Geography Archives: Africa

South Africa is set to implement an $8.5bn plan funded by western countries to transition from coal-based energy to renewables. The country’s biggest union NUMSA has warned this plan will only intensify privatization while burdening South Africans with debt and poverty.

Nnimmo Bassey (NB): Simple solutions are avoided in today’s world because they don’t support capital.

Western media fixates on coup supporters waving Russian flags in Burkina Faso’s capital while overlooking the long history of U.S. and French control over the country–and its destabilizing consequences.

The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies now seem close to winning a two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF,) a U.S.-backed clique that ruled Ethiopia brutally for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018.

At this year’s UN General Assembly, the African Union firmly rejected the coercive efforts of the U.S. and Western countries to use the continent as a pawn in their geopolitical agenda.

On 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré led a section of the Burkina Faso military to depose Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’état in January.

Numerous countries, including Canada, profit from the illegal exploitation of Sahrawi resources.

His vision of a socialist, pan-Africanist model of development⁠ was not buried with him

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022—October 1, 2022 is the 14th anniversary of the launch of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). Yet, jihadist terrorist violence on the African continent has increased since the founding of AFRICOM and NATO’s destruction of Libya resulting in civilian casualties and instability, which the West has used as pretext and justification for the […]

Mlungisi Makhanya, president of one of the largest pro-democracy political parties, PUDEMO, whose house was attacked “remains unshaken, defiant”.

Forget development. Washington’s primary interest in Africa today is keeping the Chinese and Russians out.

Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose, and Tafadzwa Mushonga: “The book places African states and their behaviors towards African people in conservation spaces within the global environmental agendas of powerful states and well-funded conservation organizations. It interprets conservation as an ideology referencing African landscapes without people. Such an ideology separates people from their biophysical and cultural milieus, leading to conservation violence authorized by states against their citizens.”

The word decolonization should not be treated as trendy slang. It describes an important political and psychological process. Media and state attempts at indoctrination show just how important it is.

Reflecting on the recent Kenyan elections, radical activist and poet Lena Anyuolo explains why she did not vote. How could anyone vote in elections that offered no alternative? Anyuolo explains, ‘Politicians crawl out like cockroaches from dark holes every five years; fat and destructive, ready to unleash more destruction.’

After a quarter century of economic stagnation, African economic recovery early in the 21st century was under great pressure even before the pandemic, due to new trade arrangements, falling commodity prices and severe environmental stress.

After a fragile ceasefire lasting just five months, the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) have once again initiated violent conflict with federal forces in Northern Ethiopia.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 30 2022 (IPS) – Most sub-Saharan African French colonies got formal independence in the 1960s. But their economies have progressed little, leaving most people in poverty, and generally worse off than in other post-colonial African economies. 

After four years of Trump’s ‘America first’ isolationism, U.S. President Joe Biden announced “America is back”. His White House has since tried to find allies against China and Russia.

China is forgiving 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries, after already cancelling $3.4 billion and restructuring $15 billion of debt from 2000-2019. Beijing pledged more infrastructure projects and offered favorable trade deals in a “win-win” model of “mutually beneficial cooperation.”

Borders barely exist for these white bodies; rather, borders are lived as a hot summer inconvenience of queues at airport security. But for the dark bodies carrying their Global South passports, the Mediterranean is a humiliating border.