Canada and Africa in the 1970s

Abstract

The nature of Canada's role in Africa in the 1970s has been sufficiently obscure that Flora MacDonald, during her short-lived tenure as Canada's secretary of state for external affairs, publicly wondered what we were doing there.1 Her musings were a product of the fact that, although Canada has consolidated and extended the initiatives undertaken in the previous decade, it is still a marginal actor in Africa and Africa's importance in Canada remains quite slight. One can not imagine MacDonald asking a similar question about Canada's role in the Caribbean or Latin America. Therefore, Canadian activities in Africa can best be understood less as the product of major interests of immediate concern to Canada than of a number of structural and ideological factors in both the domestic and the international contexts. Canada's involvement in Africa continues to be an integral, if junior, component of the larger Western presence in Africa. Within this fundamental alignment, Canada has attempted to gain influence in both Commonwealth and francophone countries. At the same time, Canadian policies and actions in the fields of development assistance, trade, and investment have been governed by the imperatives of Canada's own social formation. Therefore, it is to a consideration of these fundamental forces behind Canadian policy that we must turn before examining the nature of Canadian activities in Africa during the 1970s at greater length.