6. Aid Against Independence
Canada’s post-colonial policy in Africa was an interesting mix of the tried and true and some twists resulting from particular domestic politics.
Ottawa responded to African independence by promoting the Commonwealth and la Francophonie and delivering aid. The objective was to dissuade newly independent African countries from following wholly independent paths or falling under the influence of the Communist bloc. In a memo to minister Lester Pearson regarding Ghana’s forthcoming independence, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Jules Léger called for a major African aid program as a means of “holding the line against communism in Africa and removing from the West the taint of colonialism.”1
Once newly independent British colonies joined the Commonwealth they became eligible to receive Canadian aid. After its independence Canada initiated the Commonwealth Technical Assistance Program for Ghana.2 In fact, before granting Ghana independence in March 1957 London sought Ottawa’s support for its plan to grant Ghana “independence within the Commonwealth.”3 At the time of the initial aid allotment to Ghana then External Affairs Minister Sidney Smith warned the House of Commons that unless Ottawa stepped in to help, “these underdeveloped countries … may be prone to accept blandishments and offers from other parts of the world.”4
The African aid program was modeled after its Asian effort. With Mao’s triumph in China in 1949, Canada began its first significant (non-European) allocation of foreign aid through the Colombo Plan. The Plan’s primary aim was to keep the former British Asian colonies, especially India, within the Western fold. Or as a 1957 internal department assessment of the Colombo Plan explained: “It is to offer some hope, and to provide a sense of international cooperation, to the ruling and politically effective groups in Asian countries … to reduce the attractiveness of Communism to these groups.”5
Extending the Ghana program to other African countries, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand established the Special Commonwealth Africa Assistance Plan in 1960. By 1968-69 Canada had delivered $25.5 million ($190 million today) in aid to Commonwealth African countries.6
As part of the country’s aid efforts, Canadian troops trained armed forces in various African countries. In Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Tanzania, Canada endeavoured “to fill in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of British officers and training facilities,” notes Professor Robert Matthews.7 Military historian Sean Maloney further explains: “These teams consisted of regular army officers who, at the ‘operational level’, trained military personnel of these new Commonwealth countries to increase their professionalism. The strategic function, particularly of the 83-man team in Tanzania, was to maintain a Western presence to counter Soviet and Chinese bloc political and military influence.”8 By the end of the 1960s Canada had spent over $23 million (around $170 million today) training the military forces of seven African and Asian countries.9
After Tanzania gained independence in 1961, Ottawa worried this former British colony, led for two decades by socialist leaning Julius Nyerere, would develop an independent path. To blunt its break from the West and capitalism, Canada began a significant aid program, which included $15 million for the Canadian Armed Forces Advisory Training Team Tanzania (CAFATTT).10
Up to 90 Canadian trainers were in Tanzania at any given point from 1965 to 1970.11 Additionally, Ottawa built a military academy, delivered a dozen transport aircraft and trained Tanzania’s army and air cadets in Canada.12 In “The Canadian Armed Forces Advisory and Training Team Tanzania 1965-1970”, Andrew Godefroy writes that the “Canadian contingent built the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) from the ground up, creating everything from Tanzania’s National Defence Act to the instructional pamphlets used for teaching weapons classes.”13
Arms interests and geopolitical considerations drove CAFATTT. The Department of Defence argued that military training would strengthen the “Canadian aircraft industry which has been adversely affected by the reduction in our [NATO] Mutual Aid Programme.”14 As part of the agreement with Tanzania, Ottawa offered a dozen aircraft in the hope that building military relations with African countries would spur future weapons sales.
More important to Ottawa than the arms industry, London and Washington pushed Canada to initiate CAFATTT. In August 1964 British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home asked Prime Minister Lester Pearson to respond favourably to Tanzania’s request for military training assistance. “I hope you will not mind my saying how immensely valuable it would be if you were able to respond to this request. It might indeed be the only way of preventing the communists from gaining virtual control of the local training of the United Republic’s ground forces.”15
Fearing loss of influence, British officials needed help maintaining Western power within the Tanzanian Armed Forces. Canada obliged and over the next five years, notes Godefroy, “every opportunity to retain influence over the TPDF [Tanzanian People’s Defense force] was seized” by Canadian officials.16 When West Germany withdrew its air force trainers in a failed bid to dissuade Tanzania from establishing diplomatic relations with East Germany, Canada took over. Justifying the need for Canada to train the Tanzanian Air Force, an internal memo explained, “a real danger has arisen of a communist country being given this golden opportunity to increase very substantially its influence in East Africa.”17
Competition with China also motivated CAFATTT. Tanzania’s 1964 request for Chinese trainers disturbed Washington and Ottawa. A July 1969 Canadian Interdepartmental Military Assistance Committee memo explained: “Although it is clear from Tanzania’s decision to terminate our military assistance program that we have not succeeded in preventing the swing to virtual full reliance on China, we did succeed in postponing this development until the Tanzanian forces were basically organized and had acquired their own internal cohesion, which should leave them in a much better position to deal with possible Chinese subversion.”18
As Canadian hostility towards African liberation became ever clearer, Tanzanian officials no longer wanted Canadian trainers. “Tanzania was becoming suspicious of the Canadian training team’s cooperation with Western strategic interests in southern Africa,” notes Grant Dawson.19
Their suspicions were well placed. Canadian military trainers gathered information on the operations of guerrilla movement Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) based in Tanzania, which waged war to liberate Mozambique from Portuguese rule. Canadian trainers also spied for the US, notes Godefroy. “The CAFATTT dispatched valuable messages on the MIG issue [the possibility of Tanzania acquiring Russian fighter planes] to Ottawa on a daily basis, allowing the decision-makers in Ottawa to keep Washington well-informed of the situation on the ground.”20
In the first years after independence, Canadian aid was largely focused on former British African colonies, but the growth of Québec nationalism soon changed that. Partly to weaken the sovereignty movement in Québec, Ottawa began an aid program to French Africa. In a January 1962 memo, long time External Affairs official Marcel Cadieux wrote: “[Quebeckers] are going through a period of intense nationalism. In their present mood they are critical of the degree of influence that they have in national affairs and in particular in the field of external affairs. If a scheme of aid for African states should be developed in such a fashion as to provide an outlet to the French-Canadian interests in French-language states, the results in terms of national unity might be quite substantial ... due to the fact that there is little prospect that French-Canadian aspirations are likely to be satisfied as quickly and as easily in other fields of interest to them; e.g. a national flag, repatriation of the constitution, bilingual checks, the status of French in other provinces, etc.”21
Cadieux’s argument that channelling foreign aid to “French” Africa was a politically expedient means of demonstrating concern for Quebecker’s aspirations convinced Ottawa decision-makers. Between 1964 and 1971 Canadian aid to Francophone African countries increased more than 200 fold from $300,000 to $64 million annually.22
As the second biggest contributor to l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Ottawa ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into its various French language cultural and educational institutions. Between 1970 and 1983 Canada provided as much as a third of the budget for the institutions of the Francophonie, including the Council of African Higher Education, the Agency of Cultural and Technical Cooperation and the Association of Francophone Universities.23
Expanding aid to la Francophonie was designed to convince Quebeckers that Ottawa was sympathetic to francophone culture. It was intended, notes Canadian Development Assistance to Senegal, as “an outward looking expression of the bilingual character of Canada.”24
Even more so than the English had done, the French used language as a tool of colonial control in Africa. Schooling, for instance, was almost entirely in French, which stunted the written development of local languages as well as the rise of a common African language. It also oriented the intellectual milieu towards the colonial metropole. In Decolonizing the Mind Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues “the domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.”25
After independence, the place of French in society was politically fraught. According to Patrick Manning in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1995, “French was written in the city on street signs, posters, newspapers and government documents. French was the language of the national anthem. French was used in vertical relationships among people of uneven rank; people of equal rank tend to speak African languages among themselves.”26
At the same time as some newly independent countries attempted to promote indigenous languages, Ottawa spent heavily to link Québec with “French” Africa. After Algeria won its independence, for instance, the government moved to Arabize the nation. Simultaneously, however, Canadian aid to Algeria was channelled through French-speaking Canadians. Efforts to strengthen “common linguistic heritage” between Québec and Algeria stunted its moves towards strengthening Arabic. Though less stark, the same dynamic played out in the Congo with the local language of Lingala, in the Central African Republic with Sango and in Senegal with Wolof.
Québec-based businesses benefited from Ottawa’s focus on French-speaking Africa. One of Québec’s leading French language proponents and former head of CIDA, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, used the aid agency to strengthen Québec-based companies. Montréal’s SNC, for instance, was hired “to manage offices on behalf of CIDA in Francophone African countries where there was no Canadian diplomatic representation.”27 In 1968, SNC’s vice president of development Jack Hahn described their plan to enter Algeria: “They might be interested in North American technology offered in French.”28
Geopolitics also influenced Canadian aid policy to “French speaking” Africa. Or as Robin Gendron put it in Canada’s Relations with France and French Africa, 1945-1968, “External aid to French Africa came to be seen as a means for the Canadian government to demonstrate its commitment to keeping communism at bay while simultaneously responding to the needs of French Canadians.”29
In the late 1960s Ottawa focused a disproportionate amount of its aid on Senegal and Niger whose leaders promoted the Paris-dominated la Francophonie and its predecessor organization, the African and Malagasy Common Organization.30 Patrick Manning notes that the African and Malagasy Common Organization was developed partly “to oppose radical, socialist and pan-African visions of African politics, which were personified by such Anglophone leaders as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.”31 In a bid to isolate Nkrumah, for instance, the African and Malagasy Common Organization countries all refused to attend a major 1965 Organization of African Unity conference held in Accra, Ghana.32
Once countries won their independence Ottawa began to deliver aid as a way to maintain its influence on the continent. Canadian officials were particularly concerned about blunting radical decolonization.
How far Canada was prepared to go to do so is revealed by this country’s role in killing Patrice Lumumba.