African land grabs: New colonialism or African apathy?

Across Africa large tracts of land are being sold or leased to foreign countries and companies to grow food, flowers and biofuels. This land is handed over for a song and offers food and resource security to the richer parts of the world — Europe, the Middle East and Asia. But denies thousands of African people of the food they need to survive.

My natural instinct is to see the large firms and the bigger nations as the aggressors: the ones who are strong-arming smaller nations into deals they don’t want. It’s a new form of colonialism that takes advantage of the poor to feed the rich. And in some ways this is true.

But it’s all too easy to leave it there. It’s all too easy to leave responsibility to other people for an African problem. It is the way most of our brains have been geared to work. The liberal, the conservative, the commie and the fascist. We all have a tendency to see Africa as incapable of solving her own problems, incapable of standing up to her wealthier neighbours to the north, east and west. And frankly, that is bullshit.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We’ve all heard that saying. Especially when George Bush completely fumbled it in a speech in Tennessee. One of the greatest moments in modern politics in my opinion. But we shouldn’t jest, because across our continent, leaders are not just fumbling the words, they are fumbling the practice.

When the governments of Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo and any other African nation hand over arable land to a foreign country, they are going into those deals with their eyes open. They are going into those deals knowing what happened last time there was a scramble for Africa. They know the Europeans, the Saudis and the Chinese are looking out for themselves. But they turn a blind eye to the warning signs and sign on the dotted line. You can’t call a man a colonialist if you are a willing capitulator.

Of course I am not privy to every reason why these leaders are doing this. I am not in their shoes. But what I do know is whatever their reasoning (short-term profit, foreign investment or personal gain) they are giving away their people’s right to survival. They are giving away their future. They are breaking their promise to their nations, to their constituents and to themselves. And it is the moral duty of the people of that country and every other African country to stand up and say: “WTF? You can’t do that!”

Imagine if Germany gave away so much of its land to a Chinese company that ordinary Germans faced starvation. There wouldn’t be a single European who wouldn’t protest. If the Saudis sold off their nation’s grain supply for biofuel, you’d hear about it.

But in Africa, the complaints of the poor go unheard. The tribesmen, the impoverished farmers and the average Joe Shmoe just has to lump it. Even when successes are achieved, like in Madagascar where protests forced Daewoo to cancel the purchase of half of Madagascar’s arable land, it received little or no coverage. Even the article published this weekend in the M&G on the matter is taken from the Observer. Why does it take a foreign journalist to raise this issue? Surely the loss of Africa’s food supply is something that concerns us?

I don’t want to sound like another lame ass white afro-pessimist sipping on his Shiraz and bitching about things. I don’t want to give fuel to the people out there who will say: “Look, I told you so”.* I just want to see someone in power on this continent give a fuck about this issue. It’s important. It’s our food we’re talking about.

*Yes, Lyndall Beddy, that includes you!