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The Opinions
Africa Is Rising. The World Shouldn’t Turn Its Back.
00:30:26
Lydia Polgreen speaks to the former New York Times bureau chief Howard W. French about the cost of not engaging with Africa.
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- [00:00]
A
Dan I'm Dan Barry and I'm a longtime reporter with the New York Times. I've been here for 30 years and I've seen a lot of things change. I was here before there was a website. But one thing hasn't changed at all, and that's the mission of the New York Times, to follow the facts wherever they lead. And if that means publishing something a government or a leader or a celebrity doesn't want aired, that's not our concern. If you believe in the importance of fact driven reporting, you can support it by becoming a New York Times subscriber.
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B
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:46]
C
My name is Lydia Polgreen and I'm an opinion columnist at the New York Times. I was born in America, but so much of who I am was shaped by my encounters with Africa. Partly that's because I myself am half African. My mother is Ethiopian, but I also spent much of my childhood in Kenya and Ghana and then many years as a foreign correspondent in western and southern Africa. Globally, many wealthy countries are pulling back from Africa. We're seeing a slashing of development aid, a decrease in loans and investment, and several African nations bracing for the impact of President Trump's tariffs. And in this moment of disruption, I think it can be helpful to look to the past for inspiration, which is why I wanted to talk to Howard French. He's a former Times foreign correspondent and bureau chief and the author of a new book, the Second Nkrumah, Pan Africanism and Global Blackness at High Tide. It's about the first democratically elected leader of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. And I think it provides a framework for how Africa and people of the black diaspora can take the future of the continent into their own hands. Howard French, welcome.
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D
Wonderful to be with you.
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C
Lydia, you have a long history with effort, having gone there first in the 1970s and then returning to west and Central Africa as a correspondent in the 1990s, looking at the US relationship between sub Saharan Africa, noting that this includes many different countries with lots of different policies and America's affinities and also distance from the continent. How would you sort of describe that arc and what you say most surprises you about this moment that we're at right now with the second Trump administration?
- [02:28]
D
I think ARC is a good way to begin the conversation because in the early years, I would even say decades of my experience with Africa, the United States involvement with the continent was, if not the front ranks of its foreign concerns, nonetheless, quite rich, quite thick. There was a major bureaucratic organization called usaid, which now practically no longer exists. The United States had client rights relationships, one might say, with many African countries back in those early years. Unfortunately, a number of them were dictatorships. But these were relationships that engaged the entire national security and foreign relations establishment of the United States. And steadily over time, what we have seen is a dwindling of that kind of involvement. It didn't happen overnight with the Trump administration. However, there's been a rapid acceleration of this disengagement under the two iterations of Donald Trump's presidencies.
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C
Yeah. And now I think we're seeing an almost kind of neo imperial but, you know, country by country approach, but a broader sort of dismissiveness. I think some of the moves that we've seen from the Trump administration, from the disinvestment of USAID in programs like pepfar, to the remarkable scene that we saw of Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, being sort of dressed down and castigated and frankly attempting to humiliate him in the Oval Office.
- [03:51]
E
Do allow them to take land? Nobody can take the land. They kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them. No.
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C
That feels like a difference, certainly in style, but also a break with a history of more careful strategic thinking with regards to the continent.
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D
Sure. So I think you can think of the United States involvement with Africa historically in the post Cold War era as involving three buckets. One of them is humanitarianism, the other one involves economics, and the third of them involves conflict. And what we've seen is the humanitarian part and the conflict part have dwindled and withered. And the economic part, which has all along been narrow, has become more and more extractive, and I would say almost cynical that the United States is involved deeply in offshore oil and now in trying to catch up with China in mineral extraction, particularly in rare earths and other strategic minerals, but not in anything more transformative or more meaningful in terms of the economic lives of ordinary Africans. And so, on the one hand, we've seen health initiatives, humanitarian initiatives, peace initiatives fade or atrophy, and we've seen an intensification of these sorts of narrow, very purpose driven economic engagements with the continent.
- [05:15]
C
Well, I think this is a good moment to sort of maybe pivot to the past to try and understand kind of how we got there. I mean, Africa has been looked to by global powers for centuries as a source of resources, of people, of raw Materials of various kinds of land, a place to put excess population. It sort of found itself at the crossroads of many of these things. But one of the things that your new book really brings to life is just how central Africa was to global affairs during the early years of decolonization. And what a stark contrast that is today, where Africa does feel very much relegated to the periphery. So maybe a good place to start is just who was Kwame Nkrumah the subject and center of your book, and what made you want to write this book?
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D
Now, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, which was formerly the Gold coast, of course, was born at the wrong place, in the right time, at the wrong place, meaning in an extremely remote part of a very middle sized country in Africa. So nothing sort of predestined him to any great future. Right. But in the right time, in the sense that his birth year in the first decade of the 20th century put him, chronologically speaking, in place to come into fullness as a figure. Just as the world was exiting the Second World War, and as Africa and much of the world was being revolutionized by the after effects of the Second World War, and so Kwame Nkrumah enters the slipstream of history that way and kind of caught the wind in his sails of a post war eagerness on the part of Africans, as with colonized peoples in other parts of the world, to cash a dividend, to cash a check for their participation in European war efforts. And the check being their right to liberty, their right to political franchise, their right to independence.
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C
Kwame Nkrumah eventually becomes the first leader of a free Ghana. But one of the things that's really striking and illuminated in the book is the extent to which his ideas were forged and formed by all of these different slipstreams, as you described, described them just now. Could you talk a little bit about how that coming together led to his ultimate kind of Pan Africanist vision for Ghana and for the continent?
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D
Sure. During his childhood, Nkrumah's mother somehow gets him into a one room schoolhouse and he gets noticed and sent to the capitol just as an elite academy is being founded for the very first time in the country. And at this place, he comes under the influence of two very important figures, let's call them coincidence, in his formation as a political person. One of them is a man who almost incredibly, is going to become a future president of Nigeria. This guy's name is Nnamdi Azikiwe. The other is a man named Kwegir Agre. And he was like an assistant Schoolmaster at the academy, an indigenous gold coaster who had been to Columbia University in the United States and had come under the influence, as had Azikiwe, of Garveyism. Marcus Garvey, in the early 20th century, is leading a movement of black nationalism and of what we could call Pan Africanism, that Africa must unite and have a continent wide government. So these two people, both of whom had been to the US to go to school, persuade Nkrumah to go to the US to go to school. Almost no Ghanaians go to school overseas at all, but those that did went to school at elite British institutions. Nkrumah goes to New York. It's only for a few days. But he lands in Harlem in 1935 at a time when practically every street, street corner and Harlem has some kind of oration or political activism taking place. And this is all new to Nkrumah. He then goes on to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He rapidly accumulates 4 degrees and he starts doing a variety of things that take him up and down the East Coast. He starts visiting Howard University just then. Howard University is becoming this extraordinary platform of black intellectual talent that's drawing people from all over the world, people like CLR James and Eric Williams and Ralph Bun. And Krumah enters into conversations with people like this and with people like W.E.B. du Bois and George Padmore and the figures that I've named all tap ancient, we may call them, ancient roots of black nationalism. This notion of Africa's need to reconstitute itself and of Africa's need to become a home for black people wherever they may find themselves is really a very old idea. It goes far back into the 19th century, to the very first in the United States, to the very beginnings of the post bellum period after the Civil War in this country. And Nkrumah as a young man is encountering the present day leaders of a movement who are all part of a much longer lineage and who are all aware of this older intellectual history.
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C
The idea that black people across the world would want to return to Africa or would have some kind of natural home in Africa, I think is a really powerful one that tapped into the imaginations of many people going back into the 19th century, as you say. And it's striking that Nkrumah arrives in the United States at a moment when, you know, the civil rights movement, which is still kind of in its early years and the great successes are a couple of decades in the future, you know, where it feels at a low ebb and I'm curious about this kind of back and forth that we see over the course of his life and the idea that of return, return to Africa as being an attractive, desirable outcome of the longing for liberation of black people who were caught up in the trade.
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D
So in the United States, we are familiar, those of us who enjoy reading history, with a movement by elite groups in this country to send Africans, people of African descent, back to Africa. This is how the country of Liberia was founded, for example. In Britain, a parallel movement founded Sierra Leone. It was how to get rid of black people in the midst of largely white societies. Right. What we are less familiar with is that parallel to that, but in tension with, there were movements of people of African descent early in the postbellum period and the succeeding decades to constitute their own back to Africa movements or back to Haiti movements. Haiti was the second free republic in the Western Hemisphere. This was actually a big deal. It was not a marginal thing. And it produced a lot of literature and a lot of intellectual production as black people struggled with the challenge of how to reconstitute whole lives for them, how to find citizenship, how to find dignity in a world that had conspired from time immemorial, it seemed to most black people at the time to deny them of these things.
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C
Hmm. You're writing about Kwame Nkrumah in this current moment, and I'd be curious to hear you reflect about his ideas and legacy and why you think he's important to the conversation that we're having globally at this moment.
- [12:41]
D
Nkrumah had two ideas that are worth embracing or at least upholding. One is that Africa, as constituted by European imperialism, that that Africa would never serve African interests. And I think Nkrumah understood this early and never let go of this. That an Africa that is subdivided in lots of bits and pieces and morsels of countries, many of them landlocked, would never have the population size or the size of domestic markets or would never even have access to international trade sufficient to develop itself. And so that's the one idea that I think we should principally associate with Nkrumah and his insights. The other is that Africans and the African diaspora are each other's most important resource. We can think of resource in terms of source of investment or trade or tourism. And I think all of those things are important. But what I think Nkrumah had in mind is that an African diaspora, for example, African Americans who are deeply engaged with Africa, who freely associate themselves with Africa, who cherish their history as people derived from Africa, will exert political influence within their own domestic setting to promote the interests of Africa. In other words, they can bend the curve of American policy toward Africa, or if they are French descendants of Africans, bend the curve of French policy toward Africa. Or British, on and on. Right. And I think Nkrumah understood that overcoming the past for Africa meant leveraging these large diasporas in order to change the way that Western countries understand Africa, the way they think about Africa, the way they engage with Africa, and that this, let's call it public opinion, this public opinion resource was an invaluable asset. And so Nkrumah arrives in the United States for the first time as a politician in 1958, and he has these enormous crowds that receive him. He has to turn down invitations in lots of places. They're giving him the key to the city and they're offering him dinners at the Waldorf Astoria and places like this. Huge gatherings of African Americans, high and low, by the way, the cream of. The cream of African American society. And ordinary people just jubilant to see a black person descend from a modern airplane, conducting himself as a head of state and such visible dignity associated with them. Nkrumah understood the power of this sort of thing and was able to imagine a future that if Africa could engage it, where activating the imaginations of diasporic peoples would allow Africa to enter a different space in the global framework.
- [15:39]
C
You know, it's a profound vision. And, you know, when I moved to Ghana in 1990 as a teenager, I actually lived down the street from a woman from Compton, California, who had in 1957, written to Nkrumah just as a kind of ordinary person, black person, who had been involved in civil rights activism, to ask if she could come to his inauguration. And she used to tell me incredible stories about going to Ghana for the inauguration. And then ultimately she moved to Ghana, married a Ghanaian and raised a family there. And she formed part of that legacy that you're talking about, that legacy of connection between black Americans in Africa and Ghana specifically. But it also speaks to the. In some ways, the lost promise. I mean, the population of black Americans living in Ghana has never been more than a few thousand people. Now, of course, you have so many Ghanaians coming to the United States and seeking opportunity here, as Kwame and Krumah did. Maybe you could sketch out sort of where things started to fall apart and how we went from this extraordinary high tide moment for sub Saharan Africa, for Ghana in particular, and ended up in a place where Africans now are seeking to come to the United States and see that as the place of opportunity.
- [16:58]
D
Well, I would just say to Begin, I think that the idea of Ghanaians and other Africans coming to the United States in larger and larger numbers, up until recently, larger and larger, is not necessarily for me in any way a source of despair or pessimism about Nkrumah's vision. I think that there's a potential there for these people to do the reverse of what Nkrumah was saying. In other words, not waiting for African Americans to reform America's view of Africa and to renovate America's engagement with the continent, but Africans from Africa as they relocate and as they integrate these societies, that they themselves can take on this work. You know, I teach at Columbia University. I speak at lots of universities around the country. American higher education is full of people from Africa, Nigerians in particular, but people from all over the continent. And those young people have an important role to play and potentially in the direction that Nkrumah had in mind. So Nkrumah had a big picture vision of what activating the imaginations of people could look like, but he didn't necessarily anticipate that piece of it in terms of where did things go wrong, you know, for the United States, for African Americans, for Americans, this was always going to be an uphill battle. You know, I grew up in a time when popular culture in this country discouraged, actively discouraged black people to think of themselves as Africans, to associate in any way with Africans. Popular culture cultivated an idea of light skin being good relative to dark skin and certain types of hair being good compared to other types of hair and things like that. And so the cultural conditions of this country in a general sense have not ever really been and terribly favorable to a notion of promotion, of embrace of Africa. Africa is the dark continent, after all. You know, Africa has always been a place of primitiveness, of disease, of evil, of corruption, of pretty much a whole grab bag of negative things. And overcoming that, as I said in the beginning of my answer, was always going to be a difficult matter. Right. So here we are. You said there's only a few thousand thousand African Americans in Ghana. I'm not really sure of the numbers, but other African countries have sort of discovered some of the potential here. Senegal draws large numbers of African American visitors and some number of residents. Benin, just nearer to Ghana to the east, has just in the last year passed a law that for anybody who can show through their birth certificate that they are descendants of Africans, they can automatically become citizens of Benin. Other African countries, or there are a few other African countries, I should say, that are beginning to toy with ideas like this. So this is something that recurs and it rises and fades, but never really goes away. And I wouldn't want to predict that we've seen the end of it.
- [20:05]
C
You know, I'm struck by what you're saying about the importance of Africans coming to the United States. I mean, the numbers are really striking. It's one of the fastest growing number of immigran groups in the country. You know, in 1980, there were, I think, about 130,000 sub Saharan immigrants living in the United states. And in 2019, there were over 2 million. And I think this has, you know, profound implications for Africa. It also has profound implications about what it means to be black in America. Right. I mean, as the proportion of black Americans grows to include bigger and bigger numbers of not just African immigrants, but their children and descendants, and there's intermarriage, and it does, you know, and perhaps this is an overly utopian vision, but it does suggest a kind of. Kind of Pan African possibility of the kind that I think Nkrumah may be hoped for.
- [21:01]
D
Sure. I recently gave a talk in Brooklyn, and my moderator was Annette Gordon Reed, the great Harvard University law scholar and historian. And she was telling me, as a setup to one of her questions, that, you know, in many of the classes she's taught in recent years, there have been more people from Nigeria alone than there have been in what has traditionally been known as African Americans. Right. And so our entire concept of what it means to be a black American is in flux right now. And you don't see a lot of discussion at the sort of media level or at the national level of this sort of thing. But just beneath the surface, there's a lot of effervescence. African Americans and Africans are having to figure each other out to a degree and with an intensity that hasn't been the case until very recently and hasn't always been smooth, by the way. Each comes with its own prejudices and its own notions of what it is to be a black person in this world. Right. But given the numbers that you cite, this is a dynamic situation. And there's going to be some redefinitions taking place. There's going to be some reconfigurations taking place. And, you know, Africa is already, and stands to be much more in the remaining decades of this century, the greatest marginal source of young people in the world. World. Right. Most young people are going to come from Africa. Right. We are in a moment of great hostility toward immigration in the United States. This is taking place here at a time when we are also aging rapidly. As a society, when our own fertility is stagnant or in decline in this society, as is the case in Europe and most other rich societies, all of this rich world is going to have to wrestle with the notion of how to engage with Africa in new ways. Because their survival as places that depend on consumption, on labor, on invention, on entrepreneurialism, on energy, all of these things are going to need young people. And Africa's gonna be the place where the young people come from.
- [23:04]
C
Yeah, yeah. Well, what do you see as the sort of opportunities for some of the most forward looking African leaders in this moment? Given how quickly the global order that we've known is changing, are there areas of opportunity or areas particular danger? And what might those leaders take from Nkrumah's successes and failures in building a cohesive state and a unified continent?
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D
Well, I think if you're an African leader today, the signals that you are getting from the international environment are extremely negative. Europe's primary impulse with regard to Africa is how to prevent increased migration from Africa. The United States primary impulse toward Africa is very similar with an extra layer of kind of. Of I'm just going to call it, at least at a rhetorical level of racial hostility. Right. Calling a whole continent a place of shithole countries, for example. And you have this whole anti trade piece from the Trump administration penalizing African countries which don't amount to a huge amount of American trade to begin with, with high tariff levels and the like. So if I'm trying to imagine myself in the position of leadership of an African country, I think Nkrumah has a to say to me. And Nkrumah's message in the context of this question is, I think that we can't wait for anybody else to look out for us, that we can't wait for anybody else to do us favors, that the world is a hostile place and that Africa, as constituted today 54 countries, again many of them landlocked, most of them small and rather insignificant, is not going to be able to fend for itself very well under these terms and that the most sensible roadmap is for us to pool our resources. Now, Nkrumah's ultimate dream was of a continental government. I'm quite certain I'll never see a continental government of Africa. And I'm not sure that's even the best thing for Africa. However, Africans need to completely remake or reimagine the way they engage with each other. They have to erase the effects of borders for. For discouraging trade, for discouraging movement of peoples, for discouraging cross immigration. I think African countries need to compete with each other on the basis of attracting talent. African countries have to compete with each other in terms of producing new goods, in terms of generating more energy at cheaper rates. The answer for Africa in a hostile world is to say, how do we scale up, up and we scale up by erasing some of the effects of the borders that we have inherited and finding ways to pool our efforts to grow our markets collectively. And I think all of that is kind of straight from the Nkrumah playbook.
- [26:06]
C
I mean, I think that there is a sense that the idea of Africans coming together and figuring out how to move forward, if not with broad unity, than with at least some common cause and sense of purpose. That seems like an obvious and very important, if difficult thing to do. I wonder what the west and the rest are going to risk if they don't think differently about their engagement in Africa. What does the world lose by not engaging with Africa in a deep and serious way?
- [26:37]
D
So there's tremendous opportunity costs involved. Africa is going to to double in population, more or less, before 2070. Okay, so that means Africa will have more than 3 billion people before 2070. So what are the opportunities here and what are the risks? The opportunities here are. Does the west we think of this too narrowly? I think what are we going to lose vis a vis China? This is about us and China. I don't think it's about us and China. I think it's about where is consumption in the world going to come from or not. Right. Okay, so if Africa's not consuming, that is a drag on the global economy that will cost us. Africa is going to be urbanizing. Africa, in fact, is urbanizing faster than any other continent ever has urbanized in world history already. Right now, this is an opportunity. Do we want to be part of this urbanization story? If we don't, though, what are the risks? I don't mean to disparage Kinshasa, a city that I love, but Kinshasa is awash with slums right now. So do we want African cities that are awash with much larger slums, cities of 25, 30 million people, where poverty is, broadly speaking, the norm? Well, if we decide that we have no interest in the matter and that we're not spurred by the sense of opportunity, what happens with the risk is going to land in our laps anyway because the people whose lives are locked up in slums, those people are not going to sit still. Many more of them them are going to seek to emigrate from the continent. And I don't say this as somebody who fears African immigration. I say this as a person who fears the effects on Western opinion in driving all sorts of perverse political outcomes because of xenophobia. Right. So do we want to be involved with Africa in a positive some way, in a way that rewards us, economically speaking, or do we want to simply be standoffish toward Africa, to see it as a place without promise, a place that simply accumulates negatives and pretend that distance will protect us, that we will be shielded from the effects of whatever's taking place in Africa because we're on the other side of an ocean? That's a delusion. Right. You can tell from what I'm saying that I believe in the former, that we should engage in Afro in a much deeper way. And I want to bring this back to Nkrumah. The African diaspora and African Americans have a role to play in this. In terms of changing the public conversation around Africa, in terms of lighting a fire in the public imagination about Africa, in terms of making Africa more real and more complete in terms of the way we see it and hopefully embrace it going forward.
- [29:34]
C
I think that's a good place to end the conversation. Howard, it's such a pleasure to speak with you and congratulations on the book. Thanks for being with us.
- [29:43]
D
Thank you, Lydia. Always a pleasure.
- [30:01]
B
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