Category: Africa
Map warns of growing Russian influence in Africa—shades of the Cold War. [Source: Black Skin, White Mask
Friday, 3 June 2022 — CovertAction Magazine
Lt. General Michael Langley [Source: nytimes.com]
Lt. General Michael Langley is poised to become the first Black commander of AFRICOM—a neocolonial force whose main purpose is to enable Western corporate pillage of Africa.
Africa, the Collateral Victim of a Distant Conflict: The Twenty-Second Newsletter (2022)
Thursday, 2 June 2022 — The Tricontinental
Amadou Sanogo (Mali), You Can Hide Your Gaze, but You Cannot Hide That of Others, 2019.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 25 May 2022, Africa Day, Moussa Faki Mahamat – the chairperson of the African Union (AU) – commemorated the establishment of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) in 1963, which was later reshaped as the AU in 2002, with a foreboding speech. Africa, he said, has become ‘the collateral victim of a distant conflict, that between Russia and Ukraine’. That conflict has upset ‘the fragile global geopolitical and geostrategic balance’, casting ‘a harsh light on the structural fragility of our economies’. Two new key fragilities have been exposed: a food crisis amplified by climate change and a health crisis accelerated by COVID-19.
Watch MR Classic: Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘CONCIENCISM’
Monday, 30 May 2022 — Youtube
[As a teenager in the early 1960s, Kwame Nkrumah was one of my heroes, the voice of a newly liberating Africa! So how do his words and thoughts come across 60 years later, with the US/AFRICOM stomping across Africa? WB]
How China’s 1942 Yan’an Forum Inspired the Culture of National Liberation in the Third World
Tuesday, 17 May 2022 — The Tricontinental
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Tings Chak
tings@thetricontinental.org
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a new dossier on the legacy of the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art eight decades later.
On 2 May 1942, hundreds of China’s top writers, artists, and communist leaders gathered to discuss the most urgent cultural questions of the time. Dossier no. 52, Go to Yan’an! Culture and National Liberation, explores the history and enduring legacy of the three-week forum as well as the text that Mao Zedong published the following year summarising the fruit that it bore, entitled Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Why did tens of thousands of artists and writers make the long journey to the remote city of Yan’an, what were the intellectual debates of the time, and how did the cultural developments help bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution?
NATO and Africa: A Relationship of Colonial Violence and Structural White Supremacy
Friday, 25 February 2022 — Internationalist 360°
French Military Bases in Africa (Click to enlarge)
NATO is the means of continuing colonial aggressions against African countries.
The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property
Monday, 14 February 2022 — Caitlin Johnson
Listen to a reading of this article:
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The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”
Why Comparing Chinese Africa Investment to Western Colonialism Is No Joke
Monday, 31 January 2021 — FAIR
Trevor Noah (Daily Show, 12/16/21)
“Why China Is in Africa” (12/16/21) is a question Trevor Noah took up last month for Comedy Central‘s Daily Show. As with many of the topics taken up by the Daily Show, the issue is no joke: China has a large and growing economic presence in many African countries. The China/Africa deals cry out for analysis: Are they different from the deals on offer from Western countries like the US, Britain or France?
Africa was at the centre of Lenin’s work
27 January 2022 — Review of African Political Economy
By ROAPE
Marxism, we are told, is Eurocentric and has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars and activists. Some have even denounced Marxism as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa. Vladimir Lenin is implicated in this critique. In a far-reaching study of Lenin’s ideas, Joe Pateman argues Lenin placed Africa at the centre of his analysis of imperialism and contemporary capitalism. Here, the author reflects on the key aspects of his analysis. Following this, Pateman’s full article in the ROAPE journal can be accessed for free.
By Joe Pateman
Probing the depths of the CIA’s misdeeds in Africa
Saturday, 8 January 2022 — Africa is a Country
- By
- Alex Park
The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?
Woman walks by the rather large vibrant mural dedicated to Patrice Lumumba, political leader who brought freedom to the Congo, in L.A.’s Leimert Park. Photo credit Joey Zanotti via Flickr CC BY 2.0.
In 1958, a year after it achieved independence from colonial rule, Ghana hosted a conference of African leaders, the first such gathering to ever take place on the continent. At the invitation of Ghana’s newly elected prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, more than 300 leaders from 28 territories across Africa attended, including Patrice Lumumba of the still-Belgian Congo and Frantz Fanon, who was then living in still-French Algeria. It was a time of unlimited potential for a group of people determined to chart a new course for their homelands. But the host wanted his guests not to forget the dangers ahead of them. “Do not let us also forget that colonialism and imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise—not necessarily from Europe.”
Neocolonialism haunts Horn of Africa
5 January 2022 — Indian Punchline
Ethiopian troops vanquish US-backed Tigray rebels (File photo)
Chinese foreign ministers have traditionally marked the new year by visiting the African continent. Wang Yi’s 2022 African tour begins with Eritrea against the backdrop of the US strategy in the Horn of Africa to gain control of the strategically vital Red Sea that connects Indian Ocean with the Suez Canal.
Russia’s shadows in Sahel region
29 December 2021 — Indian Punchline
Tailors busy stitching Russian flags to meet rising demand in Bamako, the capital of Mali, December 26, 2021
On Friday, Mali’s transitional government has clarified that it is engaged with Russian military trainers even as French troops are drawing down. So, it is official that Russian security personnel are deployed to Mali.
Africa Has 17.46% of World’s Population, Only 3% of World’s COVID Deaths. Scientists Want to Know Why
7 December 2021 — Mercola
As health experts look at global statistics, they have been stymied by the low rate of infection and death across the sub-Saharan African continent, compared to industrialized nations that used various lockdown procedures to contain the spread.
Story at-a-glance:
- Scientists appear stymied by the low number of infections and deaths in sub-Saharan Africa where the vaccination rate is less than 6%.
- Africa has 17.46% of the world’s population and 3% of the COVID-19 global death toll while countries with better health care have higher death rates, including the Americas with 46% and Europe with 29%.
- Nigeria, with the highest population, has had 3,000 deaths in 200 million people, which is what is recorded in the U.S. every two or three days. Yet, Nigeria has announced an all-out vaccination program to “prepare for the next wave.”
- Factors that may have influenced the low infection and death rate are outdoor living that raises vitamin D levels, a younger population and access to medications and herbs used for other local conditions, but which are also known to reduce the severity of COVID.
Biden Demands Ethiopia’s Unconditional Surrender
20 October 2021 — Internationalist 360°
President Joe Biden continues to play the cluelessly racist and paternalistic Ugly American in the Horn of Africa.
Under his leadership, the US has been at war with Ethiopia since last November, when its former puppet, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, attacked a federal Ethiopian army base in Mekelle, the capital of the country’s Tigray Region. Tigrayans are only 6% of Ethiopia’s population, but the TPLF ruled the whole nation with an iron fist from 1991 to 2018, when popular uprisings forced them from power.
What Is France Hiding in the Sahel?
10 November 2021 — MintPress News
France’s Imperial Maneuvers
Reexamining and recalibrating its foreign policy towards Africa is something that may not appeal to France right now but it’s something that must be done.
BAMAKO, MALI — On the 8th of October, Choguel Maïga, the prime minister of Mali, boldly informed the world that its former colonial power, France, was sponsoring terrorists in the country’s northern region. Standing before dozens of cameras and microphones, he provided details on how the French army had established an enclave in the northern town of Tidal and handed it over to well-known terrorist groups. The revelation was shocking not simply for the serious nature of the accusation but because in past times West African leaders have rarely sparred so openly with the French government. A chain of events simmering in the background for weeks triggered the latest spat.
Bill Gates and the Uncertain Future of Food Security
30 October 2021 — Off Guardian
Dustin Broadbery
As we approach a winter of discontent and Global food systems go from bad to worse, there’s trouble in paradise.
At the root of these problems, Government responses to COVID-19 have contributed to a six-fold increase in famine-like conditions as global supply chains collapse, and field trials for gene-edited crops and farm animals begin in the UK.
Gaslighting 1.1 Billion Africans
15 October 2021 — Consortium News
It is generally easier for countries that offer development finance for energy projects to make low-carbon rules for others, not for themselves, write Benjamin Attia and Morgan Bazilian.
The majority of the Congolese population doesn’t have access to electricity. (Eduardo Soteras, AFP via Getty Images)
By Benjamin Attia and Morgan Bazilian
Today’s global energy inequities are staggering.
Video gamers in California consume more electricity than entire nations. The average Tanzanian used only one-sixth the electricity consumed by a typical American refrigerator in 2014.
‘The Demonization Was Meant to Pacify Readers to Accept the Brutality’
22 September 2021 — FAIR
Janine Jackson interviewed Milton Allimadi about New York Times coverage of Africa for the September 17, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times Magazine (4/18/93)
Janine Jackson: Benighted. Backward. Tribal. Corrupt. Inherently violent, yet somehow also docile unto imbecility.
Listeners will be familiar with the imagery that corporate media have long used to talk about Africa and Africans. Not just tabloids that blare their racism in crude cartoons–elite media have been key in promoting the narrative in which Europeans represent civilization, which they feel moved to provide, on their own terms naturally, to Africans that could never otherwise attain it.
Imperialism and its discontents
20 August 2021 — New Frame
The United States has wreaked destruction across the planet and bringing an end to its reign of terror is urgent. But an organisation such as the Taliban offers only new forms of oppression.
Circa 1915: American naval officers and marines from the USS Washington come ashore for the capture of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. (Photograph by Getty Images)
On the night of 14 August 1791, enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the 230th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people. The count of the lives lost stood at 1 941 at the time of writing, with around 10 000 more injured. The following day, the Taliban took the city of Kabul and thereby control of Afghanistan.
Marxism in Africa (1975)
6 August 2021 — RedSails.org
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, acquired his doctorate in England at the age of 24, and then traveled widely in the Caribbean and Africa.
In 1972 he published his legendary work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
He was assassinated via a car-bomb in Georgetown in 1980, and the crime is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Forbes Burnham, the president of Guyana at the time.
Rodney gave this speech at Queen’s College in New York, USA in 1975. [1]
The New Dark Age 