"Our
policy with respect to the continent of Africa at best has been
a policy that is inconsistent and incoherent," said NAACP
Executive Director Kweisi
Mfume, in Miami Beach last weekend for the organization’s
annual convention. "We've looked away in many instances because
Africa was not politically correct or politically cute."
Mr.
Mfume is wrong. United States policy towards sub-Saharan Africa
has been consistent since August of 1960, when President Eisenhower
ordered his national security team to arrange the assassination
of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Congo had been nominally
independent from Belgium for only two months, yet Eisenhower,
far from looking away from Africa during his last months in office,
was already embarked on a relentless policy of continental destabilization,
one that has been fundamentally adhered to by every U.S. President
that followed.
U.S.
policy in Africa is anything but “incoherent.” Rather, too many
of us have “looked away” from the clear pattern of U.S. behavior
and intent – a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African
development at every opportunity and by all possible means – including
the death of millions.
War on African civil society
Belgians
murdered Prime Minister Lumumba on January 17, 1961, no doubt
with the collaboration of Eisenhower’s men. Lumumba presented
a danger to European and American domination of post-colonial
Africa precisely because he was not a tribal figure, but
a thoroughly Congolese politician, a man who sought to
harness power through popular structures. As such, Lumumba personified
the threat of an awakened African civil society – the prerequisite
for true independence and social development.
A
popular and long held belief among Africans and African Americans
is that the prospect of continental (or even global) African “unity”
is what terrifies Washington, London and Paris. We wish that were
true. However, the neocolonial powers know they have nothing to
worry about on that score, having begun the era of “independence”
with a clear understanding among themselves that conditions for
meaningful unity would not be allowed to develop. African
civil society itself would be stunted, hounded, impoverished –
rendered so fundamentally insecure that, even should “leaders”
of African countries band together under banners of “unity,” few
could speak with the voice of the people. Only leaders of intact
civil societies can unite with one another to any meaningful effect
– all else is bombast, and frightens no one.
Tribalism
is, indeed, a problem in Africa. For Americans and Europeans,
it is an obsession – the game they have played since the
Portuguese planted their first outposts at the mouths of African
rivers in the 1400s. However, there are limits to the effectiveness
of tribal manipulation. Many “tribes” are very large – nations,
actually. Setting one tribal group against the other, while suppressing
the social development of each, is a tricky business. The colonizer
must not to allow the “favored” group to accrue, through privilege,
sufficient social space to aspire to nationhood. In that event,
the formerly favored group must be crushed by the colonizer’s
own military force – a brutish and costly business.
These
are generalities, and Africa is a big place. Numerous colonial
powers at different times employed the full mix of coercion, manipulation,
favoritism, and raw (including genocidal) force.
After
World War Two, and for a host of reasons, the colonial arrangement
had become untenable. Europeans would continue to engage in tribal
manipulation in the new political environment, while the U.S.
preferred bullets and bribes as it assumed overlord status among
the imperialists. However, it was clear to the old masters – and
especially to Washington – that the formal structures of independence
would inevitably lead to the growth of dynamic civil societies
that could impede the operations of multinational extraction corporations
and agribusiness. Civil societies can become quite raucous and
demanding, even in countries in which there are tribal divisions.
Therefore, the process of African civil development had
to be interrupted, not only in those new states that were economically
valuable to Europe and the U.S., but in all of Africa, so that
no healthy civil model might emerge. If this could be achieved,
there would be no need to fear the actions of assembled heads
of African states – an irrelevant gaggle of uniforms and suits,
standing in for nations, but representing no coherent social force.
Assignment:
crush the people
To
thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa,
the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more
accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African
Strong Man. Although both the neocolonial masters and the Strong
Men themselves make a great fuss about indigenousness – albeit
for somewhat different reasons – these characters arise from the
twisted structures of colonialism. Their function is to smother
civil society, to render the people helpless.
Joseph
Desire Mobutu is the model of the African Strong Man. He was an
American invention whose career is the purest expression of U.S.
policy in Africa. With all due respect to the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume,
there was nothing “inconsistent and incoherent” about Mobutu’s
nearly four decades of service to the United States. From the
day in August, 1960 when Eisenhower ordered the death of Lumumba
(Mobutu, Lumumba’s treasonous chief of the army, deposed his Prime
Minister the next month and collaborated directly in the murder)
to his death from cancer in 1997, U.S. African policy was inextricably
bound to the billionaire thief. It can be reasonably said that
Mobutuism is U.S. African policy.
Mobutu
and nine U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower through Clinton) utterly
and mercilessly poisoned Africa, sending crippling convulsions
through the continent, from which Africa may never recover. With
borders on Angola, 
Zambia,
Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, the Central African
Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville), and a land mass as large as
the U.S. east of the Mississippi, Mobutu’s Zaire was an incubator
of never ending war, subversion, disease, corruption and, ultimately,
social disruption so horrific as to challenge the Arab and European
slave trade in destructive intensity.
Mobutu’s
reign began in the heyday of European soldiers of fortune, allies
of his like “Mad Mike” Hoare. By the time of his death, more than
100 mercenary outfits operated in sub-Saharan Africa, safeguarding
multinational corporations from the chaos that Mobutu and his
American handlers labored so mightily to foment. So integral have
mercenaries become to Africa, a number of Black governments depend
on them for their own security, forsaking any real claim to national
sovereignty. This, too, is the legacy of U.S. African policy.
(American mercenary corporations garner an ever-increasing share
of the business.)
Millions
died in Zaire-Congo and neighboring states as a direct or indirect
result of policies hatched in Washington and executed by Mobutu
– and this, before the genocidal explosion in Rwanda in
1994, leading to an “African World War” fought on Congolese soil
that has so far claimed at least 3 million more lives, belated
victims of the policies dutifully carried out by America’s African
Strong Man.
Bush
cultivates more Mobutus
For
43 years U.S. governments have empowered Strong Men to do their
bidding in Africa. The geography and riches of Congo-Zaire allowed
Mobutu to wreak continent-wide havoc on Washington’s behalf, while
growing fabulously 
rich.
However, many lesser clients have been nurtured by successive
U.S. governments, their names and crimes too numerous for this
essay. They and Mobutu’s outrages are the logical product of the
neocolonialist program. The actors come and go, but the underlying
design remains the same: to prevent the emergence of strong civil
societies in Black Africa.
The
Strong Man’s job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and demoralized
societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the fortunes of
the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose little
threat to foreign capital.
The
African Strong Man model suits the purposes of European imperialists
and the United States, perfectly. Their overarching concern– especially
since the collapse of the Soviet Union – is for the multinational
mineral and petroleum-extracting corporations – what Europeans
and Americans are actually referring to when they speak of their
“national interests” on the continent. Representing himself and
a small base of supporters/dependents, the Strong Man can be counted
on to bully civil society into steadily narrowing spaces, snuffing
out all independent social formations, while at the same time
stripping the society of the means to protect itself outside of
his own, capricious machinery. The nation itself atrophies, or
is stillborn, as in Congo. Where nations have not had the chance
to take full root or have been deliberately stunted, the Strong
Man wraps the thin reeds of sovereignty around himself, denying
the people their means of connectedness to one another, except
through him. The state is a private apparatus and – from the standpoint
of civil society – there appears to be no nation, at all. The
people act, accordingly – that is, they do not act as citizens
of a nation.
Thus,
the Strong Man’s most valuable service to the foreign master is
to retard and negate nationhood through constant assaults on civil
society.
What
is commonly described as American “neglect” of Africa is nothing
of the kind. Over the course of the decades since the end of formal
colonialism, the governments of the corporate headquarters countries
have arrived at a consensus that a chaotic Africa, barely governed
at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable
of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least
troublesome environment for Western purposes. The extraction
corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa
are insecure.
In
Congo and Liberia-Sierra Leone, this unspoken but operative policy
has plunged whole populations into Hell on Earth. African Americans
typically criticize the U.S. for failing to treat Black lives
as valuable – in other words, Washington is accused of neglecting
the carnage in Central and West Africa because of racism. The
reality is far worse than that. American policy is designed
to place Africans at the extremes of insecurity, in order
to foreclose the possibility of civil societies taking root. This
policy has always resulted in mass death. Moreover, the
U.S. did not simply sit idly by while genocide swept Rwanda and
“World War” wracked Congo. Instead, the American government initially
thwarted a world response to the Rwandan holocaust, and has prolonged
the carnage in Congo through its two client states, Uganda and
Rwanda, which have methodically looted the wealth of the northeastern
Congo while claiming – falsely, according to a report to the UN
Security Council – to be protecting their own borders. Uganda’s
list of “proxy” Congolese ethnic armies reaches into every corner
of Ituri province, where “combatants…have slaughtered some five
thousand civilians in the last year because of their ethnic affiliation,”
according to a Human Rights Watch report. “But the combatants
are armed and often directed by the governments of the DRC [Democratic
Republic of Congo], Rwanda and Uganda.” (“Ituri:
Bloodiest Corner of the Congo,” July 8.)
Zimbabwean
officers have also plundered the country, but have been involved
in far less killing in their role as protectors of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC) government. Angola and Namibia also went
to the Kinshasa regime’s aid. The United Nations and African countries
labored for five years to untangle the mix of belligerents – with
only the most pro forma cooperation of the United States.
Prolonging
“Africa’s World War”
Had
the U.S. wanted to end or at least scale down “Africa’s World
War,” there is no doubt that Washington could have reined in Rwanda
and Uganda, who received a steady stream of American military
and economic assistance during the conflict. The Congolese (DRC)
government, on the other hand, has suffered under severe sanctions
from both the U.S. and the European Union.
It
would have cost Washington far less than a billion dollars in
bribes to quarantine “Africa’s World War” – slush money for a
super-power, and a fraction of the bribes Washington was willing
to pay for favorable votes on Iraq at the UN. Instead, the U.S.
provided aid to key combatants. That’s not a lack of policy, nor
is it indifference. In the larger scheme of things, Washington
believed that prolonging a war that weakened and debased Africa
was in its “national interest.”
Uganda
and Rwanda have reciprocated, shamelessly. “Recently Uganda publicly
backed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, defying the African position
to endorse a UN-sanctioned war,” reads the current message of
the official State
House website of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s government,
in Kampala.
Rwanda’s
Ambassador to the U.S., Zac Nsenga, was even more obsequious when
presenting his credentials at the U.S.
State Department, May 8:
“The
Rwandan Government reaffirms its commitment to join forces with
the United States and the free world to combat acts of terrorism
wherever it rears its ugly head. The events of the 1994 Genocide
and September 11th has taught us that we have to stand together
as Nations to defeat these evil acts against humanity. For this
very reason President Kagame stood firmly in support of the
U.S. led attack on Iraq, not only to root out a terrorist dictator
but also to free the people of Iraq.”
Three
million dead in Congo mean nothing when compared to two eager
clients in the heart of Africa, who are more than willing to both
defy “the 
African
position” on Iraq and help keep Central Africa chaotic – Mobutu’s
old job.
As
for Charles Taylor, the Liberian Strong Man responsible for the
death, dismemberment and displacement of hundreds of thousands
in his own country and neighboring Sierra Leone – at the time
of this writing, Bush was still playing games over whether Taylor
should leave for Nigerian exile before or after an African peace
keeping force arrives to secure the capital, Monrovia.
Concerned
American progressives debate what their positions should be if
Bush sends significant U.S. forces to help pacify the country.
He will not. If history is any judge, U.S. involvement on the
ground in Liberia will be token, if any, and brief – just enough
to show the flag. Had Washington desired stability for Liberia
and its neighbors Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, it
would have eliminated Taylor years ago. He was allowed to live
because he served U.S. policy, whether he knew that or not. Eternal
warfare is the most effective way to smother civil society.
Americans
may also one day learn this horrible lesson.
