What is this a 'rebuttal' to? What you have posted is very interesting and is broadly related to my original posting but I'd be interested to know more specifically how you think the two issues are related. The original yahoo news story , about how young people in Africa, particularly places like Liberia, Togo and Ivory Coast, do not seem to differentiate between 'Rockafella' and 'Rockefeller', in other words both the hip hop and establishment cultures are embraced as representing 'America' which is not necessarily untrue, but is symptomatic of a naivite among some (many) Africans about the way Hip Hop has been co-opted and recruited to serve as an ambassador of American 'culture'. It is worth noting that hip-hop culture also has important political significance in Africa as well, notably in South Africa, where it has taken on an interesting racial dimension, where 'colored' youth indentify more with hip-hop than 'black' youth, who tend to listen to reggae and African pop, see Lee Watkins" `Simunye, we are not one': ethnicity, difference and the hip-hoppers of Cape Town." http://rac.sagepub.com/cgi/rapidpdf/43/1/29
"The emergence of hip-hop is associated with the resurgence of black nationalism in the US, where it is near impossible to separate black nationalism from class struggle. Similarly, in Cape Town, hip-hop is strongly associated with colour and class consciousness, as well as political mobilisation. During apartheid, hip-hoppers in the wasteland of Cape Town, an area known as the Cape Flats, used hip-hop to work through the tensions of being racially marginalised from local domains of power.[1] These days, hip-hoppers continue to draw attention to their status as the victims of local and global racism. Most of the hip-hoppers are `coloured',[2] in apartheid terms that is, and while most of them identify with black people around the globe and with the ideology of black consciousness,[3] others look to the past and identify themselves as coloureds. These allegiances mark hip-hop on the Cape Flats as a space of contestation, and they speak to the category of blackness as one of heterogeneity and difference."
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Wanzala" <jwanzala at hotmail.com> New African protest slogan: "Tell George Bush to send us guns!"
My rebuttal for the 'masses' (since this week in four SA cities we're launching the SR2005):
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Excerpt from 'US Empire and South African Subimperialism' - in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Eds), Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded, London, Merlin and New York, Monthly Review Press, pp.125-144.
...
What are US planners up to in Africa? As one illustration, an expert at the US Naval War College recently drew up 'The Pentagon's New Map,' highlighting countries now considered danger zones for imperialism. In Africa, these included Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Somalia and even South Africa, sites which could not only 'incubate the next generation of global terrorists', but also host interminable poverty, disease and routine mass murder.[1] Benign - or malign - neglect would no longer be sufficient. The period during the 1990s after the failed Somali intervention, when Washington's armchair warriors let Africa slide out of view, may have come to an end with September 11. Army General Charles Wald, who controls the Africa Programme of the European Command, told the BBC in early 2004 that he aims to have five brigades with 15,000 men working in cooperation with regional partners including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and two others still to be chosen.[2] NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General James Jones, confirmed the US geographical strategy in May 2003: 'The carrier battle groups of the future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future may not spend six months in the Mediterranean Sea but I'll bet they'll spend half the time down the West Coast of Africa.'[3] Within weeks, 3000 US troops had been deployed off the coast of Liberia (and went briefly ashore to stabilize the country after Charles Taylor departed). Potential US bases were suggested for Ghana, Senegal and Mali, as well as the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.[4] Another base was occupied by 1,500 US troops in the small Horn country of Djibouti. Botswana and Mozambique were also part of the Pentagon's strategy, and South Africa would remain a crucial partner.
Central and eastern Africa remains a problem area, and not merely because of traditional French and Belgian neocolonial competition with British and US interests.[5] President Clinton's refusal to cite Rwanda's situation as formal genocide in 1994 was an infamous failure of nerve in terms of the emerging doctrine of 'humanitarian' imperialism - in contrast to intervention in the (white-populated) Balkans. With an estimated three million dead in Central African wars, partly due to struggles over access to coltan and other mineral riches, conflicts worsened between and within the Uganda/Rwanda bloc, vis-à-vis the revised alliance of Laurent Kabila's DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia. Only with Kabila's assassination in 2001 and Pretoria's management of peace deals in the DRC and Burundi, did matters settle, however briefly, into a fragile peace combining neoliberalism with opportunities for minerals extraction. However, as turmoil resumed in mid-2004, it was clear that coups and outbreaks of strife would be a constant threat, demonstrating how precarious Pretoria's elite deals are when deeper tensions remain unresolved. Another particularly difficult site is Sudan, where US Delta Force troops have been sighted in informal operations, perhaps because although China showed some interest in oil exploration there during the country's civil war chaos, US oil firms have subsequently arrived. On the west coast, the major petro prize remains the Gulf of Guinea. With oil shipment from Africa to Louisiana refineries taking many fewer weeks than from the Persian Gulf, the world's shortage of supertankers is eased by direct sourcing from West Africa's offshore oil fields.
In this context, it is not surprising that of $700 million destined to develop a 75,000-strong UN peace-keeping force in coming years, $480 million is dedicated to African soldiers.[6] But Africa is also a site for the recruitment of private mercenaries, as an estimated 1,500 South Africans - including half of Mbeki's own 100 personal security force - joined firms such as South Africa's Executive Outcomes and British-based Erinys to provide more than 10% of the bodyguard services in occupied Iraq.[7] Some African countries, including Eritrea, Ethiopia and Rwanda, joined the 'Coalition of the Willing' against Iraq in 2003, although temporary UN Security Council members Cameroon, Guinea and the Republic of the Congo opposed the war, in spite of Washington's bullying. The Central African Republic proved reliable during the reconciliation of Jacques Chirac and the Bush regime in March 2004, when Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped and temporarily dumped there, prior to taking up a cautious residence in South Africa. Africa is also an important site for Washington's campaigns against militant Islamic networks, especially in Algeria and Nigeria in the northwest, Tanzania and Kenya in the east, and South Africa. Control of African immigration to the US and Europe is crucial, in part through the expansion of US-style incarceration via private sector firms like Wackenhut, which has invested in South African privatized prison management, along with the notorious Lindela extradition camp for 'illegal immigrants,' part of a highly racialized global detention and identification system.
Of course, the US military machine does not roll over Africa entirely unimpeded. Minor roadblocks have included Pretoria's rhetorical opposition to the Iraq war, conflicts within the UN Human Rights Commission (especially over Zimbabwe), and the controversy over US citizens' extradition to the International Criminal Court. On the eve of Bush's 2003 Africa trip, the Pentagon announced that it would withdraw $7.6 million worth of military support to Pretoria, because the South African government - along with 34 military allies of Washington (and 90 countries in total) - had not agreed to give US citizens immunity from prosecution at The Hague's new International Criminal Court. Botswana, Uganda, Senegal and Nigeria, also on Bush's itinerary, signed these blackmail-based immunity deals and retained US aid.[8]
Competition from other neocolonial sponsors has occasionally been a factor limiting US arrogance, for example in the only partially successful attempt by Monsanto to introduce genetically modified (GM) agriculture in Africa. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola have rejected World Food Programme and US food relief because of fears of future threats to their citizens, and not coincidentally, to European markets. Linking its relatively centralized aid regime to trade through bilateral regionalism, the European Union aims to win major Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) country concessions on investment, competition, trade facilitation, government procurement, data protection and services, which along with grievances over agriculture, industry and intellectual property were the basis of ACP withdrawal from Cancun. The EU's 'Economic Partnership Agreements' (EPAs) under the Cotonou Agreement (which replaced the Lome Convention) will signify a new, even harsher regime of 'reciprocal liberalization' to replace the preferential agreements that tied so many African countries to their former colonial masters via cash-crop exports. If the EPAs are agreed upon by late 2005 and implemented from 2008, as presently scheduled, what meagre organic African industry and services that remained after two decades of structural adjustment will probably be lost to European scale economies and technological sophistication. An April 2004 meeting of parliamentarians from East Africa expressed concern, 'that the pace of the negotiations has caught our countries without adequate considerations of the options open to us, or understanding of their implications, and that we are becoming hostage to the target dates that have been hastily set without the participation of our respective parliaments.' Even Botswana's neoliberal president Festus Mogae admitted, 'We are somewhat apprehensive towards EPAs despite the EU assurances. We fear that our economies will not be able to withstand the pressures associated with liberalization.'[9] But the EU's substantial aid carrots and sticks will be the final determinant, overriding democratic considerations.
What of Washington's development aid to Africa? During the early 1990s, numerous US Agency for International Development mission offices in Africa were closed by the Clinton Administration. The highest-profile measures now relate to HIV/AIDS treatment, amounting to what the State Department called its 'full-court press' - including threats of further aid cuts - against governments which made provisions for generic medicines production, which Clinton only backed away from in late 1999 because of sustained activist protest.[10] Bush promised a $15 billion AIDS programme, then whittled it down to a fraction of that, then refused to provide funds to the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and then prohibited US government financing of generic medicines. Bush also introduced an innovative vehicle to fuse neoliberal market conditionality with, supposedly, greater social investment: the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). With USAID budgets still declining in real terms, the delinked MCA funding will rise from $1 billion in 2004 to $5 billion in 2006, a 100% increase on 2004 spending for all US overseas development assistance. But of 74 'low income' countries that are meant to be eligible, of which 39 are from Africa, only 16 passed the first test of governance and economic freedom in May 2004. Half of these were African: Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and Senegal. The criteria for funding these countries' aid programmes have been established by a series of think tanks and quasi-government agencies: Freedom House (civil liberties and political rights), the World Bank Institute (accountability, governance and control of corruption), the IMF and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom (credit ratings, inflation rates, business start-up times, trade policies and regulatory regimes), and the World Health Organization and UN (public expenditure on health and primary education, immunization rates and primary school completion rates).[11] Washington's attempt to disguise and legitimize imperialism through aid that carries 'good governance' and 'social investment' conditionalities dates to the Clinton era, but under Bush's MCA it involves more sophisticated disciplinary neoliberal surveillance, especially in combination with the World Bank.[12]
However, with so few African states receiving MCA funding, and with so much more at stake than can be handled by the expansion of military spending, it is vital for Washington to identify reliable allies in Africa to foster both imperialist geopolitics and neoliberal economics. Does South Africa qualify? ...
NOTES [1] Thomas P.M.Barnett, 'The Pentagon's New Map', United States Naval War College, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrules/ ThePentagonsNewMap.htm, 2003. [2] Martin Plaut, 'US to Increase African Military Presence,' http://www.bbc.co.uk, 23 March 2004. [3] http://www.allAfrica.com, 2 May 2003. [4] Ghana News, 11 June 2003. [5] Ian Taylor, 'Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and Regional/Global Configurations,' Review of African Political Economy, 95, 2003, p.49. [6] The major dilemma, here, appears to be the very high level of HIV-positive members of the armed forces in key countries. See Stefan Elbe, Strategic Implications of HIV/AIDS, Adelphi Paper 357, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.23-44. [7] Vancouver Sun, 11 May 2004. [8] Sapa, 2 July 2003. Other African countries where US war criminals are safe from ICC prosecutions thanks to military-aid blackmail are the DRC, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya,Mauritius, Sierra Leone and Zambia. [9] http://www.epawatch.net/general/text.php?itemID=161&menuID=28, http://www.twnafrica.org/atn.asp [10] Patrick Bond, 'Globalization, Pharmaceutical Pricing and South African Health Policy: Managing Confrontation with US Firms and Politicians', International Journal of Health Services, 29, 4, 1999. [11] Cited in SA Institute for International Affairs e-Africa, May 2004. These rating systems follow the examples set in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which by 2003 applied to 39 countries; the remaining 13 African states were vetoed by the White House for various reasons. AGOA conditionalities include adopting neoliberal policies, privatizing state assets, removing subsidies and price controls, ending incentives for local companies, and endorsing US foreign policy. [12] See Nancy Alexander, 'Triage of Low-Income Countries? The Implications of the IFI's Debt Sustainability Proposal,' Washington, http://www.servicesforall.org/ html/otherpubs/ judge_jury_ scorecard.pdf, 2004.