Part 1
One hundred and forty years ago, the imperialist powers gathered in Berlin to formalise rules for the annexation and plunder of Africa. The Berlin Conference, held from November 1884 to February 1885, resulted in the ratification of the General Act, accelerating European colonial expansion in what is known as the Scramble for Africa. This violent process redrew Africa’s borders, fractured ethnic, cultural, and linguistic landscapes, and entrenched capitalist exploitation and plundering by imperialist powers which continues to this day.
The conference, intended to regulate inter-imperialist tensions, instead intensified rivalries that culminated in the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, resulting in over 40 million deaths. Within two decades, the Second World War would erupt, claiming 70-85 million lives.
The mass anti-colonial movements that developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, together with the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, forced the major powers to retreat from direct colonial forms of rule. However, far from providing the impetus for economic development and social equality and revitalising the bankrupt capitalist nation-state system, as promised by the bourgeois nationalist forces backed by Stalinists and anti-Trotskyist Pabloite tendencies, the decades since have shown that this independence has failed to bring meaningful or lasting improvements to the lives of Africa’s workers and rural masses.
The experiment with formally independent capitalist states over the past six decades has paved the way for a new Scramble for Africa as part of a re-division of the whole world between the imperialist powers.
The struggle for control of vital mineral and oil reserves, raw materials and markets, as a component part of a global struggle for hegemony between the major powers against the emerging capitalist powers: Russia, and above all China, their foremost economic competitor. The confrontation threatens to ignite a global conflict that carries the threat of nuclear war.
Today’s imperialist conferences of the 21st century, in the different names of G-7, G-20, the United Nations and their ilk, are no more capable of a peaceful division of global resources among the capitalist and imperialist states than they were at Berlin 140 years ago. The only politically viable answer to the nightmarish imperialist scenario of inevitable war is the revolutionary mobilisation of the international working class on the basis of socialist policies.
The Berlin Conference
On November 15, 1884, Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the newly-created German Empire, opened the Conference of Berlin on West Africa at his official residence in the city.
The relatively free competition which had characterised capitalist development in the 1860s was supplanted by an enormous concentration of production in the hands of factory owners, bankers and big business. The age of finance capital had arrived. Colonialism, which had been on the wane, underwent an explosive revival as the need arose for new areas in which to invest and the establishment of protected markets to consume the vast output of commodities produced by the advanced capitalist countries.
This process intensified following the economic crisis of the 1870s, marked by the Long Depression, which drove European powers to expand into new territories as a means of alleviating mounting class tensions at home. Thirteen years before the Berlin Conference, the Paris Commune of 1871—the first instance in history where the working class seized power and formed a workers’ state—had terrified the European ruling class.
Declining industrial profitability and falling agricultural prices spurred a search for alternative markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities. Africa, with its abundant resources—such as rubber, gold, and ivory—and its potential as a market for European goods, was an attractive target. Amid rising competition among imperial powers, colonisation became a strategy to secure trade routes, establish economic dominance, and assert political influence in the face of rival imperialist ambitions.
Despite the veneer of civility and diplomacy, the Berlin Conference centered on a ruthless and predatory struggle among rival groups of national capitalists for the strengthening of their world economic and strategic position. It was attended by representatives from every major European imperialist power, alongside the United States, Tsarist Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.
Despite 80 percent of Africa remaining under traditional rule at the time of the conference, no Africans were present at the negotiating table. European-recognised sovereign nations like Morocco, Liberia, and Ethiopia were not invited. The Sultan of Zanzibar, who had become a pawn of British imperialism in its efforts to control the East African coast and the Western Indian Ocean against French rivals, pleaded for an invitation but was ignored by London.
Initially, the aim of the conference was not the immediate partition of Africa, but as Nigerian historian Godfrey Uzoigwe states in , “It nevertheless ended up disposing of territory, passing resolutions pertaining to the free navigation of the Niger, the Benue, and their affluents; and laying down the rules to be observed in future with regard to the occupation of territory on the coasts of Africa.” [1]
Comparison of Africa in the years 1880 and 1913
The conference’s proceedings, discussion and conclusions made clear that the continent’s rich resources and human labour were to be exploited for profits. Its mountains, lakes, rivers, canals and coastlines were now geostrategic enclaves in the competition for world hegemony. Even the most remote regions acquired a strategic significance which often outweighed their immediate economic importance.
British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury cynically admitted, “We have been engaged in drawing lines up maps where no white man’s foot ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.” [2]
The imperialist powers adopted the “General Act of the Berlin Conference”. Two of its articles were to play a devastating role in the carve up. Article 34 was the “doctrine of spheres of influence”, which stipulated that any European nation which wanted to take possession of an African coast or declared “protectorate” must notify other signatories of the Berlin Act to have this ratified.
Article 35 was the “doctrine of effective occupation” which stipulated that the imperialist occupiers had to demonstrate possession of a territory, or “authority” to “protect existing rights, and as the case maybe, freedom of trade and of transit under the conditions agreed upon”. This principle was to become the catalyst for military conquest of the African continent.
The agreement was signed and ratified by 13 of the 14 nations present—excluding the United States—establishing the framework for the conquest, partition, and exploitation of Africa, a continent of over 28 million square kilometres. The US chose not to sign the Act, preoccupied with its own continental expansion and ethnic cleansing of the Native American population, addressing the challenges of industrial expansion following the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, and upholding the Monroe Doctrine across South America—soon to become a tool to impose its own form of semi-colonial dominance in the region.
Washington, however, was deeply involved in the proceedings. It attempted to push for an “open door” policy of free trade that would secure its access to markets controlled by others—a strategy of imperialist exploitation that would later be imposed on China. The US also played a pivotal role in supporting Belgium’s establishment of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II, whose brutal regime resulted in the deaths of an estimated five to eight million Congolese through forced labour and systematic terror.
In popular presentations, the Berlin Conference initiated the Scramble for Africa. However, the conference did not begin the partition of Africa but only laid down a few rules to govern the plunder process already in full swing. France occupied Tunisia in 1881 and Guinea in 1884. In 1882, British troops invaded Egypt, which at that time was officially part of the Ottoman Empire. Italy subdued parts of Eritrea in 1870 and 1882. In April 1884, the German Reich annexed German Southwest Africa (today Namibia), moving into Togo and Cameroon in July of the same year.
In less than three decades after the conference, with the sole exception of Liberia and Ethiopia, 90 percent of the continent, a fifth of the planet’s surface, was carved up into around 40 colonial territories by five major imperialist powers. France held a dominant position in West Africa, Britain predominated in eastern and southern Africa, while Belgium secured the vast territory of the Congo. Germany took over what today is Namibia, Cameron, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda. The Portuguese established themselves in today’s Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. Spain, which had lost most of its dominions in South America, secured parts of Morocco and Equatorial Guinea.
Uzoigwe describes the unprecedented consequences of the Conference: “what is most remarkable about our period is the co-ordinated manner, speed and comparative ease—from the European point of view—with which this was accomplished. Nothing like that had ever happened before.” [3]
A week before the conference closed after 104 days on February 26, 1885, Nigeria’s Lagos Observer declared, “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.” [4]
Notes:
1. Godfrey. N. Uzoigwe, “European partition and conquest of Africa: An Overview” in General history of Africa, VII: Africa under colonial domination, 1880-1935 (1985), p.29. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000184296
2. Lord Salisbury quoted in Anene, J.C, ‘The International Boundaries of Nigeria, 1885-1960’ (London, The Framework of an Emergent African Nation, Longman Press, 1970), p.3.
3. Godfrey N. Uzoigwe, ibid., p. 19.
4. Cited in Godfrey N. Uzoigwe, “Reflections on the Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-1885.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 12, no. 3 (1984), p. 17. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44715366.
Part 2
The new epoch of imperialist barbarism
For the African masses, the scramble was a new stage of barbarism. For several centuries, the slave trade had formed a key part of the development of capitalism in Europe and America, while under developing Africa. It deprived the continent of millions of able-bodied people, displaced millions more as they fled the hideous commercial practice, and fomented predatory wars that disrupted its economy. It is estimated that 18.5 million Africans were sold as slaves and sent to the Americas, the Mediterranean littoral or the Arabian Peninsula. As Karl Marx described it in Capital (1867): “the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” [1]
After the Berlin Conference, Africans were artificially thrown together within colonially-defined territories or divided by externally-drawn borders. The sovereignty of centralised and non-centralised polities was either abolished outright or manipulated for indirect imperialist rule. It is estimated that 10,000 communities were thrown into forty colonial territories.
Tribal identities, once relatively fluid, became rigidly defined and entrenched. European colonial powers classified and codified Africans into specific groups, often aligned with territorially demarcated administrative units or based on pre-existing prejudices, which portrayed some tribes as more warrior-like, others as smarter and more capable of serving indirect rule, or as more business-oriented, hardworking, or lazy.
Economically, reliance on primary commodity exports and imported manufactured goods stifled diversification, embedding a dependency that shaped colonial economies for decades.
The partitioning of Africa, the fomenting of tribal divisions, and the establishment of exploitative colonial economies had devastating consequences for the post-independence states that emerged after the Second World War. Dominated by bourgeois nationalist forces, these newly independent economies remained subordinate to and dependent on imperialist nations for investment, technology, and access to global markets. Meanwhile, the divisive tribal dynamics engineered by colonial powers were perpetuated by African ruling elites, further entrenching social divisions and undermining the unity of workers and the rural masses.
The “white man’s burden” motive was soon nakedly exposed. Extracting profits was the overriding aim, as imperialist politicians like Joseph Chamberlain in Britain and Jules Ferry in France, admitted proudly. As one Belgium Governor said from Congo, “As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, ‘To gather rubber in the district… one must cut off hands, noses and ears’.” [2] Millions would perish to fuel the conveyor belt of raw materials, agricultural and mineral, that were sent to Europe to generate profits.
Contrary to the colonial narrative claiming that most tribes quickly accepted European rule, mass resistance erupted. In modern day Kenya, the Nandi successfully waged a ten-year guerrilla war against the British, which significantly disrupted the construction of the Uganda Railway and British control in the region before its leader, Koitalel, was assassinated during a bogus peace meeting. In Ethiopia, Emperor Menelik issued a mobilisation order against the Italian invasion and successfully stemmed Italian imperialism until Mussolini’s fascist invasion in 1936. In Tanzania, the Ngoni, Matumbi, and Zaramo people launched the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905-1907) and in West Africa, the Ashanti Empire fought British colonisation in what is now Ghana. Thousands of Egyptians, Sudanese and Somali lost their lives in battles and skirmishes against European forces.
But the backwardness, economic and social, of these regions, meant no effective resistance could be offered. Africans were soon overpowered by the superior combined forces of the European imperialists and their local proxies. Spears and arrows were no match for modern European weaponry. For those communities that had acquired muskets, there were totally outmoded compared to the new maxim gun which had ten times the rate of fire at six times charge.
The impossibility of effective resistance on the part of African societies did not result, however, just from military factors. Tribal society meant that small, scattered and diverse units and kingdoms lacked all possibility for continued resistance, let alone the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism.
Resistance was met with extreme forms of brutality. German imperialism carried out its first genocide against the Herero people in today’s Namibia, killing 80 percent of the population, many driven to the desert to starve to death. To enforce quotas and maintain the control needed to impose forced labour, particularly in rubber and ivory extraction, Belgian imperialism imposed a notorious practice in Congo involving cutting off the hands and ears of workers who didn’t meet the quotas. The British pioneered the use of concentration camps against the Dutch Boers guerrillas in South Africa, a war that unfolded at the expense of the African population.
The international socialist movement and the struggle against war
The development of the revolutionary socialist movement was inseparably bound up with the struggle against imperialism. The finest representatives of the Second International, founded in 1889, warned that imperialism was leading to war which could only be averted by the revolutionary struggle of the working class. A notable excerpt from its Stuttgart Congress of 1907 stated:
“Wars are the outcome of the competitive struggle of capitalist nations for world markets, for the expansion of capitalist domination in foreign countries. The working class, which suffers most severely from these wars, has no interest in supporting them but must instead oppose them with all its strength.”
This resolution underscored the responsibility of socialists to “Use the economic and political crises created by war to hasten the overthrow of capitalist class rule and the establishment of socialism.” [3] The Congress called on workers of all countries to reject patriotism and stand united against imperialism, militarism, and colonial exploitation.
But the political content of these resolutions was undermined by the steady growth of opportunism within the parties of the Second International, rooted in the “workers’ aristocracy” that had benefited from the crumbs of imperialism and who increasingly identified their interests, in peacetime and at war, with the economic and political successes of their “own” imperialism.
In violation of their declared policies, when war erupted in August 1914, the main parties of the Second International voted in their respective parliaments to support the demand for war credits. This marked the collapse of the Second International.
Only a relative handful of socialist leaders opposed the capitulation of the opportunists to the wave of imperialist chauvinism. The most far-sighted of these revolutionary internationalists like Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, intervened to politically rearm the working class. In their majors works, they insisted that war had arisen from the mounting contradictions of capitalism. The eruption of the war was a violent expression of the fact that the progressive epoch of capitalist development and the nation state system was over. The only alternative was socialist revolution.
Luxemburg stated powerfully in her famous Junius Pamphlet on “The Crisis of German Social Democracy”:
The world war is a turning point. For the first time, the ravening beasts set loose upon all quarters of the globe by capitalist Europe have broken into Europe itself. A cry of horror went through the world when Belgium, that precious jewel of European civilization, and when the most august cultural monuments of northern France fell into shards under the impact of the blind forces of destruction. This same “civilized world” looked on passively as the same imperialism ordained the cruel destruction of ten thousand Herero tribesmen and filled the sands of the Kalahari with the mad shrieks and death rattles of men dying of thirst… as in Tripoli where fire and sword bowed the Arabs beneath the yoke of capitalism, destroyed their culture and habitations. Only today has this “civilized world” become aware that the bite of the imperialist beast brings death, that its very breath is infamy. [4]
In opposition to the capitulation of the Second International, the Bolshevik Party that would take power in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, came out against the war. Twenty days after its outbreak, Lenin authored a resolution that defined the conflict as “a bourgeois, imperialist and dynastic war.”
The resolution declared the SPD “a party which has voted for war credits and repeated the bourgeois-chauvinist phrases of the Prussian Junkers and the bourgeoisie”. This was a “sheer betrayal of socialism. Under no circumstances can the conduct of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party be condoned, even if we assume that the party was absolutely weak and had temporarily to bow to the will of the bourgeois majority of the nation. This party has in fact adopted a national-liberal policy.” [5]
There followed a sharp reckoning with the rightwing majority of the SPD and Karl Kautsky, the representative of the “Marxist Centre” within the SPD. At the heart of the conflict between Lenin and Kautsky were their opposed assessments of the future of capitalism as a social system and the objective historical necessity for socialist revolution. For Lenin, the necessity for international socialist revolution flowed from the conclusion that the eruption of imperialist war represented the opening of an historic crisis of the capitalist system, which, despite truces and even peace settlements, could not be overcome.
Lenin insisted that the economic processes which lay at the heart of the imperialist epoch—the transformation from the competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century to the monopoly capitalism of the twentieth—had created the objective foundations for the development of an international socialist economy.
Kautsky’s perspective was diametrically opposed, seeking to obscure the objective causes of imperialist wars and their revolutionary implications for developing an anti-war strategy, Kautsky posited on the very eve of the First World War that “the growing international interweaving between the various cliques of finance capital” could lead to “a new, ultra-imperialist policy”. This new stage would “replace the mutual rivalries of national finance capital with the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital.” [6]
In his reply to Kautsky, Lenin insisted that agreements between imperialist powers could never be permanent. One imperialist coalition against another or a “general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers” are “inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.” [7]
Trotsky drew another fundamental conclusion on the war: the socialist movement could not maintain a revolutionary orientation within the framework of the nation state. This was the reason for the collapse of the Second International. He insisted, “In their historic crash the national states have pulled down with them the national Socialist parties also… As the national states have become a hindrance to the development of the forces of production, so the old Socialist parties have become the main hindrance to the revolutionary movement of the working class.” [8]
For all the developments in the global economy over the past century since the First World War, Lenin and Trotsky’s analysis of both the economic and political characteristics of imperialism retains immense contemporary relevance. The same conflicts—over markets, sources of raw materials, and access to cheap labour—which led to the First and Second World Wars are leading relentlessly to the Third.
Notes:
1. Karl Marx, “Capital: Volume One” (1867). Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm.
2. Adam Hochschild, ‘Belgium’s imperialist rape of Africa King Leopold’s Ghost—A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa’ (Macmillan, 1998), p. 165.
3. International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, August 18–24, 1907 Vorwärts Publishers, Berlin, 1907, pp. 64-66.
4. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy” (1915). Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch08.htm.
5. Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War” (1914). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/aug/x01.htm.
6. Cited in Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International” (1915). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/iv.htm.
7. Vladimir Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch09.htm.
8. Leon Trotsky, “War and the International” (Young Socialist Publications, 1971), pp. Xii-xiii.
Part 3
The struggle against imperialism and war
Today, a large group of the pseudo-left parties representing well-off layers of the middle class of North America, Western Europe and Australasia openly embrace imperialist war, utilising slogans of “human rights” and railing against so-called Russian and Chinese “imperialism” to legitimise, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations. They have aligned themselves with the US and NATO and defended their wars in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Russia and imperialist provocations across Southeast Asia against China.
Another wing of pseudo-left tendencies has updated Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism”—claiming the possibility of the peaceful, non-violent, non-imperialist regulation of world economy and the relations between the major capitalist powers—through the concept of “multi-polarity”. They insist that the US and European powers can gradually and peacefully accept their eclipse by their competitors, above all, those led by China.
This is also the official state policy of the capitalist regimes of Russia and China, which, fearing nothing more than the emergence of a revolutionary movement in their respective countries and the international working class, appeal to other states everywhere to form a counterweight to the imperialist powers. This, they hope, will increase their bargaining position at the negotiating table with imperialism.
Capitalist and Stalinist politicians across the African continent have also embraced “multi-polarity”. An example is South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema who advances the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—as a counterweight to imperialism. He defines BRICS as “a progressive and forward-looking” group with a mandate to end the “imperialist domination of the world” and “as an alternative to the G7 and NATO war alliance”. Likewise, Booker Ngesa Omole, the leader of the Communist Party of Kenya—Marxist (CPK-M), has said, “The transition from unipolarity to multipolarity in global politics presents an opportunity for revolutionaries to reshape the world order in favour of the oppressed and marginalized.”
Such a perspective is bankrupt. It assumes that US imperialism will accept its natural demotion. Reality proves the opposite. Was hington has been in unending wars for the past three decades across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa in an attempt to offset its economic decline. In the preface of A Quarter Century of War: The US drive for global hegemony: 1990-2016, David North, the Chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, wrote:
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China. [1]
Today, the US and NATO powers are relentlessly escalating their war in Ukraine, aimed at inflicting a decisive US-NATO defeat over Russia, including regime change and ultimately the theft of its vast natural resources.
At the same time, Washington and its allies are preparing a new front against China, which is viewed by the strategists of American imperialism as the chief threat to its global hegemony.
The Israeli-led genocide against Palestinians, the invasion of Lebanon, regime change in Syria and the bombing of Yemen backed by NATO powers are part of a region-wide war in the Middle East, particularly targeting Iran, an ally of China and Russia. The aim is to control the oil-rich region.
The new Scramble for Africa
Another front is rapidly emerging which takes the form of a new Scramble for Africa. Driven by internal crises and faced with the rapidly declining position of US and European imperialism on the world scale, the African continent and its rich resources are increasingly seen as a necessary means for their other war fronts.
Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo supply cobalt, vital for lithium-ion batteries used in advanced military hardware, while rare earth elements from South Africa and Madagascar are indispensable in the manufacture of electronics, lasers, and sensors used in military applications. Similarly, uranium deposits in nations like Niger and Namibia are crucial for both nuclear energy and weaponry. Metals like tantalum, abundant across the continent, are vital for missile guidance systems. Additionally, Africa’s abundant oil and natural gas reserves in countries such as Nigeria and Angola are key to fuelling military operations worldwide.
Identifying Africa as an important geopolitical region for its campaign for global hegemony, the US has launched wars across the continent for the last three decades. Between 1992 and 1994, Washington deployed troops to occupy Somalia. Following its withdrawal, the US supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2006, which was later followed by Kenya’s in 2011. These interventions, aimed at controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Somalis.
During the 1990s, the US and European powers also backed the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against the pro-French Hutu-led government in power, which erupted into a genocide in 1994. It was followed by the US backing of the Rwandan RPF and Ugandan invasions of mineral-rich Zaire (today DR Congo), to install a pro-US regime, which led to the First and Second Congo wars in the 1990s and 2000s, that left over 5 million dead.
In 2006, the US created AFRICOM with the mission of exerting greater military influence over Africa in order to maintain and facilitate Washington’s exploitation of the continent’s vast economic resources and its working masses. Since then, Washington has waged war across the continent, using AFRICOM’s dozens of outposts and working with local proxy forces to launch commando raids, drone strikes, and secret assassination programmes. Between 2013 and 2017, US special operations forces saw combat in at least 13 African countries.
In 2011, the US and European powers launched a regime-change operation against oil-rich Libya that killed 50,000 people and left the country in chaos, with no functioning central government and an apocalyptic landscape of instability. Rival tribal factions emerged, competing for dominance over the country’s vast oil reserves. To this day, various global powers continue to vie for control, leveraging local proxies to advance their interests.
Washington’s key concern in the region is the rise of its main competitor, China. With a trade volume of $204 billion, Beijing is already Africa’s largest trading partner. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has poured billions into large-scale infrastructure projects, including railways, ports, and energy facilities, while extending substantial loans to African states, undermining the influence of the US-dominated World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Beijing’s state-backed companies have secured key contracts for natural resource extraction, ensuring access to critical minerals and energy supplies. In the telecommunications and technology sectors, Chinese companies such as Huawei are increasingly dominant in the building of 5G networks.
Washington has made clear it will not allow Africa to fall to China. The US has signed hundreds of deals worth $14.2 billion with African countries in an initial bid to counter its growing influence. In December, outgoing President Joe Biden visited Angola where he said, “The United States is all in on Africa.” A central focus of Biden was the US-funded Lobito Corridor railway project aimed to facilitate the transport of critical minerals from the DR Congo and Zambia through Angola to global markets.
Given the diminishing US ability to compete with China economically, voices within the US establishment are demanding a more aggressive military approach. As US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said recently, “We need to do more, and we have to contest Chinese actions, not only in terms of their forward basing strategy, but their desire to go after Africa’s rare earths that will be critical for our industrial and technological capabilities”.
The US is the most aggressive of the imperialist powers on the continent, but the same dynamic that drives Washington toward war also operates among European imperialist states. Beset by the same political and economic diseases that afflict Washington, they possess even fewer financial resources to deal with them.
France has waged war in the Sahel zone for over a decade, in attempts to maintain its dwindling influence across Africa. Paris intervened in Libya (2011) and Mali (2013), followed by interventions in Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania in 2014. In Burkina Faso, France played a key role in the removal of President Blaise Compaoré in 2015. Despite this, mass protests have forced French troops to leave Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, as the new regimes sought closer military aid from Russia and economic ties with China. Senegal, Chad and the Ivory Coast are now planning the same.
Germany, which never forgave the loss of its colonies to Britain and France in Africa following the First World War, has intervened in Mali and Niger. For the past two years, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has aggressively toured Africa with high-ranking business representatives to announce billion-euro investments. Berlin is trying to secure access to African energy and raw materials and lucrative sales markets and cheap labour.
British imperialism, once the dominant power across Africa, is trying to reestablish its influence. British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy said “it would be a huge mistake for Labour to overlook the importance of Africa.” The UK holds the BATUK base in Kenya, the UK’s largest African base. Its troops have waged war in Mali and South Sudan, and regularly train African forces as proxies across the continent. Data on Britain’s foreign direct investment (FDI) position in Africa from 2004 to 2019 shows that the FDI in Africa peaked in 2019 at £50.5 billion, nearly double with respect to 2004.
The permanent presence of European armies on the continent demonstrates that these powers are not solely relying on proxy forces and the African bourgeoisie to enforce their interests in Africa. They are preparing for a massive escalation of war across the continent.
The election of Donald Trump will further accelerate this militarisation on the continent, as European capitals, facing the threat of additional trade war measures from Washington and increased competition from China, aggressively pursue new markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, and cheap labour.
Socialism versus bourgeois nationalism
The capitalist and nationalist regimes in Russia and China, representing the interests of oligarchs spawned by the Stalinist restoration of capitalism, have no progressive response. They do not represent a path for peaceful development for the African masses. Rather, they alternate between sabre-rattling and bankrupt appeals for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.
As for the African ruling elites, nothing exposes their bankruptcy more than them offering themselves as stooges for imperialism. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a key military ally of US imperialism and is playing a crucial role in the Palestinian genocide. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame has deployed troops to crush an Islamist-led insurgency in northern Mozambique to protect the billion-dollar gas investments of French energy giant Total. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni has sent troops to Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, DR Congo and Somalia to further US interests. And Kenya’s President William Ruto has grovelled to Washington to become a non-NATO ally, as Kenyan police are deployed to Haiti to terrorise the population into submission on behalf of US and Canadian imperialism.
In West Africa, Nigeria threatened to launch a military intervention against neighbouring Niger last year following the overthrow of pro-French President Mohamed Bazoum by the military. The threat was aimed at preserving Washington and Paris’s influence over the impoverished yet resource-rich nation. However, Nigeria ultimately refrained, wary that such an intervention could ignite widespread social unrest within its own borders.
In Southern Africa, the former national bourgeois liberation movements that once waged an armed struggle on Portugal’s colonies and the US and British-backed settler states of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa have transformed themselves into key instruments for imperialism to sustain its stranglehold over the mineral-rich region.
The African National Congress (ANC) has governed South Africa since 1994; the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Frelimo have controlled Angola and Mozambique respectively since 1975; the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980; and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) has been in power in Namibia since 1990.
In all cases, they have gutted social services, laid off public sector workers, devalued their currencies and privatised national industries to receive loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Poverty and social inequality have only increased after independence, as so-called “free market reforms” have assured that those at the top have accumulated immense wealth.
Ultimately, the struggle over Africa will not be settled through economics alone but will be driven by military considerations. Renewed military aggression and the danger of a Third World War can be averted only by the mobilisation of the international working class on the basis of a socialist and revolutionary programme.
Across the world, a surge of working-class opposition to inequality and capitalist exploitation is developing in the form of strikes and protests. Africa is rapidly becoming a social powder keg.
Between 2016 and 2023, the number of protests across African nations more than doubled. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) indicates that from January 2016 to May 2023, there were approximately 7,164 protests related to issues such as food, wages, and prices—5,039 of these occurred after the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Sub-Saharan Africa has also seen the fastest growth rate in mass political protests globally, with an annual increase of 11.5 percent between 2009 and 2019.
In Kenya, what started as nationwide protests against tax hikes on workers rapidly escalated into an insurgency. In north Africa, this year alone Moroccan workers have held more than 100 protests over wages and the soaring cost of living. Protests have broken out against IMF-austerity in Nigeria and Ghana, and opposition has mounted against US-backed authoritarian regimes in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Mozambique.
The movement of workers across Africa in alliance with workers in the imperialist centers has the power to stop imperialist war and the new Scramble for Africa, and to redistribute the world’s wealth to meet the social needs of the working class. The critical task is to bring into these struggles an understanding of the crisis of capitalism as a whole, which finds its most dangerous expression in imperialist war. It is necessary to develop a political leadership in the working class that can unify separate struggles and lay the foundation for the overthrow of the entire socioeconomic system through world socialist revolution.
Notes:
1. David North, A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2016), p. xix.
(Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.)