Capitalism in Kenya (1968)

Book Review from the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not Yet Uhuru, by Oginga Odinga. Heinman Educational Books. 35s.

The people of Kenya have had the misfortune, reserved for colonial peoples, of experiencing two sorts of capitalism. One at second hand through colonial occupation, and the other, a more modern version, exploitation by capitalists of local origin and by the economic interests of the ‘advanced' countries.

Today, control of the resources of Kenya is in the hands of large international firms and of the Kenya government. The local would-be capitalists and bureaucrats have certainly derived much benefit from independence, but the vast majority of the people of Kenya, who were at one time led to expect a post-independence egalitarian Utopia, have been disappointed.

In this autobiography we learn well how the “benefits” of capitalism were first introduced to Kenya. There is an interesting survey of early land-appropriation by the British authorities and of the break-up of the tribal system through forced wage- labour. Odinga is particularly good in his account of the Mau Mau uprising and the reasons for it. Once the rebellion presented a real threat to British authority in Kenya, and thus to British economic interests, ruthless measures were taken. All civil liberties were suppressed—an African could be arrested in the street at any time. All Kikuyu (the main tribe concerned in the rebellion) were forced either to collaborate with the authorities or to join the Mau Mau bands as a result of persecution. British capitalism wanted to hold on to Kenya so as to have an assured and cheap supply of raw materials and a market monopoly.

Today, some four-and-a-half years after independence, things have not changed much. The people of Kenya are now exploited not only by businessmen with white skins, but also by civil servants and politicians who have somehow succeeded in securing company directorships and land. Little free expression of opposition to the government is allowed. The only consolation that the people may draw is perhaps in seeing men with skin the same colour as theirs replacing white colonists at the wheels of large motor-cars manufactured in West Germany.

Odinga is allowed, probably by virtue of his popularity (he was at one time Vice-President of the republic and Kenyatta's right-hand man) to lead a tiny opposition of nine in parliament. His party is, however, allowed few extra-parliamentary ‘privileges’ such as the holding of public meetings or recruiting campaigns.

This autobiography, as well as being a good document of British colonial history, is worthwhile reading because part at least of Odinga's conclusion is acceptable. Odinga himself left high state office for the political wilderness because he saw that national independence does not in itself end servitude for the mass of the people. He also recognises the oligarchic character of the present Kenyan government. To solve these problems, however, he presents a creed which he calls “African Socialism". The use of the word “Socialism" in independent Africa is very common but worth little. It is used, for instance, by both government and opposition in Kenya. The general purpose of this is clear: to give obviously oligarchic governments a facade of popular support and concern for justice and equality.

Odinga’s “African Socialism" would take the form of “a Kenya government backed by popular enthusiasm and national mobilisation". We suggest to the people of Kenya, and indeed to the people of the world, that the only way they will solve their problems will be by overthrowing capitalism which deprives and degrades them. This can only be done, not on a national scale, but by an internationally united working class who reject all leaders and governments.

Not Yet Uhuru (freedom) is the personal and political testament of a sincere, but unfortunately misguided, political figure. It is well worth reading for the insights which it offers into the lot of the people of Kenya.

Amit Pandya

Namibia sues Germany for "forgotten genocide"

 Representatives of two indigenous groups have filed a class action suit in New York against Germany seeking reparations for an alleged genocide of their peoples by German colonial rulers over a century ago in what is now Namibia.

  The suit filed by the Ovaherero and Nama people on Thursday in New York also demands that their representatives be included in negotiations between Germany and Namibia on the issue.

  The plaintiffs said they were bringing the class action suit "on behalf of all Ovaherero and Nama worldwide, seeking reparations and compensation for the genocide" suffered at the hands of the German colonial authorities.

  They said they were also seeking a declaration of their right "to be included in any negotiation between Germany and Namibia" and that no settlements can be reached unless they are among the signatories.

  The dispute harkens back to a period in the late 19th and early 20th century when South West Africa, now known as Namibia, was a German colony.

  The suit alleges that from 1885 to 1903 about a quarter of Ovaherero and Nama lands -- thousands of square miles -- was taken without compensation by German settlers with the explicit consent of German colonial authorities.

  It also claims that German colonial authorities turned a blind eye to rapes by colonists of Ovaherero and Nama women and girls, and the use of forced labour.

  Tensions boiled over in early 1904 when the Ovaherero rose up, followed by the Nama, in an insurrection crushed by German imperial troops.

  The suit alleges that as many 100,000 Ovaherero and Nama people died in a campaign of annihilation led by German General Lothar von Trotha.

  The plaintiffs include Vekuii Rukoro, identified as the paramount chief of the Ovaherero people, David Frederick, chief and chairman of the Nama Traditional Authorities Association, and the non-profit Association of the Ovaherero Genocide in the USA, Inc.

Land As Commodity Versus The African View

Land is often discussed in economic terms. Debates on the need for land redistribution in Africa focus on whether intended beneficiaries will put the resource to maximum economic and productive use and, moreover, whether they are able to ensure the food security of the nation and realise a surplus for export.
This is mainly the case in Zimbabwe, which has faced food shortages, and is currently the debate in South Africa. Nonetheless, land remains an emotive topic in both contexts and throughout the continent.
This prompts a fundamental question: why should land be discussed only in economic terms? The answers are to be found in how colonial modernity was ushered in, as a gamut of historical experience comprising murder, genocide, destruction of existing knowledge and large scale dispossession of indigenous occupancy.
These facts about the colonial enterprise, of which land was the basis, defined and redefined African agency and reality through subjection and rejection of African personhood as Europeans strove to claim land and eliminate all that occupied it.

 

The colonial view: land as a commodity

Indeed, African personhood and “being” revolve around earth and all that walks on it, the heavens, the waters and all that live in it, the natural landscape, the atmosphere and livestock.
The colonisers brought with them a Eurocentric perception that land was a commodity to be purchased and sold. Of course the legal justification in the form of laws, particularly English common and Roman-Dutch laws, was used to legitimise the commoditisation of land.
Property is seen to be exclusive to the individual. This is the core of capitalist relations, which are embedded in colonial modernity. The history of property rights in European thought can be traced back to the 1215 Magna Carta which served to protect privileges and rights of the nobility against state interference.
In Western Europe land was of great value and defined one’s wealth status and, social, economic and class position. It is little surprise that when colonialists arrived in the colonies and stumbled across vast swathes of land, they viewed this a stroke of fortune. Land provided an opportunity for accumulation, wealth and prosperity for those who had emanated from deprived backgrounds in Europe.

 

The African view of land

But there are other dimensions which are usually neglected when the land question is discussed. To begin with: what is the African view of land? It extends beyond the merely economic, although productive use of land is fundamental.
But contemporary debates on land redistribution in Africa always privileges the production aspect. This, regrettably, is due to a lack of understanding about what land means to Africans.
Of course the economic is part of the social, the political, the spiritual, the cosmological and the philosophical.
The departure point therefore is an African perspective that enables a broader definition and understanding of land as linked to being and identity.
The belief that land stands for production of agricultural commodities destined for the market is perverted. The primacy of the market and private property which is the core of capitalist thought and logic is contrary to the African worldview. Unlike Euro-American considerations, the African views life and what it constitutes of as a totality.

Land is neither a commodity nor an individual possession. It doesn’t belong to humans but is a gift from God. Land is understood as embracing the ecological, cultural, cosmological, social and the spiritual. The juridical considerations which are ingrained in social systems result in values, norms and observances that protect natural resources, the environment and wildlife.
This is the reason for taboos and strict injunctions that forbid environmental destruction, wanton and indiscriminate cutting down of trees, defiling of sacred sites, pollution of sacred pools where water spirits that give life in lieu of water and transgressions that are said to offend the earth.
There is an interface between land, soil, earth and cosmology. These are inseparable.

Of course there is divergence between European jurisprudence and African land laws. The former views land as a private property, a commodity and the ambition to colonise nature where man rises above it and exploits it to sate his greedy impulses. African land laws debunk the idea of ownership. Instead land is a natural endowment that can neither be bought nor sold. African land tenure is not based on ownership but on use and access. Since Africans have common rights to land, communal rights override individual rights which are subsumed under the overall communal good.
Tenure rights are built through reciprocal obligations and mutuality. Land belongs to the living, the dead and the unborn, making it inalienable.
The dead are highly esteemed because they become ancestors. In African cosmology, communion with the dead facilitates meaningful prayers to God. It is the departed who guide and provide for the living.
In African cosmology there is mutuality between humans and the earth: the earth has the omnipotent power to punish transgressors. However, a particular punishment is not directed towards the offending party, it is collective and universal.

There is a need to transcend the flawed economic determinist view current in land debates that denies Africans the right to land on the premise that they would not be able to productively use the land. For Africans land is everything. Depriving one of land means robbing them of their personhood, being and identity - in other words their full humanity.

by Kenneth Tafira from here

The French Connection

The uncomfortable reality for the 154-million citizens of Francophone Africa is that five decades after independence, France still calls the economic shots. Eager to formalise its ties with its former colonies, France left behind something tangible when it vacated Africa during the wave of independence in the 1950s and 1960s: the CFA franc. Algeria, Guinea, Morocco and Tunisia exited the CFA zone shortly after independence.

In 1994 France devalued the CFA franc 50%, a hugely unpopular decision that led to a sharp increase in the cost of living and widespread unrest in Dakar, Senegal’s capital. The consequences of such a move was soaring inflation, a liquidity crisis and a dramatic rise in the cost of imports.

The CFA franc was created in 1945, ostensibly as a noble gesture to protect France’s African colonies from a devaluation of the French franc. Participating countries were required to deposit most of their foreign currency reserves with the French Treasury, which in turn dictated monetary policy and mandated when and how governments could access the money. The currency was pegged to the French franc, with France alone able to determine the exchange rate. The arrangement remains much the same 70 years later. Technically, two separate CFA francs are in circulation, each with its own central bank, in central and West Africa.

The CFA zone members must "pool together a minimum of 65% of their international reserves, corresponding to 20% of the monetary base of each central bank, into an operations account at the French Treasury". By depositing such a hefty chunk of their foreign reserves into a French-managed account, participating countries effectively lose control over their monetary policy. CFA members cannot use these funds as collateral to obtain credit because the reserves are held in the name of France. With French representatives on the boards of both CFA central banks, they are almost entirely dependent on French approval to set their own interest rates, or to control the amount of money within their economies — a basic policy tool for governments.

"The CFA franc arrangements keep the western African countries involved in the same economic shape as in colonial times. They provide raw materials to France and import all their manufactured goods. The convertibility of the CFA franc and its free transferability, combined with high interest and exchange rates, keep the franc zone countries in a state of structural deficits that render any development policies irrelevant," says Sanou Mbaye, a Senegalese development consultant and a former senior official at the African Development Bank.

Some argue that the CFA zone offers low inflation and a stable exchange rate, which in theory should encourage trade and foreign investment, says Canac.

"Unfortunately, those benefits seem to be more illusory than real. The CFA francs are overvalued and thus hinder exports while making imports cheaper (benefiting the African elite).... Although this does not necessarily prove that membership in the CFA is responsible for holding those countries back, it suggests at best that it does not help," explained Pierre Canac, an expert. "This dependence of the CFA countries ensures that France remains influential in this part of Africa. The African countries are more likely to support France, allow it to maintain a military presence, and confer some prestige to France. For France the political gains are worth the small economic costs."

Supporters of the CFA franc arrangement contend that it safeguards member countries against irresponsible governments that juggle interest rates or print money. With French backing and management, the CFA franc is unlikely to follow the Zimbabwean dollar whose value eroded after political turmoil and intense hyperinflation.

But France reaps untold economic benefits, says political analyst Gary Busch: the CFA arrangement is "the biggest Ponzi scheme you’ve ever seen". He claims the operations accounts have never been properly reckoned. In addition, these reserves have been invested in the Paris bourse with the French Treasury pocketing any profits.  Busch alleges that during the 2008-09 financial crisis, the funds in the operations accounts were pledged against the huge loans made to failing eurozone countries, such as Greece and Italy. The foreign reserves of some of the world’s poorest countries were risked to protect European states from bankruptcy.

http://www.bdlive.co.za/africa/africanperspectives/2015/03/19/frances-african-ponzi-economy

The Not So Great War

In the centenary year of the commencement of World War One much history is being remembered and re-told. Much is being ignored. A million people died in East Africa alone during the First World War. Many Africans fought in Europe, defending the interests of their colonial masters. Today, their sacrifice has been largely forgotten.

During the conflict, some 2 million people from across Africa were actively involved in the military confrontations, as soldiers or bearers, in Europe and in Africa. At the start of the war, some Africans volunteered to take part, encouraged by the prospect of a modest income. From 1915, the Europeans began conscripting thousands of African men. The French alone sent 450,000 African soldiers from their colonies in West and North Africa to fight against Germany on the frontline in Europe.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, English and French troops prepared to seize the four German colonies in Africa (German East Africa, German South-West Africa, Togoland and Cameroon). Fighting was particularly brutal in German East Africa where German General Lettow-Vorbeck adopted a guerilla strategy, drawing more and more areas into the war. More than 200,000 bearers transported weapons, ammunition and food for the troops. The myth of the "faithful Askari" (the Swahili word for 'soldier') still exists today in German history books. In reality these men had been torn from their roots and were looked down on by local populations. Back home, they were missed in the fields. Harvests suffered or were plundered and destroyed by troops passing through to ensure there would be no food left for their pursuers.

The colonial administrative area of Dodoma in what is now Tanzania lost 20 percent of its population in 1917/18 gives some indication of the deprivation and misery. Historians estimate that a million people died in East Africa as a direct result of the war. The outbreak of Spanish flu, which spread rapidly among the weakened population shortly after the war ended, accounted for a further 50,000 to 80,000 deaths. "The war changed some regions to such an extent that they needed decades to recover, if indeed they did recover," sums up Jürgen Zimmerer, history professor at Hamburg University.

One reason why the “Great War” plays little or no role in the African view of history is the fact that it is generally seen as just one episode in the long history of colonial conquests and acts of brutality inflicted on the people of Africa. During the 75 years that Belgium ruled the Congo, up to ten million people died. 

"It is just one war among many," Zimmerer says. "Colonialism was so brutal that a number as large as one million does not attract the attention that it should - or would in a European context." Europe also takes this view and generally ignores the suffering of millions of Africans in the First World War. In Zimmerer's words, the war in Africa "is generally treated as just a minor skirmish in which hardly anyone was hurt."

http://www.dw.de/africa-and-the-first-world-war/a-17573462

The Genocide Germany Forgot

"Every Herero on German territory, with or without rifles, with or without cattle, will be shot. I'm not taking in any more women and children, drive them back to their people or have them shot." - General Lothar von Trotha on October 2, 1904

Between 1884 and 1915, Germany was the colonial master in what is today Namibia. In 1904, the Herero launched a major uprising against their German colonial masters, killing more than 100 Germans. The uprising led Germany's von Trotha to order to decimation of the entire Herero population. Fortunately, he did not succeed, and today there are again 120,000 Herero and 60,000 Nama minorities in the country. The Herero people were massacred between 1904 and 1905. More than 70,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama, most of the tribal populations, were killed as an anti-colonial uprising was crushed. Christian Kopp from Berlin Postkolonial says the term genocide is appropriate "because there was a clear intent to wipe out the Herero and the Hama." Lothar von Trotha said at the time he would "wipe them out with rivers of blood."

Henning Melber, an expert on Namibia from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Stockholm. "The point about Germany in South West Africa is that it waged a war quite openly that these days would classify as genocide. It is not as if genocide was practiced in secret. In imperial Germany, events in German South West Africa were considered important and the political elite boasted quite openly that they had wiped out the Herero and Nama." During the fight German soldiers are said to have forced the surviving Herero into the Omaheke desert and blocked access to all water sources. Thousands died a painful death from starvation and thirst.

Niema Movassat, deputy for the opposition Left Party in the German parliament, says hundreds of thousands were shot or hanged, or deprived of water and left to die of thirst in the desert. Or put into camps for forced labour. "One has to take responsibility for this," he told DW. At the end of February, the Left Party brought a motion before parliament calling for the murderous campaign in what was then German South West Africa to be declared as genocide. "There has never been an official apology," said Movassat.

It was only after Namibia became independent in 1990 that the full scope of the crime became public knowledge in the country itself. 100 years after its deadly campaign against the Herero people of Namibia, the then Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul visited the former colony on Saturday. She asked for the country's forgiveness. "We Germans recognize our historical, political, moral and ethical responsibility and guilt," the development minister said. Wieczorek-Zeul told several thousand Herero people who gathered at the site of the battle. "Blinded by colonial delusion," she said, Germans brought "violence, discrimination, racism and destruction" to the country. She said, the crimes that took place a hundred years ago would have been defined as genocide, and von Trotha would have been brought before a criminal tribunal.

http://www.dw.de/germany-asks-for-namibians-forgiveness/a-1298060

When Africa was sliced up

130 years ago in 1885 European leaders met at the infamous Berlin Conference to divide Africa and arbitrarily draw up borders that exist to this day.

Representatives of 13 European states, the United States of America and the Ottoman Empire converged on Berlin at the invitation of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to divide up Africa among themselves "in accordance with international law." Africans were not invited to the meeting. With the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, all the states that make up present day Africa were parceled out among the colonial powers within a few years after the meeting. Lines of longitude and latitude, rivers and mountain ranges were pressed into service as borders separating the colonies. Or one simply placed a ruler on the map and drew a straight line. New borders were drawn through the territories of every tenth ethnic group. Trade routes were cut, because commerce with people outside one's colony was forbidden. Studies have shown that societies through which new frontiers were driven would later be far more likely to suffer from civil war or poverty.

Historians, such as Olyaemi Akinwumi from Nasarawa State University in Nigeria, see the conference as the crucible for future inner African conflicts.

"In African Studies, many of us believe that the foundation for present day crises in Africa was actually laid by the 1884/85 Berlin Conference. The partition was done without any consideration for the history of the society," Akinwumi told DW.  "The conference did irreparable damage to the continent. Some countries are still suffering from it to this day."

In many countries, such as Cameroon, the Europeans rode roughshod over local communities and their needs, said Michael Pesek, a researcher in African colonial history at the University of Erfurt. African politicians could have changed the colonial borders. But they desisted from doing so. "A large majority of politicians said around 1960 'if we do that we will open up Pandora's Box'," Pesek said. They were probably right. Looking at all the problems Africa has had over the last 80 years, there have been numerous conflicts within states but hardly any between states. When examining African conflicts, the colonial power that occupied a particular tract of land - the Belgians, French, British or Germans - is less relevant than the significance of belonging to specific ethnic groups which colonial powers often pitted against each other.

In 2010 - on the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, representatives from many African states in Berlin called for reparations for the colonial era. The arbitrary division of the continent among European powers, which ignored African laws, culture, sovereignty and institutions, was a crime against humanity, they said in a statement. They called for the funding of monuments at historic sites, the return of land and other resources which had been stolen, the restitution of cultural treasures and recognition that colonialism and the crimes committed under it were crimes against humanity. But nothing has come of all this. The historians from Nigeria and Germany are not surprised. "There is much talk of reparations for the slave trade and the Holocaust. But little mention is made of the crimes committed by the European colonial powers during the hundred years or more they spent in Africa," said Pesek.

Borders are important when interpreting Africa's geopolitical landscape, but for people on the ground they have less meaning. Socialist Banner argues that people should recognize their class bonds rather than their tribal or national affinities.

Africa - Migration Dynamics

Below are links to articles in this special issue of Pambazuka News, each in their own way relevant to current discussions in the western world about the 'whys and whos and where froms' of immigrants. Three months ago Pambazuka issued an invitation for articles on the subject. Here are some - in their diversity.
 JS

Africa and its Diaspora in migration dynamics

Tidiane Kasse

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92259

This special issue of Pambazuka News shows that the question of migration is entangled with complex political, economic, legal, social, cultural issues. One cannot address this issue from an African perspective without thinking about the violence and pillage rampant on the continent over the past several centuries 

 

Migration and Africa: On the urgent need to think beyond the nation-state

Marco Zoppi

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92252

European powers imposed the nation-state on Africa through colonialism. But even after African independencies, mainstream discourses and government policies have amplified the idea that sedentariness and the state are the only acceptable mode of modernity. Migration is portrayed as a menace to the societies where the migrants wish to settle

 

Sinking hope

Thousands of Africans drown every year as they sail to Europe in search of jobs

Kebba Dibba

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92258

Europe has transformed itself into a fortress, with anti-immigration legislation a centrepiece of foreign and domestic policy. Stringent visa regimes, among other restrictions, simply disqualify many aspiring migrants, forcing them to take ever more desperate measures.

 

The drivers and outcomes of feminization of migration in Africa

Nedson Pophiwa

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92260

Migration from Africa has historically been a male-dominated phenomenon, but the pattern has changed significantly in recent decades. African women are leaving their countries of birth to create new lives elsewhere. Economic opportunities are primarily available in childcare, domestic and sex work. These trends should be of special interest to those in the policy-making spaces who are concerned about the wellbeing of female migrants.

 

Rumble in the Belgian bungle

Citizenship questions are at the heart of the DRC's Conflict

Carol Jean Gallo

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92257

Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), particularly in the eastern Kivu provinces, can be traced to its convoluted history of migration, citizenship and property rights.

 

Which African diaspora? A slavery descendant's perspective, 500 years later

Marian Douglas-Ungaro

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/92255

Would it not be both accurate and fair to acknowledge, and to designate, that there exists more than one ‘African diaspora’?

G8 New Alliance To Re-Colonise Africa

Whenever we talk about the African continent, images of famine, ethnic cleansing and brutal corrupt dictatorships usually come first to mind. This clichéd association, which tends to blame Africans for all their ills is reinforced by a compliant Western mainstream media, which more than often plays a subservient role to structures of power and dominance. But it seems that the mood is changing as Africa is booming economically. We are now being told by politicians and others that Africa will be helped not by charity but by investment. For instance, the likes of Tjada Mckenna and Jonathan Shriver, representatives for Feed the Future, US Government food and hunger initiative are enthusiastic about the business potential that Africa can offer: ‘Africa is home to seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies and the rate of return on foreign investment is higher in Africa than in any other developing region. Doing business in Africa makes good business sense.’

Attracted by these high economic growth rates and propelled by a lack of new opportunities elsewhere, huge global food and agriculture companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and Unilever are rapidly increasing their presence in sub-Saharan Africa, seeking access to resources and new markets to expand their operations. In the same way that Europeans colonised much of the continent in the nineteenth century, large corporations are now looking for raw materials, land and labour and their attention is turning to Africa, which the World Bank has dubbed ‘the last frontier’ in global food markets.

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition is supposedly committed to eradicating hunger in Africa, building on previous initiatives (such as the green revolution) that have failed so far to reach that goal. It is a partnership between the powerful G8, a number of African governments, transnational corporations and some domestic companies. Under its cooperation frameworks, African countries promise to reform their land laws and make other policy changes to facilitate private investment in agriculture. In exchange, they get hundreds of millions of dollars in donor assistance and promises from foreign companies and their local partners to invest considerably.

The G8 funds are supposed to be aligned with the country agriculture plans developed through the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) that was carried out through national consultation. But almost all of the G8’s New Alliance policy measures that each African government commits to implement within clearly defined deadlines are exclusively aimed at increasing corporate investment in agricultural lands and input markets. This highlights how such initiatives are not really designed to serve the African people but rather to open up new markets for big corporations that are driven by maximum profits regardless of their devastating impact on local life. Instead of providing a solution to hunger, the pro-corporate approach of initiatives like the New Alliance is likely to exacerbate hunger and poverty through shifting control of the food system away from small-scale farmers and local communities into the hands of big business that will likely invest in lucrative projects such as exporting cash crops like coffee, tobacco and biofuel crops.

In 2012, Mamadou Cissokho, honorary president of the Network of Farmers' and Agricultural Producers' Organisations of West Africa (ROPPA), sent a letter to the president of the African Union on behalf of African civil society networks and farmers' organisations expressing his concerns over how the G8 was dictating agricultural policy in Africa:

‘….on the eve of the G8 meeting at Camp David, I address myself to you, the President of the African Union – and through you to all African Heads of State – to ask what leads you to believe that Africa's food security and food sovereignty could be achieved by international cooperation and outside the policy frameworks formulated in inclusive fashion with the peasants and producers of the continent…The G8 and G20 can in no way be considered appropriate places for such decisions.”

Along similar lines and in a compelling statement, African civil society networks and organisations dubbed the New Alliance as a ‘new wave of colonialism’ and emphasised the necessity of food sovereignty, on individual and household food security first, with trade arising from surpluses beyond this.

It is anticipated that these policy commitments from the African governments will reinforce land grabbing and destroy the livelihood of small farmers who will be robbed of their lands forced into using expensive and damaging agrochemicals and corporate-controlled seeds, and subjected to insecure and poorly paid jobs, increasing their poverty and debt.

As someone coming from the global south, from Africa in particular, the whole thing sounds like some IMF structural adjustment program that mortgaged our sovereignty and wreaked havoc on our countries’ economies in the 90s. For me, it is also another neo-colonial instrument advancing under the cloak of the “altruistic civilising progress”, in order to remove any barrier to greed and to keep us subordinated to a profoundly unjust global order. This is an order that is benefitting a tiny minority over the poor majority and is the cause of the poverty and hunger in Africa in the first place.
The G8’s New Alliance will neither eradicate hunger nor achieve food security for Africans and thus must be fought. Solidarity with African farmers is a duty of any person caring about global justice.

The World Development Movement (WDM) launched a new campaign in early April in order to challenge the corporate control of the African food system through the G8’s New Alliance.

WDM will contest this initiative as part of the global movement for food sovereignty, which demands the right to food to be fulfilled, and that food producers and consumers can determine their own food systems and have control over the skills and resources that form them.

What better way to send a strong message to the UK Department For International Development (DfID), the British establishment and the multinationals involved and to say loudly and clearly what the New Alliance initiative is all about, than the creative and humorous [url=]WDM stunt[/url] that was carried out on Monday 31st March. A bunch of smartly-dressed activists pretending to be representatives of several multinationals involved in the New Alliance paid a visit to DfID in order to thank them for their precious help in enabling them to carve up African markets and resources for their profits. To add to the celebratory mood, they took a big cake in the shape of Africa, a continent that they voraciously want to slice between themselves. King Leopold, responsible for the colonisation and the genocide in the Congo region and a key player in the Berlin conference where European powers formalised the African takeover, would have liked this gesture – for completely different reasons of course – as he once said: "I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” Sadly, DfID representatives weren’t so keen to help the ‘executives’ in carving up the cake.


By Hamza Hamouchene from here

The European Union And Africa

Beyond the handouts of free money to few people in the elite as corruption tool, the EU is an imperialist organization.

The EU is the Union of European countries.
The AU is the Union of African countries.
Tomorrow, there will be an EU-Africa Summit in Brussels.
Now here comes how rogue the EU is.
1. The EU refused the meeting to be between EU-AU, because the EU doesn’t want to deal with Africa as a unified continent, but each individual states.
2. The EU sent individual invitation to each african country, then the AU asked its members not to attend the meeting, because of the way the EU is trying to divide and conquer.
3. The EU first refused to invite Mugabe, a democratically elected president, but sent an invitation to the president of Egypt who is excluded from the AU because of taking power by a coup.
4. When Many Africans sided wit Mugabe, the EU then granted him a visa, but refused to give visa to his wife to come with him.
5. When Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa expressed his concern over the dubious methods of the EU in Africa, he got shunned.
Regardless of the fact that the AU (African Union) asked its members states not to attend the meeting, over 40 puppets Africans president will be tomorrow in Brussels to get instructions on how to let multinationals loot their countries in exchanges of some gifts.
Now, you may ask, how could the EU force Africans to act against their own interest. They can because before anything EU is a war machine, they have guns and they can make a coup in any country when they want. Most of the presidents are afraid to be victim of coup.
In fact, During the last 50 years 21 African presidents were Killed in office, and since 2008 altogether 13 presidents died in office in the world, 10 were African presidents.
Even the logo of the so called partnership shows the EU swallowing Africa, a continent 3 times bigger than the whole Europe, and million times richer.

Here is the propaganda website for the EU colonial pact with Africa : http://www.africa-eu-partnership.org/
They say they will open EU market 100% to african products, but … But … Africa does not produce “anything” except exporting raw materials (which the continent doesn’t have any problem selling anyway). In exchange Ecowas 16 countries will open their 300 millions consumers market 75% during the next 20 years to EU multinationals to crush the soul out of local producers (like they are already doing in agriculture) and kill any dream of african industrialization and economical infrastructure building.
It’s just plain stupid deal, but to make it easy to accept by the puppets african leaders, EU promised about 6 billions euros corruption money (also called aid) for the local elite to get new cars, new houses, etc.
While we were focused on the Ukrainian crisis, the EU tried to bribe 16 governments in West Africa to sign a colonial pact that will help its multinationals to loot more Africa, and impoverish the average african.
In fact the EU succeeded to bribe about 15 governments, who were ready to sign the so called new partnership with EU, but fortunately for us the big Nigeria refused to sign such a deal.
I suspect the EU would prepare a coup in Nigeria soon (with the help of France) to trow the nigerian government, and ask the new puppet to sign the colonial pact.
Africa is not poor, Africa is constantly agressed and impoverish by Europeans.

Mawuna Remarque Koutonin

from here

Mapping Africa

The World Bank announced an ambitious plan to initiate a $1 billion fund to finance an effort to map the mineral resources of the African continent. Their plan is to use advanced satellite and surveillance technology to, in the words of a World Bank senior manager, “identify the areas with more profitability.”

We are to believe that the World Bank’s efforts are designed to benefit Africa by enlighten African leaders to the extent of the mineral wealth that lies beneath the surface in their perspective countries. Given the record of the World Bank and its twin the International Monetary Fund’s dealings on the continent a degree of doubt about their true motives is expected. The hope for this endeavor is to unearth $1 trillion worth of new mineral resources that will be for the benefit of… Africans? An examination of African history over the last 150 years will quickly reveal that this is a story we’ve heard before.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century three organizations were founded by Leopold II, King of Belgium. The Association Internationale Africaine (AIA, African International Association), the Comité d’ Etudes du Haut-Congo (CEHC, Study Committee of the Upper Congo), and the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC, International Congo Society) were proposed as benevolent organizations dedicated to the “civilization” of central African peoples.2

The reality, of course, was that these were tools used by Leopold to exploit the resources and control the population of the Congo Basin. The result of Leopold’s political maneuvering was the Congo Free State was formed in 1885. The term “Free” of course had little meaning to the African citizens who became literal serfs in what was actually a private fiefdom of Leopold II. The Congolese lost their sovereignty to all lands outside their villages as all land and resources became the property of the “state” which, in reality meant, personal property of King Leopold II. Congolese men labored in slave-like conditions on rubber plantations while their wives and families were held hostage to guarantee that they met their production quotas. When these conditions stoked rebellion the offending rebels and their families were hunted down and killed, their villages burned to the ground.

Not to be outdone by the Belgian monarch France, Germany, and England began to scramble for a foothold on the continent. To prevent a war over territory and resources the Berlin Conference was convened in 1884. The participants, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire had come together like gentlemen to divide a continent and its spoils. As they drew up the map of Africa, that to a great extent still exist today, there was not a single African present to participate in the process.

Colonialism would go on to guide Africa into the 20th century, what was of benefit to the peoples of Africa had to be what was of benefit to the colonial powers and the corporations that grew with them....

....This is the reality of Africa today as the World Bank initiates its search for the mineral wealth that has so far eluded the neo-colonial powers and the multi-national corporations that now direct their policies and procedures. Today in the Congo Joseph Kabila resides over the rape and pillage that continues to envelop the Congolese people 54 years after Patrice Lumumba was sacrificed on the altar of western capitalism....



....So it is in the context of this neo-colonial reality that the efforts of the World Bank must be evaluated. As to this new generation of African “leaders” that will supposedly be the recipients of the largesse of western technology, one need look no further than Uganda whose legislature, instead of tackling the substantial issues that face their region and their people, have surrendered their souls to the dictates of American evangelicals and have embarked on a homophobic crusade or the South African authorities who massacred striking miners at Marikana in 2012. It is not the voice of the African people that are being heard but the voices of neo-colonial interest from mining corporations to religious radicals.

With French forces reengaged in West Africa, the U.S. military entrenched on the continent under the auspices of AFRICOM, and Chinese economic interest spreading rapidly there is little reason to doubt that the World Bank’s interest align not with the peoples of Africa but rather with the neo-colonial powers and the multi-national corporations that direct them. Chances are that this new map of Africa will have a great deal in common with the one produced in Berlin in 1885.

Lifted from this article by T. Mayheart Dardar at the Dissident Voice website 

China And Japan In Africa - In Whose Interest?

Africa was seen by Leopold II as a ‘magnificent African cake’ and still is considered as such by new foreign interests. Between the Chinese and the Japanese it seems the Japanese, like the West, seeks to ‘contain’ China’s influence in Africa. The Chinese aspire to a win-win-South-South cooperation and the restoration of Asia and Africa’s dignity.

The logic of foreign powers’ competing interests in Africa denotes a colonial mentality still prevailing toward Africa! What Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to Africa uncovered is a clear plan that Japan and Western powers have: To “contain” China’s influence in Africa. Africa is talked about just as a “walk over”, a battleground for other people’s interests except African people’s interests! Africa has been in that position since the slavery, apartheid, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and now what I call “neo-multi-influencialism”, that is to say, after the Cold War, all major powers are seeking to maintain their influence in Africa to safeguard their strategic interests there (raw materials, geopolitical support at the UN Security Council) without taking the interests of Africans themselves into consideration (making other people rich while remaining poor yourself and being convinced by those you make rich that you are actually poor and you need help, help, help!).

It is the strategic interests of these major powers that drive their strategic policies toward Africa (they decide everything about Africa without African themselves). Congo’s natural and mineral resources have been systematically looted in the last 16 years by the same people who are coming to Congo as investors. What does the term “investor” mean in this case? If America and its NATO allies can go and bomb Iraq and Afghanistan back to the stone age and award contracts to American companies to “rebuild” these countries, is that what “globalization” is all about?

 African countries themselves may have their own policies toward these major powers, but they remain on paper. Africans do not have any means to implement their own policies. Nearly 90 percent of the African Union’s budget itself is financed from outside. So, Africans have only one policy: the bigger the donation, the happier they are!

Pandering to Western powers’ influence is exactly what Zimbabwean scholars Jonathan Moyo and Charity Manyeruke think has been happening. According to Jonathan Moyo, the one very clear and disappointing state of politics in Africa today is precisely the issue raised by President Mugabe in the interview on the occasion of his 88th birthday of not just cowardice of the so-called new breed of African leaders but also their treachery (Sydney Kawadza, “Some African leaders coward,” ‘The Herald,’ 20 February, 2012).

“It’s not only that they want budgetary support from Western powers or genuinely want to address anything in Africa. It’s simply that they are sellouts by definition. They don’t think about their people but themselves and their pockets.” (Herald Reporter, ‘Political analysts castigate puppet African leaders,’ ‘The Herald,’ 21 February, 2012).


Japan is an industrial state without natural resources wants to consolidate its interests in Africa to ensure a steady flow of African resources to feed its industries. China too needs natural resources to feed its growing economy. But there are differences between the two Asian countries, as far as their policies toward Africa are concerned.

 Japan boasts modern high-technology industries. But unlike China, Japan has never transferred its technology to Africa. Africa does not need big donations forever. Africa needs modern technologies so that it can transform its resources on the spot and create jobs and markets for its people at national, regional. continental and international levels. China has already transferred some of its technologies to Africa (the Hisense company in South Africa and oil extraction technology in Sudan). Indeed, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” (Chinese proverb).

History has proven that we Africans can believe and trust China. We trust China when China says that it is ready to cooperate with any other major power in Africa provided that “we put African interests first”. As Chinese scholar Luo Jianbo writes, “of course, it is well known that a nation’s foreign policy always serves its national interests first. China is no exception. China never denies that its African policy aims to pursue its own strategic interests in Africa [nor that it has not made mistakes there]. However, one of the most outstanding features of China’s African policy from the very beginning is its aspiration to promote a win-win-South-South cooperation and the restoration of Asia and Africa’s dignity. China’s engagement in Africa provides Africa with new development opportunities and promotes Africa to integrate in the international system in a more favorable way, that is to say, as an equal partner (Luo Jianbo, “China-Africa relations and China’s international responsibility,” ‘World Economics and Politics,’ 2013, Vol.9, No.397, pp.52-70). Those who want to keep a kind of “master-slave” relationship with Africa are not happy about that.


Antoine Roger Lokongo from here

The Return of the French

France’s president Francois Hollande will host 40 African leaders in Paris for an ambitious two-day summit, as he looks to secure his nation's influence in the face of the growing clout of China and other developing economies. Hollande said ahead of the summit that the goal was to double trade with Africa, which he said would create 200 000 jobs if done within five years. More than 500 African and French business leaders were to take part in trade talks on the sidelines of the summit,

 France has played a crucial role in its post-colonial history, intervening militarily more than 20 times since the early 1960s. Of the about 7 500 French soldiers deployed overseas as of 1 December, more than 5 300 were in the continent, at a string of bases across western and central Africa, according to defence ministry figures. France's permanent military presence in Africa costs it upwards of $540m per year and that the budget was expected to rise.

http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/France-anxious-to-tap-into-Africas-growth-20131205

Africom and Obama's Africa Trip 2013

Posing as a humanist, president Obama came to Africa to reinforce the exploitation of the natural riches which are now dangerously threatened by Sino-Iranian pressure. He was unable to set up a photo opportunity with the dying Nelson Mandela, who threw him out of South Africa during his 2006 visit.

Obama had his photo taken in the House of Slaves, on the island of Gorée in Senegal, gazing thoughtfully at the Atlantic Ocean, across which millions of Africans were transported in chains to the Americas. He declared that, as an "Afro-American president," he was inspired by the site which " ... gives me even greater motivation to defend human rights throughout the world."

This is the tone that the president used to begin his trip to Africa. But in South Africa, he was confronted by thousands of workers and students who called him a "slave-trader," and accused him of war crimes and the betrayal of his electoral promises. Obama couldn’t even organise a photo-op at Nelson Mandela’s bedside, a symbolic image he had counted on.

So everything didn’t go too well on the "Africa Trip 2013." It was a propaganda tour which cost a hundred million dollars – the president brought with him from the USA hundreds of secret service agents, 56 special vehicles including 14 armoured limousines, and three trucks loaded with bullet-proof windows, plus an aircraft carrier from which fighter planes controlled the air space thoughout the presidential journey.

The real reason for the trip became apparent when Obama declared that " ... China is paying a lot of attention to Africa" and that it is " ... in the interest of the United States to augment and extend its partnerships with the African nations." But there is a problem – the USA can’t compete with China, whose investments are much more useful and advantageous for the African nations than those of the USA, which are aimed at maximum profit, and concentrate their efforts on the exploitation of energy and mineral resources.

To counter Chinese influence and reinforce US presence in Africa, the Obama administration has principally favoured its political and military instruments. Amongst these, " … the Young African Leaders Initiative," whose objective is to " ...develop a prestigious network of young leaders in fundamental sectors, and to forge even stronger links with the United States." Through these "high-level forums," and more than 2000 "youth programmes" which are financed to the tune of millions of dollars, Washington is attempting to create an elite of new pro-USA leaders in Africa.

At the same time, by way of AfriCom, they are reinforcing US military presence on the continent. The main base for this operation is in Sigonella (Sicily). It’s from this base that the Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) of the Marine Corps is deployed, equipped with tilt rotor MV-22 Ospreys and C-130 flying tankers, sending regular squadrons to fly over Africa. Since January, from Sigonella, the MAGTF has been training special African forces in Uganda, Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Seychelles, Mozambique, Tanzania, Senegal and Liberia. The Sigonella task force also collaborates with the Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa, forming officers for the African secret services in Kenya, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Nigeria and other countries.

The MIBOC-A course is defined as " … one of hundreds of security operations carried out by US military personnel in Africa." This is how the US military network is extended in Africa, by way of multiple links, recruiting officers and local special forces. The operation is directed by AfriCom, which recently installed its first "advanced command post" on the African continent, with the combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa and Djibouti . A new version of the old instruments of colonial domination.
But Obama would do well to pay attention – as he himself stated " … Africa is rising."

Manlio Dinucci

 

Britain and the Mau Mau

June 12, 2013 – The New York Times 

THE British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have always liked to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last week, the British government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Each claimant will receive around £2,670 (about $4,000). 

¶ The money is paltry. But the principle it establishes, and the history it rewrites, are both profound. This is the first historical claim for compensation that the British government has accepted. It has never before admitted to committing torture in any part of its former empire. 

¶ The Kenyan case has been in process for a decade in London’s High Court. The British fought to avoid paying reparations, so the decision to settle is a significant change of direction. The decision comes months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the British departure from Kenya — once thought of as the “white man’s country” in East Africa. 

¶ The Kenya case turned on the evidence of historians, including my own role as an expert witness. I identified a large tranche of documents that the British government smuggled out of Kenya in 1963 and brought back to London. The judge ordered the release of this long-hidden “secret” cache, some 1,500 files. 

¶ The evidence of torture revealed in these documents was devastating. In the detention camps of colonial Kenya, a tough regime of physical and mental abuse of suspects was implemented from 1957 onward, as part of a government policy to induce detainees to obey orders or to make confessions. 

¶ The documents showed that responsibility for torture went right to the top — sanctioned by Kenya’s governor, Evelyn Baring, and authorized at cabinet level in London by Alan Lennox-Boyd, then secretary of state for the colonies in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. 

¶ When told that torture and abuse were routine in colonial prisons, Mr. Lennox-Boyd did not order that such practices be stopped, but instead took steps to place them beyond legal sanction. “Compelling force” was allowed, but defined so loosely as to permit virtually any kind of physical abuse. 

¶ Why did the British keep these documents, instead of destroying them? Plenty else was burned, or dumped at sea, as the British left Kenya. 

¶ The answer lay in the unease of some British colonial officers. Many did not like what they saw. When the orders to torture came down, some realized the jeopardy they were in. These men worried that it was they, not their commanders, who would carry the can.

¶ They were right to worry. Official reports from the 1950s always blamed individual officers — the “bad apples in the barrel” — for acts of abuse. But the blame lay not with junior officers forced to implement a bad policy but with the senior echelons of a colonial government that was rotten to the core. 

¶ Kenya’s will not be the last historical claims case. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office faces others, some of which have been in progress for years. 

¶ A case already before the courts concerns the 1948 Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya, now Malaysia. There, the relatives of innocent villagers — who were murdered by young conscript soldiers ordered to shoot by an older, psychopathic sergeant major — have asked for compensation. For Americans, the case has eerie echoes of Vietnam. 

¶ Though Britain is the first former European colonial power to pay individual compensation to victims, other countries have been confronted by similar accusations. In 2006, Germany offered to pay millions of euros to the Namibian government to compensate for the German Army’s genocide against the Herero tribe in the early 20th century. It also issued a public apology in the capital, Windhoek. In 2011, the Dutch government was ordered by the International Court of Justice to compensate survivors of a 1947 massacre in colonial Indonesia; it has not yet paid. 

¶ Historical research has played its part in all these cases, but not all historians are happy with the way things are turning out. Leading historians of British colonialism have long tended to rejoice in a benevolent, liberal view of imperialism. 

¶ The British historians Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson and Max Hastings have all nailed their colors to the mast of the good ship Britannia as she sailed the ocean blue bringing civilization and prosperity to the world. This view seems unlikely to be credible for much longer. 

¶ Empire was built by conquest. It was violent. And decolonization was sometimes a bloody, brutal business. No American should need reminding of that. And Britain, along with other imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, may yet have to pay for this. 

¶ Torture is torture, whoever the perpetrator, whoever the victim. Wrongs should be put right. Whatever wrongs were done in the name of Britain in Kenya in the 1950s, the British government has now delivered modest reparations to some victims. And maybe we in Britain have also finally begun to come to terms with our imperial past. 

¶ Would the United States be so accommodating to a similar claim? In the current political climate, probably not. But times change. Fifty years from now, will Americans face claims from Guantánamo survivors? You might, and perhaps you should. 

 David M. Anderson, 
Professor of African history at the University of Warwick, 
Author of “Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.” 

China in Africa

Navin Shah, a property developer in Kenya, stresses that the Chinese are not philanthropists, and that Chinese aid is not just a gift, but also serves to benefit the benefactor: "Ultimately, it is another imperial power pursuing its national interests." He explains "The early colonisers came to Africa with alcohol and useless gifts to lure the locals. China is doing the same with arms sales, especially to those African governments under threat owing to civil war, insurgency, or barred from obtaining weapons from traditional Western sources. In fact, no other major power has shown the same interest or muscle, or the sheer ability to cozy up to greedy African leaders,"

China's engagement with Africa is not 'new'. Its roots date back to the 1950s, when China fought the Soviet Union and the United States for Africa, which was then seen as an ideal terrain in the Cold War. Known as the "coolie trade", China focused its efforts on African mining, plantation and railway construction. The most notable being the construction of the TamZam railway between 1970 and 1975, which linked Zambia directly to Dar-es-Salaam, breaking the dependency on white-ruled Zimbabwe. It was during this period that the Sino-African relations became political. By 1978, China had established diplomatic relations with 43 African countries. At the end of the 1970s it decided to focus on its internal challenges, China's leadership forgot about Africa and  turned to outright neglect in the 1980s. The inauguration of the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, in 1978 led to a new political direction and the uncertainty of economic development in China. Economic aid to Africa was reduced, accompanied by a decline in bilateral trade. However, self-sufficiency - a central pillar of Chinese policy - could no longer be maintained in a host of vital areas including energy, forestry resources and even food production. By the end of 2011, Chinese investment in African countries totalled almost $90 billion (£55.4 billion), the third-largest recipient behind Asia and Europe. Oil is the top item imported from Angola, followed by hardwood timber from Liberia. Sudan exports two-thirds of its oil to China.

As Chinese investment in Africa increases, the emergence of small-scale Chinese retailers threatens to undermine existing local shops. In Huambo, Angola, Chinese shops have increased ten-fold, from two in 2002 to over 20 in 2006. In Oshikango, Namibia, the first Chinese shop was opened in 1999; by 2006, there were 75. The influx of Chinese trading shops has been met with a mix of enthusiasm and concern. . In South Africa, Chinese migrants are seen as intruders, even by those who buy at their shops. A street vendor in Kenya scornfully remarks: "The Chinese come here with promises of new jobs and better lifestyles, but they are taking away even the simple businesses like selling groceries. Yet, the government says we should celebrate Chinese investment?" Dipak Patel, former trade minister for Zambia: "Does Zambia need Chinese investors who sell shoes, clothes, food, chickens and eggs in our markets when the indigenous people can?" And in 2006, an opposition presidential candidate ran a "Zambia for Zambians" campaign aimed at expelling Chinese influence from his country.

There is a debate regarding China's practice of employing its own nationals. A study commissioned by the Angolan government showed that while non-Chinese employers were expected to pay between $3 (£1.85) and $4 a day to Angolan labourers, Chinese labourers were paid $1 day by their own employers. At the World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, Humphrey Pole-Pole, head of Tanzania Social Forum, declared: "First, Europe and America took our big businesses. Now China is driving our small and medium entrepreneurs to bankruptcy. You don't even contribute to employment because you bring in your own labour."

The general manager of China National Overseas Engineering Corporation, based in Lusaka, Zambia, attributes the differences to cultural barriers: "Chinese people can stand very hard work. They work until they finish and then rest. In Zambia, they are like the British; they work according to a plan. They have tea breaks and a lot of days off. For our construction company, that means that it costs a lot more."

While this low-cost model insinuates low wages, it has also become synonymous with bad working conditions, abusive practices and environmental degradation. In 2010, for example, 11 local employees of a coal mine in Sinazongwe, Zambia were sprayed with bullets by the Chinese managers while they were protesting about pay and working conditions. This followed a 2005 explosion in a Chinese copper mine in Chambishi, Zambia, which killed 46 workers. In 2007, the Nigerian government leased to China Nuclear International Uranium Company a tract of land belonging to ethnic Tuaregs, without compensating them. Legal and illegal timber logging has wreaked havoc on the prospects for sustainable forestry in Liberia and Mozambique. Dams built in Sudan and Mozambique have displaced thousands of local residents, while over-fishing off the eastern and southern African coasts has impaired communities dependant on fishing for their livelihood.

Algeria's 50 years of independence

5 July 2012 marked Algeria’s 50th anniversary of national independence from 132 years of the French colonial control at the heavy price of a bitter eight-year armed struggle. 300,000-1,000,000 Algerian deaths, large-scale repression, torture and military removal of millions from their homes. Algeria’s liberation from a major Western power was well-publicized by the writings of Franz Fanon.

Yet for most Algerians it is hard to celebrate. What is there to celebrate when only 20 years ago, the military moved from the background to the fore with a coup d’etat cancelling elections and quickly leading to a decade of horrendous civil war between the military and Islamists, causing the deaths of some 200,000. The post-independence regime continues to produce a constant stream of exiles abroad.

Nevertheless, from a different perspective, Algeria has much to celebrate. From 1962 to the present, many grassroots Algerians have steadily resisted, in a variety of ways, the greed, power schemes and repression from above.  In the first year of independence and after, thousands of Algerian workers spontaneously and with the encouragement of the nationalist trade union took over operation of modern farms and units in industrial and other realms abandoned by Europeans fleeing to France and set to work to self-manage the grassroots re-booting of the national economy. Even though opposed and sabotaged by the military, bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie who resented this growing horizontalist sector of hundreds of thousands and the general challenge to elite power and privileges it represented, many self-management workers struggled for several years to maintain and embrace this attempt at "socialism" from below.

In 1980 emerged a largely spontaneous wave of massive protest and resistance among the proud Berbers of Kabylia, based on long-standing grievances against regime authoritarianism, its disdain for rich Berber linguistic and cultural identity as well as its neglect of the region’s economy. This “Berber Spring” was the first large-scale political challenge to the regime since the early 60s. The later Kabyle insurrection of April 2001 was followed by mass demonstrations and a widespread horizontalist “assemblies movement,” also showed a large-scale rejection of the regime. Virtually the entire region of Kabylia rose up in defiant protest, besieging police stations with rocks and fire bombs while also burning government and political party offices. Other Kabyles formed local grassroots councils based on centuries-old Kabyle horizontalist principles and confederated together from the bottom up. This rising massive defiance and spontaneous self-organization threatened to spread elsewhere in Algeria and to mobilize a national uprising against the regime until the regime repressed it. However, the self-organized assemblies movement persisted for several years.

 A similar but larger protest by thousands of young people took place in the capital, Algiers, in October 1988—without an explicit political program, but demonstrating through their choice of targets (government and FLN party offices and opulent retail stores) their contempt for political and economic elites prospering at the expense of most Algerians. This explosion of massive street demonstrations over several days was then repressed by gunfire, arrests and torture and used by the regime to justify and manipulate a partial liberalization of politics and economic policy. In this brief moment like the recent Arab Spring, many hoped for a genuine multiparty pluralist political system with respect for free expression and human rights. A new outspoken human rights league developed in this period along with new media, independent women’s rights groups and autonomous trade unions separate from the regime’s  largely submissive UGTA union federation. In the end, however, the combination of a growing and increasingly confident and demagogic Islamist movement, including a strong radical component, and manipulation by the dominant military to block genuine democratization culminated in a cancelled legislative electoral process (about to be won by Islamists) in January 1992. What followed was a long nightmare decade of repression, massacres, tortures, assassinations, “disappearances” and rapes committed by both sides.

Nevertheless, the human rights league, autonomous trade unions, women’s rights groups and other grassroots organizations continue to survive and to take strong political stands.The rigged lections are boycotted by large numbers, most recently a month ago for the national assembly. The continued habit of boycotts by alienated voters and further appeals for abstention by opposition figures produced another humiliating grassroots rejection of the system. While the regime claimed a 42% participation rate of eligible voters, the lack of transparency in vote-counting and other traditional forms of electoral manipulation led critics to suggest a much lower rate and fraudulent victories. As well, even among those who voted, admitted the government, about 22% of cast ballots were faulty or blank.

Each year sees thousands of more-or-less spontaneous local demonstrations, riots and confrontations, the only way aggrieved people can gain “dialogue” with oppressive officials. Whether at the level of local daily life or in broader social movements large numbers of grassroots Algerians over the past five decades have refused to accept the authoritarian and corrupt regime imposed since independence and continued the “national liberation struggle” against the national bourgeoisie. Chawki Amari suggested two years ago in El Watan, a leading Algiers newspaper, that Algerians are by nature anarchists who Bakunin would have no trouble recognizing. Every substantial political upheaval is rooted in millions of individual rebellious attitudes and behaviors nourished anonymously over generations until the right conjuncture of economic and political factors breaks through existing bonds of oppression.

It is this struggle which is to be celebrated.

Adapted from here

Nigeria's bombings - How the UK created, fostered and empowered Nigeria's terrorists

In Nigeria the news headlines are of the Islamic organisation Boko Haram's bombing campaign. A MediaLens contributer reminds us the historic role of British divide and rule in Nigeria's past.

Nigeria was the creation of British imperialism and marked the limits of its aims, arms and ambition around Africa's third longest river - the mighty Niger, which gave the country its name. Originally the invaders were only interested in the southern parts of the territory now called Nigeria, especialy its rich forests and their plentiful produce of raw materials in heavy demnd in the west, particularly its palm oil, then required to grease the humming wheels of English industry. The natural deep harbours of Calabar and Lagos with its protective lagoon, were also coveted by the British crown.

However to protect the source of the Niger from the encroachments of its French rivals then enfiltrating southwards from their North African holdings, Britain's colonial army, fresh from subduing the southern tribes east and west of the Niger, marched north and bursting through the forest found the northern Savannah domianted by one of Africa's oldest, most educated and cultivated ruling classes - the Hausa Fulani islamic aristocracy whose relatively spohisticated state structure, monotheism and powerful calavary gave them unchallenged writ across the vast northern grass lands. After subduing their initial resistance, the sultans and emirs were integrated into the coloinal structure as its willing tools, keeping their thrones and faith in exchange for fidelity and subservience to the new conquerors. Kneeling to the west for their power, if still facing the east in prayer.

Unlike the lawless and rebellious tribes to the south, with their weak states and fractious people the universal and unquestioned authority of the northern princes was attarctive to the colnial rulers as it fitted in with British colonial poilcy of occupation lite, ruling in the main through local puppets, an approach they had mastered in india. Hence the new masters favoured the aristocracy in recruitment to the new civil service army and police. Development, as would be expected from a low base proceeded rapildy in the south, while to maintain the power of its islamic allies in the North, education, industrialisation and liberal social policies were restricted in northern nigeria by the British colonial administration.

The quicker urbanisation in the south created an increasingly radicalised working class and restive intelligentsia there who from the 1920's began organising against the colonial regime. By the end of the second world war, strikes, demonstrations and increasingly assertive agitation against coloinal rule was taking place across the sotuhern regions, with its nationalist leaders demanding ever more forcefully and confidently full independence from a severely weakened post war Britain.

To counterbalance the agitation centred in the big southern cities like Lagos, the British bolstered the power of the islamic aristocracy in the North, expanding its regional base and powers and placing the scions of its ruling houses in key positions in the army and emerging civil service. The country's census was also rigged giving the north a fraudulent edge over the far more populous southern regions, at a stroke re-writing the rules of geography by increasing the population of a land the closer it got to the desert.

"... islamic terror in Nigeria first burst on the scene in the same city, Kano, it has returned to with such venom. This was in 1956, when the British colonial Government and its allies amongst the conservative islamic aristocracy in the north reacted to a motion of independence by radical nationalists, by instigating a murderous rampage of islamic mobs in the ancient city of Kano, slaugtering agitators for independence and southern Nigerians, where demands for independence were most vociferous..."

"...another far bloodier episode of apocalyptic Islamic terror in Northern Nigeria, far bloodier in scale and serious in consequence than the 1956 riots which were used to intimidate the country into handing over power at independence in 1960 to the west's prefered faction - the subservient emirs and sultans in the North , the most retrograde and reactionary social layer on the continent, who as in Pakistan, now also disintegrating at the onslaught of right wing islamic terror, the departing British imposed on the country to ensure this potential regional giant remained forever prostrate and subservient to the west.

This second major incident of right wing islamic terror in Nigeria occurred in 1966 when in response to a radical coup by a group of young leftist officers in the Nigerian army, MI6 station oficers and British diplomats in the north brazenly broke cover and together with its conservative allies helped mobilise and unleash crazed islamic mobs across the north against southern Nigerians and suspected supporters of the coup. Men women and children across the north were dragged out of their homes and hacked to death in the streets by frenzied fundamentalist mobs with pregnant women having their foetus ripped out from their wombs before the mothers themselves were butchered.

While this was going on British and American diplomats sipped tea and brandy with right wing military officers, sons and scions of the northern ruling houses, in Lagos's main cantonment, plotting a military domination of the country that would last another 3 decades and bring the country to the brink of ruin.

Almost 30,000 mostly ibo southerners were killed in the massacres of 1966 which led to the Biafran war where a milion more died. The dead were so many in Kano, yes the same Kano, that excavators had to be hired from Julius Berger and other construction firms to pile the heaps of corpses into mass graves hastily dug outside the ancient city's walls..."

"...Boko Haram the Nigerian fundamentalist group behind the Kano Bombings is not the Nigerian wing of Al-Quaeda as the western media suggest, sharing its global apocalyptic vision, although there are undoubtedly links. However like the Pakistani Taliban the groups agenda is largely local.
In reality It is the armed wing of the country's powerful conservative Northern establishment who were edged out of power after 40 years of totally dominating it by the pro-democracy uprisings and struggles of the mid to late 1990's. The current wave of bombings and indiscriminate attacks are the arrow head of a counter offensive by the Northern elite and its conservative alies across the country to regain what they beleieve to be their birth right - the right to rule the cuntry without challenge or even the most rudimentary democratic accountability. The right the British gave them at independence in 1960....As in Pakistan there are clear links between the terrorists and senior memebrs of the countries security establishment, many of whom have now gone rogue."

"...At independence with the power of the British state behind them, power unsurprisingly went to the northern leaders who now in full control of state apparatus, reeaced out to allies across the country creating a pan regional conservative alliance cutting across tribes and regional lines and based upon the direct access to and theft of public resources at the centre and repression of the masses across the country. The discovery of oil and the concentration of its revenues in federal hands increased the powers of patronage of the Northern emirs and further cemented the pan regional alliance of the newly enriched national elite, who fearing the potential power of the millions of dispossessed but increasingly organised and educated masses in the heaving southern cities particularly the teeming megapolis of Lagos were happy to keep real power in the far islamic north from whence it could crush any uprising in the perpetually seething southern cities as it had crushed the Biafran rebellion.

The military dominated by the northern ruling houses was the prefered tool of power and its most powerful arms, the armoured brigades and bomber squadrons were all based in the north. After its crushing victory over the Biafran rebellion in the oil rich south east, it would rule almost unchallenged for 3 decades - from 1970 to 1998.

The north far poorer than the south was frozen in time with a stupendously rich and powerful elite enjoying the most modern amenities and luxuries money could buy while ruling with the help of imams and islamic scholars over a populace whose standard of living had seen almsot no change from the conditions their forefathers had endured over 6 centuries before. In Northern Nigeria the rich live in splendour, the poor in their millions beg in the street, a lumpenised class whose dehumanisation is without equal anywhere on the continent and from wherein the fanatics recruit their foot soldires.

The northern Oligarchy and the ruling class it dominates have devastated Nigeria in 4 ruinous decades of staggering corruption, mismanagement misrule while surbodinating the country in the most servile manner to the most rapacious exploitation of western imperialism - a period in whch the country has earned the equivalent of a quarter of a trillion pounds in oil revene without one of its towns or city's boasting a working electricity, transport, sewage or water supply system.

The combination of miliatry dictatorship and the use of auxillary islamic mobs served to maintain the power of the elite backed at the hieght of the cold war for decades by western imperialism whose policies were then to support the most vile and reactionary right wing regimes in the thrid world regardless of their brutality in an attempt to prevent the rise of popular movements in these countries.

However this changed in the early 1990's due to two reasons; the rise of pro-democracy movements on the African continent, partly inspired by the succes of the struggle in South Africa and secondly the collapse of the Soviet Union and rise of islamic fundamentalism which replaced communism as the West's main bogey man.

In 1993, the Nigerian military backed by the oligarchs cancelled an electrion, the country's freest ever, won by a popular centre left Business man Moshood Abiola, sparking a civilian uprising without precedent in the country's history and plunging Nigeria into its biggest political crisis since the Biafran war. However this time around their western patrons, already distancing themselves from their most brutal cold war allies across the third world, and fearful of creating more hot beds of rising islamic militancy, the chancelries of the west were far cooler and more ambivalent to their old allies in the north.

Isolated internationally and weakened domestically by civil unrest and regional tensions, the millitary dictatorship collapsed in 1998.

The resultant civilian regime was a compromise one which to pacify the people edged out the northern oligarchs and their most corrupt and hated alies from direct control of the state. In 2011, to pacify the oil producing Niger Delta and its long brutalised people who had risen in arms against their oppressioin, under intense western pressure, desperate to calm the Niger Delta, an indigene of the area, Goodluck Johnatahn, was sponsored for and won the presidency.

While slavishly folowing the neo liberal agenda of all his predecessors, his victory has been a step too far for the conservative oilgarchy whose powers are directly linked to the control of the state, its oil and the immense powers of patronage it provides.

In the past the Oligarchy and conservatives would have regained power through a coup detat using the army which they've always controlled. But things have changed - military rule is no longer fashionable internationally and the growth of civil society and labour and environmental militancy particualry in the south and oil producing parts of the country makes this a fraught option - a recent general strike over fuel prices brought millions on to the streets

Any coup now would in all likelihood lead to a break up of the country and possibly a war which the Northern elite facing a changed and less favourable international climate than during the Biafran war, cannot be sure of wining. Hence the use of an armed islamic auxillary force, Boko Haram, backed by shadowy figures within the state to intimidate a civil society they now see slipping away from their autocratic control, forcing the west to re-think and hand them back their 'right to rule' or face the country being made ungovernable..."

"If Nigeria the biggest and most powerful country on Africa's west coast falls the entire region could be set ablaze with the Northern region developing into a badland of fundamentalism and violence so uncontrollable that it would make Somalia look like a sleepy saturday resort park."