The article below is an adaptation from a talk presented at the July 24 San Francisco branch meeting of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Africa has become a new focus of the imperialist powers’ inherent drive to divide and re-divide the world’s markets and resources. The strategic question of who will control Africa’s vast and expanding energy supplies lies at the heart of what many refer to as the “new scramble for Africa.”
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That document articulated and outlined a strategic orientation, urging greater extraction of oil across Africa, and encouraging the U.S. government to declare the Gulf of Guinea “an area of vital interest” to the United States.
The 2002 report states: “Official statistics indicate that 15.3 percent of U.S. oil imports come from Africa. … At 1.5 million barrels per day, the amount of West African oil flowing to the United States approximates or exceeds the volume of the U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia. … Recent significant discoveries have been made off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, Congo (Brazzaville) and Cote d’Ivoire, as well as in areas not traditionally associated with the Gulf of Guinea oil basin, such as South Africa, Namibia and Mauritania.” One congressperson attending the symposium reported that, of the 8 billion barrel oil finds in the world in 2001, 7 billion were off the coast of West Africa.
The report cites the National Intelligence Council, which “estimates that African oil imports to the United States will rise to 25 percent of total imports by 2015.” In fact, this has turned out to be an underestimate. African oil-producing countries, including those in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, already provide 24 percent of U.S. oil imports, outstripping the Middle East as a supplier to the United States.
To give an idea of the pace of Western monopolies’ penetration into Africa, consider that in 2000, Texas-based Exxon-Mobil’s operations in Africa accounted for almost zero percent of its total global production. Only eight years later, its holdings in Africa account for over 17 percent of its total global reserves. This trend accurately reflects what is going on with other Western oil companies in general.
Of all U.S.-Africa trade, 90 percent is in the oil, gas and mining industries. All of this trade is extractive, creating no value for those on whose land the resources lie.
The United States is interested in Africa’s natural resources not only for purposes of meeting its domestic needs, but also to keep them out of the hands of competing European imperialist powers. The U.S. government and other imperialists are united in combating growing Chinese ties with African countries. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, and has cultivated extensive ties throughout the continent.
China is primarily motivated by its national interests, but, unlike the imperialists, has no fundamental opposition to the independent economic development of its trade partners. Comparatively, China has become the trading partner of choice throughout Africa because its trade agreements do not come with the strings attached by Western financial institutions that hinder development and perpetuate economic dependence.
So how is the U.S. ruling class preparing to intervene given all of this? The ultimate instrument of imperialist domination, in the end, is violence or the threat of violence, for the simple reason that the imperialists enjoy vast advantages in the military arena.
One of the key recommendations made by the 2002 symposium, in addition to designating African oil a “national security priority” of the United States, was the establishment of a regional military command center with exclusive responsibility for Africa.
In 2002, the former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, located in the Horn of Africa, was transformed into a U.S. base. In February 2007, George W. Bush ordered the creation of AFRICOM, which centralizes all authority for the U.S. military operating in the African region under one command structure.
AFRICOM is currently headquartered in Germany, because every African country, with the exception of Liberia, rejected AFRICOM, vociferously characterizing it as a means to secure oil and nothing more. The Pentagon intends to establish a base on mainland Africa, and this may have been a consideration for Obama’s choice to visit Ghana over other sub-Saharan countries for his recent and much-publicized speech.
What is the White House’s orientation toward Africa?
Recently, the new assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, asserted that there would be no differences between Republicans and Democrats, because they are united on “African issues.” Mary C. Yates, AFRICOM deputy commander and former ambassador to Ghana, said that the difference between Obama and Bush would be one of “nuances,” not of substance.
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The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, is playing the “global war on terror” card to offer a rationale for bolstering the U.S. military presence in Africa. They talk a lot about building schools and digging wells for the people, but their real focus, for the time being, is to train and arm proxy military forces that can secure U.S. interests.
Proxy wars and covert wars shield government and Pentagon officials from public scrutiny. That extra layer of protection does not exist for direct military involvement. Washington has already employed the proxy war model in its military strategy in Africa.
1975 was the year of the overwhelming U.S. defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese people. It was also the year that Portuguese rule in the colonies of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea and Cape Verde collapsed, marking the demise of the last European colonial strongholds in Africa.
For the U.S. imperialists, the focal point of the so-called Cold War then shifted from Southeast Asia to Southern Africa, where it aimed to replace Portuguese colonialism with Western-sponsored neocolonialism. In this method of indirect rule, the imperialist action takes the form of creating or supporting a “local comprador class” that is controlled by or submissive to the ruling class of the dominating country.
Though the two models are different in form, they share imperialist dominance in their essence. Foreign control over their national productive forces remains in place. This means that U.S. imperialism is, by its very nature, hostile toward nationalist independence movements that seek to use domestic resources for national development.
The development of neocolonialism in newly “independent” African countries made clear to many African freedom fighters the necessity of a true socialist revolution if any real change was to happen. Support for newly liberated countries and independence movements was a priority for the socialist camp.
In a Tricontinental magazine interview published in 1968, Amilcar Cabral, a leader of the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism, stated: “We want to mention the special aid given to us by the peoples of the socialist countries. We believe that this aid is a historic obligation, because we consider that our struggle also constitutes a defense of socialist countries. And we want to say particularly that the Soviet Union, first of all, and China, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and other socialist countries continue to aid us. … We also want to lay special emphasis on the untiring efforts—sacrifices that we deeply appreciate—that the people of Cuba—a small country without great resources, one that is struggling against a blockade by the U.S. and other imperialists—are making to give effective aid to our struggle.”
Faced with the disintegration of the Portuguese empire, and determined to block any possibility of an independent or socialist African country, the United States implemented a strategy of proxy wars, covertly funding and arming counterrevolutionary groups in Angola and Mozambique. The racist South African apartheid regime, which played the same role in Southern Africa then as Israel plays for the United States in the Middle East today, sent its troops into Angola in October 1975 to smash the revolutionary movement.
The U.S.-sponsored invasion was defeated by late 1975 with the help of Cuban volunteers, dealing a remarkable and devastating blow to the South African racist regime. The Angolan victory inspired the youth of Soweto, South Africa, who took to the streets in an uprising only a few months later, marking the beginning of a new era of militant resistance to apartheid.
In Mozambique, the United States again partnered with apartheid South Africa to sponsor a terrorist counterinsurgency movement known as Renamo. This terrorist movement, which resembled the U.S.-backed contra forces mobilized against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, led to the murder of at least 10,000 people. In 1989, a U.N. study estimated that Mozambique suffered an economic loss of approximately $15 billion between 1980 and 1988, a figure 5.5 times its 1988 GDP.
Obama in Africa
Dismissing the historical context of colonial domination and U.S. interventions in Africa, which I have illustrated with only a few examples, Obama’s Ghana speech was largely a condescending lecture on democracy riddled with paternalistic statements. “With better governance, I have no doubt that Africa holds the promise of a broader base of prosperity,” said Obama. Washington, the best friend of Israeli apartheid and formerly of South African apartheid, is hardly qualified to be the examining board that awards marks for democracy internationally.
Nigerian lawyer and human rights attorney Femi Falana told reporters following Obama’s speech: “President Obama was in Egypt recently. Is Egypt a democratic country? President Mubarak has been in power since 1981. [Obama] was recently in Saudi Arabia, did they hold elections there? So you can’t use lack of democracy or free reign of corruption in Africa to excuse the connivance of the United States government or Western European countries, the connivance of these countries is the destruction of the economy of Africa.”
Obama hypocritically stated that Africa must recognize a “fundamental truth … development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient that has been missing in far too many places, for far too long.” Obama repeatedly said that his administration chose Ghana for his special address to sub-Saharan Africa, because it serves as a model for development and democracy.
In 1992, domestic poultry farmers in Ghana supplied 95 percent of the local market. By 2001, because U.S.- and European-subsidized chickens flooded the domestic market, local farmers’ share shrunk from 95 percent to 11 percent. Ghana’s rice and tomato industries have been devastated in the same way. Ghana was on the way to becoming self-sufficient in rice production in the 1970s and 1980s, but IMF-imposed structural adjustments halted farm subsidies. Now, Ghanaian rice farmers only produce 35 percent of domestic need. All of this is causing large numbers of displaced farmers to flock to urban areas searching for non-existent jobs.
In 2003, the Ghanaian parliament passed a law raising tariffs on imported chickens and other commodities to protect local farmers. The law was repealed after two months when the IMF, an institution in which the Ghanaian government has less than 0.5 percent of the vote, forced it to be revoked. The judicial and legislative process in Ghana was in essence overruled by the IMF, an unelected body dominated by foreign powers. This is the model of democracy and development backed by President Obama.
Obama’s focus on good governance and ending widespread corruption as a solution for centuries of underdevelopment begs the question: Even if every African country was run by a saint, would that keep more of Africa’s wealth from pouring out of the continent into the West? Would it erase the environmental damage caused by global warming, or have the slightest influence on the suffering caused by the worldwide economic crises, or by the sharp increase in food prices and the consequent spreading of hunger and starvation? As one writer put it, “Even a continent of Mandelas couldn’t reverse the damage done by destructive neoliberal policies that were imposed on African governments by the IMF and World Bank for the last 30 years.”
The victory of the anti-colonial struggles was an important step for African liberation, but imperialist intervention is far from being a thing of the past. The renewed and unified strategic outlook of the U.S. ruling class toward capturing the enormous energy and mineral wealth of Africa, and greatly expanding the military presence on the continent by arming and training proxy military forces, are developments that must be unconditionally opposed by progressive forces in the United States. Hands off Africa!
