US President Joe Biden met his Angolan counterpart Joao Lourenco Tuesday at the start of a two-day visit to the African country centred on a major infrastructure project that showcases US investment on the continent, where rival China is boosting its own interests.
The two presidents were expected to discuss trade, security and investment, including on a massive project to rehabilitate a railway line that transports minerals from inland countries to the Angolan port of Lobito for export.
The government of the oil-rich country has declared Tuesday and Wednesday public holidays and deployed heavy security across the capital of around 9.5 million people.
It is the first time a US president has visited the former Portuguese colony and Biden’s only visit to Africa since he took office in 2021 apart from his attendance at a COP27 meeting in Egypt in 2022.
Biden, who hands over to Donald Trump on January 20, was due to deliver remarks later Tuesday at the National Slavery Museum, which exhibits hundreds of items used in the transatlantic trade of slaves from Africa to the Americas for centuries until the early 1800s.
Angola was by the 19th century the largest source of slaves for the Americas, according to the Office of the Historian, a US State Department-affiliated website.
Biden would acknowledge “the horrific history of slavery that has connected our two nations, but also looks forward to a future predicated on a shared vision that benefits both our peoples,” national security communications advisor John Kirby told reporters ahead of the trip.
The United States has pledged a grant of $229,000 to support the restoration and conservation of the museum, once the estate of a slave trader, a statement said.
After arriving in the Portuguese-speaking country late Monday, Biden briefly met Wanda Tucker, a descendent of the first enslaved child born in the United States whose parents were brought to colonial Virginia from Angola in 1619 aboard a Portuguese ship.
– Mineral exports –
On Wednesday, the outgoing Democrat president is to travel to Lobito, about 500 kilometres (310 miles) south of Luanda, for a summit on infrastructure investment also attended by leaders from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Zambia.
The port is at the heart of the Lobito Corridor project that has received loans from the United States, the European Union and others to rehabilitate a railway connecting mineral-rich DRC and Zambia with Lobito.
It is “a real game changer for US engagement in Africa”, said Kirby.
“It’s our fervent hope that as the new team comes in and takes a look at this, that they see the value too, that they see how it will help drive a more secure, more prosperous, more economically stable continent.”
The Lobito project is a piece in the geopolitical battle between the United States and its allies, and China, which owns mines in the DRC and Zambia among an array of investments in the region.
A similar railway project involving Chinese investment is aimed at ferrying minerals out via a Tanzanian port on the Indian Ocean.
A senior US official told journalists ahead of Biden’s trip that African governments are seeking an alternative to Chinese investment, especially when it results in “living under crushing debt for generations to come”.
Angola owes China $17 billion, about 40 percent of the nation’s total debt.
– Police accused of abuse –
Human rights organisations have urged Biden to raise Angola’s rights record.
Amnesty International said last month that Angolan police had killed at least 17 protesters between November 2020 and June 2023.
It asked Biden to demand that Angola “release five government critics arbitrarily detained for more than a year”.
“Biden should stand with the Angolan people and seek a public commitment by Angola’s president to investigate rights violations by the security forces and appropriately hold those responsible to account,” Human Rights Watch said.
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