Netfa Freeman
Coordinator| Institute for Policy Studies
Roger Kotila, Ph.D
President, Democratic World Federalists
For the US, African people globally have no economic value short of being unwitting consumers whose labor-use has expired, and whose resistance to social injustice must be repressed at all costs. This conflict of interests reveals a natural contradiction between North American versus African or Black identities. African-American on many levels is an oxymoron.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of U.S. Africa Command – AFRICOM, created on October 1, 2008. AFRICOM is the re-colonization of Africa by the U.S. and constitutes the new scramble for Africa equivalent to when, in the 1800s, the colonial powers fought over which of them would dominate which parts of the resource-rich continent.
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There is no more glaring proof that the US has been waging war against both Black people within its borders and those in Africa than a cursory examination of the responses by the US National security state to Black movements for decolonization and self-determination inside the US and on the continent. A parallel history in form and essence unfolds when comparing what took place from the 1950s to the 70s in the US Black Power, Civil Rights movements with the independence, anti-colonial movement in Africa.
Documented evidence vividly illustrates that the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program, also known as COINTELPRO, orchestrated operations to “infiltrate, intimidate, imprison, and assassinate” the leaders of Black movements for social justice in the US.
In Africa, the US executed identical and chronologically aligned repression through the CIA against the independent African governments and liberation movements sweeping the continent. No matter where in the world African people are, our organizing for social justice is treated as a threat to the political, economic, and cultural interest of the US ruling class that actually constitutes the essence of Americanism. Democratically elected leaders of the new African states were subjected to coup d’états and incessant assassination attempts including that of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the successful assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and today we can add the 2011 brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
US state agents continue tantamount treatment, like spying on Black Lives Matter activists, monitoring their social media and creating the bogus FBI designation Black Identity Extremists to malign them as responsible for violence against police. All the while tolerating organized, criminal infiltration of law enforcement by violent white supremacists.
AFRICOM is the U.S. response to economic competition with China and its increased influence on the continent. AFRICOM is also to prevent the emergence of any independent African influence or force. It is NOT to fight drug trafficking or terrorism as stated in their promotional materials. The U.S. Military presence is a destabilizing presence demonstrated by events like the 2012 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Mali by an AFRICOM trained Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo and the 2015 coup in Burkina Faso led by AFRICOM trained Colonel-Major Gilbert Diendere.
During this month the Black Alliance for Peace has been rolling out its campaign US Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM urging all peace and justice loving people to sign the campaign’s petition directed to the House Armed Services Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus.
In his last year of office, instead of doing what he could to abolish the 1033 program, Barack Obama put minor restrictions on it which the Trump administration immediately reversed within its first year. The Bush administration, progenitor of AFRICOM,, was rebuked across the African continent when attempting to establish the headquarters for AFRICOM on the continent, forcing the new command to work out of Europe.
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What impact has increased militarization abroad had on US Black and Brown communities? Since 1990, about $6 billion worth of U.S. Department of Defense property has been transferred to local, state, federal and tribal law-enforcement agencies while communities are suffering from austerity cuts. The world saw this deployed against Black rebellions in response to the police shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The first actual militarization of US police started 28 years before the 1033 program in the 1960s with the creation of the Special Weapons and Tactics units –commonly known as SWAT. In South Africa (Azania) the same thing was developed at exactly the same time. The STF (Special Task Force) was an elite Police Tactical Unit of the white settler regime’s South African Police Service (SAPS). The first significant deployments of SWAT and STF units were to repress African/Black movements for liberation. On December 9, 1969 SWAT was deployed for a four-hour confrontation with members of the Black Panthers in a densely populated area of Los Angeles. In 1967 about 2,000 STF forces were deployed to guard the northern border of Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) to assist Rhodesian security forces against the liberation forces there.
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Likewise in the US, it has been shown that the rise of so-called street gangs like the Bloods and Crips reflect a generation of radicalized youth misguided after a decimated 1960s Black Power movement. In spite of gun control laws like California’s Mulford Act supported even by the National Rifle Association to curtail the Black Panther Party’s armed stand to defend the Black community from police terror, by the 1980s semi-automatic weaponry and other sophisticated small arms found its way into US Black communities and countries in Africa.
US officials reject as unauthentic “Study Response To Presidential Security Review Memorandum NSC-46” that outlines a deliberate and sophisticated policy of fostering political divisions between ”Black Africa And The US Black Movement.” Measures like:
Specific steps should be taken with the help of appropriate government agencies to inhibit coordinated activity of the Black Movement in the United States.
2. Special clandestine operations should be launched by the CIA to generate mistrust and hostility in American and world opinion against joint activity of the two forces…
3. US embassies to Black African countries specially interested in southern Africa must be highly circumspect in view of the activity … opposing the objectives and methods of U.S. policy toward South Africa…” are all arguably what has been US policy.
The double standards and hypocrisy of the US government are clear, making it imperative that the ideological schizophrenia perpetuated by Americanism is broken. A mass movement must emerge that exposes AFRICOM, confronting the powers that be about it; and that makes it inseparable from the concerns we have over the militarization in our communities in the United States.
All peace and justice loving people can start by signing the US Out of Africa! Shut Down AFRICOM petition, spreading it to others and then getting involved
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RESUMENNetfa holds a B.A. in History from the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and has been a political organizer/activist since 1985. He served as coordinator of the Committee for Political Education at the Pan-African Resource Center (1985-1989) and has worked as a phone-bank fundraiser for the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES 1988-1990)
