Africa in the superpower world

For the first thirty years or so of their independent existence, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, African states were incorporated into the bipolar global structure defined by superpower confrontation. While every state in the world, apart from the two superpowers themselves, was consigned by this structure to a position of subordination, the gap in terms of every indicator of international power between the two giants and the new, artificial and impoverished states of sub-Saharan Africa was peculiarly acute: to travel from Moscow to Mogadishu, or from Washington to Ouagadougou, was to be confronted with a level of inequality that verged on the surreal.

Analysis of the Afro-superpower relationship has therefore focused on the superpower rather than the African side of the connection. For one thing, it mattered more: to claim that so large a dog as the United States or the Soviet Union could be wagged by so small a tail as their African ‘partners’ appeared to stretch plausibility beyond any acceptable limit. In addition, while the two superpowers were intensely concerned with their own policies and those of their global rival, they were not to any comparable degree concerned with the policies of African states which barely figured in the international calculus.

American analysts in particular, encouraged but also in some degree seduced by the openness of their own policy-making apparatus to external and even academic influence, tended to concentrate their attention on issues of interest to their foreign policy establishment, and this in turn imposed an emphasis firstly on what the United States should be doing in Africa, and secondly on what the Soviet Union was doing.