Happy birthday Mr President from us, the Yoruba Descendants.
 
We Yoruba occupy an area of West Africa that we have occupied uninterrupted from time immemorial. We speak one language, Yoruba. We believe in one ancestral origin, Oduduwa. We have our own distinct culture, custom and tradition. Before colonisation, we lived in city states confederating into one of the largest indigenous empires on the continent of Africa. Over 50 million of us currently live in our ancestral home in West Africa and a similar number are in the Diaspora most notably in the US, Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean.
 
We seize the opportunity of your birthday to remind you of the pivotal role that the US played in the Berlin Conference of 1884/5, which led to the carve up of Africa into Towers of Babel. With pencil and paper in hand, conference participants, with depraved indifference, created for their own benefits territories in Africa that separated kin from kin, and lumped together peoples of different cultures, languages, religions, and traditions; peoples who had absolutely nothing in common. For example, they carved Yorubaland to amalgamate with strangers in 4 separate countries – Nigeria, Benin Republic, Togo and Ghana.
 
America triggered the 1884/5 Berlin conference through the activities of Henry J Stanford who then was America’s minister to Brussels.  He was keen to promote Belgian King Leopold III’s growing interests in Central Africa. Indeed, Leopold made him one of 4 executive committee members of the African International Association that Leopold had formed in 1877. Thereafter, Sandford mounted a campaign to persuade the US to recognise the Association.
 
Sandford served under 2 US presidents – Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He also had influence amongst important American businessmen and politicians. In 1878, Sandford recruited Henry Stanley, an influential NY Herald correspondent, to the Association. In 1879, Sandford recommended that Commodore Robert Schinfeldt visit the Congo. In 1881, he persuaded secretaries of state to send a consul to Central Africa. Stanford’s activities caused the US eventually to recognise the Association, and this in turn persuaded the European powers to recognise the Association.
 
The US participated in the 1884/5 Berlin Conference knowing that the objective was to define methods of annexing territories in Africa that had ‘not yet been subjected to the flags of any civilised state’. The US had also its own specific objectives that it achieved at the conference. One, definition of African territories as commercial rather than geographical entities. Two, determination that Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean was fair game. Three, recognition of European entitlement to African territories even if force was used to subjugate the Africans. Four, a solution that minimised friction amongst the competing white nations, and minimised US political involvement whilst preserving potential US economic interests in Africa.
 
The General Act of the Berlin Conference assumed the character of ‘a statute or a constitution’ for Central Africa. It had a most profound effect upon the future of Africa as a whole. For, it enabled the conference participants to divide Africa among themselves into 50 countries.  All of Africa’s ongoing travails can be traced directly to that single fateful conference. As a rule, in black Africa, a country’s political capital is spent on enforcing ‘unity’ whilst the economy is run to perpetrate ethnic hegemonies.
 
Domination, conflict, and instability are inevitable features of a multi-ethnic country. Each constituent group naturally considers its culture to be superior to the others’; an ethnocentricity that yields prejudice and discrimination. The dominant group controls power and resources to the detriment of the minority, which it exploits. There is a constant fear of loss by one group or another; this fear totally dominates the action and experience of each group. Federalism is unworkable partly because aspirations are different and partly because the least successful group distrusts and undermines the more successful group(s). It is no accident therefore that multi-ethnic countries are the least successful countries on earth.
 
Right from the outset, the peoples of Africa have rejected the boundaries emanating from the 1885 General Act of the Berlin Conference. Today, more than half of the 50 African countries have active separatist movements seeking self-determination for defined geographical entities. In each case, the peoples are indigenous to the conflict area - from Libya in the north to South Africa in the south, from Western Sahara in the west to Ethiopia in the east, and from Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Indeed, many of these self-determination seeking peoples are members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) – Ethiopia’s Ogaden and Oromia, Ghana’s Western Togoland, and Nigeria’s Biafra and Yorubaland being examples.
 
President Richard Nixon’s 1972 landmark report to Congress, ‘US Foreign Policy for the 1970’s: The Emerging Structure of Peace’, was filled with encomiums to American support for self- determination. This US policy has never really been pursued in ‘black’ Africa apparently because the US fears potential superpower conflict and unravelling of the world order. It was Henry Kissinger’s stated view in 1972 that self-determination should apply to southern Africa only, and not to ‘black’ Africa. US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama who have claimed self-determination as peculiarly American, embodied in its anticolonial heritage and democratic politics, did little more than hand wringing when it came to self-determination for ‘black’ Africa.
 
Sir, the unequivocal support of the US for self-determination for the Soviet and East European peoples and not for the ‘black’ African peoples suggests to us that the US self-determination policy relates to skin colour rather than to ideology. It is our view also that the reticence of the US is serving as impediment to other nations supporting self-determination in Africa.

We believe that the US owes ‘black’ Africa a debt for the part that you played in the 1884/5 Berlin conference. We seek the following as atonement:
1) a declaration of unequivocal support for self-determination for African peoples, as a distinct US policy,
2) confirmation that President Bush’s 1991 criteria for establishing the Soviet republics also apply to Africa,
3) confirmation that any ethnic peoples that fulfil the Bush criteria must and would be allowed their separate existence as per the United Nation and African Union Charters, and,
4) a declaration that the US will apply punitive sanctions against any political leaders that in any way obstructed peoples’ expressed desire for self-determination.