Cristina Nambendi receives training on farming techniques from an American-funded program in Angola. But when asked if she had ever heard of President Biden or knew much about the United States, she looked stumped.
When asked about China, however, her eyes lit up.
“What I hear and what I see is that they are building tall buildings and houses, and they are selling stuff,” said Ms. Nambendi, 47, who has been farming corn and beans for more than two decades in this southern African nation.
Mr. Biden visits Angola on Monday in his only trip to Africa as president and what is scheduled to be his last foreign trip in office. He will be there to promote the Lobito Corridor, an 800-mile railway project funded in part by the United States that is meant to be his signature initiative on the continent and an answer to China’s outsize influence across many African nations.
United States officials say the corridor will encourage private investment in Angola and provide the West with better access to minerals necessary for electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies. Yet China has already spent decades funding projects in the country and around the continent, leaving some to wonder whether America can compete with its rival.
Beijing has built ostentatious shopping malls and roads with Chinese logos and signs. Angolans say the Chinese have made life easier and created jobs. Rather than funding such development projects, the United States has sought to create conditions that will attract private investment, though there’s no telling how long that will take or when Angolans might see the benefits. Some are skeptical those benefits will come at all.
“What is real is real,” said Edu Xiong, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Luanda, the capital. “To speak loudly is easy, but to make it real is another thing. Some people are talking about this corridor. ‘We will hire a lot of people.’ But we have not seen that.”
Angola is the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. When it emerged from a devastating civil war in 2002, the government knocked on the doors of wealthy nations to ask for help rebuilding. America said no. China said yes. Angolans remember that.
Thus far, America’s only significant economic investment in the country has been in its oil and gas industries. Those who are critical of the corridor say oil and gas remain America’s true interest.
The election of Donald J. Trump has deepened uncertainty about how the United States will engage here, and there is no shortage of skepticism about what America is really after.
“Sometimes they say, ‘We do care about agriculture as well,’” Beto Pinheiro, a 48-year-old farmer in the coastal city of Benguela, said of American officials. “But at the end of the day, it’s only petrol and minerals.”
Despite the skepticism among Angolans, the country’s president, João Lourenço, has bullishly pivoted toward the United States in recent years, in some cases spurning traditional allies like China and Russia to do so.
Since Mr. Lourenço took office in 2017, he has met with Mr. Biden twice. Rather than selecting a Chinese company to oversee the Lobito railway, his government chose a consortium of European companies, even though it was China that rebuilt the century-old rail line after the Angolan civil war. Mr. Lourenço has also turned to the United States to help modernize his country’s aging military, which has historically been aligned with Russia.
Many Angolans still harbor resentment toward the United States for not supporting its fight against Portuguese colonizers. The United States also supported the opponents of Angola’s largest anticolonial movement, which had embraced communism, during the civil war that came after independence in 1975.
Mr. Lourenço, in an interview, said Angola should be more like Japan or Vietnam, countries that were once at war with the United States but had moved on and now welcomed American investment.
“Angola also could be one more of those countries that have turned the page,” he said. “We joined the market economy, and today there is no country in the world that has joined the market economy without having good relations with the U.S.”
Critics have argued that the Lobito Corridor is another example of foreign powers stripping African nations of their resources. The line runs from Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to the port city of Lobito, on the Atlantic Ocean. From there, minerals can be more easily shipped to the United States, Europe and other countries.
China is far ahead of the United States in its access to critical minerals in Africa. But the corridor could reduce that advantage, which may appeal to Mr. Trump, said J. Peter Pham, an Africa policy expert who worked in the first Trump administration.
“It’s in no one’s interest that any one country lock up the supply chain,” Mr. Pham said. “If you want to make America great again and rebuild the industrial base, you’re not going to do that without critical minerals.”
Mr. Biden has pitched the corridor as a catalyst that will help Angola diversify its economy. It will entice manufacturers to build factories along the railway because they can use it to ship goods, U.S. officials say. And it won’t bury the country in debt. (Since 2002, Angola has accumulated more than $42 billion in Chinese debt, more than any other African nation.)
U.S. officials say the corridor could allow small, subsistence farmers to ship their harvests overseas, rather than selling them at roadside markets as most currently do. The United States has also introduced programs that teach agricultural best practices, like the one helping Ms. Nambendi in Cubal, a village that the Lobito railway cuts through.
Women in the program said they had learned how to produce their own fertilizer and properly space seeds when planting. They were also taught to read and write so they could run a business.
Ms. Nambendi, a mother of seven, said she earned so much in her first harvest since joining the program that she was able to buy a goat, invest in her modest house constructed from mud blocks and build an outdoor, wood-burning oven to support her other business, baking bread.
These are small inroads that American officials hope will add up.
It’s important that Angolans understand these U.S.-backed initiatives are supporting them, said William Butterfield, the representative to Angola of the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the program.
“It helps us create the good will that’s necessary to do a lot of our other business,” such as trade and defense, he said.
Some Angolans are starting to take note.
Antonio Andrade, the deputy administrator for Cubal, stood on the farm where the women received their training, envisioning a future in which America’s efforts led to neat rows of crops resembling large commercial farms, factories that produce fruit juice and corn flour and slaughterhouses for cattle.
“America has a name to protect,” he said. “They don’t just go for quick profit.”
Along Via Expressa, a busy highway that cuts through Luanda, billboards with Chinese characters advertise Beijing’s presence. “Tough world, tough equipment,” read an ad for LiuGong heavy machinery. China City, a massive, open-air mall, occupies several blocks along the highway.
But with economic challenges at home, China has decreased its investment in Africa in recent years. Many African nations are also less willing to take on more Chinese debt. Private Chinese entrepreneurs are turning to industries like green energy, mining and manufacturing. Some also say they, too, could reap the benefits of the Lobito Corridor.
“This Lobito project is a very good project for Angola’s development,” said Zheng Gang, a Chinese entrepreneur who has been doing business in Angola for 18 years. “Angola’s economy grows, which means that we will have more opportunities.”
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