The Foreign Service Journal, May 2008

he Eisenhower administra- tion’s creation of the Bureau of African Affairs half a cen- tury ago signaled a bold step away from what had been a Eurocentric, quasi-colonial policy view of Africa. Far from being a decision made in a bureaucratic vacuum, AF’s birth resulted from the interplay of three of the great forces of the mid-20th century: the civil rights movement, the Cold War and decolonization. Ralph Johnson Bunche (1903-1971) and Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) personified these forces and, in a very important sense, are the intellectual godfathers of AF. These towering and very different men of the mid-20th century embodied the many, often contradic- tory threads of U.S. policy toward Africa. Their paths rarely crossed, but the power of the ideas and interests they personified to a large extent determined and help explain the course of America’s relationship with the con- tinent for decades to come. Interestingly, both men hailed from early 20th-centu- ry Southern California, a kind of post-frontier open soci- ety far from the racial castes of the Jim Crow South and the class tensions of the industrial North. Both rose from humble backgrounds with the aid of academic scholar- ships to college. And both considered themselves Californians first and last, even as they bucked the west- ward national migratory trend by living out much of their adult lives in the New York City metropolitan area. A Professional Africanist … By the 1940s, Ralph Bunche had established himself as a pre-eminent political scientist, a Harvard Ph.D.- holder who built up from scratch an African studies pro- gram at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He grasped acutely the intimate connection between institu- tionalized racism in the U.S. and colonialism in Africa. “As African-Americans,” he wrote, “we are not permitted to share in the full fruits of democracy, but we are given some of the peelings from the fruit.” This professional Africanist had a far broader outlook, however. In 1941, he joined Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s team as it conducted a Carnegie Endowment- funded study of American race relations. Bunche wrote much of the groundbreaking work that study would pro- F O C U S O N A F R I C A T HE A FRICA B UREAU ’ S I NTELLECTUAL G ODFATHERS T HOUGH THEY REPRESENTED VERY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES , R ALPH B UNCHE AND R ICHARD N IXON HELPED MAKE AF A REALITY 50 YEARS AGO . B Y G REGORY L. G ARLAND T Gregory L. Garland has been chief for press and public affairs of the Africa Bureau’s Office of Public Diplo- macy and Public Affairs since September 2006. A career Foreign Service officer with 20 years of experience in the U.S. Information Agency, the Board for International Broadcasting and the State Department, he has served in Maputo, Tijuana, Luanda, Conakry, Warsaw, Mexico City and Washington, D.C. 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 8