Upon taking office, a new administration has a unique opportunity to set its own goals and priorities. President Bush, although somewhat constrained by his links to the Reagan past as well as by his cold war (i.e., “globalist”) perceptions of the external world and by his self-imposed austerity measures, nonetheless retains a sometimes unrecognized room for maneuver. Taking into account the limitations in public economic resources that he faces, what policy options are open to his administration in its dealing with contemporary Africa?

There is a terrible tragedy in the making in South Africa. A blood-bath looms — and all of us are threatened by its consequences. The human costs of a prolonged and violent straggle in South Africa are incalculable both in terms of treasure and of lives — black and white — that it will consume. And the struggle for liberation in South Africa will increasingly affect the United States and the Western World. We cannot run and we cannot hide from the struggle or its consequences. All of our rationalizations for inaction will ring increasingly hollow and will only fuel racial division and conflict in America and throughout the world.

(Readers of the Summer 1975 issue of ISSUE — entirely devoted to a discussion of the 1972 killings in Burundi — had the opportunity to take the full measure of the tragedy then visited upon the country, 18 years before the latest outburst of ethnic violence. As René Lemarchand noted at the time, “anyone for whom the name Burundi evokes more than a Lilliputian entity in the heart of Africa must look back to the events of 1972 with a sense of horror and consternation: in a matter of weeks tens of thousands of human beings were systematically slaughtered in what, in retrospect, can only be described as the nearest equivalent offered by Africa of a ‘final solution.’”

Utterly destitute, exhausted, and terrorized, hundreds of Mozambicans each day make their way to neighboring countries seeking protection. More than a million Mozambican refugees have now fled that nation. Millions more are displaced within Mozambique. In southern Sudan, hundreds of thousands have died and many more are at risk of starvation. More than two million other southern Sudanese have been uprooted from their homes. Many of them are living in squalid shantytowns built atop garbage dumps outside the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Elsewhere in Africa, refugees languish in settlements where they have remained for years, dependent on international food aid, while more recently arrived refugees struggle just to survive.

This is an important time for Sub-Saharan Africa. First and foremost, because over half the region is actively engaged in wide-ranging programs of economic reform or structural adjustment. Second, because the donor community is in the process of deciding how these African efforts will be supported over the next several years. Lomé IV, (Europe’s major funding mechanism for Africa), its volume and how it is allocated, is a critical part of that process. So too are the current negotiations on the Ninth Replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA).

President Bush has a unique opportunity to link U.S. development assistance with grass roots Pan-Africanism. By broadening the focus of aid policy to include relations among networks of African nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s), the Administration can begin addressing the barriers to African participation in the surge of transnationalism that will undergird economic prosperity in the 21st century. Already, the emerging global pattern is clear: In 1992 the European Community (EC) will become the West’s largest integrated market. The Gulf States, as well as the five Maghreb states of North Africa, recently announced plans for greater political and economic unity. The incorporation of Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China holds the promise of new modalities for accommodating radically different economic and political systems within the same national boundaries. And the list will continue to grow.

I would like to share an anomaly I observed in Kigoma Region of Tanzania. It is an anomaly because of its incompatibility with many of the decision-making models implicitly used to assess development aid programs. Such models are, of course, based primarily on the assumptions and observations made by economists, sociologists and anthropologists about the already developed countries. Implicitly, they assume a certain type of rationality which is taken for granted by both expatriate planners, and local planners trained in Western tradition. However, as I think that this example demonstrates, rational behavior in rural Third World communities may be predicated on assumptions outside the unspoken parameters of the social sciences.