Going for gold (and diamonds, and oil, and cocoa): for the most part, it was the exploitation of the mineral riches of Africa that led to the colonization of the continent by Europeans centuries ago. (Africa -- Exploitation).

The exploitation of Africa's natural resources continues today, and involves some of our favourite things, from cocoa to oil, gold, and diamonds.

Cocoa farms in Ivory Coast are employing slaves so that people in the rich world can enjoy low-cost chocolate; an estimated 15,000 children, mostly from Mali, are being forced to work in Ivory Coast, which is the world's largest cocoa producer and depends heavily on cocoa exports. Small farms there supply 43% of the world's cocoa beans.

The government in Ivory Coast has blamed multinational chocolate companies for keeping cocoa prices low. This forces West African farmers into poverty and drives some of them into using child, slave labour.

Chocolate industry representatives argue that a complex buying chain prevents checking every farm that supplies them with cocoa.

The first reports of child slavery on some cocoa farms appeared in 1998 in an Abidjan, Ivory Coast newspaper. Others followed as UNICEF, the U.S. State Department, Save the Children Fund, and other aid agencies and journalists investigated the matter. The publicity forced the Ivorian government and British chocolate companies to take some action: government authorities and the six-billion dollar chocolate industry recently agreed to set up a system to help guarantee fair working practices.

In June 2001, the U.S. Chocolate Manufacturers Association (CMA) also pledged to help fight child labour in Ivory Coast and Ghana (the world's second largest cocoa producer). This followed the reports of child labour in some West and Central African countries.

Oil is also a source of much suffering among Africans. One example is Sudan, where foreign oil companies (including Talisman of Canada) are funding an oppressive government through royalties and helping to keep a 20-year-old civil war going. The war has cost millions of lives and displaced millions more. The British charity Christian Aid published a report in March 2001, saying the country's oil exports, which began in 1999, can be blamed for the loss of two million lives.

Money from the oil industry also provides Angola's governing party (MPLA) with vast funds for arms, prolonging the civil war in that country. The other side in this long, long war finances its arms purchases through diamonds, as we'll see later.

Foreign firms, along with the Angolan government, have made enormous profits from Cabinda's oil. Cabinda is a small enclave that produces nearly two-thirds of the country's oil, which totals around 800,000 barrels a day. In 2000, Angola exported about $5.4 billion (U.S.) worth of crude oil, roughly 90% of the country's total exports. The government expects production to rise to 1.4 million barrels a day in 2004. Employees of the Cabinda Gulf Oil Company Limited (CABGOC) live in relative luxury, while a kilometre away families struggle to buy water, food, education, and transport. They complain that CABGOC employees' salaries have forced up the cost of living for everyone. Chevron, the U.S. multinational in charge at Cabinda, says the company and its partners started social projects in the 1980s, and in 2000 they contributed more than $3 million to the community. But this is a tiny amount compared with the $18 million (U.S.) worth of oil produced by the companies every day.

Nigeria, the sixth-largest oil-producing country in the world, has one of its lowest per-capita incomes, and a national debt of $40 billion (U.S.). A U.S.-based international monitoring group has ranked Nigeria as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

In the Niger Delta, the heart of the country's oil industry, there are reports that little community development has resulted from the rich resource. When oil is found, a well is sunk, a pipeline is laid, and the taps are turned on, according to BBC News. But, while the oil industry and governments profit, leaking pipelines have spoiled some farmland and polluted fishing grounds: and, while the oil pours from the ground some nearby villages may have no clean water supply, no passable roads, no electricity, no clinics, and no schools.

It's not surprising that in all parts of the Delta protesters have blocked access roads, occupied production platforms, and - on occasion - sabotaged pipelines.

Gold mining in South Africa is another source of concern. Here's how writer David Ransom described a trip into one of the country's gold mines: "... Three kilometres underground the stale air smells of earth. We clamber through tunnels that grow smaller, darker, more suited to rabbits ... We are at the bottom of one of the deepest mines in the world [beneath Johannesburg], where the [`Reef' of grey rock] is just 90 centimetres wide ... We enter as if into the jaws of a giant vice, propped open by bits of wood. We scramble, lying at an angle, towards the [rock] face itself. The ice-cooled ventilation no longer operates effectively and the temperature rockets. I am blinded by perspiration. My heart races, my lungs labour, my muscles seize, my brain vibrates inside my skull with the piercing thud of pneumatic drills hidden somewhere in the darkness. I am utterly terrified ... I have been here just a couple of minutes. Thousands of people work -- and sometimes die -- here, eight hours a day, six days a week, a year at a time, for years on end ..."

Every year hundreds of people die in the mines of South Africa and thousands are seriously injured. Still, the mines employed about 400,000 workers in the mid-1990s, but low gold prices and higher production costs rapidly reduced jobs, by about 50,000 in 1997, and double that the next year. By 1999, the plummeting price of gold threatened the future of the country's 250,000 miners, and their two million dependents.

Diamonds may be a symbol of love and wealth in the Western world, but they're more commonly known as blood diamonds in many parts of Africa. They get their unattractive name because they too are funding some of the continent's most brutal conflicts: they are fuelling the civil war in Sierra Leone, for example, where the UN reports that arms go to rebels (the Revolutionary United Front - RUF) in exchange for diamonds mined in the parts of Sierra Leone they control.

The bitter fighting between government and rebel forces in Sierra Leone has caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths. According to a January 2000 report published by the Canadian non-governmental organization Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), the war in Sierra Leone was fuelled by warlords, gangsters, government officials, and international mining firms willing to go to almost any length to obtain valuable stones.

"There will never be a lasting peace in Sierra Leone until the diamond industry as a whole is properly managed," said Ian Smillie, who co-authored the report.

Diamonds are also the currency for wars and skirmishes in other places, including Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the UN Security Council.

In Angola, a guerrilla army - UNITA - obtains about $150 million a year from the sale of high-quality rough diamonds, according to one Reuters report in May 2001. "The cycle of poverty," writes Hector Oliva, a Barcelona-based press officer with Intermon Oxfam, "closely linked to the cycle of wealth, is devastating: more than 25 years of civil war, 800,000 dead, more than three million people displaced, schools and water system destroyed, state budgets giving the greatest share to the military, and a population that can barely cultivate its fields because they are covered in landmines. Angola - with Cambodia and Afghanistan - is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and, according to UNICEF, is the worst country for a child to grow up."

Some progress is being made though. In July 2001, representatives from 34 countries agreed on a plan to trace "conflict diamonds" from Africa, to help curb the illicit trade. According to the plan, government agencies in diamond-producing and diamond-trading countries will issue certificates to confirm the stone's origin.

There is another rare ore that one newspaper, England's The Independent, says "has joined the rogues' gallery of African subsoil resources fuelling wars on the ground." It's coltan, short for the minerals it contains - columbite and tantalite - and it's a key component in the manufacture of mobile phones and other electronic equipment: it was a low coltan supply that led to a shortage of PlayStation2 platforms in 2000. Few consumers would know that their supply of high-tech gadgets depends on peasants digging in the muddy hillsides of eastern Congo for a pittance, or that the mineral is partly blamed for prolonging the war in the region. Some reports maintain that coltan mining in two of Congo's national park areas - Kuhuzi-Biega outside Bukavu, and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve - is also jeopardizing the wildlife the parks were intended to protect.

Even West African fish are being scooped from the ocean by the outside world, particularly Europe. That leaves a generation of West Africans, driven to their coast by poverty and drought for the last 25 years, competing for their own fish stocks. But, they also desperately need the money from fishing licences sold to the European Union. More than half of Mauritania's foreign exchange, for example, comes from selling fish and fishing licences. In Guinea-Bissau, one of the world's poorest countries, revenue from fishing licences is thought to provide 40% of the government's income.

An environmental pressure group, the World Wide Fund for Nature, recently attacked the European Commission, for knowing "first-hand the devastating effect ill-managed fisheries have had in its own waters," and now exporting "this unsustainable fishing practice to threatened coastal states in West Africa."

The Japanese, Koreans, Russians, and Chinese also like West Africa's fish. As a result of too many people chasing the same fish, stocks off Dakar, for example, have been so hard hit that the government has started tipping old cars into the sea to create artificial reefs to try to attract the fish back.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. As long as corruption is as widespread as it is, the common people of Africa are going to continue to be robbed of their resources. Kenya's parliament threw out anti-corruption legislation in August 2001; opponents said the proposed bill left the business of rooting out corruption firmly in the hands of the government, one of the most corrupt in Africa. So, the bill was rejected even though its passage was a condition of receiving $300 million in aid from the International Monetary Fund. Those who objected, were enraged over the bill's amnesty clause: it dismissed corruption crimes more than four years old, granted immunity to retired politicians and civil servants (meaning all President Daniel arap Moi's "corrupt old cronies"), and gave the attorney-general the power to stop investigations. Do a detailed report on corruption in Kenya, and other African countries.

2. Do a follow-up report on the Bafokeng people in South Africa.

FACT FILE

Chocolate as a drink was introduced to Europe from the New World by the Spanish in the 16th century; eating-chocolate was first produced in the late 18th century.

FACT FILE

A black miner who spends 20 years underground faces a one-in-thirty chance of being killed and a one-in-two chance of being permanently disabled.

FACT FILE

UNICEF estimates that 200,000 trafficked children slip across borders in West and Central Africa every year, and has called on governments in the Ivory Coast region to step up efforts to combat the child slave trade.

Websites

Anti Slavery (with links) - http://www.antislavery.org/ homepage/news/ cocoa041001.htm

Common Dreams - http:// www.commondreams.org/

Physicians for Human Rights (blood diamonds) - http:// www.phrusa.org/campaigns/ sierra_leone/diam_q&a.html

World Cocoa Foundation - http://www.chocolateandcocoa.org/ WCF/wcfmdex.htm

RELATED ARTICLE: The threat of heavy debt.

Many African countries are crippled by debts they owe to the rich nations of the North; their leaders argue that having to repay those debts is another form of exploitation. The average African government spends more every year to finance its foreign debts than on national health care, and many spend more on debt servicing than on health and education combined. Zambia spends about 40% of its total revenue on debt payments. Cameroon, Guinea, Senegal, and Malawi all spend between 25% and 35% of theirs in the same way. But, these have been described as mostly illegitimate foreign debts that had more to do with politics than with development.

Many African countries made health-care gains in the 1960s. Then, international creditors imposed free-market reforms in the 1980s that forced these same countries to devalue their currencies, cut government spending, privatize many government services, and turn to export-oriented agricultural development rather than improve food self-sufficiency.

Some think these debts should simply be cancelled, freeing up resources for public investments in health care and education, and fostering more democratic development.

According to the World Bank, 25 of the world's 32 most severely indebted, low-income countries are in Africa. Oxfam International says the debt obligations to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, have become so difficult to manage that they are "a significant obstacle to human development in the world's poorest countries."

RELATED ARTICLE: Child-labour-free chocolate.

In October 2001, the International Labour Organization (ILO) welcomed the "Harkin-Engel Protocol." Named after U.S. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliott Engel who spearheaded talks with the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa Foundation, it aims to eliminate child slavery on West African cocoa plantations and end the worst forms of child labour in the global cocoa-chocolate sector.

The ILO, the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), the anti-slavery group "Free the Slaves," and the National Consumers League (NCL) were part of an advisory group that worked on the agreement. Along with U.S. government officials, they will help carry out all aspects of the Harkin-Engel Protocol during the next four years.

The Protocol aims to develop industry-wide global standards, along with independent monitoring and reporting, and to identify and eliminate the worst forms of child labour in the growing and processing of cocoa beans. The agreement also provides for public certification that cocoa used in chocolate or related products has been grown and processed without forced child labour.

RELATED ARTICLE: An exception.

While many Africans are exploited, the Bafokeng people in South Africa have hit the jackpot. Sitting on the world's second largest deposits of platinum, in Phokeng township, they are the richest tribe in Africa. After decades of legal battles with a couple of mining giants, the Bafokeng are now receiving royalties from the platinum that is being mined from beneath their land. In 1999, one of the mining companies, Impals Platinum agreed to transfer 22% of its annual mining profits to the Bafokeng people, as well as a million shares in the company.

The wealth has allowed the village to provide its citizens with amenities such as a high-priced athletic complex complete with track, tennis and basketball courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a 45,000-seat capacity soccer stadium. The village also has its own civic centre and a shopping mall, as well as the basic necessities of life such as water, sanitation, housing, electricity, health facilities, and schools. But, the Bafokeng people now have a battle on their hands as they oppose the government's plan to nationalize the country's mineral rights, which threatens to cloud the community's rosy future.