23 Nov 2011

How can Africa prevent the plunder of its lands by Western powers?

The history of the last 500 years on the African continent is a history of the plunder of its resources and the violent exploitation of its peoples by foreign powers who accumulated wealth at the cost of the suffering of millions of Africans and the destruction of their resources. The riches discovered by the first European navigators to reach the coasts of Africa spurred the various European powers of the day to invade the continent and subjugate its peoples through armed force, eventually perpetrating the ultimate theft of claiming the right of ownership over these lands, and even over the people living there, who were traded as slaves. The modern-day borders of most of the countries of Africa are the result of struggles between those European powers and have nothing to do with the territories of the native cultures that originally populated the continent, which were torn apart and lumped together according to the interests and possibilities of the colonial powers. The colonies of the German invaders were themselves swallowed up by the powers that defeated them in the two great wars unleashed to divvy up control of the world. Among the many ways the invaders found to appropriate the continent's resources, one of the most typical was the establishment of large plantations of sugar cane, cacao, peanuts, tobacco, oil palm and rubber trees initially based on slave labor and later on semi-slavery. In this edition of the show we ask; how can Africa prevent the plunder of its lands by Western powers?