Africa Is a Country

Crazy Bald Heads

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Crazy Bald Heads

By
Sean Jacobs

Blackwater mostly recruits from former US soldiers and former soldiers from dictatorships like Apartheid South Africa

John Rohan, via Flickr CC.

In case you missed it, The New York Times carried a story this weekend about how Eric Prince, former founder and CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, the company that dominated private contracting in Iraq and whose men have been accused of murdering innocent Iraqis, is working with the royal family of the United Arab Emirates to form a mercenary army: “… The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts … Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.”

The US government, as usual, is ambivalent about the mercenary force and the royal family are big US allies.

But there’s a small detail that caught my eye. They’re mostly recruiting from former US soldiers and those who served in the armies of dictatorships like Apartheid South Africa: “… some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s.”

You can read about it in The New York Times.

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.