The Foreign Service Journal, May 2010

M A Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 Showing the Way Airlift to America: How Barack Obama Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours Tom Shachtman, St. Martin’s Press, 2009, $24.99, hardback, 273 pages. No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half-Century, 1950-2000 William Minter, Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr., editors; Africa World Press, 2007, $29.95, paperback, 248 pages. R EVIEWED BY G REGORY L. G ARLAND The definitive history of relations between the United States and Africa during the last half of the 20th century remains to be written. To be sure, reams of monographs and memoirs dealing with the diplomatic aspects of the relationship have appeared, in- cluding a good number by State De- partment veterans. Yet until recently — with the exception of aspects of trans-Atlantic black activism — there has been almost total silence on the re- lationship’s most important dimension: the story of non-official Americans and Africans in the fields of education, re- ligion, health, economic development and political activism. In the absence of a sustained official U.S. commitment to Africa, this remarkable engagement of private citizens and institutions goes far to explain the profound good will that many Africans feel toward America. Two books have begun to show the way. On the surface, neither Tom Shachtman’s Airlift to Africa nor No Easy Victories , edited by William Minter, Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr., would seem a likely candidate for telling this story. Neither is a tradi- tional academic history. Nor does ei- ther volume claim to be an intellectual guidepost that could help alter the U.S.-Africa narrative. Yet taken together, these books go where many Africanists have failed to go: delving into the role of nongovern- mental forces in not only U.S.-African relations, but international affairs over- all. The irony here is that Africa— the last of the populated continents to enter into the modern Western histor- ical mindset — shows the way pre- cisely because of what Uncle Sam hasn’t done, leaving the field wide open for what a later generation would call citizen diplomats. Maybe that’s why — if we are to believe years of public opinion polling — Africans like us so much more than does the rest of the world. The legacy of the U.S. government’s marginalization of Africa means that the usual symbols of anti-Americanism didn’t make it to black Africa. There is no African version of a standard trope in Latin American literature: the U.S. Marines sent to teach lesser peoples how “to elect good men” [sic]. Inas- much as a vision of official America has existed in Africa until recently, it has come in the form of Peace Corps Vol- unteers and USAID officers, well-in- tentioned but imperfect. Generally, however, it was a non-of- ficial America that ventured into Africa: missionaries, educators, stu- dents, adventurers, idealistic activists and development specialists. Africans thus saw an America that contrasted sharply with the pretensions of impe- rial Europe. Whereas Europeans came to conquer, exploit and rule, Americans came as often as not to preach, teach, heal and live with, rather than apart from, black Africans. What’s more, a good many of these Americans looked like Africans, some- thing that unnerved colonial potentates and white settlers alike. No Easy Victories depicts the ac- Taken together, these books spotlight the role of nongovernmental forces. B OOKS