Critical reflections on United States socio-economic policy toward Africa: Challenges to Christian social imagination

Abstract

It is a commonly encountered postulate that Africa lies outside United States' social and political concerns. Set against the background of United States involvement in Africa during and after the Cold War, the author contends that it is the Africans, not Africa, who lie outside U.S. policy concerns. Basing on the examples of Congo Kinshasha, Angola, South Africa, Rwanda, and Sudan, the essay tries to show how the United States has been and remains focused on the exploitation of Africa's resources. Tragically, exploitation has gone hand in hand with callous indifference to the needs, aspirations, and critical concerns of the African peoples. Thus contrary to popular perception, Africa has been and remains central to U.S. social and political schemes. The author agrees that the church in the United States can and ought to change the terms of engagement away from Washington's politics of self-interest towards solidarity with the Africans. But the church can hardly embody any alternative as long as it remains encapsulated to “Capital Hill imagination” and conceives its mission in terms of making its contribution within the political space defined by Washington. And so, he suggests, the Christian story of creation in the image of God as well as Eucharistic performance must become the form and center of the church's alternative social imagination to Capital Hill's politics of self-interest and exploitation.Mtafiti Mwafrika Vol.14 2005: pp.1-32