Berman Edward H. (1980) “The Foundations’ role in American foreign policy: the case of Africa, post 1945” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cu

Berman Edward H. (1980) “The Foundations’ role in American foreign policy: the case of Africa, post 1945” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: the Foundations at Home and Abroad Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. pages 203-232.

Anti-communism and the Cold War – how to protect Western interests? Engage in an expansionist policy establishment that saw co-opting of potential adversaries as a first order response.

p. 204: “Since 1945, the trustees and officials of the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations have shared with Washington policymakers and corporate and financial leaders the belief that the future of the American economic and political system required a strong American presence in the nations of the developing world . . . Indeed, the boards of trustees of the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations represent, according to Nielsen, a “microcosm of what has variously been called the Establishment, the power elite, or the American ruling class”.”

Profiles are offered of major Foundation officials – John J. McCloy (one-time Chairman of the Board of Ford Foundation – former Asst. Sec. of War); Robert McNamara (one-time trustee of Ford Foundation, and former Sec. of Defense); Stephen Bechtel (one-time trustee of Ford Foundation, founder of Bechtel Corporation, one of the world’s largest building and defense contractors).

Not only do foundations not pursue policies inimical to government, financial and corporate interests, they actively pursue policies that will support those interests. There is no neutrality here –this isn’t rocket science.

p. 207: “The almost pathological fear that the national leaders in the developing nations would deny American access to sources of raw materials led the United States government to appraise national leaders in terms of their favorable disposition toward the American free enterprise system and the concomitant American access to raw materials. While on the one hand American democracy demanded lip service to the ideals of national independence and territorial integrity in the developing nations, the dominant thinking of the period, as Kolko succinctly concludes, held that “ . . . the future of American economic power [was] too deeply involved for this nation to permit the rest of the world to take its own political and revolutionary course in a manner that imperil[ed] the American freedom to use them.” Appropriate measures, consequently, had to be taken to assure American access to resources deemed important to the United States.”

Foundation focus in Africa, from mid-1950s onward, as independence movements picked up steam, and realization that the more overt forms of political colonialism would be ending:
(1) creation of lead universities located in areas considered of geo-strategic and/or economic importance to the United States;
(2) emphasis within these institutions on social science research and related manpower planning programs;
(3) programs to train public administrators;
(4) teaching training and curriculum development projects;
(5) training programs which shuttled African nationals to select universities in the United States for advanced training and returned them home to assume positions of leadership within local universities, teacher training institutions, or ministries of education.

1951 - Fund for the Advancement of Education founded with the support of the Ford Foundation. By 1957, it had given up to $40 million in grants, domestic and international. Black education, advanced education for strong secondary students, etc. were program foci. But work in Africa was also supported, though Berman is non-specific about this.

Rational management of social change in the Third World – Rockefeller and Ford foundations’ explicit pursuit in regards to their support of education programs in Africa.

Late 1950s – Carnegie supports the Ashby Commission study of educational needs in Nigeria. Manpower projection is a significant piece of the report – focus on utilitarian education to meet these projected manpower needs is what grew out of the report. Frederick Harbison (Princeton University economist) wrote the manpower assessment, projections, and schema – the last of which would continue to be used centrally in Nigerian government planning up to 1980 (when the Arnove book was published)

p. 212: “It hardly need be emphasized that African national leaders who subscribed to this viewpoint were more likely to be bound to the development perspectives and the political and economic institutions of the United States than were those who did not so subscribe.”

Value free development – pervaded by views of stability and efficiency such that they were hardly value-free at all. (p. 212). Perhaps it is change that is natural, not stability. Perhaps it was exactly the programs of Ford Foundation, etc. that were pathologically un-natural.

Intellectual colonialism – per Farrell – page 212 – the presumptions underlying Ford Foundation “value-free development’ policies in Africa.

Rockefeller Foundation efforts are painted as trying not at all to define away their ideology – they four-square presented their efforts as designed to support the corporate-capitalist development model.

p. 213: “The foundations heavy reliance on “value free” social science research techniques, and the topics that interested them, precluded the examination of the fundamental structures, workings, and norms of the societies they supported. In effect, the foundations contributed substantial sums of money to programs and approaches that promised evolutionary, elite-directed change as opposed to revolutionary, mass-directed change.”

Sections on programs in public administration (focus on Congo and the National School of Law and Administration) and teacher training efforts follow – little seemed applicable from these sections, so leap forward to pages on training of Africans at American universities – from page 218.

Three institutions – Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago) trained a significant portion of the Africans supported by Ford Foundation. For Rockefeller Foundation – those supported in the study of economics went largely to one of the following; Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, Chicago. For education, most Rockefeller funded students went to Columbia University Teachers College.

Yes, the students and trainees in these programs learned a lot, but they were also trained in specific methodologies, while other methodologies were left out. They were trained to see efficiency and controlled growth arising out of existing economic structures, for example, as prime characteristics of an ordered, developed society, whereas difference and change were seen as inefficient to the point of pathology, and thus denigrated.

Africa Liaison Committee – academics, scholars and intellectuals who were deemed knowledgeable about Africa, and who then were tapped to advise foundations and government on African affairs.

African Studies Association – owes existence to support from Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation.

Paraphrase of the words of Ford Foundation President, Heald, in the 1950s, when it was determined that the CIA had tried to get its operatives Ford Foundation grants to study and conduct research in Africa: “. . . it is much more in the national interest that we train a bunch of people who at later stages might want to go with the CIA . . . than it was for them to have one guy that they could call their source of information.”

1957 – Carnegie Corporation funds the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations – to educated influential Americans on international affairs of interest to the US.

Page 223: the African-American Institute (AAI) is mentioned – “The institute had been heavily funded by the CIA during the 1950s. In 1961, the recently appointed president of the AAI, Waldemar Nielsen, persuaded its board of directors to break with the intelligence agency. It was important to the foundation community to secure a more respectable base of funding for the AAI. The institute had served as a major clearing house for African students coming to the United States [and would obviously continue to do so through the life of the AFGRAD and ATLAS programs, as well as SATP]; and the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were closely identified with the institute through board memberships and program subsidies. Without undue delay representatives of the corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund agreed to underwrite the budget of the African-American Institute. They were subsequently joined in this effort by the Agency for International Development and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.”

pp. 224-225: “Although the federated University of East Africa concept eventually foundered because of political problems among the three territories, the role played by the foundations in forging an outlook sympathetic to American interests at the independent institutions was significant. Carnegie’s main emphasis was in the field of teacher education; Rockefeller’s o the biological and social sciences; and Ford’s in the social sciences and public administration. The leverage afforded the foundations by virtue of their areas of concentration and funding patterns is suggested by Thompson’s comment, cited above, that approximately 80 percent of the upper-level administrative and professorial personnel at the University of East Africa had been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation for part or all of their professional training.”

p. 226; “There is at present increasing concern among Africans that the priorities encouraged by the outside donor agencies have had a negative impact on African cultures as well as on the long-range prospects for meaningful development. Mazrui, among others, recognized that “African universities were capable of being at once mechanisms for political liberation and agencies of cultural dependency.” This is so because “university graduates in Africa, precisely because they were the most deeply Westernized Africans, were the most culturally dependent.” While the African university has indeed produced trained manpower to forward the development effort – albeit along lines acceptable to and articulated by Western interests – at the same time it has helped to expand markets available to Western corporations by altering the consumption patterns of the African student.”

Mazrui quote above comes from The African university as a Multinational Corporation, Harvard Educational Review, v. 45. page 194 May 1975.