THE current scramble between the major powers for influence over African nations is a battle for the natural resources that exist on the continent which are vital to sustaining the economies and lifestyles of the West.
Stripped down to bare bones: it’s a question of safeguarding and increasing profits.
The US, at least, can’t be accused of pretending anything other than profits are its main motivator. The US doctrine of full-spectrum dominance has been clear about this since it was adopted in 1997.
Full-spectrum-dominance is a military doctrine that is open about the willingness of the US to use its full military might on the ground, air, sea, and space, alongside psychological, biological and cyber-technological warfare, to protect its economic interests.
Enforcement of these interests includes everything from the funding of opposition forces in sovereign nations, the removal or even assassination of political leaders who refuse to toe the line, economic sanctions, and, of course, direct military intervention.
Of course, there are choices to be made by the US about which approach — or combination of approaches — it might take. There are also decisions to be made about the degree of action within each approach.
The US seems to prefer proxy interventions, such as in Ukraine and potentially in Taiwan, rather than subjecting themselves to the 24-hour news cycle pictures of body bags being flown back to their air force bases.
But fundamentally, the point is that Washington believes it has a right to inflict on the rest of the world its interpretation of democracy. An interpretation which essentially amounts to agreeing with whatever course of action the US wants to take.
The game of dominance now being played by the major powers on the African continent is for very high stakes — and it is far from new. The colonial powers have long exploited Africa for the resources they need. None more so than through the continent’s biggest resource: its people.
More than 400 years of enslavement were followed by hundreds of years of colonial exploitation.
The brutal transatlantic system of enslavement, which spawned modern-day racism, caused the forced removal of a large percentage of skilled African tradespeople.
The removal of these human beings, for the full benefit of the colonial powers, meant that African societies were weakened.
A weakness from which the continent never truly recovered.
This contributed towards what the great activist and scholar Walter Rodney described in 1972 as the underdevelopment of Africa by Europeans.
The shipments of people and resources, Rodney said in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “were all by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and this was in the interests of European capitalism and nothing else.”
As with today, the colonial powers used their military power and technological superiority to dominate and enforce their trade to build their wealth and protect their profits.
It was the colonial powers who became the leading traders of African goods — not the native people of the continent.
Karl Marx recognised the importance of this period in the development of capitalism.
In Volume One of Capital, Marx talked of the “turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins,” which signalled the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Marx went on to say that this was one of the “chief moments of primitive accumulation.”
By the time Africans had won their freedom from the shackles of slavery and entered into the brutal colonial era, the continent’s main export was raw cotton. But, as Rodney describes, its main import was manufactured cloth.
Africa provided the resources but just did not have the technology to produce what could be manufactured in Europe — mainly because the colonial powers did not want Africa to develop its own technology. Technological innovation itself created massive profits which the colonial powers also needed to protect.
Europeans continued to control Africa and its wealth by promoting conflicts, brutal massacres and coups to place people prepared to do their bidding in power. This must sound eerily familiar to the way the US exerts its full-spectrum dominance over the world.
What we can learn from the use of power in slave-holding and colonial times compared to that used by the US and its allies now is that people do not just accept the domination — they resist.
Africans always resisted slavery and used many of the same tactics to fight back against the colonial powers with guerilla warfare, strikes, non co-operation and the destruction of crops and businesses based in Africa that were primarily benefiting Europeans rather than the native workers.
Even after colonialism, European-controlled companies still owned much of the natural resources on the continent and demonstrated a ruthless determination to maintain that control.
The ruthlessness of the US, their allies such as Britain, and, centrally, monopoly capital, has meant that Africa has never really freed itself from domination by the West.
The exploitation of Africa has continued — albeit with a new face — which has sometimes been black African. International trading agreements with Africa have continued to rip off the continent to the benefit of Western monopoly capital.
Many of the multinational corporations which benefit from the raw materials from the continent and from the cheap labour they exploit do not even sell African products. Much of this has been enabled by the collaboration of some black African leaders more interested in their own power rather than the economic conditions faced by their own worker and peasant communities.
We must understand that the US and its minions will not just meekly hand over these profits to Africans who want to see a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power in favour of the people over the interests of capital.
Neither will they countenance the Chinese or Russians stepping on what they see as their territory. They will be prepared — by the word of their doctrine — to fight back with all the resources at their disposal, including militarily.
This is precisely why the answer to the dominance of the US and its mates on the African continent must be a multipolar, full-spectrum resistance.
This must include breaking down the dominance the US can exert through the dependence of much of Africa and the rest of the world on the dollar for trade.
But like all successful movements for change, it is a collective solidarity that will prevail. It must also be a solidarity that does not just rely on our leaders.
We must develop direct dialogue and co-operation between the working class and peasant peoples of the global South if we are to change the global balance of power.