UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY IN AFRICA

United States Foreign Policy in Africa

United States Foreign Policy in Africa

The relationship between South Africa (as represented by the majority of South Africans) and the United States has a complex history." The reaction in the United States to racial oppression and racial discrimination, and the manner in which it shaped the foreign policy of the United States with respect to Africa and South Africa in particular, reflects a long-standing ambivalence about the promotion of and compliance with international human rights principles(Goldstone Brian 2004).

The United States has been an active supporter of the codification of international human rights norms and draws from a strong American ethos based on democracy and rights protection. The United States, for example, played a key role in establishing the United Nations, contributing to the intense debate about race and equality in the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a nonbinding aspiration. In 1943, a committee of the US Department of State produced draft articles for the United Nations that included a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, language, political opinion, or religious belief(Goldstone and Ray, 2004: 107).

South Africa's invidious and well-documented racial discrimination need hardly be recounted in detail here. A great deal of scholarship is dedicated to the history of racial discrimination in South Africa, tracing its origin to the arrival of the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 until the present. (1) Also well documented is the rise in human rights consciousness after World War II. While governments were arguing for equality at the international level, people advocated for equality from their own governments, albeit through different means. South Africa's leading liberation organization, the African National Congress, was founded as far back as 1912. From that time until the end of apartheid, the African National Congress and other South African liberation movements met only with failures. As racial discrimination became worse, particularly under the Population Registration Act of 1950 and the creation of tribal homelands, the African National Congress turned to violence and adopted a policy of using violence against military targets. At about the same time, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was decided. This represented a huge victory for the growing civil rights movement in the United States. For many, Brown signified an emerging international consensus about the evils of racial segregation, and dramatically improved the standing of ...