Evolution of United States-Africa Relations from Disinterest, Summitry, to Containment of China's Putsch for Economic Hegemony, 1945-2014

Historically, the United States was never interested in Africa. Twice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the U.S. rejected European overtures to get entangled in the Scramble for Africa (1884-1885) and to acquire an African territory during the post-World War I Paris peace conference (1919). It was not until the advent of the Cold War at the close of World War II that the exigencies of maintaining the political, economic, and strategic stability vital to the interests of the U.S. and her allies, and the exclusion or denial of same to the Soviet Union, that the U.S. was prompted by ideological and geopolitical strategic considerations to pay some attention to a continent it had until then ignored. Although United States involvement in Africa was initiated because of the Soviet threat of exporting Communism to underdeveloped territories controlled by its allies, this interest was pursued through the agency of Britain, France, and Portugal, whose colonial claims America supported against the legitimate political aspirations of African nationalists. Ultimately, by the time a number of former European colonies were decolonized in the early 1960s, the United States had played a defining role in frustrating African nationalism and ensuring the entrenchment of European neocolonialism. From the 1960s till the end of the Cold War, independent-minded Africans saw the United States not as friend but as a foe that they distrusted and treated with suspicion. African suspicions of the motives of the United States are still rife today. What better way to obviate this age-old suspicion than by inviting the leaders of Africa to the United States to showcase America's newly found goodwill? No other American president but Obama, a direct descendant of Africa, was better positioned to win over and bring to summitry so many African leaders. When on August 6-7, 2014 President Barack Obama hosted the largest contingent of African leaders in what some observers have aptly dubbed the largest United States-Africa Summit, it was a gesture worth initiating to help assuage the friction of decades past. The assemblage was indeed large in scale — 50 African leaders in attendance; but it was also the only summit ever held between the United States and Africa. Hence, the significance of the 2014 Summit rests not in its scale but in the fact that it took place. What, then, does this portend for United States-Africa relations? Why was the summit held and what does it expect to accomplish? Much like the threat of Communism during the Cold War, a new threat of Chinese economic hegemony in Africa is looming in the horizon. Is the U.S. positioning itself to contain the Chinese economic threat as it did the Soviet threat of Communism? The proposed panel paper seeks to understand why President Obama summoned 50 African leaders, democratically-elected and dictators alike, to Washington, D.C. to deliberate with him on a variety of issues at this critical juncture in the development of the continent when China is making unprecedented inroads everywhere in the sub-continent. To that end, the paper will explore and map out the various stages of development of U.S.-Africa relations, identify and analyze the factors that led to the historic summit of 2014, and elaborate on what both parties could gain from this new relationship if all goes well.