How the US controls "civil society" throughout Africa Enemy-sponsored organisations threaten nation

By Tafataona Mahoso

24 th of July 2011

The "great democracies" of the West have been the most consistent and most persistent enemy of the African: during slavery, during the scramble for Africa after the Berlin Conference, during colonialism, during apartheid and now during the current effort to recolonise Africa, which we see in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire and the current illegal sanctions against Simbabwe. 

• Americans, the British and their European cousins have discouraged and even outlawed as dangerous to their own people are the very same qualities and habits they seek to impose, promote, fund and otherwise reward among our children and within our societies in Africa. 
• "We tend to look to (those we think are) the experts, the well-educated, thoroughly trained and richly resourced Western journalists for a lead. When they dismiss African leadership with a few worn-out clichés, we follow suit. In the process we reduce our own politics, economics and situation in history into the juvenile language of (Western) tabloids." 
• Running parallel to the "civil society" network or superstructure is the series of military and intelligence co-operation programmes which Africom is supposed to consolidate. Once Africom is in place, the recolonisation process will have been completed. 

July 17, 2011 "Bulawayo24" -- Pan African thinkers may wish to ask themselves this question: "If South Africa were at war with Canada and in the process of bombing Canadian cities back to the Stone Age, would US President Barack Obama allow Mrs Zuma (the wife of the South African President) to come and have tea and talk charity with Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter (former US Presidents) in Washington DC?" 

For anyone who knows what North Americans call the "American creed" or the Monroe Doctrine (which became the "Reagan Doctrine" in the 1980s), both US citizens and politicians would never allow such an affront. The first lady of a country at war with Canada would never be welcomed to tea by a former US President in Washington DC while the bombing was going on. 

So, why was it that two weeks ago, while the US and Nato were bombing Libya and ridiculing African Union resolutions on the same war, Barack Obama had the temerity to send his wife to South Africa and the wife had expectations to meet both the President and First Lady of South Africa and felt snubbed when she was welcomed by President Jacob Zuma's wife and by former South African President Cde Nelson Mandela?

Tutored in governance matters by our enemies 

Readers should not get me wrong. The problem is not with the North Americans and Nato as such.

The problem is with us Africans and how we have allowed ourselves to be tutored in governance matters by people who are our declared enemies or by organisations and individuals funded and managed by our declared enemies. Now, how did Africans respond when Michelle Obama was welcomed by the third wife of President Zuma and allowed to meet Cde Nelson Mandela? Too many Africans felt that it was Africa (and South Africa in particular) who had snubbed and insulted the US. Too many papers in South Africa and in our region even complained on behalf of the very same imperialists bombing Libya and recolonising Cote d'Ivoire. 

Now, this willingness to apologise against our own dignity and interests while upholding the arrogance of the enemy is not natural. It has been cultivated over several centuries. 

In 1957 a US citizen called Russell Kirk published a book called The American Cause in response to how the US had fared in the Korean War and how the rest of US society had responded to the war. 

The book identified general as well as specific weaknesses among US soldiers and US citizens in the face of their "enemies" who were identified as the Chinese "communists".

So, although the war was fought over Korea, the "enemy" was identified as Chinese "communists". 

The first general weakness the book identified was elaborated by John Dos Passos, who wrote the foreword to the book: 

"Neglect of history has long been an American failing. When that blind spot is coupled with ignorance of the special nature of our own institutions the result is a sort of vacuum in the political part of the brain. 

"Any high-sounding (alien) notion fashionable at the moment is (therefore) accepted without question. The victim is ready to be herded along any path of delusion the opinion-moulders choose."

This observation is most interesting because the US has literally turned its own problems inside-out and up-side-down. The US sponsors political parties, NGOs and religious organisations to create among societies they wish to destabilise the very same problems, the very same weaknesses which Russell Kirk and John Dos Passos identified and sought to overcome among their own security forces and within their own society. 

Almost all the political parties and NGOs sponsored in Simbabwe by the US, Britain, the European Union, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are engaged in activities and teachings which seek to erase or confuse the history of the African's struggle for freedom, independence, self-determination and autonomy. 

The whole doctrine of human rights and democracy is intended to make Africans feel and believe that they are only thankful receivers of freedom and human rights conceived, programmed, taught and funded by the West. 

Our history, dangerous to imperialists 

Why is our history dangerous to the Rhodies, the British, the US, and the European Union?

That history defines the perennial enemy of Africa and Africans. The "great democracies" of the West have been the most consistent and most persistent enemy of the African: during slavery, during the scramble for Africa after the Berlin Conference, during colonialism, during apartheid and now during the current effort to recolonise Africa, which we see in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire and the current illegal sanctions against Simbabwe.

The following books, for instance, reveal the truth that the Western democracies have been the most consistent and persistent enemies of the African: Race and the construction of the disposable other, by Professor Bernard Magubane; The United States and the war against Simbabwe, 1965-1980, by Professor Gerald Horne; Automating Apartheid: US Computer Exports to South Africa and the Arms Embargo, by the American Friends Service Committee; Apartheid Terrorism, by Phylis Johnson and David Martin; Destructive Engagement, by David Martin and Phylis Johnson; and Red Rubber, by E. D. Morel. 

These books represent a tiny sample of the evidence which presents white Western governments as enemies of the African. 

But what are the values and qualities which Western governments despise if exhibited by their own citizens but which the same governments teach, promote, sponsor and finance among the Africans through sponsored political parties, sponsored NGOs, sponsored churches and other agencies?

According to the American Cause, the following were the qualities or characteristics which the US government should have discouraged especially among those citizens who joined the security and defence forces to protect "US interests": 

• Weak loyalties to family and community; 
• Weak loyalties to country, religion and colleagues; 
• A hazy concept of right and wrong; 
• Opportunism; 
• and Underrating or under-estimation of one's own worth and so on. 

Kirk quoted a Chinese military intelligence report on the Korean War which said " . . . even among United States university graduates" there was little knowledge or understanding "of American political history or philosophy .  ."
The university graduate "is exceedingly insular and provincial, with little or no idea of the problems and aims of what he contemptuously describes as foreigners and their countries".

Above all, Russel Kirk felt that the generation of the late 1950s in the US had moved away from what he considered to be the best of North American "pragmatism", by which he meant the ability to integrate abstract concepts with practical applications and solutions in real-life situations. Kirk wanted to avoid raising a generation which could easily get lost in the world and die: 

"In the prison camps (of the war in Korea), our men died by the thousands — not from physical mistreatment, except in a few instances, but principally from despair, bewilderment, and lack of faith." 

He then turned to what he believed were the best characteristics of the founders of his country which he wanted adapted for the education and grooming of new generations. 

"Even the more radical among the founders . . . looked steadily to the past for guidance . . . They were not closet-philosophers, vainly pursuing the vision of a perfect society independent of (day-to-day) human experience . . . "

They knew political philosophy as well as history and law. They had read, many of them, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, St Augustine and Dante, Sir Edward Coke and Richard Hooker, John Locke and Edmund Burke . . . But they were not bookish . . . They did not divorce theory from practice. In their own careers they had united the authority of social custom with the authority of great books. They respected the wisdom of their ancestors." 

"Democratic reforms" inolving reinstalling white Rhodesians in strategic positions.

But these are the qualities the West and its stooges among us denounce daily here. What they have sponsored here as "democratic reforms" instead involves reinstalling white Rhodesians in strategic positions and institutions for the purpose of overthrowing our liberation heroes and ethos as well as reversing the gains of our independence. 

On 24 September 2009 the one major question CNN's Christiane Amanpor asked President Mugabe was why the President had not appointed Roy Leslie Bennett Deputy Minister of Agriculture as demanded by the Rhodesian lobby. 

And after MDC-T's spokesperson Nelson Chamisa described Bennett as their party's angel, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai made a major statement in which he made the following claims on behalf of Mr Bennett: 

"Mr Mugabe has gone back on his word [to appoint Bennett]. He confirmed to me and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara on Monday that he has no intention of ever swearing in Roy. The matter of Roy Bennett has now become a personal vendetta and part of a racist agenda." 

This means Anglo-American imperialism has sponsored its Rhodesian kith and kin to retake the Simbabwe economy and the MDC formations have gladly taken up the cause in the name of democratic reform! 

We can add that these founders of North America did not rely on donors or donor-funded NGOs for guidance. We can add that the qualities and habits which the North Americans, the British and their European cousins have discouraged and even outlawed as dangerous to their own people are the very same qualities and habits they seek to impose, promote, fund and otherwise reward among our children and within our societies in Africa.

If one looks at the donor-funded advertisements preceding the launch of the Medium Term Plan (MTP) on July 7 2011, the whole thing has become even more removed from the economic conditions of the people and even more abstract than the IMF-World Bank-imposed Economic Structural Adjustment Programme ever was. 

The jargon, the clichés and sound bites are all culled from glossy donor-funded brochures and project proposals whose purpose is to hide the realities of the devastation of people's lives by illegal sanctions imposed only by white governments. The same governments are sponsoring the adverts. As the February 1998 issue of African Business pointed out, African teachers and opinion makers have to become original in order to stop selling out.

"Leaders who have grown up from their native soils cannot be put in the same category (as foreign-sponsored puppets). Many of them suffered great tribulations and made enormous sacrifices for (and with) their people . . . The challenges they faced (and continue to face) have been far more daunting than anything any Western leader has to confront since the World War . . . The issue of African leadership is a complex one and it needs substantial study." 

Unfortunately, most of us in Africa, particularly poorly qualified and badly paid journalists, just do not have the analytical tools to work through leadership issues. 

"We tend to look to (those we think are) the experts, the well-educated, thoroughly trained and richly resourced Western journalists for a lead. When they dismiss African leadership with a few worn-out clichés, we follow suit. In the process we reduce our own politics, economics and situation in history into the juvenile language of (Western) tabloids."

The problem which the editor of African Business referred to here is the removal of history and context from media stories. 

It is no coincidence that the Pastoral Letter of the Simbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference issued January 2011 focused on ownership of Simbabwe's liberation history. 

The bishops' conference is part of a long lineage of intercessors, interveners and mediators between African leaders and African communities, between African nations and white imperialism.

This long lineage to which the Catholic Church belongs is responsible for the stubbornness of the white template through which even the mass media owned by Africans themselves continue to misrepresent African leadership. 

How the US controls "civil society" throughout Africa 

Because of the disastrous effects of neoliberal economic structural adjustment and (in Simbabwe) because of the effects of illegal sanctions as well, the number of foreign-funded NGOs has increased more than 10 times since the late 1980s. 

Moreover, this aid is not limited to the civilian NGO sector. It is also military and strategic.

Africa is opening itself to much worse manipulations if it allows the US Africom project to grow and spread on African soil. 

The Anglo-Saxon powers, led by the US, already control a continental network and superstructure of "civil society" throughout Africa. It ranges from individual activists and NGOs at the village level to national headquarters of the same NGOs operating on a nation-wide basis; it ranges from donor-funded, quasi-judicial human rights commissions to regional bodies such as the Sadc Tribunal, all the way to the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR.) 

Running parallel to the "civil society" network or superstructure is the series of military and intelligence co-operation programmes which Africom is supposed to consolidate. Once Africom is in place, the recolonisation process will have been completed. Newman Chiadzwa and Farai Muguwu would then have their military counterparts right in our midst. 

And there would be no end to co-ordinated manipulations such as what was recently attempted against Simbabwe in Tel Aviv during the fourth week of June 2010 at the Kimberley Process Certification meeting. 

In a recent paper, Professor Issa Shivji of the University of Dar es Salaam's School of Law quoted Amilcar Cabral, Archie Mafeje and Frantz Fanon to demonstrate that African leaders must rise in a world and context where the ground has been undercut and paved over by imperialism.

They therefore have to reclaim African ground by unpaving the Cape to Cairo tarmac left by Cecil Rhodes and his descendants.

According to Professor Shivji: "Cabral also makes the point that ‘so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent'. 

These are profound insights. "First (African) nationalism is constituted by the struggle of the people against imperialism, thus anti-imperialism defines African nationalism. 

"Second, nationalism, as an expression of (African) struggle, continues so long as imperialism exists. 

"Third, the (African) National Question in Africa, whose expression is nationalism (and which makes African leadership necessary), remains unresolved as long as there is imperialist domination." 

This nationalism and Pan-Africanism is what the white empire and its sponsored stooges and mouthpieces attack every day here. 

You can find the original article here.