Within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the Office of Education, the Office of Human Development, the Public Health Service, the Social Security Administration, and the former Social and Rehabilitation Service (now part of the Office of Human Development) all have a role of one sort or another in Africa or African affairs. HEW activities range from educational grants to research studies to the training of Africans. The programs carried on by each office are discussed below.

The problem of cultural change in the People’s Republic of Mozambique can be reduced to the question: how can certain indigenous traditions, values, customs, and art forms be combined with other domestic or imported values and modes of cultural expression and brought into line with new social structures?

The United States Department of the Interior is responsible for several programs in Africa through the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, and the National Park Service. These programs range in scope from training programs to technical assistance to research for the Bureau of Mines annual publication. The Minerals Yearbook.

Conjecture on any aspect of future events in Africa is hazardous; applied to politics, it may be altogether unsafe. Yet one cannot avoid looking into the future in some way. In essence our guesswork consists of extrapolations based upon trend analysis. A number of present events and forces display characteristics that suggest persistence. The convergence of the forces and their persistence offer reasonable basis for projections into the future.

Judging by the nature of past superpower involvements in Africa, it is easy to make a case for future interventions by both superpowers and intermediate (European) powers in Africa beyond the year 2000.

During the Nigerian civil war. Punch published a four-panel cartoon whose simplicity elegantly portrayed a common view of Africa’s future. The first panel depicted an outline map of the continent; the second showed another outline map, this one inscribed with colonial frontiers. Panel 3 contained the outline map, crisscrossed with a crazy-quilt of borders. The final panel showed a heap of fragments at the bottom, the continent having disintegrated.

Cartoonists enjoy the liberty to lampoon or to caricature, yet their exaggerations must be based on fact, or on a shared perception of fact. By the year 2000, will the cartoonist’s version, widely shared when printed, have become reality?

The Department of State’s role in Africa is to represent the United States Government and further American foreign policy objectives on the continent. Africa-related expenditures can be divided into four major areas: salaries and operating expenses; acquisition, development, and construction of buildings abroad; the Exchange of Persons Program; and other expenditures. Salaries and operating expenses for personnel and activities concerning Africa are discussed below under the section on the Bureau of African Affairs. Acquisition, development, and construction of buildings abroad expenditures are outlined under the country summaries in which the expenditures occur. (Country summaries appear in the Africa Bureau section). The Exchange of Persons Program is described under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Other expenditures include the involvement of State Department Bureaus, such as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, among others, in African affairs, and are discussed under the appropriate bureau headings. The Agency for International Development (AID), a semi-autonomous agency within the State Department, carries on extensive programs in Africa. AID involvement in some 28 African countries is discussed following the State Department bureau descriptions below.

Mozambique “switched from a pro-Chinese to a pro-Soviet stance during the Angolan civil war,” writes a commentator in the influential U.S. quarterly Foreign Policy of Fall 1977. “Mozambique said to Cool on Soviets, Turn West,” headlines a Washington Post dispatch of December 15, 1977. The Economist’s Foreign Report claims in its advertising to have been the first to describe the ideological infighting within FRELIMO and the swing to Russia. The commentators seemed to have missed Mozambique’s 1977 trade fair in September, at which the People’s Republic of China won first prize for an exhibit corresponding to Mozambique’s needs, but if they had been there one might well have seen headlines proclaiming Mozambique’s shift back to China.

The Agency for International Development (AID) is the primary vehicle for United States economic and humanitarian assistance to less developed countries. AID carries on functional development assistance programs in food production, population planning, health, education, and other areas of economic development in countries throughout the Near East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. AID also supports the efforts of several international organizations, such as the United Nations Development Program, in these areas. In addition, AID carries on regional and interregional programs to supplement its efforts in specific countries. Under an interagency agreement with the Department of Agriculture, AID helps coordinate and administer Public Law 480 (“Food for Peace”) assistance to underdeveloped countries (see Public Law 480 Programs section).

The importance of economic growth, development, and independence to. African countries cannot be overemphasized; Africa has been, and continues to be, the most economically disadvantaged part of the world. Economic growth, normally indicated by the increase in monetary Gross Domestic Product, is essential to meet the needs of increasing populations as well as their rising levels of expectations. Development involves the structural changes necessary to make an economy more balanced, integrated, and flexible, and is essential for sustaining growth. Economic dependence, which is reflected in such features as open economies, high levels of foreign assistance, and exports of a few primary products to a limited number of destinations, is viewed as being a major causal factor for underdevelopment and an impingement on national pride and dignity.

The Department of Transportation’s role in Africa is limited to the involvement of the Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Office of International Transportation Programs currently has no dealings with African nations, although it has had some in the past. The Coast Guard maintains a small station in Liberia which consists of one officer and a team of enlisted men. Three Africans, two from Zaire and one from Liberia, attended the Coast Guard’s Officer Candidate School four-month program in 1976.

Crystal ball gazing is hardly the province of social scientists. The best one can do, in attempting to assess the prospects for real economic growth by the year 2000, is to examine the contradictory trends and struggles shaping the political economy of Africa and the world today, and suggest potential alternative outcomes. Even the possibilities are obscure.

What is clear is that, despite over ten years of independence for over 40 African countries, the majority of African peoples still confront the overriding problem of poverty. Living on a continent endowed with extensive mineral agricultural resources, they still suffer from among the lowest per capita incomes and the highest mortality rates in the world.

The Department of Labor is involved in Africa and African affairs in two areas: training programs and technical assistance. The Department itself has no budget for programs in Africa; hence all funding for Labor’s activities comes from other government agencies or independent organizations such as the United Nations and the International Labor Office.

The millenarian tone of the rubric “Africa 2000” under which we develop these essays in prognostication reminds us that there are always religious implications in divining the future. We are also reminded of the millenarian expectations which have been planted in Africa or have risen out of the African soil. What part will these expectations claim on the future, and upon the fullness of time, play in African fruition? Bartnett lists over 6,000 independent churches and sects in sub-Saharan Africa—surely a conservative figure and biased toward movements of marked Christian influence—which suggests the vitality of church founding as a cultural phenomenon.

The Department of the Treasury has a limited involvement in Africa through the United States’ membership in the African Development Fund (AFDF) which the Treasury oversees. Members of the Fund are seventeen non-regional donor countries and the African Development Bank, representing its forty-five member states. The U.S. joined the Fund in November, 1975 with an initial contribution of $15 million or 4 per cent of $340 million pledged to AFDF as of April, 1977. The Administration has asked Congress to appropriate an additional $10 million in the FY 1978 budget. This figure represents 0.38 per cent of the funds requested by Treasury for international development banks in FY 1978 and 0.033 per cent of the Treasury’s total requested budget.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10
The Second Comingl Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe in 1959 turned to the above poem by Yeats, with its prophecy of the approach of a new age, for the title to his first novel. Ezekiel Mphalhlele in the same year chose lines seven and eight of the same powm as the epigraph to his autobiographical Down Second Avenue. This convergence upon one of the most foreboding images in modern poetry is not an accident. Both writers saw their own experiences of loss of order and future debilitation confirmed within the lines of Yeat’s apocalyptic poem. Viewed within the context of Yeats’ theory of 2000-year gyres, this vision becomes even more ominous.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) currently has no direct involvement in Africa. The last trip to Africa made by a HUD official was Deputy Assistant Secretary Sam Jackson’s visit in 1972. Twenty-three Africans attended HUD training programs in 1976; they came from the following countries: Ghana—3; Kenya—2; Nigeria—7; Senegal—1; South Africa—5; Tanzania—3; and Zambia—2. HUD has no bilateral agreements with African nations.

“Everything in Russia is ‘as of old’, at the top.
But there is also something new, at the bottom.”
Lenin, 1911

The most crucial factor overhanging any discussion of Southern Africa today is the imminent revolutionary war between blacks and whites in South Africa. The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the suppression of the ANC and PAC forced upon the leaders of the liberation movement the conclusion that only the violence of the oppressed against the white regime will bring about freedom for the blacks. Sharpeville, therefore, marked a watershed in the liberation struggle, in that the leadership of the liberation organizations abandoned hope of a peaceful resolution of the racial problem. They then proceeded, abroad, to begin preparations for the armed struggle.

Title I and Title II of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, as ammended (P.L. 480) authorize both concessional sales and donations of agricultural goods to less developed countries. The goals of the P.L. 480 programs, as stated in the Act, are “to expand international trade; to develop and expand export markets for United States agricultural commodities; to use the abundant agricultural productivity of the United States to combat hunger and malnutrition and to encourage economic development in the developing countries, with particular emphasis on assistance to those countries that are determined to improve their own agricultural production; and to promote in other ways the foreign policy of the United States” (Agricultural Development and Assistance Act of 1954, as ammended, p. 1).