The Climate Crisis in Africa
A talk from the RC webinar “The Climate Crisis in Africa,” in April 2023
Welcome. Our societies use oppression to maintain themselves. We need to end all oppression to free humans from irrationality and thereby end the threat to our climate.
THE AFRICAN CONTINENT AND ITS NATURAL RESOURCES
The African continent has fifty-five countries (according to the African Union). We have diverse cultures and peoples. Something we have in common is that we have had to rebuild our lives after centuries of exploitation and oppression.
Africa is home to about thirty percent of the world’s mineral reserves, eight percent of the world’s natural gas, and twelve percent of the world’s oil reserves. The continent has forty percent of the world’s gold and up to ninety percent of its chromium and platinum. The largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum, and uranium in the world are in Africa. Africa holds sixty-five percent of the world’s arable land and ten percent of its internal renewable fresh water.
A HISTORY OF RACISM AND COLONIALISM
At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, twelve European men, a U.S.er, and a man from the Ottoman Empire, met to divide up Africa and its resources.
Africa is not poor. It was exploited for centuries. Most of this history is hidden from the world, and most people have received biased information.
Racism and colonialism have pushed Africans away from each other and enabled continued oppression. Most of the world is unaware of this.
A lie constantly told during colonization was that Africans were primitive savages, less intelligent than Europeans, and in need of rescuing—that we should not be seen as human or have our existence respected. This narrative has persisted up to the present day.
Africans have endured centuries of oppressive comments about our cultures, foods, languages, and ways of life. This oppression continues and affects people’s ability to listen to Africans.
Between 1501 and 1867, nearly thirteen million African people were kidnapped, enslaved, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the British, French, and Spanish colonies that would later comprise the United States. Coastal communities in the United States were permanently shaped by the trafficking of African people, and local economies were built around the enslavement of Black people.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade enriched many white people and generated the capital for building some of America’s greatest cities and most successful companies. Many families, businesses, and institutions continue to benefit from the enormous wealth produced by enslavement. Meanwhile, people of African heritage in these countries still struggle with the legacy of inequality and injustice in all parts of their lives. Few people have acknowledged or honestly confronted this history.
Slavery and colonialism laid the foundation for postcolonial conflicts in Africa.
The colonization of Africa took place between 1800 to the 1960s. Our grandparents fought, and many died, for independence. There was extreme brutality and attempted genocide. For example: From 1885 to 1906, King Leopold II of Belgium ruled the Congo as his private colony. Those who did not fill their work quota had their hands or limbs cut off. During the first twenty-three years of Belgium’s rule, over ten million Congolese people were killed.
The British government tortured and murdered Kenyans who fought for their independence during the 1952 to 1960 uprising. They were sent to prison camps and tortured and murdered. These injustices were hidden from the British people.
NEOCOLONIALISM AND ITS DESTRUCTIVE POLICIES
After independence, neocolonialism took over, and the structural injustices remained. Racism, sexism, colonialism, the climate crisis, and many other injustices were embedded in social, political, and economic structures, making every area of life a struggle.
Neocolonialism can be defined as “the deliberate and continued survival of the colonial system in independent countries, by turning these countries into victims of political, mental, economic, social, military, and technical forms of domination.” This is carried out through indirect and subtle means that do not always include physical violence.
Africa has become an environmental “sacrifice zone.”
In 2019, North American exporters shipped more than one billion pounds of plastic waste to ninety-six countries (including Kenya), to be “recycled.” Much of the waste, often containing the hardest-to-recycle plastics, ends up in African rivers and oceans.
There is a correlation between where African resources are located and where the foreign military bases are located.
It is rarely safe to oppose the destructive policies. African leaders who have stood up against neocolonialism have been killed. Patrice Lumumba became prime minister at the age of thirty-four and headed the cabinet of the newly independent nation, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was tortured, shot to death, and his body dissolved in acid. In June 2022, Belgium handed over the last of Lumumba’s remains to his homeland, more than sixty-one years after his assassination. Many activists fear for their lives and those of their families.
THE INJUSTICES AFRICANS ARE FACING TODAY
After countries are looted and governments sabotaged, the imperialists position themselves as lenders. These financiers have caused havoc in African economies. Loan arrangements contain “structural reforms” that trap people in a poverty cycle—they pretend to promote self-sustainability, but instead increase unemployment and the cost of basic services.
Global lenders pushed for the privatization of public goods and services in Ghana. This included water. Then, clean drinking water was available only to the communities that could pay for it. Those who could not pay were forced to turn to unsafe sources such as rivers and ponds, with drastic health consequences.
There are many more examples of deliberate destabilization of the continent, and the racism and stereotypes that shift the blame to the continent and its people.
A stereotype is that “Africans fight or are always at war.” However, if you do a web search of weapons donations to Africa, some of the headlines that pop up are as follows: “The U.S. Donates Nine Million Dollars in Weapons.” “The U.S. Donates Over Sixty Tons of Weaponry to Somalia.”
At some point in our lives, we Africans realize that we had no chance for a life in which we were not either fighting for our life or recovering from the last time we had to fight. We never got the opportunity to just exist.
The above are some of the challenges that Africans face before we even consider the climate crisis.
The climate emergency is a “threat multiplier” for communities that are still grappling with all the above injustices.
THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY IN AFRICA
Africa is dealing with the following:
- The dumping of toxic wastes from the Global North and the mining of our natural resources are poisoning our land and water
- Africa accounts for the smallest share of global greenhouse gas emissions, at just 3.8%, but is one of the most vulnerable continents in the world to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- According to the United Nations report, by 2030, 108-116 million people in Africa are expected to be exposed to the risk of sea level rise
- Over the past fifty years, drought-related hazards have claimed the lives of over half a million people and triggered seventy billion dollars in regional economic losses
- Carbon Brief’s analysis of disaster records finds that extreme weather events in Africa since the start of 2022 have killed at least four thousand people and affected an additional nineteen million
- More than six hundred people have died in Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade
- Tropical storms in southern Africa displaced half a million people in just three months in 2022
- Temperatures reached 48ºC/118ºF in Tunisia in July, causing extreme wildfires
- Nearly two million people in Chad were affected by floods in August and October 2022
- Almost a quarter of a billion Africans will face water scarcity by 2025
- Eighty-six million Africans could be forced to leave their homes by 2050
WHAT WE CAN DO AND REMEMBER
We Africans need to remember our inherent goodness, and at the same time acknowledge how we have been separated and led to believe and internalize the racist messages. We are taking leadership and sharing information about the oppression and exploitation of our continent, and its link with the climate crisis. We are being powerfully present in places where our futures are being negotiated. We are leading initiatives, such as reforestation, and advocating for good policies in our countries. In the RC Community, we are leading support groups, webinars, and workshops on the climate crisis.
What allies to Africans can do:
We can build our relationships with openness and honesty. We need to have honest sessions about racism targeting Africa and Africans: What did you hear, see, say, or do about Africa and Africans?
We can continue reaching out for each other across the divisions. Part of that is showing ourselves fully, just as we are. What is it like to do this, to be here? What would a world look like that respected the dignity of Africans? What is in our way of treating the Africans that we interact with as our equals?
We can openly show our struggles because they get in the way of our working together. Distress patterns based on historical oppression cannot be part of our relationships.
We can keep doing the anti-racism work and learning about the history of our countries regarding colonialism and imperialism, and discharge on the action we would like to take from what we learn.
We have a big task—to work together to stop the climate crisis. This requires us to end oppression.
Africa
(Present Time 213, October 2023)