A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Although China, India and other rising powers have eclipsed the U.S. as a trading partner with Africa, Washington’s military dominance over the continent grows by the day. At relatively little cost, the U.S. Africa Command has subverted the militaries of 53 African nations. The African Union, which was envisioned as an incubator of continental unity and collective defense, is a pitiful front for the U.S. war in Somalia.
Africa Re-Enslaves Itself
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The African Union has been transformed into a vassal of AFRICOM.”
Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of Ghana, will forever be remembered as a great Pan-Africanist whose goal was the establishment of a United States of Africa. Instead, in 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown by a United States-backed coup. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi assumed the presidency of the African Union in 2009, vowing to work towards a United States of Africa with “a single African military force, a single currency and a single passport,” so that Africans could “move freely around the continent." Two and a half years later, Gaddafi was overthrown and killed by forces backed by the United States. The 53-member African Union had stood by, seemingly helpless to halt the overthrow of a sovereign African state by the Euro-American war machine.
Fifty-five years after Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana won its independence, the military force that counts most in Africa is the United States. Increasingly, the African Union has been transformed into a vassal of AFRICOM – the U.S. Military Command on the continent. The war in Somalia, which now involves the whole of the Horn of Africa, is, on paper, an African Union military operation. But the AU is just a front for the U.S., which provides all the training, weapons, equipment – everything the 15,000 African soldiers from five different nations need except their salaries, which are paid for by the European Union and the United Nations. The recolonization of Africa is well underway, but it will not require a huge American or NATO occupation force. The nations of the African Union will provide the troops for their own subjugation.
The African Union pretends not to be a puppet of the United States, but even the Los Angeles Times
“The nations of the African Union will provide the troops for their own subjugation.”
That’s all most African armies are good for, now that 53 of the continent’s nations have become military partners with AFRICOM. African officers learn from Americans how to communicate with their troops, how to deploy them in the field, and what tactics are best for defense and attack. They train on American equipment, using American intelligence, and are probably indirectly paid by the Americans. Many of these militaries have closer ties to their American counterparts – to AFRICOM – than to their own governments. As a defense against U.S. aggression in Africa, these guys are quite useless. But they fit perfectly into President Obama’s calculation, that the American public has a great tolerance for war, as long as Americans are not the ones who are dying. By subordinating the African Union to the Pentagon’s purposes, Obama has made it possible for the U.S. to militarily dominate the continent, at very little political or economic cost. Essentially, the Africans are being paid to kill and enslave themselves.
Come to think of it, we’ve heard that story, before.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
Rawan Masri joins us to talk about events in Palestine, and her recent visit to South Africa when South Africa filed its charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
El Jones joins us from Canada to discuss the censorship and criminalization of pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist opinions and the challenges she and others faced having their…
We are joined by Melanie Dominguez, lead organizer for the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice in New York. She explains the importance of two new important pieces of legislation to the…
The Democrats offer nothing but fake opposition and the duopoly is splitting. The chosen Black spokespeople are predictably hacks who get paid to spout meaningless drivel.
A 1975 “Declaration Against Imperialism” provides a blueprint for the anti-imperialist Black Studies of the future.
