The Obamas Do Africa | Black Agenda Report

The Obamas Do Africa

26 Jun 2013

🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

President Obama claims he’s off to Africa in search of trade. But the Chinese have eclipsed the U.S. in that arena by offering “far better terms of trade and investment than the Americans.” Obama talks trade for public consumption, while the U.S. military locks Africa in a cage of steel.

The Obamas Do Africa

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“The U.S. is not in the business of fair and mutually beneficial trade – it’s about the business of imperialism.”

The President and his family are spending a week in sub-Saharan Africa, with Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa on the itinerary. The focus of the trip, if you believe the White House, is trade, an arena in which the United States has been eclipsed by China since 2009. China, by some measurements, now does nearly twice as much business with Africa as the U.S., and the gap is growing. It is now commonly accepted that the Chinese offer far better terms of trade and investment than the Americans, that they create more jobs for Africans, and their investments leave behind infrastructure that can enrich their African trading partners in the long haul.

No one expects Obama to offer anything on this trip that will reverse America’s declining share of the African market. That’s because the U.S. is not in the business of fair and mutually beneficial trade – it’s about the business of imperialism, which is another matter, entirely. The Americans ensure their access to African natural resources through the barrel of a gun.

So, while the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians and other economic powerhouses play by the rules of give and take, the U.S. tightens its military grip on the continent through its ever-expanding military command, AFRICOM.

To justify its rapid militarization of Africa, Washington plunges whole regions of the continent into chaos. U.S. policies, under presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, have utterly destroyed Somalia, made the Horn of Africa a theater of war, drawn the northern tier of the continent into America’s cauldron of terror, and killed six million people in the eastern Congo.

“The Americans ensure their access to African natural resources through the barrel of a gun.”

The face of America in Africa is war, not trade; extraction of minerals by military intimidation, not conventional commerce. Washington’s priority is to embed AFRICOM ever deeper into the militaries of African states – rather than configuring more favorable trade relationships on the continent. But you won’t learn that from the U.S. corporate media, which chooses to focus on the $100 million cost of Obama’s African trip, or to look for human interest angles on Obama’s decision not to touch down in his father’s homeland, Kenya. However, even that angle is too sinister for deeper exploration by the corporate press, because Kenya’s absence from the itinerary is meant as a threat.

The United States is angry because Washington wanted the Kenyan people to elect a different president, one more acceptable to U.S. policymakers. The Americans expected the whole of Kenyan civil society to bend to Washington’s will, and reject the candidacy of Uhuru Kenyatta, simply to please the superpower. When that didn’t happen, it was decided that Kenya must be shunned, despite its past services to U.S. imperialism.

Skipping Kenya was a warning that more serious repercussions may lurk in the future – which is a potent threat, because the U.S. controls most of the guns of Africa. As the U.S.-backed warlord in Somalia said in Jeremy Scahill’s excellent film The Dirty War, “The Americans are masters of war.” War, and the threat of war, is the reality behind every U.S. presidential visit, to Africa and everywhere else. Whether the terms of trade are good or bad, the declining U.S. empire will get access to the resources it needs, or thousands – millions! – will die.

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.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20130626_gf_ObamaInAfrica.mp3

More Stories

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns
05 Apr 2023
If democrats were smart, Donald Trump would be a disgraced former president, forgotten by all but his most ardent admirers. But they aren't smart and they may have given him a political resurrection.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
ESSAY: New Creation or Familiar Death? An Open Letter to Black Students in the North: Vincent Harding, 1969
05 Apr 2023
Vincent Harding’s reflections on the expansion of Black Studies in the 1960s offers an ominous warning on the hiring of Black faculty and administrators today.
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
US Uses Rusesabagina’s Release to Whitewash Its Decades of Support for the Kagame Regime
05 Apr 2023
Paul Rusesabagina is free after being kidnapped and taken to Rwanda in 2020. The US claims credit for pressuring Rwanda to release him, hoping to distract the world from its decades of support for…
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
U.S. Push to Strip China's Developing Country Status an Attack on Development Itself
05 Apr 2023
The U.S. attempt to diminish China's economic success is a bipartisan project, and a unanimous congressional vote to strip China of developing nation status is just the latest act in the…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Whoppers of Boss Tweet...
05 Apr 2023
Whoppers of Boss Tweet…