ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at descriptions of individual and collective foreign policies or African actorness over time in order to unearth African-centred foreign policy descriptions and to sketch continuities and discontinuities in descriptions up to the present. Economic structuralism in a North-South divide left few, if any, African foreign policy choices to consider. The Cold War between East and West drew African states into dependent relationships with one or the other side, with only some, say Egypt or Tanzania, able to extract benefit from dealing with both sides by omnibalancing. Despite general weakness at home during phases of the Cold War, there seemed to be no barrier to the conduct of African foreign policy since the times “favoured the ascription to African states of a prestige in excess of their physical capabilities”. African foreign policy found global resonance with its mobilising and garnering of international and transnational support against colonial Portuguese, settler Rhodesian and apartheid South African rule.
