GULLAH GEECHEE FIGHT TO KEEP ANCESTRAL LANDS

The Gullah Geechee community are descendants of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the coastal regions of the US states of North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida during the 18th century. This resilient group has long been committed to safeguarding their heritage and the land inherited from their ancestors.

On St. Helena Island, off the South Carolina coast, Gullah Geechee people stood firm against developers threatening their traditional way of life when a company proposed a golf course and residential properties. Fortunately, the local government voted down the proposal in 2024, citing the Cultural Protection Overlay zoning law that bans golf courses and resorts.

Will the Gullah Geechee people’s cultural rights prevail over the pressures of capitalist development?

Hear Us Roar: https://news.1rj.ru/str/AfricanStream

Continued……. Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/26/gullah-geechee-st-helena-island-south-carolina

https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/07/world/africa/gullah-geechee-africa-slavery-america/index.html

THE WEST NEEDS AFRICA!

The West has consistently misrepresented Africa as a continent of poverty and in dire need of saving. But it’s quite the opposite: The West desperately needs Africa for its resources.

Africa received less than $30 billion annually in aid while losing $192 billion to those same countries, according to a 2014 report noscriptd, ‘Honest accounts? The true story of Africa’s billion dollar losses.’

As filmmaker and writer Mallence Bart-Williams explained in this 2015 video clip, the West destabilised wealthy African states to sell the narrative that Africa is poor, dying and surviving only because of the mercy of the West.

She pointed out that the West has nothing to offer. That’s why they still have their teeth sunk in African soil. ‘Instead, you should come empty-handed, filled with integrity and honour,’ she says.

Video credit: @tedx (X)

Source:

https://www.medact.org/app/uploads/2014/09/Honest-Accounts-report-v4-web.pdf

EUROPEAN POWERS FIGHTING IT OUT IN DRC

In this 1964 clip, we see Pan-Africanist Malcolm X (1925-65) pushing back on CBS News reporters who, like mainstream media past and present, love to strip all incidents occurring in Africa and the Global South of their context, obscuring Western culpability.

A CBS News reporter asked the chairman of the Pan-Africanist Organization of Afro-American Unity to condemn what the Western media labelled as the ‘massacre’ of European nuns held hostage in October 1964 in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Malcolm rightfully reminded the journalist that the massacre occurred in a country that the Western states had deliberately destabilised.

Continued……. Lest we forget that it was Belgium, the UK and the US that orchestrated the brutal assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925-61), shot by Western-backed Congolese forces, hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid, leaving behind a tooth only recently returned to his family.

Malcolm’s reply serves as a stark reminder that the ongoing conflict that had k*lled more than 6 million between 1998 and 2010 began with Western powers vying for the Congo’s mineral wealth since the late 1800s. Once again, Belgium, the UK and the US today back Uganda and Rwanda to violently loot Congo to ensure the resources enrich Western states and corporations.

Continued……. African Stream is not the first to call their bluff. In 2020, Amnesty International published a scathing report noscriptd, ‘Somalia: Zero accountability as civilian deaths mount from US air strikes.’ The report quotes Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s director for East and Southern Africa, who stated, ‘The evidence is stacking up and it’s pretty damning. Not only does AFRICOM utterly fail at its mission to report civilian casualties in Somalia, but it doesn’t seem to care about the fate of the numerous families it has completely torn apart.’

Furthermore, airwars.org lists several instances of AFRICOM’s civilian casualties, some of which the US military has admitted to. Even if you filter the reports only to include deaths confirmed by the ‘belligerent’ (that is, the US military) and not the many unaddressed alleged civilian deaths, you will find pages of reported incidents of fatal civilian casualties. Hence, the civilian death toll is far greater than three.

HOW WEST BUYS AFRICAN JOURNALISTS EXPOSED!

A leaked document noscriptd the ‘Adaptive Country Plan Research’ - obtained by West Africa Weekly’s @DavidHundeyin - reveals the extent of the on-going information war in Africa. In this clip, Hundeyin details how African journalists are used by NGOs to smear anti-imperialist individuals such as himself, as well as platforms like African Stream.

The document was assembled by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and circulated to 10 Nigerian journalist who took part in a private retreat at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra, Ghana. In it, unfounded claims by former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken - that African Stream is a Russian propaganda outfit - are regurgitated, citing sources that fail to produce any evidence.

Continued……. To ‘demonstrate’ that we are doing the Kremlin’s bidding, the document points, for example, to a story we did on the 1995 Nigerian government’s execution of the ‘Ogoni 9’ - environmental activists who opposed the destruction of the Ogoni people and their lands by large conglomerates such as British oil-and-gas company Shell. The absurd logic here seems to be that highlighting Western-backed corporate crimes against Africans is now pro-Russian!

CIR, as Hundeyin mentions, is a London-based NGO founded by Adam Rutland and Ross Burley, who are both former employees of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It claims to be independent but is funded by the FCDO and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID has recently come under scrutiny, following President Donald Trump’s funding freeze. The organisation has been accused of being a tool of US foreign policy, dressed up as humanitarian efforts. On 4 February, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that over 6,000 journalists in some 30 countries were USAID funded.

Video credit: @DavidHundeyin (X)

Sources:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hzyk4UorAxzUHKCBHZAWmnhx5O9gbr8v/view

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/usaid-and-the-media-in-a-time-of-monsters.php

https://www.info-res.org/

PROTESTER STORMS SUPER BOWL HALFTIME FOR PALESTINE & SUDAN

During Grammy Award-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show performance on 9 February in New Orleans, one of the approximately 400 ‘field cast’ members pulled out a combined Palestine-Sudan flag, with the words ‘Gaza’ and ‘Sudan’ prominently displayed. The man, who the National Football League’s spokesperson reportedly told CNN had the flag ‘on his person,’ then rushed onto the field before security detained him. Police have not yet charged the person, who the NFL said would be banned for life from NFL stadiums and events. ‘No one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent,’ the league said in a statement.

The Super Bowl is the most-watched event in the United States, drawing more than 120 million viewers in 2024.

Continued……. The protester called for people to continue advocating for Palestinians oppressed under the Western-backed Israeli occupation in Gaza and those affected by the devastating foreign-backed proxy war in Sudan.

Israel’s military onslaught has k*lled 61,000, according to the Gaza government information office, which also noted that thousands are still missing or presumed dead. It further stated that the bodies of 76 per cent of the victims had been recovered and brought to medical centres. Meanwhile, the office estimated at least 14,222 people are trapped under rubble or in areas inaccessible to rescuers. The Lancet medical journal estimated that by July 2024, the death toll may have exceeded 186,000. Reports indicate that by the end of 2024, around 1.8 million Palestinians experienced critical levels of hunger.

In Sudan, recent estimates released by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine indicated that over 61,000 people died in Khartoum State in the first 14 months of the proxy war. However, the US envoy to Sudan estimated as many as 150,000 Sudanese k*lled by May 2024. Sudan is experiencing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded, with nearly 25 million people—more than half of the country’s population—requiring aid, according to the United Nations.

Sources:

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1155836#:~:text=More%20than%201.8%20million%20Palestinians,released%20on%20Thursday%20has%20revealed.

https://theatlantavoice.com/kendrick-lamar-super-bowl-performance-2

https://www.dw.com/en/sudan-facing-biggest-humanitarian-crisis-recorded-report/a-71018990

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2024/invisible-and-severe-death-toll-sudan-conflict-revealed

https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/sudan-emergency

https://apnews.com/article/super-bowl-protester-whats-happening-gaza-sudan-dd79957e52b06212044cae6d4ce9e87e

https://x.com/geoffreyyork/status/1786073142475075756

https://truthout.org/articles/gaza-officials-update-death-toll-to-over-61000-adding-thousands-presumed-dead

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

Continued……. When Malema made the comments, his Economic Freedom Fighters party was pushing for a vote of no confidence against Athol Trollip, the-then mayor of the city of Nelson Mandela Bay. The EFF accused Trollip - a member of the White-led Democratic Alliance - of neglecting the city’s Black citizens. They wanted his head to roll - for him to be axed - not for any White people’s throats to be slit.

Malema says he will continue fighting for the rights of Black people despite threats from Musk. In a reply on X, he accuses the Space X founder of being a spoilt and racist beneficiary of apartheid.

WHY JOHN LEGEND’S CONCERT IN RWANDA MATTERS

In this clip from Episode 18 of our ‘Pan-African Attitude’ podcast on the three-decade-long, Western-backed proxy war over natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), African Stream Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Kaballo (@ahmedkaballo on X) elaborated on how ruling elites use entertainment to exert soft power in politics. Kaballo’s explanation came in response to some audience members, who have questioned why Congo activists have asked @JohnLegend (X) to cancel his concert on 21 February in Kigali, Rwanda, in collaboration with NGO Global Citizen (@glblctzn on IG and X).

Continued……Rwanda- and Uganda-backed M23 rebels’ offensive on 27 January in the eastern DRC’s Goma city—home to over 2 million people—has k*lled around 3,000 Congolese and left at least 700,000 internally displaced. This figure includes more than 100,000 people who fled the 200,000-person Kanyaruchinya refugee camp on the outskirts of the city.

In Rwanda’s case, a concert can sanitise the country’s image, given its well-documented role in fueling the resource war in the Congo. For example, Rwandan President Paul Kagame appeared on stage during @KendrickLamar’s December 2023 concert in Kigali.

What do you make of Kaballo’s analysis?

Sources:

https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/dire-health-and-humanitarian-crisis-eastern-democratic-republic-congo-prompts-escalation-efforts-who-partners

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/2/3/dr-congo-near-goma-displaced-people-begin-long-journey-home

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/5/2/blood-minerals-what-are-the-hidden-costs-of-the-eu-rwanda-supply-deal

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/06/africa/dr-congo-goma-violence-deaths-intl-hnk

https://efe.com/en/latest-news/2025-02-07/dr-congo-conflict/

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/9016/2025/en/u