The United States seeks to counter efforts by China, Russia and others to woo the continent after the turbulent Trump years.
As Vice President Harris on Saturday launches her first trip to Africa since taking office — part of an all-out push by the Biden administration to show African leaders it is committed to bolstering ties — she will confront widespread suspicions on the continent that the effort reflects a drive to counter China and Russia, not a deeper desire to improve relations with Africans for their own sake.
Harris’s week-long trip includes stops in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, chosen because they are striving to maintain democracy in the face of economic pressures roiling the continent, White House officials said. Harris met with the leaders of all three countries during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December, and she sees the nine-day journey as an extension of those dialogues, the officials said.
“The message is the same that the president delivered when we had the African leaders summit here in December,” said White House spokesman John Kirby. “And that’s that Africa matters, the continent matters, and our relationships across the continent all matter. So this is very much about Africa — African leaders, African nations — and not about anybody else.”
That’s not how everyone on the continent sees it. “We have a saying in Swahili: ‘When the elephants fight, it’s always the grass that gets trampled.’ We don’t want to get trampled,” said Fatma Karume, a prominent attorney in Tanzania and former president of its Law Society. “Tanzania needs to think about its own national security and its own national interest. It doesn’t bode well for Tanzania not to have China, Russia or the U.S. as a friend — we need to be friends with all of them.”
Harris’s trip is the latest step in an intensive courtship after U.S. relations with Africa deteriorated badly under President Donald Trump, who never visited the continent and whose reference to “shithole countries,” at a closed-door meeting in 2018, was seen by many Africans as directed at them. Beyond hosting the Africa summit — the first time the United States had done so in eight years — President Biden has announced support for the long-sought effort of the African Union, which represents 55 states, to become a permanent member of the Group of 20.
First lady Jill Biden visited Namibia and Kenya in February, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Niger and Ethiopia earlier this month. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield have also visited, while the president himself is expected to go later this year, capping a remarkable charm offensive.
For Harris, however, the trip is suffused with particular significance. She is the first Black woman to win a nationally elected office in the United States and is of Indian and Jamaican descent. A senior official said she will touch throughout her trip on the human connections between Africa and its diaspora.
Perhaps the starkest example will be a visit to Cape Coast Castle, one of dozens of large forts built along Africa’s Gold Coast that was a hub for the transatlantic slave trade. Harris also is making a return trip to Lusaka, Zambia, where her maternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer and where she visited as a child.
