This book by the former American diplomat, Herman J. Cohen, should be thought of more as a memoir or a primary source account of US diplomatic dealings with Africa rather than as a work of historical scholarship about Africans and African cultures.

Part of the reason I say that is because Cohen makes no overarching argument about this history or what it means. He provides a diplomatic history of US actions in Africa during the Cold War and the post-Cold War period, but he does not engage other scholars in any kind of historiographical debate. It does not appear that he is aware of those wider debates. If he is, he chose to ignore them, which may be his prerogative as one of the most experienced American diplomats in Africa from the Cold War generation. One argument implied but not cogently stated by Cohen is that, as a rule, American officials elevated national interests above purported American values. This book is one of the older diplomatic histories of “big men” and “high politics” mostly featuring American “g-men” on an African stage. There is no attempt or apparent awareness of the “new diplomatic history” interested in questions about how the policies of these “big men” affected the lives of ordinary people in African countries, especially in terms of race, gender, class, and the actions of non-state actors.Footnote ¹ Most of Cohen’s interactions took place with African heads of state or other African elites.

In the book’s sixteen chapters, Cohen covers the history of US government policy and actions in Africa, organized by presidential administration, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the first term of Donald J. Trump. He starts with a short introductory chapter that makes no attempt to lay out the stakes for the book or to introduce an argument. After analyzing the administrations of the fourteen presidents from 1944 through 2019, with a chapter each, he concludes with Chapter Sixteen, entitled “Reflections on Successes and Failures,” which seems less like a reflection than a recap of various points from earlier in the book through the lenses of a few key development institutions in Africa: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps — both “successes” of the short but impactful John F. Kennedy administration. This concluding chapter points to Africa’s greatest postwar challenge: independent economic development after decades of colonial economic exploitation and resource extraction.Footnote ² The rest of the book points to another of Africa’s greatest postwar challenges: making nations to attach to the states bequeathed by the colonial powers.Footnote ³

Space does not allow me to give adequate treatment to each of the fourteen presidential administrations. However, a few key themes emerge from the narratives provided by Cohen. First, as suggested by the word realpolitik in the subtitle, American interests took precedence over American values in nearly every instance. Cohen often implies this principle, but he also states it directly with a section heading in Chapter Six (on the Lyndon B. Johnson administration): “The US Policy Dilemma: Protect US Interests or Support African Liberation” (64). Cohen highlights the dilemma faced by US policymakers who, no matter how sympathetic to African liberation movements, found themselves confronting Soviet imperial moves in Africa instead. Thus, US foreign policy toward Africa was driven by Cold War calculations and not putative American values of freedom and democracy. One of the best examples of this policy could be found in South Africa, where American criticism of apartheid through a discourse on democracy and human rights had to be tempered with Cold War calculations to keep South Africa in the Western/NATO camp — not to mention an awareness of the hypocrisy of American critiques of apartheid while segregation and Jim Crow remained in force in the southern United States. Nowhere did the primacy of interests over values become more cynical than in the story about the decolonization of the Congo during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and questions about the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Cohen cites the claim of CIA station chief Larry Devlin, who claimed that although Eisenhower issued the order to assassinate Lumumba, his Belgian-supported opponents surrounding Governor Moïse Tshombe in Katanga beat the CIA to the job before Devlin could act (33–34).Footnote ⁴

Second, an implication of the first theme, American government officials treated Africa as a stage for great power competition rather than a domain in which African agency should be respected and expected to produce its own imperatives. This approach held true even in Liberia, a West African country with strong historical ties to the United States: established in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, settled by former African-American slaves, and gaining independence in 1847. Cohen refers to Liberia and Ethiopia as America’s “two old African friends” — who were essential to US foreign policy because of what they provided to Allied war efforts in the Second World War and later in the Cold War (8). Historical agency could be found in the actions of the few Liberian elites who provided the 99-year lease to Harvey Firestone for rubber production on the Firestone Plantation in Liberia. In Ethiopia, it could be found in Emperor Haile Selassie’s agreement to allow America to establish a strategic communications station at Kagnew in modern-day Eritrea (8–11). Beyond these few examples, Cohen features very little African agency.

Most of the presidential administrations covered receive a treatment by Cohen of about fifteen pages. The exception is the administration of George H. W. Bush, for which Cohen served as US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (1989–93). Cohen devotes twenty-eight pages to this chapter. Aside from Cohen’s position within it, this administration also saw some of the greatest systemic change in the postwar period. The main task for the Bush administration was to manage this change of the international system as the Soviet empire collapsed, establishing a “new world order.” As the Soviet Union disintegrated after 1989, African countries turned to “democratization” as the Bush administration tried to manage the effects of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the continent, along with an intensification of ethnic conflict fueled by resource extraction and weapons trafficking in places like Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda. This chapter driven by systemic change also provides one of the surprising moments in the book, when Cohen met with South African President F. W. De Klerk, who told him in 1989 that the South African economy of the future would require the full participation of the Black majority (167).

In terms of sources and methods, Cohen often cites himself, referring either to his previous books or to his extensive government experience.Footnote ⁵ To be fair, as the consummate Cold War American diplomat in Africa, Cohen often found himself at the center of US policy actions on the African continent. In addition, he extensively cites the US Department of State’s published primary source collection of the “Foreign Relations of the United States” (FRUS) as well as numerous untitled internet sources. These are mostly diplomatic sources for a diplomatic history, which explains why Cohen made no attempt to engage with the question of how ordinary people viewed or experienced these events.

It is surprising that Cohen largely ignores the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and other attempts at African federation or worldmaking in the wake of decolonization — issues that have seen renewed interest among Africanists.Footnote ⁶ For a diplomat, this seems like a potentially ripe harvest for the meanings of postcolonial independence and African nation-building. But then again, Cohen, perhaps like the government he represented, seems to have had little interest in African attempts to plot their own futures. His focus remains on the United States and other “great powers” at play on an African playground. In short, Cohen’s book is not a work of academic history; it is a political memoir of US diplomatic history in Africa. As long as Africanists approach it as such, it may still prove useful for teaching and research.