Africanists generally agree that the United States, in the formulation and execution of its foreign policy, has historically relegated Africa to a low priority. To the extent that there has been an Africa policy at all, it has been described by scholars with such terms as a “policy of indifference,” a “non-policy,” a “policy of benign neglect.”

The election of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States coincided with the “Age of Nationalism” in Africa, an era which saw the majority of Black Africa freed from the yoke of colonialism. Kennedy made a conscious attempt to demonstrate that the United States was sympathetic to the ideals cherished most by African nationalists: national independence and self-determination; territorial integrity and security; and economic development. It was as a result of his administration’s initiative that various economic development programs (i.e., the Peace Corps, USAID) took root in Africa. However, under President Johnson, U.S.

There are many arguments advanced in support of “constructive engagement,” but the following claims are probably the most important. Apartheid is morally unacceptable. It creates difficulties in the West. It is in the interest of the West that it should come to an end with Western help. That interest coincides with that of most South Africans, except perhaps, an increasingly unrepresentative minority. Total disengagement, disinvestment, and trade boycotts are deemed impractical and unlikely, in any event, to succeed in supplanting the racist regime.

The collapse of any social order is inevitably presaged by the failure of its normalizing institutions to command their accustomed ideological authority. All long-held values, assumptions, and moral codes and norms of behavior are suddenly called into question. Uncertainty replaces confidence. Chaos replaces order. The glaring gap between rhetoric and reality becomes too obvious to elicit respect.

The collapse of Portuguese colonization in 1975 and the ensuing independence of Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe and the intensification of the national and class struggles in Namibia and South Africa has produced a crisis of unprecedented proportions for the South African regime and its imperialist backers. Historical alliances and loyalties are being undermined.

No one is happy with the Reagan Administration’s southern Africa foreign policy strategy known as constructive engagement. Liberals object to the tilt towards South Africa, to the linkage of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola to the Namibian negotiations; to the resulting moribund state of those negotiations; and to the deemphasis of human rights and development issues in favor of increased emphasis on military and security issues. Conservatives object to economic assistance packages for African socialist and self-styled states; to the declining U.S. support of Jonas Savimbi’s ostensibly pro-Western UNITA forces in Angola; to Administration efforts to improve relations between the United States and the Marxist states of Angola and Mozambique; and to the Administration’s apparent willingness to accept a SWAPO (i.e., communist guerrilla) outcome in Namibia.

The size and intensity of this audience bespeaks the great concern that exists about the current drift of U.S. policy towards Africa, especially southern Africa. Our government has come to have close relations with South Africa, along with the business community. Why the shift in policy direction if that is indeed what has happened and if so, what is it based on? Last night, Professor Magubane said it seems to be based on the profit motive. Perhaps we are more generally accustomed to think that it must be based upon racism. Crocker has written at one point in Foreign Affairs that perhaps it is based upon temerity, that is to say, we must dare in southern Africa.

During the past decade, American foreign policy interests in Southern Africa have steadily increased. In 1974, the collapse of the Portuguese government led to independence for Mozambique and Angola. More recently the Zimbabwean and Namibian liberation struggles have occupied center stage. International attention to South African events has also increased while Western concerns about Soviet influence in the region have intensified. Policy-makers in the United States have not remained immune to these changes. In fact, while American interests in the region have not really changed, they have increased because of the foregoing events and the way they are perceived by American policy makers.

In April 1980, all the majority-ruled states of Southern Africa gathered in Lusaka, Zambia, and formed the Southern African Development Coordination Conference.

Despite continued American insistence that a negotiating impasse had not been reached, by the final months of 1982 it seemed clear that internationally-recognized independence for Namibia would not soon be achieved. While Washington claimed that negotiations between South Africa, Angola, and the Southwest African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) (with the U.S. as mediator) remain meaningful, there appears to have been a decisive move away from settlement. The latest round of negotiations, spearheaded by the United States as the leading element of the Western Contact Group (the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Canada), has attempted to move South African-controlled Namibia to independence on the basis of Security Council Resolution 435 of September 1978.

May 1983 saw two diametrically opposed efforts to change some fundamental features of contemporary South Africa. On May 3, Prime Minister Botha’s new Constitutional Bill was introduced in the House of Assembly providing for the first time for the inclusion of Coloured and Indians in the previously all white national legislature. Minor as the role of these two minorities will be should the new structure be adopted, the provisions signaled two white objectives: to split the black front, such as it is, and to underline the permanent exclusion of the majority Africans from any share in making national decisions.

On May 20, what might be considered the response to that formal exclusion came with the use for the first time by the seventy-year-old African National Congress of a new and deadly tactic when it exploded a car bomb outside airforce headquarters in Pretoria, killing eighteen people.

South Africa’s white minority government faced a severe crisis in the 1970s as it attempted to support major industrial expansion and a dynamic economy while maintaining its separate development policies. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the South African economy had been described as ready to “take off” as manufacturing moved to the dominant position in the economy. At the same time, the economy suffered from labor shortages, suppressed wages, restricted product markets, and inflation, as a direct result of the government’s restrictive labor policies. In a speech to industrialists and academics, Harry Oppenheimer of the Anglo-American industrial group stated that these industrial and economic problems were a direct result of governmental policies which limited the use of African labor and therefore throttled back the entire economy.

In their study of personal rule in black Africa, Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg maintain that the most important factors shaping contemporary African politics are the political skills, orientations, and leadership styles of African heads of state. They assert that African nations as yet lack well-developed political institutions and hold that in the absence of such institutions, the politics of personal rule are much more decisive in shaping the character and continuity of African regimes than any economic, social, or cultural factors. As a logical outcome of these contentions, Jackson and Rosberg assert that, far from being aberrations, succession crises are an integral feature of personalistic politics. Because of the decisive influence of the leader’s abilities and orientations, his death or removal may very well bring about fundamental changes in the regime over which he presided.

On returning to power following the coup d’etat of December 31, 1981, Flight-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings set two major goals: the restoration of power to the people and the waging of a “holy war” against corruption. In line with these objectives, he suspended the constitution, banned political parties, detained party leaders, and took a number of extra-legal actions. Almost immediately questions began to surface about the prospects of the regime’s impact on Ghana’s long civil liberties tradition. This essay will examine the basis for these fears and assess whether or not they might be justified. An attempt is made to do this by placing the Ghanaian civil liberties situation in a broader comparative context, seeking in this way to give a balanced perspective on this subject.

When he signed the Camp David treaty with Israel, President Anwar Sadat promised the Egyptian people that this would bring peace and prosperity. He assured American policymakers that as a leader in the Arab world, he would be in an opportune position to play a role in the region as an intermediary between the U.S. and Egypt’s Arab-Moslem neighbors, and to act as a bridge for peace between Israel and its Arab adversaries. Among many of Egypt’s Arab sister states, however, Sadat became known as a traitor, and his country became profoundly alienated from them. Since Sadat’s assassination, this condition has not improved. In fact, in recent years Egypt seems to have lost influence and prestige in the international as well as the regional community, and domestic problems have mounted, adding to the growing crisis of legitimacy which surfaced around the time of Sadat’s death.