Speaking of neocolonialism, Ethiopia is a perfect example of a country that has been constantly fighting for its survival as a united polity at least since the end of the Second World War. Ethiopia has never been directly colonized by Western powers but it has found itself at the center of the post-colonial economic and political scramble that made it the target of the drivers of world domination. During the long years of the Cold War, Ethiopia was turned into a contested sphere of influence between the Western and Eastern European powers. One of the leading causes of Ethiopia’s victimization by neo-colonialism is its strategic position in the Horn of Africa as well as its natural resources and geographic location that makes it an ideal launching pad for economic penetration of Africa.
Much of the 19th century of Ethiopian history was spent in fighting against colonialism while most of the 20th century saw the struggle against neocolonialism that tried to control its economic resources as well as its natural wealth such as the Nile waters and the strategic access to Arabia through the Red Sea. The struggle against Western neo-colonial machinations and manipulations is still alive to this day as Western powers used proxy agents and domestic politics to apply pressure on Ethiopia’s quest for genuine economic independence from foreign domination and exploitation. The struggle to protect its national sovereignty and territorial integrity still remains a central aspect of nation building.
Ethiopia is still fighting to retain its historic polity against neocolonial incursions although the struggle has never been a walk in the garden. It has even proved to be more arduous than the fight against colonialism that had been concluded with Ethiopian victory against Italy twice within a century. It had taken a few days to route Italian forces at the historic Battle of Adwa and five years to beat Italian fascist occupiers. But it is now more than eighty years since the battle against neocolonialism has started against an invisible, more deceptive and more powerful and subtler enemy.
Ethiopia’s struggle against neocolonialism has passed at least through four phases. The first phase consisted of the post WWII relations between Ethiopia and the Western powers were defined by an-ill conceived and ill-executed alliance between Ethiopia and the United States that turned our country into a military post against Soviet expansion in the Horn with the building of strategic military intelligence infrastructures like the Kagnew station which was a listening and surveillance facility that put Ethiopia’s sovereignty into question.
The second phases of Western neocolonial incursion into Ethiopia could be defined as Soviet and Eastern European penetration of the country for the purpose of stopping post-war Western strategic gains and turn the region into a sphere of Soviet influence and economic appendage that caused so much havoc on Ethiopia’s domestic politics and economy.
The third phase of Western neo-colonial influence was the new Ethio-American alliance during the thirty year-long EPRDF rule that turned the country into Western and American political, economic and cultural fiefdom that led to the mass exodus of young Ethiopians to the West as immigrants in search of better opportunities but in fact was a massive brain drain that deprived the nation of its young and educated generation that survived the havocs of the Red Terror back in the 1970s and 1980s.
This alliance of stage bedfellows between a pro-communist and ethnic movement that was the EPRDF and a Western power had all the marks of a great power conducting its affairs in the Horn by proxy and heavy financial expenditures that amounted to bribes paid to the TPLF ruling elites in order to win over a cash-strapped country wrestling with the demons of democratic transition that miserably failed in 2018.
The last phase of Ethiopia’s neo-colonial moment is the present phase of its history which is marked by a more aggressive US foreign policy that is determined to maintain the country’s status as a poor country and thereby control it in order to promote Western domination of the Horn of Africa through manipulations of various political elites that are willing to collaborate against Ethiopia’s quest for economic revival through the GERD project and its possible emergence as an independent regional power in the Horn.
This phase of its history of neocolonial victimization has also a bizarre aspect as far as its manifestations and objectives are concerned. American imperial politics in Ethiopia has become all the more fierce and unfair now than ever before in history at this particular moment when the country is struggling to go the democratic way, adopt free enterprise as its economic policy and follow a self-inspired path out of poverty and against foreign aid. While Ethiopia should be a good friend of the West, the latter has pushed it to the margins of isolation, hatred, proxy conflict and foreign intervention in the ongoing war. America and its allies are behaving like old imperialists they are. They want Ethiopia to fall to their diktats, follow a foreign policy suited to promote their national interests in the country as well as in the greater Horn region and sabotage economic policies that would free the country from foreign bondage and domestic poverty.
The US chose to befriend the EPRDF regime that was dominated by a fascistic clique. It is now working hard to undermine Ethiopia, destabilize and turn it into chaos and anarchy as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. The US expects Ethiopia will be the last domino to fall under the axe of its cruel foreign policy. As a developing country with a complicated history, Ethiopia is no doubt facing internal problems.
Yet, the US should play a constructive role by serving as a beacon of peace and stability instead of becoming the hangman or the executioner that is putting the noose into Ethiopia’s neck. Neocolonialism is working to punish a country whose sin may be to try to learn the democratic way, do away with poverty or protect its sovereignty. The West with its neocolonial politics wants developing country to rely on its largess in order to maintain their secondary status in world politics.
Neocolonialism is indeed rearing its ugly head in Africa. It is sponsoring military coups and regime changes. It is exacerbating domestic conflicts and supporting rapacious elites to come to power as its agents and proxy rulers as of old. The present conjecture in African history reminds one the time of patriotic leaderships that emerged by the end of the colonial era. It is a replay of the political drams and assassinations of patriotic politicians in the former Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The CIA organized and engineered the assassination popular leaders like Patrice Lumumba and is still to this day behind the civil wars, conflicts and chaos in that country.
More recently, a number of African countries have turned to the old method of overthrowing legitimate governments through military coups and the installation of illegitimate regimes that even the African Union has dubbed illegal and unacceptable. The old methods of neocolonial machinations are now being practiced to return the continent back to its darkest days as it did in Ghana for instance back in the 1960s.
I recently tried to compile the most important books on colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa and what surprised me is that some of the books were written by the major political figures of the pre-and post-colonial period. The first book on my list is Neocolonialism, the last Stage of Imperialism by the icon of Africa’s struggle against Western colonialism, namely Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana who was overthrown in a military coup in 1965 while he was away on a visit to China.
Nkrumah classic against neocolonialism is a masterpiece of political analysis of the causes and consequences of Western neocolonial machinations that tried to reverse the gains of the struggles for independence that were effectively reversed in the following years. The book was also prophetic in the sense that it shed light on how neocolonialism was started to subdue African countries to a new form of colonialism or neocolonialism which is in fact colonialism by remote control so to say.
The book title reminds the reader of another book by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin who called his book Imperialism, the last stage of Capitalism. In this book Lenin analyzed how Western capitalism was transformed into a more powerful economic system that sought territorial expansion in its search for markets, in turn leading to colonial occupation of previously independent nations and their exploitations and oppression by powerful multinational corporations like the British East Indian Company whose tentacles extended to almost all countries of the world in search of raw materials and markets.
Kwame Nkrumah had borrowed from Lenin’s analysis of imperialism in order to build his own analytical framework in order to see the effects of Western imperialism on Africa that led to the indirect occupation and subjugation and exploitation of formerly colonial countries. Nkrumah did this by borrowing heavily from Lenin as well as by looking at economic and political developments though his own theoretical paradigm. What is tragic about Nkrumah is the fact that while he was the prophet of neocolonialism, he was also its victim. The first Pan-Africanist leader who led his country to independence was made the victim of the revanchist politics of Western powers.
Among the books that are becoming famous again in our time are The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevin’s, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor, A Great Place To Have A War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick, Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (Hardcover) by Geoffrey Wawro, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Paperback) by Lars Schoultz, Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, and others.
The new generation of African patriots has thus a big arsenal of theoretical and empirical knowledge to fight against neo-colonialism and its manifestations. The legacy of Nkrumah and leaders of his caliber and vision are still alive. Africa should therefore rise to the occasion to fight against this old foe that can be defeated only with continental unity and solidarity. It is also time for the African Union to live up to the spirit and letter of its charter and show concern and militancy against the latest victims of neocolonial machinations and the local elites who are working in tandem with Africa’s foreign foes that have long proved to be incorrigible, heartless and maniacal.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD NOVEMBER 5/2021
