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Africa Cooperation Neo-colonialism

Black to Africa

I recently returned from a trip to Ghana with my wife and two sons, aged 20 and 17. We went for a wedding and visited Accra and Kumasi (where the wedding was held). While there, I experienced things that showed me why Blacktivism is important and the links between the continent’s history and our current advocacy work.

On our 2nd day we visited Elmina Castle. The castle was used by various European countries to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped to the slave plantations to be worked to death or worse. I stood with my sons in the men’s slave dungeon. The dungeon is about half the size of a high school classroom. It has a hard mud floor, stone block walls and one small hole for ventilation and sunlight about 20 feet up. 200 men were kept there, sometimes for months, in their own waste that often rose to just below their knees. Standing there, I found myself thinking of the Ottawa Police Service whose budget we’re campaigning to freeze. Specifically, I was thinking about two key similarities between the OPS and the slave traders. The first is the immense power the slavers had to control Black people and do things that lead to them being harmed and killed. And the second is that the main reason they did it was economic.

The OPS gets millions of dollars each year from which it pays its officers starting salaries of over $60,000. The over policing of Black and Indigenous people directly contributes to generating the data the OPS uses to justify yearly budget increases. The OPS is making money – and lots of it – just like the slave catchers did.

Shortly after returning from Ghana, I spoke at an Ottawa Police Services Board meeting and said the previous two paragraphs word-for-word. The Board then approved an $11 million dollar increase to the police budget to bring it to a total of $386 million.

The day after visiting Elmina, I met with environmental activist Patricia Bekoe of 350 Ghana Reducing Our Carbon. She and her GROC colleagues face at least two major challenges. One is the emissions from thousands of cars and trucks snarled in endless bumper to bumper traffic in the capital Accra and Kumasi to the north. One Uber driver I asked said their vehicles didn’t have to pass emissions tests to get registered and the trucks spewing black smoke seemed to confirm this. The second challenge GROC faces is an oil industry that’s been active since the 1970s. One story from our trip suggests at least one foreign oil company operating in Ghana hasn’t been a great friend of environmentalists, or the environment.

Texas-based Kosmos Energy discovered oil in Ghana in 2007. In 2009, the company spilled around 700 barrels of a toxic substance into the Ghanaian sea and was fined $35 million USD by the Ghanaian Environmental Protection Agency – but refused to pay. I learned about Kosmos because I met a brother who works at Accra’s Kosmos Innovation Centre that Kosmos funds. The Centre helps Ghanaians start businesses, mostly in the agricultural sector. That’s good. Not paying for the oil they spilled isn’t…

Ghana isn’t the only West African nation to suffer environmental damage from oil companies or to have activists or the government trying to hold companies accountable for such damage. I asked sister Bekoe if she and her colleagues faced dangers like Nigerian activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Initially as spokesperson, and then as president, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland in Southern Nigeria by multinational oil companies, especially Royal Dutch Shell. At the peak of his non-violent campaign, he was tried by a special military tribunal for allegedly masterminding the gruesome murder of Ogoni chiefs at a pro-government meeting, and hanged in 1995 by the military dictatorship.

Happily, sister Bekoe said she and her colleagues don’t face such violent opposition. This is good because Ghanaians have recently become more vocal with demands for the government to address growing inequity in the country. The grassroots #FixTheCountry campaign recently saw Ghanaians take to social media and the streets. On August 4, Al Jazeera reported that several thousand protesters marched in Accra in the latest rally against President Akufo-Addo’s government. The story said the protest aimed to demand accountability, good governance, and better living conditions from the government.

Frankly, I’m surprised we didn’t see signs saying #FixTheRoads as the horrible conditions of many roads was one of the clearest signs that any tax money the government is getting isn’t being used to fix the roads.

One very visible sign of the inequity in the country was the many places that were surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire, including both our Accra AirBnB and our Kumasi hotel (both also had 24/7 guards). One of the marketing features of our Accra AirBnB was that it was attached to a small grocery store you could access from within the compound so you didn’t have to go outside security. Another very visible – and disturbing – sign of the inequity were pre-teen Muslim girls, wearing white hijabs, begging for money at intersections. One Uber drive said the girls were brought in from Niger by people who take a cut of what they make.

Another less visible equity indicator was who owned large businesses like malls and the grocery stores in them. I asked who owned Accra’s Marina Mall and Kumasi City Mall. An Uber driver told me what I was expecting to hear: Marina Mall’s owners weren’t Black Ghanaians. In fact, he said they weren’t Ghanaian at all, they were Lebanese. However, a little of bit of Googling led to a surprise: the mall is actually owned by the Nigerian-based Marina Group whose chairman is Dr. Amerie Agunwah below.

I failed to definitely confirm the owners of Kumasi City Mall except that it’s owned by Delico Kumasi Limited which is subsidiary buried under other subsidiaries that include AttAfrica, Mauritius that’s led by two white dudes, Renier Vans Rensburg and Wynand Baard.

The main grocery store in both malls is Shoprite, a large chain throughout Africa whose majority owner is South African billionaire, Christo Wiese.

Not all the oil companies are foreign-owned like Kosmos. We also saw many GOIL gas stations. According to Wikipedia, GOIL, the Ghana Oil Company, “is a state-owned Ghanaian oil and gas marketing company, formed on 14 June 1960. Currently it holds the place of Ghana’s top oil marketing company, and is the only indigenous owned petroleum marketing company in Ghana.”

The air conditioned malls packed with tech stores, seemed a world away from the many people selling along the roads that lead to them…

Kumasi City Mall
Kumasi street market life…

Some of those wanting to #FixTheCounty would perhaps see the malls as example of what’s wrong. However, according to one Uber driver with whom I had a wide ranging conversation, not everybody even cared about fixing the country. He said many Ghanaians, including most young kids, dream of leaving it to go to the U.S.. This is partly because the idealized myth of America the Great seemed alive and well in Accra and Kumasi.

My chat with the Uber driver, who said his name was Bismarck, started after I asked him why he had an American flag next to his Ghanaian one on his dash. He said it was because he loved America, especially their technology. Interestingly, the technology he mentioned was their military. Later in our chat, he said, “But they have one problem. They hate Black people. They only like Black people when they need them.” (Another Uber driver I spoke to expressed similar love for Canada which I suggested he might want to temper given Canada’s role in the violent coup that deposed Ghana’s democratically elected president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966.)

When I mentioned to a fellow Canadian Blacktivist the love for America and Canada some Ghanaians had expressed, his response was essentially, “Of course they love the places that have lots of good stuff built from stolen wealth.” As my boys and I paid our respect at the feet (literally) of the grandfather of all uppity negroes, Kwame Nkrumah, I wondered what he’d think of the state of the country he helped lead to independence.

One last point before I wrap up….We saw very few white people in Ghana. The most was 3 or 4 together, all men, at the Ghana Premier League football game we attended, sitting in the most expensive section and on the Africa World Airways flight to Kumasi. (Children seemed to confirm the rare sightings of white folks by happily yelling “Oboroni!”, the Fante word for white person, at me on my morning walks as I happily waved back to their great amusement.)

I left Ghana with a better appreciation of the challenges facing Blacktivists in the diaspora and on the continent in working together to regain control of the vast resources in the ground, and in the people, of the continent. Given how the global pandemic has redefined what’s normal, young Blacktivists working with older folks who are committed to fundamental change – and have a long view of how to make it – have the opportunity to make Africa a global economic powerhouse that shares its wealth with all people.

Categories
Africa Entertainment Obama U.S.

Why Obama ordered the Navy to kill three Black teenagers

Depending on how old you are, you may, or may not, remember stories about Somali “pirates” that emerged around 2009. One story that got international attention happened over five days in April 2009.

Four Somali teenagers took over the American Maersk Alabama cargo ship and took its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage in one of the life boats until the U.S. Navy showed up and killed three of the teenagers. They captured the leader and brought him to the U.S. where he was tried and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Below is a letter I recently mailed to Abdulwali Muse:

March 25, 2021

FCI Terre Haute, FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, P.O. BOX 33, TERRE HAUTE, IN  47808

ATTN: Abdulwali Muse, register #: 70636-054

Brother Abduwali,

I recently read more about what led to you serving your current sentence. What happened to you shows how unfair the U.S. justice system is, especially to Black people…wherever they’re from.

I co-lead the 613-819 Black Hub, an Ottawa, Canada-based Black advocacy group. We work on issues of systemic anti-Black racism and discrimination and, although we act very locally, we think globally. We think about why we only found out about you because of the movie Captain Phillips. We think about why the movie, as its title illustrates, is focussed on the white man’s experience instead of you and your friends’. We wonder why we heard lots about Somali “pirates” attacking ships, apparently out of greed, but little of how, for many years earlier, countries illegally fishing off Somalia’s coast and dumping toxic waste depleted the fish stocks and robbed Somali fishermen of their livelihood.

We ask why they tried you as an adult when your mom said you were 16 at the time…And why did they sentence you to 33 years in prison, for a crime where no one was killed except your friends, in a country whose own president gets off free after inciting a treasonous insurrection that left five people dead?

We have stories here of young brothers ending up dead after turning to activities that put them in harm’s way because they felt they had no other choice. Eighteen-year-old brother Manyok Akol, shot dead in Jan. 2020, rapped under the name FTG Metro and spoke about how he and his friends had few choices in their west end Ottawa neighborhood.

But things changed last year with George Floyd’s death and the pandemic.

Anti-Black racism has been exposed in a way that can never be reversed – because Black activists won’t let it be. Here in Ottawa, we’re fighting to get our city council to freeze our police budget and invest in social services, like housing and employment. I’m mentoring a young brother who’s a refugee from Rwanda and wants to go into nursing. This Saturday I have arranged for him to speak to a local Black surgeon to help the brother expand his ambitions and perhaps aspire to becoming a doctor himself. People of African descent are spreading positive Blacktivity all over the world. And we will not be stopped. 

Stay strong my brother.

Barack Obama was president in 2009, having been elected for this first time in November 2008. In his 2020 book, The Promised Land, Obama wrote about the incident and the deaths of the three teenagers – which he authorized:

“The news elicited high fives all around the White House. The Washington Post headline declared it AN EARLY MILITARY VICTORY FOR OBAMA. But, as relieved as I was to see Captain Phillips reunited with his family and as proud as I was of our navy personnel for their handling of the situation, I wasn’t inclined to beat my chest over the episode…I realized that, around the world, in places like Yemen, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of the boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen), had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them – send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filing their heads. And yet, the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”

If Obama wanted to save these kids, why didn’t he commute Muse’s 33 year sentence like he reportedly did for 214 federal prisoners in August 2016, about five months before he left office?

Did countries then, and do they now, have rules to ensure that their companies don’t buy fish for us to eat that were caught illegally? Do we ask the stores where we buy our fish the same thing? Do countries have similar rules about where their toxic waste gets dumped? If they have such rules, do they enforce them?

Why were young men like Muse immediately labelled as “pirates” when, initially, they were simply trying to protect their livelihood?

The 2013 movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, is based on the memoir by the real Captain Richard Phillips, A Captain’s Duty. Although Phillips is portrayed as a hero who risks his life to save his crew, lawsuits filed by some of his former crew suggest a different story. In October 2013, the lawyer for nine of the 23-member crew who sued the company that owned the ship gave the Business Insider a different picture of Captain Phillips: “To make him into a hero for driving this boat and these men into pirate-infested waters, that’s the real injustice here. The movie tells a highly fictionalized version of what actually happened.”, said attorney Brian Beckcom. Phillips was not named in the suit.

I tried to find out how much money Columbia and Sony paid Phillips for the rights to his book but even the mighty Google couldn’t tell me.

Muse’s story is an international version of what has been happening to young Black men in the U.S. and Canada for decades. Systemic anti-Black racism leaves few choices that herd them down the path to criminality. The systemic racism is ignored but they’re harshly punished for their crimes. Then their pursuit and capture is turned into lucrative entertainment through TV shows like COPS and movies like Captain Phillips.

There often isn’t a bright side, but there is one to this story…

For his role as Muse in the film, Somali-born, Minneapolis-based actor, Barkhad Abdi, was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and a Golden Globe Award. And he won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. Abdi was born in the Somali capital, Mogadishu but fled to Yemen with his family when he was six or seven, when the Somali Civil War broke out. In 1999, Abdi and his family relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where there is a large Somali community. He sold mobile phones at his brother’s shop at a mall, worked as a limousine driver at a relative’s chauffeur company and as a DJ before landing the movie role. Neither he, nor his three friends who played the other pirates, had ever acted before.

Adbi has since appeared in several other films, made his directorial debut with the Somali film Ciyaalka Xaafada, and directed several music videos. He now splits his time between Los Angeles and Minnesota.

After the Maersk Alabama hijacking, shipping companies instituted new security measures that have reduced attacks to nearly zero.

So ships deliver their goods to us unhindered as the world continues ignoring where our toxic waste is dumped as long as it’s not in our backyard.

But we will not be ignored.