The silent war on Africa
JOHN PILGER - Jul 07 2008 00:00
'Zimbabwe shows Africa is still in the despots' grip", said the headline
in the London Observer over an article by Keith Richburg.
"Thank God that I am an American," writes this former foreign editor of
the Wa****ngton Post: An African-American, Richburg says he is very
pleased he is not an African.
He reminds me of middle-class black Americans I met when I first
travelled in Africa. They were usually tourists looking for their roots
and in their behaviour, reactions and ignorance, they demonstrated how
quintessentially American they were. For them, Africa was another planet.
A decade ago, writes Richburg, Zimbabwe was "a humming economy" with
"impressive growth".
No, it was not. In 1998 Zimbabwe was a profoundly unequal society up to
its ears in debt, with the International Monetary Fund waging war on its
economy, waving off investors and freezing loans.
Moving his gaze north, Richburg describes Somalia as a "failed state" --
a term Western governments like to use -- while saying nothing about how
this oil-rich country was manipulated and abused by Wa****ngton during
the Cold War.
He mentions only in passing the role of the US and the "international
community" as "enablers" in backing Ethiopia's current bloody invasion
of Somalia.
It is not surprising he tells us his hero is Barack Obama who, far from
defying "conventional wisdom about race in America", as Richburg credits
him, almost every day falls in with conventional, white cor****ate wisdom.
Richburg's view of Africa is from the same conventional, white cor****ate
wisdom. That Mugabe is an appalling tyrant is beyond all doubt; yet
there is a subtext to the overly enthusiastic condemnation of him by the
"international community", notably in Europe. "Unacceptable!" says
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, having personally distinguished the
campaign to morally rehabilitate the concept of empire.
"The days of Britain having to apologise for the British Empire are
over," said Brown not long ago.
"We should celebrate." And what better way to celebrate than with highly
selective condemnation of uppity despots like Mugabe while fawning
before equally awful despots such as the Saudi Royal family?
If nothing else, Mugabe has provided retrospective justification for the
glory days. And perhaps his greatest crime is having slipped the leash.
After all, both despots and democrats in Africa provide an essential
service, or as Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, "the
transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though
camouflaged. [They are] quite content with the role of the Western
bourgeoisie's business agent." Those who refuse the role of business
agent have often paid with their lives: from Patrice Lumumba to Amilcar
Cabral, Ken Saro-Wiwa to Chris Hani.
The wanton underdevelopment of Africa hardly makes headlines, yet its
victims outnumber those of Mugabe many times over.
Once known as neo-colonialism, it began more than half a century ago
with the rise of European federalism. "It can be argued," wrote Dan
Kashagama of the African Unification Front, "that the control of Africa
was central to the creation of the EU and its forerunners
"The six founder members of the EU could not maintain their economies
without "association" with the colonial territories In other words,
Africa would never be allowed to have democratic economic choices
Europe would decide what kind of economy Africans were to build. Africa
was to supply Europe's needs "
I recommend a succinct analysis by Africa's Roman Catholic bishops of
why 300-million Africans live on less than a dollar a day.
Their list is as follows: "huge crippling debts" mostly to Europe; an
"iniquitous" and "atrociously immoral" system that keeps prices for
African raw materials artificially low while those for rich-world
ex****ts continue to rise; the desecration of the African environment by
Western cor****ations; the withholding by European banks of wealth looted
by deposed and dead dictators; colonial interventions by European powers
on the side of armed factions; and a devastating arms trade.
While the British government claims it leads the world in the "fight
against poverty" it is the major arms merchant to 10 out of 14
conflict-racked African countries.
In South Africa, the Mbeki government has been suckered by British arms
companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at #17-million each, "by far
the most expensive option", according to a House of Commons re****t.
Brown, together with his EU partners, is currently demanding free trade
deals that will destroy whole African industries, such as Ghana's once
thriving tomato canning industry. "Europe," says Gyekye Tanoh of the
Third World Network in Accra, "is gaining 80% of our markets in exchange
for what is effectively 2% of theirs."
None of this excuses the outrages of Mugabe. But look beyond the West's
whipping boy and mark the enduring outrage of an imperial past that
remains a war against Africa that Africans must win.
A warning from Mugabe to Mbeki
Why is Thabo Mbeki so soft on Mugabe? Is it simply loyalty to a past of
"joint struggle", as has been suggested? Here is a clue.
In September 2005, a study submitted to Parliament in Cape Town compared
the treatment of landless black farmers under apartheid and their
treatment today.
During the final decade of apartheid, 737 000 people were evicted from
white-owned farmland. In the first decade of democracy, 942 000 were
evicted. About half of those forcibly removed were children and about a
third were women.
A law intended to protect these people and put an end to peonage, the
Security of Tenure Act was enacted by the Mandela government in 1997.
That year, Nelson Mandela told me: "We have done something
revolutionary, for which we have received no credit at all.
There is no country where labour tenants have been given the security we
have given them where a farmer cannot just dismiss them."
The law proved a sham. Most evictions never reached the courts and
bitterness among black farm workers has grown inexorably and so too has
the whole question of land, actual and symbolic. When the ANC came to
power in 1994, the "priority" of land restitution was allocated 0,3% of
the national budget. By 2005, it was still less than 1%.
When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki's second
term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe's
dictator a standing ovation. The embarrassment and message for Mbeki was
like a presence. "This was probably less an endorsement for Mugabe's
despotism," noted the writer Bryan Rostron, "than a symbolic expression
of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has
given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just come-uppance."
It was also a warning.
Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address:
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-07-the-silent-war-on-africa
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop
uk
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