"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.
