Tag: africa

Anti-Historical ‘The Woman King’ Lies About Africa’s Slave Trade

“The Woman King,” a new “historical action epic” starring Viola Davis, has been treated to laudatory reviews by the corporate press. It has been called “indelible and truly inspiring” in an ABC News review which features the subhead “Black women only — no white saviors need apply.” The Daily Beast labeled it “an absolute blast of a cinematic experience,” praising its “thick layers of history.”

Set in 1823 in the West African kingdom of Dahomey (modern Benin), the movie pits the innocent Dahomans, protected by the elite all-female Agojie army, against the evil Oyo Empire, which operates as a brutal arm of the European slave trade and wishes to force Dahomey into providing slaves. Dahomey is portrayed as a kingdom that only wishes for peace and autonomy, whose king, Ghezo (John Boyega), is looking for alternatives to the awful trade in which his tribe has been reluctantly forced to participate. Besides manfully defending the citizens and king of Dahomey, the Agojie, under their leader Nanisca (Davis), are also proponents of ending the slave trade and replacing it with the cultivation of palm oil.

Throughout the film, Dahomey is presented as a small, put-upon kingdom that only seeks harmony and desires the destruction of the evil trade in human bodies — led by greedy Europeans — which plagued the region. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “The Woman King” is an “incredible true story” about “this amazing group of female soldiers who caused such an act of resistance that slavery paused for a time.”

The problem? Almost none of this is true.

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U.S. PLAYED SECRET ROLE IN NIGERIA ATTACK THAT KILLED MORE THAN 160 CIVILIANS

THE UNITED STATES played an unacknowledged role in the 2017 bombing of an internally displaced persons’ camp in Nigeria that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children.

A surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp, which housed 43,000 people and was controlled by the Nigerian military, before a jet arrived and bombed the area where people draw water from a borehole, survivors of the attack said. The jet then circled and dropped another bomb on the tents of displaced civilians sheltering there.

The Nigerian air force expressed regret for carrying out the airstrike, which also killed nine aid workers and seriously wounded more than 120 people. But the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

Evidence suggests that the U.S. launched a near unprecedented internal investigation of the attack because it secretly provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian armed forces, a contribution hinted at by Nigerian military officials at the time. The U.S. inquiry, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was ordered by the top American general overseeing troops in Africa and was specifically designed to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendations for disciplinary action, according to the document.

Conducted as part of a long-running counterinsurgency campaign against the terrorist group Boko Haram, the January 17, 2017, attack on the camp, located in Rann, Nigeria, near the Cameroonian and Chadian borders, also destroyed at least 35 structures, including shelters for war victims who had been forced from their homes.

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Uganda Will Harvest the DNA of its Citizens Under National ID Program

The East African nation of Uganda is announcing plans to begin harvesting and tracking the DNA and biometric data of its citizens under an updated version of the country’s national ID program, which will see genetic information added to the ID cards that Ugandans are legally required to obtain.

Uganda began its national ID program in 2014, giving the cards a 10-year lifespan before they reach expiration.  Under plans recently announced by the nation’s government, when cards start expiring in 2024, Uganda will begin to harvest the DNA of its citizens for use in the revamped national ID program, though it isn’t clear exactly how the government plans to extract the DNA from its citizens.

In addition to information on Ugandan’s DNA profiles, the updated ID cards will feature biometric data and fingerprints, as well as information gathered from the eyes of Ugandan citizens using scan technology. All this, the government says, will help speed up the identity verification process at government offices and administrative centers, as well as assist law enforcement in their investigations. The cards are also digitized, giving the government instant access to citizens’ information via a massive national catalog.

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Federal authorities arrest accused Liberian war criminal ‘Dragon Master’ living in Philadelphia

A Liberian immigrant living in Philadelphia has been arrested by federal authorities and charged with fraudulently hiding his background as a high-ranking member of a rebel group — he called himself “Dragon Master” — that is accused of committing atrocities during a Liberian civil war.

Laye Sekou Camara, of Southwest Philadelphia, is accused of lying about his background in 2011 to obtain a visa to enter the United States and then later to obtain a green card.

Camara then allegedly used the green card to falsely characterize his background on a Pennsylvania identification application in 2017, according to a criminal complaint submitted to Magistrate Judge Richard A. Lloret and publicly filed last week. Camara is charged with the use of an immigration document obtained by fraud.

In news accounts dating back to 2003, during and shortly after the conflict known as the Second Liberian Civil War, prosecutors say Camera is identified as a brigadier general with the rebel faction known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD. Liberia’s first civil war was fought for most of the 1990s and left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

U.S. authorities have led the charge in recent years to bring Liberian war criminals to justice — particularly in Philadelphia, where thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict were relocated in the 1990s and 2000s.

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The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property

The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.

But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.

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At least 89 killed by mystery disease as WHO deploys task force amid fears of outbreak

The World Health Organization has deployed a rapid response task force to South Sudan to investigate a mysterious illness that has left at least 89 people dead.

The ministry of health in South Sudan has reported fast-spreading illness in the northern town of Fangak, in the Jonglei state, which local scientists haven’t been able to identify.

The region was recently hit with severe flooding — with health officials tasked with gathering samples to help identify the deadly disease.

Local health officials in Fangak said initial samples from the sick returned negative results for cholera. 

Sheila Baya, a spokesperson for the WHO, spoke to the BBC, saying the team of scientists had to reach Fangak via helicopter due to the flooding.

She added that the group is waiting for transport to return them to the capital, Juba, on Wednesday.

She said: “We decided to send a rapid response team to go and do risk assessment and investigation.

“That is when they will be able to collect samples from the sick people — but provisionally the figure that we got was that there were 89 deaths.”

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Investigation Finds WHO Employees Raped or Sexually Abused Dozens of Women During Congo Ebola Crisis; Higher-ups “Were Aware” of the Rampant Abuse “But Did Not Act”

According to a shocking new report that was released on Tuesday, Eighty-three ‘humanitarian’ aid workers, including several that were employed by the World Health Organization (WHO), committed horrific sex abuse and exploitation while they were stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the country’s 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak.

The report was compiled by an independent commission that looked into the allegations after the Thompson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian uncovered over 50 accusations of sexual abuse by aid workers that had been submitted last year.

After investigating for months, the commission uncovered that AT LEAST 21 of the 83 offenders were employed by the WHO and had routinely demanded sex in exchange for, or to keep their jobs.

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Are children ‘dying like dogs’ in effort to build better batteries?

“Our children are dying like dogs.”

That is the sorrowful statement of one Congolese mother whose son and cousin died while working the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

She and other parents like her are part of a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C., in 2019 seeking to hold Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Tesla accountable for what they allege is profiting off the misery of child labor in their quest for cobalt.

“Cobalt is a key component of every rechargeable lithium-ion battery in all of the gadgets made by defendants and all other tech and electric car companies in the world that has brought on the latest wave of cruel exploitation fueled by greed, corruption and indifference to a population of powerless, starving Congolese people,” the suit reads.

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