The US European Command based in Stuttgart is in charge of US military labourers.
While slave plantations may have still been profitable in the British West Indies in the 1820s, their economic significance Britain had diminished with the expansion of imperial wealth. Trade with the Caribbean was in collapse. Resources available to metropolitan governments allowed them to finance compensated emancipation schemes to slaveholders.
Eleven million Africans were transported as slaves between the 16th to 19th century. The continent from which they were stolen was now engulfed by colonialism and imperialism in the search for global markets. became caught up in new struggles to rid the continent of colonialism.
Today, people across Africa have won formal political independence from the yoke of colonialism, but their economies are completely dominated by imperialism under the new-fangled shackles of neo-colonialism.
The debt trap in which African countries were caught in the 1970s and 80s has now become a new mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the peoples of the South to the dominant classes of the North and the local elites of the South.
The loans to the debtor countries under the control of the international institutions, the World Bank and the IMF are granted only if the governaccept structural adjustment programmes (SAP). Governments have to privatise public services, reduce spending, and cutback their welfare budgets. These programmes were supposed, by encouraging exports and attracting foreign investment to lead to a reduction of debt.
Instead of decreasing the debt burden, by 1996, the era of SAPs had led to a 400% increase in debt to $230 billion since 1980.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) had a higher debt as percentage of GNP than any other major Third world region, with sub-Saharan Africa's percentage debt at 73 while the Middle East and North Africa was 36 and South Asia 30.
Martin Meredith sums up the state in which Africa finds itself in some facts and figoperations in Sub-Saharan Africa and now devotes 70% of its time to African affairs, centring its activities on those states with substantial oil production and /or reserves in the Gulf of Guinea ures:
"...fifty years after the beginning of the independence era.... Africa's prospects are bleaker than ever. Already the world's poorest region, it is falling further and further behind all other regions of the world. Its average per capita national income is one third lower than the next poorer region, south Asia.
"Most African countries have lower per capita incomes now than they had in 1980 or in some cases in 1960. Half of Africa's 850 million live on less than $1 a day.
"Its entire economic output is no more than $420 billion, just 1.3% of world GDP, less than a country like Mexico. Its share of world trade has declined to half of what it was in the 1980s, amounting to only 1.6%; its share of global investment is less than 1%.
"It is the only region where per capita investment and savings has declined since 1970. It is the only region where school enrolment is falling and illiteracy is commonplace; tWo in five Africans and half of all women are illiterate, compared to one in every eight adults in Latin America.
"On a list drawn up by the United Nations Development Programme, all twenty-five countries that rank lowest in terms of human development are African. Africa has also found itself on the losing side of globalisation, lacking both the skills and infrastructure to attract the multinational corporations that drive it.
"The scourge of AIDS has inflicted a terrible additional burden. SSA is home to just 10% of the world's population but bears more than 70% of the world's HIV/Aids cases.
"With the pandemic just in its infancy, by 2004 some 20 million people had died from Aids; 30 million were infected by Aids and their number was rising by an estimated 3 million new cases each year.
"Botswana has the highest infection rate in the world; more than 37% of its population of 1.6 million are HIV positive; in the age group of fifteen to forty nine the infection rate is 40%
"By 2010 average life expectancy is expected to fall to 27 years; half of all children in the country are likely to be Aids orphans. Other coun tries in the region- Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland are similarly affected.
Teachers die at a faster rate than replacements be found. (from Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa, From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, Publicbooks 2005)"
A new scramble for Africa is taking place for control of its oil. The US imports 15% of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea and this is estimated to rise to 25% by 2015. China imports more than a quarter of its oil from Africa and is Sudan's largest foreign investor.
The US sees China's growing presence in Africa as a threat to its interests. A new US imperial grand strategy has become a reality following September 2001. The US military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent.
The National Security Strategy of the US of 2002 declared that "combating global terror" and ensuring US energy security required that the US increase its commitments to Africa.
The US European Command based in Stuttgart is in charge of US military operations in Sub-Saharan Africa and now devotes 70% of its time to African affairs.
It centres its activities on those states with substantial oil production and
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