Africa Beset by Wars

Jan 6, 2025

A huge swath of Africa was engulfed in war this past year. War touched at least 16 countries—the most at any time since World War II. While it’s impossible to know the exact number, hundreds of thousands have been killed, the vast majority civilians.

Already at the end of 2023, 32.5 million people were displaced from their homes by these wars. The numbers surely grew as wars expanded in 2024. These displaced people are vulnerable to all kinds of terror: famine has hit refugees in Sudan. Health workers estimate that 80% of the women in displacement camps in eastern Congo have been raped.

Civil wars are raging or continuing in Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, and Congo. And war has been spreading across a vast region called the Sahel, south of the Sahara desert. Taken together, these wars are vaster and touch even more people than those in Ukraine or the Middle East. But they are almost never even discussed in the U.S. media.

If it talks about these wars at all, the U.S. media blames ethnic conflicts, or terrorist extremists, or rogue military forces. But in fact, these wars are a direct consequence of imperialist maneuvers and rivalries aimed at dominating Africa—led today by the United States.

The wars in the Sahel can be traced to 2011, when the U.S. and its NATO allies overthrew the government of Libya, killing its dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. As Libya descended into its own chaotic civil war, arms and soldiers spread into the Sahel. As a professor at Georgetown University put it: “With the Sahel, it’s clearly a problem of Libya’s collapse … everything is on fire.”

Throughout this region, the U.S. set up its own bases and trained and supported local troops, supposedly as part of the “war on terror.” But in fact, this just added more violence, and more armed and trained soldiers. In Niger, for instance, one group of U.S.-trained officers just overthrew another group of U.S.-trained officers.

Even while colonialism and imperialism have kept most countries in Africa impoverished, many countries are rich in natural resources like oil or minerals. But instead of funding the economic development of these countries, for more than a century, the lion’s share of these resources have flowed out of the continent to benefit U.S. and European corporations. Whoever controls the local state gets a small piece of the money for helping the foreign corporations extract these resources. So instead of developing the local economy, the main way for rival leaders to gain wealth is to gain control of at least a piece of the state.

In this way, the imperialist extraction of wealth fuels civil conflict, like the coup in Niger, or the four coup attempts in Burkina Faso just since 2022. It is also at least part of what’s driving the civil war in Sudan, which has set two rival groups of generals against each other.

On top of that, the borders in the Sahel, as in the rest of Africa, were drawn by European colonizers, not by the local people. Across the region, different ethnic groups and people of different religions were thrown by these borders into a common country and were cut off by national borders from their co-religionists or members of the same ethnic group. Burkina Faso, for instance, is divided between Muslims and Catholics, with the largest native language spoken by only 40% or so of its people. Nigeria is divided almost in half between Christians and Muslims, with each living largely in different parts of the country.

These divisions, products of the legacy of colonialism, make it possible for local leaders seeking to gain control of the state to claim to be defending the interests of their local populations.

This is part of what has made possible the rise of groups claiming to represent Islam across the Sahel. The U.S. wars in the region have created a backlash, just like the U.S. war in Iraq led to the development of ISIS. U.S. military actions and its backing of these countries’ corrupt states added to the appeal of fundamentalist Islamic groups, who claimed to be leading the resistance to the U.S. These groups have spread from Mali to Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana. They find support among impoverished populations, especially those who are excluded from a share of control over the state and the small amount of wealth that might provide.

When these civil wars break out, different powers often back the opposing sides. In Sudan, for instance, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been backing one group of generals, while Egypt is supporting another group—even as both the UAE and Egypt are U.S. allies. Russia has sent mercenaries to Mali and the Central African Republic, and France just withdrew from a long-running military “intervention” in its former colonies in West Africa.

These wars across Africa are likely to continue to accelerate as the rivalries between the different imperialist powers grow more intense. The U.S. regularly complains about Chinese investments and links in Africa and has been moving to contain it. This can only lead to more conflict, as the U.S. and China back different local armies, with the population paying the biggest price.

Africa is just as much a part of the capitalist world as any other continent. It has about 1.5 billion people, more than North America and Europe combined. That its people are increasingly devastated by these wars, fought in the interests of none of them, shows once again how bankrupt this capitalist system is, on the level of the entire world.