Geography Archives: Africa

The U.S. is falsely accusing Ethiopia and Eritrea of hindering food aid and committing genocides in the ongoing war in Tigray. The charges are false and the US has no right to make such a claim on its own. Ann Garrison continues reporting from the region. 

The age of classical colonialism in Africa changed the course of history. Exploited trade agreements and pseudo alliances between African nobility and European merchants led to heightened warfare, looting, and genocide across the continent.

Debt hangs over the African continent like a wake of vultures. Most African countries have interest bills that are much higher than their national revenues, with budgets managed through austerity and driven by deep cuts in government employment as well as the education and health care sectors.

In the first two weeks of May 2022, the Malian military government ejected the French military and withdrew from the French political project, G5 Sahel. Deep resentment spread across Mali because of the civilian casualties from French military attacks and because of the French government’s arrogant attitude towards the Malian government.

The Biden Administration’s recent decision to return  U.S. troops to Somalia represents another effort on the part of the U.S. to deny agency and independence to African people. On the 59th commemoration of African Liberation Day, the Black Alliance for Peace expresses its unequivocal opposition to this redeployment.

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of U.S. Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

Mali recently announced that it would no longer be part of the G5 Sahel. From the beginning, it was clear that the formation of the G5 Sahel was encouraged by France, and that the real focus was to be security.

Barack Obama recounts in his memoir ‘Dreams from my Father’ reading a book about Africa as a young man. He remembered how he was filled with ‘an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target’ at the way that the dominant images of the book shifted from the independence struggles of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah to ‘famine, disease, the coups and counter-coups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks’ (p.515).

These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), and to galvanise new faith in public action.

The Zionist campaign is vicious and relentless because they know that once a crack is made in their line of defense–a line that is made of deception, falsehoods and fabrication–they will fall, never to rise again.

In 1974 Walter Rodney and his family returned to Guyana. Rodney immediately faced a country divided between the Indian and African working class, and the brutal and divisive regime of Forbes Burnham. Rodney produced an impressive body of historical work which provided a Marxist explanation for the divide of the country’s working people. Chinedu Chukwudinma continues the story of Rodney’s revolutionary life.

RUSSIA and Ukraine together account for 30 per cent of the world’s wheat exports. Many African countries, in particular, are heavily dependent on them for their food supplies, which are now getting disrupted because of the war; and this disruption would continue since the war is also affecting the acreage being sown under foodgrains there.

KUALA LUMPUR: Capital flight from the global South is immense, with widespread adverse effects. A new book proposes measures to curb, even reverse capital flight from Africa. It also offers pragmatic lessons for many developing countries.

In addition to today’s fuel and energy crises, food insecurity has been a major issue for a number of reasons and, with the current Russian-Ukrainian war, a global food crisis and hunger is a real risk. Unfortunately, this may pave the way for a kind of food diplomacy and food wars.

Despite its promises of universalism, international law has clearly not yet shaken its foundation as a racial order.

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has overwhelmingly approved a new measure designed to impose sanctions on Ethiopia. Known as the Ethiopia Peace and Stabilization Act of 2022, the bill authorizes the U.S. government to suspend financial and security assistance to Ethiopia and to sanction individuals the United States decrees to be responsible for the ongoing conflict in the country.

Russia and Ukraine are taking the first steps towards ending the war through direct and video negotiations. After the past four rounds, progress was registered between the negotiators, notwithstanding the continuous clanging of arms.

HALF OF THE COUNTRIES ABSTAINING FROM THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION CONDEMNING MOSCOW WERE AFRICAN UNION MEMBER STATES

First published in 1944, ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ is an investigation of the notorious relationship between the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of European industrial capitalism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.