Africa: The New Frontier for Imperial Oil

Over the last five years, Africa has contributed one in every four barrels of new oil discovered outside of Northern America. A new scramble for Africa is afoot. The battleground is the continent’s oilfields – the looting of what the Times calls Africa’s “copious reserves of natural gas and its sweet light oil.”

Energy security is the name of the game. The Council of Foreign Relations’ call for a new approach to Africa in its report “More than Humanitarianism (2005) focuses on Africa’s “growing strategic importance” for U.S. policy. This means cheap and stable oil imports but also keeping the Chinese – important new actors in the African oil business – and Islamic terror at bay. (Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the ‘new frontier’ in the fight against revolutionary Islam.) It turns out that energy security is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation coupled to American militarism and the war on terror. Will it work?

SF Bay Area Indymedia