Henry Kissinger, who died on 29 November, was firmly on the wrong side of history with regards to political and diplomatic trends in Africa.
His strategic errors in judgement wreaked havoc across the continent, especially in Southern Africa, and has implications for US policy in the region to this day.
Kissinger’s stance toward the continent was defined four months into his tenure as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. In April 1969, he signed off on a review of US policy toward Southern Africa, known as the National Security Study Memorandum 39.
“The Whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come is through them. There is no hope for the Blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists. We can, by selective relaxation of our stance toward the White regimes, encourage some modification of their current racial and colonial policies,” the memorandum says.
As Kissinger noted in the third book of his three-part memoir Years of Renewal, the policy assessment “consigned Africa to a low priority” on the Nixon foreign policy agenda. It also provided a rationale for the US president’s nearly exclusive focus on détente with the Soviet Union, the opening to China and shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East.
Arming Portugal
What Kissinger failed to see was the erosion of Portugal’s effort to defeat the nationalist movements fighting for independence in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. In fact, the only sustained attention that he gave to Portugal was during the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973.
When the Nixon administration went to resupply Israel with weapons, Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano’s authoritarian government in Lisbon refused to allow US military aircraft to refuel at the Lajes air base in the Azores en route to Israel.
As Kissinger, by then secretary of state, writes in book two of his memoir, Years of Upheaval, “we threatened to leave Portugal to its fate in a hostile world”, given its pariah status brought on by its uncompromising colonial mission in Africa. What he doesn’t include in his memoir, and what I learned while researching my book, Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire, was that Kissinger gave the green light to Portugal to purchase anti-aircraft missiles in return for access to Lajes air base.
Lisbon was desperate for the missiles in hopes of regaining the air superiority it had lost to the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau in the last days of its flagging colonial presence in Africa.
The missiles were set to be delivered weeks before the 25 April 1974 coup that brought 500 years of Portuguese colonialism to an end. This was in violation of an international arms embargo that had been in place against Portugal since 1961.
Picking sides in Angola
Kissinger’s indifference to the continent became even more costly as Angola approached independence months later, on 11 November 1975.
The Alvord Accord signed that January in Portugal granted Angola independence and was designed to lead to elections among the three nationalist movements: the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). As the accord faltered, Kissinger picked sides in hopes that there would be an Angolan government favourable to US interests.
The reality is that Africa is too often seen as a low priority for the United States
In doing so, he overrode his assistant secretary for Africa, Nathaniel Davis, who argued that the US should not meddle or intervene in Angola’s transition. As Kissinger wrote in Years of Renewal, “Davis turned out to be willing, indeed eager, to implement conventional wisdom, which meant non-intervention.”
Kissinger’s subsequent actions, authorising military support for the FNLA and UNITA, contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in Angola and the emergence of a de facto alliance with the apartheid government of South Africa that also undermined the détente. Cuba in turn would eventually dispatch 40,000 troops to the country to help the Angolan government defend against South African incursions and UNITA, supplied in part by the US.
The US-Angola relationship only began to fulfil its potential four decades later, when then-Defense Minister João Lourenço in 2017 initiated a strategic partnership with his counterpart, Gen. James Mattis, during the Donald Trump administration. President Lourenço’s efforts to deepen ties with Washington culminated last month in a meeting in the Oval Office where President Joe Biden underscored Angola’s central role in the $1bn Lobito Corridor project, the largest US rail investment in Africa ever.
Better late than never
Alert to the global consequences of assigning Africa to a low priority on the US foreign policy agenda, Kissinger would make two trips to the continent during his final year in office.
In a remarkable piece of hagiography and Kissinger mythmaking, Harvard Business School published a working paper in 2016 that describes the secretary “delicately working” with African governments, including South Africa, and the British pressuring Ian Smith, Rhodesia’ prime minister, into accepting the principle of majority rule.
Belatedly and at great cost to the region, Kissinger came to recognise that African leadership was necessary, if not inevitable, in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), although he clearly was not prepared to go that far as it concerned South Africa and Namibia.
The reality is that Africa is too often seen as a low priority for the United States.
Establishing a summit mechanism would be one important step to ensuring on-going high-level engagement. After all, the United States has been meeting annually with Asian nations since 1989 and regularly with Latin American Leaders since the inaugural Summit of the Americas in 1994.
President Biden hosted a successful African Leaders Summit last December and the administration has undertaken a host of initiatives to deepen the relationship with the continent. Nevertheless, this was only the second summit of its kind, after President Barack Obama held the first one in 2014.
No schedule has been set for future US summits with African leaders. It is worth noting that Beijing will be hosting the 9th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation next year.
Kissinger’s legacy in Africa underscores the perils of downplaying the continent’s significance in global affairs. With one in four people on the planet projected to be African by 2050, the region is often described as the continent of the future.
In fact, it is already the continent of today. And the US needs to respond accordingly.
Witney Schneidman served as deputy assistant secretary of State for Africa under President Bill Clinton. He is a non-resident senior fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
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