It was early 1961, barely a year after Mali became independent, and Samir Amin had been kicking around the idea in a draughty government building that you could actually change the way countries functioned by planning and integration alone.

In his twenties, Amin was considerably younger than his peers. For several years before joining the newly formed Ministry of Economics, he had done graduate work in economics at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received his doctorate in Economics in 1957. Inspired by the startling display of Africa-Asia fealty at the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, his thesis was a dense theoretical marker for the non-aligned movement.

Short and slender, with shoulder-length black hair and piercing eyes that said much about his personality, the Egyptian-born economist had come to believe that the euphoria of African decolonisation as a progressive new era was merely a prelude to a new imperialism. For nearly a decade, he believed, Washington had been secretly planning the first battle of the new Cold War. The goal would be to recolonise economies rather than people; complex economic strategies, rather than brawn and bullets, would determine the victor.

In the summer of 1959 Amin wrote a paper that leaped out of the pages of his doctorate and became the subject of intense discussion in some of the newly independent West African countries. Having laid much of the intellectual groundwork in his thesis, he now described a world in which the aggressive colonialism of the previous era would give way to a softer, albeit more egregious, economic growth doctrine.

Britain and Europe, economically weakened by the Second World War, would seek new forms of cooperation through multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The United States, he theorised, would be strong enough to face alone the beasts in the jungle outside the capitalist camp of the West. A European-produced, twilit view of the modern world would now somehow be wedded to the sunny all-American politics of triumphal capitalism, cultural piety, and flag-waving African nationalism – all under American hegemony.

This was the new world order at the start of the 1960s, and Amin’s paper was a fighting document for pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity.

As Mali’s first democratically elected president, Modibo Keïta, searched for a compass through the new era just begun, Amin’s ideas caught his attention. The idea of uneven development between developed and decolonised countries and economic solidarity among non-aligned regions crammed into Amin’s PhD was suddenly converging with history.

As he and other economists sat in the airless silence of Mali’s Ministry of Economics in early 1961, discussing possible means of transforming Mali’s economy into one anchored principally on the wellbeing of citizens, they concluded that Mali’s economic success could not be separated from the progress of the West Africa region and African continent.

Two years later, in early 1963, Amin floated the concept he had begun to formulate, in accordance with the largely symbolic call by African leaders for a pan-African organisation (this would emerge later that year) for an ambitious economic integration strategy for the West Africa region. At its core was the monetary sovereignty of the region using the CFA franc, a colonial currency that survived independence. Within days of the proposal, France and its former West African colonies, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, backed by the United States and Britain, shot it down.

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More than three decades later, I met Amin in his Johannesburg hotel room on the hustings of a gruelling lecture tour of South Africa’s fledgling democracy. It was a wintry June evening in 1997 and South Africa had just become the fifty-third, and last, member of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) on a continent mired in economic ruin and civil wars.

Now sporting a full head of shoulder-length snow-white hair combed back, Amin was an anomalous sight, looking rumpled in shirtsleeves, baggy corduroys and all-weather shoes, his thin face, as always, clean-shaven. He was still completely absorbed by the continental mission he set out on in the 1960s, and yet part of his mind remained open to scepticism about the continent that would press on any thoughtful person. We sat in the echoing silence of his hotel room, and with a straight face he spoke reflectively, in a disarmingly direct way, about problems in Africa since independence.

“One of the reasons for Africa’s problems,” he said to me, “is that the OAU [Organisation of African Unity] failed to carry the letter and spirit of the Bandung Afro-Asian solidarity movement and present a challenge to the new international economic order pioneered by the United States.”

Since the mid-fifties, pan-African economic solidarity, he said, “had become the key mobilising platform in African liberation politics, promising to replace colonial sovereignties as the primary preoccupation of anti-colonial agitation on the continent. The shift in US foreign policy under the Eisenhower administration by this time towards a strategy of ‘liberal containment’ to neutralise radical impulses to communism in non-aligned countries was crucial to the revival of capitalism’s globalising tendencies in Africa after World War II. And it took place alongside – indeed it led to – the multiplication of new states outside the orbit of the old colonial empires.”

It was in this tense and dynamic atmosphere that all eight independent states of Africa (Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Liberia, Morocco, Ethiopia and Egypt) met in Accra, Ghana, in April 1958 to explore strengthening economic and cultural ties. Amin recalled the Accra conference sparking “a great upsurge of interest in the cause of African decolonisation and unity”. In December that year the All-African People’s Conference, at the instigation of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was attended by sixty-two African nationalist organisations to discuss plans to harmonise and coordinate strategies.

Gradually accreting out of these gatherings, for the first time, were incipient pan-African forms of organised agitation to colonialism around very real possibilities for sorting through the twin correlates of political sovereignty and economic integration. Without an organised pan-African organisation, however, the relative merits of such ideas would remain mere exhortations crafted out of a rhetoric of “identity” and typical of amorphous “movements” rather than practical codes, norms and institutions upon which a pan-African economic community could be built.

It was a situation, Amin said to me, “riven with divisions between independent African countries backing radical pan-Africanist unity and moderate-to-conservative nations America had hoped to lead, that called for swift action”. The call for a monetary union by Mali was the first economic battle by an independent African country after colonialism, and it was Amin’s idea.

More important than divisions in West Africa, as we will see, was the broader pattern of American influence to which the monetary union episode points. Largely secret until then, American designs on Africa were the dark underside of the post-colonial Cold War era, a shadow war in which the economy would be the battleground.

On 16 July 1960, John F Kennedy came to the podium of the Los Angeles Coliseum to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination as candidate for president. It was the tradition of American political oratory that the acceptance speech provides a phrase or slogan that would define the themes of the upcoming campaign and mark them with the candidate’s personal imprimatur – an indication of the thinking and marching orders that would characterise the future administration.

A strong performance on this occasion was particularly important for Kennedy. Franklin Roosevelt had ended a dozen years of Republican incumbency by demanding “a New Deal for the American People”; Harry Truman had won against the odds in 1948 by echoing that slogan in his call for a “Fair Deal”. But these venerated party cries had succeeded under a set of political and economic circumstances that no longer existed, and they symbolised a commitment to social and economic reform that Kennedy did not share. They had won “broad public acceptance during two decades of extraordinary crisis that began with the Great Depression, culminated in a World War, and ended with the beginning of the Cold War” against world communism.

Kennedy and his advisors believed that the Eisenhower administration’s conservatism had prevented it from making full and effective use of the economic power that the US government had acquired through the New Deal and post-war mobilisations around the Marshall Plan. In this default of action, the economy had failed to realise its potential and communism had been able to make significant gains in the Third World. Unless checked by a revival of American economic dynamism, he felt, these trends pointed to a weakening of America’s ability to sustain its Great Power role in the world. But to make this case against the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy would have to engage the public in an unusually sophisticated response to events, based on an appreciation of threats to peace and prosperity in the Third World that had not yet become palpable.

The signature Kennedy and his advisors settled on was “The New Frontier”. The choice seems an odd one for a candidate identified with the culture, politics, and ideological concerns of the urban centres of the eastern seaboard. Wild West metaphors “invoked traditions that seemed better suited to Eisenhower, known as a fan of pulp Westerns, and to the Republican Party”, which identified itself with the “rugged individualism” associated with the Frontier. Yet Kennedy was able to make the “New Frontier” seem an appropriate and credible way of describing the spirit of his campaign and the style of the administration that followed it.

On that first night, Kennedy asked his audience to see him as a new kind of frontiersman confronting a different sort of wilderness: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier… [But] the problems are not all solved,  and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier – the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats… For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history.”

Kennedy’s use of the catchphrase “New Frontier” tapped a vein of latent ideological power. Contrary to accepted wisdom, he was no silver-spoon idler. Bounding with energy, he saw the lands of former colonies as his for the taking. While he could not have predicted just how effective the frontier symbolism would be, he certainly understood that this set of symbols was an appropriate language for explaining and justifying the use of political and economic power.

The exchange of an old, domestic, agrarian frontier for a new frontier of global economic power and expansion was justification for action on the new stage of historical conflict. Its central purpose was to summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the “long twilight struggle” against communism and for American capitalism.

By the time Kennedy eventually entered office, his administration produced a new vision of America’s role in Africa. The Eisenhower administration had prevented a serious strategic plan from ever being written, preferring hubris and military coups over the long-term strategic calculations of soft power. Now, Washington under Kennedy began to plan in earnest, essentially forcing the White House and the Pentagon to go along with liberal interventionist initiatives. 

Kennedy was going to fill the vacuum left by his predecessor who had imagined that economic expansion and democracy would occur spontaneously in Africa once the colonial powers had left. The new plans included goals for influencing African leaders, economic reform, legal reform, educational reform and, of course, cultural exchange programmes: nothing short of an overhaul of the continent from the top down, culminating in a new economic frontier orbiting America’s growing axis of global power.

But with such an undertaking, the Americans faced, and in some ways didn’t face, a paradox. In a context of decolonisation, Kennedy set out to wrest control of African economies from their former colonies in a way that would allow Africans to govern themselves. But if the agenda were to secure America’s strategic economic interest, how would all the plans ever lead to self-determination in Africa? DM