Into the Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness depicts Africa as a continent of primordial darkness where savage impulses reign. Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, but The Vice Guide to Liberia presents a similarly brutal image of the Dark Continent, except that the darkness has crept out of the jungle into the dilapidated cities. This is not a really a travel guide, however; it is a deliberate search for degeneracy. Degeneracy is easy to find in Liberia, which is a particularly wretched place, even for Africa. It is a country where underage hookers sell their bodies for less than a dollar to feed their drug addictions, and where cannibal warlords transform themselves into evangelical preachers overnight. The film is reminiscent of a documentary made in the 1960s, Africa Addio. Both show aspects of Africa the West refuses to see, and suggest how difficult it is for Africans to manage a Western-style state. http://www.amren.com/features/2013/03/into-the-heart-of-darkness/#.UVDS-jC8MAo.email

Development or Exploitation Ahead for Africa

None of this will surprise observers of geopolitics in the age of the Global War of Terror. Nor will it surprise them to learn that Mali is Africa’s third largest gold producer, is thought to have a potential 5000 tons of uranium deposits, a wealth of mineral resources, and, of course, unexplored oil and gas fields. Nor will it be difficult for anyone to surmise why the hostages in Algeria were captured on an Algerian BP natural gas field. All of this is perfectly predictable because it corresponds in every degree to the mode of neocolonial resource exploitation in Africa, a paradigm that has been in full operation for decades and is gaining steam as the scramble for African resources heats up. As with every conflict, this resource war in Africa has two sides. On one side there are the neocolonialists of France, Britain, America and the NATO powers, with their pattern of propping up dictators and bombing countries to smithereens in order to insure their access to Africa’s vast mineral wealth. On the other side is China, the world’s second-largest economy and a country of 1.3 billion people that is in desperate need of an ever-expanding supply of resources to feed the gaping maw of its industrial production. In contrast to the NATO cronies, Beijing is hoping to secure long-term resource access not through the barrel of a gun, but by another time-test method: the greased handshake. http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/International_Forecaster_Weekly/Development_or_Exploitation_Ahead_for_Africa

Burn, Burn — Africa’s Afghanistan

One’s got to love the sound of a Frenchman’s Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like… a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce. Apparently, it’s a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people – with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years – in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb. http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/OA19Dj02.html

Pentagon Announces Troop Deployment in 35 African Nations

The Pentagon currently has plans for over 100 military and training exercises across Africa as part of its touted Africom effort. The “carefully calibrated” plan to move into Africa was announced in 2007 despite “misgivings across the continent that it could spawn American bases or create the perception of an undue U.S. military influence there,” according to the AP. http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-announces-troop-deployment-in-35-african-nations/

Obama’s Scramble for Africa

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.” In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make. They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-turse/obamas-scramble-for-afric_b_1667926.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

The Recolonization of Africa

In a sense Africa is simply reverting to type. Prior to the colonial era most Africans lived in rural fiefdoms commanded by chiefs who ruled on a whim with absolute and savage power. There were no courts to speak of, no elections, few property rights, and little protection of the individual. Freedom was a foreign concept. European colonials in some cases halted and in others merely constrained this process, but they at least introduced variable degrees of order. This has dissipated. The answer to Africa’s gloom is obvious: Reinstate the rule of law through intervention that leads to effective governance. We now know that African leaders, no matter how much financial assistance is provided, are seldom capable of this endeavor, so it has to come from outside. http://takimag.com/article/recolonizing_the_dark_continent_hannes_wessels/print#axzz1wluiJjM3

New U.S. War in Africa Indicates a Shift Into the Shadows

U.S. military intervention is now spanning much of the dark continent, and is all about dictators, drones, CIA, and JSOC. http://news.antiwar.com/2011/11/03/war-in-africa-indicates-a-shift-into-the-shadows/

The Sun Never Sets on the U.S. Military

Once again, President Obama has ordered U.S. soldiers into harm’s way unnecessarily. Last week, he quietly told the U.S. Congress that he had sent 100 U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers into Uganda to help governments in central Africa fight a rebel army that’s been rampaging through the region for more than 20 years. This is the way the Vietnam War started, with U.S. special forces sent to “assist” a barely democratic government cope with a guerrilla war and a president promising they would not be going into combat. Ten years later, with more than 58,000 American lives and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives lost, we had learned a brutal lesson – war is too easily escalated by those who do not have to fight or die. Now, the president seems determined to repeat history, rather than learn from America’s past. http://original.antiwar.com/lee-wrights/2011/10/21/the-sun-never-sets-on-the-us-military/

The Son of Africa Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels

For more than a decade the U.S. has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the U.S. National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world. That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29461.htm

Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa

Two Belgians traveled through the former Belgian Congo and posted their photos and observations on line. Here are some excerpts: “It is that old generation that longs back to the colonial time. They acknowledge there were a lot of problems in that period and that they were discriminated by the white coloniser. But at least they had a functional country. They had roads and schools. They had jobs and could buy supplies. And above all, there was stability. Now there is nothing but uncertainty . . . waiting for the next war to start. The first village we encountered seemed deserted at first, but as soon as we entered the village we saw people coming at us from all sides. They had machetes and sticks and were shouting. ‘Des Blancs. Argent!’—‘White people. Money!’ They were all over the place. This was not good! I floored it and sped out of the village. A rock hit the back of our car. What in gods name was that all about? Very few Congolese had made us feel welcome, but this was plain aggression! It scared the hell out of us. We passed another village, and once again a mob formed as soon as they heard us coming. Machetes flying round, racist slogans shouted. Once again we did not give them the chance to get near us and blasted out of the village. They tried following us. This was turning ugly, if we would get stuck here we would be in big trouble, these people did not want a chat!” http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2010/12/democratic_repu.php

‘Jungles and Savages’

Europeans had been colonizing America, Asia, and the antipodes for centuries before they set their sights on Africa. This was because the continent was so disease-ridden, and because the only useful things it produced—ivory and slaves—could be had by trade. Until the mid-nineteenth century the interior was as unknown to Europeans as the surface of the moon. With better medicine it became possible for at least a few hardy white men to tramp the jungle and survive, and once Europe began to take an interest in Africa it carved the whole continent into colonies and protectorates in a matter of a few decades. http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2010/10/jungles_and_sav.php

Foreigners Abandon South Africa’s World Cup

The World Cup is set to be a major financial disappointment for the host nation South Africa, after it became clear that international fans have decided to stay away and their tickets are being sold cheaply to South Africans.

Less than three weeks before kick-off on 11 June, South Africa’s revamped airports and spruced-up cities are staging an impressive show of readiness for the arrival of international fans – although now it seems there may be half a million fewer than expected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/may/23/world-cup-visitor-blow-to-south-africa

Publisher of “Tintin” Sued in Brussels by Congolese Man

THE intrepid boy reporter Tintin, or at least his publishers, have been charged with racism over the portrayal of Africans in the cartoon book Tintin in the Congo.

The civil case is being brought by a Brussels-based Congolese man who has for years tried to get the offending cartoon strip, created in the 1930s, pulled off the shelves.

http://www.thereporter.com.au/story/2010/05/05/tintin-facing-court-case-over-racism/

Obama to Increase Military Spending in Africa

Barack Obama

http://allafrica.com/stories/201004221053.html

Obama Expands Military Involvement in Africa

This growing U.S. military involvement in Africa reflects the fact that counterinsurgency has once again become one of the main elements of U.S. security strategy. Or, as a senior U.S. military officer assigned to Africom was quoted as saying in a recent article in the U.S. Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly, “We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting wacked. … We want Africans to go in.” http://original.antiwar.com/volman/2010/04/02/military-involvement-in-africa/

White South Africans Segregated into “Camps”

Sitting in a deck chair at a white South African squatter camp, Ann le Roux, 60, holds a yellowing photo from her daughter’s wedding day.

Taken not long after Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president in 1994, it shows Le Roux standing with her Afrikaans husband and their daughter outside their home in Melville, an upmarket Johannesburg neighborhood.

Sixteen years later, she lives in a caravan and a tent shared with seven other people, including her daughter and four grandchildren, at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans.

http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2010/03/26/hardship-deepens-for-south-africas-poor-whites/

Somalis: How They Get Here and Who’s Bringing ‘Em

Failed Harvest Deepens Zimbabwe’s Food Crisis

More than two million people in Zimbabwe, or close to one-fifth of the southern African country’s population, are in need of food aid, the Red Cross said Thursday.

The International Red Cross renewed its call for support for the region in a statement, saying an estimated 2.17 million people are in need of food aid, a number it says will rise on the back of an expected failed 2010 harvest.

http://news.sympatico.cbc.ca/World/ContentPosting.aspx?feedname=CBC-WORLD-V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=zimbabwe-food-crisis

Africom – Latest U.S. Bid to Recolonize Continent

Towards the end of last year, the U.S. government intensified its efforts to bring a permanent army to settle in Africa, dubbed the African Command (Africom) as a latest tool for the subtle recolonization of Africa. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24364.htm