The Africans (36 page)

Few African countries have ever benefited from that relationship. Moscow’s first “developmental” gift to Guinea, a tropical West African country where few homes have running water, consisted of two snowplows and ten thousand toilet seats. French-speaking Chad got twelve Soviet university professors, who knew only one language—Russian. In Somalia, Moscow constructed a meat-packing facility, but the bulk of production went to the Soviet Union at discount prices. In Tanzania, Moscow built the last thing that backward
country needed—a $30 million air-missile system to protect Dar es Salaam. Ethiopia had to mortgage its coffee crop for the next ten years to repay Moscow for the $1 billion arms airlift of 1977–1978. Guinea-Bissau buys fish taken in its own waters by Russian fishermen and packed in cans labeled “Caught in the Soviet Union.” In Mozambique, Spain pays $2 million annually for fishing rights; the Soviet Union gets them for nothing. Under terms of an agreement favorable to Moscow, the Soviets “vacuum-clean” the fish from the Mozambique Channel, keeping the best 75 percent of the catch and selling the leftovers to Mozambique’s Marxist government. In Angola, sixty cents of every dollar the government earns goes to the military or to repay Soviet debts. For each Cuban teacher or technician in Angola, the government pays Havana $600 a month. It also pays for the Cubans’ housing and utilities. Even to comrades, Moscow gives nothing for free and at some point it always calls in its debts.

The Soviet Union has become by far the largest arms supplier to Africa, providing eleven times more weapons than the United States and four times more than France. This alone gives Moscow considerable clout; without those guns at least two governments, Angola’s and Ethiopia’s, would not be in power today. But the Soviet Union’s biggest advantage in Africa is historical and psychological: Washington backed the colonial powers in Africa right up to the dawn of independence; Moscow supported the liberation movements. It is, though, naïve to take this tradition one step further and say that therefore the Soviet Union is Africa’s “natural ally.” But I met more than a few educated Africans, many of them Ethiopians schooled in the United States, who believe precisely that. They resent the economic and political strength of the United States, its backing of South Africa, its bullylike tactics in international forums, its professed concern for human rights abroad while having given its own minority groups at home much to complain about.

There’s an interesting point here. These same Africans speak with respectful awe of the American Revolution, considering it the model of an oppressed people’s triumph over colonialism. They know the U.S. Constitution better than most American schoolchildren do and mention it often as a document that reflects the dreams of all mankind. And if the United States and the Soviet Union both lifted visa restrictions and invited free immigration, Washington would have to send a larger fleet than it used in the Normandy invasion to carry the exodus out of Africa. Moscow wouldn’t be able to fill a
Boeing 727. Why? Because Africans know the United States offers an individual something they can’t find at home or in the Soviet Union—an opportunity for economic advancement in a free society.

Washington has never known how to react to this love-hate affair. Nor has it ever been sure how to deal with Moscow’s clumsy, militarily aggressive posture in Africa. It had a chance to confront Moscow in Angola in 1975, in the Horn of Africa in 1977 and in the Rhodesian civil war that led to the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980. Each time, it backed off and sought political rather than military solutions. As it turned out, having no policy or at least a nonbelligerent policy proved to be the best policy of all. Zimbabwe became independent with a Marxist head of state, Robert Mugabe, who was thoroughly distrustful of Moscow. Angola and Ethiopia sunk deeper into internal warfare and economic chaos, making the Soviet Union’s investment an expensive one that was unlikely to return any dividends for a long time. If you accept the premise, as I do, that Communism is not a long-range threat to black Africa, it is entirely possible Moscow may never get any return on its money at all.

No doctrine, in fact, is more in conflict with the inherent character of Africa than Communism. First, Africans are religious, whether that religion is Christianity, Islam or animist. Second, Africans are capitalistic, collecting cattle or money as greedily as any Western entrepreneur. Third, Africans ate historically democratic, choosing their village chiefs and clan elders by varying forms of consensus. Fourth, Africans are individualistic, willing to labor for themselves or their tribe, but seldom showing much interest in the broader, abstract concepts of nation or state. Fifth, Africans simply do not work or produce when they are not rewarded with economic incentive.

The United States can capitalize on this natural antithesis toward Communism by convincing Africa that economic development and security are interdependent, that the longer-term advantages of economic assistance are far greater than the short-term ones of military support.

To accomplish this, the United States and its Western allies must provide the technical and financial aid that African countries, even Marxist nations such as Ethiopia and Angola, need to arrest their deterioration and to develop economic and political self-reliance. That in turn will make Africa less dependent on outside meddlers. At some point Africa’s radical states will realize that posters of Karl
Marx or Friedrich Engels hanging in their main squares look as foolish and as un-African as would portraits of Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson. Until that happens, Africa will continue to take its guns from the East, its money from the West. But one president after another has learned that the expertise and financial resources needed for tomorrow’s growth are available only in the West, and if Africa is to develop a skilled, enterprising propulation, it is to the West that the continent must turn, just as it always has in the past.

The Soviet Union pumped $1 billion worth of weapons into Ethiopia in 1977 and 1978 to help that country gain a military advantage over two different antigovernment guerrilla movements, in the Ogaden and in Eritrea. When a severe drought struck the Ethiopian provinces of Wallo and Tigre a few months after the arms airlift, Moscow gave nary a ruble for relief. Marxist Ethiopia turned to the West and emergency assistance poured in, including $2.5 million from the United States. Drought struck again in 1983, and again it was only the West that helped.

The Gulf Oil Co. suspended production in Angola during that country’s civil war in the mid-seventies. One of the first moves of the Marxist government that came to power was to ask Gulf to resume production, which the company did. Gulf’s complex is located in the Cabinda region, and security for the U.S. interests there is provided by none other than Fidel Castro’s Cuban troops. And who did Angola retain as its economic consultants? The Boston firm of Arthur D. Little.

The UN Security Council pledged $385 million in 1976 to help Mozambique counter the financial drain of closing its border with Rhodesia, a move Mozambique hoped would help bring down the white-minority government in Salisbury. Only about $100 million of the pledge was ever delivered to Mozambique, but every cent of it came from the West.

In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union attempted to expand its political influence in the eight West African nations that comprise the constantly drought-stricken Sahel. Moscow increased the size of some of its embassy staffs, but not the amount of its donations. Again, economic assistance for the region came from the West, $1 billion in 1978 alone, of which the United States gave $67 million.

Until the arrival of the Carter Administration, the United States had displayed a remarkable insensitivity toward and ignorance of black Africa. Washington professed support for the aspirations of
the emerging nations but its real sentiments lay with the white man in Africa—the Portuguese, South African, Rhodesian. In 1962, for instance, the United States voted for a UN resolution criticizing Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa. But then, because Washington wanted continued access to Lajes Air Base in the Azores, Presidents Kennedy and Nixon both strengthened U.S. support for Portugal and voted with the Portuguese on almost every issue involving colonialism.

President Nixon continually refused to receive African heads of state visiting Washington or New York, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wouldn’t even see African ambassadors in Washington except as a group, an oversight that African statesmen quite properly found demeaning. To justify his boredom with Africa, Kissinger maintained privately that it was impossible to formulate an African policy. The place was too diverse, too politically incohesive, he said; you would need forty or fifty policies, not just a single one.

He was wrong. The Carter Administration gave top priority to forging a more equal partnershp with the Third World. Carter visited Nigeria in 1978—the first U.S. President ever to pay an official visit to a black African country. His Administration was actively involved in the settlement that ended the Rhodesian civil war and led to the independence of Africa’s fifty-first nation, Zimbabwe. And Washington began putting some distance between itself and the white supremacist regime in South Africa. Carter and his UN ambassador, Andrew Young, paid so much attention to Africa, in fact, that the British prime minister, James Callaghan, remarked, “There seems to be a number of new Christopher Columbuses setting out from the United States to discover Africa for the first time. Africa has been there for a long time.”

Foreign aid represents a reasonably accurate barometer of Washington’s interest in an area, and Callaghan might have been surprised to learn that sub-Sahara Africa did not rank high, despite all the time Carter and Young spent discussing it.
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In 1979 Washington budgeted only $265 million in developmental assistance for black Africa. That represented seventy-one cents per recipient, or 17 percent of Washington’s total world-wide aid commitment. Israel, on the other hand, recieved $785 million that year, and Egypt $750 million. One footnote worth mentioning here: four fifths of Washington’s
aid to black Africa is nonmilitary, while most of the Soviet’s is military.