importance is the absence of a framework organizing United States relations and interests on a continent whose size, diversity, and complexity defy a single approach. Policymakers, business leaders, financial investors, NGOs, and the public require a model that disaggregates Africa's 53 sovereign nations and allows a more coherent management of relations with them.
A reasonable approach to "unbundling" Africa is to start thinking in terms of five distinct subregions. Official policy and other forms of American engagement could then be organized around three areas where there are concrete national interests--economic development, security, and democracy--in each of these subregions. This approach would also help Americans distinguish between a handful of traumatized countries in one region and countries achieving significant positive change elsewhere on the continent.
On the economic front, Congress and the Clinton administration have advanced a new approach for promoting greater trade and investment with Africa. This has given rise to a debate about the right mix of development assistance, debt reduction, trade incentives, and investment promotion needed to support economic growth and sustainable development in Africa. A consensus has emerged, reinforced by the positions taken by African leaders during the president's spring trip, that all four elements are required and that trade and investment alone are not an alternative to increased development cooperation and debt relief.
On the security front, the administration has continued its year-old African Crisis Response Initiative by providing training and communications equipment to select African armies (Uganda, Senegal, and Malawi in 1997, and Mali, Ghana, and Ethiopia this year). Critics have questioned whether such support can be used to mobilize a regional force to perform peacekeeping or other conflict prevention or resolution roles. The implementation of this initiative has, however, created a new discussion of United States security cooperation in Africa that also raises important issues about how to define American national security interests on the continent.
On the third front, political reform or democratization, the Clinton administration has not offered a particular framework supporting African efforts to establish more accountable governance guided by the rule of law and respect for human rights. The centrality of this problem in priority countries such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) has forced a rethinking of assumptions about the course of political change in Africa. The emphasis has shifted from the mechanics of multiparty elections to issues of legal and constitutional reform and the role of civil society.
In debating how the United States should engage Africa on these three fronts, suggestions have tended to emphasize partnerships with "successfully reforming states," high GDP growth countries, and nations whose leaders are considered to represent a new generation of African leaders, such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. These approaches are more opportunistic than strategic. With the exception of the discourse on Central Africa, they lack a comprehensive assessment of larger regional realities. What is missing is a framework that incorporates the subregional context within which African states are attempting to make economic and political progress.
A regional approach should begin by recognizing five African countries where the United States must be involved: South Africa and Congo in southern and Central Africa; Nigeria in West Africa; Kenya in East Africa; and Algeria in North Africa. This broader approach addresses the fact that the United States has a regional concentration of interests in each area, and that these interests--economic, strategic, political, societal--are intertwined in any given country, and are easily influenced by events across porous borders.
South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, and Algeria are too important for Washington to ignore because all five meet most or all of the following criteria: they are large countries with large populations; they boast the strongest and most industrialized economies in their regions; they are among the largest markets for United States exports to Africa; the United States has diverse and long-standing interests in them; they are potential economic and political regional powerhouses; and, consequently, they are--or are likely to become--the "big actors" on the regional scene whose cooperation will be invaluable in resolving a wide range of problems. In short, they are likely to be either forces for regional security or sources of regional instability; forces for economic growth and democratization or sources of decline. The ultimate success of the African renaissance hinges on these five "anchor" countries.
Individual focus countries are obviously unique and the nature of American relations with each will be dramatically different, as will the direction of United States policy toward the different regions.
Southern Africa
Democratic South Africa is the United States most important partner in Africa. Although some were taken aback by it, President Nelson Mandela's forceful articulation of South African sovereignty during Clinton's visit lends strength and integrity to the partnership. Washington works with Pretoria on a host of pressing national and regional issues. The two countries also have begun to share broad policy objectives in South Africa itself and throughout the region. South Africa is America's second-largest trading partner in Africa; with two-way trade at $5.5 billion in 1997, it is a more important trading partner than all of Eastern Europe combined.
Cooperation on security and economic issues is most developed in the southern subregion. The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) continues to evolve as the principal vehicle for promoting greater intraregional trade and security cooperation. Nearly every country in the subregion has experienced fairly healthy GDP growth rates over the last three years, although an El Niņo-inspired drought could threaten that trend this year. Each country in the SADC also boasts an elected government (the exception is Congo, which gained membership in the SADC at the end of last year). American initiatives on trade, aid, debt reduction, and peacekeeping should attempt to reinforce the subregional cooperation under way and support the creation of a regional common market.
Central Africa
The overthrow of CIA client and United States cold war ally Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997 represented a victory for collective African action, initiated in this case by Rwanda and supported by a half dozen others, including Angola. Their military intervention and promotion of a Congolese rebel alliance under Laurent Kabila has resulted in a dramatically changed Central African environment.
Under President Kabila, the enormous and potentially rich Congo--the region's focus country--is poised to begin a process of economic reconstruction and political transition. However, persistent conflict in Burundi, a return to genocidal attacks in Rwanda, and general instability in eastern Congo (along with Kabila's failure to engage the democratic forces in his own country to create a successful transition process) suggest that greater regional turbulence lies ahead. Indeed, a resolution to the conflicts in several of Congo's nine neighboring states will depend substantially on the nature of Congo's transition.
In Congo it is not possible for the United States to embrace the self-proclaimed transitional government as a regional ally, but is it not advisable for the United States to remain disengaged. American policy requires a more creative and energetic combination of cooperation with the new government on economic reconstruction and on conflict prevention. Most important, support for democratic forces in Congo along with greater pressure on Kabila to help the country achieve a successful transition to an elected government is required. The United States should press Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola to use their influence with Kabila to develop a truly inclusive transition.
While America's economic relations with Congo are limited, its future as an important emerging market and regional economic powerhouse should not be discounted. Only a democratic resolution to Congo's post-Mobutu transition can unlock the country's enormous but long-distorted potential. It is in the United States interest to help achieve such an outcome and, in doing so, overcome its worst policy legacy in Africa.
West Africa
Nigeria, West Africa's troubled giant, is the United States largest trading partner in Africa and the second-largest OPEC oil supplier to the United States after Saudi Arabia (the United States imports some $6.3 billion annually in Nigerian oil, petroleum, and petroleum products). Despite the significance of United States trade with Nigeria, America's long-term interests in the country and in the stability of West Africa will require a re-prioritization of current United States-Nigerian relations. United States policy toward Nigeria cannot fail to recognize the centrality of democratization to the country's prospects for security and development. Military rule for 28 of its 38 years as an independent state has prevented Nigeria from assuming a regional role comparable to South Africa's in the southern region. The fate of Nigeria's democracy movement holds significant import for the evolution of democratic political systems in other countries in West Africa, and across the continent.
Increased calls internationally and in the United States for sanctions against Nigeria--including an oil embargo--are bound to influence policymakers in Washington. An escalation of sanctions, combined with higher level talks with the government aimed at freeing prisoners and getting Nigeria to accept a legitimate effort at democracy building, is the likely course for United States policy in the short term. As Washington faces growing domestic support for the country's pro-democracy movement and continued intransigence by the ruling junta, it will find it impossible to adopt a different standard toward Nigeria than that used for South Africa during the late 1980s. The prudent course will be to help end Nigeria's protracted crisis in the interest of greater progress in all West Africa and long-term United States economic interests.
West Africa generally continues to defy the larger trend in Africa toward elected civilian governments based on peaceful political competition. Following nearly eight years of fratricidal war, Liberians elected former warlord Charles Taylor president in 1997. ECOMOG, the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force that brokered the peace deal and provided shaky security in the country, is to withdraw this year. In neighboring Sierra Leone, ECOMOG recently forced the military junta to flee and returned the elected civilian government to power. Elsewhere in West Africa, military governments in Gambia and Niger civilianized themselves through questionable elections, and Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha appears likely to use his transition plan to achieve the same result in elections scheduled for later this year. This strategy has brought meaningful political change only to Ghana, while elsewhere it has served to delay democratization and perpetuate military rule in civilian garb.
The mainly civilian-led governments in francophone West Africa continue to promote regional economic cooperation through the West African Economic and Monetary Union and plan to launch a collective stock exchange based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Most of these states have recently boasted economic growth, as has Ghana. The subregion's overall economic, political, and security prospects are, however, directly undermined by Nigeria's refusal to countenance political and economic freedom for the country's more than 110 million people. The regionwide economic cooperation organization ECOWAS has not achieved any real economic integration, mainly because of Nigeria's economic and policy failings.
East Africa
Revitalized United States support for democratization in Kenya is crucial if this focal East African country is to avoid slipping into a violent ethnoregional crisis; such support would also provide a positive example of the economic benefits that can accrue from democratic governance. As East Africa's economic leader, Kenya is a potential hub around which regional economic development could be built, including greater economic cooperation between the countries of eastern and southern Africa in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. In addition to its economic interests in Kenya (the eighth-largest African market for American exports), the United States still depends on access to Kenyan ports and airfields for military operations in the Persian Gulf and for humanitarian intervention in East Africa itself.
Continued corruption and the repression of Kenya's considerable democratic movement threaten to undermine East Africa's precarious stability; they have already slowed the progress of the East African Cooperation program, which was re-launched in 1996 by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to promote greater ties and benefits in the economic heart of the subregion.
A more dramatic regional development is the advance of a guerrilla alliance against the dictatorial Islamist regime in Sudan. Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda's cooperation in support of this project is seen by many as offering hopes for a repeat of last year's successful intervention in Congo by a similar collective. The Clinton administration imposed financial sanctions on Khartoum in 1997 and is providing "nonlethal" support to Sudan's three allied neighbors. Washington's preoccupation with Sudan has led it to play down the importance of political reform in these three countries, a strategy that could ultimately threaten the national transformation each hopes to accomplish.
North Africa
In Algeria, the complicated challenge of "mainstreaming" Islamic fundamentalism into a new democratic system has regional implications across not only North Africa but also parts of West and East Africa and Western Europe. The dual threats of radical religious fundamentalism and the authoritarianism of governments in many North African states require a strong policy response if the United States is not to be forced to retreat from promoting its interests in the region.
The carnage consuming Algeria has highlighted the impotence and disinterest of the international community, including all Arab and African regional institutions, in initiating a dialogue for peace or an intervention to protect Algerian lives. The extreme violence of the fundamentalist Islamist opposition, and the government's own involvement in massacres and continued political repression, show no signs of abating. Throughout the region, the increasing number of unemployed youth, combined with repressive regimes and Islamist movements often offering the only alternative to the status quo, portends a growing instability that threatens to overwhelm the little economic progress most states in the region are achieving. The United States should stop hiding behind French indecision and organize an ambitious diplomatic initiative with the European Union and African and Arab states to promote a negotiated settlement to Algeria's nightmare.
With the exception of South Africa, growing human rights abuses will make it nearly impossible for the United States to cooperate with the focus country governments on other regional issues. This suggests the need to rapidly press forward on human rights and democratization issues, not only because they deserve urgent attention in themselves but also because failing to do so could jeopardize Washington's ability to promote collective solutions to larger regional problems and to help realize Africa's economic potential.
A regional approach will not limit the scope of United States involvement in Africa but will sharpen the focus. By thinking regionally the United States would be better able to promote the objectives it shares with most of Africa. This approach would also permit the United States to remain engaged with the entire continent in a manner commensurate with American interests.
SALIH BOOKER is a senior fellow and director of the African studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations
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