“Enormous sacrifices made in the protracted and often brutal anti-colonial resistance wars are now coming to naught.”
“If you saw some of the things that I see through intelligence -- what’s going on in Africa -- it is so sad, it is so vicious and violent -- and we want peace. We want peace for Africa. We want peace all over the world.” Thus declares the self-styled angel of peace, Donald Trump, who pulled the rug from under the Iran nuclear deal on tacit orders from Israel, despite his skepticismabout Israel’s desire for peace with Palestinians. The bigot-in-chief who once called African nations s***hole countriesalong with Haiti and Guatemala, has spoken. To uphold his barefaced racism, Trump made no secret of his desire to have more (White) immigrants from countries like Norway, whose citizens made it clear they were not interested in migrating to the US. Surprise, surprise, butmore Americansmigrated to Norway in 2016 than Norwegians moving in the other direction. Norway must be desperately short of “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Trump’s duplicitous longing for peace and the containment of violence in Africa is hardly borne by his reckless bombing of civilians in Syria to “protect” them from Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his own people, a fabrication that enjoys the same level of credibility as the WMD lie that was used to invade and destroy Iraq. Rampant gun violence, his country boasting of 64% of the world’s serial killersand routine mass shootings in his backyard do not figure in his reckoning on violence while contemplating his peace-seeking mission in faraway Africa. His unabashed yearnings stand in sharp contrast to American arms and military hardware worth billions of dollars sold to adversaries in the Persian Gulf -- Saudi Arabia ($110 billion) and Qatar ($12 billion) and the carte blanch supply of US arms and taxpayer dollars to Zionist Israel. Thanks to American death merchandise, mass murder and mayhem is being rained on civilians in Yemen by Saudi Arabia and fellow medieval Gulf monarchical serfs. Through no small coincidence, such royalty presiding over bastions of democracy are America’s staunch allies. And lapdogs. Peace indeed!
“Trump’s unabashed yearnings stand in sharp contrast to American arms and military hardware to adversaries in the Persian Gulf.”
Thousands of ex-apartheid petitionerscalled on Trump to "take the steps necessary to initiate an emergency immigration plan allowing white Boers to come to the United States…" in the wake of an impending South African constitutional amendment that would allow land to be stripped from White farmers and handed to Black Africans. South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate, Bishop Desmond Tutu, would hardly be the ideal candidate for the petitioners to request that he use his good offices to reverse such measures. It had to be Trump. It takes one to know one.
Australia was another country where such sentiments for White farmers found sympathy. Some shared values and empathy here from countries that decimated their native populations. Fancy Palestinians calling on Trump to stop open-ended military aid to Israel where American weapons are used to kill unarmed protesters and the dispossession of Palestinians of their lands has become a norm. Trump’s reserves of empathy and a desire for peace in Africa naturally become exhausted when it comes to the deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of trigger-happy racist cops.
Trump's concern for the welfare of Africans is matched by his ignorance of the continent, where he once invented a country, “Nambia”, an improbable hybrid between the far-flung, culturally and linguistically distinct African countries of Namibia and Gambia. But who really gives a damn? All s***hole countries are alike. The presence of some 5,000 American military personnel(in all likelihood a gross under estimation, given the secrecy of the project “AFRICOM”, a pet US creation) in some 52 of 54 countries of the continent is priming the continent’s complicity in Africa’s transition from classical colonialism to its modern equivalent, neo-colonialism. It is political retrogression with the detached collusion of many African countries themselves. Both projects target the continent’s natural resources including oil and vast mineral resources. Add that to the creation of yet another market for American arms to be used in the War on Terror and the repackaging of colonialism.
“Trump’s reserves of empathy and a desire for peace in Africa naturally become exhausted when it comes to the deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of trigger-happy racist cops.
US legislators had been completely kept out of the AFRICOM loop until 4 US Special Forces troops were killed in Niger and one in Somalia. The planned military scams provided a perfect rationale and cover, among others, for NATO’s vicious whacking of Gaddafi, to borrow lexicon from the mobster community. Soon after ousting the monarchy, Gaddafi closed the giant (20 square miles) Wheelus air base in Libya, then the largest US foreign military base. Hilary Clinton could not resist gleefully celebrating the gruesome death of Gaddafi with her infamous words “We came, we saw, he died.” Libya is one of the countries currently with an active American military presence. Naturally.
The smooth-talking Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, whose net worthis said to be about $250 million, complete with luxury properties in a posh London neighborhood, comes with an impeccable King’s English accent. An accomplished orator, he passionatelyarguedagainst Western aid and handouts to his country stating that the aid was as harmful to the donors as it was to recipients. “We do not want to remain the beggars of the world,” he asserted in a speech to the RoyalAfrican Society, based in London. Bear in mind the lecture was not delivered to the African Union, not to member states of the Economic Community of West African States in Monrovia, Liberia, not to a graduation ceremony in an African university, nor during a state visit to any African country. His impassioned speech scorning dependency, was meant to impress, but flying squarely in the face of a recently concluded military agreementbetween Ghana and the US (you guessed wrong if you thought Boko Haram was Ghanaian). Some feeble backtracking and denials issued in response to protestsby thousands of Ghanaians came a little late. The dependency die had been cast.
The situation in Africa is now so dire that if a new neo-colonial map were to be superimposed on the old map of the colonies delineated in the Berlin conference -- the Scramble for Africa -- in the 19thcentury, any resulting incongruities would be purely coincidental. Save for wantaway states like Eritrea, Somaliland and South Sudan. A new scramble for Africa is under way and being inaugurated without the pomp and circumstance of conferences under the auspices of aspiring Western imperial nations.
“These “collaborations” require African militaries to completely surrender command to AFRICOM.”
Post-apartheid South Africa, one African country that was initially hostile to AFRICOM’s establishment, has now fallen prey to this scam. A country whose apartheid era nuclear program was dismantled with the demise of apartheid rule, now happily allows US nuclear submarines to dock in “training exercises” in what is ostensibly branded a “theater of security cooperation.” This piece of lexical bullshit falsely creates the impression that equal partners are at work. Contrast this to the reality that these “collaborations” require African militaries to completely surrender command to AFRICOM -- i.e. the US.The new Scramble for Africa has found willing African lackeys to go along with an unprecedented betrayal now under way. Swiftly and surely. Enormous sacrifices made in the protracted and often brutal anti-colonial resistance wars are now coming to naught. The US had adopted a hostile stance toward African liberation movements during the resistance era and later openly backed tyrants.
Only history will tell if the colonial-neocolonial transition can be halted. Uncommon creativity and public commitment will be called upon to re-launch another front to reverse this tragic south-bound trend. A daunting task indeed. Any armed resistance will likely be aborted by resorting to the handy pretext of “terrorism,” a term that is effectively ending the classical methods employed to rid Africa of colonial and settler rule. At least for now. Never mind that the purported harbingers of freedom, democracy and human rights located in Washington, Paris and London are the most ruthless purveyors of terror and violence in their varied manifestations: political, military, economic or cultural. Emerging African ideologues with a desire to consolidate political independence will be swiftly incarcerated or simply “disappeared” and foot soldiers brutally dispatched. The challenges will be very, very daunting. And that’s putting it mildly.
Dr. Kweli Nzito is a retired scientist now living in the Philippines.
The idea that a reverse migration to the south is a route to greater political power should be treated with skepticism.
Richard and Roberto would like to dedicate this feature to Glen Ford, one of the fiercest critics of U.S. corporate media the country has ever known.
The U.S. has twice kidnapped Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.
Conspiracy laws, RICO statutes and "gang" designations are tools of police and prosecutorial misconduct and the maintenance of the mass incarceration state.
