This is an excellent history of the Cold War in Africa by one of America's leading Africanists. Only one of Elizabeth Schmidt's eight chapters, covering 15 per cent of the book, extends past the end of the US-Soviet competition in 1991, and only a quarter of that chapter summarizes the ‘war on terror’, the paradigm that provides the post-9/11 justification for Western intervention in African politics. Still, I would recommend this book for a course on today's interventions in Africa because it would place them in the historical context that so powerfully informs African politics. Western policymakers tend to downplay history's significance and appear to be surprised when enduring memories of the Mahdi and Gordon, Usman dan Fodio and his Fulani Jihad, the Zulu-British War, tribal conflicts, and collaboration with and resistance to colonial occupation burst into contemporary focus.
Foreign intervention was so incessant in Africa during the Cold War that despite ranging over all regions of the continent and telling many tales in good detail, this book must be a sampler rather than an encyclopedia. As Schmidt argues, it is hard to distinguish foreign involvement from intervention, because soft power and hard power have always been combined. With that definition every one of Africa's 55 countries deserves a lengthy treatment of its struggles and compromises with its former colonial master, the United States, the Warsaw Pact countries, and now China.
Schmidt shows how the United States and the colonial powers tried to prevent decolonization after the Second World War. When that proved impossible, they tried to control it, creating neo-colonial regimes whose indigenous elites preserved the trade and investment advantages, mineral rights, and often military bases that characterized colonialism. In a disturbing replay of the Congo ‘Free’ State of the nineteenth century (which was free only in the sense that all foreign traders could share in the captive market), the United States backed French colonialism as long as American firms had the same access as French firms.
A notable exception to this mercantilism was Eisenhower's reversal of the seizure of the Suez Canal by Britain, France, and Israel in 1956. An irony here is that Nasser seized the canal for its revenues, which he said were needed to build the Aswan Dam. Schmidt reminds us that an anti-communist Congress was to blame, because it had barred planned US aid for Aswan when Nasser recognized China instead of Taiwan.
At the core of US policy, says Schmidt, was an acceptance of Nasser's right to nationalize foreign-controlled commodities. If Eisenhower had applied this reasoning to Castro three years later, Schmidt's history of foreign intervention would have been far different. The embargo of Cuba for nationalizing American firms nurtured a conflict that led the tiny island to play an outsized role in Africa. As recounted in Piero Gleijeses's magisterial Conflicting Missions, Cuba was the only Cold War player to bring combat brigades to Africa and was the deciding factor in wars between Algeria and US-backed Morocco, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and South Africa (twice), and Ethiopia and US-backed Somalia.
Schmidt properly skewers France's role in Africa. From the instance of its liberation from Nazi oppression, France acted out a Napoleonic fantasy and brought its own oppression back to its colonies. Just as De Gaulle prevailed on Truman to ship French troops to Vietnam in 1945, his successors enforced a ‘French Union’ of African colonies from 1946. Massacres in Algeria, the Cameroon, and Madagascar showed how far France would go to preserve colonialism and as the cost of colonialism led to its demise, the economic assault on Guinea showed how far France would go to force compliance with its new strategy of association.
Schmidt exposes how the secret ‘Africa Cell’ in the French president's office ran the former African colonies as a chasse gardée, or ‘private hunting ground’, complete with compliant dictators, bribes, and covert operations, military bases, three dozen military interventions, a Paris-run currency, and uranium deals for France's nuclear production. Cold War ally of the United States or not, France saw America as an enemy in Africa and worked as hard to keep it out of its preserve, as it did the Soviet Union.
Most analysts explain the civil wars of the 1990s as a result of the end of the Cold War competition that had brought US and Soviet aid to favored dictators. While acknowledging this ‘abandonment’, Schmidt also traces the wars to ethnic tensions that revived during the economic collapse of the 1980s, when a rise in oil prices, a drop in other commodity prices, and foreign-imposed structural adjustment policies ended postcolonial growth. She provides a rare ethnic review of the Liberian civil war that makes her analysis of its non-ethnic ending under warlords without allegiances all the more compelling. A case for Schmidt's economic interpretation can be found in France's former colonies, where Mitterand (who had run the war in Algeria in the 1950s as interior minister) no longer rushed to back colorful dictators in trouble and presided over a reduction of aid and a consolidation of military power into three main bases.
Schmidt argues that the ‘war on terror’ has brought foreign intervention in Africa full circle, back to the Cold War. This time, though, the two main actors, France and the United states, share a goal. A dramatically expanded United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) backs virtually any regime that provides intelligence and military cooperation to identify and disrupt Islamist militants, and France is more willing than ever to supply the troops. Once again, African democracy is being sacrificed to promote a definition of Western security that may not withstand scrutiny. Attacks on the United States and France are attributable to grievances about intervention, not to a global jihad. When they collaborated to deny an Islamist party its electoral victory in Algeria in 1991, the result was an appalling civil war there and bombings in France. Al-Qaeda made it clear from its founding that it was only turning its attention to the ‘far enemy’ of the United States because of its support for its true enemies; Egypt's Mubarak and the House of Saud.
Schmidt is not sanguine about the future. She concludes that foreign interventions typically exacerbate conflicts, even the best-intentioned humanitarian and peacekeeping operations. Her analysis runs counter, she acknowledges, to today's trend, in which multilateral diplomacy is being supplanted by multilateral military action. It is often the African Union that first calls for intervention and then supplies the troops, albeit funded by the West. The historic United Nations decision to establish a ‘responsibility to protect’ people from massacre has been used to justify interventions in Libya, Mali, Uganda, Somalia, and the Central African Republic.
Schmidt concludes from her study that interests, and not governments, are the real actors in Africa, because the governments there are generally as fractured as the societies they represent. This allows foreign interveners to identify and obtain the requisite internal collaborators. Until African countries become nations with the sort of unifying identity that emerged from Europe's millennium of bloody sorting out, the foreign interventions will continue and books like Schmidt's will be needed.
American analysts owe Schmidt final thanks for her review of the regional effects of the US policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the apartheid regime in South Africa and its National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) proxy in Angola under Reagan. Reagan's apologists appear to have taken the occasion of Mandela's death to embark on a project of rewriting history. His aide, Chester Crocker, argues that his policy paid dividends for the Namibian people, but Schmidt shows clearly how Reagan's dance with the devil simply led to ‘justice delayed’ in Namibia's struggle for independence and an extra two decades of war and devastation in Angola. As the Obama administration asks Congress for funding for its cooperative devils today, this almost predictable result of foreign intervention on Africans is worth contemplating.
