Resistance and the 'War On Terror' in East Africa

A Kenya Defense Force soldier speaks to three women in Garissa, Kenya, in April 2015. [Noor Khamis/Reuters]

Racial justice protests in the U.S. have forced a national debate over defunding the police and the U.S. prison system. But the violence of American policing is not confined to our borders.

Twenty years after 9/11, the U.S. is engaged in a perpetual war in the name of fighting terrorism, and continues to carry out violence (much of it shrouded in secrecy) in countries across the globe via drone attacks, airstrikes, and extrajudicial killings.

As part of this program, the U.S. partnered with governments in East Africa, spawning a complex network of policing and violence at the local level and beyond. Samar Al-Bulushi, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and contributing editor with Africa Is a Country, has written about this deadly ecosystem. I called her to learn more about how it works, and the rising international resistance. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

You’ve written about AFRICOM’s role in the U.S.’ so-called war on terror. Can you start by explaining what it is?

So, AFRICOM is the acronym for the U.S. military command in Africa, one of the most recently established military commands. It became operational in 2007-2008, and the primary basis for its establishment [in the wake of 9/11] was “security.” But even leading up to 9/11, U.S. security analysts had identified Africa as a very important geostrategic site for securing continued access to oil for the United States.

When AFRICOM formed, there was much debate about whether or not it would have its headquarters on the African continent. Its headquarters are now in Stuttgart, Germany, but the U.S. has either established military bases or, kind of, sharing agreements with governments across the African continent, such that members of the U.S. military are able to be based within Africa.

Much of the activism around AFRICOM has focused on how to shut it down. And increasingly, now, we're seeing the language of abolition come up in relation to it.

And it’s not just AFRICOM, as you’ve pointed out – there’s a wider matrix of militarized violence at work. What does that mean?

So, even if AFRICOM as a military command could be formally shut down, that would leave in place many of the infrastructures and relationships that it has already established. It would not necessarily mean that troops leave. And even if they do leave, when the U.S. spends all of this time and money training and arming African police and African military, that's going to have a longstanding effect, whether or not the U.S. military maintains its own presence.

Very often, U.S.-based activists will refer to African governments as proxy actors. There are limitations that come with that framing, though, because the assumption is that these are kind of unthinking actors who simply follow orders, and they're not significant enough to warrant study and analysis.

We need to actually pay attention to the details and the actors and institutions that make this work sustainable, and make it possible for AFRICOM to function.

This seems like a daunting task. How would people even start to think about dismantling something like this?

I’ve found the work of scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore really helpful because part of the point that she is trying to get across in her thinking about both the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex is that there are so many different actors and institutions that are entangled in this domain, that it means that there are many places to fight.

So we have to be ready to take the time to do that research, you know, to identify all these different actors and institutions and to distribute the activism accordingly. Part of that is understanding that in each country, as a simple starting point, the people based there are really the best positioned to know who is making what decisions.

What’s an example of the work that people are doing at the local level?

In the Kenyan context, where I did my research, there's a whole range of activists (some who formally identify as activists, others who would not) who have been focused on the disappearances and extrajudicial killings of people who are “terrorist suspects,” often by their own government.

Many of these activists have been at the forefront of shedding light on the very infrastructures that make the “war on terror” possible.

After the Ethiopian military invaded Somalia you had the first instance of mass “rendition” in Africa in 2007, when hundreds of people who fled across the border disappeared.

The Kenyan government works closely with the U.S. and the British. They engage in intelligence sharing with the Kenyans, and train and equip a special police force.

A lot of my interlocutors in Kenya were people who did that work of tracking down who disappeared, who they were related to. They would go to prisons and inquire after certain people. And they were then able to map and release information about many of these individuals and what happened to them. And it was from there that groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were able to write reports about those renditions.

But as we know, as with a lot of the activist work in the U.S. context, that resistance itself is often classified as terrorism. And so many of these very people who have been trying to track down people who disappeared are then themselves labeled suspects. It has been a huge challenge when it comes to simply maintaining a public discussion and debate about counter-terror policies, because the effect of that, of course, is to silence people.

It’s worth noting that for many of them, AFRICOM is not the focus of their activism, right? Their focus is on the Kenyan police because that's who they see on a daily basis … sometimes I think we miss the more everyday forms of policing that occur in contexts that are not officially characterized as sites of war [but are linked to initiatives like AFRICOM].

It sounds like some of these activists you mentioned share similar goals with groups in the U.S. working to counter violent policing and militarism.

Yes, and there’s a clear effort on the part of the donor industrial complex and the U.S. government, and others, to steer people's attention away from the folks in the U.S. who are calling for abolition right now. There's a deliberate attempt to maintain separate worlds.

The donor industrial complex across Africa over the last 10 to 20 years has introduced the language of police reform, and it’s been used very, very heavily. Many activists in Kenya, for example, have been kind of strangled by this complex which tells them that they can only receive money to do certain kinds of activism and not others.

So I do think it would be really, really useful to put some of these activists in conversation with U.S.-based activists, in order to kind of reawaken the spirit of agitation ... to break that down and exchange strategy.

I have seen sites where some of this is starting to happen; a Philadelphia-based scholar, Krystal Strong, has organized a series of conversations where she has invited African activists to share their own experiences of policing in their own contexts.

In general, though, I think it will require a lot of humility on the part of American activists not to preach, and time and energy and patience. It will require them to take the time to learn about the context in which many of the Africa-based activists are operating, including the risks that they face.