Southern Africa: The Largely Unsung Role of U.S. Former President Carter in Southern Africa

Former US president Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday aged 100, was well known for his diplomatic skills and commitment to respecting human rights – much less so for his African legacy. And yet he was the first US president to visit sub-Saharan Africa and during his short term in office from 1977 to 1981 he worked hard to enable the transformation of racist Rhodesia into an independent Zimbabwe.

Carter signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, establishing the framework for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

It’s seen as one of his major political achievements.

Yet looking back on his term of office, in 2002, he told history professor Nancy Mitchell: “I spent more effort and worry on Rhodesia than I did on the Middle East.”

Mitchell – author of Jimmy Carter in Africa, Race and the Cold War – said reams of documents detailing his commitment to end white rule in Rhodesia and help bring about its independence as Zimbabwe backed up the former president’s claim.

Carter’s involvement in Rhodesia during his four-year stint in office was based largely on realpolitik.

Southern Africa had become a theatre for Cold War politics – Fidel Castro had sent Cuban troops to Angola in 1976 to protect the leftist MPLA from a US-backed invasion by apartheid South Africa, and Mozambique had fallen to left-leaning Frelimo. South Africa faced the prospect of being surrounded by hostile black-ruled states.

Meanwhile in Rhodesia, an insurgency – led by the leftist Patriotic Front against the white minority government – was gaining ground.

The Patriotic Front was backed was Cuba and the USSR. Washington knew that if the conflict did not end, Cuban troops risked crossing the continent to help the rebels.

According to Mitchell, the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights meant it was unthinkable to intervene in Rhodesia to support Ian Smith’s racist government. But equally, the US could not stand by and allow another Soviet-backed Cuban victory in Africa.

In a memorandum on southern Africa signed just a week after taking office, the Carter administration stated that in terms of urgency the Rhodesian problem was “highest priority”.

The Americans spearheaded negotiations that led to the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement in London, resulting in the first free elections in 1980 and black majority rule in an independent state of Zimbabwe led by Robert Mugabe.

Despite this, Mitchell insists Carter has not received “the credit his administration deserves” for the Zimbabwe settlement.

First American president in sub-Saharan Africa

Having grown up in the segregated southern state of Georgia in the 1920s and 1930s, Carter also had personal reasons for getting involved in the African continent.

While Mitchell says he “didn’t question the racist strictures of the Jim Crow South” as a youngster, his world view was broadened by his time in the US Navy and as an elected governor of Georgia.

He was also influenced by Andrew Young, a former close aide to Martin Luther King, and came to see parallels between the struggles of the African continent and those of the US civil rights movement that helped liberate the South from its segregationist past.

“I felt a sense of responsibility and some degree of guilt that we had spent an entire century after the Civil War still persecuting blacks, and to me the situation in Africa was inseparable from the fact of deprivation or persecution or oppression of Black people in the South,” Mitchell quotes him as saying.

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In 1978, Carter became the first US president to set foot on sub-Saharan soil when he visited Liberia – a country colonised in 1822 by the American Colonization Society.

During the war in the Horn of Africa, he resisted strong pressure to offer the Somali government full US support in its war of aggression against leftist Ethiopia. The Carter administration condemned apartheid in South Africa and also tried, and failed, to negotiate a settlement in Namibia.

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The late president’s Africa policy was at its weakest in Angola, according to historian Piero Gleijese, whose ground-breaking research has laid bear the US’ conflicting missions in Cuba and Africa. Notably, Mitchell points to US insistence that full relations with Angola could only be restored once Cuban troops had left, even though they’d been invited by the Angolan government.

In later years, Carter returned to Liberia and toured other African countries as part of the Carter Center foundation that monitors elections and works in the fields of human rights and health around the world.

The Center has facilitated the almost total eradication of Guinea worm, saving an estimated 80 million Africans from the disease. “Eradicating Guinea worm will be my most gratifying experience,” Carter said in 2016.

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