When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008, the news was greeted with enormous hope in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as among the small coterie of Americans who follow the region closely. This son of a Kenyan father would not only understand the continent better than his predecessors in the White House, the thinking went, but he would also treat it as a strategic priority and direct more resources its way. At the time, it didn’t seem far-fetched to predict that Obama would usher in a new era of improved U.S.-African relations. Even though President George W. Bush had substantially increased aid to Africa, anti-Americanism there had grown under his watch, the result of opposition to his unilateralist foreign policy.
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