The challenge of addressing the Congo as nation-state: American approaches to sub-Saharan Africa policy, 1957--1961

The United States began to formulate its first Sub-Saharan Africa policy during President Eisenhower's second term in office from 1957–1961. Various forces impacted the policy debate and subsequent choices by key policymakers. There were a number of international and domestic, private sector and governmental, directives for U.S. Africa policy. The Eisenhower administration, in some cases, heeded and, in other cases, rejected these various recommendations. Specific examination of U.S.-Congo policy provides a crucial case study because the Congolese timeline of independence, ethnically diverse composition, and the challenges Congo faced as it emerged as a nation-state were significant to the west and to other Africans awaiting independence. Sub-Saharan Africa policy under Eisenhower was not simply an extension of a broader Cold War policy; it did indeed reveal, specifically in the case of U.S.-Congo policy, a more sophisticated approach to the developing world in the unprecedented climate of decolonization.;President John F. Kennedy is often popularly credited with this new American approach to Africa policy; however, careful examination of the many forces involved in the foreign policy making process, reveals that a new approach to Africa was in fact under construction throughout all of Eisenhower's second term in office. Many of the recommendations made to President Eisenhower were impactful in shifting language of four official NSC policy statements from 1957 to 1960.;As the first U.S. Africa policy took shape under Eisenhower, this policy sometimes responded to and sometimes ignored pressures from the United Nations, Belgium, the Congo, Ghana, the United States Congress, the domestic press, domestic lobby groups, Africanist scholars and internal voices, from within the administration and the Executive bureaucracy, specifically those of the Department of State's Africa Bureau. The executive policymaking machine of the Eisenhower administration was able to acknowledge that Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the Congo, was relevant beyond the scope of the Cold War. During Eisenhower's second term, American approaches to Africa policy indisputably shifted, in some cases quite dramatically. American leaders and policymakers began to conceive of the vastness of Africa, its regional distinctiveness, and perhaps most importantly, to conceive of the need for Africans to rule themselves.