The Open Veins of Africa

There is no discussion on Africa today that does not make
reference to the contradiction that exists between its wealth of natural
resources and the poverty of most of its people. Africa is not a poor
continent, and not all Africans are poor. Yet Africa is depicted as the
world’s poorest continent, where the majority of people live with no
access to clean water, decent health care, education and electricity,
and struggle to survive in the face of high levels of unemployment,
poverty and inequality. This is the reality we see all around the
continent. The reason, according to Professor Tatah Mentan, is that
extractive foreign industries and the competition to access natural
resources envelop parasitic African governments in a web of
unaccountability, corruption, repression, and rent-seeking. The love
affair between many African governments and international
corporations—and the optimistic power of the “Africa rising”
narrative—are obscuring harsh realities, namely that many Africans are
deprived of benefiting from the exploitation of their own natural
resources. In many of these high growth countries, citizens now believe
that they are paying too high a price for economic growth, which does
not trickle down to them. There is a new wind blowing across the
continent and it is bringing with it increasing demands for Africa’s
resources to benefit Africans. And past relations between extractive
imperialists and puppet African governments are under scrutiny.

This
book dissects the dynamics of the politics of natural resource
extraction in Africa that resolves into a matter of class struggle. This
class struggle is visible at the level of combatting the workings of
capitalism and imperialism in the interest of the dominant international
class of corporatocrats and its African parasitic class, and
simultaneously mobilizing forces against those exploitative and
oppressive interests. Tatah Mentan’s book is therefore a MUST READ for
students, researchers, social scientists examining the political economy
of contemporary imperialism, policy makers, and corporate managers.