U.S. preaches trade not aid at African summit

Black Americans and Africans met in Senegal recently for a third "roots" summit mixing nostalgia with efforts to boostinvestment in the poorest continent.

The four-day African-African American summit, grouping heads of state and representatives of government and business from the United States and Africa, takes place against a backdrop of trade liberalisation in much of the continent.

Although many African countries have been diligently swallowing their World Bank and International Monetary Fund medicine -- some like Ghana for over a decade -- investors have tended to favour the booming economies of Asia.

"Trade, not aid, and the power of Africans and African-owned enterprises in the internaional marketplace will bring hope and progress to this continent," U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told delegates, underlining a theme uppermost in the minds of most of the leaders present.

He said American business was already raising its profile in Africa, hoping to challenge the dominance of European powers, notably France and Portugal, dating back to colonial days.

Summit host, Senegalese President Abdou Diouf, opened the meeting with the words: "Africa must reach out to achieve the economic challenge facing the continent."

The biennial summit, first held in Ivory Coast in 1991, is the brainchild of the Reverend Leon Sullivan, an African American preacher and rights campaigner.

It draws its inspiration from the historical and cultural links born of the transatlantic traffic of millions of black Africans over a period of almost three centuries.

"We have come back home. We were taken away in chains, but we have returned with skills and money and political strength," Sullivan told the meeting.

Historians say up to 20 million people were uprooted from West and Central Africa and shipped to plantations of the New World by Europeans -- often in collusion with local African rulers who raided neighbouring tribes.

Of those who began the trip, an estimated 10-to-20 percent died on the horribly overcrowded ships or within a year of landing in their new country.

One political issue uppermost in many minds in West Africa is the fate of Liberia, set up by returning slaves as Africa's first independent republic in 1847.

West African leaders and the warlords whose fighting and squabbling have devastated Liberia meet in Nigeria on May 17 for yet another summit to try to end five years of civil war.

Many leaders, like Ivory Coast's Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan, have come to the Dakar hoping to cash in on Africa's special links with the world's biggest economy.

"It's a reunion. On the one hand cultural but more and more, economic," Duncan said before leaving, adding that the aim was to help Africa out of its isolation. Ivory Coast, which devalued the CFA franc it shares with other French-speaking African countries in January 1994, is hungry for investment as are other states in West and Central Africa, many of whose people have yet to feel the benefit of IMF sponsored belt-tightening.

The presidents of Botswana, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Gambia and Togo are among those attending the summit along with U.S. civil rights campaigner and politician Jesse Jackson.