Africom: The Poisonous Fruit of the Mercy Industrial Complex

The real danger in the US militarization of Africa, otherwise known as Africom, is not so much in the escalation of the tension, conflict and political dependency of the continent reminiscent of the cold war years, but in the likelihood that the opposition to it may not be significant until it is too late.

The recent call by Danny Glover and the TransAfrica Forum is one of the many isolated voices that risk being drowned by the Western rhetoric of aid and its accompanying vocabulary of “fair trade” and “humanitarianism.” Moreover, this “poverty-speak” has already been adopted by some African elites who head various governments or non-governmental organizations funded by American donors and who are members of a class that will find it difficult to bite the hand that feeds them.

Nevertheless, an element of hope provided by Danny Glover in an interview with Democracy Now is that some African leaders have voiced opposition to the US plan. The principle parties that have criticized the US move include the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Hopefully, these voices will prevail in our continent that only recently emerged from the ravages of the cold war.  

By contrast, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi have pledged support for the US initiative. The interests of Johnson and Zenawi in backing the US are not immediately clear. Those that stand out, however, are the fact that Zenawi is already receiving American support as Ethiopia flexes its muscles in Eritrea and Somalia. Johnson-Sirleaf, on the other hand, is lobbying for the military force to set its base in her country. She may be motivated by the desire to pull away from the political grip of ECOWAS, the West African military force that helped Liberia stay intact during its warn-torn years. However, the preference for American support over that of fellow African states is politically short-sighted and resembles a symptom of the inferiority complex that still plagues the continent, sometimes driving Africans to choose supporting the Western world over collaborating with their neighboring ethnic groups, countries or regions.  

It is symbolic that President Johnson-Sirleaf recently reiterated her support of Africom at an award ceremony hosted in her honor last month by Africare, an organization which raises money for aid to Africa. The coincidence of the venue and the political message reflects the manner in which the “poverty-speak” about Africa has become a camouflage for Europe and America to intervene in any manner in Africa with disregard for their centuries-long sordid history in the continent. President Johnson-Sirleaf proved adept at using the required jargon when she proposed in her award acceptance speech that Africom would be instrumental in helping “support institution-building by embracing good governance.”  Of course the question arises as to whether a military force is capable of promoting good governance, especially in a continent that has only recently emerged out of the military dictatorships supported by the very US government that is now purportedly interested in poverty alleviation and “security.” But in such a forum, Sirleaf-Johnson could not, and probably did not want to address this history. 

It is in this language of “poverty-speak,” characteristic of the Mercy Industrial Complex, that lies the greatest threat to African peace, security and dignity that is now posed by Africom. It will be interesting to see what responses Danny Glover and the TransAfrica Forum will receive in the United States that is already sedated with the vision of Africa as a dark continent and that cannot understand or accept the crucial role of Europe and America in most of the challenges confronting the continent. 

Although I hope that the American responses will be critical, recent events have been slightly discouraging. The kidnappings organized by the French humanitarian organization L’Arche de Zoe (Zoe’s Arc) were sanctified by the Western media who portrayed the prospective buyers of Chadian children as purely motivated by the need to rescue Darfur children from the jaws of death. Angelina Jolie and Madonna were treated just as favourably by the news media despite the fact that both stars dealt a blow to the claims of national sovereignty in Namibia and Malawi respectively. 

The ideology that “Africa needs help” but never justice is fuelled by the racist fallacy that Africans are ignorant unless they have a Western degree and speak a colonial language, or that an African is naked simply because he is shirtless, or that an African has not travelled if she has not been to Europe or America, even though she may have visited different corners of her home country and a neighboring country as well. This ideology is promoted by the Western media and philanthropists who see all Africans as “poor” based on the color of their skin that is used to automatically alienate them from access to Western cultural or consumer goods.

The lies inherent in this framework are audacious. The websites of several charities do not even bother to look credible when they place a bland statistic about the alarming number of children who die in the continent every number of minutes alongside pictures of chubby-cheeked – not obese – African children with mucus running from their noses, wearing soiled clothes and no shoes. Yet untidy children are a common sight in any society in the world. If anything, children who are constantly dressed in their “Sunday best” would probably miserable and lonely because they have no opportunities to play. The organizations concerned can afford to be that reckless, since their objectives rely on the inviting the viewers to participate in the automatic equation of Africa with poverty. And while the self-righteous Euro-Americans gasp at how “untravelled” Africans are, few of them remember that many Americans have not stepped outside the borders of their own state or the neighboring one, let alone their country. Others forget that it makes sense to be shirtless in tropical climates, even though they are familiar with the scenes of beaches flooded with practically naked tourists all year round. 

Western charities also minimize the truth about the  huge industry and the millions of  unimaginative, under-qualified and inexperienced people of European origin who earn their income from the funds generated in the name of actual or fictitious projects in Africa.  In some multi-national charities, the African projects raise the largest income, far outpassing the funds attracted by similar projects located in Western Europe. Ironically, it is the African projects that are allocated the least funding by contemptuous Euro-American staff who demand of their lesser-paid, more qualified African colleagues evidence of market-style management policies. They persistently complain that the projects are poorly managed, a thinly-veiled reference to the image of Africa as a continent plaugued by corruption. Even in the decreasingly noble UN organizations,  Euro-American nationals earn "expatriate" salaries in African-based institutions while Africans with more qualifications and experience do all the work. 

Nevertheless, the rhetoric of poverty does not lack disciples from the African continent and its diaspora. Despite the recent scandal at Oprah’s school for girls in South Africa, the project still draws mushy and sentimental approvals even from some black American observers. A number of black American websites that have commented on it have not transcended the “Africa needs all the help it can get” framework. To my knowledge, one of the websites that has posted the most critical commentary on Oprah’s philanthropy is blackademics.org. One entry cites Oprah explaining that she chose to help black children in South Africa rather than in her hometown of Chicago because the Chicago children did not appreciate her “mentoring” skills, which included “taking these girls out of the streets…for ski trips and etiquette classes.” In another, more insightful entry, the website points out that Oprah’s school may affirm the wrong image that black American children already have of Africa which “could be summed up in a few phrases: HIV/AIDs, poverty, people living in trees, etc.” The article concludes with the pertinent question: “Is her school progressive or is it neo-colonialism in Black face?”

The readers’ responses to the latter entry are sadly predictable. Most have ignored the writer’s citation of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s seminal work The Miseducation of the Negro and have instead praised Oprah for being a good role model and a generous individual. Yet Woodson’s work points to the ambiguity of Western education and its impact on the African psyche. He highlights the important contradiction that has bothered African nationalists: African graduates leave Western-oriented schools with a low self-esteem and often end up serving the very institutions that oppress their own people. The readers not only ignore this issue, but they also defend Oprah on the basis that she has poured money into an area in which it so badly needed, revealing an internalization of the racist framework that sees blacks, as W.E.B Dubois aptly put it in The Souls of Black Folk, as problems rather than as people with problems.  

There is no doubt that millions of people in Africa, like everywhere else in the world – even in the so-called developed countries – have limited access to a decent standard of living. However, the problem with the poverty rhetoric is not the extent to which it may or may not reflect the living conditions of Africans, but the fact that it places poverty before Africans’ humanity. The ubiquity of the rhetoric also imposes on the African elite returning from the West the debilitating and oppressive angst that leads them to spot disease, poor roads and corruption even before they have had time to laugh, love and enjoy good times with friends and family.   

Behind this damaging rhetoric sadly lies an inherent ignorance or dismissal of the history of the struggles of Africans in both the continent and the diaspora. Many of the prominent national heroes such as Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X in the US and Dedan Kimathi in Kenya did not pursue university education, but they had a clear perspective of reality and a strong commitment that not many African graduates of Western schools can boast of.  Africa still makes important contributions to the production of world-disseminated knowledge and to the political order in the West, particularly in the United States. African taxpayers pay for the primary, high schools and even colleges at which many African elite study before they seek further education in the West. When in the US, many of these students write research papers and dissertations based on information they gather from the continent. A more uncomfortable truth is the fact that Africans residing in the United States are sometimes used by American institutions to present a façade of diversity and improving race relations, a move that minimizes the hurdles that black Americans continue to face today despite the formal end of slavery.  

America and Europe derive excessively more contributions to their social, political, moral and economic order from Africa than Africa receives from them. For this reason, the fundamental question that Africom raises is, as Sokari Ekine eloquently puts it, “not…whether Africa NEEDS Africom but why the US believes it NEEDS to have a military presence in Africa.” A cursory glance at blog commentaries and newspaper articles reveals that many believe that answer lies in America’s fear of China’s growing economic ties with the continent. However, as Prof Zeleza has intimated on this website, these concerns are not backed by reality. He points out that the United States is, in fact, one of China’s leading trade partners, and the trade between Africa and Euro-America far surpasses that between Africa and China. Consequently, one would agree with his statement that the concerns about China’s relationship with Africa are driven by hysteria, “possessive paternalism,” and the assumption that Africa can only relate to the world outside the continent from the inferior position as the colonized.  

Prof. Zeleza’s commentary points to the fact that there probably is no logical reason for establishment of Africom. The search for the political or economic motivations for Africom tragically attempts to give coherence to the actions of an empire spiralling out of control. The US government has proceeded with this dubious plan despite its waning political stamina, diplomatic influence and economic and military resources. It has already exhausted international goodwill, sunk billions of dollars and stretched its military strength in Iraq, which explains why it has appointed a black Secretary of State and a black Commander of Africom to give its imperial ambitions credibility.  

The United States’ vision of reality is so distorted by its history of racism and oppression that it no longer can distinguish between fact and the fiction drenched in the blood and sweat of the oppressed. The solitary and lonely empire is suffering from amnesia, conveniently forgetting that since the American Revolution, it has not won a war without increasing resentment towards it, except for the great wars that it fought in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Besides Western Europe that trembled at the Nazi onslaught, no society in the world has words of genuine praise for the United States coming to its rescue. Instead, many countries, from Vietnam to Somalia and Cuba, just to mention a few, carry scars of the millions of lives lost and the destruction left behind by the United States military interventions. But more than that, they have the pride of having successfully beaten a country with infinitely superior military might, and have earned the admiration from the world outside Euro-America.   

The US government is foolish to bury its head in the exaggerated narrative of African poverty when the history of its European allies demonstrates the tragic results of underestimating Africans. Europeans arrived in Africa believing that their sophisticated weaponry and their noble goal of bringing civilization and medicine would tranquilize Africans into accepting their rule. They did not last a century. We may still be reeling from the cultural effects of this tragic history, but the fact is that we gave Europe a run for its money. But an even more interesting factor that the United States has forgotten is that its citizenry is too racist to digest the idea of losing its soldiers in wars with  Africans in the “dark continent.” One of Clinton’s first moves in the White House was to quickly withdraw US troops from its Somalia operation, predictably called Operation Restore Hope, after the American casualties became politically embarassing.  

On the other hand, we must not underestimate the cunning schemes behind Africom. The real money to be made is not just in Africa’s mineral resources, as many believe. It is also in the US government contracts to mercenary groups such as the infamous Blackwater corporation. David C. Walsh openly admits the involvement of mercenary groups in this latest US military operation in the African continent: “AFRICOM is a consortium of all U.S. military branches and private defense and security contractors firms like Northrop Grumman, Blackwater Worldwide, DynCorp International, and MPRI. It’s meant to interface with reliable offices and agencies, including military, in Africa’s hardest-hit nations.” 

Jeremy Schahill's in-depth investigation into Blackwater provides important lessons about the American government corruption and sly genius behind the involvement of “security contractors” in Africa. If African bodies start to pile up, the American guns that shot them will not be identified in the American press because the mercenaries are not subject to the scrutiny of the American public in the same manner as the army. The deaths will therefore be easily dismissed as casualties of “inter-ethnic” or “tribal” conflicts between Africans themselves, a lie which the sedated American public will most likely swallow. In addition, any American casualties will not be reported to the American public, for fear of whipping up politically anxiety caused by the prospect of Americans dying at the hands of Africans with weapons.   

The “security contractors” will make a quick buck in the continent and many African lives may be tragically lost before the truth about Africom finally prevails. And prevail it will. The French political class tried the same thing by running a similar operation in Africa, the infamous Françafrique, with the help of mercenaries such as Bob Denard and of the petroleum company Elf. For decades, the French government was able to hide from its human rights obsessed and intellectually overdosed public its corruption and its instigation of African civil conflicts. African citizens now get a whiff of France’s dirty linen when Nicolas Sarkozy as much as steps on a plane headed for Chad. Ordinary citizens in Côte d’Ivoire and the DRC rebuffed France’s “peace-keeping” forces in their countries, and in Rwanda they supported Kagame’s severing of diplomatic ties with France.   

It remains to be seen whether enough African elites will resist, before too much damage is done, the United States’ promises of aid and other candies or see through the sentimentalist rhetoric of aid agencies and universities purportedly concerned about the “advancement” of African women and the “rights” of the African child. In the meantime, Western humanitarian organizations, philanthropists and human rights organizations remain morally and intellectually responsible for deadly initiatives such as Africom. They have become the modern heirs of colonial missionaries and anthropologists, liberally misusing terms such as “charity,” “aid” and “humanitarianism,” and in so doing, fashioning an ideology for a new military invasion of the continent.