By David Hundeyin, September 25, 2024
The state has put targets on the backs of left-wing independent media outlets it identifies as subversive. Outlets Like African Stream are being accused of being Russian puppets in an age-old pattern of using Red Scare-style propaganda to manufacture consent for the continued crackdown on journalism and freedom of speech.
On Friday, September 13, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken addressed a press briefing in Washington DC, as he has done many times before. The purpose of the briefing was to announce new measures to counter “Russian propaganda,” a pronouncement that was not out of the ordinary. The US has placed nearly 6,000 sanctions on Russia over the years, making a press briefing to announce the State Department’s latest Russian sanctions a normal and prosaic event. That is, until Blinken got to the main point of his briefing:
Last week, our government revealed how RT launders information operations through unwitting Americans to covertly disseminate Kremlin-produced content and messaging to the American public. Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world. In Germany, for example, RT covertly runs the Berlin-based English-language platform Red, a successor to the now defunct RT-linked platform Redfish. RT also secretly runs the online platform African Stream across a wide range of social media platforms. Now, according to the outlet’s website, “African Stream is” – and I quote – “a pan-African digital media organisation based exclusively on social-media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad.” In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.
With these words, Secretary Blinken simultaneously declared war on one of Africa’s most important news media platforms and signaled the start of a new type of U.S. information warfare on the African continent. Where previously, the U.S. approach to Pan-Africanist or anti-imperialist independent media platforms based outside the U.S. had generally been to ignore them and treat them as objects of no consequence, this was an announcement that heralded a change of strategy – one with huge implications for the future of information in Africa and around the world.
Red Scare/Bogeyman Tactics: A Brief Primer
Coming at the end of a week where the U.S. attention economy was dominated by the saga of fictitious cat-eating Haitian immigrants and other electoral buffoonery, most people who follow U.S. politics either missed the story entirely or did not quite grasp its significance. I am not most people, primarily because in addition to being a Nigerian journalist whose work is hyper-focused on Africa and its diaspora, I also happen to regularly collaborate with African Stream and I have previously worked onsite as a reporter at its offices in Nairobi, Kenya.
In fact, prior to Blinken’s presser, I was scheduled to begin hosting a biweekly podcast on African Stream’s YouTube channel in October. The status of that project now lies unresolved because within 12 hours of Blinken’s – completely evidence-free – claim that African Stream is part of a “global Russian propaganda network,” African Stream‘s YouTube channel was promptly suspended. Its Facebook, Instagram and Threads pages also followed in rapid succession as African Stream was taken down across all Meta platforms. Stripe then announced that it would no longer process payments for African Stream on X, leading to the demonetisation of its X profile. Eleven days later, TikTok also removed suspended African Stream’s profile, which had close to a million followers.
All of this, remember, took place without Blinken or the State Department showing a single shred of evidence to support their claim that we were – in any way at all – linked to Russian state funding, support or assistance. A politician made an accusation in Washington, and within 24 hours, some of the world’s largest digital censorship hammers came down on a group of 20-something and 30-something-year-old Africans 7,000 miles away in Nairobi. Apparently, by simply invoking the infamous “Red Scare ” in the Brave New World of 2024, the US government could entirely ignore little things like the burden of proof, the rule of law, the legal process, and even national sovereignty – with zero consequence.
In my reaction to the unprecedented action, I pointed out that it was the latest manifestation of a tried-and-tested U.S. political habit of giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it. In the 19th century, Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright from Mississippi famously theorised that Africans escaping from slave plantations must be afflicted with a mental problem because slavery was such an elevation from the natural status of an African that any African seeking to be free must be mentally ill. He called the proposed mental illness “Drapetomania,” and he published multiple papers suggesting corrective treatments for “Drapetomania,” including regular whipping.
In the 1930s, at the peak of Jim Crow in the U.S. and Apartheid/settler-colonialism in Africa, the U.S. government claimed that the rise of transatlantic Pan Africanist thinking and political movements was the result of Russian propaganda aimed at provoking a “world Negro rising.”
Thirty years later, during the Cold War, the U.S. State Department and CIA began regularly pulling out the same party trick whenever they decided to carry out an assassination or regime change. The CIA accused Patrice Lumumba of being a Soviet-linked Communist, and he was subsequently captured, tortured, murdered and dissolved in sulphuric acid by their Belgian proxies. Kwame Nkrumah was also accused of being a Soviet-linked communist, and the 1966 CIA-backed coup in Ghana was the result. In the U.S., everyone from Fred Hampton to Martin Luther King was similarly labeled with the “Russian agent/Communist” tag which, at the time, was the same as placing deadly targets on their backs. They were all duly assassinated.
This tactic for eliminating powerful pro-independence African voices on the continent and in the diaspora was so successful that even the South African apartheid government borrowed it. Prime Minister P.W. Botha famously remarked in 1985 at the peak of the black liberation struggle in South Africa, “Most blacks are happy, except those who have had other ideas (read: ‘Soviet propaganda’) pushed into their ears.” Predictably, the Black voices that expressed the most strident anti-colonial ideas in South Africa ended up eliminated, while those adjudged to be “moderate” like Nelson Mandela were made to be the faces of the “Rainbow Nation” rebranding exercise of 1994 – an exercise that left South Africa’s structural and economic inequalities entirely unchanged to date.
What South Africa’s apartheid government and the U.S. government figured out, like other global white power institutions, was that winning the information war in Africa was key to maintaining their position at the top of the world’s economic and social order. In order for the world’s most resource-rich continent to remain the “magnificent African cake” described by King Leopold II of Belgium – a place that exists for industrial inputs and resources to be cheaply mined and rapidly transported to the coasts for export to the places where they believe real humans live – Africa could not be allowed to be seen as a place with its own ideas, ideologies, thinkers, voices, plans and leadership.
Consequently, as it was when “Drapetomania” was invented as a justification for the maintenance of a socioeconomic system that was beneficial to global white power, so the Red Scare had to be invented and deployed to serve a similar purpose today. If a core tenet of the global white supremacism religion is that Africans are far too stupid and primitive, with their behind-the-bell-curve gorilla brains, to actually come up with ideas, voices and plans for their own future that do not coincide with the Western model, then it must logically follow that when they do come up with these things, there is only one explanation: the Russians did it.
Unfortunately, as has been seen over the course of multiple centuries, global white power is not capable of changing its worldview or adopting new tactics, because in 2024, Anthony Blinken has done the narrative equivalent of breaking the “In case of fire break glass” panel and grabbing the rusty old weapon:“These independent journalists at African Stream who are working on driving Africa’s self-directed 21st-century narrative from Nairobi are, in fact, Russian government cutouts. Only a white person could possibly come up with work that threatens the Empire.”
Implications For African Voices and Media
There are several takeaways from the ongoing ritual de-platforming and financial censorship of African Stream across every social media platform that is owned by U.S. interests, but the three most important ones go as follows:
1.) The U.S. government is planning to go to war in Africa. In the world of today, putting boots on the ground in a country 7,000 miles away from home requires careful narrative curation. In 2011, the NATO-led invasion of Libya was only possible under the guise of imposing a “No-fly zone” as part of a “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” premise. The first act in war is ensuring control over the covering narrative. The importance of narrative control over modern warfare is illustrated by the fact that a large part of the Western world’s population believes that the year-long campaign of U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is a rational and acceptable response to “October 7.” That same population, however, cannot understand or accept “October 7” itself as a response to 76 bloody years of Israeli terror, genocide, land theft, apartheid and settler-colonialism.
If the U.S. government and its French allies are allowed to construct and curate a narrative around, say, the Sahel region of Africa and, if it goes unchallenged by the likes of African Stream, we could end up with a Libya 2011 scenario where the U.S. and its NATO allies used the excuse of “humanitarianism” to justify their military invasion for geopolitical aims. The attack on African Stream is an attempt to destroy sources of precious information and alternative viewpoints. Without our kind of alternative media, Africans will continue to have only the “America! Woo woo!” as their news sources. As a rule of thumb, when the information war is won, the shooting war commences.
2.) Western technology is a risk factor for alternative media spaces. When “Drapetomania” and the Red Scare were deployed in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was at least an attempt to give the accusations some factual basis, no matter how tenuous or fabricated. In this instance, neither Blinken nor the State Department bothered to make any attempt whatsoever to support their accusation that African Stream is funded by Russia. Blinken merely stood on a podium and delivered the latest set of imperial edicts from Washington. Subsequently, global tech giants took real-world actions, affecting the political and information economy of millions of people around the world in response to these edicts.
African Stream went to the extraordinary extent of retaining legal experts to trawl through YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Threads TOS to see what rules it might have broken. There were none. The platforms simply decided to enforce an instruction from Washington that was delivered without any justifying evidence, and for entirely geopolitical reasons. In other words, the U.S. has demonstrated that it is able and very much willing to weaponise its technology for use in information warfare in the exact same way it has always accused the Chinese and Russians of doing. The gloves are well and truly off.
3.) We are doing something right. The work that African Stream and others in the independent, Pan-Africanist media space are doing is having a real effect in cutting through decades of foreign propaganda and raising the independent consciousness of the new generation of internet-savvy young Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. The U.S. state propaganda machine consequently cannot keep up with this new and unfamiliar technologically-able enemy, and so it is lashing out with petulant stunts such as holding briefings falsely accusing independent media platforms in Nairobi of being “run by RT.” When it could not come up with any evidence, it recruited its imperial agents to attempt to formalize the smear against African Stream with a poorly-researched, badly-written pseudo-academic article hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.
If the most powerful empire the world has ever known is this threatened by the work of a group of young Africans, then these Africans are definitely doing something right.
David Hundeyin is a Nigerian investigative journalist, bestselling author and founder of West Africa Weekly, an independent Pan-African digital news publication focusing on West Africa and the Sahel region
@Black Agenda Report