Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  The next chapter turns to a continent generally neglected by the United States but that, as a result of its strategic and economic value, particularly to the resurrection of Western Europe after World War II, came into the consciousness of the American state and, therefore, the major American foundations: Africa.

  6

  FORD, ROCKEFELLER, AND CARNEGIE IN NIGERIA AND THE AFRICAN STUDIES NETWORK

  Nigeria is an oasis of democratic development in an arid desert of authoritarian-inclined African states.

  —Arnold Rivkin (1962)

  The African continent has provided the laboratory for research in almost every discipline and the multitude of problems connected with development…

  —L. Gray Cowan

  Unlike Indonesia, Nigeria was purportedly viewed by U.S. policy makers as neither a direct American strategic interest nor a vital economic asset.1 Yet it was to U.S. officials “the most important country in Africa,” providing America with “an excellent opportunity… to demonstrate to the newly-independent African nations that the best way to achieve their economic and political aspirations lies in… cooperating with the Free World.”2 Like Indonesia and Chile (see chapter 7), Nigeria was seen as a “laboratory” for “modernization” theory and particularly for the role of economic “planning” to avoid inflation and exchange controls as the key to building a thriving free-market economy within a politically stable democratic polity. The optimism characteristic of modernization theory and applied liberally in the 1960s, the allegedly inevitable linear progression through stages to full “development,” was evident in both official U.S. aid and in philanthropic foundations’ activities in Nigeria.3 Indeed, there was great overlap in the thrust of the programs between official and private agencies, which shared evaluations of the significance of Africa in general and Nigeria in particular. Yet the level of knowledge about Africa and Nigeria, as exemplified by the title of a key book by one such planner—Planning Without Facts—was so low among U.S. officials and (many but not all of) their university and foundation-funded advisers that “planning” frequently turned out to be based on superficial generalizations, prejudice, and blind faith in the “rational” methods of the social sciences. Yet within a few years, Nigeria descended into a bloody civil war, which surprised (most) American experts, demonstrating both the latter’s ignorance of Nigerian society and ethnic politics and that American planners had exacerbated the tensions of Nigeria through enriching a “new class” of “gatekeepers” that benefitted enormously and disproportionately from Western aid and markets.4 In the long run, American aid and modernization strategies delivered little by way of benefits to the mass of Nigerians but did a great deal to build and maintain pro-American elite networks, mindsets, and agendas—and an economy and polity increasingly undermined by corruption, deep indebtedness, and inequality.

  African studies in the United States developed in tandem with American elites’ increasing interest in Africa. Their interest being largely instrumental in character, Africanists saw Africa as a laboratory for theories of development and modernization, much as missionaries had seen it as a source of converts to the truths of Christianity. Africa was to be studied, observed, dug up for archaeological evidence, its peoples’ voices recorded for evidence of its cultural and social development, its thought patterns analyzed, and its peoples’ responses to modernity and rapid change assessed by behavioral scientists. Then lessons would be drawn up and applied by policy makers, university builders, and military strategists. If the study of Africa was an overseas “project,” the African Studies Association (ASA) was its professional vanguard: small, self-perpetuating, closely knit, well funded, and well connected with state agencies. As modernization theory unraveled under the weight of problems ignored (or unseen, being beyond the theory) in Africa and Nigeria, so the ASA’s elite (white) leadership faced a rebellion from below from its own membership, who were outraged by the association’s elitist character, its racially exclusionary practices, its involvement with America’s intelligence agencies, its refusal to condemn apartheid in South Africa, and its failure to consider the educational needs of African Americans. The 1969 Montreal “uprising” and walkout of ASA members—some white but mainly black—against their leaders led to a split in the association, the effects of which have lasted decades. The lack of consultation by Carnegie and Ford—and the ASA—of Africans about African development and the almost complete absence of black American Africanists in the leadership of the ASA and its powerful committees were of a piece, a remarkable demonstration of a mindset whose foreign policy fully reflected its domestic attitudes. These “secular missionaries,” who had failed to see what was going on in their own association, confidently believed that they could solve the problem of poverty and development in Africa. Their failure, however, obscures a great “success”: the construction of domestic and foreign elite cadres that continued to function after the “crisis” and that, after some handwringing and reform, form the basis of the foundations’ continuing programs: the network as both means and end of foundations’ activities.

  AFRICA’S SIGNIFICANCE TO THE UNITED STATES

  Though Nigeria and Africa more generally were not necessarily of decisive importance to the U.S. economy or private American investors, there was clear recognition of Africa’s economic and strategic significance to both the United States and Europe. The latter, it will be remembered, was the object of American attention through the Marshall Plan and NATO, which included significant efforts at encouraging greater intra–Western European cooperation. The restoration and preservation of a strong Western European bloc as market and strategic ally in the Cold War was an American vital interest. The restoration of Europe’s lines of communication with its former African colonies was fundamental. Africa was also, of course, of especial importance to African Americans, and though this was recognized by some Africanists it was hardly acted upon, and then only for a short-lived period in the 1970s, by either American policy makers or the major foundations. The latter’s racist attitudes on the intellectual capacities of African Americans were broached in chapter 2; they were magnified in the postcolonial settings of Africa. In a Carnegie Corporation–funded volume, Rupert Emerson, an African Studies Association stalwart who unselfconsciously writes of the relatively recent “discovery” and “rediscovery” of a mysterious Africa, notes that American policy makers only took Africa seriously once strategic interests were threatened during World War II. Africa is significant because America cannot ignore a continent that covers a fifth of the world’s surface, would be a fundamental loss if it entered the Soviet bloc, and was of great economic significance to NATO allies.5 Africa was vital to Europe. It is rich in industrial diamonds, columbium (used in the aerospace industries), cobalt, chromium, and beryllium; a significant producer of tin, manganese, copper and antimony; its uranium (in Congo and South Africa) was fundamental to the atomic age; the discovery of oil in Libya and Algeria elevated their importance; and its agricultural produce includes coffee, cocoa, cotton, and vegetable oils.6

  Africa’s “backward” character, however—as a result of colonialists’ “failure… to bring their African wards” up to the levels of “the imperial centers”—had created an incendiary problem that, according to Chester Bowles, created an “ominous revolutionary situation” threatening the “free world.”7 Emerson was very conscious of the threat of Africa’s slide into the chaos caused by Algeria’s “terrorism” against French rule, the Mau Mau rising in Kenya, and the “troubled affairs of the Congo.”8

  As ever, the “solution” to the “problem” of Africa lay in elite top-down modernization. As Emerson noted, French and British colonial rule created at least the embryonic bases of new African leadership elites familiar with the modern West and normally speakers of an “alien” language, in contrast to the “masses,” whose mindsets are more traditional. That “Western-educated and in many respects Western-orientated elite” would win the day in Africa, though not without conflict.9 I
t was Emerson’s view that Africa’s future leaders must be educated in the United States to effect the greatest intellectual transformation.10 Acculturation of an African elite had political and economic consequences, including expanded markets for Western consumer products.11

  Emerson does not label as anti-American African voices that question America’s motives. He is clear that America must be active in Africa but aware that his country’s anticolonial credentials were severely undermined by alliances with the colonial powers, its tepid attitude to revolution, and the treatment of America’s twenty million black “citizens.” As Vice President Richard Nixon pointed out after his visit to Africa in 1957, “we cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States.”12 The linkage of America’s policies toward Africa and Asia with her domestic racial order, particularly in the deep South, was by the 1950s and 1960s accepted by the liberal Establishment, though not necessarily consistently acted upon at home.13 In consequence, the racial question—of the relationship between white and black Africanists and their respective access to resources—was to cause a major schism in the 1960s politics of African studies. Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise, given the history of enslavement and Jim Crow racial discrimination.14

  It is against this backdrop that the major foundations’ activities must be viewed. Africa’s significance was of great consequence to the Carnegie Corporation, as part of its remit included the British colonies and dominions. Carnegie acted as a significant catalyst for the development of African higher education in “British” Africa, bringing into close cooperation U.S. aid agencies, Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the State Department, major American investors, and the British Colonial Office. Nevertheless, and instructively, Carnegie’s interest in the erstwhile British Empire focused disproportionately on the whites of South Africa and white colonial educators across the rest of the (British) African continent. Beyond Africa, Carnegie focused on Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, an important indicator of a continued Anglo-Saxonism. Africa’s development needs only became urgent once Ghana became independent in 1957 and Vice President Richard Nixon had declared the significance of Africa for America. Rockefeller philanthropic interest in Africa preceded that of Carnegie but focused, in its earliest days, on public health, tropical diseases, and scientific research. As Donald Fisher and Richard Brown have noted, the imperial character of such programs was evidenced by their motivation to rid the world of diseases that negatively impacted the lives and health of colonialists, soldiers, and missionaries.15 Although Rockefeller supported educational exchanges with Africa in the 1920s, it was not until the rise of independent Africa that Rockefeller took an active interest in its political and economic development.16 Ford, emerging during the Cold War, was the most overtly “political” in its approach, despite maintaining a formal veneer of scientific objectivity. Ford collaborated with U.S. state agencies and engaged in active institution-building programs, including economic planning units, such as at the University of Ife, and behavioral sciences at the University of Ibadan, both in Nigeria. Ford also funded in large part institutes of African studies in Ghana and Nigeria in a bid to construct stronger senses of national identity in newly independent states.

  The foundations also contributed millions of dollars to build African studies either as a separate “discipline” or to the study and research of African issues within existing disciplines in the U.S. academy. In addition, the foundations, especially Carnegie, were instrumental in founding the African Studies Association in 1957 and later making the ASA their main conduit for grant making in the fledgling discipline. Within a decade, however, the ASA was to be challenged for its racism and elitism in excluding black Americans and concentrating resources at a few elite institutions.

  Nevertheless, the foundations’ activities, in collaboration with one another and numerous other key agencies in African institution building, travel scholarships, research fellowships, and the funding of major new programs and study centers in African studies in the United States, created active and prolific networks of scholars, investors, philanthropists, and policy makers that proved broadly enduring and influential. Although publicly intended to alleviate poverty and “underdevelopment” and inaugurate economic growth and prosperity, the programs’ achievements fell short. American foundations’ programs that purportedly steered a middle course between the demands of African nationalists for rapid progress and the elitism of British colonials who were more interested in creating an African elite in their own image ultimately created networks that were elitist in outlook and composition and contributed little to national development or removing inequality. The construction of elitist and pro-American/Western networks were the foundations’ most enduring achievement.17

  AFRICA IN FOUNDATIONS’ THINKING

  Africa in the thinking of American foundations in the 1950s was still loaded with colonial images—backward, barbaric, violent, and stagnant. It needed help as it “awakened” from its long “sleep” and became “restless” and self-conscious. This view skipped over and absolved from responsibility colonial rule and at the same time credited colonialism as the source of the African “dawn.” At one level, of course, such developments were inevitable, though largely a by-product of liberal-elitist colonial education—welcomed by some, feared by others, perhaps the majority of colonial administrators. At another level, it is clear that colonial authorities fostered development of native elites for functional purposes: to aid colonial rule. But extractive states were interested primarily in raw materials, mineral wealth, and commodities and provided few if any services to their subject peoples. They had little need of extensive administrative apparatuses and therefore of anything more than a tiny minority of educated Africans. But an Oxford education did foster Western-oriented elites, which the American foundations would work further to nurture and develop, as Emerson noted above.

  However, to men like Alan Pifer, the image of the African and of Africa was bleak, though with a few glimmers of hope, as befits missionaries of modernization. Before he visited Africa, he informed his trustees, “I assumed the people would all be very much alike and the terrain an endless jungle.”18 This echoed the views of a key Carnegie-funded scholar who headed up an African development research center at MIT, Arnold Rivkin. For Rivkin, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Andre Gide’s journals provided the framework for making sense of Africa. Rivkin had noted that Conrad’s Africa of the 1890s, which Gide considered “the other side of hell” in the late 1920s, was still very much present in 1950, when Rivkin first visited.19 Rivkin’s trip to Madagascar is symbolic of the American interest in Africa expressed also by the Carnegie Corporation. As part of his duties under the Marshall Plan, he visited Madagascar to secure for the United States strategic stockpile raw materials, such as large flake graphite and phlogophite mica.20 This “lost frontier,” according to Rivkin, needed to be rediscovered, understood, and, ultimately, controlled. Rivkin was encouraged to find in Madagascar “a small but growing elite of [colonially] educated Malagasy… hovering between traditional and modern society, [who] were soon to lead an independent state.” Understanding this “vital transitional group” would provide “an insight into what was to happen in Africa later.”21 Of course, the terminology of the 1950s and 1960s had embedded within it more subtle but clear traces of colonial-era racism: “backward peoples” “struggling” toward “modernity” and “development” bore all the hallmarks of Western superiority in all areas of life and suggested that these were difficulties that could only be borne with American expertise. That, at least, was the ideology. Strategic raw materials and the like, needed for America’s military competition with the Soviet Union and global hegemony, played their role more or less explicitly in this vision.

  In a private memorandum to Carnegie’s John Gardner, in the wake of Ghana’s independence in March 1957, Pifer was decidedly unromantic about the significance of Africa to America’s global well-being
:

  (1) as a geographical area four times the size of the U.S. producing minerals and primary agricultural products of great importance to America and (2) as the home of nearly 200 million people, most of them colored, who, unless we are very careful, may take sides against the West…. We are going, therefore, to need every bit of expert knowledge we can possibly muster about all parts of the African continent.22

  In 1954, Pifer stated that Carnegie’s interest in Africa was primarily motivated by a desire to strengthen “the western democratic part of the world” despite the fact that most Africans still lived under colonial rule.

  At a State Department conference in 1955, Pifer and other foundation officials listened to a number of official statements that were described by Pifer as “generally good” and that consisted of the department’s policy toward Africa: to keep the continent “free of inimical influences” but friendly to the United States; to ensure Africa’s “political, economic, and social evolution” in America’s image; guarantee “U.S. access to resources”; “safeguard any strategic needs”; “increase U.S. commercial, industrial, and cultural activities”; and to “consolidate our cultural and moral position with respect to Africans.”23 It is difficult to tell the difference between the approaches of Carnegie and of the State Department to Africa, despite the former’s declared independence of the latter.