China in Africa

Adam Swerer, "The Most Dangerous American Idea", The Atlantic, Aug. 5, 2019. The article's lede: "No belief in the history of the United States has been more threatening to democracy than the certainty that only white people are fit for self-government." And the opening paragraph:

Last week, the historian Timothy Naftali revealed a 1971 conversation between Richard Nixon, then the president of the United States, and Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, in which Reagan referred to African United Nations delegates as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” Reagan was expressing anger over those African nations that voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China, rather than Taiwan, which had held the seat since the UN was founded, in 1945.

The article is about American racism, not China in Africa. But it has a great deal to say about China in Africa, and that interests me a great deal in the context of my Kisangani 2150 project.

Here the article returns to China-in-Africa:

Nixon’s and Reagan’s racism had also blinded them to what actually occurred at the UN: They had been diplomatically outmaneuvered by China, which had spent years forging ties with African nations in a bid to increase its own influence as it split from its close alliance with the Soviet Union. China had worked diligently to present its agrarian communism as the logical path for rural societies seeking independence and prosperity, and as a way to resist Western dominance.

“The Chinese are trying to make a name for themselves in Africa; they see Africa and building alliances there as really important to their ambitions for Beijing to be recognized as the legitimate government of China,” Laura Seay, a professor at Colby College who focuses on African politics, told me. “This is in the depths of the Cold War, and the United States diplomats at that time misread what was going on. They read Chinese behavior as consonant with the Soviets; it took time for them to see how deep that divide was.”

The Chinese government funded infrastructure projects, offered medical aid, and made a strong public-relations push to present itself as being in solidarity with oppressed nations around the world fighting white colonial governments or leaders aligned with them. The United States, in the meantime, was focused on fighting communism, which in practice meant supporting white-minority or colonial governments in Africa—including, most notably, the apartheid government in South Africa. By 1971, the CIA had participated in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; the U.S. had ignored Portuguese atrocities committed in an attempt to retain control of its African colonies, and had quietly backed the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. As independent African nations were emerging, and American priorities aligned the U.S. with the European colonial masters those nations were battling, China positioned itself alongside those seeking independence.

“China put itself forth as an ally, a powerful nation in the third world,” says Elizabeth Schmidt, a professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland and the author of Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. “The United States under Nixon, and later Reagan, was quite sympathetic to the white-settler colonies like South Africa.”

While America was trying to reconcile its own contradictions, the Soviet Union and China were eagerly exploiting them through propaganda, as American segregationists and their political enablers loudly denounced the civil-rights movement as a communist conspiracy.

It may seem a strange irony that self-styled champions of individual liberty like Nixon, Reagan, and Barry Goldwater consistently backed white-minority governments in Africa. That support was inconsistent with a belief in the fundamental democratic rights of all human beings, which all of them espoused. But it was consistent with the belief that black people could not govern themselves, whether in South Carolina or South Africa. Just like Greeley during Reconstruction, Nixon and Reagan saw the struggles African nations faced emerging from colonialism as symptoms of black inferiority.

“During decolonization, African leaders were trying to figure out how to run a country, how to bring in revenue, how to settle tensions between ethnic groups and regional blocs, how to build political institutions,” Seay said. “With a few exceptions, colonizers had allowed for very limited development of political institutions.”