Straight off the back of March 2022’s UN General Assembly’s Russia sanction votes, the Biden-Harris administration put together an anti-Afrika Act, which passed through the House of Representatives on April 27. It’s called the “H.R. 7311 — 117th Congress: Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act.” The Act, among many colonial measures, pushes policies to control Afrikan governments, voters, and Diaspora groups. It appears to develop a strategy to counter Russia’s and its proxies’ “malign influence and activities” in “strategic sectors” of Afrika, such as mining and other natural resources extraction by oligarchs, Russian-funded military basing and private military contracting, and other areas of diplomatic, economic and security interest.
The Act is like the Berlin “Colonizer” Conference of 1884-1885, where Western European powers divvied up the Afrikan continent with neither Afrikan consultation nor Afrikan representation. The Biden-Harris administration and their Western European allies—all champions of democracy, are now set to “legally” recolonize the continent in the name of “strengthening democratic institutions… improving standards relating to human rights… [and] other tenents of good governance.” In reality, it’s in the name of the West’s interests, which compete with Russia’s and China’s. The African Report (AR) online publication noted, “they’re [US Americans] trying to gain access to the African continent to rape their natural resources and dominate their energy markets…“
Suffice it to say that the Act formalizes what’s already happening in Afrika as the US, its NATO allies France, Canada, and Britain, along with apartheid Israel, and Saudi Arabia, are already busily recolonizing the continent. If this Act passes the Senate and becomes law (and it seems more than likely), the US has not only legalized existing and expanding neo-colonial economic practices but may have also nominated Afrika as a site of the next world war. A potential “nuclear” showdown with China and Russia. The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) has at least 34 “known” military bases within easy reach of all 54 countries, which gives the US a clear edge over its so-called enemies. Enemies who are essentially just economic competitors but whom the Biden-Harris Act proposes to transform into nuclear-mad enemies on Afrikan soil.
“Like the Bush-Obama AFRICOM project, the Biden-Harris Act places a stranglehold on Afrika and its resources”
Since 2007, thousands of US troops have been deployed in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central Afrikan Republic, Chad, DR Congo, Kenya, Libya, Niger, South Sudan, Mali, Somalia, Tunisia, and Mauritania. Additionally, US’s NATO allies France has at least ten “known” military bases in Afrika and Britain has seven. Outside the UK, the most significant number of UK armed forces deployments are based in South Afrika. This presence gives US-NATO at least 51 “known” military bases in easy reach of its 54 states.
On the other side (at the time of writing), China had only one “known” military base in Afrika, located in Djibouti. Reputedly, Russia has been preparing to find four military bases in Afrika. There’s a high likelihood that both China and Russia will pressure Afrikans for more military bases on or around the continent to cement economic partnerships and defend their Afrikan interests against the US. The Biden-Harris Act would then trigger adverse economic and political, if not military, consequences. US Secretary of State Anthony J Blinken, in a speech at an ECOWAS (Economic Community of West Afrikan States) conference held in Abuja, Nigeria, on November 19, 2021, that: “As the urgency of the climate crisis grows, our focus will increasingly be on Afrika – to solve an emergency that threatens our collective security, our economies, and our health. Here, where the potential for renewable energy is greater than anywhere else on the planet, we see not only the stakes of this crisis but also – also its solutions.”
Like the Bush-Obama AFRICOM project, the Biden-Harris Act places a stranglehold on Afrika and its resources. As a result, Afrika will likely be lost to Indigenous Afrikans, not unlike how the US became lost to its Indigenous Americans. European “expatriates”–euphemistically termed ex-pats, rather than immigrants, or migrant workers, as Black and Brown peoples are usually classified–will migrate to Afrika in wild throngs to take newly created executive jobs. Middle management jobs will go to Indians and Europeans. In contrast, low-level administrative jobs or mundane-servant jobs will be given to Afrikans.
“Afrikans must demand that these terms be made transparent, and more importantly demand to know when these terms due for review”
Afrikans need to ask important questions, even rhetorical ones, such as: what and whose interests are US, British, French, Chinese, and Russian bases serving? Why are paramilitary groups operating in Afrika, often in the same regions or countries where these bases are located? Who’s arming and paying them? And these questions beget more questions, such as on what terms, legal or otherwise, are these bases situated in or around the continent? Afrikans must demand that these terms are made transparent and, more importantly, demand to know when these terms are due for review. Finally, despite Afrikan leaders’ doziness, Afrikans must assert themselves on the threat of nuclear war that the Biden-Harris Act poses.
Afrikans forget, at their peril, that the US had armed apartheid South Afrika’s army with nuclear weapons when it became evident that apartheid was militarily unsustainable, presumably to use against Black South Afrikans and their Afrikan allies. These nuclear weapons were destroyed and removed as soon as Mandela assumed political control in 1994. In other words, as soon as Black South Afrikans gained control of their country’s military. This slice of colonial history should leave no one in doubt as to what US White supremacists are prepared to do to Afrikans if or when they are thwarted or become desperate.
George Bush the younger created AFRICOM in 2007, laughably, “to promote a stable and secure political environment in Afrika, in support of US foreign policy.” Obama expanded it in 2008, with very little opposition from Afrikan countries, presumably because they trusted the first “Black (Mixed) president” with a Kenyan father. Since then, it’s evident that AFRICOM has been doing more to expand and reinforce US economic interests in Afrika than securing or stabilizing the Afrikan continent.
“Afrikans forget, at their peril, that the US had armed apartheid South Afrika’s army with nuclear weapons when it became evident that apartheid was militarily unsustainable”
The Biden-Harris neo-colonial anti-Afrika Act, which legitimizes the US’ outright control of Afrikan territory and resources, is also an electioneering gambit to boost Biden-Harris’ second-term presidential hopes. It gives them right-wing foreign policy credentials–comparable to Obama’s “AFRICOM” and Hillary Clinton’s Ghaddafi take-down. The “Obama-Clinton and Biden-Harris ethos” may have established a “multiracial commanding mind” or diversity leadership ethos. Not unlike the Hindu-White supremacy coalition, which is in vogue and proliferates in American, Irish, and the British body politic(s) in particular. That is until something goes wrong. For example, Britain’s chancellor Rishi Sunak’s potential leadership challenge to prime minister Boris Johnson, which withered on the vine, and with it, his neo-liberal economic strategies, along with Sunak’s wife’s lucrative Russian tax loopholes. White supremacist countries, Afriphobic alt conservatives, and liberals seem less threatened by this “Blasian and White” leadership combo, particularly a male-female compromise, than a Black Afrikan leadership or even a White-Black leadership. For example, Biden and someone like the former Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, Ms. Stacey Abrams, a BLM-type protagonist whom they’d probably regard as “too Black.”
If Harris becomes US President, she may be keen to justify her accession to White supremacy’s table by “selling out” Black Afrika as Obama did when he expanded AFRICOM, invaded Libya, and overthrew Muammar Ghaddafi. In this context, Trump’s call for a march turned attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is insignificant. Worse, President Harris may be eager to acquire Thatcheresque warrior credentials by treating Black Afrika as her own Malvinas (Falklands) just because she can, especially if it improves her chances of a second “historic” term in office. Black Afrika could be her Iraq—her sacrifice on the altar of triple historic achievements—first woman, first Browning, and first back-to-back VP-Presidency.
The late Colin Powell soundly rejected pioneering the Black-White US Presidential combo when he rejected US Republican Party presidential candidacy in 1996 and again in 2000. Perhaps he did not want his legacy tarnished by being part of a “multiracial alt conservative or White supremacy collaboration,” which would essentially betray Afrikans and Black nations at every opportunity. Powell expected that he would need to assassinate “promising” Afrikan leaders, as has the custom historically, and perhaps still is White supremacy’s neo-colonial way of effectively dealing with troublesome or progressive, incorruptible Afrikan leaders like Amilcar Cabral or Patrice Lumumba. Or instigate coups that removed and replaced them with “prefects” or “servant leaders,” who’d be more compliant. Examples of such coups are plentiful, including the one by which one of the founding fathers of Pan Afrikanism, Kwame Nkrumah, was dispatched. They would only have to remove two or three such leaders, and the rest would fall in line, gamely.
Powell was also well aware that under such circumstances, he would have to murder Afrikans in genocidal droves to subjugate or control them—all of which will be legitimized by the Biden-Harris anti-Afrika Act. In other words, the Biden-Harris administration has retooled Jim Crow domestic fascism for use against Afrikans at home—not as policies that conflict with United Nations Charter, but as US law, which is less subjected to UN, human rights, or civil rights challenges.
The US has repeatedly shown that United Nations Charter and resolutions can be thwarted or discounted in pursuit of its interests as the US pays the lion’s share of the UN’s budget. The UN can be brought to heel by threatening its finances or withholding funds, and even by threatening countries whose members stand up for the Charter, such as late General Secretary Kofi Anan and his country Ghana. Therefore, the Biden-Harris anti-Afrika Act could easily hold sway and withstand UN scrutiny unless it is routed by global Afrikans or repealed by a future US administration, which could take too long and by which time Afrika would be lost to Afrikans.
“The US has shown time and again that the United Nations Charter and resolutions can be thwarted or discounted in pursuit of its own interests, because the US pays the lion’s share of the UN’s budget”
Suppose Donald Trump, who regards Afrika and other Black and Brown countries as “shithole countries,” wins a second term. In which case, he might also interpret and enforce the Biden-Harris anti-Afrika Act with impunity and blood-soaked consequences. Moreover, he would undoubtedly use it to lever into place Trump’s MAGA dream of using the US’s military might to obtain and keep control of Afrika’s vast resources. To restore, strengthen, and maintain the US’ “threatened” superpower status, which would undoubtedly be Trump’s “redemptive” place in history. All of which points to the fact that Afrika could end up paying the crippling cost to the US and Europe, of Russian sanctions, the Ukraine war chest, and Covid-19 Pandemic economic recovery costs. In many ways, Afrika is already their feeding trough.
Apartheid Israel has been implementing its replacement scheme in Afrika, where it avidly seeks and is granted “observer” status in the Afrikan Union—a kind of renewable virtual membership. In July 2021, the AU Commission Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, made the unilateral decision to grant Israel the “observer status,” for which Tel Aviv had been lobbying for twenty years. However, the decision was later suspended by other AU member states for being incompatible with the Union’s Charter.
Why does Israel want “observer” status in the Afrikan Union so severely? Especially with such an atrocious race relations record. Israel has allegedly been directly linked to groups committing massacres against Afrikan civilians in order to obtain diamonds. Israel is also in the habit of withdrawing or canceling agricultural technology partnership projects in Afrika whenever it does not get its way. While raping Afrikan resources and imposing itself on Afrikans at home, Israel has been subjecting Afrikans to various forms of discrimination. For example, Ethiopian Jews and Black Jews, in general, had been banned from attending pilgrimages to holy sites. Israel is a crucial ally and beneficiary of the US. Unfortunately, its supremacist behavior usually presages nothing good. Black Israelis had to combat racism in apartheid Israel by setting up a version of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Israel is the home of the descendants of one of humanity’s most heinous racist atrocities. Yet, paradoxically, this Jewish state is committing some of the world’s most atrocious racist crimes less than a century later.
And here we are, another Afrikan catastrophe of world war potentialities in the making, ironically being partly authored by none other than a female feminist democrat of Afrikan descent. Her country and waning superpower, the US, need a big war abroad pretty soon. A war to distract denizens from socioeconomic hardships, a rapid decline in world status, “unwanted Black refugees,” and genocidal violence at home caused by mad, bad, or insane religious cult wielders of assault weapons, which rightly belong on a battlefield. Contextual with evangelical White supremacist paramilitaries and second amendment NRA terrorists, espousing spurious theories to justify committing atrocities primarily against Black Americans.
“If Biden-Harris domestic policies fail to deliver socioeconomic justice to Afrikan Americans at home it is hardly likely that their foreign policy will benefit Black people globally, particularly a law designed to undermine Afrikan sovereignty”
Like its predecessor, the Biden-Harris administration is unlikely to be able to implement adequate laws or policies to rid the US of these genocidal attacks by legislating for meaningful gun control and periodic amnesties to take assault rifles and other military-grade weapons away from children, young people, and society in general. Black mother Ms. Zeneta Everhart’s, whose son survived the Buffalo shooting last month with critical injuries, said at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing: “No citizen needs an AR 15 [a gun].” An irony sadly lost on the same US lawmakers who want to deprive Afrikans of their sovereignty.
The Biden-Harris Congress have not yet produced the badly needed socio-economic policies and relevant legislation for which they received almost ninety percent of Afrikan America’s votes in the 2020 presidential election. According to a Guardian article, “Biden almost dropped out of the race to become the Democratic presidential nominee… after several disappointing results in early voting states–until Black voters in South Carolina delivered him a resounding win. And while the race between the former vice president and Donald Trump remained too close to call… it appears Black Americans once again stepped up to give the Democrat the backbone of his support, especially in key battleground states, including Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.”
The Black vote tasked Biden-Harris to improve education, policing, criminal justice systemic reforms, and reparation prospects for 246, possibly 500 years of combined slavery, colonialism, and genocide of Black and Indigenous Americans. However, suppose Biden-Harris’ domestic policies fail to deliver socio-economic justice to Afrikan Americans at home. In that case, it is hardly likely that their foreign policy will benefit Black people globally, particularly a law designed to undermine Afrikan sovereignty.
Rescuing the Biden-Harris presidential prospects in 2020 could be Afrikan Americans’ biggest mistake. But what else could they have done?
“What’s happening on the Afrikan continent has a direct bearing on what happens to you and me in this country: The degree to which they get independence, strength, and recognition on that continent is inseparable from the degree to which we get independence, strength, and recognition on this continent“
Malcolm X, NY Harlem Youth Forum, December 12, 1964