Old Articles | Thursday, January 31 | · | The Real Invasion of Africa is Not News |
Saturday, December 01 | · | Zimbabwe Empowerment Lessons for South Africa |
Tuesday, July 17 | · | Donor Dollars Aiding Political Repression in Ethiopia |
· | The Genocidal Fruits of U.S. Africa Policy |
Saturday, May 26 | · | Colonialism never ended, it continues by different means |
Monday, March 19 | · | Social Media Scam Alert: Top Ten Ways to Tell Kony is Phony |
Friday, March 09 | · | Kony 2012: Invisible Children and Visible Racism |
Wednesday, January 11 | · | |
Friday, December 02 | · | Africa Lies Naked to Euro-American Military Offensive |
Monday, October 31 | · | |
Friday, October 21 | · | |
Saturday, September 24 | · | US Ambassador Echoes Cecil Rhodes |
Sunday, July 24 | · | Ground Your Warplanes, Save the Horn of Africa |
Wednesday, May 04 | · | Who We Attack: History Can't Hide Hypocrisy |
Tuesday, April 05 | · | Occupying the World: The New Colonialism |
Monday, March 07 | · | Mixed Messages: Arabs Challenge Israeli Hasbara |
Sunday, January 30 | · | Internet Access: Formidable tool to curb and control mass mobilizations! |
Wednesday, April 14 | · | UK media's covert racism laid bare |
Friday, April 02 | · | Africa: since ages living in the racist abyss of capitalist barbarism |
Wednesday, March 10 | · | Quo Vadis, Africa? Some historic Reflections about a truncated Future |
Older Articles
| |
| |
Africa Focus: Shadow Armies: The Unseen, But Real US War In Africa Friday, January 12 @ 03:52:47 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
January 12, 2018
There is a real – but largely concealed – war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to define the future of the continent and its global outlook.
It is easy to pin the blame on US President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is, the current US military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration of President George W. Bush, and actively pursued by President Barack Obama.
In 2007, under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, the US consolidated its various military operations in Africa to establish the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). With a starting budget of half a billion dollars, AFRICOM was supposedly launched to engage with African countries in terms of diplomacy and aid. But, over the course of the last 10 years, AFRICOM has been transformed into a central command for military incursions and interventions.
| (Read More... | 9205 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Obama Pushes Africa Investment: US Corporations 'Drool' over Resources Thursday, August 07 @ 08:54:10 UTC | Critics warn Obama's multibillion dollar push to open Africa for U.S. business will further dispossess and impoverish people across the continent.
By Sarah Lazare
August 06, 2014 - Common Dreams
At a Washington, DC gathering of African state leaders and U.S. corporations, President Obama on Tuesday unveiled a multi-billion dollar drive to promote U.S. business investments in Africa. While the President said the plan will unleash "the next era of African growth," experts warn it amounts to more of the same extractive policies that have already impoverished and dispossessed people across the continent.
"All you have to do is look who has a seat at the table to understand what is happening," said Emira Woods, expert on U.S. foreign policy in Africa and social impact director at ThoughtWorks, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice, in an interview with Common Dreams. "We're talking African leaders, some with bad human rights records, and American CEOs."
| (Read More... | 6555 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 1) |
|
Africa Focus: How the Global Financial Elite Pillage Africa Tuesday, July 15 @ 11:56:37 UTC | Behind 'Smokescreen' of Charity, Global Financial Elite Pillage African Nations $60bn Each Year
"Notions of aid and charity are in reality aiding politicians and multinational corporations to continue plundering Africa behind a shroud of 'generosity'."
By Lauren McCauley
July 15, 2014 - Common Dreams
Under the "smokescreen" of giving aid or charity, western governments and multinational corporations are pillaging states in sub-Sahara Africa with losses nearing $60 billion each year, according to research published on Tuesday by a coalition of 10 Africa and UK-based NGOs.
The report, Honest accounts? The true story of Africa's billion dollar losses (pdf), finds that while an estimated $134 billion flows into the continent annually through a combination of loans, foreign investment and aid, African nations lose approximately $192 billion in profits made by foreign multinational companies, as well as through tax evasion and the costs of adapting to climate change.
| (Read More... | 3114 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Questioning the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign Wednesday, May 21 @ 18:33:36 UTC | By Danny Haiphong
May 21, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“US imperialism is the real terrorist for African people and the root of terrorism in Africa.”
When tragedies occur, questions arise. If a close relative is injured in a car accident, the affected family may ask a number of questions for both clarity and guidance. One question certain to come up is “who or what is responsible for the accident?” Most people wouldn’t accept an answer to this question from just anyone. Instead, concerned family and community members would probably seek verifiable evidence that leads to logical conclusions about the nature of the incident.
The #BringBackOurGirls campaign doesn’t appear interested in asking the difficult questions necessary to understanding the forces behind the kidnapping of 300 young girls in Nigeria. The campaign instead calls for US intervention to track down the so-called “terrorist” organization, Boko Haram. US imperialism responded quickly by sending marines to Nigeria, escalating US militarization in a country already dominated economically and politically by the West. #BringBackOurGirls supporters achieved their objective of further US militarization at the expense of African people. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign is thus not a social movement at all, and it must be clearly understood that there is much more to the kidnappings in Nigeria than the campaign is willing to address.
| (Read More... | 9233 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa Friday, May 16 @ 15:42:39 UTC | By Glen Ford
March 16, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“The Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a post-Gaddafi Africa – thus justifying a larger military presence for the Americans.”
A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the “international community” and the Nigerian military “Do something!” about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged “news” products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been “doing” to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried “not a single television news story about Boko Haram” in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn’t mean the Nigerian army hasn’t been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country’s mostly Muslim north.
| (Read More... | 12981 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Tuesday, May 13 @ 09:14:43 UTC | By Margaret Kimberley
May 13, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“The last thing Nigeria needs is a foreign military presence to prop up its corrupt government.”
Bring back our girls. The message is a simple one that resonates with millions of people around the world. Those four words were first seen in a now famous twitter hashtag in the aftermath of the kidnapping of 280 teenagers from a school in Chibok, Nigeria on April 14, 2014. The Boko Haram group which is fighting that country’s government admits to holding the girls captive.
Only people who closely follow international news were aware of this situation until last week. It is right that so many people are concerned for the girls’ safety. Unfortunately, the effort to draw attention to this horror is of little use without a deeper understanding of Africa’s political situation.
| (Read More... | 7256 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: South Sudan: When the Empire is Your Liberator, You're Not Independent Monday, January 20 @ 06:20:00 UTC | By Glen Ford January 15, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
“The South Sudanese military has broke up into its component warlord parts.”
For decades, the United States and Israel sought to bring about the fracturing of Sudan, which had been, geographically, the largest nation in Africa. Secession of the South was a special project of Israel, whose most enduring and fundamental foreign policy is to spread chaos and dissention in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Sudan, under the political control of the mostly Muslim North, joined the Arab League immediately upon independence, in 1956. Israel has sought to destabilize Sudan ever since, both to strike a blow at “Arabized” Africans and to curry favor among Christians on the continent.
John Garang, who rose to leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, received military training in Israel in 1970, during Sudan’s first civil war. However, Garang favored keeping the South in federation with a united Sudan. In 2005, under a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Garang became vice president of the whole of Sudan and premier of the southern part of the country. He died in a mysterious helicopter crash six months later. Garang was succeeded by Salva Kiir, who sports a black cowboy hat given to him by President Bush, in 2006.
| (Read More... | 4332 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Mandela Is Dead: Why Hide The Truth About Apartheid? Monday, December 30 @ 05:31:19 UTC | By Fidel Castro
December 29, 2013 - monthlyreview.org
Maybe the empire thought that we would not honor our word when, during days of uncertainty in the past century, we affirmed that even if the USSR were to disappear Cuba would continue struggling. World War II broke out on September 1, 1939 when Nazi-fascist troops invaded Poland and struck like a lightning over the heroic people of the USSR, who contributed 27 million lives to preserve mankind from that brutal massacre that ended the lives of 50 million persons.
War, on the other hand, is the only venture that the human race throughout history has failed to avoid, leading Einstein to say that he did not know how World War III would be like but most certainly the fourth would be fought with sticks and stones.
Added up, the means available to the two most powerful powers –United States and Russia— amount to 20,000 (twenty thousand) nuclear warheads. Mankind should know that three days before John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency of his country on January 20, 1961, a US B-52 bomber, in a routine flight, carrying two atomic bombs with a destructive capacity 260 times that of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, had an accident and the aircraft crashed. For such cases sophisticated automatic equipment are in place to prevent the bombs from exploding. The first bomb landed without risks. In the case of the second, three of the four mechanisms failed, and the fourth, in very critical conditions could barely function. The bomb did not explode by mere chance.
| (Read More... | 14009 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: The Mandela Barbie Sunday, December 15 @ 17:51:09 UTC | By Greg Palast
December 13, 2013 - gregpalast.com
I can't take it anymore. All week, I've watched Nelson Mandela reduced to a Barbie doll. From Fox News to the Bush family, the politicians and media mavens who body-blocked the anti-Apartheid Movement and were happy to keep Mandela behind bars, now get to dress his image up in any silly outfit they choose.
It's more nauseating than hypocrisy and ignorance. The Mandela Barbie tells us in a squeaky little doll voice, not his own, that apartheid is now "defeated" - to quote the ridiculous headline in the Times.
Poor Mandela. When he's not a doll, he's a statue. He joins Martin Luther King as another bronzed monument whose use is to serve a new version of racism, Apartheid 2.0, worsening both in South Africa - and in the USA.
| (Read More... | 7601 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 5) |
|
Africa Focus: Good Liberation Hero-Bad Liberation Hero Saturday, December 07 @ 19:54:42 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
December 07, 2013 - gowans.wordpress.com
It seemed almost inevitable that on the new day Western newspapers were filled with encomia to the recently deceased South African national liberation hero Nelson Mandela that another southern African hero of national liberation, Robert Mugabe, should be vilified. “Nearly 90, Mugabe still driving Zimbabwe’s economy into the ground,” complained Geoffrey York of Canada’s Globe and Mail.
President Mugabe gives a toast to a closer relationship between Zimbabweans and progressive South Africans and to peace and prosperity in 1990.
| (Read More... | 4958 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Mandela, A Life of Struggle: The History Most Mainstream Obits Omit Saturday, December 07 @ 07:34:55 UTC | By Derrick O'Keefe and Jahanzeb Hussain
December 07, 2013 - commondreams.org
Nearly 50 years ago, in 1964, Nelson Mandela — along with many other comrades in the struggle for the liberation of South Africa from racist white domination under apartheid — was sentenced to life in prison. His statement to the court, made when he was facing the real threat of execution, remains an historic demonstration of defiance and resistance.
Mandela’s sentence was “reduced” to life imprisonment. He would spend 27 years caged by the brutal racist regime in South Africa, before the resistance movement there and a worldwide solidarity campaign helped to force his release.
Many times, the apartheid government dangled a pardon for Mandela — if he would agree to publicly renounce the armed struggle. Contrary to liberal, depoliticized histories of the life of Mandela, he was in fact a political leader who believed in achieving liberation by any means necessary. Indeed, in 1961 he helped to found Umkhonto we Sizwe — which means ‘Spear of the Nation’ — an armed struggle wing of the liberation movement. Earlier that same year, Mandela gave his first ever television interview. In it, he alluded to the sense of futility of fighting against a violent apartheid regime with only non-violent means.
| (Read More... | 7869 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
War and Terror: Innocent Kenyan Blood Drips from Imperial Hands Sunday, October 06 @ 22:56:19 UTC | By Mark P. Fancher
October 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“There has been speculation that the U.S. drive to dominate Somalia’s oil supply has prompted an interest in perpetual instability and division within the country.”
A 2011 report prepared for members of Congress lacks significant references to Kenya, but it details eye-opening events in Somalia that set the stage for the recent attack on a Kenyan shopping mall. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, titled “Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace” also contains facts that allow readers to conclude that much of the innocent blood shed by shoppers killed by al-Shabaab militants drips from western imperialist hands.
The recent shopping mall attack was reportedly in retaliation for Kenya’s participation in military operations against al-Shabaab in Somalia in 2011. Al-Shabaab became a force in Somalia after a 2006 military operation that dislodged a government run by “The Islamic Courts Uni0n,” a network of tribunals that administered Islamic law. In 2006, the U.S. State Department’s point person for African affairs was Jendayi Frazer, and she was quoted as saying: “The top layer of the [Islamic Courts Uni0n] courts are extremist to the core. They are terrorists and they are in control.”
| (Read More... | 6815 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: US & France Intervene in Mali To Protect Land & Resource Grabs Monday, April 29 @ 05:36:06 UTC | US & France Intervene in Mali To Protect Land & Resource Grabs, Not Because of Al Qeda
By Bruce Dixon
April 29, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
On March 15, former General and AFRICOM commander Carter F. Ham testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the situation in the West African republic of Mali is, along with that in Nigeria and Somalia, “a direct threat to the national security of the United States.” In plain language, claiming a direct threat to US national security is the standard justification for murderous military intervention around the world, and Mali has just been added to the hit list.
Echoing official sources like General Ham, corporate media tell us that Al Qeda and related Islamist forces, flush with weapons from the recent conflict in Libya, are poised to overrun Mali. Should we believe them? Aren't they the same folks who once assured us Saddam, and nowadays Iran, have nuclear weapons? Of course they are, and the real reasons for US intervention are something else entirely.
| (Read More... | 4662 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 4) |
|
Africa Focus: Africa: Imperialism's High Mark of Conquest in the 21st Century Wednesday, April 10 @ 13:24:17 UTC | The US-NATO military curtain has fallen the length and breadth of Africa. 'Zimbabwe and tiny Eritrea are among the few nations on the African continent that have not yet been absorbed into the AFRICOM matrix.'
By Glen Ford
April 10, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“Imperialism with a Black face has been fantastically successful, in Africa.”
At present, nothing stands in the way of the militarization and occupation of Africa by the United States and its junior imperialist partners. Every global and multinational organization of any consequence on the continent has been suborned to the service of the neocolonial military project. AFRICOM, the United States Military Command in Africa, has become the headquarters of recolonization, augmented by the militaries of NATO and legitimized by the African Uni0n, itself, and the global credentials of the United Nations.
| (Read More... | 4673 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Opportunities and War in Mali Wednesday, February 13 @ 08:44:41 UTC |
No Security Firms for African Refugees: Opportunities and War in Mali
By Ramzy Baroud
February 13, 2013
The British security firm G4S is set to rake in massive profits thanks to crises in Mali, Libya and Algeria. Recognized as the world’s biggest security firm, the group’s brand plummeted during the London Olympics last year due to its failure to satisfy conditions of a government contract. But with growing unrest in North and West Africa, G4S is expected to make a speedy recovery.
The January 16th hostage crisis at Algeria’s Ain Amenas gas plant, where 38 hostages were killed, ushered in the return of al-Qaeda not as extremists on the run, but as well-prepared militants with the ability to strike deeply into enemy territories and cause serious damage. For G4S and other security firms, this also translates into growing demands. “The British group (..) is seeing a rise in work ranging from electronic surveillance to protecting travelers,” the company’s regional president for Africa told Reuters. “Demand has been very high across Africa,” Andy Baker said. “The nature of our business is such that in high-risk environments the need for our services increases.”
| (Read More... | 10594 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
| |
Facebook & Twitter |
| |
Big Story of Today | There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet. | |
Random Headlines |
[ Gold ]
| |
|