occurred in Zanzibar. It proved to be a model - many aspects of which
are being repeated in the 'War on Terror'.
In Britain, the attack on the upmarket Westgate shopping mall in Kenya
in which 130 people lost their lives, is rapidly fading from public
memory, already ascribed to just another act of 'mindless violence'
perpetrated by Islamic terrorists.
But many Kenyans see things differently. Some regard it as the result
of Kenya's involvement in a proxy war being fought in Somalia on
behalf of Europe. Others highlight Israeli or American involvement.
The facts support these analyses: the EU provides 124 million euros
for peacekeepers in Somalia; a recent Israeli arms deal with Kenya
specifically mentioned fighting Al Shabaab; and as for America, its
role is an overarching one, in the words of the US House of
Representatives Armed Services Committee, it 'leverages local and
indigenous forces [for use] ...aggressively and surgically in Africa
and the Arabian peninsula... in close coordination with, and in
support of, geographic combatant commander and U.S. embassy country
team requirements'.
What were the paths which led from the struggles against British
colonialism in East Africa in the 50s and 60s to what have been called
today's new colonial wars? In my recent book, The Threat of
Liberation: Imperialism and Revolution in Zanzibar, I explore this
question for a small segment of the vast and diverse region of East
Africa, Zanzibar. I focus particularly on the first US intervention in
the region which occurred during the Cold War, looking at it partly
through the experiences and memories of the members of the Marxist
Umma party. Although unique in many ways, those experiences still
provide a microcosm of the mechanisms through which imperialism
operated, and to an extent still operates. They remind us also that a
different future was, and perhaps still is, possible.
Zanzibar had been a British protectorate with a population of mixed
African and Arab heritage, ruled by a feudal Sultan on a wage from the
colonialists. The British had done everything possible to engender
ethnic tension, and when in 1963 they finally departed, they
transferred power to a party representing the Sultan and his allies.
Within months the Zanzibar revolution, the first revolution against
neocolonialism in Africa, had swept the islands. Initially a
spontaneous uprising mainly by African youth, the involvement of the
multi-ethnic Umma party transformed it into a revolutionary
insurrection where Arabs and Africans stood together against the
neocolonial rulers. As Abdulrahman Babu leader of the Umma Party put
it, the people rose up 'not simply to overthrow a politically bankrupt
government and a caricature monarchy. They revolted in order to change
the social system which had oppressed them and for once to take the
destiny of their history into their own hands...It aroused hopes far
beyond those of the revolutionaries themselves’..
Declassified documents of the period show that it was these hopes of
the people, and the possibility of both political and economic
liberation, which US and British officials in Zanzibar and other East
African countries found most disturbing. They dispatched a hurricane
of messages to Washington, about the fate of a NASA tracking station
set up on the islands to keep an eye on the Indian Ocean, about the
revolution being a 'coup' instigated and armed by the 'ChiComs'
(although they could find no actual evidence of Chinese involvement),
about the youth of Zanzibar who had been 'drilling and training in
what can only be described as a militant manner' and much else.
Panicking, the US State Department moved a battleship several times to
and from the shores of Zanzibar, and urged the British to invade. In
the next few weeks, however, they began to formulate a longer term
'Zanzibar Action Plan'. Under this, US officials would work on those
Zanzibari leaders they thought they could manipulate to ask for a
British military intervention, and so make an invasion look like an
African initiative. Meanwhile, the CIA, anxious that Zanzibar might
become a 'Cuba of Africa from which sedition would spread to the
continent', began to plan an Africa-wide strategy. This involved
bringing the countries of Central and East Africa under their control
to prevent socialist influences from the countries of North Africa
reaching Southern Africa with its host of western investments. It
required, most urgently, the 'neutralisation' of socialist influence
in Zanzibar.
Eventually this was done, not by military conquest, but through
subterfuge, bribery and illegal means. A new country Tanzania was
created by uniting Zanzibar and Tanganyika, with the connivance of the
leaders of Kenya and Uganda, and presided over by Tanganyika's
President Julius Nyerere. In the days that followed, William Leonhart,
the US Ambassador in Tanzania, cabled Washington reporting that
'Nyerere's United Republic has given us the initial political
framework with which we can work' and urging the US State Department
to give Nyerere 'the maximum quiet support from the beginning’. The US
Ambassador to Kenya noted, meanwhile, that the laws of Tanganyika
'would become supreme throughout', adding that 'the [colonial]
Preventative Detention Act could be used to round up radicals in
Zanzibar'.
This was indeed what happened. While Zanzibar was almost powerless
within the Union, bound to what had been Tanganyika in a semi-colonial
relationship, hundreds of Umma party members and sympathisers and
others who were seen as critics, or potential critics of the regime in
Zanzibar, were arrested and locked up. Torture chambers were
established on the main island where men, women, and even children,
were brutally tortured. Many were killed.
Nyerere, who had become an object of love and high regard for Western
liberals, said and did nothing to stem the horrific violence. Babu and
several other leaders of the Umma party were incarcerated in mainland
Tanganyika, and charged with treason. They remained there for six
years in appalling conditions, until they were released following a
powerful international campaign.
The US intervention into Zanzibar and its aftermath brought economic
decline to the islands, but people were not much better off in
mainland Tanzania. The Revolutionary government of Zanzibar under
Babu's leadership had laid down the blueprint for an independent
economy. This involved dismantling the colonial economy, based as it
was on production for export, and replacing it with an economy geared
to meeting the people's essential needs while at the same time
creating a domestic market. But these plans were forgotten. Under
Nyerere, Tanzania which had once been the largest food exporter in
Africa, became one of the poorest countries in the world - dependent
on food aid from the West.
In the mid-1980s, under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, the
government, now under Nyerere's successors, embarked on economic
liberalisation. Since then the country has sunk deeper into US
domination. Much of mainland Tanzania's resources, precious metals
and minerals have been sold off to the robber barons of global
capital, while its fertile agricultural land has been leased off to
corporates for growing biofuels and food for export.
This pattern of corporate land grabs was, of course, taking place all
over East Africa. In the 1980s, in Somalia, then under the pro-US
President Siad Barre, nearly two-thirds of the country's oil reserves
were allocated to the American petroleum giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron
and Phillips. After Barre was overthrown, the US invaded Somalia
primarily to protect these investments. It was one of the markers of a
new period, when with the fall of the Soviet Union, the US, suddenly
bereft of an enemy, created and targeted a new one – Islamic
terrorism. Done in the name of 'humanitarian intervention', it was in
fact the launch of the 'war on terror' in the region.
In Somalia today the US and Britain, with the help of their many proxy
fighters and 'peacekeepers' claim to be fighting Al-Shabaab.
Tomorrow, it could be a different terrorist group or a different
country which is targeted. In Africa, as elsewhere, the 'war on
terror' can always find ‘terrorists’ to fight - they could be ordinary
people going about their business which happens to stand in the way of
corporate loot, or groups which grow under the shadow of imperialism
generated by people’s anger against its injustices, or encouraged and
created by imperialism itself .
What is common to all recent American interventions, however, is that
they occur in regions rich in resources. Contemporary US cables
revealed by WikiLeaks clarify this link between the 'War on Terror'
and America's hunger for African land and its oil, gas and minerals.
They provide some clues too about the regional context for the
evolution of AFRICOM, the highly sophisticated US military command in
Africa, which claims, among other things, to protect the continent
from terrorism.
We learn, for example, that in 2006, (at a time when the US military
were already entrenched in Africa) the government of Tanzania had
agreed to the establishment of a 'Civil Affairs presence' in Zanzibar
by the US Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa. This 'Civil
Affairs team (which we have rebranded as "AFRICOM")', the cables tell
us some three years later, is carrying out 'humanitarian' operations
and helping build 'Civil Military Operations (CMOs)… capacity within
the Tanzania Peoples Defense Forces’.
What are CMOs? The US army provides us with an explanation. They are
‘a primary military instrument to synchronize military and nonmilitary
instruments of national power’. Their work includes surveillance,
abduction, rendition and torture, providing bases for drone aircraft
and similar operations. Only now it is to be done by the Tanzanian
army, thanks to capacity building by AFRICOM .
CMOs deal, the document goes on, with ‘potential challenges’ such as
ethnic and religious conflict, cultural and socioeconomic differences,
terrorism and insurgencies, the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and most significantly perhaps - the ‘sharpening
competition/exploitation of dwindling natural resources [my italics]’.
In other words they can, where necessary, provide military force to
secure the resources that the US wants from Africa.
As for the 'sharpening competition', other contemporary cables make it
clear that this is a reference to America's old Cold War enemy, China.
While in the 60s, the US worried about Chinese arms and influence,
today it is concerned about its burgeoning imports from, and exports
to, the countries of Africa. Chinese strategy in Africa today is very
different from that of the US, it has been willing to obtain its
resources through trade, providing light industrial goods in return
for raw materials; and building and developing infrastructure –
railways and bridges, for example, to facilitate this process.
China's increasing presence in Africa is, in fact, one of the
strategic reasons behind the setting up of AFRICOM. One AFRICOM study
even claiming with a touch of Cold War hysteria that ‘The
extrapolation of history predicts that distrust and uncertainty will
inevitably lead the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to Africa in
staggering numbers’.
However, US diplomatic messages make it clear, through reports on
private conversations, conference briefings, and personal assessments,
that the structures of imperialist exploitation have changed.
Corporates are far more powerful, and in this neoliberal era, they
thrive on both the expropriation of resources and the 'war on terror'.
Currently, American troops are being deployed in 35 African countries.
In every case there are huge profits to be made, not only from the
resources taken over, but from the sale of weapons, training and
armaments of all kinds.
It is ultimately on behalf of big business too, as US cables show,
that teams of US and EU officials, supported by donors, have been
putting pressure on the politicians of Zanzibar to provide the
'stable' infrastructures which would make the potentially lucrative
oil deposits, found in the waters of the islands not long ago,
accessible. And if this requires Zanzibar to leave the Union with
mainland Tanzania - so be it.
As for AFRICOM, it is mainly in East Africa that relations with it
have been welcomed. In 2007, the Southern Africa Development
Community, made up of 14 African countries, openly denounced it; and
in 2008, the African Union categorically rejected President Bush's
plan for AFRICOM to be based in Africa. But in East Africa, leaders
such as Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete and intra-government
organisations like the East African Community, have been ready to
provide the political framework for US military penetration - eagerly
signing Memoranda of Understanding on joint military cooperation on
'counterinsurgency, peace-building and peace keeping, with operations
on both land and sea.’
However, despite their leaders compliance, in East Africa too, people
are angry that Africans are being killed fighting wars with other
Africans on behalf of the west. People's resistance to imperialism is
growing through anti-land grab movements and in struggles against
giant mining companies. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Zanzibar
revolution approaching, people's anger against the surrogates of
imperialism on the islands is palpable. Will Zanzibar prevent its oil
being taken over by foreign oil companies? Will it be able to use it
to transform the acute poverty which stalks the islands? These are the
questions which hang in the balance.