At a time when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was celebrating its 75th anniversary in Washington D.C., with 37 heads of state and government in attendance and the sound of boots on the ground in Ukraine, a conference was opening in Dakhla, Morocco: “Vision d’un Roi, l’Afrique atlantique, pour une région inclusive, intégrée et prospère” (A King’s vision of Atlantic Africa, for an inclusive, integrated and prosperous region), organized by the Le Matin media group. The tone was less security-conscious than in Washington, and clearly pointed to this African Atlantic that is too often neglected on the diplomatic agenda, even though the stakes are enormous. They were enthusiastic about His Majesty King Mohamed VI’s new initiative, unveiled in November 2023, the main thrust of which is to offer access to the Atlantic to four “brotherly” Sahelian countries: Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso. The populations of these countries, which have been hard hit by terrorism for over twenty years, are also suffering from the impact of the sanctions. The availability of road, rail and port infrastructures should offer them new economic prospects. Of course, we’ll need to get down to the nitty-gritty details, such as defining strategic priorities, integrating projects already underway like the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project, the Great Green Wall, harmonizing maritime governance mechanisms and, of course, the question of financing to support infrastructure modernization.
This is why the Moroccan Atlantic initiative is both a development plan and a peace plan.
We remember the warning from Macky Sall, former President of Senegal, who knows what it costs to protect the Senegalese border from terrorist incursions: “Their objective,” he said in an interview on Rfi on February 23, 2021, “is to reach the Atlantic.” This is the old terrorist project, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. And with good reason: the Atlantic is a strategic piracy area where, with 4,000 ships passing through every day, the connection is made with South American drug-trafficking networks, essential for enriching and equipping their troops. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see attacks on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, Togo or Côte d’Ivoire. We have to get to the Atlantic before they do.
Beyond geography, there is also history and its lessons. Inland Africans can’t get by without access to the Atlantic. They know the price of the ocean. Witness the story of El Hadj Omar’s Toucouleur Empire and Samori’s Wassoulou Empire. Faced with the inescapable advance of European colonial conquest, these two 19th-century African heroes did everything in their power to “capture political initiative before it was too late, and keep it in African hands”, in the words of historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo in his Histoire générale de l’Afrique (Hatier, 1972). Asphyxiated, they desperately sought to overcome the continental nature of their territories by opening up to the ocean. They understood that the Atlantic was their only salvation. El Hadj Omar Tall, whose empire covered part of present-day Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania and Mali, and whose ambition was to liberate the oppressed from the tutelage of the aristocracy and the slave trade, while unifying the Sudan of the time, came up against Faidherbe’s troops before failing at Matam and disappearing into the cliffs of Bandiagara in 1869.
His son and successor at the head of the empire, Ahmadou, failed for the same reasons: by refusing the alliance offered by Samori, founder of the Wassoulou Empire, another landlocked area covering part of present-day Guinea, Mali and northern Côte d’Ivoire, he precipitated his own defeat. Alone against the French from 1880 onwards, Samori, despite his tenacity, illustrated by the battle of Woyo-Wayankô on April 2, 1882, was hunted down as he made his way towards the coast, until he was captured on September 29, 1898 by Commandant Gouraud and finally exiled to Gabon.
The failure of these heroes paved the way for colonization. The strategic importance of the Atlantic as taught by history remains.
The Atlantic is still the second largest of the five oceans, after the Pacific. It covers 17% of the earth’s surface and a quarter of the world’s maritime space. More than a hundred countries on three continents border the ocean, including the world’s leading power (the USA), other permanent members of the UN Security Council (including the UK and France), and Latin American powers (such as Argentina and Brazil). On the African side, the Atlantic is home to 23 coastal nations, from Morocco to South Africa to Senegal, the westernmost tip of the African continent, all of which account for 46% of the continent’s population, 55% of its gross domestic product and 57% of its trade. The area is also rich in natural resources, including oil. From a space to an Atlantic civilization, as NATO has come to be, whose member countries are united by a sense of military solidarity, it’s a world away. Yet this is the challenge facing the countries of the African Atlantic.
Today, as in the past around the Atlantic, the stakes are as much threats as opportunities. Maritime legitimacy remains an assertion of power, as demonstrated by the violence of the zones of tension where questions of maritime sovereignty are at stake, such as between Nigeria and Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsula until 2008, between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire until 2017, between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau until 1995, or between Gabon and Equatorial Guinea over Mbanie Island. This battle for influence is fought primarily over control of exclusive maritime zones, straits, capes and canals, between states vying to exploit energy deposits. The law of the sea, derived from the 1982 Montego Bay United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is not always sufficient to shelter them, and this is a strategic space that cannot escape militarization by states wishing to extend their sovereignty.
For a country like Senegal, illegal fishing practices that deplete fish stocks are the main challenge. Resolving this issue, which is crucial for the 600,000 Senegalese who make their living from fishing, is one of President Diomaye Faye’s main commitments: to renegotiate agreements and sanction foreign trawlers, particularly Chinese and Turkish, which seek to evade regulations under the Senegalese flag. According to the Environmental Justice Foundation’s 2022 report, “China’s deep-sea fleet – by far the largest in the world – catches around 2.35 million tonnes of seafood each year – according to some estimates, around half of China’s total distant-water catch – valued at over $5 billion”.
Independent zones, considered as a “common good”, also appear to be the focus of a new mobilization to safeguard biodiversity. On June 19, 2023, after two decades of negotiations, the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity adopted the “historic” agreement on the protection of marine biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction.
Aware of these assets, African institutions have drawn up a framework for action around the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the Integrated African Strategy for Seas and Oceans to 2050 and the African Charter on Maritime Safety, Security and Development, proclaimed “2015-2025, Decade of the Seas and Oceans of Africa” and decided that July 25 would henceforth be “African Seas and Oceans Day”. This is because the stakes surrounding the blue economy are crucial in Africa, where the maritime energy transition, the port and maritime transport revolution, fishing and energy activities with numerous discoveries (notably in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana) and undersea cables are dramatically shaking up African maritime economies. The governance of the oceans is a major challenge still to be met by African states at a time when the world’s leading naval power, the United States, has just launched a new Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation on September 18, 2023, at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.
Nearly half (15) of the 32 Atlantic countries that are members of this Partnership are African at the time of its launch: Angola, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Togo. This Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation must not, however, be a mere instrument of great-power rivalry. It can support African states in their efforts to maximize port cooperation, the deployment of intelligent ports and tourism levers, at a time when the continent is launching the world’s largest free-trade zone. Politically, the African Atlantic has 20% of the votes at the UN, but without coordination between these coastal countries, the African Atlantic is a lion without teeth.
Here again, history teaches us that the Atlantic has not always been a promise.
Growing up on the Senegalese corniche, the Atlantic and its beautiful coastline were first and foremost playgrounds for the carefree children we were, a market for our mothers who came to stock up on fish, a professional space for our families born of generations of fishermen. In the background, the island of Gorée reminds us that the Atlantic swallowed up many of our people, the epicenter of a slave trade that dehumanized Africa for five centuries. To build community, the Atlantic must become a space for cooperation in remembrance, with diasporas from Brazil to the Caribbean at the forefront, and why not between coastal museums bearing this memory, from the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar to the new International Afro-American Museum in Charleston (USA), to the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes (France).
As tomorrow, July 25, the international community celebrates the “African Day of Seas and Oceans”, everything, from history to geography, recalls the centrality of the Atlantic.
By Rama YADE
Senior Director, Africa Center
Atlantic Council
Source: Le Quotidien
