Conversation with Professor Willard Johnson
Dr. Willard R. Johnson is professor emeritus of political science at MIT where, for thirty-one years, his academic focus was on international relations and development policies and institutions with an emphasis on Africa. Throughout his professional career, he has combined scholarship and teaching with leadership in public affairs. Dr. Johnson's research interests have included African international relations and foreign policy and the role and potential of development assistance agencies, finance institutions, and NGOs in promoting the development of African human and organizational capacities. Professor Johnson is a founder and a senior advisor to the Boston Pan-African Forum, an association that fosters public education about, and engagement with, the African world. It is in that capacity that he is helping to organize the July 16-17 New England regional meeting of the National Summit on Africa--part of a nationwide effort to create a shared policy agenda to guide U.S. relations with Africa; educate the American people about Africa; and broaden and strengthen the network of Africa's supporters in the U.S. In this interview, Dr. Johnson discussed with us signs of hope emerging from Africa and why it is important to involve a racially diverse U.S. population in the development issues of the continent.
This National Summit project arose out of the long experience of people in government, aid agencies, and funding sources trying to develop better relationships between the American government and African governments. The black community--the African American mainland community and those who have come from the Caribbean and from other parts of the world where there are people of African descent--have been intensely interested and involved in Africa, but, for the most part, they have not been an activist community around international policy issues.
I just came from a luncheon today with the new U.S. ambassador to Tanzania and he told a story that was indicative of the general level of ignorance about Africa in our society. He said he talked to various friends who were heading out to Kenya. He said, "Why are you going?" They answered, "Because we want to go to Mt. Kilimanjaro." He replied, "But that's in Tanzania!" A lot of people who are concerned about wildlife and environmental issues in Africa do know something about East Africa, but we want to help them to also become concerned about policy matters that concern how people will live better.
Africa is a very profitable place to invest. The average return two years ago, for the continent, was 28 percent on foreign investment. There's no question about the fact that you can make a lot of money in Africa. Our concern is that we develop a relationship with Africa that is long-term, that leads to real sustainable growth and development where benefits are broadly spread. That means getting investors to take a longer view and to come in looking for and finding local partners of real substance who have a long-term stake in what happens in those societies.
So there are issues about how to promote investment and development that are part of a public education process. There's also a need to have policy makers and citizens here understand that this has to be a two-way street for it to be long-term. Africans need to find markets in the U.S. Traditionally, their markets have been for unprocessed goods, for gold, for iron, for raw diamonds, for copper, for bauxite, and heavy metals. Africans have to find it possible to bring finished goods into this marketplace in order to form lasting partnerships. It has been proven in other parts of the world that when the U.S. engages in open trade and in substantial long-term foreign investment, U.S. jobs grow and the benefits, while mutual, are actually greater for the U.S. than for the developing country.
The process of discussion and education we are undertaking will also raise issues about linking African economies to ours without simply having Africa replace the sweatshops of Korea or Vietnam or Malaysia. We must come to see that the global marketplace can be positive if we protect workers from the runaway greed of the major corporations looking for the cheapest labor and most vulnerable labor pool. We must address the question of how we can build into this relationship fairness, both to the general market competition and fairness to environmental concerns.
This Summit is designed to create discussions with people throughout our society, not just those who are in the business or government sectors, but people concerned about human rights, environment, religious communities, and those interested in people-to-people or sister city connections. We want people to understand that what's going on in Africa is of significance to us all.
Africa is emerging. In the last 10 years we've seen what you might call a Renaissance, the second independence of Africa. It's a time of economic growth. Most countries on the continent now have returned to the column of net growth beyond their population growth rate. That brings both opportunity and threat. Runaway growth without a commitment by external capital for the long-term could, in fact, lead back again to destructive uses of resources and the environment.
Some years ago I led a project on communications in Africa. It had two prongs to it. One was try to break through the barriers in the American press. But the second side of it was in Africa itself: the infrastructure was so rudimentary for communications. It was so costly. At best, newspapers had very marginal, small readerships and circulation. Only the elite had telephones. Now it is different. South Africa uses cellular phones extensively and their use is spreading throughout the continent. Phones connect a whole village. Now even out in the middle of the Sahara one finds nomads with cell phones.
I was oriented to international relations initially by attending a model U.N. as a student. I wound up on the delegation representing South Africa. Apartheid was in its heyday. I found a way to honor my own values and self and yet show what South Africa was. I was cantankerous. I was objecting to everything going on in the U.N. In the course of all that, I had a chance to learn a great deal about what was going on there and people had a chance to engage us. We wound up being the best delegation. Until then, I had been oriented to law or medicine.
At UCLA, we blacks couldn't live on campus because fraternities and sororities dominated the housing and they had restrictive policies. This was in the fifties. So we protested and we organized a student chapter of the NAACP. It was immediately called a communist organization and squashed. So we decided we would organize a campaign. I wound up becoming student government president. One thing led to another. In each instance I was seeing that there was something wrong but also seeing that I could say something about it. Then the lucky part of it was that having said it enough times made some difference. So I kept believing that was the way to behave.
In my own scholarship I've tried to focus on issues that would make a difference from the point of view of victimized populations, starting with black people. I embraced Africa initially out of a conviction that there was no way for us to have a place in America if America couldn't come to grips with Africa, and if black Americans, in particular, couldn't come to grips with Africa. For me, embracing African studies was just a way of carrying out what I thought was a necessary element of the struggle for emergence and participation and self-assertion here. That I could make a living out of that came as a nice bonus.
I've looked for those issues that embodied the question of how power is used for people at the bottom of society. My first studies were around questions of unity in Africa. How could this incredibly complex, diverse continent come together? My next set of studies had to do with the way the Arab states related to the African states. At each stage it's been a matter of focusing on how power is used.
When social turmoil came home to New England, I joined up with groups in Roxbury to create Circle, Inc., a community-owned and -based non-profit economic development promotion complex, using the African model of the National Community Development Corporation as a mechanism for local community development here. I worked with Mel King, Hubie Jones, Byron Rushing, and a lot of other activists. I took a leave from MIT to run that. We did quite a good job.
The fortunate thing for me is that MIT was tolerant enough to appreciate that kind of applied dimension to scholarship. The whole drift of the social sciences in the U.S. has been away from practice and towards theory, away from experientially-based understanding to more abstract models and generalized rules. While you need that to some extent, there is a danger in it as well. We've gotten more and more away from the sense that what we do as scholars should and could be guided by the ordinary needs on the ground.
When I started in the fifties, the issue was for black people to see blackness in a positive way. We didn't see blacks on television and in the movies, as we do now. The country itself has become much more multicultural. The immigrant populations have emerged. But we haven't done nearly enough yet to have the most recent major immigrant groups recognize anything of interest for them in connecting to African Americans--despite the fact that the color line is still the dominant problem of our century.
I think the Summit will provide a very important process of coalition building. Politically, it's pretty obvious that you cannot talk about national policy and national interests if you never get out of your neighborhood.
Lots of positive things have happened. When this Summit process started, we really couldn't be sure that President Clinton would go to Africa, although he talked about it in the very earliest days of his presidency. It made an enormous difference that he went. It also made an enormous difference that in our times we've had somebody like Nelson Mandela emerge and that South Africa became such a glorious achievement.
It is increasingly obvious that it is very costly to try to pick up the pieces after things fall apart. The United States owes more than a billion dollars to the U.N. That's a big chunk of money. But how cheap it is to have the U.N. functioning well when you consider what it costs to go into a country in a time of crisis. We spent in three weeks twice that in Somalia. At this stage, we've already spent two or three billion in Kosovo and have asked for 6 billion more. If you had come and said, "let us put into place a process of mediation and assistance so that it's in everybody's interest to sort things out early," that cost would have been less than one-third of what we've spent but there wasn't the political will for it.
The perception in the public is that we have been spending so much money for foreign aid. In fact, the U.S. is now by far the lagging country in foreign aid allocations. We've cut way back. We never met our goals. Not in the last 30 years. The target set in the seventies was for 1 percent of GDP going into foreign assistance for the U.S. We had maybe one-tenth of that.
I went to Uganda before Idi Amin, and not very long thereafter all this bestiality broke out in Uganda. Nor could one have imagined that you would get the atrocities that you saw in Rwanda. How did that happen? Well, you might be tempted to think these are somehow not human beings. Human beings wouldn't do things like this. The real lesson is that if you take away the framework of society, the certainty, the assurance that there are rules and there will be some order somewhere, perhaps embodied in government, there's no telling what people will wind up doing to each other. It is the same thing in Kosovo. You can say you have a really evil leadership, but you have a lot of followership that will do things they never thought themselves capable of because they no longer understand what will protect them if they don't. They don't understand any way of operating in a normal human circumstance. That's a lesson of Rwanda; it's also a lesson from Kosovo.
In some ways there's also the lesson that intervention has to be the very last resort. In most cases, it will wind up causing as many problems as it relieves. I happen to believe that there is a justification for intervention. I think that a small force early on, when it was asked for by the U.N. representative in Rwanda, could have saved more than a half-million lives. In Somalia we actually did save hundreds of thousands of people. But it cost us 18 soldiers in a very dramatic way, including seeing one body dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. All of our thinking about whether these people are worth it just went out the window. So we have to find a way to beef up all of our mediation and early warning efforts.
We need the U.N. And the U.N. cannot function if the U.S. won't pay its dues. So we have a lot at stake in the whole realm of building cultures of peace and mechanisms for peace. It's too bad that in this post-colonial period Africans became so demoralized by colonialism and so cut off from their own traditions that no new African state looked to their own traditions as a basis on which to build. And now finally they're looking back and trying to find ways to keep the religious underpinnings, the notion that political leaders are in some cases the same as religious leaders. All of it involves, in the end, what one scholar calls a "principle of reciprocity" as the underlying cultural springboard for African society, which is at the heart of a culture of peace and is the basis for reconciliation.
There's a lot in African tradition that unfortunately has been marginalized Actually, in a way, Somalia is a demonstration of that because there has been no state in Somalia since the U.S. intervention. There is no central government. What they've done is to work out a basis of clan units controlling certain sections. That's not an adequate basis for the long-term future but there's a principle at work that has to be incorporated into the long-term future, which is that you've got to have structures of power and processes of participation that people understand and feel represent them and their traditions. Modern statecraft with elections and with states and with participation in the U.N. cannot afford to ignore that kind of cultural underpinning. There's just so much we need to learn about building a culture of peace.
The most fundamental lesson is human respect for the divine order. African culture is so profoundly a religious and spiritual society. You see a lot of it coming through in the aesthetic, even in simple things like syncopation in music. At the heart of it is the requirement of participation by the listener. Syncopation plays off of the dis-rhythm, so to speak, or the irregularities in such a way that physiologically you must join in. That's why you can't sit still. I have found this in so many aspects of African culture: a fundamental way of being in relational terms. This Summit is not going to be able to teach all of that but we're going to have, once again, an opportunity to learn from Africa at a cultural, spiritual, and humanistic level.
The New England regional meeting of the National Summit on Africa will be held on July 16-17 at the John F. Kennedy Library and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. For registration information call (617) 524-5829 or visit the Boston Pan-African Forum website. You can find general information on the National Summit on Africa at www.africasummit.org.
|
|