There is very little likelihood that the US presidential elections this November will bring any dramatic change in American policy towards Africa. Despite claims and hopes to the contrary, continuity is far more likely, extending the policies developed through two Republican administrations and eight years of Democratic President Bill Clinton.
President George W. Bush's use of the last four years to solidify the most militarist, unilateralist and openly arrogant US administration in recent history has caused many people in the US to embrace the slogan ‘anybody but Bush,’ and provoked world-wide protests and the defections of long term European and Asian allies.
But there is very little at stake for Africa in the US presidential elections. If anything, it appears likely that President Bush will feel more obligated to provide increased levels of funding for development assistance and more focus on situations of concern to Christian fundamentalists such as the conflict in Sudan. Although Kerry's election platform includes demands for enhanced AIDS assistance, a Kerry presidency will be under much less pressure to fight for higher levels of economic assistance or to engage with the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or other crisis areas. Thus advocates of a policy of benign neglect for Africa,1 as the best US policy given the havoc wrought when Washington does engage, might be more satisfied with a government led by Senator Kerry.
But beyond the question of official policy, the more important question for readers of ROAPE may be what is the future of individual or movement support in the United States for progressive struggles in Africa? The local and national movements in support of African liberation movements that ultimately culminated in a powerful anti-corporate movement in support of the end of white minority rule in South Africa have essentially disappeared. But they have not left a vacuum. In their place has emerged a smattering of local and national organisations calling for debt cancellation, supporting demands for fair trade not free trade, as well as acting in support of African movements for health care and treatment access for persons with HIV/AIDS. These issue-focused campaigns and movements have been complemented by groups, often based in the African diaspora, that are focused on the situation in specific countries such as Liberia, the DRC, and Sudan.
Examining these organisations and efforts reveals that 15 years of growing continuity in US policy is matched by the emergence of a new ordering of Africa policy, organisations, and struggles – a development for which old nationalist and solidarity frameworks provide little guidance. It is thus not just the marginalisation of Africa and its importance to the US state and capital that we are watching – as many economists and activists argue – but a new set of struggles over a post-liberal, post-nationalist liberation movement paradigm. And herein lays the importance of placing policy and party concerns alongside the rise of new, and often confounding, movements and organisations.
This essay, written in August before the November presidential elections, charts these claims by providing first a brief overview of US policy, and what progressives can expect from the US government, regardless of which candidate wins the election in November, and, second, by attempting to place popular movements and individual actions in support of African progressives within the new post-cold war, post-national liberation movement, and post-liberal context.
US policy: The big five
For many observers, US policy towards Africa has narrowed to a concern with, to use the words of one longtime activist, ‘oil, Islam, terror, and AIDS’. There is certainly much long-term, bipartisan evidence of this. The recent bipartisan report by the Africa Policy Advisory Panel, authorised by Congress in early 2003 and conducted by the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), focused on five policy ‘drivers’: HIV/AIDS, terror, oil, armed conflicts and global trade.2 Of these oil and energy figured first in its published concerns, with increasing attention being given to Central and West African oil states – principally Nigeria, Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipé. Given the pace of new discoveries, it is expected that Africa will in ten years provide up to 20 per cent of all US imported oil.
Bolstering rich and authoritarian oil states has been a constant, bipartisan policy. In the starker and harsher post-9/11 era the language of democratisation and development has been replaced by language of support for the war on terror and unruly states. While a post-Bush administration might replace the language of unilateralism with a more inclusive rhetorical approach, and thus win greater international legitimacy, the policy will surely be extended (witness candidate Kerry's reaffirmation that the US will never rule out unilateral action).
More innovative Africa actions by the Bush administration also seem likely to be continued by any successor administration. Key here are actions in the wake of 9/11, using militarist conceptions to cement alliances between African and US policymakers, and placing policy and alliances within a terror framework. Much of this preceded Bush of course. As I wrote during the Clinton presidency, Clinton broke new ground by forcefully applying free market policies to Africa and, often unnoticed, by placing Africa on the US foreign policy map by casting it as a transnational security threat.3 As Susan Rice, Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (and currently a key Kerry advisor) put it at the time,
We have consistently articulated two clear policy goals: integrating Africa into the global economy … and combating transnational security threats, including terrorism, crime, narcotics, weapons proliferation, environmental degradation and disease.4
Bush's discourse and web of military engagements after 9/11 have turned these Democratic policy statements into concrete actions, sustaining compliant allies in the hope they can contain local unrest and resistance to corrupt local states, international capital, and imperial interventions. The discourse of internal and international terrorism is thus not simply substituting for the ideology of the Cold War, but is forging new military and ideological networks as capable of repressing internal dissent as pursuing ‘foreign’ terrorists.
For example, Bush has moved farther and faster than any recent administration in constructing a network of military and political alliances, with military-to-military linkages being expanded all across the continent as part of the Pentagon's growing ‘war on terror’. As General Charles Wald, Deputy commander of the European Command (which oversees all operations in Africa outside the Horn), said by way of justification while visiting Ghana recently: ‘there have been indications that al Quaeda is operating [in Africa].’6 The Horn, always seen as part of the Middle East, has received the most attention, with the creation in 2004 of a Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa, now based in Djibouti. In June 2003 Bush also launched a $100 million Eastern Africa Counter-Terrorism initiative involving Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Eritrea as well as Djibouti. Another new State Department programme, the Pan-Sahel Initiative, is being implemented by Pentagon and civilian contractors in Mali, Mauritania, Chad, and Niger.
These actions suggest the obvious targeting and encirclement of Islamic Africa. Yet the number of African armies involved extends well beyond Islamic or oil-rich areas, and well beyond the countries listed, at one time or another, as members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ supporting the invasion of Iraq (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Rwanda and Angola). More than a 120 senior African military officers and defense officials from 44 states participated, for example, in seminars this past February at the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies.7 Compliant African states and militaries offer Washington far more than checks to radical Islam; they are increasingly seen as a counter-weight to rival core powers in the North and unruly states and leaders in the South. African peacekeeping forces, the thinking goes, may be especially valuable in replacing, as the occupation of Iraq has so starkly indicated, European and other allies now unwilling to occupy areas conquered by direct US military action or deploy to areas the US is unwilling or unable to (due to overextension in Iraq and Afghanistan). And even if South African troops are not sent to Iraq, the South African government seems more than willing to allow their mercenaries, now converted into ‘private military contractors’, to play major roles in the US occupation.
African states are clearly judged by some US policymakers to be more politically compliant as well as more militarily dependent – and have a proven track record. This may prove especially valuable as the ‘war on terrorism’ transmutes into a broader discourse that supports a global, post-liberal order including repressive regimes in the South. The current top ten contributors to UN peacekeeping operations are Third World states, with Africa providing four of the ten (Nigeria, 2,930 troops; Ghana, 2,790 troops; Kenya, 1,826 troops; Ethiopia, 1,822 troops). Indeed, a recent US proposal to create with other rich states a 75,000-strong, standby peacekeeping force depends heavily on African participation; of the $660 million pledged by the US approximately $480 million is targeted for African militaries.8 Senegal, Uganda, Nigeria and soon South Africa already participate in the US's African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance which has trained 12,000 African peacekeepers since 1997.9 None of these actions will create independent African militaries capable of launching and sustaining peacekeeping operations, even in Africa; the lack of airlift capacity alone guarantees this. But as the US support for Uganda has illustrated, these programmes also have strengthened some of the most brutal and corrupt militaries in Africa.
The militarisation of African studies and attacks on academic freedom are similarly accelerating, as new funds flow into area studies, including the study of Africa with its large Islamic cultures and populations.10 Again, this is not new. Over the course of the last decade scores of US students, funded by the National Security Education Program (NSEP) – which requires student grantees to pursue careers in federal agencies with intelligence and national security functions – have studied at many African universities.11 Led again by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS), all large federal African study centres publicly re-confirmed their boycott of funding from military and intelligence agencies throughout the 1990s.12
In the wake of 9/11 a wholesale campaign has been launched by neo-conservatives against those area studies programmes and individual scholars that adhere to the boycott. Spearheaded by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution and the National Review,13 the campaign led to hearings in Congress attacking both Middle East Studies centres – supposedly driven by the anti-American ideas of Edward Said – and Africanist faculty and centres that reject the determination of language and areas studies by the needs of military and intelligence agencies. David Wiley of Michigan State University has been a particular target of Kurtz's, while Kurtz has lavished praise on supporting statements by other faculty at major centres, such Professor Eyamba Bokamba at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.14 Proposed legislation would create a new federal oversight agency, with appointees from homeland security agencies. The progressive response to these manoeuvres has been weak, and as academic institutions face additional funding cuts, the temptation to take such funds will increase.
Trade, aid, AIDS
While these policies are pushed forward, few if any new measures related to economic development assistance are on the horizon. Democrats in Congress have offered no alternative to Bush's trade and aid bills, and indeed protectionist and patriotic language is greater among Democrats. The extension of the AGOA trade agreement was recently passed after lobbying by Bono, Republican Senators, NGOs (e.g. World Vision, Bread for the World, Africare, Goodworks International) and black (e.g. Coca Cola's Carl Ware) and white businessmen (e.g. ChevronTexaco, Coca Cola). Most of the major figures in the Democratic Party also supported the bill, as did candidate Kerry, who characterised this expansion of AGOA as part of the road to ‘a brighter future for many of the continent's poorest countries.’15
However, AGOA offers only the shortest of advantages, since the current global system of quotas on textile and apparel is set to expire on 1 January 2005 when WTO rules will finally apply. And even if the US and other countries use temporary measures to delay the implementation of this provision, there is no evidence to date that African producers will be able to compete against China's cheap and repressed labour, and protected currency and national markets. Here one need only refer to the fate of the Caribbean under Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative, which momentarily stimulated textile production and foreign plant investment, only to see foreign owners rapidly shift location when the passage of NAFTA opened up Mexico and, shortly thereafter, the door opened to even cheaper Chinese imports.
The simple facts are that the full incorporation of China and Eastern Europe into the world trading system over the next decade will more than double the number of workers in the global economy in just ten years time. The AGOA legislation passed in 2004 provides some preferential access for certain categories of African textiles until 2008, but there is no evidence that any African state will be able to build up viable domestic textile industries capable of competing with Chinese producers before that deadline.
The lack of any capacity or strategy for sustainable, broadly distributed development through expanding trade is a dilemma not only for Africa. Indeed it is a dilemma that ties together much of the rest of the developing world. For the corporate world has essentially bid individual countries, or in some cases enclaves in specific countries designated as ‘Free Trade Zones’ or ‘Enterprise Zones’, against each other in a grand race to the lowest wages and worst working conditions.
In short: the prospects of long-term sustainable African development via negotiated access to the US market are not good. It is hard to see any future administration granting more favourable terms given protectionist claims and the pressure to meet international textile and fabric regulations under the WTO. In the absence of other proposals from Africa or from the US, the only advantages in this system for Africans will be providing oil and other raw materials not available from other areas.
It is similarly difficult to see any significant changes in AIDS programmes or debt relief, to name but two additional, key issues. President Bush may be forced to deliver at least part of the $15 billion he has promised toward combating the AIDS pandemic, particularly in Africa. But he will almost certainly in a second term be under more pressure to ensure that these funds are channeled through conservative religious organisations that are undermining a science-based approach to this disease and working to destroy proven multilateral efforts. But here too, Kerry and other Democrats have offered little new beyond bland promises of higher AIDS funding through more multilateral agencies.16 To be sure, Bush's fundamentalism over condoms and birth control would likely be reversed, but increased funding, especially to basic health care programmes, is unlikely to be advanced.
Certainly, opposition to the breaking of pharmaceutical patents and international property rights was greater under Clinton and Gore than under Bush. In the area of debt relief, where so little advance has been made even under the meagre HIPC programme,17 Kerry has said nothing and the nature of Kerry's economic advisors offers little hope for major relief – the team advising Kerry on Africa policy consists of former officials from the Clinton administration and the authors of the CSIS report referenced above. Most of the motivation for Africa policy under the Clinton administration was a desire to cultivate linkages with African-American constituencies in the United States, but there is almost no evidence that candidate Kerry has been responsive to that constituency. Nor is there any evidence that Kerry's wife, who was born and grew up in colonial Mozambique, will be a force for positive change. She has publicly stated she hasn't wanted to visit there given the changes after independence.
The movements strike back: the failures of neo-liberalism & naked empire
To stress the continuity and narrowness of US policy over the last four administrations does not lead to the conclusion that weak progressive movements face implacable and immovable state policies and bureaucracies. Indeed, the constellation of US policies and programmes today are a response to the unexpected consequences of the growing failure of the stark neo-liberal policies that core states imposed in the wake of the unruly markets and states of the 1970s. It is thus not only post-World War Two, liberal state-building and development, and nationalist and national liberation movements, that have disappeared; a new constellation of programmes, organisations, ideologies and movements have fitfully emerged in their place.
The neo-liberal policies at the heart of this new order have failed, and are recognised to have done so, all across the periphery of the world economy. This is especially the case in the one continent where these policies were most directly applied: Africa. The World Bank may trumpet a global decline in the number of persons living on under a dollar day between 1981 and 2001, but it fails to highlight that the number of Africans in this situation increased from 164 million to 314 million.18
Nowhere is the increasing illegitimacy of late neo-liberalism more evident than in the development of ‘anti-globalisation’ movements across Latin America, South Asia, Africa – and even North America. In Latin America, for instance, these movements have forced changes in governments in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela, to name just a few countries. In Africa, there are small, but growing movements challenging this development path not just in South Africa, but in Mauritius, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and other countries. Although they may not have won their battles with capital, movements to challenge the bankrupt development policies behind particular mega projects such as the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline or the Bujagali dam have delayed programmes and forced concessions.19
This failure of the neo-liberal model has placed US administrations, like international financial institutions, in a difficult position as they search for means and policies to legitimise market and capital rule. The Millennium Challenge Account,20 which offers dramatic increases in development assistance linked more explicitly than ever before to neoliberal economic policies, is just the latest of these efforts. The movement to the language of ‘poverty alleviation’ and AIDS charity is another face of these efforts, as is the formative use of the ‘war on terror’ to cohere a new global partnership. But none of these efforts have succeeded in delivering even the modest advances in Africa that might provide leaders on the continent with crumbs with which to placate growing unrest or persuade impoverished communities to abandon the search for salvation through conservative religious ideologies.
These contradictions are most evident in Bush's policies. September 11 provided a conceptual opening to cement and legitimise the harsh realities of a post-liberal order that relies on raw economic and military power. But even the Bush administration, particularly in Africa, does not want to shoulder the burden of imposing order for capital alone. Bush's brute unilateralism and costly military adventurism is likely to give way to new networks with more social-democratic faces and voices – including alliances with Europe and prominent African, Latin American, and Asian leaders. The transition in World Bank discourse to a concern with poverty, state capacities, and working with ‘civil society’ (mainly contracted NGOs) offers a parallel development.
As this is being written, the divisions between the US and European powers have prevented the developed nations from bringing sub-regional powers such as Brazil, South Africa and India into alliances through preferential trade deals – as was starkly evident at the failure of the Cancun negotiations of the WTO. But local economic expansion could, if it resulted in some redistribution of world income to favoured powerful regional states such as Brazil and South Africa, cement alliances among northern states, international institutions, and global capital. The advantages of bringing Lula and Mbeki aboard such a project are clear, and in both cases there is much evidence that even these most nationalist leaders can become willing partners, opening their doors to capital while performing difficult peacekeeping tasks in areas like Haiti, Burundi, and the DRC.
Yet for most of Africa, and similarly located countries in Asia, such a scenario would be a disaster, matching increasingly subservience to world markets and capital to long-run tendencies toward poverty and incapable and undemocratic states. The few concessions that the developing world have been able to wring out of the WTO – mostly in the form of stalling the advance of negotiations on issues such as the Singapore round – have come because of the unity between sub-regional powers and the rest of the developing world.21
More direct action against individual African responses to the failures of neoliberalism has also been built into US policy. As increasingly marginalised populations demand access to work and wealth, we have witnessed a growing flight of Africans to Europe, and, to a lesser degree given distances, North America. As immigration and asylum rules have tightened, this has triggered not only growing racism, but a deadly ring of new state and private prisons and detention centres surrounding Europe, Australasia and North America.
North America stands out here as the exemplar in constructing this increasingly racialised and global carceral system: as jobs, wealth and welfare fled urban areas after the 1970s, prisons emerged to contain newly marginalised and especially black populations. By 2003 over 2 million persons were imprisoned, with one in eight black men between the ages of 20 and 34 behind bars. After 9/11 new controls over immigrants have also accelerated,22 as has a protest movement calling for prison abolition in general and the freedom of immigrant detainees in particular.23 The growth of European prisons follows this pattern, with foreigners, most notably those of colour, constituting a growing proportion of the prison population.24 Multiple racial identities may now be accepted by even conservatives, marking the abandonment of liberal hopes for assimilation, yet this acceptance of more fluid racial differences has only served to justify accelerating racial inequality and profiling.
Regional powers, particularly those with Euro-American populations and investments, have similarly been constructing the language of crime waves and dangerous foreigners to justify xenophobic policies and accelerating prison populations. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Africa, where private US and European firms have built prisons at great government expense, while the state and the media have legitimised campaigns against foreign Africans.25 Mozambican immigrants are now more likely to be murdered in Gauteng than in Germany. This too reveals the contradictions of post-liberal racism: the language of equality and human rights ensured by the international community and national states has been replaced by the language and policies to check international movements of colour. The African state may have been deracialised, as Mamdani argues,26 but this has come at the cost of the increasing inter-state racial difference and repression.
This is then the likely future for US policy: attempting to manage the results of accelerating class and racial inequality across national boundaries, without the possibility of amelioration by development and the liberal redistribution of income and employment. Post-liberal rule thus increasingly turns upon legitimising the new ideology and institutions required to guard the centres of privilege and capital accumulation. As global liberalism has been abandoned, novel modes of linking African and Euro-North American dominant classes, new international and civil society (NGO) political agencies, and new institutions capable of controlling unruly black populations are likely to grow. US Africa policy, which for almost two decades has been searching for a way to sustain this new world order, is likely to continue to focus upon isolating and controlling a threatening Africa, and doing so in alliance wherever possible with new political and commercial classes in Africa itself.
Linking protests & movements: The US side
These bleak conclusions follow directly from a focus on power and policy. Yet one may be more optimistic by turning attention elsewhere. As we have suggested above, popular perceptions of and protests against US power have served to successively undermine neo-liberalism and foreign interventionism. This is likely to continue and even accelerate, even when a post-Bush administration puts a more multilateral and social-democratic face on current North-South relationships in general and Africa policy in particular.
Indeed a good case can be made that the most important focus for ROAPE and other progressive forces is not the policies of London or Washington, but transnational linkages among the new radical movements that have emerged over the course of the last ten years. It is certainly the case, as Jennifer Davis, past-Director of the African Fund and current, interim Director of the Washington Office on Africa, put it: ‘the old international solidarity linkages that used to exist are now gone.’ When crises or calls to action emanate from Africa ‘there are no automatic responses’ as the past.27
What does emerge in the US in response to African developments, as in Darfur or West and Central Africa, are new lobbying coalitions variously composed of humanitarian and refugee groups, aid agencies and NGOs, African states, religious groups – including fundamentalist Christians – and the narrowing circle of activist and Africa organisations, most notably Africa Action, the Washington Office on Africa, TransAfrica, Jubilee USA and the Africa programme at the American Friends Service Committee.
In the case of Darfur, Africa Action led by organising a petition signed by over 28,000 persons. On 25 August 2004 a protest outside the Sudanese embassy, reminiscent of similar antiapartheid protests outside the South African embassy, led to the arrest of Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, Bill Fletcher Jr, president of TransAfrica Forum, Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, Rev. William G. Sinkford, president of the United Universalist Association of Congregations, and actor and activist Danny Glover. Yet even in this case organising beyond petitions outside Washington was minimal.
Africa does figure prominently in anti-globalisation campaigns, as in the anti-debt campaign waged by Jubilee USA and the World Bank Bonds Boycott, both of which have union, church and municipal endorsers.28 Activists from the continent often come to Washington in relation to these efforts, particularly at the moment of anti-IMF/World Bank protests, and through such actions movement linkages are formed.29
Yet with rare exceptions these linkages have yet to form sustainable networks, much less led to a direct impact on government policies or a broad public consciousness. And at times direct conflict between US and continental African NGOs and civil society groups is quite open. When US NGOs participated in the official NGO Forum at the AGOA Ministerial Forum in Mauritius in early 2003, for example, they were denounced by the local Platform Against Bush Politics – a coalition of local trade unions, women's organisations, and other civil society groups which regard AGOA conditionalities and privatisation as ‘the recolonisation of Africa.’30
Exceptions provide signs of new directions. Here the parallel campaigns against Northern and Southern governments' inaction in the face of HIV/AIDS are most notable. The growth and success of the well-known Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, which holds itself separate from past party political models, has matched a long history of US HIV/AIDS campaigns. The militant activists from ACT UP first took up this call in the US with a highly successful targeting of former Vice President and then presidential candidate Al Gore for his defence of the drug companies. More recently, Africa Action has spearheaded efforts to bring the historic Africa activist community in the United States into alliances not just with allies in Africa but also with the AIDs activist community in the United States. Africa Action has organised forums and begun the slow, difficult task of linking up local networks of activists working on these issues in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and other regional areas, but none of these campaigns have yet reached a critical mass that translates local action into a powerful national movement. Nonetheless, the sustained direct action led by the groups in Africa has in this area scored real victories against pharmaceutical multinationals as well as, slowly, the policies of and AIDS funding by the South African, African, and the US governments.
This is all the more remarkable on the US side given the steady decline in the appreciation of AIDS as an public health crisis in the US itself-in part reflecting the widespread use of antiretroviral drugs, and in part the calculated invisibility of both the lack of health care for poor African-Americans and the high proportion of new cases within the African-American community. While African-Americans are 12% of the US population, they account for over 50% of new AIDS cases while almost twice as many African-Americans die from HIV/AIDS than whites.31
Organising in these areas must and does draw upon persons now a generation distant from the anti-apartheid struggle, and two generations removed from the national liberation support movement. ‘There is a tremendous interest in learning more about Africa and people are spurred to act’, says Imani Countess of the African Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organisation that has one of the most powerful networks of local offices and activists around the country (although Africa work is not the principal focus of the AFSC network). In the last year Countess has organised two regional ‘Peace Tours’ bringing Africans and activists together to speak at community meetings and other venues around the country.
But the community activists attending forums and actions today are not, by and large, veterans of the anti-apartheid movement, but are a new group of activists, says Countess. In an interview for this article, she insisted that the problem is not a lack of interest in these issues in communities around the US: ‘There is an enormous interest out there. We have such a huge obligation to figure out ways to tap into that interest.’
Individual groups have organised some issue specific campaigns, but as yet there is no development that would signal the emergence of cohesive nationwide support for African struggles. There is nothing on the horizon, for example, that would parallel past anti-apartheid and national liberation support movements, much less the support networks generated by the Chiapas rebellion.
To look for such developments, and lament their absence, may however be falling into the trap of searching for replications of past solidarity struggles. As the examples discussed above of protests in Africa and Latin America suggest, the future is unlikely to pivot upon mass movements supporting liberation parties in different countries. Far more likely are solidarity linkages among local movements organised around labour, land, and basic rights (health, education, citizenship) movements. As everyone recognises from struggles over health and AIDS, industrial production and factory wages, or land and seed crops, these local struggles are increasingly linked internationally.
This does not make forging North-South movement relationships any easier, particularly as single-movement organisations centred on capturing state power are increasingly rare. While many movements may originate within or support specific political parties, most increasingly resist being brought into party politics much less central state power. This poses a great dilemma of course for many movements, as can be seen in the case of trade unions in Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, not to mention the PT (Partido des Trabalhadores) in Brazil. This is less a dilemma for the far more numerous, newer movements that have taken on civil society or NGO forms, such as those surrounding land and health issues. For progressive activists in the North, solidarity work in the post-liberal era may indeed develop along the lines suggested by current AIDS, debt, or trade campaigns: a steady networking by smaller groups working around centralised states.
None of this is cause for unbridled optimism. As the survey above suggests, conscious support for such solidarity work in the United States is at a low ebb. Past predictions of growing black support for Africa, driven by the Afrocentric wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s that culminated in the Million Man and Million Women Marches, have ebbed with that movement's decline. Yet current cultural connections across the African world, particularly for the majority youth population, are nevertheless stronger than ever due to the influence of commercialised hiphop culture.
As one progressive cultural activist told us, however, ‘you don’t get a sense of political engagement'– despite considerable coverage in hip-hop media and acts of AIDS, reparations (e.g. comedian Dave Chappelle), artists' visits to Africa (e.g. musicians Beyoncé, Dead Prez), and the incarceration crisis. Recent hip-hop conventions have called attention to Africa's AIDS crisis and the need for debt relief, but there have been no concrete follow-up actions. And in the ongoing battle in lyrics and print between the ‘bling bling’ commercialisation of black youth culture, and the demand that hip-hop return to its political and consciously black roots, the former is clearly dominant across the Americas and Africa.
Still, the most widely-applauded song at a free Dead Prez concert in Harlem this past summer was ‘I’m A African', while star performer Nas' free concert in New York City's Central Park broadly attacked the US empire and racial oppression. The latter sentiments are, of course, completely absent in the widely-publicised get-out-thevote work by mainstream artists from P. Diddy to Bruce Springsteen. In return, radical rap artists challenge even the value of voting, given selection processes which eternally ensure the lack of any candidate who might plausibly represent their communities.
How such battles will work out in a climate where poverty and polarisation increase within the US as well as between Africa and the North is uncertain. Over the course of the last four US administrations US policy has assumed new and narrower forms, designed to address the failures and increasing illegitimacy of the neo-liberal order developed in the 1980s and 1990s. As new movements slowly emerge both in Africa and the US, one thing seems certain: they will not replicate past issues or modalities of struggle. As ROAPE readers have always known: a luta continua.