Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 99

Kwasi Wiredu���s golden rule

The greatest achievement of Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu was to recast African knowledge from something lost to something gained. Photo by Claude Nai on Unsplash

Ask ten people what decolonization means, and you will get ten different answers. The term���s incoherent resurgence has sparked an understandable backlash, with complaints directed mainly against its liberal and or neoliberal defanging. When attempts to pin down decolonization���s meaning pit ���real��� material work against mere theory, staking out a position feels easy enough. Things are harder to parse where the object of concern is knowledge itself. What exactly counts as ���decolonizing��� in the resolutely immaterial domains of concept, culture, or moral life? Because this question must be hard to answer, the certainties with which it is often answered fall short. It is typical of our moment that Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu���s death this year was met with much-unqualified praise of his ���decolonial��� status, with that descriptor confirming countless more specific���and discordant���views.

In Wiredu���s agile hands, the decolonization of knowledge was a distinctive method: it entailed clear analytic steps as well as safeguards against cultural romanticization. This means that it can be learned, given the time and commitment, and indeed must be learned regardless of one���s cultural starting point. In this sense, Wiredu was a staunchly disciplinary thinker even as his political ideals have far-reaching resonance. Trained at Oxford mainly by philosopher of mind Gilbert Ryle, Wiredu���s writing is marked by what Sanya Osha recently described as ���a matter-of-fact fastidiousness and tone.��� The difference between Wiredu���s disarmingly lucid philosophy and the more abstract, even poetic modes of decolonial thought now in broader circulation is the difference between grandiose calls for the world���s ���unmaking��� or ���delinking��� and the painstaking disaggregation of cultural wholes into constituent parts. Wiredu���s hallmark move was to break down ���culture��� into particular traditions, beliefs, and phrases, which could then be evaluated on their own merits. He was a master of ���showing his work,��� and the sheer amount of labor he expended to do so in print makes his work unsuited to an age of easy excerpts and virtual point scoring.

Wiredu���s method is most fully worked out in two books, Philosophy and an African Culture (1980) and Cultural Universals and Particulars (1997), but many of his essays have also stood the test of decades. One of the most memorable examples of how he takes his native Akan (and specifically, Asante) heritage apart to assert its philosophical importance appears in a 1998 article titled, ���Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion.��� Wiredu here wields insights into the nature of Twi syntax to present the Akan God as an architect rather than an ex nihilo creator. Whereas the Christian God is linked to a Western metaphysics of being that can, in principle, be unmoored from context, Wiredu argues that the nature of the verb ���to be��� in Twi or Fante���expressed as either wo ho or ye���necessitates some kind of pre-given situation. (I cannot, in Fante, state simply ���I am,��� or ���she is.���) Whereas the Christian God can thus be imagined to have made the world from nothing, the Akan counterpart is assumed to have worked with pre-given materials in its construction. By extension, whereas the Christian tradition prioritizes miraculousness, the Akan tradition puts more weight on design and ingenuity. Neither one is right or wrong, intrinsically better or worse. Wiredu���s agenda is to make clear the level of conceptual distinction and follow-through required to place them in an equal-footed conversation.

This penchant for linking fine points to grand plans is also on full display in a late-career, 2009 essay called, ���An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality.��� Here, Wiredu turns to the Akan tradition of talking drums to refute simplistic ideas of cultural uniformity. Using a well-known drum text rife with metaphysical implications, Wiredu concludes that the drums��� theology is in fact opposed to the broader Akan belief system. (The drum text is in his view pantheistic, while Akan religion is theistic as he describes it in ���Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion.���) His reading yields a few important insights, including into the formative role of intra-cultural disagreement in what might later appear to be shared oral traditions. The main thing to emphasize, however, is that Wiredu���s deep dive into Akan knowledge results in its destabilization. This does not mean that Akan culture, such as it may be said to exist, is somehow ���not real��� by virtue of being complexly constructed; this is true of all cultures, everywhere. It means, instead, that it is robust enough to withstand real pressure on pieces of it in order to think seriously about the whole. While acknowledging the colonial odds historically stacked against African knowledge traditions, Wiredu���s philosophical approach to Akan concepts insists that intellectual work can and must do more than reflect this injustice.

Kwasi Wiredu���s lasting decolonial achievement���and that which must be widely memorialized���is to recast African knowledge from something lost to something gained. He refused to treat it as fragile, even as he stared down the many ways it has been sidelined and subjugated. To be ���decolonized,��� for Wiredu, is to think with extreme care about each and every practice and position, equally open to radical change and renewed conviction. Worship traditionally or as a Christian, he wrote, but in either case really know why. Getting there on his model is daunting, but at the end of the exertion is moral and cultural reciprocity that cannot be claimed lightly. Or, as Wiredu once put it, it yields ���the golden rule that gives us the basis … to consider every person as one.���

What���s good for investors isn���t good for Africans

How Africa���s pension funds risk becoming instruments of Africa���s neoliberal takeover. Photo by Oren Elbaz on Unsplash

African pension funds have been getting a lot of attention in the financial press lately. An October 2021 article in The Economist plays matchmaker for some very eligible asset pools: the African Development Bank, it notes, has estimated an annual bill of $130 billion to $170 billion dollars for infrastructure improvements across the continent. Perhaps African pension funds���which, the magazine notes, ���have grown impressively��� in the last few years and have a tendency to stay close to home, unlike those more fickle foreign capital flows���could be a good fit. Also last year, RMI, a US clean energy think tank, suggested that African pension funds invest in clean energy projects across the continent to ���trigger a positive economic-growth feedback loop.���

African pension funds have been shifting their assets to African development projects for some time, but the pace has recently sped up. In February, a consortium of Kenyan pension funds announced they would be working with Chinese firms on a plan to invest in local infrastructure, and just weeks ago, Bloomberg reported that South Africa���s Government Employees Pension Fund, the largest in Africa, planned to invest $1.6 billion across the continent.

It���s easy to see why editors at The Economist would get excited about the new trend. But for those of us more wary of finance capitalism, it���s worth considering the experience of Brazil, where pension funds were instrumental to bolstering a neoliberal takeover of the country at the turn of the century.

In the early years of his presidency, Lula In��cio da Silva took steps to make it easier for workers to invest in pension funds. Simultaneously, he gave unions more freedom to administer the nation���s pension funds and encouraged them to invest in the Brazilian economy. All of these moves were part of a plan to, in the words of Uruguayan journalist Ra��l Zibechi, ���moralize, humanize, and domesticate capitalism.��� But like so much else from the Lula era, what was on its face a way to help Brazil���s working class by playing to the rules of the rich and powerful became, instead, a neoliberal ploy: a way to uplift the rich and strengthen the market forces through which the rich derived their power in the first place.

Within a few years, the pensions grew precipitously, but with the pension���s capital now powering it, the finance sector grew even more. Rather than shaping the Brazilian finance sector to suit their ends, the unions���long the Brazilian Left���s institutional power base���internalized the ambitions of the exclusively white, male clique of S��o Paulo financiers with which they now collaborated. Instead of seeking out ways to use the enormous weight of their assets to uplift Brazilians, union leaders sought out ways to protect and expand the capital they managed.

The financiers encouraging African pension funds��� entrance into development finance have skipped the talk about moralizing capitalism which characterized the Brazilian experience. But like their Brazilian peers a generation ago, African pension funds now risk putting their assets in the hands of financiers intent on carrying out a developmental vision that, at best, equates the needs of African people with the needs of capital. To see how, one only needs to look at the investment vehicle of choice for any investors looking to bank on African business: private equity (PE).

Since stock markets outside South Africa are generally weak and underdeveloped, African pension funds���like other institutional investors around the world���are funneling their capital through private equity funds. (The aforementioned $1.6 billion South African windfall, for instance, will pass entirely through ���unlisted��� companies, which almost certainly means it���ll be going through PE.)

To even be considered for admission into a PE fund, pension funds, like all potential investors, have to demonstrate they share the values (and the vision) of the fund managers. One reason is that it���s a long-term relationship: joining a fund means pooling assets and interests with the fund managers and other investors (a group that typically includes European development agencies, multilateral development banks, and American pension funds) for a decade or more. Thereafter, what projects and companies the PE funds back with investors��� money are, generally, up to their managers. But even when those managers claim to be uplifting Africa with their investments, one can expect them to be uplifting capital even more.

Take, for instance, the Rise Fund, a PE fund cofounded by Bono and Jeff Skoll. With a declared intent of transforming African economies and a long list of American pensions as investors, the San Francisco-based PE fund is exactly the kind of partner African pension funds might consider backing in the near future. In 2019, the fund invested in Uganda���s Pearl Dairy, which by then already had operations in nine countries in Africa and Japan. Money in hand, Pearl scaled up its operations even more. The Rise Fund���s parent company, TPG, now says that Pearl sources milk from more than 10,000 small farmers. But in March, one farmers��� union in Uganda accused it of collaborating with other milk producers to drive milk prices down to the point that many farmers could no longer support themselves.

It���s common for investors looking to capitalize on Africa���s growing economies to say, in so many words, and in spite of evidence to the contrary, that what���s good for them is good for everyone. African pension funds���which, like pensions in most countries, have a reputation for caution and prudence���would do better than throwing their clients��� assets behind their agenda.

An African Queer in the academy

We do not have to die, become sick or leave the academy to live and be in this space. Photo by Changbok Ko on Unsplash

An article, ���African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography,��� (Mara & Thompson 2022) published in the African Studies Review, the official journal of the African Studies Association, which dominates the discipline in the US), has sparked justifiable criticism over the extractive nature and unethical methods of data collection employed by the authors.

The article is particularly violent because the authors co-opt the discourse�� of decolonization while they journey from Europe into particular African communities with tools of ���autoethnography��� and ���privileged near-insider��� and offering up a wanting justification�� to ease their consciences and appease the tenets of ���ethical research.��� What is equally astonishing, to critics, is the fact that this paper has passed through various stages of peer and editorial review.. As an African, queer and gender non-conforming PhD scholar this signals a politics of collusion, underpinned by gaping fractures within ���African��� curated spaces within the academy, which implicates individual and institutional actors as well as within the meta space of African Studies. In order to contribute to this conversation, I reflect on my brief experience in African Studies while doing my PhD.

Lived experience is not just a set of past/current experiences that can be packaged into a physical body, invited into the academy and used as a measuring stick to deconstruct how the colonial academy has violated, characterized indigenous peoples and policed non-conforming expressions of genders and sexualities. Lived reality is first a reconfiguration and reclamation of power actively denied by structures and cultures of exclusion. It is saying: ���I know.��� It erases the gaze of Western empiricism that speaks for subjects. It means shedding the paternalism ���of giving voice��� because the voice has always been there: it is silenced by structures of racism, imperialism and heteropatriarchy; sustained by carnal, exploitative power relations through capitalism; and further cemented by institutional cultures that are competitive, void of trust, and absent of care for both practice and research.

Lived experience is also not static. Although I was raised in relative poverty and with various forms of violence done to my body, I have also received multiple degrees (with distinction) from world-ranking universities. I am no longer the young person who established a community-based organization (CBO) in my hometown to challenge the failures of the DA-led government in Coloured communities in Cape Town. I no longer speak Afrikaaps, and express myself predominantly in English, the language of my trade as an academic. And yet, by virtue of my lived experience and regardless of the upward social mobility my education affords me, I continue to exist precariously within academic spaces, particularly ���African-��� and ���Gender-���curated spaces. Many times I have been reminded by senior peers that academia is a game and we know that games always produce winners and losers. In this supposed game I wonder where African Queer lived realities factor in and whether I have agency.

African Queer lived realities can be understood as the productive site in which we grapple with a reconfiguration of gender, sex and sexuality, pleasure, joy as modes of existence. It also speaks to spiritual decimation and the reclamation of spirituality from which Queer people are often robbed. Of course, I cannot speak for all African Queer lived realities, especially as a South African Queer person (who enjoys conditional freedom afforded by my nation state). Although African Queer lived realities are not homogenous, these power relations structurally and institutionally underpin our understanding of them. Therefore, for me, African Queer lived experiences is a possible antidote to this silencing mechanism employed by the ���rational��� academy.

My lived reality poses a critical question of power in the Western university space: Do universities and centers or departments of Black, African, Gender Studies know how to engage African Queer realities as equal producers of knowledge? Writing, reading and doing a PhD has meant absorbing epistemic violence, during a pandemic, during the implosion of my country���s already dubious liberal democracy. Through grief, illness and anxiety. Reading then how trans* lived experiences are constructed by supposedly seminal texts, how race is conceptualized, the role that religion (that has saved me so many times) played in producing the violence we experience becomes a violent encounter with history, politics, economics and culture. All of this must be digested by me and then translated into a research output that does not replicate epistemic violence, exclusions and power relations.

From one vantage point, my body (already an archival meeting point of complex histories) becomes the buffer, absorbing violence and histories and outputting texts that invite liberatory politics, joy, and love, which a neoliberal university can usurp without much effort. No generic academic workshop would help me in this sense. It takes me twice as long to read and to write. It breaks down my spirit, and no amount of meditation will address the structural/institutional flaw that enables this breakdown. I ask myself, why are white and cishet scholars writing about Queerness and trans* identities not being asked if they are ready for the work? What about my African Queer subjectivity exposes the flaws in ���African-��� curated spaces in a neoliberal, white university? If I have the intellectual ability, these questions must follow: ���What about this process, our spaces, our centers cannot hold space for African Queer lived realities as equal producers of knowledge?��� and ���How can we pool our resources to support these scholars and their work?��� Such questions bring discomfort and expose structural, institutional, and individual incapacities.

���The PhD is lonely.���

���The PhD feels like this.���

���It does get better.���

These are the generic responses an encounter with my lived reality produces.. Before the pandemic, there were already gaping inconsistencies and inequalities for PhD students, and students in general. It is harmful and borderline unethical for university staff to ���address��� the concerns PhD students raise with generic responses that reverberated through their own graduate journeys. It indicates a lack of understanding, radical care and illustrates complicity in replicating power dynamics that leave many PhD students, particularly African, indigenous, queer and women, living precariously.

We need academics to be radically invested in dismantling the very systems, cultures and practices that afford them undue privileges in the academy and in the world. This radical dismantling requires them to turn deep within to see how they personally benefit from the historically constructed structural oppression of the very communities they study in Africa. This is not something that can be simply encapsulated in a positionality statement, ethical board review or secondary PTSD workshops post fieldwork.

Of course, most who have done a PhD will tell you it is difficult and demanding. There is no denying that. However, these age-old and clinical responses to concerns of loneliness, mental health, juggling egos, and financial concerns cannot be fixed through generic responses. These issues require an institutional response, truthful reflexivity, and a radical shift in imagining knowledge production. Yet, these necessary movements to address concerns of African Queer scholars are eclipsed by the bureaucratic, neoliberal business model universities employ, power struggles between those in academic ranks in relation to student bodies, and the continuous co-option of African and indigenous knowledge systems and practices in which academics are experts and those of us with multiple degrees, lived experience and heterogenous politics of decolonisation are decentred. Additionally, the failure to listen when we speak stems from a culture in academia where ���speaking up��� is often detrimental to funding, grants and career advancement, and shrouded in subtle (and sometimes overt) harassment and bullying.

I wonder if centers of African studies in Europe, historically white-only institutions (and those in the US), know what decolonisation might mean. Do they know about radical care and empathy? Do they know that their majority white and cis-gendered staff will have to do work to deconstruct their�� life experiences, to lay bare the intimate dimensions of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist exploitation? It will require accountability that cannot be encapsulated in a workshop series that can be filed for tenure promotion. I wonder if they dare to admit the deep failures and gaps in their knowledge and practices? It will require Africans and Queer persons who are already established in these spaces to shake the mentality that there is only one seat at the table, which leads us to claw, connive, and scheme for space. This breaks down efforts of community building, which are central to a caring, decolonial turn. It will require of scholars like me, with my lived reality, to be critical of our affiliations to a Global North university studying African Queer lived realities���the material and structural privilege my institution might grant me when applying for jobs. I must ask myself, am I open to the radical rebuilding of the very space that affords my meals and fuels my inquiry?

We cannot decolonise methodologies, curriculums and spaces without trust. Who do I trust to hold and create space for my African Queer lived realities? Who will be an ally if institutional cultures and policies push for ���business as usual��� throughout a deadly pandemic that reconfigures modes of existence, income and creates more precarity? I doubt ally-ship because during my MSc and current PhD studies, so many of my peers remarked, ���Westerners are pushing LGBT politics down our throats.��� Yet, they were touted as the best from Africa, and some were previously employed in influential positions. I saw the replications of colonial norms and gendered power relations; I saw greed and historical revisionism.

More troubling is that the probability of these people being employed by aid agencies, institutions of governance increases because of their international degrees and the currency this carries in various African spaces. Trust is central to decolonization because it facilitates the building of communal practices and spaces that colonization has so violently disrupted. African Queer survival 101, which is orally passed down from the one friend, colleague or ally in the department, is that you find community and trust outside of the institutional space. These conversations of community happen in pockets within the institution, or outside of it. I have built such communities in different institutions in South Africa, the US and the UK, and they are why I am still here, willing to continue. The joy, love, and care I experience when I am in commune and relation with other Queer and African Queer beings drives my work. Too easily, the institution and its agents can exclaim, ���Do not bite the hand that feeds you,��� and so we fill in annual reviews and course evaluations with glee and lay bare the truths only in the inner circles we trust.

However, times are indeed changing. Communities of joy and love that practice radical care and community-making are on the rise. We are creating new practices of engaging our bodies, each other, spirituality and our existences in this world. We do not have to die, or become sick or leave the academy to live and be in this space.

Keeping a displaced group closely knit together

Abderafiou Boukari recently sat down after Maghrib prayer at Masjid Tajul Huda, a majority-Nigerian mosque in

The land of the freed people

'We Slaves of Suriname' (1934), by Afro-Surinamese author Anton de Kom, was the first study of Dutch colonial rule from the perspectives of the people who resisted it. It is has been published in English for the first time. Anton de Kom circa 1924, photo originally published in De Correspondent (via Wikimedia Commons, public domain).

Anton de Kom was born in 1898 in (roughly: land of the free people), a working-class creole neighborhood of Paramaribo, Suriname. Anton���s father, Adolf, was freed from slavery as an infant on keti koti, the abolition of slavery on July 1 1863, which took place in Suriname 30 years after emancipation in the British Caribbean. After a so-called transition period where the Dutch required ���freed��� slaves to keep working on plantations for another decade, authorities instituted compulsory basic education. In the language of the colonizer, schools were to promote ���civilization” and impose a ���unifying��� language (Dutch) in a place they viewed as bewilderingly diverse, undisciplined and inefficient. Adek, as De Kom is known in Suriname, attended these colonial schools modeled on the Dutch system.

In Wij Slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), first published in Dutch in 1934 and , De Kom reflects on the ways colonial education taught him to loathe himself. Confined to the back of their classrooms and forbidden from speaking Sranantongo, Black children learned heroic stories of Dutch ���explorers��� and colonizers. Writing 30 years before the Brazilian Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, De Kom recalls,

We, who searched our history books in vain for the names of the rebels Boni, Baron, Joli Coeur, did our utmost so that, when the exam came, we could quickly rattle off the names and days of the Dutch governors under whose administration our fathers had been imported as slaves.

���And the system worked,��� he continues, remembering his childhood alienation from the beauty of Surinamese nature and his learned disdain for maroons (descendants of those who escaped plantation slavery by forming free communities deep in the rainforests), all while dressed ���in our European clothes.��� There is ���[n]o better way to foster a sense of inferiority in a race, than through this form of history education, in which the sons of a different people are the only ones mentioned and praised.���

For a very long time, the name Anton de Kom would not be found in either. I completed the Dutch school system in the 1980s and 1990s where I witnessed what Gloria Wekker describes as the ���stark juxtaposition between the Dutch imperial presence in the world, since the sixteenth century, and its almost total absence in the Dutch educational curriculum, in self-image and self-representations.��� I only learned Anton de Kom���s name in 2018 in a text written by a US scholar, Melissa Weiner, mentioned We Slaves (1934) alongside (and, not insignificantly, preceding) the seminal works of C.L.R. James (1938) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1935), the Anglophone decolonial scholars who guide my teaching and learning. The unfamiliar Dutch name jumped out at me and led me to a digital copy of the original 1934 edition of Wij Slaven van Suriname.

When young De Kom���s questions went unanswered at colonial schools, he set out to teach himself. Relatives remember him as a teenager with ���his nose in a book.��� Responding to his incessant questions, De Kom���s grandmother and aunts cautiously shared memories of slavery and hinted at maroonage in the family, though these stories were shrouded in mystery. Their words stayed with Adek, as he would later recall in We Slaves: ���Never have the sufferings of slavery spoken to me so clearly as through the eyes of my grandmother when, in front of the hut in Paramaribo, she told us children her tales of the old days.���

De Kom finished middle school, the highest level of education available in Suriname at the time, and trained as a bookkeeper. He worked for the Colonial Balata Company where he observed the exploitation of workers. With the help of a storeroom assistant, De Kom covertly built relationships with the balata bleeders, many of whom were illiterate. He taught basic literacy and numeracy skills so the workers could guard against wage theft, his biographers note.

At age 20, De Kom boarded a ship to Holland (via Cura��ao and Haiti) as a working passenger. His dream to enroll as a student in The Netherlands was never realized, but he built relationships with nationalist Indonesian students and Dutch Communists, the only left-wing group with an explicitly anti-imperialist platform. While working as a business agent for a coffee and tobacco company in The Hague, De Kom wrote for communist publications (his articles often focused on the exploitation of Asian contract workers in Suriname) and he maintained correspondence with Surinamese labor organizers. Adek immersed himself in literature, poetry, and libraries, starting work on the project that would become We Slaves in 1926.

We Slaves is an unusual text. Tessa Leuwsha reminds us in her foreword to the book���s 2020 edition that writing in the colonial language, De Kom played with genres and literary styles, interspersing his scholarly writing with intimate narration, poetry, and subversive word play, and Surinamese odo (proverbs). While some white commentators focus attention on De Kom���s ���bitter��� remarks and ���accusations��� against the Dutch, We Slaves resolutely centers the Surinamese. The book���s opening chapters describe the establishment of racial slavery on the Guyanese Coast:

��� Each new ruler drove out the last, yet each one, after taking violent possession of the settlements of other Europeans, would begin by making the solemn declaration that under the new regime the right of property ��� which is to say, the right to use and abuse one���s living chattels, to buy and sell our fathers and mothers ��� would still be held sacred and enforced.

In this manner, De Kom uses ���we,��� ���us,��� ���our��� and direct invocations to enslaved ancestors and deceased loved ones������our fathers and mothers������throughout We Slaves, as Duco van Oostrum discusses. Connecting Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, the Chinese, Javanese (Indonesian) and Hindustani (Northern Indian) contract workers, who colonizers trafficked to Suriname on fraudulent contracts to replace enslaved labor after emancipation, De Kom���s ���we��� explicitly include all exploited people in the category of slaves of Suriname. Some of the book���s most harrowing passages describe the misery, hunger and sickness among the Asian unemployed. We Slaves retells the histories of Suriname and the Dutch empire through stories of maronage, uprisings, and everyday resistance during the periods of conquest, slavery, and its aftermath.

De Kom reads the silences in colonial records, travelers��� narratives, and abolitionists��� reports with his grandmother and aunts��� stories in mind. In the alarmist 1750 warnings of the director of Vlucht en Trouw plantation to the surrounding white population, for example, De Kom refocuses attention on the circumstances surrounding the reported slave insurrection. The enslaved rebelled when the manager flogged an enslaved woman to death. The woman had defended herself when the plantation manager attempted to rape her. When an elderly enslaved man protested on the woman���s behalf, the manager shot him too, for good measure.

With ���our mothers and fathers��� always in view, We Slaves writes Surinamese people back in to their own histories���as workers engaged in backbreaking labor, as people engaged in resistance and acts of solidarity in the face of the cruelest punishments, and as people cultivating knowledge about their own lives.

As De Kom recenters the enslaved and exploited in their own histories, he also offers insights into their oppressors. The planters��� ���excesses��� were not a result of their mismanagement or inefficiency, as the Dutch government (and abolitionists) maintained. Rather, De Kom shows, planter culture emerged precisely from the exploitative and violent relations that sustained them. Evoking their raucous feasts, De Kom directs the reader to consider the slaves who would have served the Surinamese slaveholders, the ���silent��� Black masses beyond their windows, and the ���implacable armies of maroons��� in the forest. In their ���frenzy of sensual pleasures,��� the reveling planters tried in vain to forget their fear of those they oppressed, fear living in each of their hearts.

Adek narrates his own short-lived return to Suriname in 1933 in the book���s epilogue, the only passage of the book previously translated into English. Beset by homesickness and worried about his ailing mother, De Kom undertook the long journey with his white Dutch wife and their young children. De Kom���s mother died before his ship docked. He was met at the docks by about 1,000 proletarians wearing their Sunday best. This multiracial group of workers may have remembered De Kom from his time at the Balata Company and spread the news of his return by word of mouth. Javanese and Hindustani workers, in particular, welcomed De Kom home as a liberator.

In the book���s epilogue, De Kom wrestles with his grief for his mother and his shock at witnessing the desperation of the Surinamese during the crippling economic crisis. He is labeled a communist and banned from public speaking. Drawing strength from his late mother���s example, he decides to set up an advice bureau in his family���s yard in Frimangron with the goal of listening to workers. Hundreds, and soon thousands, of struggling workers and unemployed��� the descendants of African slaves, Asian indentured workers, Indigenous people, and Ndyuka leaders���traveled from plantations and forests to share their experiences of hunger, illness, exploitation and abuse. De Kom reflected on his political goals:

Perhaps I shall succeed in overcoming some of the disunity which has always been the great source of weakness of these colored people. Perhaps I shall succeed in driving it home to Negroes and Hindustanis, to Javanese and Amerindians, that only solidarity can unite all the sons of mother Sranan in their struggle for a life worthy of man’s dignity (Pomerans translation).

When police shut down De Kom���s listening project after a month, hundreds of Javanese workers staged an impromptu demonstration, squatting in the yard as officers tried to remove them. De Kom describes his first encounter with non-violent protest with awe: The Javanese did not ���budge even a centimeter from where they sat.��� The protests spread across Paramaribo during what came to be known as the February Uprising, as documented by . When De Kom was arrested, thousands more workers took to the street to demand his release. Authorities attacked the multiracial protestors, reserving particular brutality for the Javanese.

1933 protest for the release of Anton de Kom in Paramaribo. Originally published in Het Leven, nr. 10 (1933) 303 with the title ���Unrest in the West��� and reprinted in Fatah-Black (2017). Credit: Nationaal Archief/Collectie Spaarnestad/Het Leven/Fotograaf onbekend.

While Adek���s advice bureau notebooks were destroyed in the initial raid, We Slaves��� epilogue may be the first account of multiracial labor organizing in the Dutch empire. After three months in Fort Zeelandia jail, where plantation managers once brought the enslaved for brutal punishment, De Kom was deported to the Netherlands with his wife and children, where he completed We Slaves in exile. Though the manuscript was published in 1934, he faced censorship, repression, and depression. When Germany invaded The Netherlands, Adek joined the communist wing of the Dutch resistance. He was captured in 1944, perhaps after being betrayed, and died in a German concentration camp in April 1945, likely just days before the camp was liberated. Camp survivors recall a Surinamese man who spoke longingly of home.

We Slaves appeared destined for obscurity until a Surinamese student, , found a copy of the manuscript in Leiden University���s library in 1964 and immediately recognized the text���s significance. A group of leftist Surinamese students took it upon themselves to study the text, locate De Kom���s widow, and recover his other writings, some of which were later lost or stolen. The students, many of whom returned to Suriname in the 1970s, promoted We Slaves and disseminated bootlegged copies. These efforts and the work of De Kom���s daughter, Judith, spurred the book���s first reprint in 1971 and a Spanish translation published in Havana in 1981.

Thanks to the tireless work of generations of community organizers and study groups, We Slaves is read, known, and celebrated. Suriname���s only University was renamed after De Kom in the 1980s. Amsterdam-based scholar-activists The Black Archives spearheaded a much-lauded 2020 edition, which has been flying off Dutch bookstore shelves. De Kom was finally named in the Dutch history curriculum in 2020, the first Surinamese person to be included. Caught up in the fraught politics of memory work, as historian Karwan Fatah-Black documented, the publication of an English-language translation was delayed for decades. Polity���s 2022 translation now offers English speakers the first opportunity to the read We Slaves in full.

Something for nothing

As coal is dying we must be prepared to absorb the transferable infrastructure of this industry and re-tool it for use in the emerging economy. Port Alfred, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Image credit Roger Gordon via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The alternative energy economy is moving in the right direction. But there���s a devil in the detail: the extraction of rare-earth minerals (REM) needed to develop the technology and infrastructure for renewables are as devastating to the environment as the fossil fuels they seek to replace. Transitioning to a clean energy economy is imperative, and to do so justly, we must ensure job security, reparations, and environmental remediation to the communities where mining has both historically and currently exist.

In moving forward, we must ensure a just transition towards an alternative energy economy for our planet and for those who live on it. A just transition moves our economy off of fossil fuels, and toward clean energy, while providing just pathways for workers to transition to high-quality work with integrity. A just transition leaves no worker behind. This transition focuses on environmental and economic sustainability through decent work, social inclusion and poverty eradication.

Lithium, cobalt, arsenic, gallium, indium, tellurium, and platinum, just to name a few, are needed to develop a strong alternative energy economy and shift away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they are being mined with the same harmful practices and disregard as the very fossil fuels they���re meant to replace. The affected communities are often not those with purchasing power, but the Indigenous communities living in proximity to the mines.

In 2019, Evo Morales, Bolivia���s first Indigenous president was ousted in a coup, partly due to his push to nationalize the country���s lithium mines. It is believed that Elon Musk, the South African tech mogul had a hand in this process. Lithium is a mineral used in batteries that power various clean energy technologies, including electric cars. According to The International Energy Agency, the demand for lithium is slated to outpace the growth of fossil fuels two-fold in lieu of policies that will be in place to support its growth.

The low-carbon energy economy is at a cusp where the cross section of public policy and social consciousness has the potential to merge and propel our society into the future. In this transition to a clean low-carbon economy there are many jobs to be created, not only manual labor that poses high risks to human health but also jobs in electrical engineering, plant management, and urban design that are ultimately more skilled and higher paying. This transition will also require the implementation of educational infrastructure to help communities adapt.

It is imperative that we work to improve the ability of the people most affected by mineral extraction to have a say over that of the companies in what happens in their communities. We must ensure that the communities impacted have a pathway into the new economy and that nobody is left behind.

The process of mineral extraction is exactly that, extractive. Not only does it take from the earth, it also diminishes the value of the land over time and more often than not leaves a toxic mess that destroys entire ecosystems to which a monetary value can not be assessed or assigned. This process also requires immense human capital; the labor needed to get the job done. The pool of labor is often relegated to those within proximity to the mine, who exist at the cross section of poverty and opportunity. Even if the ultimate cost of this opportunity is the future of the local environment. When it comes between feeding one���s family where few other options are available, it���s a choice that must be made. It is the responsibility of the government and corporate interests to come together to ensure a just transition from the fossil fuel industry to an alternative energy economy.

As coal is dying we must be prepared to absorb the transferable infrastructure of this industry and re-tool it for use in the emerging economy. Factory buildings can be rehabilitated into solar power plants. Railways and transportation waterways can be retrofitted [with minimal effort] to assist in not only the transportation of goods and raw materials but for public transportation as well. The framework of industrial boom towns can lay the groundwork for community housing and commerce. Ensuring job training and security to the new energy economy is a vital form of equity for the communities impacted by mining. Alongside the reabsorption of the existing built infrastructure, we need to establish comprehensive and culturally comprehensive education apparatus to support the growth and development of a varied, skilled workforce required for such a transition.

South Africa, while one of the most mineral rich countries on the planet, cannot sustain its historical extractive economy. Research completed by the Alternative Information Development Center (AIDC) in Cape Town, shows that the legacy of post colonial-extractivist economics in South Africa has resulted in widespread resource depletion across the range of the country���s key resource sectors. It indicates that coal reserves have been mined downwards of 20% of original estimates. As of 20 years ago, 98% of South Africa���s total water resources had already been allocated, and the degradation of soil fertility is confirmed on 41% of cultivated land.

The extraction of resources and human capital is the keystone of colonialism and post-colonial neoliberal economics. This long standing tradition of the powerful taking something and leaving the poor with little or even something far worse continues unabated in our globalized world. Consequently, the framework of global energy infrastructure is a living relic of colonialism, harmful neoliberal economics, and ecological devastation. A debt left to the Indigenous communities where those, now even more, precious. minerals exist.

In order to transition towards a more just energy economy we must come together to:

Nationalize all existing and future energy infrastructure and each citizen is given a stake in the economic and functional well being of the grid and energy infrastructure. This also requires that industry is purchased or seized from foreign interest to retain as much of the economy in-house and circulate the wealth within the community.Ensure all residents have fair and equitable as well as free or affordable access to all forms of energy.Retrofit existing mining town infrastructure, factories, warehouses, storage facilities, waste sites are assessed with the appropriate environmental impact assessments and made available to the new economy.Establish education and training programs to allow the existing and emerging workforce to be trained with job skills for the new economy. Some jobs will be lost indefinitely, so an economic safety net must be available along with a plan for those who may not be able to transition to the new economy so quickly.Ensure that minerals such as titanium and lithium are mined with the full consent of the local community. They must not be extracted in the current, harmful ways.Give priority to local peoples throughout all levels of employment in the mines and adequately training and developing the capacity of local leadership.

While these are just a few major considerations, it is important to involve the community to holistically define not only what a ���just transition��� can look like, but what a just transition will be for them���from the way rare earth minerals are mined, to the way we ensure job security and access to the new economy for those whose backs it has rested on for so long. Otherwise, the energy economy from fossils to alternatives remains a colonialist institution of quid pro quo for Indigenous, Black and Brown people.

A hopeful song about Sierra Leone

A new film and accompanying theater project from acclaimed journalist and filmmaker, Sorious Samura, attempts, with varying success, to sing a different song of Freetown. The Sing, Freetown premiere in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Image credit Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda ��.

The film opens on the Atlantic Ocean along the shores of Freetown, Sierra Leone. A boat is rowed to sea accompanied by powerful and beautifully evocative images, a longing for the past and a call to differently revisit and redefine the past.

As the boat dances on the ocean, followed by a montage of ancestral ceremonial mask dancers, ruins of slave forts, and the undeniable lush of Sierra Leone, we hear a melancholic voice yearning for what Sierra Leone used to be, how special and inspiring it was, how this was the ���province of freedom,��� where enslaved black people returned to rebuild their lives and how today, that history, pride and excellence is long forgotten. The voice is that of Sorious Samura, an internationally renowned journalist and filmmaker, who rose to fame for his first documentary aptly titled Cry Freetown, a negation of this film, Sing, Freetown. He speaks about the need to find ���our way back, back from the brink. But how,��� he asks and concludes that it must be via the only way we know��� ���with a story.���

This sets the film in motion, this journey to tell a story, a new story and a hopeful one about Sierra Leone. Samura seeks out his former teacher, Charlie Haffner���a playwright, director and founder of the 33-year-old theater and performance group, Freetong (Freetown) Players. The company brings plays directly to the people on the streets and at their homes, across the country. It was founded following a 1960s clampdown in the country on theater, and artists in general. Haffner is an icon, a quiet but persistent resistor, who refused to let theater die.

Samura and Haffner set out across the country to find the story for Haffner to write and stage. The intrigue develops as the relationship between these two men unfolds. Samura has become a product of the West; wants things done quickly, which has its advantages, yet he comes with standards that Haffner isn���t accustomed to or, perhaps, doesn���t want to adopt. Haffner isn���t a journalist, so things must not be rushed, especially when one is on a quest for a story that represents the rekindling of a nation to its past. The tension between the artist and the journalist is palpable. and it becomes an introspection of what Sierra Leone the nation has become. It raises questions about when and how we can forge the future; how we think about ourselves and the arts���the soul, the nourishing core of any nation; about the method and pace of rediscovering ourselves and what wisdom and tools we draw on to rewrite our story. The two men become nearly estranged while grappling with these questions and trying to deliver a play that would bring hope to the nation.

Throughout the journey, Samura confronts the torment of wanting to change the narrative of Sierra Leone, indeed of Africa in general, from doom to something else. He admits to having made his career focusing on the doom and madness, and now he needs to tell another side of the story. Haffner wants to return the viewer to our true identity, before the arrival of the ���white man,��� who brought slavery, colonialism and now imperialism.

Both men agree on the need to look within and back to our ancestral stories. However, the film falls short in this regard. Despite acknowledging the need to move away from the common tropes of degradation and hopelessness, the film unnecessarily incorporates images of the violence and brutality of civil war. Narratively speaking, there is no need to revert to these images, as the context of the country���s horrific past is already clear.

Sing, Freetown is a film worth watching, but I am not convinced that it succeeds in capturing the song of the past, our past, a new song that has no white gaze and that doesn���t ramble on about Sierra Leone, as a former ���Athens of Africa������another reference to the colonial project that we are still undoing.

This undoing and the larger task at hand was evident during the May 15 premiere of the film in Freetown���a very well attended and curated event for a city that is still navigating its understanding of the importance and impact of the arts on society. Haffner admits, ���It is a lonely existence to be an artist here in this country, not the loneliness an artist chooses, but an isolation. Any society that doesn���t value art at its core cannot make policies���economic or otherwise���that work for its people.���

This sentiment came up again during the Q&A when someone asked about when the play, A Nation���s Journey, will be on stage in the city, or around the country. Haffner explained the cost of staging a play, and the lack of funding or interest to date. An audience member suggested the play should be performed in schools. Haffner���s response: ���If you want theater or the arts in general to be part of this society, then it must be in the school curriculum as it used to be. And not just an event of actors coming to perform. The arts teach people to know themselves truly.��� The audience didn���t understand what he meant and once again that loneliness and isolation Charlie had mentioned was apparent.

A Nation���s Journey may have been born during the making of Sing, Freetown, but it is uncertain whether it will survive. For now, we are in the moment between a cry and a lukewarm song for Freetown, and for Sierra Leone.

Take back the unions for their members

Why South Africa needs to democratize its labor movement. The 2016 NUMSA conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Image courtesy author CC BY 4.0.

This is one in a series of re-publications as part of our partnership with the South African publication Amandla!.

What we are witnessing in the labor movement today is quite simply a tragedy. At a time when the working class is suffering as never before, leaders of South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) are tearing the young federation to pieces.

The working class needs this federation to strengthen and grow. It is the only potentially militant, independent grouping of trade unions in South Africa. And it is not just a question of the labor movement needing such a leading force. It is the working class movement as a whole. Community organizations are weakened if they are unable to get the active support of organized workers. Abahlali baseMjondolo needs the active support and resources of organized workers. The Xolobeni struggle for the Right to say No is strengthened by the support of a federation of workers.

The loss and the setback to the working class movement will be huge.

What lies behind

The heart of the dispute inside SAFTU comes down to a strategic difference over how to build the working class movement politically. The country���s largest single trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) argues that the correct way is to build what it calls a Marxist-Leninist Vanguard Mass Party. The SAFTU general secretary and a number of affiliates favor the building of a mass working class party or Movement for Socialism.

In 2019, NUMSA established its ���vanguard party,��� the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP). It now wants SAFTU to throw its weight behind the SRWP. It views as a class enemy anyone who stands in the way of that project. And here is the first error, which can be traced back to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party after the 1917 revolution. The Bolshevik Party regarded itself as indispensable to the working class. Without the Bolshevik Party, the revolution would fail. And it wasn���t just the Bolshevik Party, it was its leadership; and not just its leadership, but also the general secretary. So the interests of the working class become reduced to the interests of the party and thereafter to the infallible leader. Defense of the party becomes synonymous with defense of the working class.

Perhaps it was more understandable at a time when the Bolshevik Party had just successfully played a leading role in a revolution. It is rather less understandable when the party we are talking about is a largely dysfunctional, factionalized, small grouping of mainly NUMSA worker leaders and staff. It is an organization that was able to secure only 24,439 votes nationally in the last election. Yet, NUMSA appears to be willing to shatter SAFTU, a federation of 600,000 members. What an irony. The famous NUMSA Special Congress in 2013 led to its expulsion from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) because the affiliates of the latter required allegiance to the ANC. NUMSA is now ready to break SAFTU apart because it requires allegiance to SRWP. Is there no learning from history?

Whence the factionalism?

Factional politics are narrow politics. Politics that fetishise a tactic or strategy at the expense of having a perspective of the interests of the working class and the poor as a whole. NUMSA fetishises a particular form of political party. Only a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party will retain a revolutionary perspective. Only a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party can be relied on to not to sell out. Look at Syriza; Podemos: living proof. And then there is the other aspect of this tragedy���the sell-out to a lifestyle for union leaders funded by a union investment company. In NUMSA���s case it has been a particularly insidious process because of the business that the investment company engages in. The main customers of the NUMSA Investment Company (NIC) are the union���s members. This has become clear as the sordid story of 3Sixty Life (the main subsidiary of NIC) has unraveled through South African investigative journalism outfits amaBhungane and GroundUp.

3Sixty makes its money by selling insurance policies to workers. NUMSA organizes 350,000 workers. A perfect synergy you might think. The benign view of this model is that NUMSA���s company makes money by selling policies to members and then plows that money back into the union for the members��� benefit. It must have looked like a pretty model on someone���s computer 15 years ago.

But what of the consequences of turning your members into customers? What of the consequences of turning your shop stewards and staff into sales people? What of the consequences of giving the union leadership a source of income separate from the subscriptions of its members?

It might look like a clever financial model. But when looked at politically and organizationally, it is a nightmare.

So the less kind view of the model sees a membership delivered as customers to an industry that has always been known as exploitative. It wants to sell policies. Selling of policies works on commission. The more you sell the better everybody does. So workers are persuaded one way or another to spend some of the little they earn on policies, often with no clear idea of their real value. And NUMSA opens its doors to this industry. NUMSA becomes part of this industry. And the membership becomes its prey. And the problems grow. Once the investment company is so deeply entangled with the union, it starts to have an interest in how that union is run and by whom it is run. The doors to its customers must remain open. The tail starts to wag the dog as the interests of the company become more important than the interests of the union members.

The results are plain to see in NUMSA now. Bitter struggles for leadership positions have ended up in court cases around elections. Stories abound about money flowing in the election process. Compared to ordinary workers, the investment company has plenty of money. It has the means to buy people. And if you think we exaggerate, listen to Khandani Msibi, the CEO of the investment company, himself. In recent court proceedings he was challenged about why he spent money on the birthday party for the NUMSA general secretary? Why did he buy his daughter a laptop? What was the value for the company in these expenditures? They could not be valid expenditures if there was no benefit to the company. And what was his answer? It came straight out of the Bosasa playbook (the now infamous prison services company mired in corruption allegations): these expenditures were ���marketing initiatives”; they ���allowed 3Sixty Life access to NUMSA events where it could further its brand and strengthen relationships.���

When he said this, he jumped right out of a frying pan and straight into the fire. He was proudly proclaiming to the world that by sweetening the general secretary, he gained access to the union. What���s the difference between that and Gwede Mantashe���s security system? Or disgraced ex-minister Malusi Gigaba���s bags full of cash? All of it is about access���access to the state as a market. Access to NUMSA as a market looks very much the same.

And now?

So where does the trade union movement go from here? It seems clear that we have reached a point where the interests of the leadership have become separated from those of the membership of many unions. A leadership layer enjoys a lifestyle very far from that of the members. They develop an interest in making sure they remain leaders. This happens at all levels. Which full-time shop steward, after four years working in an office, with access to a computer and a car, wants to go back to being a worker on the production line? Which general secretary who lives in a modern, middle class housing estate and drives a Mercedes Benz or a BMW to work, with a bodyguard to boot, wants to go back to the ranks of the union again?

A new vision and practice for the labor movement is needed. The only direction when dealing with such a bureaucratized leadership is to organize workers again from the ground up. To build the capacity of members to challenge the vested interests of the leadership. To take back the union for its members.

Such organizing is often called a rank and file approach. It���s a foot soldier���s approach. In fact, it���s where unions started in the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa. There is a task to rebuild our trade union movement where the interests of members prevail and where to lead is to serve. We have to break the pattern of union leadership being about escaping your class position and status.

It is time to begin the arduous task of building democratic organization again from the grassroots. To struggle to wrest control of unions from those who currently mislead them. It won���t be a rapid process. There may be victories, and there will certainly be defeats along the way. But on this, there really is no alternative.

Troubled times in Egypt

On this week's AIAC Podcast: A decade after the Arab Spring, Egypt faces troubled times. Could we see another uprising? Image credit Simon Matzinger via Pxhere.com CC BY 2.0.

Will is joined by returning guest, Nihal El Aaser, to discuss the roots of Egypt���s ongoing economic crisis. In The New Arab, Nihal argues that ���These conditions eventually became the economic foundations of the Arab Spring, the 2011 uprisings that gave us the famous slogan ‘Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema���eya,’ meaning ‘Bread, Freedom & Social Justice’.��� Could Egypt be heading towards another cycle of social revolt? Or does Sisi���s regime of brutal repression, which includes the ongoing imprisonment of thousands of activists (like Alaa Abd El-Fattah), make organizing on the scale required unlikely. Nihal is an Egyptian writer and researcher based in London and has contributed to various publications, including Jacobin, Verso, and Africa Is A Country.

Listen to the show below, and subscribe via your favorite platform.

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/e0d240c0-aba0-40fd-853d-89b5c79a6999/AIAC-20Talk-20Egypt-27s-20economic-20crisis-20-202022-05-23-200-converted.mp3

Endless war in Somalia

Somalis have enough to worry about. The last thing they need is more war, especially one sponsored by the United States��� War on Terror. US Air Force in Somalia. Image credit Master Sgt. Russ Scalf for the US Air Force via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

In yet another indication that the Biden administration has no intention to bring an end to endless war, the New York Times reported on May 16th, that the US Africa Command will be redeploying troops to Somalia, and that the White House has approved the Pentagon���s request for discretionary authority to conduct drone strikes in the country.

Somalia has been the target of imperial warfare since December 2006, when the US backed an Ethiopian-led invasion that dislodged the first stable government that had emerged in years. As Ethiopian troops drove the Somali leadership into exile, more militant factions emerged in their place, planting the seeds for the growth of what is now known as al-Shabab. The State Department designated al-Shabab a foreign terrorist organization in February 2008, which provided cover for the Bush administration to begin targeting the group from the air.

Soon after President Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, he authorized US drone strikes as well as the deployment of Special Operations forces inside the country. Then, President Trump designated parts of Somalia as ���areas of active hostilities,��� and instituted war-zone targeting rules when he expanded the discretionary authority of the military to conduct airstrikes and raids. Southern Somalia was then subjected to an unprecedented escalation of US drone strikes, with between 900-1,000 people killed between 2016-2019. All of this occurred without the US ever formally declaring war on Somalia.

President Biden has clearly decided to maintain Trump���s ���flexible��� approach to drone warfare in Somalia���one that gives military commanders in the field more latitude to make decisions, requiring that they obtain consent from the State Department���s chief of mission rather than the White House. As such, analysts assessing the temporary lull in drone strikes last year were correct to interpret it as an artificial lull, as the Biden administration���s pledge to engage in a comprehensive review of the government���s policy on drone strikes clearly did not stimulate an ethical reconsideration of the use of drones.

What the Biden administration has done is draft new laws and procedures, offering safeguards against civilian bystander deaths that purport to provide protections for adult men as well as women and children. In this sense, the Biden administration is continuing prior administrations��� use of the law as a tactic of war, referring to the introduction of new laws and policies in order to suggest that the US makes more of an effort to limit civilian casualties, even as it employs deadly force. As historian and law professor Samuel Moyn observes, the idea that war can somehow be fought humanely has become central to American liberalism, with fewer and fewer Americans questioning the decision to wage war itself.

In the meantime, racialized depictions of Somalia as a war-torn country with the alleged potential to threaten US interests are instrumental in maintaining public support for renewed commitment to war. AFRICOM Commander General Stephen Townsend claims that al-Shabab is ���bigger, stronger, and bolder,��� even if its exact capabilities are ���an open question.��� What this assessment is based on is unclear. Just as US officials did in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, AFRICOM���s strategy appears to be a simple one: repeat the claim of a purported threat often enough, and���absent critical questions from the press���it becomes truth.

In light of AFRICOM���s stated plan to enhance the capacity of its partners to target al-Shabab, Congress and the American public should raise questions about these very partners, from Bancroft Global to the Danab Brigade and AMISOM (recently replaced by the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia���or ATMIS), whose collective roles in exacerbating the violence have been widely documented.

The Danab Brigade was established in 2014 with initial funding from the US State Department that paid for the services of Bancroft Global, a private security firm that trained and advised the unit. Since then, it has also received funding and training from the Department of Defense. AFRICOM���s reliance on surrogate forces such as the Danab Brigade is made possible by the 127e program, a US budgetary authority that allows the Pentagon to bypass oversight by allowing US special operations forces to use foreign military units as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. The Intercept has documented similar 127e operations in African countries, primarily in locations that the US government does not recognize as combat zones, but in which US troops are present on the ground.

Ironically, the New York Times reports that the Biden administration���s deliberations about next steps in Somalia have been complicated by political chaos on the ground, implying that the US somehow stands outside and above seemingly local factions and loyalties. But a closer and more critical look would reveal that the US military and its private security partners are deeply implicated in this chaos, as business and security interests are irretrievably entangled on both sides of Mogadishu���s green zone.

Gun prices soared in advance of Somalia���s presidential elections last weekend as anxious Mogadishu residents worried about prospects for instability. It is no coincidence that many of these guns arrived via a loophole in a UN arms embargo that permits the distribution of weapons to the Somali National Security Forces in the name of training and security sector reform. This is not the first time that arms intended for security purposes have been diverted to the black market, and in light of the Biden administration���s decision to double down on its commitment to endless war, it likely won���t be the last.

Somalis have enough to worry about as food prices skyrocket with the shutdown of global supply chains, and as the worst drought in four decades affects more than�� seven million of the country���s inhabitants. The last thing they need is more war.