From Slaves to Oil: United States Role in the Plunder of Africa

By David Model

Famine, drought, internecine wars, corrupt leaders and culture have all been postulated as the cause of African underdevelopment despite its enormous wealth of resources. These myths are a smokescreen for the major causes of poverty, malnutrition, lack of amenities and death in Africa which has been the rapacious looting of the African continent for centuries by Western Powers.
In the early twentieth century, King Leopold of Belgium slaughtered ten million Congolese in order to purloin rubber for the nascent automobile industry. One century later, United States, Belgium and France were responsible for the deaths of five million Congolese to gain free access to the vast riches of its resources such as gold, diamonds and, in particular coltan, an essential ingredient in electronic devices.
This book explodes many of the myths about the fate of Africa which hide the truth about American and European interference in the development of the continent such as the context of the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, responsibility for the Rwanda Genocide, the origins of Boko Haram in Nigeria and its kidnapping of young girls and the real cause of the humanitarian intervention in Libya.
The greater European advancement in military prowess, political organization, strong naval capabilities, particularly during the colonial era, in conjunction with the greed permeating European economic zeitgeist empowered first Europe then America to exploit the continent for cheap or free labor, bases, allies, markets, investments and resources.
As a result of this exploitation, African nations are among the poorest on the planet, suffer the horrors of war on a regular basis, face the plight of hunger and disease more than anywhere else and lose more children before the age of five.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496919816

David Model

David Model has taught International Studies and Political Science at Seneca College in Toronto for over 40 years. He has published six books in the past 16 years including People Over Profits: Reversing the Corporate Agenda, Corporate Rule: Understanding and Challenging the New World Order, Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes with a Straight Face, State of Darkness: U.S. Complicity in Genocide since 1945 and Selling Out: Consuming Ourselves to Death. He has delivered papers at over a dozen academic conferences including the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK on such diverse subjects as The Rationalization of American Foreign Policy, War Crimes in Iraq, War Crimes in Serbia and on American Post-colonialism in Africa. David has written articles for CounterPunch, OpEd News, Dissent, Z Magazine, StraightGoods and the College Quarterly reflecting his passion for peace and social justice. His unique perspective has been informed by his academic, political and activist experiences as well by his extensive travels to many former hotspots such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam and Cambodia. Touring these countries and seeing firsthand the impact of war on the people and the land inspires David to persevere on his journey for peace and justice through his work and his writing.

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© 2014 DAVID MODEL. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/17/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1982-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1981-6 (e)

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Congo

Chapter 2 Somalia

Chapter 3 Libya

Chapter 4 Ethiopia

Chapter 5 Rwanda/Uganda

Chapter 6 Nigeria

Chapter 7 Liberia/Sierra Leone

DEDICATION

To my grandson Aidan, 2 ½ years old, for having the wisdom to be born in Canada, a country with a high standard of living and which is safe and secure.

INTRODUCTION

It is lavishly wealthy continent; it is devastatingly poor continent. Africa has always been far richer than Europe in resources but lagged light years behind in economic, industrial, social, military and political development. Despite its extreme wealth in resources such as gold, diamonds, ivory, oil, uranium, coltan, cobalt and rubber, Africa has been unable to capitalize on these advantages to promote any substantial progress in achieving stability or raising the standard of living of its peoples.

To account for this paradox, it is necessary to examine the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. The greater European advancement in military prowess, political organization and, in particular, strong naval capabilities, in conjunction with the greed permeating European economic zeitgeist empowered first Europe then America to exploit the continent for cheap or free labor, bases, allies, markets and resources.

American and European dominance and exploitation of African countries, after they gained independence, is best understood in the context of post-colonial analysis. Post-colonialism is a hotly debated concept involving many fields of study but I will restrict myself to a definition formulated by Noam Chomsky who stated that: The former imperial powers have laboured to ensure that the structures of power and exploitation remain largely in place [after independence]. In particular, Chomsky claims that Washington was determined to ensure that traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been aligned remain in power so that exploitation would meet with minimal resistance.

Post-colonialism required that friendly governments ruled in targeted countries. The United States resorted to a number of different strategies to secure subservient governments in power in victimized countries to ensure that its policies were favorable to the United States and its resources were readily available.

For example, some of the leaders who were not friendly were assassinated such as Trujillos in Panama in 1981, Roldos in Ecuador in 1981, Lumumba in the Congo in 1960, Allende in Chile in 1973.

Some were removed from power through the use of a proxy force including Ortega in Nicaragua in 1990 - the proxy was the Contras; Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 - the proxy were ex-national guardsmen; Isabel Peron in Argentina in 1976 - the proxy were military leaders; the government of East Timor 1975 - the proxy was Suharto of Indonesia; Manly in Jamaica 1979 - the proxy was the World bank; and the Islamic government in Somalia - the proxy was the Ethiopian army. Others were removed from power by the CIA as was the case with Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Diem in Vietnam in 1963. In other words, either a leader supported American post-colonial policies or he/she was replaced.

When a government was identified as U.S.-friendly, Washington offered considerable support, mostly military, to secure that government in power. Maintaining brutal and corrupt dictators was the upshot of this policy. For example, the following is a sample of the brutal dictators who were supported by the United States:

Perhaps the most salient example of this exploitation occurred in the Congo around the turn of the twentieth century. Between five and fifteen million people died in the Congo simply to aggrandize the personal wealth of King Leopold II of Belgium.

Leopold succeeded his father to the Belgium throne on December 17, 1865 and remained on the throne until his death on December 17, 1909. After a number of attempts to establish colonies in Africa, he created the International African Society (IAS) in 1876, a private holding company whose ostensible purpose was to promote scientific and philanthropic endeavors.

Its real purpose became evident when Leopold, through the IAS, commissioned the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, well-known for unearthing the whereabouts of Dr. Livingstone, to establish a colony in Africa. Following his initial instructions to construct a wagon trail and a series of forts and trading stations, he was ordered to carve out a new nation in Central Africa. Stanley signed treaties with over 400 African chiefs in which they abdicated sovereignty over their territory where Stanley established a network of outposts.

At the Berlin Conference of 1885, called for the purpose of dividing all African territories into colonies for the fourteen European nations in attendance, the land claimed by Leopold, known as the Congo Free State, was allocated to the IAS thereby securing Leopold’s control over a huge part of Africa.

Leopold’s primary ambition was to enrich himself by first collecting ivory through such ruthless methods as raiding villages, sending out hunting expeditions and whipping inhabitants who failed to cooperate. Ivory did not yield the riches he had expected and, as a result, he turned his attention to rubber.

The first rubber tires appeared in the mid-1850s. Rubber tires adoption for use on automobiles was pioneered by the Michelin brothers who equipped a car with pneumatic tires for the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux road race. In 1898, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was formed followed by the founding of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company in 1900. Suddenly, the demand for rubber was increasing exponentially.

A growing demand for bicycles followed by cars drove up the price of rubber rapidly which engendered the potential for huge riches. As a result, King Leopold restricted foreign access to rubber trees and forced the local population into slave labor to work on the King’s rubber farms in his new colony.

Leopold’s methods for maintaining a system of slave labor and controlling the population were brutal and included savage beatings, imprisonment, widespread killing and setting daily quotas for each worker who risked the loss of their hands if they failed to meet it.

His methods greatly expanded the production of rubber from 100 tons of rubber in 1890 to 6000 tons in 1891. Another result of his methods were uprisings, revolts, burned villages, refugees, starvation and disease.

King Leopold’s exploitation and human rights transgressions were the modality for advanced nation’s relationships with Africa. An excellent framework for understanding this relationship is World Systems Theory which divides the world into periphery, semi-periphery and core countries. Core countries are characterized by high skill labor, capital-intensive production while peripheral countries are characterized by low-skill, labour-intensive countries. The core countries draw their resources from the peripheral countries and tend to control their development thus maintaining a system of inequality.

World Systems Theory is partially based on dependency theory where the core countries penetrate the peripheral countries for the purpose of exploitation, limiting self-sustained growth in the peripheral countries and breeding vast economic inequality reducing the peripheral countries to the status of hewers of wood and drawers of water.

In order to exploit and violate the human rights of the peripheral countries, the core countries had to dehumanize the populations of these countries. Although a misinterpretation, Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden seemed to reinforce legitimization of imperial powers’ brutal exploitation of Africa. The unconscionable villainy inflicted on the peoples of the Dark Continent underwent a number of phases which include the original scramble for territory and the concomitant atrocities, struggles for independence followed by post-colonial exploitation in which the United States has played a major role.

Since the sixteenth century when Portugal established permanent settlements along the coasts of Africa to the present day, Europe and the United States constructed a concept similar to that of Edward Said’s Orientalism but applied to Africa, to justify plundering, massacres and looting of the continent’s myriad resources desperately needed to fuel the industrial revolution and the age of technology.

By perceiving the African people as the other, colonizers treated them in a somewhat similar fashion as the treatment of the natives in North America who were considered uncivilized, primitive and most importantly, inferior and superfluous. The land on which they lived was merely an inconvenience to the pioneers moving West who simply took it; the very same words used by Theodore Roosevelt when asked to explain his justification for taking the Panama Canal.

Murder and forced marches westward were some of the strategies employed to remove the natives from the land that clearly belonged to the colonizers, at least according to the colonizers. Twelve million Native Americans or 97% died during the colonization of the territory now referred to as the United States.

Another example relates to South America. Columbus is known for his voyage to America in 1492 but his real legacy was the slaughter of the vast majority of natives in the Caribbean. In 1493, Columbus returned to the New World with an invasion force of seventeen ships to conquer the inhabitants already there and to steal their wealth. Upon arrival, he declared himself governor and viceroy of the Caribbean islands and settled on the island of Española, now known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Any obstacle posed by the native Taino population, who already occupied the land in the Caribbean, was quickly overcome through displacement, enslavement, and extermination. They were forced to abandon their well cultivated fields to work as slave labourers for their conquerors. As well, all Taino natives over the age of 14 were required to produce a hawk`s bell of gold for the Spaniards or lose both their hands. Extermination assumed many shocking forms, including burning at the stake, hacking children into pieces for dog food and hanging or roasting on spits.

When Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean, there were about eight million inhabitants, but when he departed in 1500, his brutality and savagery had reduced their numbers to approximately 100,000. He had virtually annihilated the entire Taino population, setting a model for future explorers who were encumbered by local native populations.

The people of Africa were similarly an obstacle to the expansion, enrichment and prestige of the imperial powers of Europe and the United States. Given the history of brutality for the purpose of exploitation, it is not in the least surprising that Europeans and Americans would eradicate any barrier to their own enrichment and expansion in Africa.

During the industrial revolution, Imperial powers had developed weapons far superior to those in Africa thus providing the mechanism by which they could easily suppress any resistance to their grand designs.

Additionally, European countries had been at war with each other 206 times between 1500 and 1900. Some of the better known wars include the War of the Roses 1455-1466, Austrian-Hungarian war 1477-1488, Ottoman-Hapsburg War 1521-1718, Eighty Years War 1568-1648, Anglo-Spanish War 1585-1604, Thirty Years War 1616-1648, Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815 and Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871. During these wars, European nations had an opportunity to strengthen their armies, navies and weapons and were capable of completely overpowering any army in Africa with very few exceptions.

European countries scrambled for territory to purloin resources, force the locals to engage in slave labour, and to establish outposts for their empires. In the process, they deprived these nations of riches that rightly belonged to them and perpetrated the most heinous crimes against humanity in order to aggrandize their own wealth.

To regulate the fierce competition for colonies in Africa, Portugal called for a conference in Berlin in 1884 which was organized by Otto von Bismarck. The 1885 Berlin Conference crafted a set of rules to guide colonization in Africa. One of the rules determined which regions each European power had an exclusive right to and another prohibited the establishment of a colony in name only. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe controlled all of the territory in Africa except Ethiopia and Liberia.

Despite efforts to regulate the plundering of Africa, a series of crises eventually capitulated Europe into World War 1 when previous rivalries and alliances divided Europe into two opposing sides who slaughtered each other in the bloody trenches of Europe to settle their imperialistic conflicts.

Prior to the independence of African nations, most European nations capitalized on the aforementioned advantages to pillage resources or expand their empires.

A number of examples elucidate the relations between Europe and Africa prior to independence.

According to the 1985 United Nations Whitaker Report, Germany was guilty of genocide in South-West Africa when it murdered 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Namaqua between 1904 and 1907 in an attempt to supress an uprising against German rule. The rebellion was quashed by 1908 and the inhabitants were subject to slave labour and a system of apartheid.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British were preoccupied with consolidating their colonies in South Africa and securing access to their valuable resources, particularly diamonds. Their primary obstacle was the Zulu Kingdom with its standing army of 40,000 disciplined warriors. In January, 1879, the British were caught off guard and were defeated in the first Zulu war but with reinforcements, the British rebounded to defeat the Zulus in August of the same year. Crushing the Zulus was a critical point in South African history since the Zulus were the only power in the region that were capable of resisting white expansion.

Another example of British Imperialism took place when fifty British and French ships arrived in Alexandria Egypt in 1882 fomenting riots in Alexandria in which 50 Europeans were killed. Britain responded by ordering the British fleet to bombard Alexandria which destroyed most of the city following which British marines occupied the city. British occupation didn’t end until 1936.

There is disagreement about the British motivations for their actions in Egypt which ran the gamut from preserving British control of the Suez Canal to protecting British investors who had financed the Canal.

In addition to Egypt, the UK decided that to maintain stability in the region and safeguard Egypt from the Mahdi forces in Sudan who were in control of most of the country, Mahdi forces would have to be crushed. British and Egyptian forces had already experienced defeat at the hands of the Mahdis, when the British/Egyptian forces attempted to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885.

In 1898, Horatio Herbert Kitchener led a 9,000 strong force into Sudan and defeated the Mahdist forces in the Battle of Atbara with the use of British machine guns and rifle power, killing 30,000. British control of the Sudan survived until its independence in 1956.

In retaliation for losses suffered during its first invasion of Ethiopia in