Between Pax Americana and Pax Africana

Ali A. Mazrui Director Institute of Global Cultural Studies Project Syndicate

War and peace exist in Africa for reasons that are not always internal to Africa. Conflicts in other parts of the world often have huge repercussions across Africa. Four times as many Kenyans as Israelis died in November 2002 in the terrorist attack on the Paradise, an Israeli hotel in my hometown of Mombasa. Was this but another moment of blood-stained convergence between the politics of the Middle East and the politics of Islam in Africa?

Here we must distinguish between national and international terrorism. Much of the terrorism in Africa in the second half of the 20th century targeted the colonial powers and the European minority regimes that were their legacy. Kenya won its independence partly in an anti-colonial war of liberation in which both the British colonial forces and the Mau Mau movement resorted to terrorism.

In retrospect, "national" terrorism in Africa was a form of warfare that must be judged within its political and moral context, and by its ultimate results. Kenya's Mau Mau war delivered independence in 1963; the Algerian revolution liberated that country in 1962; anti-colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau destroyed the Portuguese empire in 1974; the anti-UDI struggle in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) ended white rule; and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa finally triumphed against the apartheid racial order.

Unlike anti-European guerrilla war and anti-colonial terrorism in Africa, anti-American and anti-Zionist terrorism in the Middle East has led nowhere. Yet its brutality has often caught Africa in the crossfire.

In order to kill 12 Americans in an attack on the U.S. Embassy in August 1998, Middle Eastern terrorists killed some 200 Kenyans in Nairobi. Far more Tanzanians than Americans were killed and wounded when the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam was targeted at the same time. Sudan bore the brunt of U.S. retaliation, when President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of an apparently harmless pharmaceutical factory near Khartoum as retaliation for an Osama bin Laden sponsored terrorist attack.

Indeed, violence between Americans and Middle Easterners has been spilling over into Africa for decades. Before Clinton, president Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya in 1986 in retaliation for the bombing of a German disco in which several Americans were killed. Similarly, many Africans were killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 -- Senegalese hawkers, Nigerian investors, Ethiopian or Eritrean drivers, Ghanaian students, Egyptian and South African tourists, and others.

Security forces throughout the continent subsequently opened their doors to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency. Pax Americana entered Africa, forging an alliance with the governments and people long struggling to establish a Pax Africana. The FBI reportedly arrived in Tanzania with the names of 60 Muslims selected for interrogation. The Kenyan authorities, eager to please the U.S., were tempted to hand over Kenyan citizens on the slightest encouragement.

September 11 2001 and its aftermath may exacerbate tensions not only between pro-Western and anti-Western schools of thought in Africa, but also between Christians and Muslims. A demonstration by Nigerian Muslims in Kano against the U.S. war in Afghanistan provoked stone throwing by Nigerian Christians. Churches and mosques were soon being burned in communal riots.

Moreover, efforts by the U.S. to unite African governments against terrorism may merely bolster authoritarianism. The pressure on African governments to enact legislation against terrorism may pose new threats to civil liberties at the very moment when democratization is gathering momentum. In the war on terror, it seems, Africa's dictators may find it easier to justify continuing tyranny.

Because the thousand-year-old city of Mombasa historically had a superb natural harbor, it was fought over many times -- by Arabs, the Portuguese, Zanzibaris, the Mazrui, the British, and others. Once called Mvita, the Isle of War, its people coined the proverb "When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers".

Since the attack on the Paradise hotel, only a single elephant, the U.S., with its protigi, Israel, exists. But when even a lone elephant does a war dance, the grass still feels the pain. Mombasa's anguish, economic as well as in terms of security, may have only just begun.

Speedy action is needed to restore the sense of dignity of Coastal and Muslim Kenyans before Kenyan Islam is radicalized into a Black Intifada. Even speedier action is needed to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both for its own sake, and because its repercussions destabilize other parts of the world.

But will American resources help to strengthen Pax Africana, or will American power simply turn it into a handmaiden of Pax Americana? How can we avoid the Americanization of Pax Africana?

One solution is for the African states to evolve a common position and shared rules of engagement in the war on terrorism. Ideally, the U.S. should deal with a South Atlantic Treaty Organization, consisting of African states that are allied against terrorism, rather than cutting bilateral deals with individual African countries.

Above all, if Africa is to escape the crossfire of international terrorism, the trend towards establishing U.S. military bases on the continent must be stopped.