An article in the June 2006 issue of Monthly Review sheds light on the increasing attention U.S. policymakers are paying to Africa. “A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy,” by sociology professor and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, puts the new focus on Africa in the context of the inherent drive of imperialist powers to divide and re-divide the world’s markets and resources.
 U.S. soldiers train in the Pentagon’s largest African base in Djibouti, January 2003. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein |
“The U.S. military is now truly global in its operations, with permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil,” Bellamy writes.
The article documents the growing U.S. military presence in Africa, with a major military base in Djibouti in the eastern Horn of Africa and forward-operating bases in five other countries. In western and northern Africa, the Flintlock 2005 exercise involved 1,000 U.S. elite Special Forces troops.
Bellamy cites the fact that “the U.S. military’s Europe Command [which oversees the Pentagon’s Africa operations—Ed.] now devotes 70 percent of its time to African affairs, up from almost nothing as recently as 2003.”
What is at stake in this growing U.S. military presence, according to the article, is the increased exploitation of Africa’s huge oil reserves. Bellamy cites projections that up to 25 percent of U.S. oil imports will be from the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa by the year 2015. He quotes Richard Haass, a chief spokesperson and Middle East policymaker for the Bush I regime during the first Gulf War and now president of the think tank Council on Foreign Relations: “By the end of the decade, sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be as important a source of U.S. energy imports as the Middle East.”
Who will control access to Africa’s vast energy supply is part of what Bellamy calls the “new scramble for Africa.” The expanded U.S. military and corporate presence is directed against competing European imperialist powers, although he notes “militarily, they are working closely with the United States to secure Western imperial control of the region.”
The real worry for U.S. strategists, Bellamy argues, is China. China’s economy is the fastest growing in the world, and it is cultivating extensive economic ties throughout the continent. He quotes the 2005 Council on Foreign Relations report, “More than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa”: “The United States and Europe can no longer consider Africa their chass gardé [private hunting ground].”
Bellamy puts the new U.S. drive into Africa within the context of the inherent imperialist drive for markets and resources. He points out, as Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin noted in 1916, that this capitalist drive for profit leads inevitably toward war.
 Jomo Kenyatta, first president of independent Kenya. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images |
What Bellamy does not consider in his article is how this new context impacts the African anti-imperialist struggle for liberation.
China’s solidarity with Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, has been under severe U.S. and European economic pressure for the past decade. Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who has led the country since liberation from white racist rule in 1980, has been vilified as a tyrant.
What are the crimes of Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front government he leads? The government has been moving steadily toward redistributing land to the Black peasants, seizing it from the white landowning elite.
The imperialist powers, led by the United States and Zimbabwe’s former colonial power Britain, have responded by economically isolating Zimbabwe. Loans from Western banks have dried up. This has generated real hardships for Zimbabwe’s 12 million people.
It would be difficult for any government, even one with such deep roots in the country’s liberation struggle, to withstand the pressure. They have done so largely with the aid of China.
“Skepticism Pervades China Trade Finance Deals with Zimbabwe,” read a headline in the June 28 Financial Times. The article discusses China’s announcement of a $1.3 billion investment in Zimbabwe.
It reports “in 1998, China ranked only 11th in Harare’s roll call of importers. Now it accounts for 6 percent of Zimbabwe’s imports,” making China the country’s second-largest supplier of imported goods.
“We have participated in economic cooperation with Africa on the principles of equality and mutual benefit,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu told the Times. “We are trying to expand imports of goods from Africa.”
That is no small pledge. Imperialist trade relations with African countries have been characterized by extracting raw materials like oil and minerals, then forcing them to buy back refined goods at elevated prices.
It is not just Zimbabwe that is benefiting from Chinese aid and cooperation. Sudan, Angola and the Congo are also building stronger partnerships with China.
Independent development for Africa
Almost the entire African continent was colonized by and controlled by European imperialist powers until the end of World War II. It was a brutal legacy that came on top of the genocidal slave trade of the prior centuries.
But with the vast expansion of the socialist camp in Europe and the Chinese and Korean revolutions in Asia, the clamor for independence in Africa grew louder and louder. Leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Sekou Toure in Guinea and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya were at the head of strong national liberation movements.
By the mid-1950s, many African countries achieved political independence from their former colonial masters. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, one African nation after another won their independence.
The question for African revolutionaries then was how to overcome the past colonial oppression and develop their countries free of colonial or imperial intervention. For the centuries that capitalism had underdeveloped Africa, the colonies were denied the best and newest technologies. When technology was present, it was in the hands of whites from the oppressor countries who knew how to control it. Native industry was ignored in favor of intensive mining and farming.
In short, Africa did not experience the same bourgeois capitalist development that the imperialist world experienced. Africa’s economic growth was prematurely stunted by colonial occupation.
So the first question facing the new African nations and liberation movements was how best to economically develop. U.S., British and French imperialism aimed to keep African nations in bondage. They aimed to turn these nations into de facto colonies.
The great majority of African freedom fighters recognized this trend. They understood that it was capitalism that had kept them underdeveloped in the first place. Many of the nations set out to develop their economies using socialist principles of state intervention and economic planning.
The newly liberated countries could count on the support of the socialist camp—the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries—for both material aid and technical support. That included sending tractors and helping to build factories and generators. Thousands of Africans studied at universities in the socialist countries free of charge.
The socialist countries also provided critical military support for countries and movements that were under constant attack by U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries.
The collapse of the socialist camp had a severe impact on the independent African countries. It set the stage for the latest round of imperialist penetration of the continent.
The only recourse for most was to rely on loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—loans that forced huge sums to be devoted to interest payments instead of addressing the poverty that millions of African face.
New basis for unity
The role China is playing does not signal any type of return to a revolutionary foreign policy on the part of the Chinese government. But it has given African nations breathing space. Loans and investment from China make it much easier to resist the forced restructuring of the economy and social safety net that is always a prerequisite to IMF and World Bank loans.
Despite the unfavorable world situation, the legacy of Nkrumah, Toure and Kenyatta continues to inspire millions who aspire to African unity and development on the basis of people’s needs.
Notably, organizers of an African Union summit in late June gave a prominent place to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution is facing many of the same challenges that the African continent is facing today. Its growing partnership with Bolivia and socialist Cuba is viewed around the world as an example of unity based on anti-imperialist solidarity.
On July 1, Chávez said, “Africa has everything to become a pole of world power in the 21st century. … Latin America and the Caribbean are equipped to become another pole.
“We should march together, Africa and Latin America, brother continents with the same roots,” Chávez noted. “Only together can we change the direction of the world.”
