Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

WHEN THEY SAY "AID", THEY MEAN "RAID"
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[Col. Writ. 6/13/05] Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal  (http://www.mumia.org)

    Recently, the news columns were full of a supposed dispute between
the Americans and the British about foreign aid relief to Africa. If
the news reports are to be believed, the British wish to push the
Americans further, to provide more debt relief for countries staggering
under their economic burdens.

    The media image that arises is one of the rich, Western, White
nations caring about the lives and conditions of starving Black Africa.
And like many media images, it simply isn't true.

    What is often lost in this angelic imagery is the truth behind the
so-called aid. That 'aid' that was given years ago, was given to
military dictatorships, and it was often military aid meant to
strengthen dictatorships, against, not foreign attacks, but popular
resistance, from their own people!

    Indeed, in a 1960 meeting of the U.S. National Security Council,
American spies and diplomats spoke rather openly about U.S. support for
military regimes. The minutes of the meeting record them saying:

       We must recognize, although we cannot say it publicly, that we
       need the strong men of Africa on our side. It is important to understand that
       most of Africa will soon be independent and that it would be naive
       of the U.S. to hope that Africa will be democratic ... Since we must
       have the strong men of Africa on our side, perhaps we should in some
       cases develop military strong men as an offset to Communist
       development of the labor unions. The President agreed that it
       might be desirable for us to try to 'reach' the strong men of
       Africa ...
       [Fr. NSA mtg., 1/14/60 as published in *Foreign Relations,
     1958-1960, Vol. XIV*, pp. 73-78.]

    From meetings such as this, came US 'aid' to such dictators as
Zaire's late Mobutu, who was among one of the wealthiest men in Africa,
if not the world. Through 'African strong men' such as he, the U.S. ran
many countries as neocolonies, through which they could further exploit
the people of the continent.

    The late U.S. President, Richard Nixon, spoke a powerful political
truth when he said: "Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is
*not to help other nations* but to help ourselves." [Fr. Graham Hancock,
*Lords of Poverty* (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989, p. 71].

    Think about it this way: when millions of dollars in military aid is
given to a dictatorship, where does the money go? To the receiving
country, or to the arms dealers and defense contractors which makes the
weapons? So, how is this 'aid'?

    It's aid to ourselves to arm forces that keep their own people in
line. Also, since at least the 1970s, U.S. food aid has been tied to
the myth of population control. In order to receive 'aid' from the
nice, White, West -- African, Latin American and Asian countries have
had to pledge they would reduce their populations.

    Why would countries that are agricultural gardens of Eden even need
food aid? That's because, after formal colonialism, Western powers
often installed military dictators who spent the nation's resources on
weapons used to break and destroy labor unions! A 1986 study by the
National Academy of Sciences found that the single country of Zaire,
alone, could feed it's own population -- 62 times over! Indeed, that
one country, with high agricultural outputs, could feed the entire
continent of Africa!

    But, under the rapacious U.S. -supported military dictatorship of
Mobutu, much of that agricultural potential, and it's vast wealth of
resources, was squandered, and sent into Belgian and European banks.

    The late, great Kwame Nkrumah said 'political independence, without
economic independence, is but a mirage.'

    The sweet words of 'aid' muttered by British and American officials
to Africa is to lull the people asleep with promises.

    It is, in truth, yet another plan to exploit people who have been
exploited by outsiders for millennia.

    True 'aid' is reparations, for the crimes of colonialism.

    Real 'aid' would be an end to the support of military regimes.

    Real 'aid' would be an end to political, economic, and social
interference in the social, cultural and familial affairs of African people.

    Real 'aid' would be an end to imperialism!


Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal

[*Source*: Information Project for Africa, *Excessive Force: Power,
Politics & Population Control* (Wash., DC: Infor. Proj. for Africa, 1995).]

http://lists.topica.com/lists/mumiacolumns/read/message.html?mid=811244843&sort=d&start=367

The recent focus on Africa reinforces our perception of it as picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic and passive

Madeleine Bunting
Monday July 4, 2005
The Guardian

Call me naive, but I thought it was possible that 2005 could achieve even more than a historic breakthrough deal on debt relief and aid for Africa. The conjunction of this key political moment with a huge cultural festival, Africa 05 - television and radio programmes, festivals of music, museums all over the country hosting exhibitions - seemed to hold the promise of achieving one of those lasting shifts in public understanding of Africa.

What seemed within grasp was the start of a new relationship between the neighbouring continents of Europe and Africa - at last. Could Britain open a new page in its long engagement with Africa, finally drawing a line under the colonial themes of "saving" and "civilising" the continent? The wealth of African creativity evident everywhere - art, music, sculpture, film - would reinject into the public sphere a perception of the immense ingenuity, resourcefulness and reflective inquiry of Africans. It would shatter the myth of Africans as powerless victims at the mercy of western generosity and do-goodery.

It would help us to put back into the political landscape a sense of African agency. It would correct the media myth that the fate of millions of Africans is passively lying in the hands of eight men arriving in Gleneagles on Wednesday, and make clear that, given half a chance, Africans can shape the circumstances of their daily lives - and their often-precarious survival - far more powerfully and effectively than the G8.

The hope was that people would get to see more of Africa than starving black babies on their screens. We would get to hear about Africans much like ourselves - with the same hopes, fears and aspirations; we would, finally, begin to identify with them as human beings. That shift of perception offered a radical potential for a more equal engagement between Europe and Africa - the kind of sustained long-term relationship necessary to deal with the huge challenges to our species of climate change and Aids.

You may say that was ludicrously naive. And I begin to fear that you are right. What we are seeing now in this unprecedented media focus on Africa is a very old theme. In 1787 the slogan of the Quaker abolitionists was "Am I not a man and a brother?" But the radicalism of this rallying cry was belied by the image on the Anti-Slavery Society's seal of the African slave - he was on his knees. His liberty and dignity was ours for the giving, not his for the taking. The relationship at this G8, more than 200 years later, is similarly framed: African as supplicant to the (mostly) white men.

An entire continent has been reduced to a "scar on the conscience of the world", stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787. The images we saw of Africans at Live 8 on Saturday were the dying, the starving and the desperately impoverished. Postcolonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification. To the partying Hyde Park crowd, Kofi Annan said "thank you". But for what?

Blair's Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as "the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries" of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that "it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance".

What the past few weeks have reinforced in popular perception is the absurd simplification of an entire continent so that it is explicable in terms of just four adjectives: picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic and, above all, passive. This is the formula used by such interlocutors as Bob Geldof and Rolf Harris (the BBC seems to think we won't watch Africa without a white face to show us around). In the Geldof episodes I forced myself to watch, I heard only two Africans speak - a few whispers from a frightened child, a few words from a wizened elder - and none in Harris. Sumptuous maybe, but these programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say. This kind of TV reflects a profound lack of curiosity in Africa; a sharp contrast to the early 20th century, when Africa revolutionised western art, or the 60s, when a wave of new African leaders drew nervous respect across Europe.

The lost opportunity that 2005 may come to represent is not for want of trying. Visit the near-empty galleries of the Crafts Council's Africa exhibition to marvel at the beauty and skill of the basket-making, the beaten silver, the woven clothes; visit the British Museum's Africa galleries to admire the beauty of El Anatsui's woven tapestries of bottle tops. All over the country this year are examples of African art's use of recycled materials - from bottle tops to bed springs, machine guns to petrol cans. But Africa 05's director, Augustus Caseley-Hayford, is bitterly frustrated at the refusal of the mainstream media to engage - a kind of wilful incomprehension that he can only see as racism.

It is almost as if the west can't accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four Ps because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial history of the "dark continent" of Joseph Conrad fame. Is this the price that has to be paid for an instant of western attention?

The west, in its rapacious and impatient greed, destroys with contempt or indifference all that it can't appropriate for its own aggrandisement. Africa exposes - like no other continent - the hubristic arrogance of the western industrialised countries that dominate the globe and are forcing an entire species into one model of human development - a model with catastrophic shortcomings.

Now is precisely the point at which we need to learn about the genius of Africa's own history of development, which, Lonsdale suggests, lies in the extraordinary resilience and self-sufficiency to survive and adapt in habitats not always conducive to human life. The resilience is derived in part from an investment in relationships (rather than things); partly it lies in the qualities of self-disciplined willpower that sustain individuals against all the odds. These are skills we've forgotten or may never have had, but the coming centuries suggest we'll need to learn them from Africans.

If we recognised the immensity of this achievement of human endeavour over thousands of years, it might help to dismantle the self-satisfied superiority by which the west lays claim to a monopoly on concepts of progress and development. We - Africans and westerners - might begin to reframe the debate and ask ourselves if it isn't the grossly polluting G8 which is a scar on the conscience of the world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0,13365,1520793,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0,13365,1520793,00.html)