Canada

PAPPhotoshot Yves Engler The United Nations, then under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, and Canada played key roles in the assassination of popular Congolese Prime Minister and eminent African statesman Patrice Lumumba. To Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Lumumba was a “major threat to Western interests”. Neither the UN nor Ottawa has ever accepted responsibility. Fifty-six years ago today the United Nations launched a peacekeeping force that contributed to one of the worst post-independence imperial crimes in Africa. The Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) delivered a major blow to Congolese aspirations by undermining elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Canada played a significant role in ONUC and in Lumumba’s assassination, which should b...

NOVANEWS Yves Engler Self-described Africa scholar Gerald Caplan’s recent praise of Canada’s relations with Uganda is superficial and misleading. He ignores Canada’s support for imperialism in East Africa that goes back to the days of the slave trade. A recent Globe and Mail article (reprinted on Rabble.ca) by Gerald Caplan detailing Canadian relations with Uganda made be mad. Why? It was not so much for what’s in the article, but rather what it ignores, which is reality. Any progressive author writing about Canada’s foreign affairs betrays his readers if he ignores the bad this country has done and feeds the benevolent Canadian foreign-policy myth. “Canadians have had ties to Uganda for many decades”, writes Caplan, a self-described “Africa scholar” citing the...

NOVANEWS Yves Engler Despite a long list of abuses by Canadian mining companies in Africa - and elsewhere - it’s very difficult to hold them accountable at home. Will the new government of Justin Trudeau defy the powerful mining industry and adopt legislation to constrain their abuses abroad? Two weeks ago police shot and killed an individual at Pacific Wildcat Resources tantalum mine in central Mozambique. The incident received some attention in Canada because community members responded by seizing the Vancouver-based company’s mine site and setting some equipment ablaze. One protester told O Pais newspaper this wasn’t the first time someone was shot dead at the mine and another said: “We don't want to see the managers of this company operating in the mine...

NOVANEWS Yves Engler Unlike the US or France, Canada is not a leading military force in Africa. But Ottawa exerts influence through a variety of means including training initiatives. Canadian Forces have trained hundreds of African soldiers at the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre in Kingston Ontario and Lester B. Pearson Centre in Nova Scotia. Canadian forces have also directed or participated in a slew of officer training initiatives, running courses in Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Mali among other places. In recent years Ottawa has funded and staffed various military training centres across the continent such as the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center in Ghana, African Centre for Strategic Research and Studies in Nigeria and Ecole ...

NOVANEWS ccirn.qc Yves Engler The Canadian mining magnate is just one in a long line of Westerners who ask the world to believe what they say but ignore the actual results of what they do — a “spin-sploiter” publicly professing humanitarian ideals all the while exploiting Africa. What do you call people who try to make other people believe what they say but ignore the results of what they do? How about spin-sploiters? After a few years of research I have come to realize that there is a long and ignoble history of Westerners exploiting Africans while touting humanitarian objectives. Unfortunately, this practice is not confined to the distant past. A leading Canadian NGO official, who then founded Québec’s largest mining company, provides a recent exam...

NOVANEWS dailytrust.com Yves Engler Few Canadians are familiar with pre-colonial African cities, and even fewer know a Canadian military leader helped sack one of West Africa’s great metropolises. When the British and Canadians took part in the ‘Scramble for Africa’, they did so with impunity, a complete disregard for property, sacred forests and people. They only saw savages that needed to be tamed. In the fifth installment of its Story of Cities series The Guardian  recently focused on Benin City, the lost capital of an important precolonial state. At its height in the Middle Ages Benin City and 500 interconnected settlements was the site of the largest earthworks prior to the mechanical era. The walls built in what’s now Southern Nigeria were four t...