Africa

By Chris Cole

On January 28, the New York Times reported that the US is planning to establish a new base for its drones in north-west Africa. While the base is to be used initially to fly unarmed surveillance drones, according to the article the US does not rule out the possibility of using the base to launch drone strikes in the future. One day after the NYT piece, Reuters reported the base would be established in Niger. According to ”a senior government source” says Reuters, ”the U.S. ambassador to Niger, Bisa Williams, made the request at a meeting on Monday with President Mahamadou Issoufou, who immediately accepted it.”

Hujambo!

I greet you with the Swahili phrase so common in East Africa, taught to me by my mentor and colleague Pan African pacifist Bill Sutherland as we travelled through Tanzania to engage President Julius Nyerere in conversations for our book Guns and Gandhi in Africa. One of the things which Nyerere and Bill helped teach me was that—like the village-based collective farming experiments known as Ujamma—it was not at all that nonviolence in Africa had failed to bring about radical change. The truth was that Ujamma, like unarmed revolution, had never really been tried.

By Matt Meyer

Despite decades of anti-colonial civilian resistance in Africa, a pernicious movement of land acquisition is overtaking the continent at a rate unprecedented since the conquests of the 19th Century. In a low-profile manner, significantly more than 125 million acres of land—more than double the size of Britain—has been sold to wealthy investors or foreign governments since 2010. With China and India leading the list of national purchasers, and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan amongst the leading multinational corporate plunderers, the countries most affected by recent sales include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Oxfam International has reported that, in some cases, land has been sold for less than forty cents an acre.

"Mining-induced displacement ... was one of the most underreported causes of displacement in Africa, and one that was likely to increase, as mineral extraction remained a key economic driver in the whole region," was one of the conclusions of a official report by SADC, the Southern African Development Community, early 2006.

Aluminium's countless applications in modern civilian life tend to mask its numerous uses in weapons technology, which make it one of a handful of metals classed as “strategic” by the Pentagon, meaning that a top priority of the world's most powerful Governments is to ensure its constant supply at lowest possible cost.

Old Commitments, New Hopes

Collected by Matt Meyer

For advocates of revolutionary nonviolence - the interconnected commitment to radical social change and the strategies and tactics of unarmed "soul force" - the history and contemporary struggles throughout the continent of Africa provide rich example of great hope.

While public interest in Europe and Northern America focuses on the Balkans, many changes in the face of the military can be seen in Africa too. While the war in Congo involving participation by many African countries demonstrates the example of military intervention only by African armies, Nigeria and other countries serve as example of a military which presents itself as promoting democracy after years of military dictatorship and the only effective force against corruption.

The workshop looked firstly at the historical development of militarisation in Africa.