Introduction

 

“Judge me by my actions, not my words.”

Lord Byron, nineteenth century poet

 

At the end of 2014 I spent a brief, but exciting, five weeks traveling through Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The trip provided a glimpse of life in East Africa. One striking contrast with Canada was the freedom kids had to roam. Siblings, older children and neighbourhood adults supervised the littlest ones. I admired the social trust regarding children, but held my breath every time I saw a six or seven-year-old grasping a toddler’s hand mere feet from a road.

A highlight of my travels was running into a group of kids playing football in Mwanza, Tanzania, who were happy to have a “Muzungu” join their game. Rather than chase the ball, the youngest in the group spent most of the game doing flips. It was fun, but didn’t do my team any favours!

After 3,000 km in three countries I can confidently say that the buses are less comfortable than those in Canada. Bumps repeatedly sent me flying. But while the road jolted me from my seat the stops made it so one needn’t get out. At every stop individuals sold nuts, fruits, popcorn, drinks and other goodies through the window or aisle. Crossing Tanzania a young man got on with a large bag of warm corn and slowly made his way up the aisle peeling a cob to whet the appetite of anyone who looked his way. By the time the driver let him off he was tens of kilometers from his starting point though carrying a much lighter load. The corn seller was lucky. Another vendor ended up miles from where he started without selling a single biscuit.

The entrepreneurial spirit is much stronger in East Africa than Canada. Notwithstanding certain ideological claims, however, it’s highly inefficient. It may be convenient to purchase a bag of nuts from the comfort of one’s bus seat, but a large number of sellers at every stop reflects limited opportunities and is a poor use of people’s capacities.

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This book details Canada’s role in exploiting Africa and undermining the sovereignty of its people. Canadian policy provides a unique window into Western exploitation of Africa and this book can hopefully contribute to overcoming widespread ignorance of African affairs.

The first half of the book is largely organized chronologically while each chapter in the second half covers a region or theme in Canada-Africa relations. I focus on sub-Saharan Africa, but the northern part of the continent has been included where it fits the general pattern.

Prior to Confederation in 1867 the territories of current day Canada played a small part in the transatlantic slave trade. For over 200 years, New France and the British North America colonies held Africans in bondage and Canadians helped suppress Caribbean slave rebellions. Most significantly, the Atlantic provinces literally fed the slave system, generating great wealth selling cheap, high-protein cod to keep thousands of “enslaved people working 16 hours a day.”

As the European powers transitioned from stealing Africans to taking the continent’s resources, Canadians helped Britain and the Belgian King conquer various parts of the continent. Four hundred Canadians traveled halfway across the world to beat back anti-colonial resistance in the Sudan in 1885 while a decade and a half later thousands more fought in defence of British imperial interests in the southern part of the continent. Usually trained at Kingston’s Royal Military College, Canadians also led military expeditions, built rail lines and surveyed colonial borders across the continent.

At the same time as Canadians fought with the imperial forces, Canadian missionaries helped the colonial powers penetrate African society. Gripped by a desire to rid “darkest Africa” of “heathenism”, in 1893 a couple of Torontonians founded what later became the largest interdenominational Protestant mission on the continent. By the end of the colonial period as many as 2,500 Canadians were proselytizing across Africa.

These Christian activists sometimes worked alongside Canadian colonial officials. Hundreds of Canadians administered British colonies, even rising to become governor in Ghana, Northern Nigeria and Kenya. Throughout the various stages of the colonial project, Canada provided political, military, economic and moral support.

As independence struggles grew, Ottawa opposed or abstained on many anticolonial resolutions at the UN and repeatedly called for independence movements to be patient. Canadian officials regularly condemned liberation movements for engaging in armed struggle and despite delivering (free of charge) weaponry to the colonial powers, Ottawa never sold, let alone gave, arms to anticolonial movements.

Upon independence Canada immediately promoted participation in the Commonwealth (and later La Francophonie) as a way to keep African countries within the colonial fold. Ottawa also delivered aid in the hopes of dissuading newly independent countries from following wholly independent paths or falling under the influence of the Communist bloc.

But when African leaders strayed too far from Western dictates, Ottawa backed more coercive methods of maintaining its influence. The Canadian military played a significant role in overthrowing African independence leaders Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah.

As the post–independence anticolonial spirit dissipated, the leading capitalist nations took the offensive. Since the mid-1980s Ottawa has pressed African countries to follow neoliberal economic prescriptions, spending tens of millions of dollars in Canadian “aid” to promote International Monetary Fund structural adjustment policies.

Canadian companies grabbed a significant share of the spoils of the neoliberal war on government. A number of Canadian corporations promoted, facilitated or profited from the privatization drive across the continent. While some prominent Canadian public utilities took over or managed state-owned companies, one relatively unknown Ottawa-based consulting firm led corporate Canada’s assault on Africa’s public sector.

Canadian mining corporations have been the main beneficiaries of “free market” reforms on the continent. Since the late 1980s Canadian mining investment in Africa has grown 150 fold, surpassing $30 billion. Extractive companies have benefited from aggressive government lobbying and a slew of “aid” initiatives to advance their interests. Yet Canadian mining companies are often bitterly resisted by local communities.

Nowhere have Canadian extractive companies been linked to more rights violations than in eastern Congo. Canadian officials also exacerbated conflict in that country and, with Senator Romeo Dallaire in the lead, have promulgated a remarkable deception about the terrible violence that has engulfed Africa’s Great Lakes region.

At the same time as the Canadian military became involved in Rwanda, racist Canadian soldiers tortured and killed Somalis in 1993. Then in 2006 Ottawa supported the violent US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

Alongside the emerging US Africa Command (AFRICOM) Canadian forces have played a growing role in African military affairs. Ottawa exerts influence on the continent through its training initiatives and participation in regional security initiatives. Canadian naval vessels also patrolled the coast while the military sought to house equipment and soldiers in a number of African countries.

While deeply involved in African military affairs, Canadian officials largely turned a blind eye to the continent’s leading threats, namely corporate tax evasion and climate change. While Western commentators are quick to denounce corruption in Africa, they generally ignore the role multinationals play in it and the fact that the continent loses more from corporate tax evasion. Starving governments of much-needed income, many Canadian companies evade their African taxes through various morally and legally questionable means.

More than elsewhere, anthropogenic global warming poses a particularly profound threat to large swaths of the continent. Demonstrating near total indifference to the impact of global warming in Africa, the Canadian government has pushed to grow the global “carbon bomb”.

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The twin political purposes of this book are to engender solidarity with Africans and antipathy towards Canada’s foreign-policy intelligentsia. Since 2012 at least three books have been published on Canadian foreign policy in Africa: Canada-Africa Relations: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, Canadian Foreign Policy in Africa: Regional Approaches to Peace, Security and Development and Canada and Africa in the New Millennium: The Politics of Consistent Inconsistency. Purported to be serious investigations, they instead demonstrate academia’s broad subservience to state and corporate power.

In the opening chapter of Canada-Africa Relations: Looking Back, Looking Ahead editors Rohinton Medhora and Yiagadeesen Samy write: “Even if very ad hoc and reactive, Canada’s engagement, whether it was for developmental reasons, peacekeeping, nation building, democracy promotion or human rights, reflected familiar Canadian values. Commercial interests, although present, have never been a defining feature of that relationship.”1 One wonders how the dispossession of First Nations fits their definition of “Canadian values”, but leaving this aside, Ottawa has repeatedly demonstrated its indifference to both democracy and human rights in Africa. Additionally, anyone with access to Google can easily find examples of corporations, particularly the mining industry, shaping Canadian policy in African countries.

Echoing Medhora and Samy, the author of Canadian Foreign Policy in Africa: Regional Approaches to Peace, Security and Development, Edward Akuffo, theorizes the “moral identity” supposedly driving policy. “Canada’s overall foreign-policy orientation is embedded in the maintenance of moral identity — the pursuit of humane oriented foreign-policy objectives, including human rights, human security and poverty alleviation.” For Akuffo “Canada’s moral identity is the core element of the non-imperial internationalist approach to Canadian foreign-policy in Africa. Non-imperial internationalism draws on constructivists’ approach to international relations and focuses on the role of ideas in shaping the identity and interests of actors in the international system.”2

According to Akuffo, Canadian politicians who make lofty pronouncements about aiding Africans are compelled to fulfill them otherwise they may lose their “moral identity”, which largely motivates Canadian policy towards the continent. The logic may be circular and his argument obviously downplays the influence of corporations and Washington over policy, but at least Akuffo is making clear the underlying assumption of most liberal foreign commentators: Listen to the high-minded statements Canadian officials make not what they actually do.

Academics can wax lyrical about the “Canadian values” or “moral identity” shaping policy in Africa because mainstream scholarship has largely sanitized Canadian foreign policy history. Ottawa’s decades long endorsement of colonialism in Africa, for instance, is almost entirely unacknowledged in the foreign-policy literature. In a chapter of Canada-Africa Relations: Looking Back, Looking Ahead devoted to diplomatic relations with the continent, Queens Professor David C. Elder notes that Canada opened its first trade office on the continent in South Africa in 1902 and that trade offices were established during the colonial period in the Congo, Egypt and Rhodesia.3 But he fails to point out how this represented a tacit diplomatic (among other realms) endorsement of colonial rule.

Elder is unable to mention this politically salient point because it runs counter to the large body of liberal scholarship glorifying Canadian foreign policy, especially the post-World War II period. For example, prominent foreign affairs writers Andrew Cohen and Jennifer Welsh call the 1940s and 50s the “Golden age” of Canadian diplomacy.4 Either these critics of Stephen Harper’s aggressive foreign policy back Ottawa’s support for colonialism in Africa, are ignorant of it or feel compelled to mythologize Canadian foreign policy history. (In scanning the literature one of the only explicit comments on Canada’s diplomatic endorsement of colonial rule I came across was in a PhD thesis titled At Arms Length: Canada’s Relations with Commonwealth West Africa 1957-1977. Chukwudi Pettson Onwumere notes, “direct official contact with black Africa was nonexistent, probably due to the colonial status of the African states and Canada’s close association with the African colonial powers, particularly Britain.”5 A few pages later Onwumere adds: “Ottawa had neither made any public utterances condemning British colonial policy nor had it requested the speeding up of the giving of independence to members of the Commonwealth either.”6)

While mainstream scholarship rarely strays far from the state and corporate perspective, the dominant media is even less critical. The corporate media (and CBC) permit only a narrow spectrum of opinion regarding Canadian policy in Africa.

Since 2008 Canada has concluded and/or signed fifteen African Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements (FIPAs), which give Canadian corporations the right to sue governments internationally for pursuing policies that interfere with their profit making. But I was unable to find a single criticism of an African FIPA in a major Canadian news outlet. Even when Ottawa signed a long-lasting FIPA with an interim, military-dominated regime in Burkina Faso the media ignored it. Four major dailies refused to publish a (tame) opinion piece I submitted on this flagrant disregard for electoral democracy in Burkina Faso.

In probably the most remarkable example of media bias, criticism of Senator Romeo Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda have been almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media even though his commander published a book criticizing the Canadian general’s bias in favour of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As mentioned in Chapter 12, a Canadian news search found only three mentions of Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks) by Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of the mid-1990s UN mission in Rwanda. (A National Post review headlined “Allegations called ‘ridiculous’: UN boss attacks general,” an Ottawa Citizen piece headlined “There are many sides to the Rwanda saga” and a letter by an associate of Dallaire). Other critical assessments of Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda have fared no better including Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later in which the authors “suggest that Dallaire should be regarded as a war criminal for positively facilitating the actual mass killings of April-July, rather than taken as a hero for giving allegedly disregarded warnings that might have stopped them.” On the other hand, a Canadian news search of “Romeo Dallaire Rwanda” elicited over 6,000 articles that generally provide a positive portrayal of Dallaire. Similarly, a search for mention of Dallaire’s 2003 book Shake Hands with the Devil elicited 1,700 articles.

While the dominant media rarely says so, western geostrategic interests and corporations generally drive policy. Popular opinion and pressure has played little role in shaping policy towards the continent. In Canada, the Congo Crisis, and UN Peacekeeping, 1960-64 Kevin Spooner provides a striking example. “At the departmental level, public opinion rarely seems to have been a concern. One External Affairs departmental memo enumerated no less than 10 major considerations in Canada’s Congo policy — public opinion did not make the list. Moreover, documents prepared by External Affairs and National Defence never emphasized public opinion as a significant matter.”7 Spooner is referring to Canada’s substantial role in the UN military mission that enabled the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, dealing a significant blow to that country, and the continent’s post-independence aspirations.

Since that time a number of social movements have emerged to challenge different elements of Canadian foreign policy on the continent. At the end of the 1960s some agitated against Canadian support for Portuguese rule in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau while in the 1970s and 80s a more significant movement campaigned against Canadian complicity with apartheid South Africa. More recently, diaspora communities have questioned Canadian backing of Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame and Ottawa’s silence concerning the illegal 2006 US/Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. A number of groups have also worked to expose Canadian mining abuses on the continent.

But we need a great deal more public engagement. Anthropogenic global warming and technological innovation has made it more important than ever for us to see ourselves as part of a collective humanity. We share a single planet and must begin to act like good neighbours to all who call Earth their home.