THE MAN WHO SAW THE FUTURE OF AFRICA. Essay by Howard French in NY Times

Not long after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president, he received his first visit from a foreign leader. He had chosen Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. By today’s standards, in which Africa seems to sit on the far margins of world affairs, the selection is practically unimaginable.

But even as a senator, Mr. Kennedy had begun to see Africa — with its enormous landmass, newly independent countries and young population — as a continent full of promise. By one count, during his presidential campaign speeches in 1960 he mentioned Africa 479 times. As president, he was keen to compete for influence there with the Soviet Union and even side with anticolonialism, courting tension with America’s European allies.

Until Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Nkrumah remained the American president’s most important African interlocutor, a fact that reflects both the Ghanaian leader’s charisma and the tremendous prestige he had earned on the continent by peacefully leading his country to independence from colonial rule in 1957. Driven by his belief in Pan-Africanism, Mr. Nkrumah worked tirelessly to overcome the Balkanizing impact of colonial rule across Africa.

As the world’s powers turn away from the continent, it’s a vision that may hold the key to realizing Africa’s potential today.

The United States did not withdraw from Africa after Mr. Kennedy’s death, but the continent was sharply downgraded in the hierarchy of Washington’s interests. America’s involvement quickly narrowed to a policy of near-zero-sum competition with Moscow, in which each superpower forged alliances with the aim of restraining the influence of the other. Most of these involved military relationships and limited financial support to dictatorships of one kind or another, with little regard for democracy, governance or long-term economic development.

Since the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, American engagement with Africa has declined sharply and become largely limited to humanitarian assistance. Under President Trump, even this is now in doubt, with the virtual elimination of the United States Agency for International Development and apparent plans to end support for PEPFAR, a program created by George W. Bush that has had remarkable success in combating H.I.V. in Africa.

This summer, a new nadir was reached when news outlets reportedthat the White House was considering restricting entry to the United States from 25 African countries, in addition to the seven that were covered in a ban announced in June. And even as Washington raises barriers to immigration from Africa, it has begun to explore ways of using the continent as a dumping ground not only for Africans deported from the United States but also for people from other continents.

It is tempting to see the United States as a complete outlier, but its withdrawal from Africa reflects broader developments in the world. Europe’s involvement with the continent has also declined. This is attested to by France’s retreat from a large swath of West Africa in the Sahel, after years of failed efforts to defeat a variety of Islamic insurgencies. Today the biggest African concern of the former colonizing powers — as well as of the European Union generally — is preventing growing migration from the continent.

Even China, after more than two decades of a determined push to expand political and economic ties to Africa, has put on the brakes and started to focus elsewhere. After expanding rapidly from a tiny base, Chinese economic involvement with Africa has plateaued, as Beijing has quietly reassessed the difficulties of realizing profits on the continent. Chinese lending to Africa peaked in 2016, with its investment there now relatively flat.

In light of trends like these, Mr. Nkrumah’s logic about how Africa should engage the outside world appears remarkably sound. His determined nonalignment was based on more than the principled belief that African countries should be free to pursue their interests with whichever partners they wished. He was leery of the proposition that any foreign partner — even a United States led by Mr. Kennedy — would commit to Africa’s development in the long term. He believed that this was, above all, the duty of Africans.

At the time, Mr. Nkrumah was opposed and derided by some fellow African leaders for what they saw as his unrealistic dream of merging dozens of newly formed countries to form a continental government, perhaps with him at the helm. His ideas were more subtle, though, and his tactical vision more patient than he was given credit for in his day.

As long as the continent was composed of its legacy jigsaw countries, most of them small in size and population — and many of them landlocked, condemning them to additional poverty and instability — they would remain underdeveloped. The small size of their markets would make it all but impossible to industrialize or to sustain engagement with the outside world on favorable terms. This implies more than the kind of naked extraction of fossil fuels and minerals that is commonplace now and a shift to local transformation of the continent’s resources and commodities.

The Ghanaian leader saw this move toward larger units, both economically and politically, as a matter of successive voluntary steps — with states joining to integrate their markets and road and rail networks, then perhaps merging at the subregional level before any eventual attempt to form a nation that would encompass, say, all of West, East or Southern Africa. If it were ever to come about, a continental union lay in a distant future.

One surprising source for this vision was the Federalist Papers. While he was a college and graduate school student in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Nkrumah became deeply familiar with the history of how a group of small colonies bound themselves together to forge an independent, federal country that became much richer and stronger than the sum of its parts. This was the future he saw for his continent, as he explained to his peers at the founding summit of the Organization of African Unity, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1963.

Mr. Nkrumah’s fellow leaders rejected his idea. But the continent’s subsequent history — six decades of deprivation, poverty and corruption — has laid bare the costs of having a plethora of small countries that largely turn their backs to one another. In the absence of collaboration, they remain poor and condemned to engage as weaklings with the outside world.

In demographic terms, Mr. Kennedy was right that Africa is the continent of the future. Its population will more than double before 2070 and by the end of this century could be larger than India’s and China’s combined. It is up to Africans to unlock their economic future, matching that population growth with development.

With no one in the world serving up favors to the continent, Mr. Nkrumah’s insight about the gains to be had through federation is as salient as ever. What is lacking is sufficient action. The time has come for a continent cut loose in the world to take the next step.