History
John F Kennedy: When the US President met Africa's Independence Heroes By NII NTREH | Associate Editor
Anoth minis 1961 JFK PRESIDENTAL LIBRARY
President John F Kennedy met Ghana's first President and leading pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah at the White House in March 1961
In our series of letters from African journalists, Sierra Leonean-Gambian writer Ade Daramy mines an archive of photos featuring US President John F Kennedy, who set the template for US relations with Africa. BEFORE KENNEDY BECAME PRESIDENT in 1961, his country had made little attempt to understand the rapid changes that Africa was undergoing. By the time he was assassinated in 1963 the picture had radically changed. In his short time in office, Kennedy had received at the White House either the leader of every independent African state - numbering more than two dozen at the time - or its ambassador. A year before he became president, 17 African countries had gained independence from their colonial masters, and aware that the world was
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Senegal's President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a key figure in the anti-colonial movement in Francophone countries, flew into Washington in November 1961
changing, Kennedy knew that a new relationship needed to be forged. That relationship was based on supporting the new African nations. It was a foreign policy outlook that essentially survived, given the occasional tweak, until President Donald Trump's efforts to replace it with his more transactional approach. It was reported that Mr Trump infamously used derogatory language when talking about the continent, and Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight D Eisenhower, had his own negative views. He told Togo's President, Sylvanus Olympio, that the reason the US shared one ambassador between Togo and Cameroon was because he did not want his diplomats to "have to live in tents". During the 1960 election campaign, Kennedy repeatedly criticised Eisenhower's administration for neglecting the needs and aspirations of the DAWN
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