Summit proved Africa is rising from ashes of pessimism

Two years to the end of his term, the clock has been ticking for the United States President Barack Obama to secure his legacy for Africa. Obama finally found his legacy moment in the United States-Africa Leaders’ Summit this week.

The forum, billed as the first in US-Africa relations, focused on strengthening financial, trade and security ties between America and Africa.

Obviously, the trade and financial perks that Washington promised during the conference are a pale shadow of the Marshall Plan — when Washington gave $13 billion in aid to post-World War II Europe to rebuild its economies and thwart the spread of Soviet Communism.

Obama’s African legacy lies elsewhere — in robustly securing a new progressive image for Africa. On August 5, in a six-minute speech at the summit dinner hosted for African leaders, Obama toasted to “the new Africa” and to “the Africa that is rising and so full of promise”.

With this terrific toast, Obama rendered his power as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation and moral force as America’s first-ever president of African descent to an unabashedly new image of Africa.

Arguably, August 5, 2014 may take on a similar redemptive aura as March 25, 1807, the day the Slave Trade Act received the Royal Assent from the British monarch.

In a momentous way, Obama’s “new Africa” avowal struck a mortal blow at the old foreboding and ominous ideology of “afro-pessimism” — the pervading perception of Africa in the West as a hopeless continent with a bleak future.

For centuries, Afro-pessimism has defined relations between Africa and the West and undergirded slave trade and slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism in our times.

Obama’s “Africa rising” assertion reveals how far Africa has come since the 1980s — dubbed “the lost decades” — when Afro-pessimism was at its peak in the media, governments, creditors, business and the academy in the West.

DOOMSDAY SCENARIO

In recent decades, Afro-pessimism has targeted African leaders, pointing to their weakness. It has also highlighted the horrors of a few African countries, ignoring the progress made by many others.

Both strands of Afro-pessimism peddled the doomsday scenario that Africa is incapable of self-rule, which reached a dangerous peak when some pundits and scholars began to cynically advocate Africa’s re-colonisation.

This blanket portrayal of Africa as hopeless profoundly undermined Africa’s prospects of development as an attractive destination for foreign investments and technical assistance.

Riding on the optimism of South Africa’s triumph over apartheid, a new generation of leaders declared Africa’s 21st century war on Afro-pessimism.

While sharing the assertiveness of earlier pan-Africanists like Kwame Nkrumah, the new leaders jettisoned socialism and embraced free market policies.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki popularised the concept of “African Renaissance” — first articulated in 1946 by the Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, and monumentalised in his book: Towards the African Renaissance (January 1, 2000).

At the dawn of the new millennium, the continent established a new peace and security architecture within a reformed African Union to resolve festering conflicts and portray Africa as an attractive place to invest and trade.

Additionally, Africa became bolder and assertive in global affairs. This assertiveness was aptly articulated by Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta during his inauguration speech on April 9, last year, which envisioned a world order founded on “the well-established principles of mutual respect and reciprocity”.

STEADY GROWTH

These efforts have started to bear fruit. According to the Africa Development Bank, six of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa. And Africa has experienced a decade of steady growth, resulting in the emergence of a huge middle class.

(READ: You have our support, World Bank tells Kenya)

Inversely, emerging economies especially Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (Brics) are rolling back the frontiers of Afro-pessimism, having moved in forcefully to tap into African resources and growing markets.

China surpassed America as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Its trade with Africa has shot up meteorically from $10 billion in 2000 to $200 billion last year, eclipsing the US with about $85 billion and catching up with the European Union with slightly more than $200 billion.

Beijing is matching its economic expansion with a robust diplomacy. Besides launching the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation — which Washington seems to have used as a model to fashion the recent Summit — China’s senior officials are on a jet-set making countless trips to Africa to reiterate their cooperation.

Afro-pessimism has cost America its influence in Africa for “letting Europe and China go faster”.

But America’s power elite appears keen to catch up. “We … realise we are having some catching up to do,” admitted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And Obama told the American business in the Summit that “We want to do business with these folks.”

The Summit decidedly eschewed a main tenet of Afro-pessimism: The usual fixation with the weaknesses of the African leadership. Obama and the Washington policy wonks were effusive about a “new generation of African leaders”.

(READ: US companies plan $14b in Africa investments)

Almost all leaders attending the summit received more than 50 per cent in a survey of presidential job approval conducted by Gallup, the prestigious International Polling company, in the build-up to the Summit.

President Kenyatta was ranked third (78 per cent), behind Mali’s Ibrahim Keita (80 per cent) and Botswana’s Ian Khama (81 per cent). And Kenya’s diplomats are celebrating a report published in the Washington Post (3/8/2014) which ranked the country among the top democratic states in Africa.

Western media and wonks still cling to an obsolete image of Africa as hopeless, still carrying out of Africa depressing headlines. But Obama’s embrace of the new progressive image of Africa marks a significant step in slaying the hydra of Afro-pessimism and opening up the continent for business.

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute