African lead­ers play­ing host to influ­ence-vying lumi­nar­ies from Moscow and Wash­ing­ton over the past few days might want to bear in mind the Roman poet Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, specif­i­cal­ly, the line: “Be wary of Greeks bear­ing gifts.”

Vir­gil was refer­ring to the Tro­jan Horse. The Russ­ian and Amer­i­can dip­lo-war­riors aren’t about to mir­ror Odysseus’ sneak attack, but nei­ther nation has an envi­able track record when it comes to com­mit­ment or inten­tions in Africa. The lat­est “we’re the friends you need” effort is almost Cold War déjà vu.
Back then, the two super­pow­ers fought proxy wars by pro­vid­ing com­pet­ing lib­er­a­tion move­ments with polit­i­cal sup­port, funds and weapon­ry to wage guer­ril­la strug­gles that often wreaked hav­oc on their own peo­ple in the name of lib­er­at­ing them from colo­nial and racist yokes.
The rival­ry end­ed when the Sovi­et Union dis­in­te­grat­ed. Africa was no longer strate­gic. But times change. “There is lit­tle doubt that, today, much of Moscow’s involve­ment in Africa relates to Putin’s desire to revive his country’s great-pow­er status.”
The lat­est incar­na­tion of the courtship of the con­ti­nent is the safaris by U.S. Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Janet Yellen and Russ­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Sergei Lavrov.

                               PROMISES, PROMISES

At the kick-off of her three- nation hunt, Yellen avowed: “The Unit­ed States is all in on Africa, and all in with Africa, and our engage­ment is not trans­ac­tion­al. It’s not for show. And it’s not for the short term.”
It would be grand to think that means her pro­nounce­ment of U.S. plans to expand part­ner­ships with Africa on con­ser­va­tion, cli­mate adap­ta­tion and access to clean ener­gy is gen­uine. And con­sid­er­ing that 17 of the world’s top 20 cli­mate-vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries are African, and the issue was the focus of the last COP cli­mate sum­mit,  it seems fair to say “it’s about time”.
Yellen also made a point of not­ing the ear­mark­ing more than $1 bil­lion to sup­port African-led cli­mate resilience efforts. Unsaid, and uncyn­i­cal to note for con­text, is that Africa is a repos­i­to­ry of some of the world’s largest min­er­al reserves, many of which are crit­i­cal for the Biden administration’s clean ener­gy plans. 
Moscow is already ahead in the influ­ence stakes. Sev­en­teen African nations abstained from vot­ing on the March 2022 UN res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion in Ukraine. Among them was South Africa, where Lavrov dropped in before Yellen. 
Pre­to­ria is still neu­tral on the Ukraine issue, and will hold joint naval drills with Rus­sia and Chi­na off its coast in February.
In the grand scheme of glob­al pow­er strug­gle it means lit­tle, but diplo­mat­i­cal­ly, Moscow can count it as a victory.
Shades of Cold War chess, when nei­ther side got to check­mate, Africa was a pawn, and if it had­n’t all been so vile and futile, might have been funny.

                   THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND

The West’s biggest bogey­man in south­ern Africa was the Sovi­et ambas­sador to Zam­bia, Vas­sili Solodovnikov. Diplo­mat­ic sources I plumbed on a reg­u­lar basis when cov­er­ing the region in the late 1970s were so per­plexed and vexed by his appar­ent influ­ence with var­i­ous lib­er­a­tion move­ments, that I wrote they thought he was “the spi­der in the mid­dle of Moscow’s Africa web.” 
Post-per­e­stroi­ka, over glass­es of vod­ka in his Moscow apart­ment, the genial ex-ambas­sador laughed about it. Far from being “the spi­der”, he said, he was a buffer between the embassy’s com­pet­ing agents from the KGB and GRU (mil­i­tary intel­li­gence). Then for­eign min­is­ter Andrei Gromyko appoint­ed him to pro­vide a neu­tral assess­ment of what was real­ly going on.
“We didn’t care about ide­ol­o­gy,” Solodovnikov told me. “We knew they would nev­er be prop­er com­mu­nists. What we want­ed was trade and sup­port in inter­na­tion­al forums.”

                      DEMOCRACY RULES

Washington’s lat­est ambi­tion is what Yellen called “democ­ra­cy strength­en­ing”. Any­one look­ing at today’s ver­sion of democ­ra­cy in the U.S. from the out­side can be for­giv­en if they find that some­where between amus­ing and deeply sad. 
How­ev­er, Yellen is a step up from the Cold War days when  to “strength­en democ­ra­cy”, Wash­ing­ton sent in the clowns.
The ”free­dom fight­er” du jour for iron­i­cal­ly both the U.S. and then apartheid South Africa, was Jonas Sav­im­bi, a guer­ril­la leader holed up in the scrub­lands of south­ern Ango­la, who turned out to be a socio­path­ic butcher.
In 1985, along with a hand­ful of oth­er jour­nal­ists, I flew at tree top lev­el in an aging Dako­ta to Jam­ba, Savimbi’s HQ, with Lewis Lehrman, a staunch Rea­gan­ite and direc­tor of a lob­by­ing group called “Cit­i­zens for Amer­i­ca”. His mis­sion was to sup­port “the fight for inde­pen­dence from Sovi­et colo­nial­ism.” Lehrman hand­ed out framed copies of the Amer­i­can Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence to Sav­im­bi, Nicaraguan Con­tra leader Adol­fo Calero, Eth­nics Lib­er­a­tion Organ of Laos leader Pa Kao Her, and Afghan muja­hedeen com­man­der Amin Wardak. 
In exchange, they signed a pact called the “Demo­c­ra­t­ic Inter­na­tion­al”. How well that might go seemed prob­lem­at­ic, giv­en that the Laot­ian trans­la­tor repeat­ed­ly referred to Sav­im­bi, as “Doc­tor Zimbabwe”. 
Mean­while, back in the present, Bei­jing is invest­ing bil­lions in African infra­struc­ture projects, Russ­ian mer­ce­nar­ies are com­mit­ting war crimes and help­ing Putin loot min­er­al resources, and the U.S. is play­ing catch-up.
Watch out for metaphor­i­cal  wood­en hors­es, and if Cold War his­to­ry is any­thing to go by, maybe real ones.

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