Resist Africom: the movie

By ACAS | 12 December 2008

‘A major strategic shift in U.S. attention toward’ Africa: New American Foundation

By ACAS | 12 December 2008

“U.S. arms transfers to Africa are being carried out against the backdrop of a major strategic shift in U.S. attention toward the continent, as embodied in the creation of the Africa Command,” writes the New American Foundation.

Africa Says No to AFRICOM

By ACAS | 11 October 2008

A top Pentagon official for African affairs insisted on Wednesday that no country on the continent had been asked to host the new United States military command for Africa (Africom), as she began a three-day visit to Angola.

ACAS events at 2008 African Studies Annual Meeting

By ACAS | 2 September 2008

ACAS meets every year at the African Studies Association annual meeting. ACAS has four roundtables scheduled for the African Studies Association 2008 Annual Meeting with the theme “Knowledge of Africa: The Next Fifty Years” scheduled for November 13-16, 2008, in Chicago.

U.S. Military Activities in Kenya

By Jesse Benjamin | 1 December 2007

Once President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it was easy for the corporate Western media to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks earlier had declared the elections free and fair. Bush and Fraser’s hands were pushed by the emerging evidence that the elections were illegitimate and that the violence, on both sides, had been orchestrated.1 Maintaining a lopsided alliance with the Kibaki government would not be so easy in the glare of public opinion, now cast briefly on the Kenyan nation, and so we saw a total flip-flop in US policy. But neither position is contradictory as the US is heavily invested in stability in Kenya.

AFRICOM: The U.S. Militarization of Africa

By Olayiwola Abegunrin | 1 December 2007

President George W. Bush approved a Pentagon plan in January 2007 to set up Africa Command Center, to be known as AFRICOM. According to the plan, the Command Center is set to complete and go into service by the end of September 2008. The United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the new plans as he addressed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the defense spending President Bush proposed in his 2008 budget submitted to the Congress that, “The main purposes of the Africa Command Center would be to fight the war on terror, cooperation, provide humanitarian aid, building partnership capability, oversee security, defense support to non-military missions, and if directed, military training operations designed to help local governments.”

AFRICOM: What Is It and What Will It do?

By Daniel Volman | 1 December 2007

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom. Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the [...]

The Campaign to Resist AFRICOM

By Daniel Volman | 1 December 2007

In the summer of 2007, a group of concerned U.S. and Africa based organizations and individuals opposed to the creation of Africom—the new U.S. military command for Africa—came together in Washington, DC, to organize Resist Africom to campaign against the increasing militarization of U.S. policy toward Africa. ACAS voted to join Resist Africa at the membership meeting on 20 October 2007, during the ASA meeting in New York City. Resist Africom is working to educate people both in the United States and abroad about Africom and to mobilize people in a campaign to prevent the creation of Africom in its present form.