V o L u m e I : a d

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Africa took many different forms.

American intervention was shaped in part by history, as the nation had expe-

rienced varied economic and cultural ties with different parts of Africa over a

long period of time. Freed slaves from the United States settled in Liberia in

the early nineteenth century, and so that country became a virtual American

colony. Much of the continent, however, was ruled by European colonial

powers and therefore had been long off-limits to American influences.

By the 1940s American economic and cultural ties to South Africa were sig-

nificant, and in the early Cold War period the United States relied heavily upon

South African uranium deposits for its nuclear programs. At the same time,

the United States continued to make clear its opposition to formal colonialism

and welcomed Africa’s independence movements in the 1950s, hoping that

newly independent nations would not slide into the Soviets’ orbit of power.

The strongest initial African ally in this period was Emperor Haile

Selassie of Ethiopia, who allowed the United States to build a major com-

munications facility in his country. Direct U.S. political involvement in

Africa was, however, quite unlikely. When the Congo crisis erupted in 1960,

the United States remained determined to exert influence via the United

Nations (UN), despite evidence of Soviet and Cuban involvement there.

President John F. Kennedy was concerned that America should not be seen

as actively supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa and so, despite

that country’s strategic significance, American policymakers began to take

measures to express their displeasure with apartheid. In general, however,

Africa remained low on the list of U.S. priorities, and under President

Richard M. Nixon American policy again swung behind the white minority

regimes of southern Africa, on the grounds that the existing liberation forces

were unlikely to overthrow them.

In the 1970s, however, the continent underwent significant changes. In

1974 the United States lost a key ally when Selassie was overthrown. Then,

with the approach of Angola’s independence in 1975, U.S. Secretary of State

Henry Kissinger decided to intervene covertly to prevent the pro-Soviet

Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) from coming to

power. The Ford administration provided the Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) with funding to work with the South Africans to support the two rival

Angolan political movements, the Union for the Total Independence of

Angola (UNITA) and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA).

But after the arrival of Cuban forces in Angola, the CIA operation collapsed

in disaster, and the Clark Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress forbade

the use of funds for further covert operations in that country. The CIA then

sought to recruit mercenaries for use in Angola and to aid the increasingly

beleaguered white Rhodesian regime in Zimbabwe’s liberation war. These

measures proved equally ineffective, however.

The Clark Amendment was repealed in the 1980s, when President Ronald

Reagan hoped to dislodge the pro-Soviet MPLA government in Angola by

supporting UNITA. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was invited to

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Washington and hailed as a “freedom fighter.” At the same time, Reagan’s

assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker, was trying to

secure the linkage of the complete withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola

with the independence of Namibia. In 1988, through active mediation in a

series of meetings among the governments of Angola, Cuba, and South

Africa, Crocker was at last able to achieve a negotiated settlement of the

Namibia issue, and the Namibia/Angola accords were signed at UN head-

quarters in December 1988. This was perhaps the U.S. government’s most

successful intervention in Africa, although by that point the United States

was working together with the Soviet Union rather than against it.

Christopher Saunders

See also

Africa; Africa, Soviet Interventions in; Central Intelligence Agency; Ethiopia; Ford,

Gerald Rudolph; Kennedy, John Fitzgerald; Kissinger, Henry; Namibia; Reagan,

Ronald Wilson; South Africa; Zimbabwe

References

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the

Global Arena. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Clough, Michael. Free at Last? U.S. Policy toward Africa and the End of the Cold War.

New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992.

Cohen, Herman J. Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking on a Troubled Conti-

nent. London: Macmillan, 2000.

Schraeder, Peter J. United States Foreign Policy toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and

Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Black national liberation movement in South Africa. Long before the advent

of the Cold War, the African National Congress (ANC), formed in 1912 by a

group of black South Africans headed by Pixley Seme, had links with the

Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), which was formed in 1921. Black

Africans could be members of both, but until the 1950s the two remained

distinct organizations with different philosophies, as the ANC was, as its

name suggested, a black nationalist organization. After the white-majority

National Party came to power in 1948 and established a harsher form of racial

segregation known as apartheid, the CPSA was forced to go underground in

1950. At that juncture, links between the ANC and CPSA became closer.

Former CPSA members along with the Congress of Democrats, an all-

white organization established in 1950, worked closely with the ANC leader-

ship in the antiapartheid Congress Alliance of the mid-1950s. Members of

the newly formed South African Communist Party (SACP) played a leading

role in the creation of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), which engaged in sabotage

from 1961 and in time became the armed wing of the ANC. In the begin-

ning, a young Nelson Mandela was the commander of the MK.

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