In July, the White House hosted the administration’s first major summit with African leaders. President Donald Trump and members of his staff had lunch with the leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal. The lunch was intended to be something of a soft launch of the administration’s new Africa policy. I say “soft launch” because, as several observers pointed out, the summit involved relatively small countries without extensive US interests, selected at least partly based on who happened to be in the United States at the time. The summit generated little attention—its most newsworthy moment for US media was when Trump complimented President Joseph Boakai of Liberia on his grasp of English, the country’s official language.
The second Trump administration has made dramatic shifts in its approach to Africa. Following the abrupt dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department has been framing its approach as one of “commercial diplomacy.” As Trump commented at the lunch, “We’re shifting from aid to trade. . . . In the long run, this will be far more effective and sustainable and beneficial than anything else that we could be doing together.” In this policy, the state’s infrastructure will explicitly serve the interests of the private sector. In a speech launching the policy delivered in Abidjan, Secretary of State for African Affairs Troy Fitrell stated, “All US ambassadors in Africa are now being evaluated on how effectively they advocate for US business and the number of deals they facilitate.” The administration has billed its policy of commercial diplomacy as a “new chapter” in US-Africa relations.
That same week, I also happened to be in Washington, researching a book on the economic history of American interactions with Africa during the interwar period. A vast literature has studied US-Africa relations during the Cold War, but scholars have largely ignored their interwar foundations. As my research that week showed, the administration’s “new chapter” isn’t new at all. Instead, it is an almost verbatim repetition of the policy that prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s.
During that period, one of the main duties of US consular agents abroad was to provide intelligence on economic opportunities in their districts and facilitate relationships between American firms and local agents. Consuls were graded on their performance through detailed inspections by consuls-at-large. In 1914, for example, William Askew Haygood of the Cape Town consulate received a dismal overall rating of 65 percent, on a scale in which anything below 70 was “poor.” Haygood fared slightly better on commercial matters, scoring 75, but his overall score was dragged down by his lack of skill in consular administration. In 1921, Stillman W. Eells in Nairobi scored a much more impressive 95 on his commercial functions, owing to his broad local network of officials and businessmen, which provided him with useful intelligence on potential opportunities.
So how much did this system increase US trade with Africa? This is difficult to say. Certainly, trade with Africa increased through the period. Before World War I, direct US trade with Africa was almost nonexistent. The United States was becoming one of the most important consumers of African commodities, but it tended to import them via imperial capitals. In the first decade of the 20th century, therefore, direct trade with Africa was only around 1 percent of total US foreign trade.
The war marked a turning point in US-Africa trade relationships. When European shipping was redirected to military purposes, American shipping capacity helped fill the gap, creating the first direct shipping links between the US and West Africa of the 20th century. Policies adopted by European imperial powers to safeguard their own access to raw materials also raised concerns across the Atlantic. The 1920s saw a joint effort by the US government and American business to strengthen direct channels of trade with Africa. African producers and merchants also looked to the United States to circumvent what they saw as exploitative relations with metropolitan interests. By the 1930s, direct trade with Africa more than tripled in real value (and as a share of total US foreign trade) to more than 3 percent on the eve of World War II. The US became one of the most important destinations for many colonial commodities and a source of manufactured imports like cars.
In this process of trade expansion, US consular agents were vital sources of economic intelligence. They submitted regular reports on topics of broader commercial interest to the State Department or the newly established Bureau of Foreign Commerce. Agents also fielded inquiries from both American and local producers. In September 1920, William Yerby—one of the only African American consuls serving during the period—received at Dakar a letter from Mohamed Sasy of Sierra Leone expressing interest in setting up a relationship with American textile manufacturers, particularly African Americans. Yerby replied that he knew of no African American manufacturers producing for export. His responses were often quite blunt about the limits in opportunities available, and his inspection ratings (generally poor) reflect the tension between realism and boosterism in this system of commercial diplomacy.
Assessing the outcomes of commercial diplomacy was difficult. When asked during a 1925 inspection of the Dakar consulate to report on the “concrete results” of his trade promotion efforts, Yerby wrote that “trade between the United States and West Africa has increased wonderfully during the more than eighteen years [this] officer has been stationed here, and he is disposed to claim that a large part of this has been due to his commercial work; but he has never learned of any ‘concrete results.’”
African consuls faced numerous obstacles to promoting trade. Many queries submitted by both the State Department and American businesses had little regard for African conditions, and consuls thus spent considerable time reporting on products like motion picture cameras, filing cabinets, or woodstoves for which there was little or no African market. The sheer size of their districts was also an issue. The 1936 inspection report on the Nairobi consulate noted that it covered a territory “only slightly smaller than the portion of the United States lying east of the Mississippi River.” Others were of similar scale. Combined with limited transport and communication infrastructure and the fragmentation of the territory across numerous colonial administrations, this made it difficult for consuls to access the information they needed.
Broader economic conditions contributed to the challenge. Consular agents could do nothing about exchange rates, tariffs, and imperial trade restrictions. In 1920, the consul at Loanda (now Luanda) replied to a query about the market for motorcars that “as regards Angola, trade with the United States is made difficult by the differential tariff and by the present low level of the escudo.” In the same year, Yerby in Dakar enticed an American firm to commit to purchasing 10,000 tons of groundnuts from Senegal, only to have permission for the deal be denied by the French government in Paris.
Whatever its cause, was this trade an engine of growth for Africa? Export trade certainly contributed to African growth and could be a source of upward mobility for African producers. But that growth was volatile and created losers as well as winners. Take the Firestone Rubber Company’s concession in Liberia. Rubber exports increased rapidly, generating some of the fastest economic growth in Liberia’s history. That period also saw an expansion of schooling and literacy, at least in some part linked to services provided by Firestone. Yet research by Gregg Mitman and Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo shows that Firestone also uprooted villages, leaving those displaced and their descendants still waiting for compensation.
As they replicate century-old federal policy, the current administration could learn from the experience of the 1920s and 1930s. First, an emphasis on commercial partnerships does not mean the government can shortchange resources devoted to African diplomacy. Interwar consuls were less effective because of the size and diversity of territories they were expected to cover. The administration’s proposal to cut diplomatic posts could lead to the same problem. Second, this policy needs to be joined up with other commercial policies. The imposition of travel bans and tariffs on African nations are likely to undermine any deals that diplomatic staff might facilitate.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, growth and development are not necessarily the same thing. For Africa to become a major market for US exports, it must see a sustained rise in per capita incomes. That requires broader investments in human capital and diversification. The interwar expansion of US trade with Africa was dwarfed by its growth after World War II, when more comprehensive foreign aid programs helped reduce poverty and created durable and encompassing relationships. While there were many reasons to critique the foreign aid system that dominated US-Africa relations during the second half of the 20th century, the loss of trust resulting from its abrupt withdrawal with the closure of USAID may also impact efforts to build new commercial channels, as African states and producers look to more potentially reliable partners.
The International Monetary Fund has dubbed this the “African century,” based on the idea that the continent will become increasingly important—demographically as well as economically—as we approach 2100. It is also a period of hegemonic shift in which a new multipolar world is replacing the era of US dominance that has prevailed since the Cold War. To understand how to relate to this increasingly important region in this period of change, we must better understand the history of the last such transition, when the US began to overtake the colonial powers of Europe. It is only by doing this that we can avoid history not just rhyming but actually repeating.