Search

Begin New Search Political Geography Africa Journal American Diplomacy Publication Year within 10 Years

11. Living with Africa for a Lifetime

Author:
Mark Wentling
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
My friends say I was born and raised in Kansas, but I was made in Africa. I first stepped on the continent in 1970 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo and stayed much longer than expected, serving with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and working with non-governmental organizations across the continent. I ended up knowing firsthand in varying degrees each of Africa’s 54 countries.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Memoir, Peace Corps, and USAID
Political Geography:
Africa and United States of America

12. Grim Week in Guinea

Author:
Mark Wentling
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Guinea’s first president, Ahmed Sékou Touré (AST) died on March 26, 1984, following emergency heart surgery at a Cleveland hospital. When Guinea gained independence from France in 1958, AST was the only leader of France’s African colonies to say “no” to Charles De Gaulle’s offer of continued association with France, stating loudly “We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery.” The French thus quickly abandoned with much vengeance their most wealthy West African Francophone colony, destroying everything they could not take with them.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Memoir, and USAID
Political Geography:
Africa and Guinea

13. IntraHealth and Global Development

Author:
Brenda Brown Schoonover
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
IntraHealth, originally known as Intrah, the Program for International Training in Health, was created in 1979 to train health workers and enhance the skills and champion health workers in overseas countries in areas where they are most needed. Intrah grew out of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) cooperative agreement with the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). Much of IntraHealth International’s success in global development is due to its President and CEO, Pape Amadou Gaye, who is stepping down after 16 years heading the organization. I first met Pape Gaye in the late 1990s, when he was Regional Director for Intrah’s West and North Africa programs in Lome, Togo, where I was U.S. Ambassador.
Topic:
Development, Diplomacy, and Memoir
Political Geography:
Africa and United States of America

14. Trauma in Togo

Author:
Mark Wentling
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
In April 1991, while I was serving in Lomé, Togo as the USAID Representative for Togo and Benin, protests in Lomé against the dictatorial regime of President Eyadéma reached the boiling point. One night, President Eyadéma’s barbaric soldiers entered the original neighborhood of Lomé, Bè, and killed a couple dozen people or more. They collected the bodies and threw them into the lagoon which cut across the northern part of old Lomé. Their morbid idea was that when the people saw the dead bodies, they would cease revolting against Eyadéma, his cronies and all for which they stood.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Trauma, Memoir, and USAID
Political Geography:
Africa and Togo

15. Can the European Union Save Multilateralism?

Author:
Mikael Barfod
Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Controversies have abounded, including Palestine and Israel within the UN's Human Rights Council, lack of US support for the International Law of the Sea (since 1994), and the International Criminal Court (since 2002). Collectively, the European Union and its Member States remain by far the largest financial contributor to the UN, providing 30% of all contributions to the budget and 31% of peace-keeping activities in addition to substantial contributions towards project-based funding. 4. Some may object that the European Union has been hampered by the lack of a common position among EU Member States on the future of the UN Security Council (UNSC), where two member-states, UK and France, currently have permanent seats and one, Germany, is desperate to get one.
Topic:
International Relations, Cold War, Human Rights, European Union, and Multilateralism
Political Geography:
Africa, China, United Kingdom, Europe, Iran, Israel, Asia, France, Germany, and United States of America

16. The Rwandan Genocide Revisited

Author:
Robert E. Gribbin
Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Twenty-five years ago, in April 1994, the havoc of genocide visited Rwanda. In a three-month-long paroxysm of violence, almost a million souls died. The country was devastated, the remaining population cowed, government non-existent, and the economy in shambles. Twenty-five years ago, in April 1994, the havoc of genocide visited Rwanda. In a three-month-long paroxysm of violence, almost a million souls died. The country was devastated, the remaining population cowed, government non-existent, and the economy in shambles.
Topic:
Security, Diplomacy, Ethnic Conflict, Genocide, Politics, History, Peacekeeping, Refugees, and Memory
Political Geography:
Uganda, Africa, Tanzania, North America, Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic, United States of America, and Zaire

17. Murder in Equatorial Guinea: A Foreign Service Urban Legend

Author:
Mark L. Asquino
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
Almost fifty years have passed since the terrible day in 1971 when one State Department officer brutally killed another in the tiny, African country of Equatorial Guinea. What took place there is a lurid story of sex, madness and murder that almost every foreign service officer has heard about at one time or another. In many ways it’s the State Department’s version of the 1984 classic film, “Nightmare on Elm Street.” However, the murder in Equatorial Guinea is a real-life tale of horror that continues to intrigue foreign service officers. Here are the basic facts of what happened.
Topic:
Cold War, Crime, Diplomacy, and Memoir
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, North America, United States of America, and Equatorial Guinea

18. USIA Films that failed in Africa

Author:
Bob Baker
Publication Date:
11-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
While many films made by the US Information Agency (USIA) were very useful in Africa to tell about American society and policies, two were not. These two, one about President Kennedy and the other about American agriculture, had the opposite result from that intended. Local African culture distorted the films’ messages.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Film, Soft Power, and Memoir
Political Geography:
Uganda, Africa, North America, and United States of America

19. Getting to Know Jane Goodall

Author:
Ralph Bresler
Publication Date:
09-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
My wife Barbara and I, and our children, were fortunate to work closely with Dr. Jane Goodall during our 1987-1991 tour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 1989 Goodall called on Secretary of State James Baker in order to enlist him in her new cause of trying to save chimpanzees in the wild. After discussing her many years of groundbreaking chimpanzee research in Gombe, Tanzania, Goodall explained that, in addition to destruction of habitat, a major problem was the bushmeat trade. She noted that ten adult chimps were killed in the wild protecting every infant captured, and only one out of ten infant chimps survived the journey to the marketplace after being taken from their mothers. Secretary Baker offered the Department’s assistance to her effort. As the largest chimpanzee population was in the DRC, Kinshasa was her first stop in this new endeavor.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Environment, and Memoir
Political Geography:
Africa, North America, United States of America, and Democratic Republic of Congo

20. Africa and the Politics of Possibility

Author:
Louis S. Segesvary
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
According to the IMF, the 2016 GDP per capita estimate for Eritrea was only $771 per annum; for Ethiopia $739; for Gambia $435; and for Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa's most populous country with major petroleum reserves, it was $2,930, or around $244 a month. According to a comprehensive report prepared by the African Development Bank Group, the number of impoverished people in sub-Saharan Africa had doubled from 1981 to 1998, with the number of people living on less than US $1 per day in the region, "reaching 290 million in 1998, which is over 46% of the total population." According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, in 2014/2015 some 153 million individuals in sub-Saharan Africa, about 26 percent of the population or one out of four individuals above 15 years of age, was "hungry but did not eat or went without eating for a whole day because there was not enough money or other resources for food." [...]a case can be made that all this aid has contributed to fostering a culture of dependency in which foreign aid grants become a form of entitlements that governments rely on to maintain a status quo, as opposed to attracting the type of private sector investments that grow economies.
Topic:
Development, Migration, Poverty, and Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
Africa and Europe