Just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was celebrating its 75th anniversary in Washington D.C. in the presence of 37 heads of state or government, under the noise of boots in Ukraine, a conference was opening in Dakhla, Morocco: ‘Vision of a King, Atlantic Africa, for an inclusive, integrated and prosperous region’ stated Le Matin media group.  The tone was less security-conscious than in Washington, and clearly pointed to the African Atlantic, which is too often neglected on the diplomatic agenda, despite the huge stakes involved. 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 ‘sister countries’ in the Sahel: 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 provision of road, rail and port infrastructure should offer them new economic prospects. Of course, it will be necessary to go into the daunting detail of defining strategic priorities, integrating projects already underway such as the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project, the Great Green Wall, harmonising maritime governance mechanisms and, of course, the question of funding to support the modernisation of infrastructure.

This is why Morocco’s 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 with RFI on 23 February 2021, ‘is to reach the Atlantic’. This is the old terrorist project, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. And for good reason: The Atlantic is a strategic area for piracy where, with 4,000 ships passing through every day, there is a connection with the South American drug trafficking networks, which are 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. Therefore, we must get to the Atlantic before they do.

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Beyond geography, there is also history and its lessons. Inland Africans cannot survive without access to the Atlantic. They know the price of the ocean. As witnessed by the story of El Hadj Omar’s Toucouleur Empire and Samori’s Wassoulou Empire. The two African heroes of the 19th century, faced with the inescapable advance of the European colonial conquest, did everything in their power to ‘capture, before it was too late, the political initiative and keep it in African hands’, in the words of the historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo in his General History of Africa (Hatier, 1972). Suffocating, they tried desperately 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 today’s Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania and Mali, and whose ambition was to free 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 the current territories of Guinea, Mali and the north of Côte d’Ivoire, he hastened his defeat. Alone against the French from 1880 onwards, Samori, despite his tenacity, illustrated by the battle of Woyo-Wayankô on 2 April 1882, was hunted down as he continued to head towards the coast until he was captured on 29 September 1898 by Commander Gouraud and finally exiled to Gabon.

The failure of these heroes paved the way for colonisation. 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 United States), other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (including the United Kingdom 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 via 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 an area with an Atlantic civilisation, as NATO has come to be, whose member countries are united by a sense of military solidarity, there is a world of difference. Yet this is the challenge facing the countries of the African Atlantic.

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Today, as in yesterday around the Atlantic, the issues at stake are as much threats as opportunities. Maritime legitimacy remains an assertion of power, as shown by the violence of the areas 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 waged 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 area that cannot escape militarisation by states wishing to extend their sovereignty over it.

For a country like Senegal, illegal fishing practices that deplete fish stocks are the main challenge. Dealing with 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 penalise 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 total deep-sea catches are far from China’s waters – valued at over 5 billion dollars”.

Independent zones, considered as a ‘common good’, are also the focus of a new mobilisation to safeguard biodiversity. After two decades of negotiations, the ‘historic’ agreement on the protection of marine biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction was adopted on 19 June 2023 by the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity.

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 25 July would henceforth be ‘Africa Day of Seas and Oceans’.  The issues 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 transforming 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 18 September 2023 at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.  Almost 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. The Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation must not, however, be a mere instrument of rivalry between the great powers.  It can support the African states that are working to maximise port cooperation, the deployment of intelligent ports and tourism levers, at a time when the continent is launching the world’s largest free trade area. 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 coast of Senegal, the Atlantic and its beautiful coastline were first and foremost playgrounds for the carefree children that we were, a market for our mothers who came to stock up on fish, and 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 epicentre of a slave trade that dehumanised Africa for five centuries. If we are to build a community, the Atlantic must become an area of cooperation in remembrance, with the diaspora from Brazil to the Caribbean at the forefront, and why not between coastal museums bearing this memory, from the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar to the new International Afro-American Museum in Charleston (USA), to the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes (France).

As the international community celebrates, tomorrow, 25 July, the ‘Africa Day of Seas and Oceans’, everything, from history to geography, points to the centrality of the Atlantic.

By Rama YADE

Senior Director, Africa Center

Atlantic Council

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE