Biden, in Africa, decries history of slavery and urges partnership

LUANDA, Angola - President Joe Biden on Tuesday used his only presidential trip to Africa to pay tribute to the tragic history of the enslaved person trade, urging the United States and Africa to expand a relationship built on investment and equality without losing sight of a past often marked by cruelty and enslavement.

The centerpiece of Biden’s visit is the Lobito Corridor, an 800-mile trans-African railway project funded in part by the United States to move vital minerals from the continent’s interior to a port where it can be shipped to Western markets. Biden on Wednesday will travel to the railway’s terminus at Lobito Port, on Angola’s central Atlantic coast.

But the heart of the president’s appearance was his passionate speech at Angola’s National Museum of Slavery, where he recounted the “unimaginable cruelty” of the enslaved person trade and America’s brutal history of slavery. He also spoke of the U.S. Civil War, the fight against segregation and the “still unfinished reckoning with racial injustice in my country today.”

Biden spoke Tuesday to an audience of Angolan ministers, politicians, activists and business leaders. With his back to the Atlantic Ocean at a spot where enslaved people were loaded onto ships, he introduced three Americans who are direct descendants.

The president argued that it is important to know America’s full history - an apparent rebuke to Republican efforts to reshape the teaching of Black history in American schools. “While history can be hidden, it cannot and should not be erased,” Biden said. “It should be faced.”

The emotional comments formed the backdrop for Biden’s emphasis on investment in Africa, which have taken on a new urgency as mineralssuch as copper and cobalt become central to the high-tech economy and America is increasingly embroiled in an economic and geopolitical battle with China.

“We know Africans want more than aid. They want investment,” Biden said. “The question is not, ‘What can the United States do for Africa?’ It’s ‘What can we do together?’”

Still, Africa has hardly been a top priority of Biden’s, as he has seen his foreign policy overtaken by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Biden will soon have to step aside for President-elect Donald Trump, who has questioned long-standing U.S. alliances and trade deals, leading some to worry that American support for the Lobito Corridor and other projects could drop when he takes office.

John Kirby, Biden’s national security spokesman, told reporters the administration hopes Trump’s team recognizes that the Lobito Corridor “will help drive a more secure, more prosperous, more economically stable continent.”

Biden’s aides argue that he has been a strong supporter of Africa. He has urged African representation on the U.N. Security Council, convened an African leaders summit in Washington in 2022, hosted a state dinner for Kenyan President William Ruto and overseen billions in aid for the continent.

On Tuesday, Biden announced more than $1 billion in U.S. aid for Africans displaced by drought and food insecurity.

Still, China, which has built or funded numerous project in Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative, has enjoyed a tremendous head start.

Angola, for example, is Africa’s largest recipient of Chinese loans, as Beijing has made more than $42 billion in loan commitments to the country over the last 20 years. Luanda owes Chinese creditors nearly 40% of its external debt, much of it secured by Angola’s oil reserves, leaving Angola highly vulnerable to fluctuations in oil prices.

The Biden administration, along with lawmakers in both parties, has noted an opening in Africans’ growing anger at such terms.

In Uganda, some members of parliament have said the finance minister should be jailed after AidData, a research lab at William & Mary University in Virginia, published documents showing that China had stipulated that revenue from Uganda’s main international airport be used to repay its loan on a priority basis for 20 years.

Kenya is struggling to repay its loans from China that financed an underused railway, forcing the government to propose such heavy tax hikes that protesters stormed parliament, setting off months of deadly protests. Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo - key players in the extraction of minerals and in the Lobito Corridor rail project - are also burdened with billions of dollars in Chinese debt.

Against this backdrop, Angola, which owes Chinese lenders about $17 billion, has emerged as a critical partner for the United States in Africa.

The Lobito Corridor railway is designed to ensure that copper, manganese and cobalt from mines in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are vital for electric vehicles and renewable energy, can travel easily and cheaply to Africa’s Atlantic coast for shipping to America.

The Congolese mining companies that dominate the extraction work rely on smoke-belching trucks, which often get tied up in miles-long congestion.

“A shipment that used to take 45 days will now take 45 hours,” Biden said Tuesday, calling the roughly $3 billion U.S. expenditure on the Lobito Corridor “the right way to invest.”

The railway, built during Portugal’s colonial rule of Angola and refurbished by the Chinese several years ago - to unsatisfactory results - already moves some minerals and other commodities to the Lobito Port. Officials have provided no timetable for when they think the redevelopment will be complete.

Thousands of land mines left over from Angola’s civil war will need to be cleared to make way for business along the rail line, and miles of physical railroad will have to be laid anew, or refurbished, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Zambia. Political disputes over those plans have already emerged.

The capital that Biden drove through Tuesday, amid an unrelenting downpour that quickly flooded the streets, was itself a picture of the country’s ongoing economic growth, coupled with the vast poverty experienced by most of its citizens. Gleaming high-rises dot downtown Luanda, but the city’s well-maintained buildings belong almost exclusively to wealthy companies, private banks, gated communities and expensive hotels.

Interspersed among them are decaying apartment buildings, houses and shops, their corrugated metal roofs held in place by bricks.

As Biden prepared to deliver his address at the slavery museum, muddy, trash-filled rivers born of the storm gushed downhill along potholed streets, flooding shantytowns where residents stood about in the rain. At the speech site itself, museum staffers and U.S. officials rushed to clear away floodwater before the president spoke.

Earlier Tuesday, Biden met with Angolan President João Lourenço at the presidential palace, where the two leaders discussed expanded trade between the two counties, with Biden focusing heavily on the Lobito Corridor, White House officials said.

“We don’t think it’s a bad thing to have Chinese investment in Africa,” a senior administration official told reporters last week, speaking on condition of anonymity under terms set by the White House.

But, if after years of investment, that effort has not lifted up “the lives of the communities, if it means that the government is going to be living under crushing debt for generations to come,” then African governments are going to have to decide “whether that’s the alternative they want,” the official said.

The election of Lourenço a few years ago was a turning point in the U.S.-Angola relationship, U.S. officials say. A former defense minister, he replaced the notoriously corrupt José Eduardo dos Santos, whose family embezzled much of the country’s oil wealth during his 38-year rule.

Angola is still wrestling with that legacy, some of its political leaders say.

“The government took the money, but doesn’t invest for the people,” said Olívio Nkilumbo, a parliamentarian with the opposition UNITA party, referring to Lourenço’s predecessor.

Biden’s address to the country was welcomed by the ruling party, Nkilumbo said, but ordinary Angolans continue to live in extreme poverty, with high unemployment and “without food, without water.”

White House officials say Lourenço has taken steps to clamp down on corruption and has expressed an affinity for the United States, where he and his family have spent time.

The Biden administration has advanced several U.S.-Angola initiatives during his presidency, including technical support from the U.S. Treasury Department to help Angola manage its debt. The administration has also helped to close 12 business deals and investments in Angola with a combined value of $6.9 billion, the White House says.

The United States in recent years has also increased its flow of security assistance to Angola, a still-fragile democracy, spending nearly $17 million since 2020 on training and other assistance to the Angolan military.

While this is Biden’s first trip to Africa, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the continent in March 2023, stopping in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. During that trip, she sometimes became emotional as she referred to her Black and Indian heritage background in a way she rarely did at other times during her tenure.

Biden in his own way has also taken pride in his relationship with the Black community. He often notes that he served as vice president to the first Black president, and that he selected Harris as the first woman of color to be vice president.

On Tuesday, Biden said the world could learn from the U.S.-Angola relationship.

“Two nations with a shared history in the evil of human bondage,” Biden said. “Two nations on opposite sides of the Cold War, the defining struggle of the late part (of the) 20th century. And now, two nations standing shoulder-to-shoulder working together every day for the mutual benefit of our people.”