Mikaela Nhondo Erskog
Dongsheng
So to not cause any confusion, I'm taking off my MC hosting hat, putting it over here and now taking my speaker hat.
I actually have a very similar start to that of Ben’s, and I promised we didn't coordinate this. I also did not coordinate with Jonis with some of the words I'm about to say. But from the US-Africa Leaders Summit that was held in December 2022 to the 4 high-level US government representative visits to Africa between January and March, which included US Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States is scrambling for Africa.
After decades of neglect, of half-hearted gestures, later on all-out races, foreign policies under Trump, the United States now is scrambling for Africa. With the deepening of ties between Africa and China and a growing mood for non-alignment and growing vehicles for self-cooperation, it comes as no surprise that Washington is scrambling for hegemony in Africa, which is to echo what he said about: they're asking themselves how did we lose Africa, when did we lose Africa.
And so what is their response right now? What is their strategy to reinvigorate their soft power and media hegemony on the continent? In August 2022 the United States published a new foreign policy strategy aimed at Africa. In the 17-page document, it featured 10 mentions of China and Russia combined, including a pledge to, in their words, counter harmful foreign actors on the continent. Not once was they mention of the term “sovereignty,” or anything that looks favorable to Africa sovereign development.
And yes, despite US government officials repeating lines like African leaders are free to choose who they partner with, they would say things like the US is interested in bolstering Africa's own development plan, it was clear that the document unabashedly displayed that the central focus of US engagement in Africa is not support for Africa and our pursuit of our goals, but rather it frames its ambitions in competitive terms around the presence and the relations of Africa's foreign partners in the continent.
So what we're seeing is the US strategy in many ways a revival of the old McCarthyism is shifting away from the terrain of trying to contest around trade and development because China has clearly made important mutually beneficial advances in the last 2 decades, and now it seem to be returning to a militarism of you know decades past. I also worked at Tricontinental. We've documented this in one of our studies which can check out on our website. And part of this militaristic move or shift towards militarism has been moving, as Ben already said, towards warfare through information an area where on the African continent is still reigned supreme to a large extent.
And I just want to mention in March of 2022 the COMPETES Act. You know, the US is one of only countries in the world that frames everything in terms of competition, in terms of fighting, in terms of battles. One day I wish we could hear about the Cooperation Act coming out of the US. But this Act is part of an effort to address, in their words, “US tech and communications, foreign relations, and national security” amongst other things. And part of the Act outlines a pledge of about 500 million US dollars for an agency known as the US Agency for Global Media, which is explicitly framed in combative terms, aggressive terms and again clearly targeting not African people's reality but all the foreign partners.
What we're seeing is that various Africa-based, particularly civil society organizations, are now gearing up in particular to undermine China's development cooperation with Africa whilst promoting the so-called, you know, “US democratic form of development.” And so it was no surprise a few months after this act was passed they were report circulating in Zimbabwe that the US embassy had funded educational workshops that were basically encouraging African journalists to target and criticize Chinese investments. The local organization involved in the programs. It's none of the information for development trust which in turn if you do enough searching and now I can't find the information even though it was available about 2 years ago, but no longer appears on the internet. It turns out they are funded by the US government's very own National Endowment for Development.
So I'm raising this because as people working in media, we in Africa particular need to have a greater sense and do greater mapping of the kind of funding that's coming into some of the hegemonic projects. But we need to understand, as you know Ben pointed out and many others have pointed out, these come out of historical processes out of relationships forged in colonial periods, in the neo-colonial periods, in the neoliberal era. And so I just want to use one example to kind of show the trajectory or the early trajectory of the US media strategy that has been developed over decades. And I want to use South Africa where I have lived many many years.
So progress in the struggle against the party in South Africa was basically obstructed by Washington who viewed the situation as it does today through the framework of trying to diminish at the time Soviet relationships but now are the foreign partners on the continent. Despite the well-documented atrocities committed by the party of regime against black majority of South Africa and other surrounded countries, the regime was regarded as a strategic ball work against the spread of socialism and soviet influence on the continent.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, while the United States was aiding apartheid in South Africa in its war against the independent struggles, the people struggles, it was also assisting the same campaigns in neighboring Angola in Namibia. And officials in Washington were simultaneously orchestrating specific and targeted media campaigns that they claimed would educate the black population on democracy. And I just want to refer to an internal communication in 1989 that basically outlines how the US was doing this. We were funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to different South African media outlets and journalists to, in their words, “create awareness of democratic ideals and principles amongst the black community.”
But in a missive that wasn't, you know, publicly circulated and I want to quote a bit at length, the US government said in a grant[7:19] to one of South African media groups “it is hoped that a concrete discussion of democratic values will help counter the strong Marxist campaigns now being used to coerce South African blacks and black townships, pointing the weight of democratic forms of government that are more desirable and achievable in South Africa. We are known as a systematic myth that's being used in South Africa to generate awareness of democratic principles on a large scale.” So basically saying none of the mass movements the trade union organizations, the women's organizations who are operating on a large scale in the 1980s had any awareness of democratic values. And just end the quote says “the wide propagation of democratic principles can however be achieved by publishing material regularity over a period of time in a popular black publication.”
So what they did is they took one of the biggest newspapers at the time was called the City Press, and it had the widest reach at the time. And what they did was through it they would target certain type of story certain type of people again to promote what they saw as the best form of democracy, the only form of democracy: the US model of development.
And again you know I mentioned that a nice little organization of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), they were the principal funder at the time in the 1980s. And although branded as a non-governmental and independent nonprofit foundation the NED was founded by the US government under the Regan administration to, and I want say this in the words of the founder Alan Weinstein in the 1990s, he said this: “a lot of what the NED do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA, the central intelligence agency, the central intelligence agency.
So it was clear to them that they were doing this type of covert work and the NED was financing its media campaign in South Africa. It was also at the same time funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, pro-Contras organization in Nicaragua, anti-Soviet trade unions in eastern Europe, and anti-government groups in Granada. So the NED, which still exists today, still funds many civil society organizations comes from this specific history and the specific point of view, which is why I want to say and I think a lot of people have said really interesting things today but I think it's worth repeating is that even though many of us believe that we need to create and expand more platforms, we don't want more media just to, you know, create more media. as many people have said we want media projects that are clear about the political stakes the political conjuncture we're in, the class interest that are at play today. Many of us in this room believe and know that the capital's ideology is the one that dehumanizes, that humiliates, that feeds of crisis and fuels it at the same time, and so only organizations media projects networks that understand that anti-imperialist anti-capitalist forms of media dissemination and engagement are the ones that will enable not only for us to you knows peak truth to power, but to better organize the people who is saying we represent on the ground.
We have a range of extremely, incredible dedicated organizations and people doing this work so our task right now is to amplify that work through, of course, these stronger communication channels and networks that are based on the principle of “communications as solidarity.” But I will say we all face challenges that I'm hoping that we will be able to grapple with together, because ultimately…
For example I am in the Dongsheng, which is the news group basically try to get stories about China to international audiences. And part of the work I do is a podcast we recently started a few months ago called “the Crane.” And one of the biggest challenges I have is, on the one hand we have a dual role of having to sense the moment we're in, and sense it on the large scale as well as on the micro scale. So for example, of course I have to be able to say it's really important that many and most African countries are not willing to go into the US-led NATO war. That's an important step. That's an important breach of what has been a historical trend to follow the line of the US.
But simultaneously we have the challenge in African countries where the very governments who are standing up against NATO don't necessarily advance the social development and economic interest of the people in their country and their region. So in media what we have this incredible challenge now of not only whose stories were telling, how stories were telling, but as many people have said how do we encompass the complexity, how do you speak to a trade union, I mean the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa. But how do you also speak to an intellectual in the kind of Brazilian landscape? How are we able to use the different formats, not because we want to stretch ourselves, but because we need to think about how we multiply our efforts with the very limited unfortunately limited resources and people we have around us.
So just to end, I think, ‘cause I'm reaching my time. In the case of Africa, the revolving door between the US state-funded efforts and the dominant media platforms really does require us to come with innovation, creativity and, of course as we are gathered here for this explicit purpose, more collaboration that has premised on this concept of solidarity. But also I think we need to agree that it's premise on a different type of politics that is dominating in many of our regions. And with that thank you for your time and I'm looking forward to the other finalists.