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Africa
Aug 15, 2013 19:10:10 GMT
Post by dodger on Aug 15, 2013 19:10:10 GMT
Defeated militarily and no longer able to extract wealth from Africa in the old colonial way, imperialism has turned to new forms of holding on to power: trade agreements, buying up resources, and aid are all tools of control...
Capitalism’s ruthlessness in Africa as it sucks the continent dry of resources.
WORKERS, MAY 2013 ISSUE
In 1961, the UN General Assembly passed the “Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”. After the dreadful spectacle of the imperialist Scramble for Africa (see April issue of Workers), it seemed that at last a new era was dawning for the continent. This declaration was a result of newly independent nations gaining UN membership and exercising their collective power through the General Assembly.
angola
Children in post-independence Angola – a country that fought for its independence.
Photo: Workers
Two years later, in 1963, the UN Special Committee on Decolonization was set up to oversee the implementation of the Declaration. That same year the Organisation of African Unity was established by those African countries that had won independence and by liberation movements from a number that were still colonies.
Unity
The OAU aimed to promote African unity, to defend the territorial integrity and independence of African countries, and to fight to eradicate all forms of colonialism. It was opposed to any outside interference in the internal affairs of African countries, took a neutral stand in the Cold War and called for respect of the artificial borders created by the colonial powers. The USSR, revolutionary Cuba and China had already committed their support, both financial and material, for colonial liberation movements around the world. So there was weight behind the liberation struggles.
But in Africa, the old colonial powers were not just going to roll over and die, and would not give up this continent with its wealth of resources and its cheap labour. They tried everything they could to keep control, even after independence.
The colonial powers tried to hand over power to leaders who would do their bidding, as Britain had done in Libya and Egypt. They tried ruthless suppression, as in Kenya. They tried post-independence sabotage as in Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique.
Britain had the Commonwealth to maintain its influence in newly independent nations, many of which had no indigenous infrastructure other than liberation movements and churches. They were going to need aid. But aid came only with strict conditions, and woe betide any country that was seen not to abide by those conditions – Zimbabwe a case in point.
France, which had tried to merge several West African territories into one to maintain its control, had somewhat similar arrangements with its Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.
Portugal, however, having no such mechanism, decided to fight every liberation movement that it was in conflict with. The advent to power in 1979 of Thatcher and in 1980 of US President Reagan saw a new approach.
The Portuguese had ruthlessly resisted all struggles by liberation movements in its resource-rich colonies, while Cuba and the USSR were actively supporting those movements. These wars precipitated a military coup in Portugal in 1975 by military officers tired of the war and its high Portuguese casualties. As a consequence, those colonies won their independence that year, and the new governments were friends of Cuba and the USSR.
Cold warriors
Reagan and Thatcher, the two Cold Warriors, vowed to reverse this. South Africa was already ahead of them in the game. It had invaded Angola, determined to get to Angola’s capital, Luanda, before the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which had led the liberation struggle, declared the independence of Angola.
South Africa not only tried to topple the MPLA government in Angola but along with Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime in Rhodesia was actively sabotaging Mozambique. Thatcher and Reagan put their weight behind the South Africans in order to cling on to this part of Africa.
Mozambique, independent in 1975 and led by Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), is a good example of how imperialism tried to regain control of a newly independent nation. Mozambique declared in its constitution that socialism was the nation’s objective. The government began to build schools and clinics.
Then it complied with UN sanctions on the white supremacist government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia and closed the so-called Beira corridor, which linked Rhodesia to the sea and had been Rhodesia’s lifeline. Smith’s government reacted by creating RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana – Mozambican National Resistance), an armed force that began destroying schools and clinics, killing doctors and teachers. This developed into a ruthless war.
When the Smith regime was replaced by ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and majority rule, South Africa stepped in to fund RENAMO which, by now, was destroying the country’s infrastructure. South African troops were directly involved.
Foreign intervention, coupled with drought, caused Mozambique to suffer what became known as the South African man-made famine: 200,000 starved to death while the death toll from the war reached 1 million.
Mozambique pleaded for food aid. The biggest donor was neighbouring Zimbabwe. The US, the biggest contributor to the World Food Programme, kept its food aid to a minimum. When the situation was so bad that Mozambique had no alternative, when even its President, Samora Machel, had been murdered by South Africa, it pleaded directly to the Americans.
The US agreed to provide food aid on certain conditions. 1) Mozambique and Frelimo must remove all reference to Socialism in their constitutions. 2) Frelimo must share power with RENAMO and, most importantly, 3) No aid to be handled or distributed by the government, but instead all aid must be distributed by NGOs.
This effectively removed all power from a government now totally dependent on aid, and handed power to NGOs, most of which were funded by USAID and run by Christian fundamentalist organisations. Mozambique was re-colonised by NGOs and the churches.
The South African-led war on Angola supported by Reagan and Thatcher was also ruthless. It’s another example of imperialism's determination to hold on to Africa. But Cuba was directly supporting Angola in many ways. The battle at Cuito Cuanavale in Southern Angola in 1987/8 (see workers.org.uk/features/feat_0710/angola.html) effectively marked the end of both the apartheid regime in South Africa and the colonialism defined by the Scramble for Africa of the 19th century.
There was no history of a working class in many African countries, and with the exception of South Africa, most economies were peasant agriculture. Many post-colonial countries were still dependent on big western companies exploiting their natural resources.
But EU and US industrial decline meant less demand there for many of the raw materials from Africa, while the demand from countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and India was rapidly growing, particularly from China. Is this neocolonialism? Given that the 19th-century Scramble for Africa was about finding resources and markets to satisfy the industrial revolution in Europe, the answer is possibly yes.
Infrastructure
But this time it’s not about sending armies and enslaving the native population. China builds infrastructure in the African countries it does business with instead of exchanging raw materials and commodities for cooking pots and beads. The Chinese build roads, railways, ports, airports, even houses and sports stadia. The African Cup of Nations football finals in Angola in 2010, for example, were only possible because China built all of the stadia. Imagine the Victorian capitalists doing this.
Yet there are Chinese hedge funds investing in Africa in exactly the same way as British or US hedge funds, so it is still capitalist exploitation. But EU and US holdings in Africa remain greater than China’s $200 billion worth of investment.
But what of the OAU? It was abolished in 2002 and replaced by the African Union (AU). The differences between the two are stark. The OAU declared that the old colonial boundaries should be respected. The AU says the opposite. The OAU declared that there should be no interference in a sovereign state’s internal affairs. The AU says the opposite. (Hence Chadian troops in Mali). The OAU was a collective of sovereign states. The AU has an African Parliament. The AU is modelling itself on the EU. There is even talk of a single currency.
But it’s not straightforward, because Africa is not the EU. In 2009, for example, Muammar Gaddafi, President of the AU at the time and President of Libya, proposed to the AU the establishment of the Gold Dinar. This implied that those African countries exporting oil should sell it for gold and not the US dollar, and that a currency across the continent should be based on gold. This would have revolutionised the relative value of African currencies at the expense of the US dollar.
Gaddafi offered the publicly owned Libyan State Central Bank as the driving force to set it up. Two years later his country was destroyed by NATO, he was murdered, and the new regime’s first act was to abolish the State Central Bank and set up a private Central Bank.
The jury may still be out on the AU. It is surely not comparable to ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, which is based on sovereignty and non-interference. Perhaps more worrying is the foreign militarisation of Africa. The US has had a major base at Djibouti since it established the US Africa Command. There are now US drone bases not just in Djibouti, but in Niger, Libya, Ethiopia and the Seychelles and other US military bases in Uganda, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and shortly South Sudan.
France has military bases in Mali as well as Gabon, Ivory Coast and Djibouti. Britain also maintains a military presence in some of its former colonies.
Meanwhile, capitalism’s bleeding of the continent continues apace. Timber, minerals and commodities are sucked out of Africa to satisfy capitalism’s need for these resources across the world, from China to Brazil and from the EU to the USA. Sometimes this fuels wars, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (which has cost 4 million lives), in order to sate capitalism's rapacious appetite for such rarities as coltan, used in mobile phones, diamonds in Sierra Leone or Angola, and, of course, gold in Mali. The African people have yet to gain control of the resources of their continent to meet their own needs.
www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_0513/africa.html
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Africa
Aug 20, 2013 15:24:05 GMT
Post by dodger on Aug 20, 2013 15:24:05 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_0313/africa.htmlAfrica and amalgamationWORKERS, MAR 2013 ISSUE “We expect full integration around 2030, when the [continent’s] economy will be amalgamated. Africans will use one currency, and goods will flow freely within the continent. The common market will also have a unified tax rate for all outsiders.” So said René N’Guettia Kouassi, Director of Economic Affairs for the African Union Commission, in January.
If the disaster of the European Union was not large enough for the world to see, how sad to hear such dismal prospects promoted for such a great continent. One world created in the depressing image of capitalism would seem to be the vision of such blinkered people.
Africa, the world’s greatest centre of undeveloped mineral wealth, is beset with war and neoliberal economics and squabbled over by the armies of previous empires. It needs to stand up around the principles which originally drove African unity: independence, sovereignty, national liberation and socialism. Why imitate the failed European Union?
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Africa
Sept 29, 2013 8:05:11 GMT
Post by dodger on Sept 29, 2013 8:05:11 GMT
Capitalists like to refer to Africa as a hopeless case, unable to advance politically or socially. But a glance at its history shows how capitalist colonisation distorted its economies and sucked out its natural resources...
Africa: how a mighty continent bled dry by capitalism asserted its independence
WORKERS, APR 2013 ISSUE
Relic of the struggle for independence: burnt-out tank in Angola
Photo: Workers
After the slave trade had created what the missionary-explorer David Livingstone called “the open sore of the world” in central Africa, he called on Europe to open up Africa to commerce, Christianity and civilisation. Such pious intentions combined well with the requirements of capitalism in the mid-19th century and led to the “Scramble for Africa”. The continent must be civilised and Christianised in the name of commerce. This became the clarion call of the competing colonial countries, of whom Britain was the greatest protagonist, as they carved up Africa.
The Berlin Conference of 1884 was intended to “regulate”’ the scramble for African colonies, but in reality it only ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity. Britain grabbed the biggest slice of the colonial pie, followed by France, Portugal, Belgium and Germany, and then Italy. Most of Spain’s 400-year-old, tiny conquests in North Africa were taken by France but Spain did end up with Spanish Morocco.
Cut-throat
This cut-throat imperial contest was ultimately to lead to the First World War and the defeat of Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The spoils of war went to the victors and German African colonies were redistributed among Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal. Only Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, remained beyond the reach of the European imperialists, until fascist Italy conquered it in the 1930s.
But what was behind this race to colonise Africa? Led by Britain, Europe in the 19th century experienced its industrial revolution. Industrial production requires labour, capital and natural resources. There was no shortage of labour, but there was a shortage of natural resources. Two hundred years of trade with Asia, the Americas and Africa had brought great profits to European traders, much of which was invested in the industrial revolution.
The trade with Africa had mainly been the Atlantic slave trade. Because Europe was resource poor, European capitalists were dependent on raw materials from Asia, the Americas and Africa. For example, although Manchester had a thriving textile industry, all cotton, as the raw material, had to be imported. Consequently, competition for raw materials grew and there was a strong lobby of capitalists, not only in Britain, to encourage their governments to colonise Africa as a method of guaranteeing sources of raw materials.
At the same time, capitalism in Europe was producing more goods than could be consumed in domestic markets. The same lobby of capitalists pressurised governments to colonise Africa so as to protect their markets there from competition.
Many of these lobbyists on behalf of capitalism were people like Livingstone, who provided the “acceptable” face to a ruthless and murderous colonisation. Before colonisation, there were perhaps 10,000 different states or political entities in Africa.
By the end of the First World War, there were a handful of colonial powers governing Africans in territories with artificially created borders dividing most of the political entities. Borders were merely the consequence of rival colonial armies reaching their limits or making deals between themselves. The colonising powers used a combination of warfare, threat of force and treaties with African rulers to establish control over Africa.
At the end of the 19th century, Europe slumped into an economic depression and the colonies were told that they had to be self sufficient, raising taxes and funds from within the colony to pay for colonial administration, including the colonial army and police force. Consequently, the material and human resources in the colonies were ruthlessly exploited.
After 1900, European colonial governments began to introduce changes to colonial rule to increase revenues. These changes included taking land from Africans and giving it to European settlers. They also introduced taxes such as the hut tax and poll tax that forced the Africans to work for the settlers in order to pay taxes in cash instead of cattle or crops, as was the previous practice.
The exploitation of African labour only fuelled resentment against the European employers. Resistance movements began to rise in colonies with a growing number of settlers where more and more land was being taken from the Africans.
Some tribal chiefs organised revolts against this exploitation. One such Chief was the Zulu Chief Bambatha, who organised an armed rebellion against the British after they had imposed a poll tax of £1 on his people and taken land from them. It took the British a full year to suppress the uprising, killing 3,000 Zulus and Chief Bambatha.
Similar revolts took place in Eastern Africa, South West Africa and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Similar patterns of forced labour and taxation across Africa led to revolts that were ruthlessly crushed by overwhelmingly superior firepower.
Most colonies, except South Africa, developed single- or double-industry economies. For example, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) became a series of copper mines while Southern Rhodesia grew tobacco and had huge cattle ranches. Angola and Kenya grew coffee whilst Tanganyika grew cotton. All of it was to service the industrialisation of Europe.
Liberation movements
Political parties began to be formed in urban areas where some men had received education at missionary schools, but these were no more than civil rights campaigners. Perhaps the biggest single factor in spawning the liberation movements that followed the Second World War was that Africans fought as soldiers in that war.
Africans played an important role in liberating Ethiopia from Italian rule and creating an independent Ethiopia. If it could happen in Ethiopia it could happen anywhere. In 1947 India won its independence from Britain, providing yet another example.
After the war, Britain occupied Libya but the UN set a deadline for its independence. In 1951, Britain handed power to a safe pair of hands in Libya – King Idris – but faced the Mau Mau uprising in its Kenyan colony from 1952, and a campaign of strikes and civil disobedience by Kwame Nkrumah’s followers in Gold Coast (Ghana).
By 1954, Algerians were using weapons left from the Second World War to launch their revolution against French colonialism and won independence in 1962. Inspired by these struggles, liberation movements grew across the African continent.
Colonising to the end
Was capitalism’s colonisation of Africa coming to an end? It didn't go quietly. As soon as Algeria declared independence, France encouraged Morocco to invade. When Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960 under Patrice Lumumba, the US and Belgium tried to separate mineral-rich Katanga Province from the rest of the country. Lumumba was toppled in a coup and shot.
By the 1970s, Portugal was engaged in military conflicts in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, where Soviet and Cuban assistance was given to liberation movements. Cubans fought alongside freedom fighters in Guinea Bissau, inflicting a major defeat upon Portuguese troops – precipitating a military coup that brought down the fascist Portuguese regime and leading eventually to independence for all of Portugal’s African colonies.
Zimbabwean nationalists were fighting the illegal settler government while the ANC in South Africa and SWAPO in occupied Namibia were taking on the apartheid settler regime in South Africa. These two settler regimes, backed by the USA, continued with a bloody and ruthless war against newly independent Mozambique and Angola as well as their own people, with South Africa taking over the war against Mozambique after Zimbabwe won its independence.
Their wars were effectively ended in 1988 when the Apartheid regime was defeated by Cuban, SWAPO and Angolan forces at Cuito Cuanavale. So the fall of the apartheid regime marked the end of colonialism as we knew it in Africa. |
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Africa
Sept 29, 2013 8:59:07 GMT
Post by dodger on Sept 29, 2013 8:59:07 GMT
The epic story of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola in 1987/89 is little known in Britain. But the events leading up to it show how small yet decisive actions by workers can bring about massive changes in the world…
Cuito Cuanavale – the story behind the battle that became Africa’s Stalingrad
WORKERS, JULY 2010 ISSUE
You could argue that the battle of Cuito Cuanavale all started with the actions of Cuban workers through their trade unions, that led first to the Cuban revolution of 1959, and then through their crucial role in Africa to the establishment of independent Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia, handing a decisive defeat to Portuguese and US imperialism in Africa and contributing to the victory against apartheid in South Africa.
Without the Cuban revolution, one Jorge Risquet would not have led an armed column to Congo Brazzaville in 1965 at the request of the newly independent Congolese government. Here contact was made with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) who were fighting for independence from Portugal.
Neither would one Ernesto Che Guevara have led another column to Eastern Zaire via Guinea where he talked with Amilcar Cabril, the leader of the independence movement for neighbouring Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) that was conducting armed struggle against the Portuguese colonialists and who were considered to be the best organised liberation movement in Africa.
The consequences of these engagements were very significant. Cuba sent to Guinea Bissau 31 volunteers – 11 mortar experts, 8 drivers, 1 mechanic, 10 doctors and an intelligence officer, all of them black to be unnoticed and all in time for a battle to take the Portuguese fortified camp at Madina de Boe.
The doctors were to go to the liberated areas and the mortar experts were sent to instruct on the use of artillery that Cuba would send along with trucks, munitions, olive uniforms, medicines and, of course, cigars and brown sugar! Cuba also trained 31 students from the Cape Verde islands in guerrilla war tactics and returned them to fight with PAIGC. By 1967 there were 60 Cubans in Guinea Bissau.
In 1969, US Ambassador Dean Brown reported from Dakar “The war in Portuguese Guinea has gone from bad to worse for the Portuguese during the past three years despite increased Portuguese troop strength from 20,000 to 25,000. PAIGC controls 60 per cent of the country”. In November 1970 the Portuguese resorted to attacking the capital of neighbouring Guinea hoping to overthrow that government and so end its backing for the PAIGC’s anti-colonial struggle.
The attack was a fiasco and the writing was now on the wall. With Portugal about to lose Guinea Bissau to PAIGC and fighting the MPLA in Angola and Frelimo in Mozambique its army was set to mutiny. On 25 April 1974, revolution overthrew the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, whose troops were withdrawn from Guinea Bissau by November.
In 1975, Portugal was set to hand over power to Frelimo in Mozambique and to a combination of three independence movements in Angola: the MPLA; the FNLA funded by the CIA and Mobutu’s Zaire; and Unita, backed by apartheid South Africa. In July 1975, the US agreed secretly to fund both the FNLA and Unita.
Double invasion
Fighting broke out in 1975 between the deeply unpopular but well armed FNLA, whose Zairian leader had not stepped foot in Angola since 1956, and the MPLA. At the same time Zairian troops entered Angola from the north and South African forces from the south to support Unita. Eventually the MPLA would take control of the whole of Luanda, the huge capital city, where it had mass support.
Angolans bid farewell to Cuban troops in 1989.
As Independence Day approached in November 1975, the MPLA appealed to Cuba for military instructors, weapons, clothing and food as Zairian and South African forces headed towards the capital.
Cuba sent 480 instructors who would create four training centres that opened in October 1975. They also sent weapons, clothing and food and were set to train 5,300 Angolans in three to six months. However, as the South Africans and Zairians advanced, they found themselves having to go into action themselves to defend their training camps.
Cubans were queuing up to volunteer to go to Angola, but the USA did not find out about this until weeks after the first Cubans arrived. It was described as the world’s best kept secret – only eight million Cubans knew about it! They crossed the Atlantic on old Britannia planes dressed as tourists, with weapons in their suitcases and in the hold of the planes. They went by ship as well. Jorge Risquet was politically in charge of the military and civilian Cuban missions.
As the South Unita and Zairians/FNLA closed in, all seemed lost. But with the MPLA fighting on their own turf, Soviet military equipment arriving and Cubans going into action straight from their plane, Independence Day came with the MPLA in control of Luanda and the joint Cuban/Angolan forces pushing back the South Africans and Zairians. Victory was sealed after a few months. However, FNLA and Unita continued a slash and burn war.
Cubans began to help Angola build health and education services, carrying out vaccination and anti illiteracy campaigns and training the Angolan Air Force and Army (FAPLA). Whilst Cuban and Angolan forces still had to battle with Unita and FNLA, the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO), fighting for Namibian independence from South Africa, set up bases in southern Angola with Cuban and Angolan support.
The South African Defence Force (SADF) set up what it called the 32nd Battalion, comprising ex-FNLA soldiers who had fled to occupied Namibia plus other black mercenaries under white SADF officers, who murdered and sowed terror in Angola. South African bombers frequently attacked Angolan towns, cities and Namibian refugee camps. Invasions of southern Angola were frequent.
Eventually, after another South African invasion of southern Angola in 1987, the combined forces of Cuba, Angola and SWAPO forced the South Africans back to the Namibian border taking the strategic Angolan town of Cuito Cuanavale. The South Africans responded with airpower and tanks and tried to retake the town, knowing its strategic importance. Cuba sent reinforcements, tanks plus Cuban and Angolan MiGs.
As Jorge Risquet said, “There were negotiations going on between Angola and the US, who was after all behind the South African government. In southern Angola, the SADF responded with aircraft and stopped the FAPLA offensive. FAPLA withdrew to Cuito Cuanavale where elite Angolan troops were gathered. The SADF laid siege to Cuito Cuanavale aiming to liquidate the Angolan troops in the midst of negotiations. If they won they would have demanded Angola’s full surrender.
“The US had refused to allow Cuba to participate in the negotiations and Cuba had said that it was prepared to stay in Angola until apartheid was defeated, but would only stay as long as Angola wanted them to. However, the SADF launched an attack on Cuito Cuanavale on January 13 1988. By then Cuban reinforcements had arrived and Cuba’s best pilots were flying sorties against the SADF inflicting heavy casualties. The South African attack was defeated. This changed the balance of forces and the US agreed by the end of January to the participation of Cuba in the negotiations.
“In March another meeting was held between Angola, Cuba and the US after the South Africans suffered another defeat in their second attack on Cuito Cuanavale in February. Five attempts to take Cuito Cuanavale were made by the SADF and all failed. We built an airstrip in record time and our planes could now reach SADF bases in northern Namibia and this forced South Africa to accept the first four-party negotiations in May. It was time for the US to stop serving as a messenger between Angola and Cuba on the one hand and South Africa on the other. It was time to seat the declared enemy at the table and seek a negotiated settlement.
Decisive
“So Cuito Cuanavale was decisive. The negotiations came later. The battle of Stalingrad took place three years before the fall of Berlin, but it was at Stalingrad that the outcome of World War II was decided. The South Africans arrogantly used delaying tactics but the die was cast after two more defeats at nearby Tchipa and Calueque. They realised that a frontal war in southern Angola and Northern Namibia would be the swan song for apartheid. So they were forced to negotiate.”
The result was full independence for Namibia, no further South African or US support for Unita, withdrawal of all SADF forces to within South Africa’s borders and withdrawal of Cuban troops. The SADF was broken and so was apartheid.
In April that year, Nelson Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison from Robben Island and in December to Victor Verster Prison to negotiate the end of apartheid, followed by his release on 11th February 1990. In 1994, the first democratic elections were held in South Africa sweeping Mandela and the ANC to power.
No wonder so many ANC activists and trade unionists said at the time that those elections were made possible by not only their struggle but by the Cubans at Cuito Cuanavale. |
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