4-24-08, 11:23 am
No region of the world was so devastated by both commercial and industrial capitalism and the imperialisms they fostered than Africa. From the 16th to the 19th century, Africa was robbed of tens of millions of its people for the slave trade that European and later North American states used to enrich themselves by developing much of the Western Hemisphere with human chattel. This was followed by colonial empires which looted Africa of its natural resources and also condemned tens of millions of Africans to forced labor in mines and on plantations to pay feudal taxes that were imposed on them.
“Africa Arises,' chapter six of Gerald Horne’s fine new book, Blows against Empire, looks at a different relationship between Africa and a new world power, the Peoples Republic of China. Along with a huge rise in trade relations and Chinese investments, China is working with Africans to build roads, to assist Ethiopia in constructing the continent’s largest dam, to aid Nigeria in developing a communications satellite system, and to introduce life saving anti-malarial drugs in Uganda.
While some critics may argue that the Chinese are doing what the European and U.S. colonial powers have done in the past, Chinese investments in projects to facilitate their gathering of resources, clearly aid African development in a direct way.
Horne looks at the positive role that China is playing in the Congo. By contrast, the U.S. through the CIA subverted the anti-colonial peoples revolution led by Patrice Lumumba at the end of the 1950s. CIA operatives and assisted in Lumumba’s murder and installed as its major African “asset” the brutal and corrupt Joseph Mobuto, whose dictatorship lasted three decades and was considered as one of the worst in the world.
Horne is not uncritical of China’s past support in the 1970s of adventurist and elements in Africa as part of its anti-Soviet stance and its subsequent “strategic alliance” with the U.S. But, whereas U.S. and European states hypocritically pose as defenders of “democracy” against governments like that of Zimbabwe (Horne reminds readers that it was China which supported Robert Mugabe in the 1970s against political rivals who had Soviet support), China has continued to develop economic relations with various African states that are helping Africans raise their standards of living and improve their overall quality of life.
The U.S. is not the only nation by any means involved in neo colonial activities in Africa. France. A large colonial power in Africa until the post WWII era, in a more direct way than the U.S. has its firms and “expatriates” working with local “allies” to control oil, bauxite, and other important resources. French military power is also around in a direct way to back up its firms. But Horne suggests that the “relative decline of U.S. imperialism – the locomotive of world imperialism – may be so significant that it will be unable to arrest the rise of Africa in league with China.”
Horne is at his best in this chapter in untangling the complex geopolitical manipulations of U.S. imperialism in Africa, from its continuing attempts to create a dangerous new Africa Command (AFRICOM) for the U.S. military on the continent to advance its imperialist interests, to its struggles to control oil resources to its attempts to undermine Chinese relationships with African nations in a wide variety of ways.
Horne also follows the money, showing how predatory “lenders” including U.S. GOP backers “buy up the debt of impoverished African countries from pennies and then force those countries to “renegotiate” under constitutions which give deepen their poverty and provide the ‘lenders’ with super profits.
He also shows how U.S. based pharmaceuticals have sought to deny HIV and other life saving drugs to poor African nations, where these diseases are epidemics, in order to retain their profit margins in the developed countries. Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization and the IMF continue to put the squeeze on African nations as they do on Latin American and other nations, limiting social sector development in education and other areas in order to foster “free markets” and “fiscal responsibility” (neo colonialism in what is a fairly crude form). Finally, American based big agribusiness firms are exploiting African land and in effect increasing hunger among its peoples.
All of this open plunder should make the critics of Chinese policy in Africa, along with those who selectively criticize the “human rights” abuses of some African states, take pause. Whatever contradictions may exist in China’s policy in Africa(which one might say is clearly one is seeking to develop resources for its own industries) its Communist leadership and revolutionary anti-imperialist traditions have kept it from engaging in the crude forms of exploitation that have characterized the Euro-American states for five centuries.
Horne concludes optimistically that the role of China in Africa along with possible role of India (which has, as a legacy of British imperialism, its own Diaspora on the continent) and the global Diaspora created by slavery and colonialism, especially the large African-American community, offers hope for both African liberation and global victories against U.S. imperialism.
Whether that, “the coming together of progressive Africans transnationally,” which Horne also sees as “a vindication of (W.E.B.) Du Bois vision” will occur remains unclear. But that it can occur and that all anti-imperialists should struggle to make it occur, not only for Africans but for Americans and all the world’s peoples, is clear.
