Remembering Africa

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In 1991, resurgent democratic movements in sub-Saharan Africa sensed a surprising shift in Bush administration policy. African political reformers were caught on the rebound and the continent’s aging despots were stunned. U.S. foreign policy toward Africa had edged closer than ever before to the timeworn position of its congressional critics. For the first time since the Kennedy administration’s support for anticolonial African nationalism, crowds yearning for freedom, this time from domestic tyranny, cheered statements from the U.S. State Department as it distanced itself from the autocratic and unpopular leaders it once supported.

The demise of the Cold War and the steady though incomplete dismantling of apartheid have undermined the logic that once drove America’s alliances of expediency on the continent, which were so inimical to expanding civil liberties in Africa. While attitudes in the West may have changed, the policies of the United States and its European allies toward Africa are still not the supportive pillars of stable market-driven democracies they could be. But much also depends on Africa itself. African political reformers must now discard the old ideological shibboleths that have helped keep their countries shackled in poverty, communal violence and political repression. The pace of their own reform, how quickly they can devise new development policies and institutions more consonant with the march of history toward economic and political liberalism, will help determine the full impact of external support for change.

Only with the emergence of African states that foster individual freedoms and market economies with complementary public sectors will the continent receive the attention it deserves. African societies might then graduate from being passive recipients of charity to full actors in global politics and economics. Amid the flood of problems that still exist in Africa, its surging tide of democracy is barely visible, especially to a world whose eyes are keenly focused on events elsewhere.

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