Africa still under colonial conditions

Life for African diamond workers today has changed very little. In the
past few years DeBeers has slashed the wages of South African
mineworkers. They now live in the shanty towns that have burgeoned
in South Africa since the fall of the apartheid system and the rise of
neocolonialism, the system in which white imperialist power installs
indigenous puppets as its front in Africa and other former colonies.
African men are still stuffed into compounds and ramshackle huts near
the mines, while African women who work as cleaners must stay in the
women’s barracks. If a husband and wife are found sleeping together
they are fired.
In Namibia the unionized diamond workers live in abject poverty in
hovels without running water, electricity, health care or education for
their children. The men live in compounds separated from their
families. They are given bunk beds without mattresses to sleep in and
are exposed to radiation and other health hazards.
In the past century since the genocidal Belgian colonialism in Congo,
African people have been subjected to ongoing war, bloodshed and
powerlessness. The poverty is so severe that most African people have
nothing to eat for days at a time.
Yet Congo alone holds immeasurable wealth from diamonds, coltan
and a wide variety of other valuable minerals essential to the daily
functioning of the capitalist world. By all rights, every single resident
of the Congo should enjoy the highest standard of living in the world.
Every child should grow up in a prosperous family with a lovely house,
with access to the highest quality education and the best possible
health care.
In the past 10 years proxy wars financed and backed by the U.S.,
other imperialist powers, including DeBeers, have ravaged the Congo
to get or maintain control of those bountiful resources whose benefits
never reach the average African person.
Five million people in the Congo have been slaughtered in those wars
so that life in the white world can go on in peaceful, prosperous, hi-
tech tranquility. No one in America protests this new generation of
genocide in the Congo. No one even talks about it.
Most of Africa is blessed with this profuse wealth of natural resources.
Yet half the people in diamond rich West Africa live on less than a
dollar a day. It has the lowest life expectancy at birth in the world—in
10 countries in Africa the life expectancy is 46 years. Sierra Leone has
the highest infant mortality rate in the world with 284 deaths per
every thousand live births.