America has long viewed the continent mainly through the lens of corporate interests and that’s unlikely to change
U.S. President Joe Biden’s end of 2024 trip to Angola was only his second to Africa, following his appearance at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh. Coming near the end of his presidency, the visit perfectly captured America’s disregard for the continent. To the United States, Africa is an inconvenient theatre of strategic rivalry, demanding attention only for its valuable minerals and raw materials.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. established a military presence in more than a dozen African countries as part of a largely ineffectual counter-terrorist strategy against al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates. And during Donald Trump’s first presidency, the U.S. paid hardly any attention to the continent.
Although Biden did host a U.S-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington in 2022, his administration did not bother to seek African input when shaping the event’s agenda or drafting a strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The latter focused largely on containing China’s presence on the continent, while paying lip service to Africa’s development and security needs. The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs has remained massively under-resourced.
Although China is America’s third-largest trade partner and second-largest creditor, the U.S. frequently warns Africans that it is a “malign” influence advancing “its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests” on the continent. True, China sometimes pursues one-sided deals – as it did in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – and it has a military base in Djibouti. But this hardly compares to America’s overwhelming military presence in the region. Moreover, America accounted for 16% of arms sales in Africa between 2019 and 2023, compared to China’s 13%.
China’s focus has been more on development, with its Belt and Road Initiative funding the construction of roads, bridges, and railways across Africa. And China remains Africa’s largest bilateral trade partner, with turnover reaching $282 billion in 2023, four times more than Africa-US trade. In addition to lending African governments $160 billion over the last two decades, Chinese-backed projects now account for 20% of Africa’s industrial output and nearly one-third of new infrastructure projects worth more than $50 million. The overwhelming majority of African debt is owed to Western creditors. Only seven of 22 debt-distressed African countries owe more than one-quarter of their public debt to China.
Unlike China, the U.S. views Africa primarily through the lens of its multinational corporations. U.S. funding mechanisms are maddeningly bureaucratic and slow compared to China’s flexible and fast approach. The US-led G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment has produced mostly talk and little action.
Biden’s visit to Angola was supposed to showcase the Lobito Corridor, a project (backed by $803 million in U.S. loans) to renovate the 1,700-kilometer (1,056-mile) railway linking Angola to land-locked cobalt and copper mines in the DRC and Zambia. But if the U.S. was sincere about promoting Africa’s development, it would work with China, which is renovating the Tanzania-Zambia railway it built in 1975. Ironically, exporters of cobalt to China could end up benefiting the most from America’s Lobito Corridor project.
On the matter of global governance, the U.S. has pushed for two African permanent seats on the UN Security Council; but these, notably, would not come with the veto power enjoyed by other permanent members (the US, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom). More positively, Sub-Saharan Africa was awarded a 25th seat on the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board in July 2024 (though Mexico still received more in IMF loans last year than all 55 African countries combined). But US-dominated institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation remain hostile to debt suspension and trade preferences that would benefit African countries.
Similarly, the Biden administration contributed funding to peacekeeping efforts in Africa, and it backed a UN Security Council resolution in December 2023 to use funds from the UN’s regular budget to support African-led operations on “a case-by-case basis.” However, it balked at using these funds for the African Union force in Somalia (now in its 18th year), and is instead pushing to fund a mission in Sudan – where there currently is no peace to keep or any realistic prospect of such a force being deployed. Worse, the U.S. turned a blind eye to reported arms sales to Sudan’s genocidal Rapid Support Forces by its ally, the United Arab Emirates.
During Trump’s first term, he famously referred to African countries as “shitholes” and never set foot on the continent or held a summit with African leaders. In contravention of a UN plan to organise a referendum on self-determination in Western Sahara, his administration recognised Morocco’s 1975 annexation of the phosphate-rich territory. Now, several of his advisers are reportedly keen on recognising Somaliland (a self-governing part of conflict-wracked Somalia), which could further destabilise the Horn of Africa.
More positively, the first Trump administration sought to mediate a dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. And Trump withdrew America’s 700 soldiers from Somalia on the eve of his departure, though the Biden administration reversed that decision.
But the writing is on the wall. Recognising that the U.S. Africa Command is not prepared to risk the lives of American soldiers in dangerous counterterrorism operations (it prefers to use African troops as cannon fodder), Niger’s military junta ordered the closure of America’s $100 million air and drone base. Likewise, France’s decade-long counterinsurgency force in the Sahel has collapsed. The U.S. would be unwise to try to throw a lifeline to the French, lest it be tarred with the same neo-colonialist brush.
Perhaps the best that Africa can hope for from an isolationist Trump administration is a further withdrawal of U.S. troops from Africa. Greater U.S. cooperation with China would benefit everyone, but that seems unlikely.
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa, is the author of `Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty’ (Routledge, 2024) and `The Eagle and the Springbok: Essays on Nigeria and South Africa’ (Routledge, 2023).
