Africa News Wrap for April 2023

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis of Russia-Sudan relations.

Russia’s ambitious plans to establish a naval base in Sudan could soon be thwarted. The northeast African country is reportedly trying to “blackmail” Moscow by demanding a review of a deal allowing construction of a Russian naval facility on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

In November 2020, the Kremlin announced plans to build a seaport technical facility in the city of Port Sudan, guaranteeing Russia’s first substantial military foothold in Africa since the former Soviet Union was dismantled. The two countries reached a deal that would allow Russia’s navy a 25-year lease in Port Sudan, housing up to four ships and 300 soldiers, in exchange for weapons and military equipment for the northeast African country.

But now, a Russian state news agency, RIA Novosti, reports Sudan wants to re-negotiate the deal. One Russian publication went so far as to call it “blackmail.” In exchange for providing the land for a naval base to Russia, Khartoum reportedly has asked Moscow to arrange payments to the country’s central bank during the first five years of the lease, with the option of extending the deal to 25 years.

The Kremlin has not yet responded to the proposal, although Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said the two countries’ militaries continue negotiations on the creation of a naval logistics base for Russian warships in the Red Sea. Sudan’s officials, on the other hand, strongly deny their country has been trying to “blackmail” Moscow.

“It is not true. This news is not true. This is groundless news. The Sudanese side is not asking for any payments in connection with the military base agreement,” said Onur Ahmad Onur, charge d’affaires of Sudan’s embassy in Moscow.

Whether or not Sudan really asked Russia for financial compensation, the Kremlin’s struggle to improve its positions in northeast Africa is unlikely to be an easy one. Back in June, it became obvious Russia could face many obstacles in its attempts to establish a material-technical support facility in the strategically important region located between the Gulf of Aden in the south and the Suez Canal in the north. Such a facility could provide material support in the form of ships and soldiers and technical support in the form of command, control, communication, computer and intelligence operations.

On June 1, Sudanese Armed Forces Chief of Staff Muhammad Usman al-Hussein announced the revision of the agreement. About three weeks later, the Sudanese Minister of Defense Yasin Ibrahim Yasin traveled to Moscow to discuss Russian-Sudanese military cooperation with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoigu.

In July, while Russia was preparing to ratify the agreement, Sudanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Mariam al-Mahdi arrived in the Russian capital. She said Sudanese lawmakers will “evaluate whether the agreement is a benefit to Sudan itself and the strategic goals pursued by Russia and Sudan.” She also pointed out the future of the deal will largely depend on a “positive solution to a number of issues on which Khartoum counts on Moscow’s understanding and support.”

In an interview with Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, Al-Mahdi openly stressed Sudan needs Russia’s help regarding the country’s dispute with neighboring Ethiopia, which is building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)—a hydroelectric-power gravity dam on the Blue Nile River.

“Thanks to its good relations with Ethiopia, Russia can try to convince the Ethiopian side to listen to the voice of reason and come to an agreement that will not do harm to Sudan, as was the case when the dam was first filled,” Al-Mahdi said.

Khartoum fears Ethiopia’s apparent determination to fill the GERD would “threaten the lives of half the population in central Sudan.” In addition, the two countries have a decades-old border dispute, and some analysts claim Sudan and Ethiopia are on the verge of a wide-scale confrontation. It is worth noting Russia and Ethiopia signed a military cooperation agreement in July, and Kremlin officials claim the deal “does not have any destabilizing character.” However, Sudan recently seized Russian-made weapons—72 boxes of arms and night-vision binoculars—that were reportedly smuggled to Khartoum from Ethiopia. This was seen as an “attempt to destabilize the country.” It is entirely possible Russia is trying to balance between the two regional rivals, although Moscow could attempt to indirectly pressure Sudan to give the green light for the establishment of the Russian naval base in the Red Sea.

At this point, it remains uncertain if the Sudanese parliament will ratify the agreement on the Russian base in Port Sudan. Some Russian experts think the construction of a Russian military facility on the Red Sea is unlikely.

“Russia is not going to pay Sudan to host a base in Port Sudan,” said Dmitry Zakharov, head of the Eurasian Institute of Youth Initiatives. “Due to the unthinkable corruption in the African country, the Russian government has no desire to invest in such a project.”

Unlike the Kremlin, the United States seems willing to provide limited financial assistance to Sudan. On August 29, Sudan’s Ministry of Finance and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) signed an agreement for a $5.5 million development grant to support “democratic transition” and to promote economic growth. This is part of a total estimated amount of $200 million to be granted by 2024.

After the Sudanese transition government recognized Israel in 2020, the Trump administration removed Sudan in December from the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and lifted U.S. sanctions. Sanctions normally prevent food, fuel and medicine from entering a country, harming ordinary people. Three months later, the two countries held an online Business and Investment Forum, and U.S. navy ships docked in Sudan for the first time in decades. Some Russian military experts believe the United States is pressuring Sudan not to allow Russia to open a naval base in the country, although such a facility could improve Khartoum’s position with neighboring Ethiopia.

Overall, it is Russia, rather than Sudan, that seeks to strengthen its geopolitical positions in the strategically important region. Thus, the coming days and weeks will show if Russia will adopt a more proactive approach regarding this sensitive issue. One thing is for sure: The naval base on the Red Sea would be just the first step in Russia’s ambitions plans to return to Africa, a region that has ceased to be in Moscow’s geopolitical orbit in the post-Soviet years.

Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Global Wonks.

In the spring of 1860, wealthy businessman Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could illegally kidnap and ship Africans from Africa to Mobile, Alabama, without being detected by federal officials. Fifty-two years earlier, the U.S. Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which ended the United States’ legal involvement in the international slave trade.

While transporting Africans to the United States for slavery was now prohibited, U.S. slave traders turned to the existing slave breeding industry, which grew after the ban on importing Africans.

But the story of the bet Meaher made, as well as the ship, “Clotilda,” he financed, and the descendants of the Africans brought to Mobile, Alabama, are the focus of a recently released Netflix documentary, “Descendant.”

Oral History

Kamau Sidiki, master diver and contributor to the Slave Wrecks Project, notes in the opening scenes of the documentary, “There were over 12,000 ships making over 40,000 voyages over 250 years of slave trade. To date, there are only five [slave] ships in maritime history in the database. Why is that?” It should be noted that Sidiki was crucial to finding and verifying the authenticity of the Brazilian slave ship, Sâo José Paquete de Africa.

Author Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” looms large in the documentary, as the focus of her novel was one of the captives aboard the “Clotilda,” Cudjo Lewis, born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. Lewis was the last living survivor of the “Clotilda” at the time Hurston wrote his account in 1931 (the book was only recently published in 2018).

It is through the words of Lewis, and the oral history of the enslaved ancestors passed down through the generations that they have kept alive the story of the lost slave ship. Oddly, it is through this oral history that the bet, the crime, and the attempt to cover it up are also conveyed and should lead viewers to wonder how much of your family’s oral history is just exaggerated family lore, or hidden history only revealed when the grandkids go to visit Grandma and Grandpa and ask them, “What happened back then?”

Videotapes from 25 years ago of the griots of Africatown, a community of the descendants three miles north of downtown Mobile, Alabama, recount not only the lore that is fact, but the terror campaign waged against them to silence them throughout generations about the crime of which their very existence is evidence. Griots are traveling poets, musicians and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.

‘One of the Africans’

The Black families of the now long-gone Africatown are the offspring of the last Africans brought to the United States. They identify themselves as “one of the Africans” with pride. They do this while recounting their connection to the formerly missing ship, the “Clotilda,” with righteous indignation at the forces that tried to silence the story and with hope that the physical connection to their ancestry would be found. It was impossible not to see the pride in these people.

The descendants of the “Clotilda” are connected to that ship and the continent it brought them from, just as they are connected to the land their ancestors are buried on, the land that they were admonished by those ancestors to never give up in this cruel new world to which they were brought.

The imprint of the family that carried out the crime marks Alabama today. Street signs and parks are named after the slave-owning Maeher family. The ancestral land of the first African stolen from their homeland, who had to buy land from their former slave owner to establish Africatown, is today surrounded on all sides by Maeher family-owned heavy industry that pollutes the air, water, and soil. The pollution has caused significant health problems for residents of Africatown.

The Larger System

In a way, “Descendant” is also a chronicle of how capitalism undergirded and evolved the slave trade. Just as capitalism kept Africans enslaved at the bottom for centuries during slavery to help develop the United States as a global economic powerhouse, it kept freedmen at the bottom for 100 more years under racist Jim Crow laws. And, today, the Black working class and poor are at the bottom.

There is no delineation between the past and the present in “Descendant,” and that is an accurate reflection of the relation of slavery and its atrocities to the present condition of the descendants of the “Clotilda,” and the rest of the descendants of Africans brought to this country to be enslaved. And the descendants reflect that throughline of history not only in keeping the history of the “Clotilda” alive, but also through their continued embrace of African culture. African dance is part of celebrations, spiritual rituals honor their ancestors, and their everyday wardrobe includes African dress and jewelry. They are African, and they are proud to be.

But “Descendant” also holds an important lesson to be aware of: When the powerful, who have suppressed the truth for centuries and have profited off of their continued oppression of others, can no longer avoid facing the truth once exposed, do not expect them to take any responsibility for their actions or offer fair compensation for the damage they have done. They will only offer empty platitudes and meaningless window dressing to the affected. Whatever tangible efforts materialize from any agreement between the aggrieved and their oppressors will always ultimately—in this capitalist system that they built their wealth of oppression upon—benefit those who have always held the power.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary;” and a Toward Freedom board member.

Phoenix Express 2021 (PE21), a 12-day US-Africa Command (AFRICOM)-sponsored military exercise involving 13 states in the Mediterranean Sea, concluded on Friday, May 28. It had kicked off from the naval base in Tunis, Tunisia, on May 16. The drills in this exercise covered naval maneuvers across the stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, including on the territorial waters of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania.

The regimes in these countries, which cover the entire northern and northwestern coastline of Africa, participated in the drill – one of the three regional maritime exercises conducted by the US Naval Forces Africa (NAVAF). Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain were the European states that participated in the drill. 

Among the heavyweights deployed in the exercises was the US navy’s USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4). The 784-feet-long warship is a mobile military base which “provides for accommodations for up to 250 personnel, a 52,000-square-foot flight deck.. and supports MH-53 and MH-60 helicopters with an option to support MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft,” according to the Woody Williams Foundation. “The platform has an aviation hangar and flight deck that include four operating spots capable of landing MV-22 and MH-53E equivalent helicopters.” 

When the warship entered into its maiden service with the US navy in 2017, Capt. Scot Searles, strategic and theater sealift program manager at the Program Executive Office (PEO) Ships, said, “The delivery of this ship marks an enhancement in the Navy’s forward presence and ability to execute a variety of expeditionary warfare missions.

The Algerian National Navy frigate El Moudamir (F911), Egyptian Navy frigate Toushka (F906) and Royal Moroccan Navy multi-mission frigate Sultan Moulay Ismail (FF 614) were also part of PE21, bringing with them a range weapon systems including surface-to-surface and surface to air missiles, torpedo launchers, heavy naval guns and naval radars.

According to a press release by the US navy, the purpose of this exercise was to test the ability of the participants “to respond to irregular migration and combat illicit trafficking and the movement of illegal goods and materials.”

Smugglers moving goods across the border also illicitly traffic migrants fleeing war or economic crisis in their home countries. AFRICOM has on multiple occasions acknowledged that instability in Libya is the driving force behind the migration crisis. 

 

Who Is Destabilizing the Region?

While ‘Russian intervention’ is blamed for the instability in Libya, AFRICOM played a key military role in the Libyan war in 2012, deposing Muammar Gaddafi, who was a staunch opponent of expanding US military footprint in the region, with the help of radical Islamist organizations. With the exception of Algeria, all the other north African states which participated in PE21 had supported this war in Libya, which has led to mass distress migration. 

Many Islamist organizations which emerged amid the anarchy caused by the war were also used by the US and its allies in the Syrian war in a bid to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad, triggering another major wave of destabilization and migration.

Noting that “Syrians.. have (also) entered Libya from neighboring Arab states seeking onward transit to refuge in Europe and beyond,” a US Congressional Research Service report states: “The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that nearly 654,000 migrants are in Libya, alongside more than 401,000 internally displaced persons and more than 48,000 refugees and asylum seekers from other countries identified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).”

The report in 2020 acknowledged that with “human trafficking and migrant smuggling.. trade has all but collapsed compared with the pre-2018 period.” 

This migration wave, caused in no small part by AFRICOM-coordinated military interventions in Libya, has since been purported as a reason for further militarization of the region through such exercises as PE21 sponsored by AFRICOM. 

The hysteria surrounding migration whipped up by right-wing parties has provided politically fertile ground for the US to mobilize state militaries for such drills. This is despite a fall in undocumented migration.

The need to respond to ‘irregular migration’ with warships is one of the official pretexts which, like the ‘war on terror’, has been used to further the militarization of Africa through AFRICOM since it was established in 2007. 

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the fact that the main cause behind the explosion of terrorist organizations in the region was the 2011 Libyan war in which AFRICOM itself was an aggressor, it continues to be portrayed as a bulwark against terrorist organizations. Its operations in Africa over the last decade, including hundreds of drone strikes, correlate with a 500% spike in incidents of violence attributed to Islamist terrorist organizations.

 

The Chinese Boogeyman

Another justification given by the US for AFRICOM is the perception of a growing Chinese influence. “Chinese are outmaneuvering the U.S. in select countries in Africa,” General Stephen Townsend, commander of AFRICOM, told Associated Press late in April, less than three weeks before the start of PE21. 

He went on to claim that the Chinese are “looking for a place where they can rearm and repair warships. That becomes militarily useful in conflict. They’re a long way toward establishing that in Djibouti. Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there.”

Calling out the lack of credibility of this claim, Eric Olander, a veteran journalist and co-founder of The China-Africa Project, wrote: “The Chinese are looking for a base but he doesn’t provide any specifics or any evidence to back up the claim. Again, we’ve heard this before… for years in fact. For all we know the general doesn’t have any more refined intelligence than the same speculation that’s been floating around African social media all these years about a new Chinese base in Namibia or was it Kenya or maybe Angola?”

Townsend also pointed to the Chinese investments in several development projects in Africa. “Port projects, economic endeavors, infrastructure and their agreements and contracts will lead to greater access in the future. They are hedging their bets and making big bets on Africa,” he claimed.

This has been disputed by Deborah Bräutigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who concluded that China’s economic engagements in Africa are not of a predatory nature. 

Bräutigam argues that Chinese economic engagements on the continent are very much in line with the economic interests of these African states, providing jobs to locals and improving public infrastructure. 

Neither the concocted threat of Chinese domination of Africa, nor terrorism and irregular migration add up to the raison d’etre of AFRICOM. As former AFRICOM commander Thomas Waldhauser explained to the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, the purpose of AFRICOM is to enable military intervention to propagate “US interests” across the continent, “without creating the optic that U. S. Africa Command is militarizing Africa.” However, the 5,000 US military personnel and 1,000 odd Pentagon employees deployed across a network of 29 bases of AFRICOM in north, east, west and central Africa present a different picture.

AFRICOM has its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, which sponsored PE21. While this exercise was still underway, preparations for African Lion 21, Africa’s largest military exercise, had already begun.  

This article first appeared in People’s Dispatch.