The U.S. Out of Africa Network and the Black Alliance for Peace want to thank everyone who participated in the International Month of Action Against AFRICOM that has now come to a close. On October 1 of this year, the Black Alliance for Peace and the U.S. Out of Africa Network launched a month-long mobilization effort in support of the U.S. Out of Africa!/Shut Down AFRICOM! campaign to raise the public's awareness about the U.S. military's existence in Africa, and how the presence of U.S. forces exacerbates violence and instability throughout the continent.
A webinar entitled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa” kicked off a month of various activities, including teach-ins, more webinars, banner drops and other forms of activity in the U.S., on the African continent, and beyond. These efforts should and will continue. Please visit the Black Alliance for Peace website for additional resources, like a Toolkit to Shut Down AFRICOM, in order to inform yourself and show solidarity with Africans on the continent who are facing militarized repression and expose the connections to the domestic war on colonized people here in the U.S.
The effort to shut down AFRICOM is ongoing and will continue past the month of October. If you would like to get involved and stay up to date with the campaign, we urge you to consider joining the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), which is the organizational arm of the Black Alliance for Peace’s U.S. Out of Africa!/Shut Down AFRICOM! campaign. We will continue to educate the public about the destructive U.S. hybrid war and imperialist policies perpetrated by AFRICOM on the African continent and build real opposition to the designs of the Pan-European Capitalist Patriarchy.
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin speaks with Dr. Sharon Gramby-Sobukwe, who is a professor of Political Science at Eastern University, and a former central committee member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union. Her published works address Africa and structural adjustment, African leadership, black women in the church and political movements. She is an ordained minister and founding member of Black Radical Christians.
The following is a continuation of the interview published in Bulletin #33.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Are there important distinctions between the Financial Imperialism imposed by Western powers and the increasing imprint of China on the continent? If so, please talk about them.
Dr. Sharon Gramby-Sobukwe: Definitely, yes. First, while some argue that China is indebting African nations in neocolonial relationships, China does not extort African countries to get them indebted. Whereas imperialists force peripheral countries worldwide into the structural adjustment trap with nothing to show for it over 50 years, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) provides another alternative. BRI focuses on infrastructure and human development, producing considerable infrastructural improvements, such as ports, waterways, highways, hospitals and innovations in technology and farming. In return, China benefits as a trading partner, typically in raw materials needed for industry and especially manufacturing growth, on free trade terms (Prashad, 2021).
While the future will tell if China is entrapping African countries, this does not seem to be the case. Chinese banks have been restructuring African debt, to Africa’s advantage, for two decades. Multilateral lenders — the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and others — constitute 20 percent of Africa’s debt service this year. While these lenders are undertaking some efforts to help countries repay their own loans, they are not relaxing repayment requirements (Acker, Brautigam, & Huang, 2021). Meanwhile, the pandemic has worsened Africa’s debt crisis, such that during the pandemic, 64 countries spent more on debt service than healthcare (Prashad, 2021). However, China is responding. In at least 16 cases, China has restructured debt of $7.5 billion in 10 African countries between 2000 and 2019. China also wrote off the accumulated arrears of at least 94 interest-free loans amounting to at least $3.4 billion.
In addition to cancelling debts, China’s restructuring has involved extending repayment periods and occasionally, decreasing interest rates to address cash flows available for loan-financed projects as well as the country’s overall payments position (Acker, Brautigam, & Huang, 2021).
Secondly, for those who contend that China is neither socialist nor communist, and certainly not revolutionary, it’s worth studying how China has transformed its population. The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research found that “850 million people had climbed out of absolute poverty (the culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949), that their per capita income had increased to US$10,000 (a ten-fold increase in the last twenty years), and that life expectancy had increased to 77.3 years on average (compared to 35 years in 1949).” Further, studying ground level poverty eradication efforts, they found the concept of multidimensional poverty is central to the Chinese approach. Through this approach, the Communist Party of China provides
‘three guarantees’ (safe housing, healthcare, and education)
‘two assurances’ (being fed and being clothed).
cadre to help local authorities survey households to understand the depth of poverty in the countryside.
3 million cadre out of the Party’s 95.1 million members to be part of 255,000 teams that spent years living in poor villages working towards the eradication of poverty and the social conditions it created. One team was assigned to a village, and another to each family.
These studies resulted in five core methods for eradicating poverty:
developing industry, which created capital-intensive agricultural production (including crop processing and animal breeding); restored farmlands; and grew forests as part of the ecological compensation schemes, reviving areas that had become prey to resource overexploitation;
relocating people;
incentivizing ecological compensation;
guaranteeing free, quality, and compulsory education;
and providing social assistance.
While there is still much to be done in this area, emphasis was also placed on educating minority populations and women. As a result, in 2020, China ranked first in the world in the enrolment of women in tertiary education, according to the World Economic Forum.
Countries in Africa and the periphery in general seem to get more options with China than multilaterals. The BRI is the Chinese Communist Party’s internationalist mission for the second century, it has socialist experience backing it, and it provides a win-win for both developing countries and China. As Campbell (2015) notes, it’s simplistic to suggest that China is imperialist because there are large-scale Chinese investments in Africa. Chinese investments in Africa are less than in Europe, North America, or in Eastern Europe, and many of these criticisms emphasize investments by Chinese state companies, while the much larger, and more clearly exploitative, role of Western multinational corporations is hidden in accounting due to their private nature. However, as Campbell (2015) argues the Chinese state is vulnerable to criticism for the exploitation of Chinese and African workers alike, and for its history of lack of respect for environmental standards.
AWB: A 2018 Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) tracked 30 African countries from 1970-2015 and concluded that they lost about $1.8 trillion in capital flight to include interests and earnings. Over the same period the same countries received just under $500 billion in foreign aid and investment which show that Africa is actually a net creditor to the rest of the world. Yet it is widely viewed as a debtor region. Can you talk about why there is such a wide gap between how Africa is perceived and the reality?
SGS: This question, I think, is related to the next. If one considers only the criteria and standards of imperialist reporting and lending agencies, what is evaluated plays to the interests of the imperialists. Intellectuals who assess the impact of imperialism on the periphery, as Samir Amin did, must use different analyses, which highlight the experiences of African countries and the African masses.
AWB: The Egyptian scholar and economist Samir Amin talks about intellectual compromise and how academic programs in the social sciences in many African universities stifle the development of critical thought. As a result, African students are essentially trained to maintain the status quo of Financial Imperialism. How can this be changed?
SGS: We can follow Samir Amin’s model. He was, first, always optimistic about the processes of revolutionary change on behalf of the masses, avoiding the typical ‘pessimism of the intellect’ common among frustrated intellectuals and students. Further, like Amin, we must be committed to dialectical analyses, reflecting between theory and practice to fully assess the issues of imperialism and racial capitalism, and focusing on the material and social realities of the suffering masses to understand the relationships between global and local conditions, and ensuring a rounded and connected analysis of the developments of capitalism. Amin also made sure his analyses were grounded in not only the present but history as well, recognizing that capitalism is fundamentally a global system, determined in its nature and functioning by the unequal relationship between center and periphery (Ghosh, 2021). Regardless of whether universities teach this kind of dialectical analysis, we must do so in revolutionary organizations.
AWB: Thank you for your time and analysis!
News and Analysis
Ethiopians Mobilize to Halt Western-backed Coup Attempt
November 8, 2021 by Abayomi Azikiwe
Western imperialists led by the United States are behind the TPLF attempt to re-take power in Ethiopia. These events illustrate clearly the role of imperialism in fostering division and balkanization in Africa.
The Fight to Free Africa: Africans vs. AFRICOM
November 4, 2021 by Hood Communist Radio
In this episode of Hood Communist Radio, the editors discuss the need to shut down US imperialism in Africa, as part of the Black Alliance for Peace month of action on AFRICOM.
African Union Must Implement Strategies to Reverse Military Coups
October 29, 2021 by Abayomi Azikiwe
The class position of the military within post-independence African society is a manifestation of the legacy of colonial rule.
AFRICOM and the Horn of Africa
October 25, 2021 by United National Antiwar Coalition
BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley and Yolian Ogbu of the Horn of Africa Pan Africans for Liberation and Solidarity and the All African People's Revolutionary Party spoke with the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) as part of the "Shut Down AFRICOM" month of action.
Weekly Pan-African News: Shut down AFRICOM! with Tunde Osazua of Black Alliance for Peace
October 21, 2021 by A-APRP New Mexico
This episode of #WeeklyPanAfricanNews featured a discussion with Tunde Osazua, the U.S. Out of Africa Network Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, about the movement to get the US and NATO out of Africa.
Pantsula Podcast Ep. 41: End AFRICOM and 1033 now!
October 18, 2021 by Kaji Circle A-APRP
On this episode of the Pantsula Podcast, A-APRP organizers Evan and jamilah speak with Jelani, organizer with Black Alliance For Peace (BAP), discussing the campaigns to end AFRICOM and 1033, as well as the importance and mission of BAP's work.
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No Compromise, No Retreat!
Banner Photo: Distinguished visitors day in Kitgum, Uganda, courtesy of flickr user U.S. Army Africa.