Africa Information Centre

Africa Information Centre

This website is currently being reconstructed

Welcome to
africa-adapt

Welcome to the homepage of africa-adapt.com. We are a small team of researchers and analysts specialising in sustainable development for the people and continent of Africa. We are all Africanists, which is to say that we are believers in Africa and the African cause. We are dedicated to providing information and sharing knowledge, inspiration and support to people's genuine aspirations for a better life in their own homeland. Our target audience is the 'ordinary' African man, woman, girl or boy. Our dream is for better lives and wellbeing for those too often overlooked, the people at the sharp end of life who are the lifeblood of the African continent; our concern? their lives, livelihoods, lands and environment.

The online platform Africa Information Centre (AIC) which was created in 2004-5 is an early manifestation of the objective to enlarge the knowledge budget on Africa. You can catch the old website in the left-hand margin of every africa-adapt page. In 2021, we have decided to reinstall it online with the promise to slowly refurbish and bring it up to date. The AIC proved inadequate but it was a start, as was the community-based organisation Barotseland.com, which was set up to promote devlopment in western Zambia, existing from 2003 to 2010, staffed and manged by local people, the remnants of that CBO live on today in a knowledge sharing platform called barotseland.net. Barotseland.com worked by going out into the community to literally ask how people felt and what they needed and tried to address their needs. Getting support from the international organisations and aid agencies proved almost impossible as they wanted to command the agenda and were unprepared and untrusting to invest in local African capacity. That is part of the problematic that africa-adapt seeks to highlight and address today.

Productivity

What you will find here online are:

An evolving online platform that seeks to share unbiased and impartial information and knowledge on Africa - a difficult task indeed as there are is so much biases and partiality to navigate. This will slowly become interactive whilst taking care to try to avoid the trolling and abuse that accompanies interactivity online and in social media these days.

Themed subject areas that delve into issues considered to be of major relevance to African people. These may include:

Development: context, challenges and ways forward
Climate change variability and extreme weather: impacts, challenges and opportunities

Health: the key to human development

Water: the lifeblood of the continent

Gender and the hidden potentiality of women and girls for whole communities

Social ecological system analysis

Briefing Notes and Essays on contemporary themes

Teaching and learning aids for Africa in various academic disciplines at different levels, using our own materials and selected materials from elsewhere, carefully examined for quality. These will be directed towards capacity building in decision and policy making.

Productivity

Briefing Note 1 - 31 Jan 2021:Covid vaccine wars: 6 lessons for Africa
Short essay - 24 Feb 2021: The colonisation of Africa in our Time: 1. Context

africa-adapt: The colonisation of Africa in our time

Part 1. Context

The term africa-adapt is chosen here with great care and intent. Africa needs to adapt in order to break free from its colonisation - capture and peripheralisation - by the globalised capitalist world economy. Africa must seek its own unique development path to assert itself in the world economy in ways that set out its own brand of progress and its own conception of an African future in the context of the wider world that we all share. This short essay sets out an (it is not alone) articulation of the colonisation of Africa in our time.

Africa's capture, which comprises a historical stranglehold on development and the entrapment of a whole continent's psyche in the conception of being somehow 'behind the curve' first took place centuries ago, when Europeans first started engaging with Africa, and has evolved in stages that included:

the invasion of mercantilist capitalism emanating from western Europe, which introduced the policy of extracting raw materials from Africa for processing in Europe and the export of finished goods back to Africa which was simultaneously thwarted from developingthe manufacture of goods for itself. Great Britain was the master power at this uneven trade process which evolved into:

the Arab and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades, the former of which went on for many centuries, the latter of which refined mercantilist capitalism through the 'Triangular Trade' which involved ships coming to Africa from Europe on the first leg of the triangle, laden with goods, including arms and ammunition, to trade with Africans and to exchange for human beings to transport on the second leg from Africa to the Americas to labour on plantations to produce further commodities such as sugar and tobacco to transport on the third and final leg of the voyage back to Europe. The slave trades denuded the continent of its most productive people and self-respect as peoples turned on one another to satiate the appetites of the European economic barons who could not even be bothered to try to capture Africans for their despicable activities themselves.

formal colonialism - formal as in state sponsored, supported by military, police and armies of colonial staff to man the administrations - at the hands of European countries, especially Britain and France and, to a lesser extent, Portugal, Germany and Spain, whose interests in Africa were both brutally economic and designed to address imperial competition in Europe and to soften the exigency of urban poverty in Europe articulated by authors such as Charles Dickens. Competition for power and influence between aspiring European states has been played out in Africa's backyard throughout the colonial project. It was no accident that the big cannons lodged on the ramparts of the slave castles of the Gulf of Guinea, still evident today at Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana, were pointed out to sea and not inland towards Africans! The colonial project refined the art of withholding productive activity such as manufacture and value addition from processing and the extraction and expropriation of raw commodities for European industry. It was carried out quite often through military expansionism and subjugation, often through trickery - such as of signing over of land and rights to natural resources in exchange for 'protection' of African people against often invisible enemies, crosscut by authoritarianism, racism and cultural imperialism. Today, the ex-imperial masters continue with what we can call:

neo or informal colonialism: in this they have been joined by newly aspiring hegemonic 'masters' including China and the United States with new external forces in the wings such as India and Saudi Arabia. All of these powerful economies have continued the colonisation of Africa in dependence and peripheralisation ever since. They do this through limitations of trade through tariffs and quotas imposed on African exports, buying up large tracts of Africa's best land to grow food and other crops for their own people that Africans will never consume, by retaining the most profitable and cutting edge of capitalist modes of exploitation by their own companies and by restricting the flow of people from Africa to their countries by erecting mobility walls in the form of visa restrictions impossible for most Africans to fulfil and priced out of reach to all except the narrow elites and by limiting immigration of Africans to Europe to only the most highly qualified, thereby emptying Africa of its most formidable minds and talent. And neo or informal colonialism is also exercised through the tacit encouragement of debt. African indebtedness to the IFIs, the ex-colonial powers and Chinese interests is at an all-time high but it gives the lendors power to dictate to African governments without the need for formal colonial officers.Indebtedness breeds government weakness, reduces decisiona nd policy-making independence and creates a socio-economic environment of degraded public services, inflation, high prices, and restricts the flow of new technology, skills and imvestment to countries. The expression 'debt-trap' is very appropriate and is a key tactic of neocolonial control of Africa.

institutional colonialism: From the ultra-elitist, highly autonomous and much-feared World Bank with representatives and offices throughout the world and other international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (both of these headquartred in Washington DC), through the multifarious organs of the United Nations, though the power of trans-national corporations (TNCs) such as Coca-Cola and international banks who charge excritiating fees and interest rates for their services in Africa, including the media and IT giants such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, who expatriate profits from their activities in Africa to their core country headquarters, through academic apartheid that privileges - and finances - European and American research and publishes material on Africa and Africans on its own first-world academic platforms. The institutional colonialism of Africa is probably the most insidious modern-day form of capture of African aspirations and desire for autochthonous development, as it is so often staffed and represented by Africans in a false show of political correctness, as they divert and demote the interests of Africa in favour of the colonial project.

And the extent of informal colonialism does not stop at what is immediately apparent. Other equally insidious internal forms of colonialism that hold Africa and African people back are in play in everyday domestic African society. Nationals of ex-colonial powers and countries such as China, India and Lebanon, some of whose forbears were originally imported to Africa in formal colonial times, have conspired in the process of caturing capital and holding back autochthonous African socio-economic and even political development for their own gain. This is done through monopolised trade and commercial activities. They do so by co-opting and conspiring with 'comprador'local elites including governance and political leaders dedicated to enriching themselves at their compatriots' expense. It has been going on all through the formal colonial and post-independence period. These non-African elements, who have come to Africa because the opportunities locally exceed what is available to them at home, are regularly found with African passports and citizenship. They justify their presence, accumulation of capital and quite often, mistreatment of local people by saying that they employ Africans who would not otherwise have work and generate economic activity. In fact, they retain the levers of economic power in their own hands, rarely re-invest in the host countries unless it is in their own names, often lobby and interfere in African governance and impose glass ceilings on Africans, limiting their ability to achieve ownership of assets and reinforcing the postcolonial mindset which constrains self-confidence and limits the notion that 'African is not only good but can be best.' In South Africa, since 1994 and Namibia since 1990, official apartheid has been replaced with black African majority political power but economic power remains in the hands of the minority white population which during apartheid called itself European but since majority rule laughably tries to re-brand itself as African, apparently forgetting how it came to command the lions share of the South African economic cake. These former brutalisers who held back and subjugated African people, now export their denigration of African capacity through capitalistic enterprises throughout Africa in the form of shopping malls, TV media, brewing monopolies and farming enterprises to name but a few, a re-colonisation of Africa from within!

Aid agencies, humanitarian assistance, loans for infrastructural development and even military assistance as well as grants to combat underdevelopment, climate change, disease and other plagues unleashed upon Africa by the sponsors of all this 'support' have been accompanied by the chains of conditionality that have constrained indigenous development planning and compounded Africa's neocolonial imprisonment since the phase of granting 'independence'. This imprisonment is not only economic, it is also psychological, something that has been implicit since the time of mercantlist traders, European explorers, missionaries and formal colonial administrations, the perception that African is second-best, even in Africa and that foreign goods, foreign enterprises, foreign ways of governing and most everything that emanates from those old metropoles is somehow more efficient and better. This is the postcolonial mindset, a syndrome which has inserted itself into the African consciousness over centuries and is extremely hard to deconstruct. Postcolonialism holds back development and is as virulent as many of the more material forms of oppression detailed above.

The 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic and treatment of Africa over vaccines has merely confirmed the colonialism and second-class branding of the continent with a 'everybody for themselves, the richest look after the richest first' mentality, a bit like Trump's America First slogan. It is only in February 2021 that the unfairness of this 'rich come first' mentality is being exposed for its hypocracy simply because the no matter how many Europeans, Americans, and other rich country citizens are vaccinated , they will not be safe whilst ever the vast periphery of the world economy upon which teh core countries prey to retain their advantage is not vaccinated. Put simply, historical parasitic processes of colonialism and exploitation of Africa and other less developed parts of the world cannot be continued if vaccines are denied to Africa and Africans. Countries like New Zealand and Australia would need to remain closed forever to outsiders and that would defeat the object of the colonial project.

Meanwhile, many African governments and their leaders seem to have misunderstood the importance of their roles and do not appear to lead the charge for the upliftment and empowerment of all of their people. Instead, they stand accused by their own citizenry of 'eating' their country's resources. But, in this they are not alone in Africa. African institutional bodies charged with defending African people's rights to their own unique development include the 'Old Boys Club' known as the African Union, HQ in Addis Ababa curiously built and financed by China, whose existence seems to be primarily to protect and broker the interests of corrupt leaders and governments who seek to find ways to remain in power unconstitutionally at the people's expense, and mutilateral bodies such as the moribund (United Nations) Economic Commission for Africa whose main agenda appears to be internal infighting and whose impact on uplifting the lives of Africans has been minimal and Africa's own African Development Bank where 16.1% of the voting shares are allotted to one country - Nigeria - and 40.4% of voting shares are in the hands of non-African countries (African Development Bank figures - October 2020). These African multilateral bodies have, despite good founding intentions, done little, since their inception, apart from paying their employees fat salaries and allowances, to help the continent out of its peripheralisation. The fact remains that roughly 40% of Africa's people still live in abject poverty i.e. on less than $1.90 per day (World Vision 2019) and 85% live on less than $5.50 per day (World Bank 2019). In all of this governance institutionary apparatus, the problem seems to inadequate or self-serving leadership and poor management compunded by a lack of focus on what these expensively staffed bodies are actually supposed to be doing, serving the African development agenda, achieving the much maligned Sustainable Development Goals, reducing inequality and enhancing the wellbeing of ordinary African people.

Meanwhile, the United Nations (UN) and its multifarious offshoots have hardly helped. UN peacekeeping in Africa has been an abysmal failure - evidence Rwanda 1994, DRC, South Sudan, Somalia, Sahel, Central African Republic for several decades and all these despite spnding countless billions of taxpayers hard-earned dollars on staff and equipment. Getting the UN's senior decision-making body the Security Council to decide on anything in ordinary people's interests has deteriorated in recent years to the status of farce as the permanent members from the western blocs can be guaranteed to be opposed by China /Russia and vice versa at every turn. At the same time, caring for people such as those suffering food insecurity has also evaded the capacity of the UN which invariably complains of failing to secure enough funds from the international community.

In most African capitals, as in 131 countries worldwide, UN activity - undertaken by some 24 agencies - is supposedly coordinated by a UN Country Team (UNCT) commanded by the UN Resident Coordinator who enjoys almost ministerial status and id highly influential with government. Omnipresent and senior amongst all of the UN teams has always been the UN Development Programme (UNDP) which sits atop all UN and even non-UN development activity in-country, usually carrying out financial oversight of all UN activity, advising government and acting almost as a parallel government, unelected but wielding extraordinary power. But the UNDP does not just exist in-country. It has a global apparatus, headquartered in New York linked to and able to approve/disapprove Government's attempts to attract funding, for example from bodies such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), headquartered in Seoul, hosted by the Korean Government, another parallel organisation, which like the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change, based in Bonn, Germany, its headquarters hosted by the German Government, which the GCF evolved out of, that has failed to address what should be its core mission, to fund adaptation and resilience to climate change, for very easily visible reasons. In both cases, institutional capacity is constrained by poorly qualified but highly paid staff, almost impossible to fire, who have little or no understanding of real people's daily lives, and inadequate methodologies and funds, except for its its own payroll.

Where climate change is concerned, we have the much vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), nobel prize winning enigmatic body pumping out plethoras of narrative and dire warnings, much of it unconsumable by decision and policy makers. Like its sister UN bodies, the IPCC fails to connect with real people's lives and livelihoods in the face of a global exigency, because those who understand such things are not invited to the elite IPCC feasting table. Instead, the institution acts as self-promotion vehicle for its authors who almost fight among themselves to be heard and whose very careers and CVs depend on their IPCC status and the organisation's existence, headquartered, like several UN agencies, in costly Geneva, Switzerland, well away from where climate change impacts poor people.

But climate change is a real and global crisis, generated by the advanced industrialised countries over centuries since the Industrial Revolution began in England in late C18, impacting most on the likes of an unsuspecting Africa, resulting in losses, damages and confusion for the people and countries most affected. Such losses are incurred on a daily basis, usually out of sight of the global media, reversing fledgling development gains. They are incurred despite the very obvious fact that Africa generated only a tiny proportion of the emissions that have propelled this deadly crisis. And yet, despite that, Africa is told, directed even by developed countries and blocs such as the EU and their agencies, that it may not exercise its own development at any further cost to the already carbon-drenched atmosphere, lest global warming enter an unstoppable and potentially deadly phase. Green and Blue Development are the new buzz terms that are actually directives aimed at Africa with penalties attached should any country fail to comply. No fossil fuel development - despite the fact that several African economies depend on fossil fuels for their exports, suggesting the need for an understanding and 'Just Transition.' Even the less polluting natural gas exploitation is to be discouraged and negated, whilst developed economies such as Germany are in the throes of finalising the multi-billion Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline (it already has one) in tandem with its geopolitical adversary Russia, in order to keep the home fires burning in the West European winter.

The modern day colonialism of Africa then, takes place without soldiers and colonial policemen or administrators, without slaving ships and chains to manacle people as they are marched away from their families and livelihoods but through the economic might wielded by the 'core' countries of the world economy, who include the ex-formal colonial masters and through institutional colonialism wielded by a well-honed networked apparatus that has infiltrated, like a cancer, every aspect of governance and development in the periphery of the world economy. That periphery comprises all so-called 'developing countries' and all of Africa. And whilst this institutional colonial power is largely staffed and peopled by faces from the 'developing world' it commands, real power lies where it has always lain, with the economic powers that fund these institutions and, behind the scenes, dictate not only how the money is spent but what direction policy and decision making in Africa should take.

That Africa is vulnerable was demonstrated in 2020 when the Trump administration in the USA decided, in a fit of Trumpesque pique, to further the war it was waging over economic hegemoney with China, to withdraw funding from the World Health Organisation (WHO), another integral part of the UN system, and threatened to discontinue its membership in exactly the same way as it oulled the US out of the Paris Agreements on climate change (now reversed). The US is the largest contributor by far to the WHO's budget and is very much concerned with its governance. But the WHO's principal beneficiaries are the poorest and least developed countries with poorly developed health systems, including virtually all of Africa. Even the WHO, led currently by an African, suffering from lack of exposure to 'real-world' exigencies, would not boast that it handled the Ebola or Covid-19 crises adroitly but due to the enforced impoverishment of African health infrastructure, it is a lifeline of both knowledge and concrete support to the continent. So whilst the principal target of Trump's angry disinvestment in the WHO was China, the real impacts of such disinvestment would have been innocent Africans with no protection and no access to vaccines to combat trans-national health crises such as Ebola, Covid-19, HIV and malaria (a disease that kills more Africans than any other yet largely ignored by the giant pharma corporations who rushed so diligently to produce vaccines for Covid-19, but malaria does not affect the advanced economies of Europe, Japan and America, yet!) that put serious constraints on development. It is well known with what distaste Trump and his racist proxies perceive African countries and their people! The threats and dangers implicit in this example of muscular super-power provocation and prevarication, however, are lacking in factual bases or joined up logic, are very real. Trump maybe gone for 4 years in 2021, but the lesson for Africa is of how little it is valued and how quickly it can become collateral damage in competition between those who wield power and wealth, exactly as happened during the mercantilist, slave trade and formal conialism eras.

Is it any surprise, therefore, that after seven decades of post-colonial (formal that is) development and countless trillions of dollars expended on the 'development' project, an industry all of its own, that all African countries, with the possible exception of Mauritius and the Seychelles (South Africa has been sinking recently tho still a member of the BRICS group of semi-peripheral countries, still lie in the periphery of the globalised world economy, rooted to the bottom of the human development league table, where inequality rules, where technology is most expensive and least available, where wages are lowest and where living standards are least. Where has all this money gone, you may ask? Could it be, that the answer to that lies in maintaining a historical status quo?

African peoples, desperate to find ways of securing opportunities and survive, let alone prosper in a sea of poverty and lack of opportunity, try to find ways to escape through illegal migration, only to be met by a tide of racism, rejectionism and hostility both en-route to their hoped for salvation, where they are abused, robbed and even killed, and upon arrival where they are detained, treated as criminals and regularly returned penniless. Meanwhile, formal walls are erected by developed countries to keep Africans out through visa restrictions, quotas, qualifications stipulations, and other means of discrimination that induce those who are desperate to find ways to improve their lot to seek informal and illegal means, usually to their severe cost. These impositions are made by the very colonisers who impoverished Africa and its people in the first place!!

The time for change is upon us, it has been upon us for centuries but there has to be a time when African people say 'no more,' 'enough is enough.'This is NOT to suggest that African people should reject the rest of the world or people on the continent who are not African. Africa has always been a welcoming continent. Africa is inclusive and is part of the global community. There are many, many people, not just African but also non-African, who love the continent and its people, who are prepared to dedicate themselves to the upliftment of life, livelihoods and well-being and reject 'colonialism in our time.'

Manifesto

Zambezi sunset

Welcome to the
Africa Information Centre
(AIC)

Children of Libonda, Western Zambia

Password protected pages

"Turning challenges into opportunities, promoting Africa and the African diaspora in the global arena"

Welcome to the homepage of the Africa Information Centre (AIC). We are a small dedicated team of development analysts and consultants specialising in Sub-Saharan Africa providing information and research to the development community, governments, academic and commercial organisations. We carry out research, both in the field and desk-based, compile reports and offer support and assistance to development projects on a consultancy basis. We also provide teaching on Africa in various academic disciplines at different levels, and offer workshops/seminars using our own materials.

The AIC is commited to the positive development of Africa and the upliftment of the lives of its people. As well as consultancy, we also engage in small-scale initiatives desined to build capacity amongst local communities in order for them to be able to design and enact their own development according to their own aspirations. An example of this was Barotseland.com, a community-based organisation, now unfortunately no more, registered and based in, Mongu, Western Zambia, dedicated to the recognition and valorisation of local history and heritage and to community based adaptation to climate change in the area stretching across the Upper Zambezi floodplain in western Zambia as far as the Angolan border.The knowledge sharing platform barotseland.net is the legacy of this effort.

The AIC also aims to provide access to a wide range of information and knowledge about Africa on the Internet and elsewhere. We hope that you enjoy your stay and find what you need. For a résumé on the AIC, including who we are, our origins, objectives and a mission statement, click here.

If your interest is news, you will find the Africa news pages packed with links to agencies and publications in Africa and around the world, dedicated to news specific to the African continent.

If you are busy studying Africa then you may find our academic links, libraries and maps pages useful.

If you are interested in one or more issues or features on a specific country, including statistical information, map, flag, news etc. then go to our fully clickable map and choose a country OR select a country from the bar below.

Country Links: (If you cannot see a box with country links, click here)

back to the top