President Bill Clinton’s 1998 visit to Africa, while taken by some as a distraction from domestic scandals, marked a potential breakthrough in American relations with Africa.

The US, without the colonial entanglements of Europe (except for Liberian resettlement schemes) had subsequently become involved in Africa through missionary work there by both whites and blacks.

After the Second World War, foreign aid and development projects, including the Peace Corps, increased US presence, as did political intervention, from boycotts of the apartheid regime in South Africa to disputes with individual regimes. This rarely involved the military exercise of Somalia or the bombing of Sudan, although Africa was a constant market for US arms, as well as a site for CIA activity motivated by imagined Cold War exigencies (as in the 1965 assassination of the Congo leader, Patrice LeMumba, followed by support for Mobutu).

Yet all this intervention has often been based on a continuing sense of distance tinged with super-iority, even if African and Afrocentric studies, from ethnography to politics, have begun to bring home the rich history and cultures of a continent. Hence, while Bosnia received daily media attention, the horrors of Rwanda or Sierra Leone evoked no active intervention or adoption of refugees. These relations with Africa are complicated by millions of descendants of those torn from Africa by slavery, for whom the continent may be a distant albeit unfamiliar homeland. W.E.B. Du Bois chose to end his distinguished life in Ghana, and Afrocentric scholarships and cultural revivals have made often-generalized clothing and food more mainstream. African music has probably been the area of deepest crossover. Other African Americans have found that profound cultural, religious and social gaps make Africa a deeply unfamiliar place, in which they are outsiders or even considered “white.” Modern African migration to the US has been extremely small, with sub-Saharan immigrants accounting for only 2 percent of all immigrants in 1985, long after the watershed of immigration reforms. These were often students and professionals, a “brain drain” from African nations, as well as intellectual and political exiles like Wole Soyinka.

Illegal immigrants have become associated in the 1990s with peddling and ethnic resources. The documentary In and Out of Africa (1995) reveals the dialectic of African and American goals and attitudes in the arts trade, while the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City, NY underscored the racial settings into which African migrants fit.