This edited collection is the result of an international conference on the United States and West Africa convened by the Africa Program, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), which was held April 28–30, 2005. Established in 1994, the Africa Program seeks to promote business, educational, and technological relations between the state of Texas and Africa.

The conference was organized in recognition of the growing public and scholarly interest in relations between the United States and West Africa. Scholars from Africa, Europe, and the United States offered multidisciplinary perspectives on the history and complex relationships between the United States and West Africa. In particular, the conference recognized the West African heritage of African Americans. The ancestral homeland of most African Americans is West Africa. Knowing the history of West Africa is, therefore, important in achieving an understanding of the people who became the first African Americans. West Africa was also the place where the first and the majority of African American returnees to Africa settled in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Furthermore, the conference recognized the increasing importance of West Africa to the United States from an energy, security, and counterterrorism perspective. For a long time, the United States has been interested in African oil resources as an alternative to those of the Middle East, and the United States now defines African oil as a strategic national interest.