Locked down at home
recently I read two of the great histories of the assault on Africa in the
later 19th century by the European imperial powers. I also had the pleasure of
seeing the publication of my new novel about today's assault on Africa by the
empire that took over for the Europeans as guardian of western interests after
independence in the 1960's. That would be our very own United States, which
dominates today through a continent-wide deployment of CIA and AFRICOM forces.
The two great histories
are The Scramble for Africa by British historian
Thomas Pakenham (Random House, 1991) and King Leopold's Ghost by American journalist
Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998). Pakenham lays out the
imperialists' cynical use of humanitarianism and exceptionalism as they
convinced their citizens that imperial rule would help Africans benefit from
"Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization" and the suppression of the
"Arab slave trade." Hochschild focuses in on just one of the horrific
results, slavery of another sort -- brutally forced labor for rubber and ivory
-- in the "Free State of the Congo," which killed millions of
Africans and destroyed the functioning states of Central Africa. The results of
the popular mania to "do good" for benighted Africans are still felt
in the Congo's chaos today.
My new novel, Arms Deals, brings the humanitarian and
exceptionalist fraud of empire in Africa up to date. It takes place in Niger,
the poorest of all African countries, where the Trump administration trades
advanced weaponry for drone bases and military cooperation -- as indeed, in
real life, in Niger and many other North African countries, it has continued
this policy of the Bush II and Obama administrations.
Proponents of the arms
deal promote it in Washington as a way to protect Africans, particularly women,
from Islamist terrorism, just as they would have sold it in the Cold War as
liberation from Soviet communism or in the Bush I and Clinton "rogue
states" era as a way to track the movement of weapons of mass
destruction....or "stability" or checking Chinese influence or
whatever is the most marketable imperial excuse of the day.
The subtitle of the
novel, A Mar'Shae McGurk Thriller about "Shopping to Get
Yours," reveals my idea of reaching readers of crime fiction who
may not focus much on foreign policy. They may never have considered that we
are not, in fact, the good guys the imperialist establishment expends so much
effort to convince us we are. This is the second in my series of
anti-imperialist novels hiding inside crime thrillers.
My hero in both novels
is unlikely
FBI agent Mar’Shae McGurk, a high school dropout from “east of the river” in
the District of Columbia who was redeemed in the military police. In the
first thriller, The Weathermen on Trial, a tweet by President
Trump starts her on a "cold case" mission to track down political
terrorists from the 1970's. They provide their critique of U.S. imperialism
during the trial that takes place.
In Arms Deals McGurk takes on two cases: corruption in a U.S. arms sale to the impoverished West African country of Niger and the murder of her young cousin in D.C.’s Simple City neighborhood. Both cases turn on using violence to get what you want – “shopping to get yours,” in African-American street dialect. As Mar’Shae, known as “Black” by her family and friends, pushes hard on both cases they become dangerously intertwined.
So stay safe, and take advantage of this downtime by reading these tomes!
All
the best, Caleb
No comments:
Post a Comment