Africans Rise Up Against IMF-Imposed Neocolonial Debt

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of people of African descent convened this past weekend at two events that aimed to be the people’s opposition to the Biden administration’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which is taking place this week amid a military buildup to enforce the summit’s security in Washington, D.C.

The summit is described as a four-day event (Dec. 12-15) that is designed to foster economic opportunities and reinforce the United States’ alleged commitment to human rights and democracy. It is the first summit of its kind since 2014.

“I look forward to working with African governments, civil society, diaspora communities across the United States, and the private sector to continue strengthening our shared vision for the future of U.S.-Africa relations,” U.S. President Joe Biden is quoted as saying on the summit’s website.

However, the summit comes amid dim relations between the United States and many African countries, some of which have decried Western financial and arms support for the war in Ukraine. Western sanctions against Russia have caused price spikes in wheat, with 345 million people in the world expected to experience “acute food insecurity.” Several African countries have relied on Russia and Ukraine for large portions of their wheat imports. However, U.S. officials have been pilloried, too, for saying African countries that continue to trade with Russia would face consequences.

Speakers at both counter events said the Biden summit is really a U.S. attempt to maintain control over the African continent.

Netfa Freeman, an organizer with Pan-African Community Action and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating Committee, spoke December 10, at the Global Pan-African Peoples Intervention on the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. The Global Pan-African Congress organized the event at Howard University’s School of Social Work in Washington, D.C. Freeman read aloud a December 9 statement the Black Alliance for Peace issued.

“The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) recognizes the ‘U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit,'” the organization states, “as nothing more than collusion between neo-colonial powers and U.S. attempts to advance and maintain dominance over the continent.”

The Biden administration invited leaders of 49 African countries. The exceptions were Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Guinea, Mali, the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic and Somaliland. An unnamed “senior administration official” was quoted in a transcript of a December 8 background press call as citing the African Union suspending most of these countries for why they were not invited. (A background press call is meant to provide off-the-record information to invited press, hence officials went nameless in the transcript. Toward Freedom was not invited.)

However, long-time colonizer and U.S. ally, France, recently announced the removal of military troops in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. This came after coups and instability in these countries. Mali also recently banned French NGOs. Guinea experienced a coup in 2021 that appeared to be welcomed by its population. Meanwhile, the United States does not recognize Western Sahara, or the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, as a sovereign state.

While the officials mentioned various civilian-led entities the United States has deployed to cultivate leadership on the continent, none of them spoke about the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). That is one of 11 combat and technical military structures the United States has deployed throughout the world to ensure control of shipping lanes and resources. AFRICOM’s press officer has denied commerce is its only interest, while acknowledging it is one of AFRICOM’s reasons for being. Meanwhile, its 2022 “posture statement” to the U.S. Congress states, “Africa sits astride six strategic chokepoints and sea lines of communication, enables a third of the world’s shipping, and holds vast mineral resources. When access through these strategic chokepoints is blocked, global markets suffer.”

Speakers at the weekend’s events remarked on U.S. intentions.

“The U.S. government and their scribes are misguiding the public on what the roles of the U.S. government, NATO, AFRICOM and neoliberal leaders are in maintaining the state of unrest and violence in countries so they can steal their resources,” said Jacqueline Luqman, a Toward Freedom board member, who spoke as co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary” on a panel about the role of the media.

“The US gov. & their scribes are misguiding the public on what the roles of the US gov., NATO, AFRICOM & neoliberal leaders are in maintaining the state of unrest & violence in countries so they can steal their resources,” @luqmannation1 @Blacks4Peace #apf2022. pic.twitter.com/WQ5Xti8eMV

— CODEPINK (@codepink) December 11, 2022

That panel was one of three held during the first-ever African Peoples’ Forum. The December 11 event was organized at the Eritrean Civic and Cultural Center in northeast Washington, D.C. Moderators included Eritrean activist Yolian Ogbu and Hermela Aregawi, an independent journalist of Ethiopian descent who has reported on the Horn of Africa.

The five-hour event featured three panels of prominent speakers like Eritrean journalist and activist Elias Amare; and Paul Sankara, brother of assassinated Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara; among many others.

Aregawi announced to the audience of a couple of hundred mostly African-descended people that the event was so successful, the forum may take place quarterly to create more opportunities for African anti-imperialist activists to come together. The event was pulled together in just three weeks’ time, she said.

To continue with the momentum in opposition to the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, BAP has organized a week of actions, December 13-16, to raise awareness about the nature of the U.S. role in Africa.

“BAP calls for the dismantling of NATO, AFRICOM and all imperialist structures,” the organization’s statement reads. “Africa and the rest of the world cannot be free until all peoples are able to realize the right of sovereignty and the right to live free of domination.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Editor’s Note: The author offers their perspective on American Exceptionalism in this essay.

In a chapter he wrote titled “Exceptionalism,”¹ historian Daniel T. Rodgers argues American Exceptionalism is a historically contrived myth. The book in which the chapter appears is Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (1998, edited by Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood). Rodgers discusses the origins and evolution of the historicism that undergirds the embedded structural creed that says the United States stands alone as inimitable among nations. Historicism is the theory that history determines social and cultural phenomena.

Within U.S. social movements, American Exceptionalism increasingly has been used to explain the ideology that guides U.S. interventions around the world and against domestic colonized populations, such as African and Indigenous peoples. This essay seeks to examine the roots of this ideological framework.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner first struck an exceptionalist chord in his 1893 essay, “The Frontier in American History,” with his “perennial rebirth” or “rebaptized as an American”² theme that proclaimed a singular “American” character. This came about by rejecting the European ethos and replacing it with a unique pioneering spirit exclusive to the “American.” Within was a detailed examination of the dialectical shifts of American historiography, philosophy and religion that pulsed through the “American” experience: From the earliest origins of the pious fundamentalism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the American Revolution, World War II, the Cold War and its current role as a global hegemonic superpower, Rodgers demystifies and untangles the “skein of tropes”³ that underpin the “newness” and “distinctiveness” that defines United States’ historical, social and political “uniqueness.”⁴ Rodgers ignites his chapter with a question: Is the United States different? Then, through the use of scholarly and authoritative evidence, he methodically proceeds to lay bare the mythological foundations that buttress the United States’ fabled white-supremacist history, analyzing and exposing an unexceptional exceptionalism at its core, for all to see. Yet, in spite of his and other scholars’ well researched conclusions, Rodgers ends his chapter by exposing the persistent and entrenched depths of the American exceptionalist archetype, writing, “Michael McGerr and Michael Kammen demonstrate [that within modern American historicism] challenges to the exceptionalist paradigm [still] generate sharp, visceral reactions.”⁵

Rodgers, unswayed by post-1950s acculturation, looks back through time critically scouring the metahistorical chronicle in search of the decisive epochs that contributed most to the phenomenon called American “exceptionalism.” His contribution is considered a seminal work in contemporary and post-exceptionalist historiography. Literary critic and academic Donald Pease writes, “Daniel T. Rodgers, perhaps the most articulate of a growing cadre of post-exceptionalist U.S. historians, has formulated the rationale for this collective endeavor with eminent clarity.”⁶ Rodgers proclaims the United States’ build-up and victory in WWII, its rise to global supremacy and its dominance throughout the Cold War are central to decoding the portent of American Exceptionalism. 

Contemporary scholars concur. “I agree that World War II set up an important phase in the history of American exceptionalism,”⁷ states Ian Tyrell. Rodgers and his post- exceptionalist colleagues (through primary and secondary source material) expose past and present historiography by turning it on its head. Laurence Veysey points out, “It is clear that earlier interpretations of American history and culture, aggressively put forth as recently as the 1950s and emphasizing ‘uniquely’ American experiences and habits of mind, served largely to mislead us.”⁸ Eric Rauchway pushes even further by stating, “The concept of American exceptionalism does not really have anything to do with actual history,”⁹ meaning that, in-depth analysis of the historical record reveals quite a different story.

Rodgers points to another specious characteristic of exceptionalist historicism. That being the claim that providential intervention and the United States’ cultural preeminence are guided, if not driven, by God, which defines the nation’s “difference.” Rodgers explains, “…difference in American national culture has meant ‘better’: The superiority of the American way.”¹⁰ He argues how unexceptional the United States is in this regard. “Pride and providentialism are too widely spread to imagine them American peculiarities.”¹¹ According to Rodgers, the dissemination of American Exceptionalism, in the mid-20th century, was undergirded by a political, philosophical and psychological propaganda campaign: A deep rivalry with the former USSR that led the United States to co-opt and invert a Stalinist neologism of the 1920s (i.e., Soviet “exceptionalism”) and plant it firmly and inextricably, in its “divine” and rightful place: The United States of America! Yet, he queries even further: “What was the historiographical past of that conceit?”¹²

Rodgers traces the historiography back to an 18th-century travel writer, J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, who first described the Europeans [i.e., white males] inhabiting North America as unique and distinctive. Crévecoeur posed an essentialist question, “What is an American?”¹³ Rodgers demonstrates Crévecoeur was, “virtually unread in the United States before the twentieth century [his] lyric passage on … [the] ‘melting’ of persons of all [European] nations into ‘a new race of men’ [was] extracted from context … which now seemed to appear everywhere.” That was co-opted and retitled, “What Is the American, This New Man?” by “Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., [U.S. historian who] made it the motif of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1942.”¹⁴ Rodgers asserts, “The literature of the new American Studies movement [from then on] was saturated with Crévecoeur references.”¹⁵ He continues, “They led off that catalyst of revisionist histories … [including] Robert E. Brown’s Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, in 1955.”¹⁶ The United States was considered from that point on, in and out of the academy, a uniquely singular phenomenon in world history.

Rodgers exposes an irony. “…In their anti-Marxism, they reimagined Marx’s general laws of historical motion applied everywhere but to their own national case.”¹⁷ Meaning, “John Winthrop’s ‘city upon a hill’ … was no longer a mid-Atlantic hope … it was now America itself.”¹⁸

Until the most recent shockwaves of the U.S. empire felt externally, and internally, in the forms of a 20-year-long Afghan debacle, endless wars for profit, brutal domestic police abuse (which disproportionately kills people of color), a permanent war on the poor and a healthcare system that ruthlessly places profits above life, the American Exceptionalism myth woven throughout U.S. history was fixed. But now, the mask has fallen for all the world to see.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh’s School of History. He is a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist, a self-taught musician and performer. As a musician, Scott uses American Roots Music to illustrate the U.S. social and political landscape. His latest video is “We Know They Lied.”

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¹ Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony
Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–40.
² Ibid., 25.
³ Ibid., 22.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid., 35.
⁶ Donald Pease, “American Studies after American Exceptionalism?” in Globalizing American Studies (University of
Chicago Press, 2010), at https://chicago-universitypressscholarship-
com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/view/10.7208/chicago/9780226185088.001.0001/upso-9780226185064-chapter-2
⁷ Ian Tyrrell and Eric Rauchway, “The Debate Table: Eric Rauchway and Ian Tyrrell Discuss American
Exceptionalism,” Modern American History 1 (2018): 247–256.
⁸ Laurence Veysey, “The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered,” American Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1979): 455.
⁹ Tyrrell and Rauchway, “Debate Table.”
¹⁰ Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” 22.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid., 21.
¹³ Ibid., 37.
¹⁴ Ibid., 27.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid., 29.
¹⁸ Ibid., 27.

KHOCHI, India—Anita Bhil regrets taking just a day off after more than two months of work without stop.

Since the first week of October, she has been cutting sugarcane for roughly 12 hours each day using a sickle. She then piles a bundle onto her head to walk over to a tractor. Each bundle of sugarcane weighs 20 kilograms (44 pounds). That’s about the equivalent of a large packed suitcase. By the end of each day, Bhil will have carried 50 bundles on her head and she will have tied together more than 100 bundles of sugarcane stems.

“In the past three years, my body has gotten used to this back-breaking labor,” said Bhil, who’s in her late 20s.

However, October’s devastating rainfall in Khochi village, followed by a sudden drop in temperature, then unusually high temperatures amid winter, caused her to be feverish. She took anti-inflammatory analgesics, returning to work the next day, despite an ailing body.

“Had I not taken a [day] off, I would have cut another 2,000 kilograms (4,410 pounds) of sugarcane,” Bhil said. A landless farm worker from the indigenous Bhil community, she had never before felt the need to migrate from her Chhavadi village in the Dhule district of western India’s Maharashtra state.

However, things have changed since 2018, she said. Incessant rainfall, rapid changes in the local climatic pattern, heat waves, and other recurring climatic events began destroying her region’s farms. For instance, between July and October of this year, natural disasters have affected more than 2.46 million hectares (6 million-plus acres) in Maharashtra alone.

For Bhil, these climate-induced events meant having no choice but to migrate 375 miles to the fields of western Maharashtra to cut sugarcane, moving from one plot to another on any given day. “No one in my family had ever entered this line of work,” she said.

Bonded Labor

In India, the sugar industry impacts the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their families, who have helped produce more than 500 million metric tons of sugarcane worth 1.18 trillion Indian Rupees ($14.26 billion) from October 2021 to September of this year. That turned India into the largest sugar producer and consumer worldwide in 2021-22. However, producing sweet sugar has come with the bitter taste of labor-law violations, inequality and the perpetuation of the grinding cycle of poverty. In Maharashtra, more than 1 million sugarcane cutters migrate hundreds of miles from their villages, working 15 hours a day for five to six months each year.

With income sources drying up, Bhil and her husband, Kunal, 35, took out a loan of 50,000 Indian Rupees ($615) to pay for each year of their children’s education and meet everyday expenses for up to five months. That meant both had to cut more than 181,000 kilograms (399,036 pounds) of sugarcane in roughly five months, an average of 1.2 tons (2,645 pounds) daily. For cutting 1,000 kilograms of sugarcane, plus tying and loading them onto tractors, these workers in Kolhapur’s Khochi village are paid $3.40.

Anita has reported a consistent decline in her physical and mental health, which has meant the amount of sugarcane she has been able to cut has decreased. She’s been keeping a mental count of every kilogram of sugarcane because last year, by the time the season ended, the couple was 54,000 kilograms short of their target. That is why they returned to the sugarcane fields this year. Yet, every hour lost to a health ailment pushes workers deeper into bonded labor. “I won’t be able to meet this year’s target as well,” Kunal said.

However, what makes sugarcane cutting appear lucrative to poor people is the advance sums.

“It’s a debt trap,” explained Narayan Gaikwad, 75, who has spent more than four decades fighting for the rights of cane cutters, farm workers and daily wage earners. A member of All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Gaikwad has unionized hundreds of sugarcane cutters in the Kolhapur district.

“The wages have fallen drastically in the farming sector because of tremendous losses caused by rains and heat waves,” he said.

In the Dhule district, for 10 hours of work, men are paid $1.80, while women earn $1.20. But over in the sugarcane fields of western Maharashtra, workers like Anita and Kunal Bhil are paid $3.40. However, no one can be assured work will be available because of the impact climate change has had on farming. And yet, it’s better than what they faced on their family farm in Chhavadi village.

“When there’s no work in the fields, you are forced to take loans from private money lenders,” Gaikwad explained. “To repay this loan, workers then take loans from sugarcane contractors—it’s a vicious debt cycle.”

On any given day, 49.6 million people around the world are forced into modern slavery, said an International Labour Organization report. The report finds that one-fifth of people involved in forced labor exploitation are in debt bondage, which is most prominent in the mining, agriculture and construction sectors.

“Marginalized communities, ethnic and religious minorities, and indigenous peoples are among the groups at particular risk,” it mentions.

A September 2021 report by Anti-Slavery International and International Institute for Environment and Development issued a warning: “Climate and development policy-makers and planners urgently need to recognize that millions of people displaced by climate change are being, and will be, exposed to slavery in the coming decades.”

Recurring Climate Disasters

Kunal was once proud of the diversity of crops farmers cultivated in his region: Soybean, cotton, maize, sorghum and others. However, since 2018, it’s become increasingly difficult to grow these crops.

“None of them could survive the changing climate.”

Kunal’s father and two uncles collectively own 16 acres. Last year, on four acres, he cultivated pearl millet and was able to harvest just 17 quintals (3,747 pounds). “I was expecting at least 35-40 quintals.”

As a result, he couldn’t sell a single kilogram and kept the entire harvest for household needs.

The monsoon rains started late in his region. By the time the crop was ready, rainfall was too heavy to allow for harvesting. This was surprising, given Kunal comes from a drought-prone region. “We always cultivated crops that don’t require much water, but now everything has changed.” When he decided to shift to water-intensive crops, the delayed rainfall and the devastating October rains destroyed those, too. “We can’t decide what to grow because of the fluctuating climate.”

Moreover, the losses aren’t restricted to the farming fields. Of his three daughters, Kunal brought two of them to the sugarcane fields. “Who will take care of children back in the village when everyone migrates?” he asks.

Kunal, who became a helping hand too early in his life, couldn’t go to school. “I never wanted this to happen to my children, but looking at the climate disasters, I think even they will have to do this work.”

Paying for the Sins of the Global North

Between 1991 and 2001, climate disasters led to 676,000 deaths and affected an average of 189 million people living in developing countries every year, according to the Loss and Damage Collaboration’s report. “In the first half of 2022, six fossil fuel companies made enough to cover the costs of extreme climate- and weather-related events in all developing countries and still have nearly $70 billion left over in pure profit.”

Loss and Damage refer to the economic and non-economic impacts of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation or adaptation. Oxfam’s report said the estimated cost of Loss and Damage can range from $290 billion to $580 billion. Research published in Lancet found that from 1850 to 2015, the Global North was responsible for 92 percent of excess emissions, the United States 40 percent and the European Union 29 percent.

In 1991, Vanuatu, an island country in the south Pacific Ocean, first proposed on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) compensation for the impacts of rising sea levels due to climate change. It took 31 years for the issue to be addressed at a COP.

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), held last month in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, ended with an agreement to establish a Loss and Damage fund.

However, several details, such as its operation and which countries would contribute to this fund, haven’t been finalized. The negotiations ended with an agreement to establish a “transitional committee,” which would make recommendations on operationalizing the funding and adopting it at the next COP.

To top it off, no agreement remains about what counts as Loss and Damage. Meanwhile, thousands of workers like Anita Bhil are being pushed every day into bonded labor.

‘No Option But to Migrate’

After cutting cane for more than two months this year, Prakash Bhil, 32, said he made a firm decision.

“No matter what, I won’t return next year to cut sugarcane.” He paused for a few moments and said, “But…” Then he stopped again. Almost teary-eyed, he placed his hand on the right leg. He thought it might be fractured, but he couldn’t visit a doctor because of the workload. “But it all depends if I will be able to cut enough sugarcane this year and whether rains create any havoc in my village,” Bhil said. “I just hope my children get a good education.”

Last year, the fields where he worked saw devastating rains, washing away cotton, soybean and sorghum. “Nothing survived.” Earlier, he found work for at least 25 days a month. “Now even finding 15 days of work is becoming difficult,” he said, referring to the impact of incessant rainfall.

Unable to pay off a $74 loan from last year, he returned to the sugarcane fields. “This year, I took an advance of $245 and won’t be able to repay it because of my poor health.” While he’s resting, the entire burden has fallen on his wife, a frail Sarla in her early 20s.

Back to Work 3 Days After Giving Birth

“There are massive labor rights violations in the production of sugar,” said Narayan, the organizer. He then shared the story of a sugarcane cutter who had migrated to the Kolhapur district. She was 9 months and 9 days pregnant.

“She was cutting sugarcane for seven hours and started experiencing labor pains in the evening. The case was so complicated that three public hospitals rejected her.” Narayan then took her to the district hospital and ensured a safe childbirth. “After three days, she was back to cutting cane,” Narayan added. “A decade since then, nothing much has changed.”

For more than seven years, community healthcare worker Shubhangi Kamble in Maharashtra’s Arjunwad village has been helping make public healthcare accessible to sugarcane cutters by going door to door, providing healthcare on the spot and connecting workers with doctors and hospitals. She said the cutters’ situation has been getting worse every year, attributing it to declining incomes caused by climate change impacts.

“Sugarcane cutters are trapped in debt, and no matter what happens to their health, they don’t take a break. Many do not even complete their prescribed medical course because they can’t afford the costly medicines,” she shared. In the past three years, complaints of body aches, fatigue, and dizziness have increased among cane cutters, especially among women, according to Kamble.

One among them is Anita Bhil, who, despite her deteriorating health, is adamant about not taking a break.

“A day’s off can push an entire generation into poverty,” Bhil said, as thuds of chopping sugarcane reverberated throughout the fields.

Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.