African Liberation Day should serve as a time to ground ourselves in the history of our people and take those lessons with us as we continue the struggle toward liberation.
Every year, many Africans commemorate Africa Liberation Day on the 25th of May. Such commemoration has been often hijacked by cultural liberalism where folks dress in traditional clothing, celebrate cuisines, and only engage in ahistorical, depoliticized conversations. However, memorialization and commemorations are not just cultural festivities detached from political and economic histories. They are meant to instill in us the fervor, consciousness, and awareness of the ancestors, a revisiting of our history, as a guide for today.
During the Russia-Africa Summit of 2023, Burkina Faso’s president, Captain Ibrahim Traore asked a pressing question about the condition of Africa and Africans:
“The questions my generation are asking are the following… it is that we do not understand how Africa, with so much wealth on our soil, with generous nature, water, sunshine in abundance—how Africa is today the poorest continent. Africa is a hungry continent. And how come there are heads of state all over the world begging? These are the questions we are asking ourselves.”
If we attempt to answer Traore’s questions and diagnose the conditions of the Sahel and Sahara states, which are a microcosm of the continent, we can see the manifestation of imperialism: polyarchical reactionary leadership, militarized accumulation, and coercive economic measures. All are a recipe for the reproduction of the foreign plundering of the African continent, the same recipe against which our ancestors fought. To combat this current predicament of imperialism in Africa, we must have a clear-eyed understanding of its nature. And by focusing on Libya’s demise and its ongoing reverberations across the Sahel, we can delineate which forces enable imperialism and hinder African liberation, and which actors are fighting for a sovereign and liberated Africa.
Polyarchical Leadership and Reactionary Islamism
Since NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011, what was Africa’s wealthiest nation, is now run by polyarchical elites parachuted by the UN without any popular consent from the masses. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems, which is funded by the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and has a history of manipulating elections across the world, was aiding in organizing Libya’s elections by the end of 2021. But they were mysteriously canceled. The organizers of the elections were hesitant to run elections because they knew the results would not turn in the imperialists’ favor, especially given the popularity of Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi, son of Muammar Qaddafi, and the appearance of his name on the election ballot. Libya, therefore, has been plagued by a Government of National Unity in western Libya and a parallel Libyan government in eastern Libya. This division is enabled and funded by a foreign intervention that has been lingering since 2011 which seeks to keep the current demise of Libya and its peripheral status in the world system.
The division in Libya is bolstered by militias in the east and the west that receive directives from foreign states. The CIA-trained Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya is the head of the Libyan National Army. He is a chameleon-like figure, without principles or eternal enemies. He receives backing largely from the UAE, Egypt, and, furtively, Russia. Haftar is also a dual citizen of the US and Libya and recently appeared in a Virginia court giving an oath to the US constitution while testifying to the war crimes allegations he committed in Libya.
The situation in western Libya is no different. There is an abundant presence of Turkish troops and military equipment in Misrata and at the Witya airbase, southwest of Tripoli. Thus, many militias receive their military training in Türkiye. The UN documented in 2020 that there are more than 20,000 foreign troops of different nationalities occupying Libya.
Despite the cessation of national sovereignty across all of Libya’s territories and the adherence to the diktats of imperialism, the reactionary Islamists are becoming the moral and religious mouthpieces of imperialism. Recently the Grand Mufti of Libya (the head of religious rulings and legal advice in the country), Sadiq Al-Gharyani, gave a lengthy rant about the Russian presence in Libya and the necessity to declare Jihad against them:
Recently, Haftar made an agreement with Russia and enabled them to develop Africa Corps in Libya… In every country, they have an agent that acts as a tool for destruction. In Syria, [Bashar] Alassad allowed them to destroy it… Now in Libya, there is some hope, and they do not want to let Libya be at ease… I want to tell the Libyan people and the Muslims in Libya that this is an occupation by an infidel, atheist state. Jihad against this occupation is an obligation. You have to, o’ people of Libya, whoever has weapons or does not own any, I tell you that the presence of Russian armies in Libya that were brought by Haftar, is an occupation by an infidel state that must be fought and Jihad declared against it. Everyone with whatever means they have. With words, like I am doing; with the assassination of Russians, that must be done in the streets; no one is allowed to buy and sell to them, nor befriending them, out of greed of their money. They must be harassed and considered enemies, a foreign invasion that must leave… This is what I tell people… they have to put their hands on the trigger and declare Jihad on these criminals, not to give up, and not to surrender their country to their enemies.
But Al-Gharyani is filled with contradictions. In 2011, ironically enough, he gave fatwa on NATO countries’ (infidel states per his definition) legitimacy to intervene in Libya, based on his Islamic perspective. Furthermore, as the US funds the genocide in Palestine and arms that Zionist entity, it is western Libya’s militias that are making agreements with private security companies and being trained by the US-Africa Command (AFRICOM) that has killed Libyan civilians in the past with impunity. And it is the Turkish troops and military that are influencing Libya’s internal politics, even in the field of educatio n . None of these imperialist countries bother Al-Gharyani, but for some reason only the Russian presence in Libya. After all, the Arabic dictum of the ancestors, “a land we are not willing to die for does not deserve us”, no longer seems to ring true when Libya is run by such polyarchichal and reactionary Islamists who are performatively supporting the resistance in Palestine while conducting business and military agreements with the entities that fund the genocide. This is Islamist reactionism acting as a functionary of imperialism.
(Re)Emergent Signs of African Anti-imperialism
For centuries, Africa has been reduced, due to colonialism and neocolonialism, to docile, disjointed states unable to conduct their national developmental projects. Whenever a revolutionary regime attempted a fissure from reaction and follow a revolutionary path, it was sanctioned, bombed, isolated, couped, and starved, all to show that the only way forward for the African continent was to abide by the development project designed by imperialism – i.e., maintain the peripheral status of the economy that solely exports raw materials to the core for the latter to produce high-end consumer goods and usurp the surplus (profit).
In the past couple of years, we have seen massive popular uprisings across much of the Sahel against the sitting reactionary regimes that were eventually overthrown by revolutionary coups (not orchestrated by the USAID, NED, NDI, MI6 or CIA) that led to cutting ties with imperialism and forging their independent national development (particularly Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso). It would be vacuous, however, to treat these milestones from a methodologically nationalist sense and forget how the imperialist system implicates countries in its orbit or outside of it into its coercive measures.
This is highlighted in the case of Niger which overthrew its long-sitting reactionary president and since then the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP) government has been politically reorienting itself with a different pole than the imperialist one. Given its massive oil wealth, the CNSP signed an agreement with China (PetroChina) in November 2023, to construct pipelines to export oil via Benin’s ports. As the deal was finalized and the beginning of exports was about to commence, it coincided with Niger’s demand of expelling AFRICOM from its territory. AFRICOM head, Langley, flew hurriedly to Benin , and a few days later, Benin decided to ban Niger’s oil exports via its ports, a decision that has ugly US fingerprints all over it.
The compass has always been and continues to be imperialism
It is becoming clear that the liberation of one country cannot be achieved if it is surrounded by reactionary neighbors. Therefore, calls for African Unity (á la Kwame Nkrumah) are not just performative calls for singing “kumbaya” and holding hands in cultural events, such as African Liberation Day. It is a historical necessity to delink from imperialism and prevent coercive practices by the US and its allies from hindering Africa’s sovereign development.
The destruction of Libya has reduced the country to factions, while its massive gold reserves (in 2011 amounted to 143 tons) that were meant to create the Pan-African currency , 40% of which have disappeared, and recently 25 tons were attempted to be smuggled to Türkiye via Misurata port . What is clear from that destruction is that it has led to the destabilization of the whole region in the Sahel and Sahara. Since NATO flooded the country with weapons, those arms ended up in the hands of the groups that a decade later AFRICOM is allegedly fighting in NATO’s “Southern Neighborhood”.
As Libya is destroyed, it is wrong to assume that the people are in a state of comatose. On the contrary, the people’s uprisings in the Sahel are a sign that people make their history with the tools at their disposal. While western liberals believe that change solely happens through the ballot box, even if it leads to anti-imperialist successes like in the recent case of Senegal, the global changing dynamics are also highlighting the necessity of revisiting our political compass and the way we practice politics.
Given the successive failure of imperialist policies in the continent, people are turning to the new rising poll, spearheaded by China and Russia. These countries provide better trade agreements, cancel debts, forge people-to-people ties, and do not engage in coercive economic measures. The growing economic presence of these countries in Africa is what bothers the imperialists and gives them reasons (not justifications) to have a presence on the African continent. The NATO-AFRICOM presence is meant to stifle what is arguably our civilization’s biggest infrastructural project and that is the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI has been so successful for the Global South that US strategist at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Daniel Runde, gave a testimony at the House CCP Select Committee, where he was asked what he thinks of the BRI. He replied : “Unfortunately, the BRI is an ambitious and hopeful project that speaks to the aspirations of China’s friends and potential friends. I hate it because it is a great idea because it inspires folks in the Global South. It is just not our idea”. This anti-China attitude is also apparent in the former Yugoslavia (another country attacked by NATO and then balkanized), where China’s BRI is making headway and Washington is using its coercive measures to dissuade Montenegro and Serbia from engaging with China.
Many tend to regurgitate US State Department talking points about Russia as imperialist, and China as proliferating debt traps across the continent, and that they both support authoritarian dictators. We must be wary of this propaganda because it is literally taken from the CIA’s directives and the USAID has been funding the anti-China and anti-Russia sentiment in Africa to amass disillusion that what is replacing western imperialism is another vicious imperialism.
Imperialism is the primary contradiction of our time and it is responsible for impeding a united and sovereign Africa. While rapid changes are happening across the globe, we must be vigilant of the forces that enable and reproduce imperialism, and the contending forces that offer leeway for sovereign national development outside of the orbit of imperialism. By celebrating and commemorating Africa Liberation Day, we are not only remembering the sacrifices of our great ancestors who taught endless lessons for an independent Africa, but we draw from their lessons an inspiration that aids us in analyzing the current conjuncture. Africa Liberation Day is a reminder of the necessity of analyzing our conditions and acting upon the existing dynamics. Otherwise, we will be constantly doomed to be manipulated by the primary contradiction of our time: Imperialism.
Essam Elkorghli is a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches Libya’s modern political history and contemporary imperialism in education. He is a labor organizer with the Graduate Employees’ Organization, assistant editor for Middle East Critique Journal , and a member of the Global Pan African Movement .