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from high altitude to support yet another mission in Dickensian telescopic philanthropy. As I write this one, I have just finished reading a piece in the British Independent announcing that the British Government is “considering” providing direct military assistance to international troops fighting Islamist insurgents in Somalia. And the phrase “Islamist insurgents” is a bad enough name to hang an African under-dog unseemly squatting on Africa’s tamed horn. Language, legitimation and war.

The war that’s already begun
The report rules out British ground force, a fact put as a regrettable favour to Somalia and to Africa. Is it not wonderful to have Albion’s thudding boots stomping on African soil? Subconsciously, it is as if someone is crying, please give us thudding boots on our land, please, please the British!
After all we are better than Libya, please, please, Your Majesty! Gentle reader, Africa has entered the smooth phase of nuanced imperialism, has it not? A cruising phase where one bad breeds a thousand more for our continent, for its betterment.

Here is The Independent: “While the use of ground troops has been explicitly ruled out it is believed there could be some role for Britain following the successful NATO air operation in Libya. As well as air power, SAS and SBS units are stationed with the US-led Horn of Africa Task Force based in Djibouti.
The Somali government, which has been fighting insurgents known as al-Shabaab, has little influence outside the capital Mogadishu.”
Somewhere further down in the article, the paper matter-of-factly makes a major disclosure: “Both the US and the French have been actively involved in Somali military operations – the Americans carrying out drone strikes from the southern Ethiopian port of Arba Micah, while the French are ferrying in equipment.
A French helicopter-gunship crashed at the southern port of Kismayo, while, it is claimed, providing support fire for Kenyans flushing out al-Shabaab positions.”

British terrorists in Somalia
I am sure the reader smells something ghostly about the whole article. So far, no attributions, no real grounding.
Yet in spite of this fatal omission, you cannot miss the air of presentiment, the overbearing augury in the article. You cannot miss the fragrance of a brutal war already being fought; you cannot miss the sweet aroma of imperial aggression long underway.

Far, far below in the same article, a voice is dropped, dropped like a god from an imperial machine: “Yesterday the International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell appeared to hint at a greater British involvement. Describing Somalia as a direct threat to the UK’s security because it is one of the ‘most dysfunctional countries in the world’ he said: “It is a place from which emanates piracy, drug running, this weight of people trying to come to a more attractive economic shore. There are probably more British passport holders engaged in terrorist training in Somalia than in any other country in the world.” The Somali dog now has more than a bad name. It is ripe for hanging!

Already droning from Djibouti
Let us play back in time. Date: Wednesday, 21st September, 2011. Source, the authoritative Wall Street Journal.
It is UN time, and in that great publication of international finance capital was tucked a small story which announced that the US Military is deploying a new force of armed drones to eastern Africa, in an escalation of it’s campaign to strike militant targets in the region and expand intelligence on extremists.
The report disclosed that the unmanned aircrafts, better known as drones, would be based in Seychelles, with Djibouti’s US Camp Lemonier as the main base. Again buried in the article was a sentence which read: “The US military has long operated a base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, and has already used drones against militants in Somalia.”

New times, old causes
From September, let us fast-forward a bit, to the month of October of the same year just about to wear out. We turn to the same Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
On 15th October, this authoritative journal reported that White House had authorised US troops and advisers to deploy in Central Africa “to help track down the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel force” fighting President Museveni’s government in Uganda.
The deployment was situated within a broader threat posed against US interests by “Al Qaeda offshoots in Somalia and Yemen, extremists in Nigeria, war in Libya, unrest in Egypt and dangerous tensions between Sudan’s north and south.”

All told, WSJ told us 100 troops and advisers would deploy, or more accurately, had deployed into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The bogey was the fugitive Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), itself a rag-tag armed group of less than hundred insurgents roving between DRC and CAR, less to cause war and more to seek refuge on the margins of the weak states of Central Africa.
A few years ago, Angola had its own Kony look-alike, called Jonas Savimbi with strong American ancestry. Again, America deployed, then on the side of Savimbi, Kony’s look alike. New times, old measures, new sides, old causes.

Belated self-defence or causality?
Two days later, on October 17, we read that Kenya had intervened in southern Somalia to battle al-Shabaab Islamist militia.
Reports also indicated Kenya was supported by the United States of America in this intervention in Somalia, with the war aims passing for a carbon copy of America’s reasons for deploying in Central Africa.
In that act, Kenya had joined Ethiopia, Uganda and Burundi who were already operating in Somalia, all under the aegis of the African Union, all bankrolled by the US and the EU.

The Kenyans invoked the argument of “self-defence”, stressing “the government is taking robust measures to protect and preserve the integrity of the country by invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter.” Article 51 of the UN Charter grants any country the “right to pursue the enemy through hot pursuits and to try to reach him wherever he is.”
I do not need to remind the reader that Kenya and Somalia have always been each other’s neighbours, from time immemorial. Or that Somalia, always in turmoil since the death of Siad Barre in the late eighties, could have prevented Kenyans from never knowing about the remit of Article 51 of the UN Charter, until on the eve of US deployment in Central Africa. Was this a case of coincidence or causality?

Droning Africom
Dear reader, all I am trying to do is to rebuild for you the ecology of Anglo-American and French military operations on the continent, specifically on the so-called Horn of Africa. To show you how this military presence is itself the cause of wars, not war’s antidote.
Yes, I am trying to show you how Africa’s impotence or prostration over Libya could only have bred greater, graver adventurism and impunity on the continent, including allowing US to establish a de facto Africa Command, Africom for short, all by stealth, all through seemingly small, unrelated operations which in the final analysis will coalesce into one big occupation of the silent, effete and dehorned continent. We are witnessing Africom coming into being through remotely controlled drones, slowly, slowly, slowly.

Military-Media Nexus
But I also want to show you how deadly imperialist deployments always enlist and incorporate the media as forerunners, as balloon fliers.
The reader is left with an indeterminate sense of media speculation, yet the reader is already getting hints on the beginnings of a second Anglo-American and French campaign on the continent, second to the bloody one in Libya.

The Anglo-American military factor is expanding on a supine continent, buoyed by its initial invasion, unchecked by any show of African unity. Did not Libya show that Africa is used to having its own hunted down, killed and exhibited before it takes back its corpse, still, for secretive, nightly burial, ceremony-free?
The sun still rose from the East, got warmer towards lunch, tilted to empty its hot venom, before finally retiring into the mouth of a waiting crocodile. No sweat.
In the latest episode we have a vividly clear military-media nexus, military-media complex, don’t we? Quite a sophisticated communication strategy where actual deployments are presented as speculative possibilities, all to naturalise them through phased, graduated disclosures, seemingly by a peripheral and even poorly informed player called the free media.

Deodorised precedent
But beyond disclosure, a clear forerunner role for the media to give the condemned dog a bad name, and a condemned war in some country to the North of us, a good name, good fragrance.
So far from being a bad war, an unjust war, an unjust imperialist occupation, today Libya gets reissued in western media lore as an inspiring precedent on how to fight a smart war on a dark continent.
A lifting precedent on how to conquer a continent while sustaining nil casualties indeed while using the continent’s shortcomings as reason and justification for its conquest and occupation.

The mighty power of the global media is brought to bear on our doubts, on doubts of us the African sufferer.
In spite of the many we buried, in spite of the pulverised apartments of Tripoli we used to call home, we are now faced with a deodorised model intervention which must now be replicated in Somalia, which shows why we deserve to be attacked, conquered, occupied and despoiled.

Same Koran, different Sharias
And if Libya’s curse was a bad strongman who killed his own, a strongman presiding over too strong a state, Somalia’s curse is its failure to produce a strongman in replacement of the dead Barre, one strong enough to create a state that will not fail. And the twist of irony gets deeper, even more comical.
The same insurgency type that gives NATO a ground force, or which NATO arises as its Air
force, in Somalia passes for a causa belli, a reason enough for a war whose rumours we are beginning to hear.

To this day, no one in NATO can tell you the real Islamic content and temperament in the Libyan insurgents who fought, as we all thought, under the banner of the NTC. Yet NATO trusted and admitted this unknown, variegated insurgency species into its bed.

But not Somalia’s insurgency which we are told, told with no iota of proof, that it is a sub-contract of Al Qaida. And while Libyan insurgents are granted the luxury of patriots, these Somalis cannot be fighting for anything edifying but simply to unfurl the banner of the dead bin Laden.
The Sharia which the NTC says it will impose on a new Libya, cannot be the same Sharia which al-Shabaab seeks to impose on Somalia. There are differences, differences graduated enough to make one an ally, another an enemy to be extirpated through the use of deadly drones.

The new diasporans
Back to the British Minister of war, ironically misnamed International Development Secretary. Among the deadly threats Mitchell itemizes for the little Island of the great English Queen is the fact of a dysfunctional Somalia with “this weight of people trying to come to a more attractive economic shore.” Wow! Gentle reader, I draw your studious attention to soaking pieces in the Guardian, all British, all English and by name guardian to English values.

The first one, printed this Thursday, only a day before the Independent issue announcing British bellicosity, loudly told us of a huge EU exodus as professionals from the European Union, both old and young, experienced and inexperienced, leave the meltdown for more attractive economic shores, among them Africa, yes, Africa!
The Portuguese are leaving in droves for Brazil and for Mozambique. Yes, MOZAMBIQUE! And they are not trekking there as investors. No! Mere job-seekers in former colonies. In case you think this is one swallow, I give you another. The Spaniards. They are leaving all for Argentina.

The Guardian gives a figure of 1200 every year, far more than illegal immigrants who ever make it to the whole of Europe, running away from wars and underdevelopment caused by the same Europe.
There is an interesting line in the story: “Most of them come from Spain and Italy but some are from Britain.” Yes Mitchell’s Britain which like Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby, has no time for its starving and neglected children, all its attention fixed on the parlous fate of some faraway Indians living in some geographically never-never land called Tuckahookapooo!
What now, Mr Minister for International Development? Close air support against this dysfunctional continent called the EU, so wont to spewing its millions to more attractive shores, all for the second time in less than two millennia?

Where is Ho Chi Minh?
Here in Zimbabwe, the statistics are so clear. In the last few years, we have experienced a net “gain” by way of so-called white returnees. They are coming back in droves, quietly buying themselves cosy, into the leafy suburbs of Harare.
They come back quietly, in sharp contrast to their noisy departures from a land we were told was melting down, inexorably. When a white man comes to settle into your country, in mad flight from dysfunctional economies of his home country, he is beautifully baptised “investor”, celebrated as a boon to his new hosts. When an African leaves the continent to help anemic economies of aged Europe, he is demonized as economic refugee, as an asylum-seeker, regretted as a bane for a shunning continent about to be his reluctant host. Always the former ends in a boardroom, at the helm; more often the latter ends in a real asylum, raving mad, concussed. And for our continent, the former can be a basis for going to war on the part of Europe. Equally, the latter – as in the case of Somalia – can also be the reason for going to war on the part of Europe. And when war has to be declared for reasons so patently extraneous, any country, however geographically far, can always turn out to be geographically contiguous enough to pose “a direct threat” to the United Kingdom. I suppose that is what “global village” means, what it shall always mean until some little, undaunted Vietnam, some lanky, wizened Hon Chi Minh, bursts onto the scene to give imperialism another bloody nose. Otherwise it’s back to the age of reaction, the age of Empire. For now at least. Icho!