2 Aug 07 testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations on Africa Command: Opportunity for Enhanced Engagement or the Militarization of U.S.-Africa Relations?:

Theresa Whelan, Dpty Asst Secretary of Defense for African Affairs
...there are fears that AFRICOM represents a militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Africa and that AFRICOM will somehow become the lead U.S. Government interlocutor with Africa. This fear is unfounded. AFRICOM will support, not shape, U.S. foreign policy on the continent. The Secretary of State will remain the chief foreign policy advisor to the President, and the Secretary of Defense will remain his chief advisor on defense and security matters. The creation of a single U.S. DoD point of contact for Africa will simply allow DoD to better coordinate its own efforts, in support of State Department leadership, to better build security capacity in Africa. The intent is not for DoD generally, or for AFRICOM at the operational-level, to assume the lead in areas where State and/or USAID has clear lines of authority as well as the comparative advantages to lead. DoD will seek to provide support, as appropriate and as necessary, to help the broader U.S. Government national security goals and objectives succeed....
Kurt Shillinger, South African Institute of International Affairs
....For more than 50 years, Western developmental assistance to Africa was hampered by insecurity. The end of the Cold War and apartheid in South Africa laid the necessary pre-conditions for Africans to set their own integrated security and development agenda. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, meanwhile, precipitated a hard re-examination of international security assumptions in the West. What should emerge from these trends is engagement with Africa based on a convergence of interests. Africom essentially represents a re-packaging of current US military partnership initiatives with Africa under a coherent organisational structure. The skepticism it has raised among African states and societies indicates the need for Washington to reassure its prospective African partners that Africom acknowledges the lead role of Africans themselves in determining their own security, development and governance priorities. In the African context, this means at least a great an emphasis on poverty alleviation as it does on military professionalsim. US security assurances in Africa must therefore depend on quiet, sustained support for Africa’s own prescribed agenda for renewal.
Wafula Okumu, South Africa Institute for Security Studies
...The hostility that it has faced so far points to the fact that Africom could turn out to be an expensive endeavor, both in terms of resources and long-term U.S.-Africa relations. It should not come as a surprise that Washington’s designs for Africa are now viewed with skepticism. Oil, China and terrorism are being seen to be the principal concerns of the U.S. initiative. If the coordination of a securitized development policy for Africa is part of the U.S. strategy, then it is seen by many local observers as essentially secondary and subordinate to the main aim....
J. Peter Pham, James Madison University
...In the end, I know of no other factor which may have as much influence on how AFRICOM is initially received as the decision concerning its basing. The selection of the site will have both positive and negative impacts on the new command’s strategic effect and will, in turn, dictate AFRICOM’s ability to influence and support the various elements of American national power in helping build a secure, stable, and prosperous African continent.

Given the larger perspective of the history of colonialism and its still deleterious consequences, including those having to do with perceptions, as well as the practical question of infrastructure and security, I would counsel the basing of the command headquarters in the United States, with a forward, mobile headquarters deployed as needed. This option would afford maximum operational flexibility, while avoiding the negative consequences of opening ourselves to accusations of neo-colonialism and militarization. In this scenario, sub-components may, of course, be based on the continent in support of African initiatives, for example, a training mission working in partnership with the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre in Accra might well indeed be based in Ghana....