WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY AFRICA US News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI, #175 - The African quagmire (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The declared intention of the Meloni government to act in Africa as a

subagent of the policy of the United States and Europe, in fact a
candidate to succeed the role once played by the former colonial powers
on the Continent, requires paying particular attention to the current
crisis of the Republic of Niger, a country located within the Sahel
area, which is the one that divides Mediterranean Africa from central
and southern Africa.
This area has peculiar characteristics that should be remembered because
they are little known in our country due to the constant lack of
interest in Africa and its problems.
The Sahel is made up of a group of countries, designed on the
configuration of the settlements of the Western powers and born as a
consequence of colonial domination, following the decisions taken by the
Berlin conference of 1884, with which the great powers of the time
(France, Great Britain, Germany, the United States) decided to proceed
with the division of the areas of influence and penetration in that
still unexplored part of the African continent. However, this area had
well-defined peculiar characteristics in terms of religious affiliation,
uses, customs and cultural traditions, because it had been the object of
Islamic penetration, which had occurred, starting from the 12th century
through the birth of Islamic brotherhoods, of Sufi orientation, who
professed a mild and tolerant Islam, customs and rituals were largely
incorporated into the rules of the brotherhoods made up of the various
feki (Marabutti, spiritual masters) who over time gave life to religious
communities, while at the same time covering the role of political
leaders of the communities.[1]
The functioning and structures of the brotherhoods proved to be
particularly suitable for penetrating into the autochthonous societies
since the Sufi masters transmitted principles and practiced teaching
orally, in perfect coherence with the tradition of community life of
those populations, testified to their religiosity through mercy and the
example of a frugal life, they claimed the ability to heal and perform
miracles, they used the interpretations of dreams and nocturnal
apparitions to strike popular credulity, boasting in this way their
communion with God, they designed a way for the faithful, that is, a set
of behaviors and rules. that they were supposed to guarantee them the
possibility of reaching heaven.
Operating in this way, Islam had managed to establish political control
over the area, hybridizing at least in part and to an ever greater
extent as the Islamic presence extended towards the south of the continent.

The colonization of Africa

Western development and penetration into the African continent took the
road of settlements on the coast, often used as commercial emporiums or
support points for navigation. Here were created gathering places for
slaves coming from inside Africa, raided by local potentates, which were
used as labor at no cost for the colonization of South America and the
United States, while the flow of slaves was not irrelevant towards the
colonial possessions of the East. The settlement on the continent begins
only later, with the penetration towards the interior and the
progressive enlargement of the coastal possessions as the exploration of
the internal territories proceeded. The spread of Christianity as a
religion of the colonizers accompanied and supported this process,
therefore it began in a later period and proceeded from southern and
central Africa towards the north, with settlements of missionaries from
the Christian Churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
In the Sahel area, only starting from the nineteenth century, the
animist and Islamic presence attempted to replace the forced conversion
to Christianity, in a massive way, with a not insignificant presence of
Protestant Christian religious confessions which have evolved over time,
in turn, towards original transformations and hybridizations, giving
life to Churches that have merged with the local culture and traditions
of the area.
Reconstructing Africa's previous history helps us to understand why the
Sahel is the area in which the attempt at re-Islamisation is being
fought today, implemented by radical Islam, especially the Wahhabi, who,
considering the Islam of this area to have degenerated , has taken upon
himself the banner of the fight against inequalities and
underdevelopment and against colonial exploitation, arguing that the
degradation of the area is due to religious choices, to the betrayal of
the orthodox principles and practices of Islam, in which only salvation
from the exploitation and moral degradation of populations.
That is why it proposes the fight against Western culture, schooling,
conversions, the recovery of traditional customs, the submission of
women, the return to the original and founding principles of Islam as
the only remedy for the current situation. This explains the activism in
the area of movements such as Boko Haram, the frequent kidnappings of
young women, their forced marriages, their enslavement, the burning of
schools, the destruction of religious buildings, the massacres of entire
communities .[2]In this action, radical Islam is opposed, even
militarily, by the Western powers which, since they exercise significant
control over the area, exploiting its resources, especially minerals,
see their interests threatened.
In particular, the dependence of the French and European nuclear
industry on supplies of uranium from Niger is known, which is one of the
main producers, also in order not to have to resort to uranium from
Russia - not by chance excluded by the sanctions and by the embargo -
despite the war in Ukraine.

The crisis of French control and the growth of the Chinese presence

In proceeding with the division of Africa, the colonial powers initially
parceled out their possessions, to then progressively expel Germany,
after the First World War, and, already in the first phase of
decolonisation, Portugal, while the former British and French colonies
have remained - some more and some less - under the hegemonic control of
the former colonial powers, masked behind an apparent independence,
achieved with great difficulty, but complicated by the increasingly
significant presence in the United States. It took decades for these
relationships to weaken to the point that even today they cannot be said
to be completely exhausted.
At a still later stage, Chinese and Russians appeared on the mainland.
The former date back to 1965 with Zhou Enlaii's first trip to Tanzania.
The increasingly close relations also have political consequences: very
often the leaders of various states on the continent are those who have
received political training from Communist Party officials, such as the
current president of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Africa is so
important to China that it is traditional for the Chinese foreign
minister's first overseas trip each year to go to the African continent.
In these sixty years, Chinese policy towards Africa has been
distinguished by a massive economic and commercial penetration,
particularly effective, characterized by proposing itself as builders of
infrastructures useful to the various countries, obtaining in exchange
the management for a good number of years, thus realizing the economic
enfeoffment of the country to the Chinese trading area. Chinese
companies have built over ten thousand kilometers of railway and
motorway sections on the continent, dozens of ports, power plants,
hospitals, schools, as well as religious buildings such as the Algiers
minaret or public buildings such as the headquarters of the African
Union in Addis Ababa, i.e. the center African institution par excellence.
In 2022 China confirmed its position as the continent's leading trading
partner with 282 billion dollars of trade, an increase of eleven percent
compared to 2021 and it was generous, to the point of continuing trade
relations, despite the difficult debt situation of different countries.
Lastly, in December 2022, an agreement was signed for the creation of a
railway link with Simandou (Guinea), site of the main iron ore deposit
in Africa and the port of the capital Conakry.
China also clearly dominates cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, which alone has about fifty percent of global reserves. It is
a fundamental material for the development of electric cars, a sector in
which, not surprisingly, Chinese companies are leaders. In the first
months of this year, the work was started on a large oil field in
western Uganda with the involvement of two Chinese state-owned
companies, Offshore Oil Engineering Co. and China Petroleum Engineering
& Construction Corp and many other examples could still be done. It
follows that China's grip on the continent is solid at best.

The Russian presence in Africa and the Sahel

A different approach has been used by Russia to establish its presence
on the continent, starting from the struggles of liberation movements
against colonial domination. Since then the Soviet Union, which has now
been replaced by the Russian state, has ensured political, financial and
military support to the various national liberation movements,
stipulating, once independence has been achieved, commercial and
political agreements to support the new state entities. Russia has
inherited this political and military presence and today stands out in
providing the various governments of the area with military support and
support for the regimes that gradually took office, following the crisis
of the fragile and weak Western-style democracies, created with the
support from the former colonizers.
Wishing to proceed with the mapping of the Russian presence on the
continent, it would be necessary to have much more space than that
available here: an articulated and punctual reconstruction of the
existing is impossible to achieve with the available spaces. However, it
will suffice here to draw attention to what the situation is today in
the various countries of the Sahel to understand the nature of the
problems to be faced and what are the possible scenarios facing Western
countries and in particular one will find the Italy, since it intends to
embark on the African adventure, retracing the inglorious paths of the
Italian armies on the continent.
Restricting our attention to the Sahel area and proceeding from the west
as a test, we find the territory of Mauritania militarily occupied by
Morocco, where a ferocious repression of the population has been going
on for years, while the POLISARIO (Popular Liberation Front of Saguia el
Hamra and the Río de Oro) tries to oppose a desperate and isolated
resistance to the Moroccan occupier, without international support,
despite the blatant violation of human rights throughout the territory
and the denial of every most elementary political freedom.[3]Entering
the continent, we point out that both Mali, a country with an ancient
Islamic settlement and a great cultural heritage, is under the attack of
radical Islam, attributable to a mild and dialoguing Islam,
characterized by the presence of a great culture, endowed with a
precious heritage of manuscripts, the result of Arabic transcriptions of
the ancient texts, not surprisingly the object of the iconoclastic work
of destruction of culture, implemented by fundamentalist Islam, which
prefers to set ancient libraries on fire.
claims by local ethnic components (Tuareg) and Islamic fundamentalists,
France intervened (with troops and bombings by Ecovas (Economic
community of West African States) to which 15 African countries in the
area belong. The intervention proved to be ineffective, causing a
growing crisis within Ecovas - with the defections of Ghana,
Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia and the suspension of Mali
itself - for which the tools for an intervention by the western part
seem to have disappeared. the country's government is governed by a
military junta that has relied on Wagner and Russia's support for its
security.
Now alongside Burkina Faso, a country that from 1983 lived until 1987 -
President Thomas Sankara - a brief but intense experience of
revolutionary social reforms that had completely changed the living
conditions and well-being of the populations, making the country
self-sufficient from the point of view from a food point of view, thanks
to land redistribution reforms and democratic and popular management of
power.
The joint intervention of France and the United States led in 1987 to
the murder of the incumbent President and seven of his collaborators and
to the beginning of a series of military crimes which progressively
devastated the country, restoring the power of the multinationals which
exploit it agriculture, but at the same time laid the foundations for
the development of an opposition to power dominated by Islamism which
presents itself as the extreme solution to the country's social
problems. However, jihadist extremism has encountered strong social
resistance. but past political experiences experienced by Burkina Faso
society seem to have laid the foundations for antibodies capable of
reacting at the same time, both to Western interference and to jihadist
extremism, which in fact destroys - as has been said - the traditional
cultural values of the country attributable to a mild and tolerant
Islamism. In this situation, in 2022, a military coup d'état who fought
against jihadism, but who refer to the tradition of the left in the
country, takes power and asks for and obtains international support from
Russia.
If the gaze instead turns to the east coast of Africa, always looking at
the same latitude and proceeding towards the center of the continent, we
find immediately to the north the countries of the Horn of Africa, with
Somalia and Eritrea, devastated by the civil war and by the more radical
Islamism and, in parallel, the presence in the extreme east of Ethiopia,
a country also subject to Russian influence, one of the most important
and populous on the continent which aspires to play a role of local
power in the area. Ruled by a government that has embraced the "theology
of prosperity" and torn apart by internal conflict with the Tigris
region, the country has to deal with the strong influence of Islamism
and the "Islamic courts" in the south, which claim spaces of power
autonomous management of the company.[4]
Proceeding westward, we meet South Sudan, a country in which there is a
significant and declared presence of Wagner which controls the mining
exploitation of the country, which is extremely poor but rich in gold,
silver, diamond, coltan, tungsten, uranium, copper and other precious
minerals, followed by an equally unstable state, Chad, a country
tormented by political violence and recurrent coup attempts,
economically underdeveloped, among the poorest and most corrupt in the
world. Most of its inhabitants are engaged in subsistence farming and
the country, with a total poverty-stricken population of 18 million, is
overrun by 1.13 million displaced people - one of Africa's largest
refugee populations. Of these, 800,000 are South Sudanese, 126,000
Eritreans, 58,000 Ethiopians, hosted mainly in two camps in the east of
the country. Its economy, once based on the cultivation of cotton, is
now made up of oil exports to China. This country too is governed by a
military dictatorship which frequently practices abuses such as
extrajudicial executions, arbitrary incarceration, while the security
forces and armed militias repress civil liberties.[5]
Between the two parts of the continent - just described - remained
Niger, which constituted a wedge which, starting from the heart of the
continent, made up of one of its most populous states, Nigeria, projects
towards the borders with Libya and constitutes the natural corridor
through which the populations fleeing from Central Africa and the
neighboring territories to the east and west of it, described above,
pass, from which the populations are forced to flee because of the wars
and the absolute poverty that reigns there. The strategic role of Niger
as a migratory route derives from this situation, the main fact that has
led to the location of French, American and Italian military garrisons,
openly aimed at stabilizing the country, but in reality projected to try
to control and hinder the migratory flow , acting as a hinge for the
transit of fleeing populations. The coup d'état underway in the country
throws this presence into crisis and increases the destabilization of
the area, allowing those who, like Russia, control the countries on its
side, to look with interest not only at its economic resources, but also
to its strategic role in containing the mass of African populations
destined to pour towards Europe.

Meloni the African

The "Mattei plan", designed by the Italian center-right government, fits
into this scenario and in the de facto situation has little chance of
having any effectiveness, since it was conceived with respect to a
profoundly changed international scenario, of which the Italian
government has no including neither features nor complexity.
The international crisis, triggered by the war in Ukraine, accelerated
the end of the first phase of globalisation, produced a profound change
in the international scenario, complicated by the simultaneous start of
a profound economic and social restructuring which has Europe as its
center and looks with concern for climate change and energy problems,
drawing new priorities and new economic and strategic choices.
This perspective of new economic scenarios, of new balances, moves from
the conviction that the existing economic model needs to be profoundly
modified at a global level and replaced with what we could define as a
"court economy"[6]which has some peculiar characteristics as regards the
volumes production, economic exchanges, the flow of goods, the balance
between the various production areas, and aims at achieving profit
within a production model that assumes recycling as a point of reference
and self-sufficiency in production islands as an objective.
The model envisages economies, no longer based on the high value of
logistics and exchanges between the various production areas, which we
could define on a scale, in some ways self-sufficient, which start from
the belief that the world is divided into plates, delimited by
municipalities interests, designed on the double physical-continental
criterion, or constituted by economic-cultural islands, in some way
homogeneous, in which convergence and commonality of interests occur,
which can also give rise to institutional organisms.
The process is complicated on a political level by the contextual and
contemporary attempt of some States to reconstruct areas of imperial
domination, re-proposing ancient geopolitical configurations,
plastically represented by attempts such as those of Turkey, Great
Britain, Russia itself, by the ambitions of some Islamic States and
whatnot, and all this not without reducing the ambitions of American
imperialism still convinced of being able to maintain control of the
countries in the backyard - - Central and South America and of being the
hegemonic power on the planet. In other words, the nation-state form
seems to be approaching the end of its historical cycle to take on other
guises that better represent the economic and commercial interests
prevailing in this era.
With the intention of simplifying and giving a more complete idea of the
new possible scenarios, let us try to indicate some of the possible
entities that are emerging, among which we can certainly include Europe
itself up to the Urals, Russia, China, India, while those that aggregate
around Turkey form plates of a semi-imperial historical-cultural
character, having as a projection at least part of what was once the
Ottoman Empire, the area of the Arab-Islamic countries, the area of the
Southern Pacific , the one that revolves around Indonesia and the South
China Sea, while
still undefined are the borders and the dislocations of Latin America,
which nonetheless revolves around the economic area represented by the
Brazilian giant, and the African area which certainly has South Africa
as one of its poles of reference, while the rest of the continent is,
not at random, shaken by continuous turbulence, because it constitutes
an area of confrontation and contention between different competitors.
A plastic representation of the new balances that are being prepared is
constituted by the continuous and constant growth of the aggregation of
the BRICS which sees an increase in membership, to the point that most
of the countries of Mediterranean Africa can now be placed in this orbit
or aspire to enter it at fully fledged, evading other attempts at
economic and commercial coordination. This means that, in this changed
context, there are growing difficulties for an actor like Italy to enter
into partnership relations with the countries of North Africa and even
greater, if not impossible, are the difficulties in creating
constructive ones with the countries of the Sahel which, as we have
seen, are politically and militarily removed from any possibility of
influencing or even simply influencing their economic policies and power
management.
If possible, there is a greater distance between what could be the role
of Italy in proposing itself as an economic, commercial and
collaboration partner for equal investments and cooperation with the
remaining African countries, even more distant - if possible - from the
influences both of Italy taken individually and of our country as a
subagent of the United States on one side and of Europe on the other.
This is all the more true if one thinks of Italy's difficulty in seeing
its proposal to become the spearhead of a European policy towards the
Mediterranean accepted, while the investments of political resources and
capital from the United States that want to use the Italian springboard
as a bypass of their investment policy in Africa and this also because
Italy definitely does not have the military support capacity that France
once had to support its international role and its investment and
partnership policy.
It is these reasons that make Meloni's proposal on Africa a nostalgic
utopia, which tragically retraces the imperial dreams of his grandfather
Benito to conquer Africa, in a revised and corrected modern version,
which Italian neo-fascism proposes, rediscovering its own ideal
historical mission of reconstruction of the empire.
Italian fascism and its imagery, the myth of imperial Rome, dies hard.

Gianni Cimbalo

[1]G. Cimbalo, Islamic brotherhoods in the Balkans: a model of plural
European Islam, in "Daimon". Yearbook of comparative law of religions,
Il Mulino Bologna, 2009, pp. 225-245.; ID. Africa in miniature. First
notes on law and religion in Cameroon, Cultural and religious rights
between Africa and Europe (edited by F. Alicino and F. Botti),
Giappichelli Editore, Bari, 2011.[2]The Editor, Modern Islamic
fundamentalism, son of globalisation, Political Growth Newsletter, N.
68, Oct. 2014,
http://www.ucadi.org/2021/03/28/il-fundamentalismo-islamico-moderno-figlio-della-globalizzazione/

[3]GL, Moroccan colonialism, Ucadi Political Growth Newsletter, Number
169 - March 2023 ,http://www.ucadi.org/2023/03/22/colonialismomarocchino/
[4]Dr. Artam. Ethiopia: internal problems and international actors of
the crisis, Newsletter Growth Policy, n°141, 13 says. 2020,
http://www.ucadi.org/2020/12/13/etiopia-problemi-interni-e-attori-internazionali-nella-crisi/;
ID., Ethiopia: internal conflict and destabilization of the Horn of
Africa , Political Growth Newsletter, N. 139, Nov. 2020.
[5]EP, Sudan, a war at the gates of cas, Political Growth Newsletter, N.
171, May 2023, http://www.ucadi.org/2023/05/29/sudan-una-guerraalle-
doors-of-home/
[6]UCAd'I, Analysis of the 2022 phase, Political Growth Newsletter, No.
163, Sept. 2022,http://www.ucadi.org/2022/09/29/analisi-della-fase-2022/

44http://www.ucadi.org/2023/08/18/il-pantano-africano/
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