February 2017 – Gondaronline.com

What Africa Would Look Like If It Were Not Colonized?

Africa, Uncolonized: A Detailed Look at an Alternate Continent

What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then the Reconquista never happens. Spain and Portugal don’t kickstart Europe’s colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa might have looked like.

The map – upside down, to skew our traditional eurocentric point of view – shows an Africa dominated by Islamic states, and native kingdoms and federations. All have at least some basis in history, linguistics or ethnography. None of their borders is concurrent with any of the straight lines imposed on the continent by European powers, during the 1884-85 Berlin Conference and in the subsequent Scramble for Africa. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of Africa’s land mass. Only the Abyssinian Empire (modern-day Ethiopia) and Liberia (founded in 1847 as a haven for freed African-American slaves) remained independent.

This map is the result of an entirely different course of history. The continent depicted here isn’t even called Africa [1] but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for ‘Land of the Blacks’ [2]. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name ‘Africa’ as a European imposition. It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn’t become a colonizing power?

To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe’s population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover?

Allohistorical Africa, seen from our North-up perspective. The continent’s superstates (at least size-wise): Al-Maghrib, Al-Misr, Songhai, Ethiopia, Kongo and Katanga.

European colonies in Africa in ‘our’ 1913. Blue: France, pink: Britain, light green: Germany, dark green: Italy, light purple: Spain, dark purple: Portugal, yellow: Belgium, white: independent. Lines reflect current borders.

Cyon borrowed this counterfactual hypothesis from The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book, first published in 2002, explores how the depopulation of Europe would have altered world history. Robinson speculates that Europe would have been colonized by Muslims from the 14th century onwards, and that the 20th century would see a world war between a sprawling Muslim alliance on the one side, and the Chinese empire and the Indian and native American federations on the other.

Cyon focuses on Africa – or rather, Alkebu-Lan – which in his version of events doesn’t suffer the ignomy and injustice of the European slave trade and subsequent colonization. In our timeline, Europe’s domination of Africa obscured the latter continent’s rich history and many cultural achievements. On the map of Cyon’s Africa, a many-splendored landscape of nations and empires, all native to the continent itself, gives the lie to the 19th- and 20th-century European presumption that Africa merely was a ‘dark continent’ to be enlightened, or a ‘blank page’ for someone else to write upon.

Basing himself on Unesco’s General History of Africa, Cyon built his map around historical empires, linguistic regions and natural boundaries. His snapshot is taken in 1844 (or 1260 Anno Hegirae), also the date of a map of tribal and political units in Unesco’s multi-volume General History.

Al-Andalus, in this timeline still a dependency of Al-Maghrib; and the Emirate of Sicily to the left of the map.

Zooming in on the northern (bottom) part of the map, we see an ironic reversal of the present situation: in our timeline, Spain is still holding on to Ceuta, Melilla and other plazas de soberania in Northern Africa. In Cyon’s world, most of the Iberian peninsula still called Al-Andalus, and is an overseas part of Al-Maghrib, a counterfactual Moroccan superstate covering a huge swathe of northwestern Africa. Sicily, which we consider to be part of Europe, is colored in as African, and goes by the name of Siqilliyya Imārat (Emirate of Sicily).

The Arabic is no accident. Absent the European imprint, Islam has left an even more visible mark on large swathes of North, West and East Africa than it has today. Numerous states carry the nomenclature Sultānat, Khilāfator Imārat. The difference between a Caliphate, Sultanate and Emirate?

A Caliph claims supreme religious and political leadership as the successor (caliph) to Muhammad, ideally over all Muslims. I spot two Caliphates on the map: Hafsid (centered on Tunis, but much larger than Tunisia), and Sokoto in West Africa (nowadays: northwest Nigeria).

Sokoto, Dahomey, Benin and other states in country-rich West Africa.

A Sultan is an independent Islamic ruler who does not claim spiritual leadership. Five states in the greater Somalia region are Sultanates, for example: Majerteen, Hiraab, Geledi, Adāl and Warsangele. Others include Az-Zarqa (in present-day Sudan), Misr (Egypt, but also virtually all of today’s Israel), and Tarābulus (capital: Tripoli, in our Libya).

An Emir is a prince or a governor of a province, implying some suzerainity to a higher power. There’s a cluster of them in West Africa: Trarza, Tagant, Brakna, all south of Al-Maghrib. But they are elsewhere too: Kano and Katsina, just north of Sokoto.

Islam of course did not originate in Africa, and some would claim that its dominance of large areas of Africa, at the expense of pre-existing belief systems, is as much an example of foreign cultural imperialism as the spread of Western religions and languages is in our day. But that is material for another thought experiment. This one aims to filter out the European influence.

Neither European nor Arab influence is in evidence in the southern part of Africa – although some toponyms relate directly to states in our timeline: BaTswana is Botswana, Wene wa Kongo refers to the two countries bearing that name. Umoja wa Falme za Katanga is echoed in the name of the DR Congo’s giant inland province, Katanga. Rundi, Banyarwanda and Buganda, squeezed in between the Great Lakes, are alternative versions of ‘our’ Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

Some familiar-sounding names around the Great Lakes.

There is an interesting parallel to the Africa/Alkebu-Lan dichotomy in the toponymic ebb and flow of Congo and Zaïre as names for the former Belgian colony at the center of the continent. Congo, denoting both the stream and the two countries on either of its lower banks [4], derives from 16th- and 17th-century Bantu kingdoms such as Esikongo, Manikongo and Kakongo near the mouth of the river.

The name was taken up by European cartographers and the territory it covered eventually reached deep inland. But because of its long association with colonialism, and also to fix his own imprint on the country, Congo’s dictator Mobutu in 1971 changed the name of the country and the stream to Zaïre. The name-change was part of a campaign for local authenticity which also entailed the Africanisation of the names of persons and cities [5], and the introduction of the abacos [6] – a local alternative to European formal and businesswear.

Curiously for a campaign trying to rid the country of European influences, the name Zaïre actually was a Portuguese corruption of Nzadi o Nzere, a local term meaning ‘River that Swallows Rivers’. Zaïre was the Portuguese name for the Congo stream in the 16th and 17th centuries, but gradually lost ground to Congo before being picked up again by Mobutu.

After the ouster and death of Mobutu, the country reverted to its former name, but chose the predicate Democratic Republic to distinguish itself from the Republic of Congo across the eponymous river.

Kongo – a coastal superstate in the alternative timeline.

This particular tug of war is emblematic for the symbolism attached to place names, especially in Africa, where many either refer to a precolonial past (e.g. Ghana and Benin, named after ancient kingdoms), represent the vestiges of the colonial era (e.g. Lüderitz, in Namibia), or attempt to build a postcolonial consensus (e.g. Tanzania, a portmanteau name for Tanganyika and Zanzibar).

By taking the colonial trauma out of the equation, this map offers a uniquely a-colonial perspective on the continent, whether it is called Africa or Alkebu-Lan.

Map of Alkebu-Lan and excerpts thereof reproduced by kind permission of Nikolaj Cyon. See it in full resolution on this page of his website. Map of Africa in 1913 by Eric Gaba (Wikimedia Commons User: Sting), found here on Wikimedia Commons.

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Strange Maps #688

[1] A name popularized by the Romans. It is of uncertain origin, possibly meaning ‘sunny’, ‘dusty’ or ‘cave-y’.

[2] The origin and meaning of the toponym are disputed. The Arabic for ‘Land of the Blacks’ would be Bilad as-Sudan, which is how the present-day country of Sudan got its name.Other translations offered for Alkebu-Lan (also rendered as Al-Kebulan or Alkebulan) are ‘Garden of Life’, ‘Cradle of Life’, or simply ‘the Motherland’. Although supposedly of ancient origin, the term was popularized by the academic Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan (b. 1918). The term is not a 20th-century invention, however. Its first traceable use is in La Iberiada (1813), an epic poem from 1813 by Ramón Valvidares y Longo. In the index, where the origin of ‘Africa’ is explained, it reads: “Han dado las naciones á este pais diversos nombres, llamándole Ephrikia los Turcos, Alkebulan los Arabes, Besecath los Indios, y los pueblos del territorio Iphrikia ó Aphrikia: los Griegos, en fin, le apellidaron Libia, y despues Africa, cuyo nombre han adoptado los Españoles, Italianos, Latinos, Ingleses y algunos otros pueblos de la Europa”.

[3] A.k.a. the Plague, a very contagious and highly deadly disease caused by Yersinia pestis. That bacterium infested the fleas that lived on the rats coming over from Crimea to Europe on Genoese merchant ships.

[4] In fact, Brazzaville and Kinshasa, capitals of the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively, are positioned across from each other on the banks of the Congo River – the only example in the world of two national capitals adjacent to each other.

[5] The ‘founder-president’ himself changed his name from Joseph-Désiré Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga. The capital Léopoldville was renamed Kinshasa, after an ancient village on the same site.

[6] Despite the African-sounding name, abacos is an acronym of à bas costumes, or: ‘Down with (Western) suits’.

UK Trains Ethiopian Security Forces, as MPs Call for Action on Death-Row Dad

By Common Dreams

The UK Government is training senior members of Ethiopia’s security sector, despite the illegal detention of a British father on the country’s death row. The news comes as 53 MPs and peers call on the Foreign Office to secure Andy Tsege ’s return from unlawful detention.

A freedom of information request by international human rights organisation Reprieve has shown that senior members of Ethiopia’s police, military, justice ministry and diplomatic corps are studying for an MSc in Security Sector Management, as part of a UK-aid funded program.

The revelations come amid growing concerns for British father of three Andy Tsege, who is on death row in Ethiopia.

53 MPs and peers from across the political spectrum have written to the Foreign Office to request that ministers “make representations – privately or publicly – for Mr Tsege’s release.” The politicians, representing the Conservatives, Labour, SNP, Lib Dems, Greens and SDLP, criticise what they say is a set of “limited demands” that the government has made to Ethiopia so far, in relation to his case.

Mr Tsege has been imprisoned unlawfully in Ethiopia since 2014, when he was kidnapped at an international airport and rendered to a secret Ethiopian prison. Mr Tsege is a prominent critic of Ethiopia’s ruling party, and his ordeal is thought to be linked to a wider crackdown on dissent in the country. In 2009, while Mr Tsege was living in London, an Ethiopian court handed him an in absentia death sentence.

The Foreign Office has stopped short of requesting Mr Tsege’s return to the UK, instead focusing on a regular consular and legal access for him. However, the Ethiopian authorities have only agreed to sporadic consular access, while Mr Tsege has been prevented from contacting a lawyer. Ethiopian officials have said Mr Tsege faces no prospect of appealing his death sentence.

In 2014, the Department for International Development told Reprieve that it had cancelled a similar MSc programme because of “concerns about risk and value for money”. However, the programme was restarted several months later under the £1bn Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), with the oversight of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

This month, a Parliamentary committee on the National Security Strategy issued a report that heavily criticised the government’s use of the CSSF, saying the Fund was dogged by a “fundamental lack of transparency”. They also warned that CSSF projects carried a risk of UK complicity in abuses.

Ethiopian officials told the ‘Ethiopian Reporter’ newspaper in 2016 that “some 90% of the senior officials currently serving in Ethiopia’s intelligence institutions have completed their masters degree in the UK on subjects related to security.” They added: “The courses are fully financed by the UK government.”

Commenting, Harriet McCulloch, a deputy director at Reprieve, said:

“It’s shameful that the UK is funding Ethiopia’s security sector, when Ethiopian forces are holding a British dad illegally on death row. MPs are right to express serious concern over the government’s approach. Boris Johnson must explain why his department is training Ethiopian security officials, but refusing to negotiate Andy Tsege’s return home to Britain.”

Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.

Sudan’s president accompanies UAE’s rulers to defense show

By Jon Gambrell | AP

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Fighter jets screaming overhead and theatrical explosions marked the opening of an arms show Sunday in Abu Dhabi, as a bullet-scarred Emirati armored personnel carrier served as a reminder of the country’s ongoing military campaign in Yemen.

The Emirates announced over $1.2 billion in arms deals at the opening of the biennial International Defense Exhibition and Conference, known by the acronym IDEX. It and other Gulf nations, buoyed by rising oil prices and suspicious of nearby Iran, are likely to spend even more in the weeks and months ahead.

“The need for new equipment for modernized systems is still there and it is increasing,” said Charles Forrester, a senior defense industry analyst at IHS Jane’s. “Countries are beginning to deploy their own operations in … Iraq and Yemen and so they need to find ways to deploy and protect their people, as well as achieve their missions.”

Two of the UAE’s most-powerful rulers, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, attended the event Sunday. During the military demonstration, they flanked Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the world’s the only sitting head of state facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court.

Al-Bashir attended the 2015 IDEX arms show, but this year’s trip comes after U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order in the waning days of his administration to permanently revoke a broad range of American sanctions on Sudan after a six-month waiting period.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who was also in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, was not seen at the demonstration. Brig. Gen. Rashid al-Shamsi, an IDEX spokesman, said he didn’t know if Mattis attended.

Al-Shamsi announced over $1.2 billion in deals, the lion’s share coming from the $544 million purchase of 400 armored personnel carriers from a local manufacturer. Raytheon Co., based in Waltham, Massachusetts, announced a deal with the UAE navy for missiles to arm its Baynunah-class corvettes.

Many of the other contracts dealt with resupplying ammunition for the UAE, which is taking part in the Saudi-led campaign against Shiite rebels and their allies in Yemen. The war, which has killed over 10,000 civilians, began in September 2014, and the Gulf Arab nations entered the conflict in March 2015. It shows no signs of ending soon.

Iran remains a worry for Gulf Arab nations after world powers agreed to lift sanctions in return for Tehran curbing its nuclear program.

“In Yemen, … it’s a conventional war, of course, but it is one where you have to deal with armored vehicles and airpower as well,” Forrester said. “With the Iranian threat, it is the case of missile defense systems, radars to help track these situations.”

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Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap. His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .

Foreign Investment in Ethiopia Slumps After Business Attacks

By Nizar Manek, Bloomberg

Foreign direct investment in Ethiopia dropped by a fifth in the first half of the country’s fiscal year after violent anti-government protests in which foreign-owned businesses were targeted.

The country attracted $1.2 billion in the six months through the end of December, compared with $1.5 billion in the same period a year earlier, Fitsum Arega, commissioner of the Ethiopian Investment Commission, said in a phone interview Monday from the capital, Addis Ababa. He said the government may miss its annual target of $3.5 billion, with $3.2 billion more likely to be attainable.

The government of Ethiopia declared a state of emergency in October to deal with unrest accompanying protests by ethnic Oromo and Amhara communities that began in late 2015 over the alleged dispossession of their land, political marginalization and state repression. Businesses including those owned by Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote and Dutch fruit processors were attacked during the unrest. The security forces killed at least 600 demonstrators, according to the Association for Human Rights in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia, one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, is expected to expand 7.5 percent this year, compared with an average of 9.1 percent over the past five years, according to the International Monetary Fund. Opponents of the government argue that Ethiopia’s economic gains haven’t been matched by increased political freedoms since the ruling party cracked down on the opposition in 2005, after losses in that year’s elections.

The government is paying out damages to foreign and domestic companies deemed affected by the unrest, with 100 million birr ($4.4 million) already disbursed and “more in progress,” Fitsum said. Claims were received from at least 20 domestic companies. At least two foreign businesses were successful in making claims from insurance companies, while the government is also providing tax relief to operations that sustained damages during the violence, he said.

While no foreign investors canceled planned projects, they have taken a “wait-and-see attitude” to the country, Fitsum said.

“We already have big investors in the pipeline,” Fitsum said. “There are also big textile-manufacturing companies we can expect to have in the coming six months,” he said, referring to Ethiopia’s Hawasa Industrial Park that opened in July and which the government says is the largest in Africa.

Companies investing in Hawasa Industrial Park are from countries including China, India, Belgium, Spain, France, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Fitsum said.

Total foreign direct investment in Ethiopia in the 2015-16 fiscal year was $2.2 billion, according to an EIC statement published on the website of FANA, the ruling-party affiliated broadcaster.

Yields on Ethiopia’s $1 billion of Eurobonds due 2024 hit a record 9.66 percent at the peak of the unrest in January last year, and have since recovered to 7.35 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The notes have returned 5 percent this year, compared with an average 2.5 percent for the Bloomberg USD Emerging Market Sovereign Bond Index.

Why Is Morocco Rejoining The African Union After 33 Years Absences?

“It is so good to be back home, after having been away for too long.”

Those were the first words of Moroccan King Mohamed VI in a speech at the 28th African Union (AU) Summit Tuesday. The speech came after a vast majority of the AU’s member states voted Monday to readmit Morocco to the continental bloc after a 33-year absence.

As the Moroccan king addressed the chamber in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, it felt like a defining moment, according to Liesl Louw-Vaudran, an analyst at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa. “I’ve been following the AU for 20 years and I never thought I would see King Mohamed walk in and make a speech, it was quite historic,” she said from Addis Ababa.

King Mohamed VI at AU summit King of Morocco Mohammed VI (L) greets Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame in the main plenary of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, January 31. The AU voted to readmit Morocco to the bloc after a 33-year absence, but the status of Western Sahara remains a matter of dispute between Morocco and some AU members.ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/GETTY

But why has the North African country decided that, after a three-decade absence, it needs to rejoin the AU? After all, the collective is often criticized for bureaucracy and failing to resolve crises on the continent. Take Burundi, as an example: the AU has been largely toothless in dealing with a civil conflict that broke out in April 2015, which has killed more than 400 people. It backed off from sending in a peacekeeping force after Burundi expressed its dissatisfaction.

According to analysts, two key benefits stick out in Morocco’s reintegration in the AU: the opportunity for greater trade with African countries, many of which are growing much faster than European states; and a potential means of resolving the continent’s last remaining colonial dispute— the status of Western Sahara, a territory Morocco claims as its own but that an independence movement says deserves autonomy.

On the economic front, Morocco’s links with the rest of Africa are growing but still make up a small percentage of the country’s overall trade. The European Union is Morocco’s biggest trading partner, constituting 55.7 percent of its trade in 2015, with near neighbor Spain and former colonial power France being the biggest beneficiaries. Morocco has also been unable to benefit from intra-African trade regions to the same extent as other countries. It is a member of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), a five-country trade agreement with Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and Tunisia. But the AMU has made little progress in boosting trade on account of recurring disputes between Algeria and Morocco—including on Western Sahara, since Algeria supports its independence—and has not held a meeting since 2008.

Mohamed indicated in his speech that this was something he wanted to change, and that he has already been hard at work. The monarch said that Morocco had signed almost 1,000 agreements and treaties with various African countries since 2000, while he had made 46 visits to 25 countries on the continent in the same period. Moroccan banks have expanded throughout Africa, with a presence in more than 20 countries, and the country’s state-run airline Royal Air Maroc is one of Africa’s biggest airlines, with Casablanca used as a transit point for many sub-Saharan Africans traveling across the continent.

“Morocco has opened a number of interesting diplomatic and commercial interests with their nearest African neighbors,” says Claire Spencer, a senior research fellow and North Africa expert at international affairs think tank Chatham House. “It’s logical that if their sub-regional development [in the Maghreb] is not going to happen that this should take place within the African Union.”

The Western Sahara dispute was the reason why Morocco left the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), in the first place. A desert area roughly the size of Colorado, Western Sahara has been at the center of a dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front, an organization representing the indigenous Sahrawi people, since the 1970s. Morocco annexed the territory in 1975 after Spanish colonizers withdrew, prompting the Polisario Front to launch a guerrilla struggle that continued until 1991, when the United Nations brokered a ceasefire. An estimated 90,000 people are living in refugee camps near the Algerian desert town of Tindouf, according to the U.N., as a result of the conflict.

Ban Ki-moon meets with the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon, left, arrives for a meeting with the Polisario Front’s representative at the U.N. in Bir-Lahlou, in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, March 5. The region has been mired in a protracted dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front that is backed by Algeria.FAROUK BATICHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Morocco left the OAU in 1984 when a majority of members voted to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, as the Polisario Front calls the territory. In Monday’s vote, several countries—including Algeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe—reportedly wanted to make Morocco’s readmission to the AU contingent on it recognizing Western Sahara’s borders. But a top Western Sahara official, Sidi Mohammed, told the BBC that it welcomed Morocco’s readmission, calling it “a chance to work together” on organizing a long-promised referendum on the territory’s status.

According to Louw-Vaudran, however, Morocco’s re-entry to the AU could simply offer the North African state an air of “legitimacy” in seeking its desired solution in Western Sahara. Morocco has offered limited autonomy to the territory, but is unwilling to counsel full independence.

“Morocco wants to work from the independence to get Western Sahara expelled from the AU and once and for all lay to rest the whole issue of Western Sahara and its claims to independence,” says Louw-Vaudran. “I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that total independence for Western Sahara is still on the cards.”

In a veiled nod to the controversial issue, Mohamed said in his speech that he was aware some AU member states were suspicious of its intentions. “We have absolutely no intention of causing division, as some would like to insinuate,” he said. Time will tell whether that proves to be the case.

Egypt Boosts Navy As Part Of Red Sea Controlling Strategy

By Amr Emam,

Over the past two years, Egypt spent billions to upgrade its navy, buying helicopter carriers from France, frigates from Russia and submarines from Germany. Photo by AHMED XIV/Wikimedia

CAIRO, Egypt — By establishing a naval force in the Red Sea, Egypt aims for more than protecting navigation in the Suez Canal, a vital waterway for international trade, military experts said.

“The force will be the backbone of Egypt’s new Red Sea strategy,” former Assistant Defense Minister Hossam Suweilam said. “There is a marked surge of unrest in the southern entrance to the Red Sea, which needs an aggressive policy.”

The new force utilizes recently acquired naval equipment, including a French-made multifunction helicopter carrier.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the new force would help his country protect its coast. Defense Minister Sedki Sobhi said the force would help Egypt impose control on its territorial waters in the Red Sea.

Cash-strapped Egypt spent billions of dollars to upgrade its navy over the past two years. It bought two helicopter carriers from France, frigates from Russia and submarines from Germany. Cairo does this for a purpose, military experts said.

In 2015, Egypt spent almost $8 billion to dig a parallel channel to shorten transit time in the Suez Canal. It also dug tunnels under the canal to deliver water and ease the movement of people and goods to and from Sinai.

These huge investments are only part of Egypt’s vision for the Suez Canal region, one that cannot be implemented without proper security in the Red Sea, experts said.

Egypt wants to turn the banks of the canal into an investment magnet where vast industrial zones, huge logistics areas and extensive service facilities are planned. Egypt plans to attract hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to the region. In 2015, revenues from the Suez Canal totaled $5.2 billion, which did a lot to buoy Egypt’s struggling economy.

Analysts in Cairo said Sisi does not squander the limited funds available at the central bank with a purpose in mind.

Last April 8, Sisi ordered Prime Minister Sherif Ismail to sign a maritime border demarcation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal includes the handover of two disputed Red Sea islands to Riyadh. Egyptians now debate whether the islands are Saudi.

Absent from the conversation, however, are the reasons Sisi insists to demarcate the maritime border with the Saudis. He has said Egypt cannot explore its territorial waters for oil without defining its sea boundaries.

He mentioned a similar agreement with Greece and Cyprus. A few months after Egypt signed the agreement with both states, Italian state-owned petroleum company Eni announced the discovery of the East Mediterranean’s largest natural gas field off Egypt’s coast.

There is a strong probability of Egypt’s territorial Red Sea waters containing wealth so huge that Sisi is ready to risk angering his people with the maritime border demarcation deal with Saudi Arabia.

“Such a potential wealth is badly in need of a military power to protect it,” said Nasr Salem, a lecturer at Nasser Military Academy, the army’s strategic and military science institute. “We cannot leave the billions of dollars we spend on investments in the Red Sea without protection.”

Parliament is to debate the deal soon. Analysts expect that after deal approval, Egypt would offer concessions to international oil firms to explore Red Sea territorial waters.

Fear for these investments and potential wealth lies, meanwhile, more southward, near the coast of restive Yemen where the Houthi militia controls key port cities near the Bab el Mandeb strait, political experts said. The Houthis have threatened Red Sea navigation many times.

The establishment of the new Egyptian naval fleet comes after pro-Saudi forces in Yemen failed to capture the country’s port cities.

The fear in Egypt is that the Houthis can threaten traffic in the strait, which would deal an irreversible blow to the Suez Canal.

Close to 4 million barrels of oil pass through the Bab el Mandeb strait en route to markets in Europe and the United States every day, most of which is moved through the Suez Canal, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

A disruption of traffic at the strait would be catastrophic to Egypt and the world.

“This is exactly why Egypt takes the security of this area very seriously,” said Mohamed Kamal, a political science professor at Cairo University. “Whoever controls the southern entrance to the Red Sea will control the Suez Canal and Egypt cannot leave this control in the hands of anybody else.”

This article originally appeared at The Arab Weekly.

Why UK kill A Women’s Aid Program In Ethiopia?

By Paul Schemm

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The headline in Britain’s Daily Mail couldn’t have been more triumphant: “Aid: Now they’re listening,” it shouted in huge letters.

The conservative paper was celebrating the withdrawal of British funding for an aid project in Ethiopia it has dubbed “the Ethiopian Spice Girls.” These “girls” are a five-member all-female band known as Yegna, or “Ours.” It was founded three years ago and produces a radio drama and music videos aimed at helping girls through the perils of adolescence in Ethiopia.

The Daily Mail attacked the project for years with a string of vitriolic articles, calling Yegna “the most wasteful, ludicrous and patronizing” aid project in Africa. That coverage apparently convinced Britain’s Department for International Development to withdraw its funding on Jan. 6.

Yet the aid agency had previously given the program high marks, presenting it as an innovative way to empower Ethiopia’s young women. And while Ethiopia is the second largest recipient of British aid, getting $470 million a year, Yegna received only $6.4 million in total from the British government from 2015 to 2018.

Aid workers and activists say the rush to scapegoat Britain’s aid policy not only hurt a program that is helping adolescent girls but unfairly attacks the idea of using media for social change, a method development workers say is getting good results around the world.

The show features the five members of Yegna, each from different backgrounds, confronting and overcoming many of the challenges specific to Ethiopia’s young women. Girls in this nation of 100 million suffer alarming secondary school dropout rates, domestic violence and a culture that in many places restricts them to doing chores at home. Many young women are also forced into early marriages.

The program was an initiative of Girl Effect, an organization that advocates for more development programs focused on young women across Africa. In Ethiopia, it hit on the idea of using music and entertainment to convince its audience rather than typical public service announcements.

“Music is deeply rooted in Ethiopian culture,” said Selome Tadesse, Yegna’s managing director, pointing out that both young woman and their parents responded to the tactic. “If there is anything that will bring the Ethiopian people together, it is music.”

The band has put out more than 20 singles and produced eight seasons of the radio drama, which consists of weekly hour-long shows tackling forced marriage, teen pregnancy, taboos around menstruation and other topics.

Though the project has only been running three years, its organizers already cite substantial attitude changes, based on independent annual surveys carried out by advertising agency M&C Saatchi — part of the monitoring requirements of the program.

According to the latest survey, conducted in 2016, 76 percent of the girls who listen to the show say it inspired them to stay in school. Listeners are also twice as likely to agree that parents beating their children should be reported to the authorities compared to those who don’t listen to the show. Some 3,000 schools in the Amhara region also use the radio program as part of their teaching materials.

Edem Birouk, a slight 17-year-old student in Addis Ababa, said the radio drama is the only show that talks about girls’ issues. “It helps us cope because the characters in the drama are around our age,” she said. “We learn how to deal with the issues they face, whether it is harassment or issues of self worth.”

Her friend Sarra Ayele, 16, said the show has encouraged her to open up to her mother and discuss the challenges she faces. “Since it’s not what I used to do, my mother finds it very surprising,” she said with a shy smile. “My mother now tells me her experiences and it makes her happy.”

The challenge is also getting boys and adults to listen to the show as much as they listen to the group’s songs. “Those who harass girls on the streets would be less likely to do so if they were regular listeners because they would then get what it does to the girls,” said Hikma Jamal, 16.

Yegna isn’t the only project in Ethiopia that uses media to challenge deep-seated social behaviors. In fact, it’s a tactic increasingly used by international development organizations.

“There is still a lot of skepticism on the influence of media for social change,” admitted Bill Ryerson, founder of the Population Media Center, which has been producing radio dramas and soap operas for development purposes across Africa since long before Yegna appeared on the scene. But Ryerson said social research proves that well-produced, well-written dramas are the best way to tackle such intractable problems.

For Ethiopian women’s rights activist Sehin Teferra, the fate of Yegna is a lesson not only in tactics but the limitations of foreign funding — and how much anti-aid sentiment exists in many countries.

The United States is no exception: President Trump’s transition team sent letters to the State Department asking pointed questions about aid to Africa as well as international programs promoting “gender equality,” suggesting there could be a major rethink in the U.S. aid approach.

“This is always the problem with the aid model,” said Teferra. “The funding can be taken away.”

The show will attempt to continue with other sources of funding.

Paul Schemm is the Post’s overnight foreign editor based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, joining the paper in 2016. He previously worked for the Associated Press as North Africa chief correspondent based in Morocco and prior to that in Cairo as part of the Middle East regional bureau.

Follow @paulschemm