Introduction
The peoples of Africa and Arabia are closely interconnected by geography, kinship, history, religion, trade and culture, yet today, in the realm of international politics and diplomacy, they are separated by a yawning chasm of mistrust. The important question is why Africa and Arabia, which have so much in common and which, on the face of it, should form such natural allies in global politics, are in fact distant in the main and often antagonistic to each other underneath a thin veneer of surface amity? In point of fact, ten (Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and the Comoros) out of the twenty two members of the Arab League (AL) are located on the African continent (the Comoro Islands are located off the East African coast) and are, therefore also members of the African Union (AU). Both Africa and Arabia, in the main, threw off the yoke of European colonialism during the latter half of the 20th century and both suffered from the arbitrary drawing of national boundaries under the imprimatur of European conquest. These inheritances of artificial national boundaries lead to the rise of similar nationalist responses, i.e. Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism, in both regions.

The de-colonisation era of the 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of nationalist Arab and African leaders, e.g. Gamal Abdul Nasser (Egypt), Ahmed Ben Bella (Algeria) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) among others, who saw a natural Arab-African alliance taking a leadership role in global politics through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The struggle to liberate Palestine from Zionism and South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia from apartheid was viewed as one and the same and it united the nationalisms and international politics of Africa and Arabia. Indeed, in a historic UN General Assembly in the late 1970s, Africa and Arabia united the overwhelming majority of the Third World behind them in passing a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism. Thus, was the ruling, theocratic paradigm of Israel equated with the odious racism of South Africa’s apartheid and the close friendship between those two pariah states born of shared ostracism in the community of nations. The question this paper seeks to answer is how and why the Arab-African relationship declined from this peak of collaboration and fraternity to the present frigidity and mutual suspicion.

The Demise of Leadership
One of the reasons underlying the distinct cooling of the African-Arab relationship is certainly the passing away or fall from power of the nationalist leaders that initially cemented it, notably Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), Ahmed Ben Bella (Algeria), Mohammed Ibrahim Egal (Somalia), Sadiq Al Mahdi (Sudan), Abdi Karumeh (Zanzibar/Tanzania) among others. These visionary leaders were replaced, in the main, by much lesser men with little or no vision of a strategic, anti-colonial alliance of Third World countries underpinned by an African-Arab axis that focused upon the decolonisation of Africa and Arabia. Of equal importance is the fact that many of the replacements of these independence leaders in Africa were military officers who came to power through coups d’etat instigated or encouraged by one or the other super power. Thus, the anti-colonial impulse driving African and Arab diplomacy became subsumed in the capitalist vs. communist geo-political rivalry of the East-West blocs. The surrender of the anti-colonial nature of the struggle for Palestinian nationhood to the East-West geopolitical rivalry was more marked in Arabia than was the corresponding struggle for the independence of the African countries mentioned above.

After the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the front-line Arab states (with the exceptions of Jordan and Lebanon) consciously adopted a pro-Soviet stance in response to America’s clear and overt pro-Israel policy, while America’s traditional allies in Arabia, principally Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Arab Gulf states, sought to punish the US and its Western allies by quadrupling the price of oil overnight. Thus, the Palestine-Israel dispute became an essentially Arab-Israeli conflict with the two protagonists lined up along an East-West axis with each superpower supporting one side of the conflict. While the UN was the forum for the each side to present their case and seek the moral and diplomatic initiative, it was a clear fact of realpolitik that resolution of the dispute would only come from superpower intervention and disposition. The anti-colonial nature of the dispute and the sway this factor held throughout the Third World was still evident in the plethora of General Assembly resolutions passed in favour of Palestinian rights and statehood, and the numerous vetoes the US had to employ to shield Israel from Security Council resolutions that sought to censure it for its denial of Palestinian rights.

Despite the clear support of the overwhelming majority of the Third World for Palestinian rights, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war cemented the transformation of the Palestine-Israel conflict from an anti-colonial struggle into Arab-Israeli proxy, regional conflict between the superpowers. Israel won that war largely because the US commitment to Israel trumped the USSR’s commitment to Arab victory, as evidenced by the massive airlift of US arms and materiel to Tel Aviv, not to mention the US’s dire warnings to the Soviets about US action should Israel’s internationally recognised borders come under Arab threat. The superpower primacy in the Middle East conflict is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the disengagement of forces and the eventual ceasefire was agreed between Washington and Moscow, and not between Israel and the Arabs. By contrast, the struggle for national self determination in southern Africa remained anti-colonial in nature despite the efforts of many in both the West and the East to reformulate it into an American-Soviet conflict through proxies. Thus, during the 1970s and 1980s, the liberation struggles for self determination in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola were able to secure massive public support in the West despite the antipathy of many Western governments.

Another factor underlying African-Arab estrangement under this heading of leadership demise is the effective withdrawal of the Arab members of the AU from African diplomacy after the exit of the nationalist leaders listed above such as Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella. The successors to these nationalist leaders saw the future of their countries exclusively within an Arab axis and not equally as part of an African grouping. Thus, Arabia and the AL became the principal focus of the regional politics of the Arab members of the AU, while they paid lip service to African regional politics and the AU. The only exceptions to this general trend within the AL members of the AU were Sudan and Somalia which were both active in African regional politics for their own different reasons. Sudan, while seeing its destiny within the Arab world, was faced with the civil war in the south where Christian and animist Africans demanded autonomy and a share of power from the Muslim, Arab speaking north. With the discovery of commercial deposits of oil in the south, the north was unwilling to relinquish its power over the south, while the military dictatorship ruling Sudan increasingly sought to legitimise its grip on power through appeals to Arab nationalism, adherence to Islam and religious purity, which further alienated the non-Muslim Africans of the south.

The Sudanese regime, thus sought to play an active role in the AU to forestall African criticism of its increasingly brutal suppression of southern aspirations and the human rights of its African citizenry. To the Arab world, Sudan very effectively played the card of Arab nationalism and religious solidarity which were well received – more on this later. The case of Somalia is quite different. The Somali people don’t have Arabic as their mother tongue as the do northern Sudanese (in fact Somalis have their own language – Somali – which belongs to another family of languages (Cushitic) which includes other north east African languages e.g. Danakili, Galla, Oromo etc.), although Somalis are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims. Also, while some Somalis claim descent from the original Arab sheiks that brought Islam to East Africa, they do not consider themselves Arabs in the same way as do the northern Sudanese.

Indeed, it would be more accurate to depict the Somali perception of their relationship with the Arabs as first or second cousins. The decision to join the Arab League was taken by Somalia’s pro-Soviet dictator, Mohammed Siyad Barre, in 1973 for essentially economic reasons when it became clear to him that while his Soviet patrons were a willing source of arms and military training, they would, or could, not provide him with the financial largesse he desired. Barre was successful in his aims and Somalia’s accession to the AL resulted in a massive inflow of bilateral and multilateral Arab funds and capital into that country. Needless to say, most of these funds were appropriated by the ruling elite to finance their rapacious appetite for luxury goods and services as well as for arms to maintain their ruthless grip on power.

Thus, by the 1980s the Arab-African alliance and solidarity that was fashioned by the nationalist heroes of the 1950s and 1960s had atrophied into estrangement with each bloc largely going its own way, although lip service was paid to mutual solidarity at international forums such as the UN and the NAM. It is very interesting and telling that no head of state of an Arab, north African country (except Muamer Ghadafi) sought to host an AU summit meeting, or its predecessor OAU, and so become its Chairman, although nearly all of these countries have hosted AL summits.

Culture & Identity – Racism & the Legacy of Slavery
The ten ton elephant in the room in any discussion of the African-Arab relationship is the rampant racism festering in Arabia within the lingering legacy of slavery. Unlike the West, where slavery was an economic construct upon which the mercantile and agrarian power of European imperial, colonialism was built; in Arabia slavery did not form the base of an organised, economic system of production of goods and services. Rather, it was a largely cultural phenomenon whereby ownership of slaves denoted the wealth of the slave owner much as did ownership of gold, and therefore, his or her standing and status within society. It has sometimes been argued that Arab slavery was somehow more humane than Western slavery, since the former was more of a cultural construct than a purely economic one, and thus slaves were often treated better in Arabia than in Europe and the Americas. The truth is that African slaves were as much a commodity to be bought and sold in Arabia as they were in Europe and the Americas, thus this facile and self serving argument needs no refutation here and is best left to wither on the vine.

It is a fact that slavery was abolished in some parts of Arabia as recently as the 1960s, and that until this day the term “abid” (slave in Arabic) is routinely and casually used by many Arabs to denote blacks, without the slightest compunction or awareness of the insult. It is also true that in those Arab countries with significant black populations, principally Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and the Gulf States, that blacks tend to be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder by all measures of development and advancement, i.e. education, employment, home ownership etc. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the de-colonisation of much of the Third World and the simultaneous enfranchisement of minorities and extension of civil rights to all members of society in the West. This wave of liberation and empowerment of oppressed peoples, which was vigorously resisted by vested, sectarian interests, underlies the success of democracy and representative government over totalitarian communism and the demise of the Soviet empire. This tidal wave of emancipation and extension of human and civil rights has passed Arabia by entirely and the Arab world continues to be bound by the chains of ignorance and xenophobia, particularly in relation to race and prejudice.

The most egregious example of this overt Arab racism in international diplomacy is the case of southern Sudan. During all the years of the savage, civil war in that country, neither the AL, nor any Arab country ever sought to mediate between the Khartoum government and the rebels in the south to seek a peaceful solution to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in that sister country. While the AU was also slow to take up the issue, by the mid-1980s, it had initiated talks between the protagonists and indeed it was this AU initiative that eventually resulted in the peace deal that ended the war. What is truly sad and pathetic is that to this day, many prominent Arab pundits continue to persist in seeing the peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA as a dastardly scheme to dismember an Arab country that was/is orchestrated by a Western (read American), Christian and Israeli cabal. These myopic pundits are completely oblivious to the historical, racial dimension to this conflict and the inherent justice of the cause of the southern rebels in fighting for their civil and human rights. The AL is now applying the same callous and misguided myopia to Khartoum’s latest assault upon another distinct group of its citizens in Dharfur. What is particularly inexcusable here is that the conflict in Dharfur does not have a religious component, since both protagonists are Muslim, although it does have a racial one in that Sudanese Muslims of African racial origin are fighting for their rights against a Sudanese government lead by Muslims of Arab racial origin. Once again, Arab nationalism and racism trumps African human rights and civil justice.

The Role of Islam – Alienation & Denial
Unlike Christianity within which developed branches that sought to reconcile slavery and racism with the teachings of the Bible, e.g. the Dutch Reform Church of South Africa, Islam was from the onset clearly opposed to slavery. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) purposely selected Bilal (a freed African slave) as the first muezzin to call the faithful to prayer to demonstrate the equality of all Muslims (and therefore mankind) before their Creator. Thus, while slavery certainly persisted in Arabia after the advent of Islam, it could never be cloaked in bogus religious rationalisations since a fundamental tenet of Islam is that all of mankind is “abid-allah”, i.e. slaves to God but to none else, indeed Islam prohibits Muslims from bowing subservience to any entity but Allah to whom they bow in prayer. This direct conflict between the egalitarian teaching of their faith and the entrenched racism of their cultural legacy of slavery presents Arab society with a social and psychological schism – a cultural schizophrenia, if you will.

On the one hand, there is the religious impulse of Muslim unity, or the “ummah” (i.e. the unity of all Muslims often referred to as the Muslim nation or Pan-Islamism), while on the other there is the cultural, Arab identity from which the abid is distinct, inferior and excluded. Thus, co-existing within the Arab, Muslim identity is both adherence to an egalitarian, inclusive faith and an overtly racist, exclusionary culture that has never addressed its xenophobia and oppression of minorities head on. Any African or person of colour, who has lived or visited the Arab world, can freely attest to this psychological dichotomy, or cultural schizophrenia, which is widely prevalent in Arabia. This racism is not confined to Africans or people of African descent, but is also applied to people from the Indian sub-continent, Asia, the Pacific and Latin & South America. Interestingly enough, people from Europe and North America, or the “white” world are subject to a reverse racism since they are viewed as dominant and superior. One African, Muslim intellectual, who lived in Arabia for many years, recently opined that the tacit, but practised, racial hierarchy in Arabia was more layered and variegated than the apartheid system of South Africa.

At this juncture in history, with the rise in the Arab and wider Muslim world of an armed, anti-Western, political movement that cloaks itself in a narrow, anti-historical, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, and the corresponding rise in the West of reversion to a crude and xenophobic imperialism, the contradictions between the inclusive nature of Islam and the unaddressed racism underlying Arab culture are becoming ever more acute. Nowhere is this dichotomy more stark than in Africa, where the new fundamentalist, jihadists are actively seeking adherents among the Muslim populations. Their exhortations for jihad against the Western infidels are largely falling on deaf ears among Africa’s rapidly growing Muslim population, with the notable exception of the failed state of Somalia. In this sad and largely forgotten country, a decade and a half of anarchy have created an environment in which a desperate citizenry will clutch at any straw that seems to offer even a faint hope of stability, while heavily armed, mercenary militias are available to the highest bidder. In the long run, however, the jihadists are doomed to fail since they have no vision for development and socio-economic advancement, and only offer a theocratic autocracy and a backward, feudal social system that is alien to Africa.

Conclusion
The Arab-African relationship is destined to remain mired in distance and mutual mistrust until both sides muster the courage and faith to speak honestly to each other. The Africans must stop biting their tongues in fear of losing Arab aid and financial largesse and address the issue of Arab racism directly and forthrightly. For their part, the Arabs must be willing to look inwards honestly and frankly and address the issue of race within their societies as well as and the racial dynamic of their international diplomacy. They must also frankly and openly put to their African counterparts the requirements Africa must fulfil to be a full partner for Arabia in forging a new strategic alliance, not only in the political arena, but also in the economic one. The combination of Arab capital and African land and material resources could create an economic powerhouse to rival both Asia and Europe, however this cannot be even contemplated, much less realised, until both sides eschew the present dialogue of the deaf and initiate one built upon honesty, a willingness to consign the past to history, and a desire to forge a new future.

Ahmed M.I. Egal
11 April 2006