AFRICOM is growing more bold in its attempts to maintain dominance over the African continent. Now is the time for Pan-African and Black Nationalist forces to organize to sabotage those efforts and support the masses struggling to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism.
On June 25, 2024, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) convened the African Chiefs of Defense (ACHOD) Conference in Botswana. The conference, purportedly to “strategize on counter terrorism, collaborate on crisis response and the importance of civilian and military relations,” has been held annually since 2017. This latest ACHOD was the first to convene in Africa. The earlier conferences were convened primarily in Europe.
At this conference, it was revealed that AFRICOM would attempt to use Libya as a new front against Russia. Journalist Habib Lassoued reported that:
According to Libyan sources, US officials demanded during the past period that General Khalifa Haftar, commander-in-chief of the National Army, limit the alliance ties that bind him to Moscow and expel Russian militants.
The sources confirmed that there are realistic fears that Western capitals are trying to push the Libyan factions into a new war whose main goal is to force Russian fighters to leave the country.
AFRICOM Commander Michael Langley repeated his current mantra about “Russia’s disinformation campaigns.” According to him the alleged disinformation has caused “deadly violence, encouraged and validated military coups, forced members of civil society into silence and served as a smokescreen for corruption and exploitation.” Listening to this Black U.S. military commander, one could be forgiven for not realizing that the nation he serves led NATO’s military assault and destruction of Libya in 2011 and is primarily responsible for its current state of perpetual instability in the region and across the continent.
That year, 2011, the US-EU-NATO axis of domination blatantly circumvented the African Union’s Peace and Security Council plans to send a peace mission to Tripoli, Libya for negotiations designed to ease the U.S.-instigated conflict in the country. No single occurrence in Africa’s modern history has caused as much destabilization across the continent as the NATO destruction of Libya – from southeastward to Somalia and across the Sahel to West Africa.
Thirteen years later U.S. neo-colonial motives continue. Langley admitted such motives and the mission of AFRICOM when he explained in a Senate committee hearing on March 16, 2023: “We need to be able to maintain access and influence across the Maghreb from Morocco all the way to Libya.” To hell with African sovereignty and the human right to self-determination.
Today U.S. and NATO influence and access is waning with developments that should be a source of inspiration for all people of African descent everywhere in the world. On July 6, 2024, the leaders of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which make up the anti-imperialist L’Alliance des Etats du Sahel (AES) or Alliance of Sahel States, met in Niamey, Niger for a daylong summit. At this meeting, they formally turned the AES into a confederation and outlined several declarations toward self-determination.
This comes as Niger is set to complete the courageous process of expelling AFRICOM from its territory. The government of Niger had ordered Washington to withdraw its nearly 1.000 soldiers stationed in the country. This process is now projected to be complete at the beginning of August, a month ahead of schedule.
The growing antipathy on the ground against Africa’s former colonizers (and now, neo-colonizers that include the U.S.) has imperialism desperately grasping for ways to keep its stranglehold over Africa. For example, the U.S. just made Kenya a major non-NATO ally (MNNA), the third country in Africa to hold the designation, after Egypt and Morocco. This is a reward mainly for serving as imperialism’s proxy occupation force in Haiti, cooperating with AFRICOM operations in bordering Somalia, and further opening its economy to the ravages of the International Monetary Fund.
The MNNA designation has been used to effectively expand NATO to nations outside of Europe. It makes the countries eligible for loans of materials and equipment for research, development or testing, to stockpile US-owned War Reserves, considered for the purchase of depleted uranium ammunition, entering into formal agreements with the US Department of Defense (DoD) to carry out research and development projects. And firms of MNNA countries can bid on contracts to repair and maintain DoD equipment outside of the US. Here, we must also see how the destabilization and insecurity of Africa has helped create a reliable windfall for military contractors. This is one reason why imperialist domination is a consistent bi-partisan consensus within the U.S. duopoly.
The time is ripe for all those in the U.S. who consider themselves Black Nationalists or Pan-Africanists to intensify the struggle to expose and challenge the neo-colonialist role and insufferable impact of AFRICOM on the continent. Multiple methods must be deployed that include media outreach, issuing public statements, engaging representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Members of the CBC, postured as working in the interests of Black people, are complicit in the dire state of Africa if only through their deafening silence about AFRICOM and the U.S. policy of militarizing Africa and consigning it to its realm of forever wars. It is imperative that a mass revolutionary Pan-Africanism within the U.S. be elevated to challenge the complicity of the U.S. Black compradors. A Pan-Africanism that exposes the parallels between the domestic policies of police repression against the Black working class and the racist paternalism of U.S. military domination over Africa.
That Pan-African and Black nationalist organizations have not uttered a formidable outcry against AFRICOM over its 17 year existence should be concerning. Those Africans from the US who have left the heart of empire and are now living on the African continent should lead the charge against US militarism there. They should amplify anti-imperialist positions through institutions there, participating in the effort to rebuild a Pan-African center of gravity. Now is the time.
October 2024 will be the 4th annual International Month of Action Against AFRICOM, led by the Black Alliance for Peace and the U.S. Out of Africa Network. Get plugged in and join the broader movement for the liberation of Africa.
Netfa Freeman is an organizer in Pan-African Community Action (PACA) and Co-Coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team. And is also co-host/producer of the WPFW radio show and podcast Voices With Vision
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