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Report after report says more and more Africans, including Kenyans, are lately falling for the ‘bait’ of job offers abroad to only end up fighting and dying for Russia in war-weary Ukraine.
The two Eastern European nations, Russia and Ukraine, have been at war since February 2022, with reasons for the fighting ranging from Moscow’s disapproval of Ukraine’s hoped-for Nato membership to a rekindling of a long-lost, Soviet-era sense of ethno-regional bosom and control over territories within Ukraine’s borders endowed with newly discovered rare earth metals.
It is clear that Africans are fooling themselves, or are being fooled, into the human cost of this war in a familiar case of injustice perpetrated abroad, but aided locally. A few centuries ago, when dark-skinned Africans were enslaved in Western Europe and the Americas, local chiefs reportedly aided the practice, gladly trading away their villagers and tribesmen for guns and such European-supplied ‘symbols of sophistication’ as mirrors!
Brazil, the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish the slave trade alone enslaved up to four million dark-skinned Africans from present-day Angola. In the United States, by the time the country’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, there were well over four million slaves of African descent, up from an initial cohort of 20 first held in the state of Virginia in June 1619. Cities in the United Kingdom, including Manchester, Leeds, and Bristol, were either built or industrially nourished with proceeds from the trade in Black slaves in Confederate America.
With the colonial enterprise that followed the 1884-1914 Scramble for Africa, Europe’s derogation of Black people only continued. Until 1958, in several European countries, particularly Germany, France, and Belgium, there existed what were known as ‘human zoos’, where men, women and children sourced from newly vassalised Africa were either trussed up or coffled together and paraded for the locals and visitors to snigger at and pelt with both coins and bananas.
In the Congo, which lived through all of 75 years of pain under the boot of Belgian colonisers, the conditions were so horrific that an estimated ten million people died. During World War I (1914-18), in East Africa alone, up to a million people died, with the administrative area of Dodoma, in modern-day Tanzania, particularly losing up to 20 per cent of its population then. Africans fought on the frontline in Europe, with the French alone, as fighter-masters, condemning to the doom of war-death some 450,000 soldiers from their colonies in West and North Africa, and South Africa, particularly losing an estimated 10,000 fighters of their own in Belgium, France, Pakistan, North Africa and the German colonies in Africa.
Up to two million Africans actively took part in the war as either soldiers or bearers across Europe and Africa. In both World War I and World War II (1939-45), the Europeans sought to give the impression that the Africans committing to fight and die for their respective sides were ‘volunteers’ motivated by the lure of filthy lucre.
In most cases, however, forcible conscription in cities and villages across Africa, accompanied by the European-concocted pretext that ‘the enemy’ (Germany) had called Black people ‘apes’, saw to the corralling, with minimal resistance, of hordes of Africans towards the battlefield depredations and dignity-sapping casualties of foreign-declared wars. Though to Africans, the master-professed reason for fighting fascism, in the case of World War II, was a barely good enough, hard-to-own goad, the Black man was being offered a chance to prove that he was, indeed, human!
And thus continues the foreigner-perpetrated injustice of Africans taking up arms and going Goliath-puffy into death-fraught battle for the hollow glory of a non-African power. Russia, the latter-day bearer of an otherwise long-provenanced fighter-master insignia, has lately taken advantage of the existence of both recruitment cynics and hardship-cheapened, ready-for-anything folks in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, to sustain its war in Ukraine.
Recently, the BBC put the number of foreign fighters augmenting the Russian side in the war at 18,000, with those from Africa, particularly Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Tanzania, the Central African Republic, South Africa and Libya totting up to 1,500. Up to 3,000 Russian-conscripted foreign fighters, including Kenyans, number among those killed thus far.
And the blame for this sorry state of affairs is hardly or sufficiently put on the governmental co-players in these Russian-enlisted fighters’ home countries. Many come from either conflict-scourged or misgoverned countries whose economies are too strife-strangled, corruption-choked, or simply mismanaged to create and help along the cascade of opportunity. In Africa, for instance, the dream of equal, for-the-people opportunity is made even more pious, if not impossible, by the artificial privations of an elite-beholden leadership.
Resource-rich countries are often misruled by a power-built cabal of mostly old, long-serving strongmen into hopeless, basket-case situations. In some, like Kenya, those charged with the governmental job of creating opportunity instead fob the people off with the fond promise of to-be-found-abroad heaven. With this kind of governmental mismanagement, Africa will only continue to be such a dosser-peopled, fertile ground for such up-to-no-good, empire-building and bait-dangling foreign powers as Vladimir Putin’s Russia to exploit.
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Report after report says more and more Africans, including Kenyans, are lately falling for the ‘bait’ of job offers abroad to only end up fighting and dying for Russia in war-weary Ukraine.
The two Eastern European nations, Russia and Ukraine, have been at war since February 2022, with reasons for the fighting ranging from Moscow’s disapproval of Ukraine’s hoped-for Nato membership to a rekindling of a long-lost, Soviet-era sense of ethno-regional bosom and control over territories within Ukraine’s borders endowed with newly discovered rare earth metals.
It is clear that Africans are fooling themselves, or are being fooled, into the human cost of this war in a familiar case of injustice perpetrated abroad, but aided locally. A few centuries ago, when dark-skinned Africans were enslaved in Western Europe and the Americas, local chiefs reportedly aided the practice, gladly trading away their villagers and tribesmen for guns and such European-supplied ‘symbols of sophistication’ as mirrors!
Brazil, the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish the slave trade alone enslaved up to four million dark-skinned Africans from present-day Angola. In the United States, by the time the country’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, there were well over four million slaves of African descent, up from an initial cohort of 20 first held in the state of Virginia in June 1619. Cities in the United Kingdom, including Manchester, Leeds, and Bristol, were either built or industrially nourished with proceeds from the trade in Black slaves in Confederate America.
With the colonial enterprise that followed the 1884-1914 Scramble for Africa, Europe’s derogation of Black people only continued. Until 1958, in several European countries, particularly Germany, France, and Belgium, there existed what were known as ‘human zoos’, where men, women and children sourced from newly vassalised Africa were either trussed up or coffled together and paraded for the locals and visitors to snigger at and pelt with both coins and bananas.
In the Congo, which lived through all of 75 years of pain under the boot of Belgian colonisers, the conditions were so horrific that an estimated ten million people died. During World War I (1914-18), in East Africa alone, up to a million people died, with the administrative area of Dodoma, in modern-day Tanzania, particularly losing up to 20 per cent of its population then. Africans fought on the frontline in Europe, with the French alone, as fighter-masters, condemning to the doom of war-death some 450,000 soldiers from their colonies in West and North Africa, and South Africa, particularly losing an estimated 10,000 fighters of their own in Belgium, France, Pakistan, North Africa and the German colonies in Africa.
Up to two million Africans actively took part in the war as either soldiers or bearers across Europe and Africa. In both World War I and World War II (1939-45), the Europeans sought to give the impression that the Africans committing to fight and die for their respective sides were ‘volunteers’ motivated by the lure of filthy lucre.
In most cases, however, forcible conscription in cities and villages across Africa, accompanied by the European-concocted pretext that ‘the enemy’ (Germany) had called Black people ‘apes’, saw to the corralling, with minimal resistance, of hordes of Africans towards the battlefield depredations and dignity-sapping casualties of foreign-declared wars. Though to Africans, the master-professed reason for fighting fascism, in the case of World War II, was a barely good enough, hard-to-own goad, the Black man was being offered a chance to prove that he was, indeed, human!
And thus continues the foreigner-perpetrated injustice of Africans taking up arms and going Goliath-puffy into death-fraught battle for the hollow glory of a non-African power. Russia, the latter-day bearer of an otherwise long-provenanced fighter-master insignia, has lately taken advantage of the existence of both recruitment cynics and hardship-cheapened, ready-for-anything folks in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, to sustain its war in Ukraine.
Recently, the BBC put the number of foreign fighters augmenting the Russian side in the war at 18,000, with those from Africa, particularly Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Tanzania, the Central African Republic, South Africa and Libya totting up to 1,500. Up to 3,000 Russian-conscripted foreign fighters, including Kenyans, number among those killed thus far.
And the blame for this sorry state of affairs is hardly or sufficiently put on the governmental co-players in these Russian-enlisted fighters’ home countries. Many come from either conflict-scourged or misgoverned countries whose economies are too strife-strangled, corruption-choked, or simply mismanaged to create and help along the cascade of opportunity. In Africa, for instance, the dream of equal, for-the-people opportunity is made even more pious, if not impossible, by the artificial privations of an elite-beholden leadership.
Resource-rich countries are often misruled by a power-built cabal of mostly old, long-serving strongmen into hopeless, basket-case situations. In some, like Kenya, those charged with the governmental job of creating opportunity instead fob the people off with the fond promise of to-be-found-abroad heaven. With this kind of governmental mismanagement, Africa will only continue to be such a dosser-peopled, fertile ground for such up-to-no-good, empire-building and bait-dangling foreign powers as Vladimir Putin’s Russia to exploit.
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By Mulang’o Baraza