I've been saying that for years. Africa has huge resources. Africa has a large population of moderate Christians, native religions, and moderate Muslims. Radical Islam is being exported, instability is being increased. Oil and mineral resources are being extracted. If we're late to this party, we'll regret it. Leaving Somalia was a huge mistake.
The U.S. has been in Africa since the days that the now defunct New York Herald sent Henry Morton Stanley to the continent to search for David Livingstone, in the 1870s. In the 1890s, William Astor Chanler, another American -- who later became a politician and was involved in the Spanish-American War -- became the first Westerner to reach the parts of Eastern Kenya where I come from.
The biggest problem is that very few Americans see Africa as place worth doing business in, despite the early inroads and years of heavy investment in the continent in the way of direct economic aid by the U.S government, and indirect aid in things like education and healthcare by non-governmental and quasi-government agencies.
The Chinese have been doing business in Africa since the 1420s, but in the last decade -- especially after Sept. 11 -- they've upped the ante in dramatic ways. What I've seen first-hand in the last three years in Kenya, for example, is scary in both speed and scope. Almost every major construction project in Kenya that would have been carried out by an American, European or Israeli company in the past is now the domain of Chinese companies.
While we American are busy sending folk to often do silly missionary religious work, aid projects and political advising in slums and remote villages, the Chinese government and companies are sending their people there to strike business deals, build factories, super highways, airports and power generating plants, etc. Some of those facilities are in locations no one would have thought have any economic viability. There's current talk, for example, of a highway that will cut through Kenya' arid lands from the coastal town of Lamu all the way north to Ethiopian border in the north. Such a highway will enable the Chinese to get their from Kenya to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan.
On a side note. it's interesting that Stanley, a Welsh-American, would later return to African as an agent of European interests and participate in events that led to the terrible Berlin Conference of 1885, in which European powers divvied up Africa among themselves, for the sole purpose of exploiting her people and resources. At the conference, in which no African participated or was asked for an opinion, the European powers created brand new countries and carved up boundaries -- many of which are catalysts for conflict today.
It is at that conference, as Gary Stewart put it so eloquently in his wonderful book "Rumba on the River, "with a few pen strokes and the firepower to enforce them, the old nations of Africa were sundered and fused into counterfeit states to be run from the capitals of Europe. .... The 900,000 square mile of central Africa Stanley had carved out for the King (Leopold II) covered eighty times the area of tiny Belgium. The saddened land sustained an estimated five to six million people of more than 200 national groups, many of whom were cut off from their brothers and sisters by colonialism's illogical arbitrary boundaries."
