The visit by President George Bush to Africa could be a welcome signal that the US has concluded that the continent's welfare - indeed, its survival in the face of war, famine, and AIDS - is a matter of strategic interest to the world's most powerful nation.
It could be, but many will take some convincing. The serious engagement by the US in the sort of Marshall Plan for Africa so passionately advocated by Bob Geldof in this paper yesterday would make anything possible. Indeed, Mr Bush's commitment of $15 billion over five years to the fight against AIDS, predominantly in Africa, is an important first step.
Why then do many not take this, and other stirring promises, as genuine earnests of good intentions? Why the unease which many of his African hosts share about the blurred line between US interests and those of Africa's starving millions?
Despite its protestations to the contrary, the US is still devoting only some 0.11 per cent of GNP to development aid - that's one third Ireland's commitment and a sixth of the UN target. And the contrast between that $11 billion a year and the $80 billion committed by the recent US Farm Bill to its farmers speaks volumes. While US cotton growers will get some $4 billion in grants, their unsubsidised counterparts in West Africa are being driven to the wall in their millions. And Mr Bush talks about fair trade.
And then there's the matter of oil. The US is currently importing 1.5m barrels a day from West Africa, about the same as it imports from Saudi Arabia. The US Department of Energy expects African oil imports to reach 770 million barrels a year, and US investment in the oil fields to exceed $10 billion a year. Some $200 billion in oil revenues is expected to flow into African government coffers over 10 years, dwarfing by far the West's puny aid efforts. That could lay the basis of Africa's salvation. But colossal economic and strategic interests are at stake which have as much to do with US hopes to negotiate the establishment of a network of military bases across Africa as do concerns about the spread of Al Qaeda's influence.
Protests greeted Mr Bush in South Africa yesterday over the invasion of Iraq, and there are fears throughout the continent at the US's heavy-handed unilateralism and that the President's rhetoric of concern masks another, less than benevolent, agenda. Mr Bush could dispel some doubts by committing US troops to a UN peacekeeping mission in war-ravaged Liberia, by leaning on the governments of Rwanda and Uganda to end their bloody involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by dismantling trade-distorting farm subsidy regimes, and by massively increasing aid.