Riots in South Africa. Starvation in Ethiopia. Drought in the Sahel. While these problems create international news, they have received minimal attention from our politicians, even in election years, according to Elliott P. Skinner. Skinner, winner of the esteemed Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association, edited Beyond Constructive Engagement: United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa to counteract America’s ignorance of Africa, especially our government’s tendency to formulate African policy based upon its effect on Western Europe rather than upon Africans themselves.

In Beyond Constructive Engagement, experts from government, higher education, and philanthropic organizations present, in a series of essays, the scope and limitations of U.S.-Africa policy. While the Reagan administration’s carrot-and-stick, “constructive engagement” approach to apartheid receives great attention, the full range of policy implications-for politics, education, culture, health and military strategy-is examined. This book raises provocative questions for students of African affairs and the general reader:

• Is our provision of emergency food in the wake of a famine a disincentive for native food production?

• What can be done about the four million refugees seeking asylum in already overburdened countries?

• How well has “constructive engagement” worked?

• And, most of all, how can we create an “Afro-spective” rather than a “Euro-centered” African policy?

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: United States Economic Policies Toward Africa
Robert S. Browne
Commentary
Richard E. Feinberg
Discussion

Chapter 2: United States Military and Strategic Interests in Africa
William J. Foltz
Commentary
Morton A. Kaplan
Discussion

Chapter 3: United States Response to Inter-african Regional Problems and Prospects: Foreign Policy in a Turbulent Age
William H. Lewis
Commentary
I. William Zartman
Discussion

Chapter 4: United States Policy Toward Political and Social Conflict in Africa
Robert I. Rotberg
Discussion

Chapter 5: United States Policy Toward Refugees and Immigrants in Africa
Mabel M, Smythe
Commentary
Roger P. Winter
Discussion

Chapter 6: United States Response to African Educational and Cultural Policies
Marie Davis Gadsden
Commentary
Calvin H. Raullerson
Discussion

Chapter 7: United States Policies Toward South Africa and Namibia
Gwendolyn M. Carter
Commentary
Peter Duignan
Commentary
Walton R. Johnson
Discussion

Conclusion: Toward an Afro-Spective Policy
Elliott P. Skinner

Authors and Commentators

Index

ELLIOTT P. SKINNER, former U.S. Ambassador to Upper Volta, is currently Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. In granting him their Distinguished Africanist Award, the African Studies Association said: “He has been an ardent and vigorous defender of the interests of both Africa as a region and African studies as a discipline. On the African continent, the field of African studies in America is as much identified with Elliott Percival Skinner as with any other American scholar.” His books include: A Glorious Age in Africa, African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou, and Roots of Time. A Portrait
of African Life and Culture, and others.