Who Benefits from African Liberation? 

Well another year gone! The year 2009 was not just another year; it was the last year of the first decade of the second millennium.  We are squarely cemented into the 21st century. As we make our journey in the 2000s, I remembered the anxiety around the world in 1999—were all our computers going to crash?!  Technology was on my mind again during this milestone but for different reasons.

A United Nations study in 2009 reported that between 2003 and 2008 subscriptions of cell phones in Africa soared from 54 million to 350 million.  The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Information Economy Report stated that in some countries on the continent such as Seychelles and South Africa have subscription rates close to 90 percent of the population. This growth has been a tremendous benefit to populations which lacked landlines just a few years ago.  People are using mobile phones in a variety of ways: transfer money; access healthcare needs; to mobilize communities on important political and social issues.

So everything is great for Africa with this cell phone boom in the continent and the world? Well not exactly.  Most of thephones are manufactured abroad.  Also coltan, critical element to build them is extracted by multinational corporations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and processed externally. These companies have been directly or indirectly been implicated with fueling the ten-year conflict in the DRC which has claimed over 5 million lives. Coltan—short for columbite-tantalite—a black metallic ore which when processed stores energy in devices such as cell phones, laptop computers and DVD players.  Eighty percent of the coltan of in the world is in the DRC, but as during colonial-rule the country benefits little from this and other resources in its territory.  At independence in 1960 the first elected leader in DRC, Patrice Lumumba, asserted that the time had come for Congo to control its abundant resources.  But that was not to be as powerful foreign interests colluded to remove him and maintain the colonial economic stature.

The DRC in 2010 will celebrate 50 years of freedom from Belgium just as fifteen other African countries, including the most populous state, Nigeria.  Starting with the very first day of the year with Cameroon and ending with Mauritania in November.  I was reminded of this milestone by two things this past year: the 100th birthday of the late Kwame Nkrumah and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You ask why I link the two commemorations together.  Well Lincoln graduate Kwame Nkrumah—a Pan-Africanist, a founder of the Organization of African Unity (now African Union)—in 1957 became the first leader of his country Ghana.  Nkrumah and his nation became powerful symbols of African and African Diaspora pride. Ghana and its leader welcomed dozens of African Americans to assist the country: it became the final home for W.E.B. Du Bois.

Berlin in 1884-85 was the site where European powers carved up Africa a watershed moment in the ‘Scramble for Africa.’  The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 speeded up the colonization process of Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  In this millennium we see a new scramble for Africa: foreign countries and multinational corporations buying millions of acres.  The products from this ‘land grab’ consist of food crops such as wheat and rice, and bio fuels.  This development has been dubbed agri-colonialism because it perpetuates the system which has the continent’s resources extracted and exported, to be processed and used elsewhere. Communities which plowed their own soils for generations for their daily food needs are now the hired help—forced to grow items they do not use.

So as we embark our journey in the second decade in the 21st century, we in Africa and the African Diaspora have to ask ourselves what is independence and who does it benefit? 

Nicole C. Lee is the President of TransAfrica Forum