Guerrilla History - W. African Women's Development (Part 1) w/ Takiyah Harper-Shipman

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on the fantastic Africana studies scholar, Professor Takiyah Harper-Shipman, to talk about West African women's development, Sankara, AFRICOM, and more!�� Due to time constraints, this episode will act as an introduction to these topics for our next conversation with Professor Harper-Shipman, which will take place soon and will be a longer, more in-depth discussion.  We really enjoyed the conversation, and are already looking forward to diving into the minutiae with the Professor very soon! Takiyah Harper-Shipman is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Davidson College.  Her courses include Africana political economy, gender and development in sub-Saharan Africa, African feminisms, international development: theory and praxis, and research methods in Africana Studies.  Her book Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa is available from Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Ownership-of-Development-in-Africa/Harper-Shipman/p/book/9780367787813.  We also highly recommend checking out her chapter La Santé Avant Tout: Health Before Everything in the excellent A Certain Amount of Madness The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337579/a-certain-amount-of-madness/.   Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use

the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki. Unfortunately, only joined by one of my co-hosts today as Professor Adnan Hussein, of course, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University, is out sick today. So Adnan, we hope you feel better very soon and undoubtedly you will by the time that you hear this. But just know that we're thinking about you and hoping that you feel better really, really soon. I am, however, joined by my other co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today? How are things going in Nebraska? Hello, I'm doing good. Yeah, things are okay here. Same all same. But yeah, happy to be here and

very excited for this conversation. Absolutely. We've got a really interesting conversation with a really interesting guest, somebody that I've been wanting to talk to for a very long time. coming up. So our guest today is going to be Professor Takeda Harper Shipman, who is an assistant professor in the Africana Studies Department at Davidson College, somebody who has done quite a bit of work that I have seen before, who I've heard speak before. And actually when we were hatching the idea for the show over a year ago and thinking about people who we should bring on to the show, She was one of the first ones that came to mind. I had her page bookmarked on my computer for like over a year in preparation of this.

And we just wanted to get some more ground-level conversations beforehand recorded, like our introduction to African revolutions and decolonization struggle, before we jump into a super esoteric topic, like the one that we're going to have today, which is female development in West Africa, particularly in Burkina, Faso both during the Thomas Sankara era as well as after the Sankara era and how those eras compare and then comparing that context to Ghana and other surrounding countries. So as you can see, a very esoteric topic and something that would be pretty dense to jump into like in one of the first episodes of the show.

That's why we kind of held this off for a little while. But I'm really looking forward to this. Brett, anything that you want to open up with as we begin to talk about what we're going to hope to get out of this conversation. Well, yeah, just from the, just from what you were saying a second ago is like, not only do do we have that more introductory episode on grill history, but over at Rev. Left, we've done an entire episode on Thomas Sankara and that period of time in Burkina Faso's history. So, you know, there's always more supplemental material out there for you to go check out

to get a better understanding of these complexities and this history. But yeah, I'm really interested primarily, you know, kind of in the legacy. of Sankara in the country, how that legacy perhaps lives on today, the different fronts of society, whether that's health care, you know, women's rights, environmentalism, and how those have played out. And then, of course, you know, Burkina Faso is a country that has faced like many countries in the area, you know, multiple coups over the last several years. And I would like to touch on that as well and try to get a clear understanding of the political dynamics at play and this most recent coup happened in January of this year, 2022. So I'm very curious as to

how that happened, what the ideology behind that is and how exactly that's playing out. But yeah, this deep dive into into this I think is really important and is going to clarify and sort of inform on an area that is generally understudied and undercared about in the world more broadly because, you know, the European domination of the global narrative and of American hegemony means that the focus is, you know, on the Anglo-American world or on Europe or on China or whatever, and Africa often gets excluded. So at that guerrilla history, we've always tried not to fall into that trap. And this is another episode of us trying to inform our listeners more about that continent and its issues. Yeah, absolutely. And I would like to reiterate

the fact that you have that Thomas Sankra episode. I remember it vividly. I remember exactly where I was when I listened to it. It was walking back from work when I I was working at a lab in Germany, really fantastic episode. And I highly recommend everybody check that one out on the Rev Left channel. And of course, I also recommend that people check out the introductory episode to African revolutions and decolonization struggles that we did in the past. It'll kind of give you an idea of what this period of time was like across the African continent, of course, keeping in mind with the caveat that we made many times in that episode

that, you know, Africa is the second biggest continent, both in terms of science. and population, and that's something that we in the West tend to, we want to flatten Africa, right? We want to like kind of homogenize it to make it easier to conceptualize because we have so little that we're taught about Africa in our education. We have so little that's spoken about in our media that when we hear about Africa, you hear, you know, something is happening in Africa and you just kind of universalize it across the whole continent. But what we're doing here is we're really trying to dive in into a specific context of, you know, Burkina Faso as well as Ghana. And we couldn't have somebody better to talk about these things.

Allow me just to pitch a couple of other things that listeners can look into in addition to those two episodes that we already talked about, things that will familiarize themselves with Professor Harper Shipman. So the professor has a book. It's an academic book, but it is quite decent and it's written in a very straightforward way. I have it both on my computer and my phone called Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, came a couple of years ago from Routledge Press. And it really does clarify the mode of thinking that she is going to be using in this interview,

I am sure, which is talking about not only development, but also ownership of development. And it's a point that she reiterates over and over again in that book. It's a point that she reiterates over and over again in a chapter of another book that I highly recommend, A certain amount of madness, the life philosophies and legacies of Thomas Sankara, which is an edited work of a bunch of essays about Sankara, where her chapter, it has a French name, but I'll just give the English because my French pronunciation is absolutely abysmal, health before everything. And again, we're talking about the legacies of Sankara on health, on development, but also how ownership of development relates to this. So very, very interesting and something that is rarely talked about. And also, she's currently working on something else. At least I've heard that she's working on something else called unburdening the state family planning and the population principle in Ghana, which again takes us to a nearby country, kind of same, a similar cultural background, region-wise, it's very close by.

But again, when we're talking about female development, something that's brought up a lot is family people. planning. And that is something that, well, in some of her work, she's called it Neo-Malthusian thinking to focus on family planning in the way that it's been pushed by Western NGOs and, you know, the World Bank and USAID, all of these organizations. So there's a lot that can be said here. And I know I'm getting a little bit rambling just to kind of put all of this stuff out there to say, you should really check out Professor Harper Shipman's work because it is very in depth. It covers a lot of different indexes and matrices that we are going to not have nearly enough time to talk about during this episode, but they're definitely going to help ground

you in this understanding of the specific context of West African, particularly the sub-Saharan, West African female development and how ownership relates to that. Brett, anything else you want to add before we truck towards the interview? Just one more quick thing in relation to a recent episode we did. We were covering the French elections, and it just comes out today, yesterday that Macron beat Le Pen and will be another, what, five, six years in office. But, you know, that's relevant only in so far as, you know, the French politics and the far right and their legacy of colonialism in Africa specifically. You know, Burkina Faso is right underneath Mali, which is right underneath Algeria. French

have their fingerprints all over all of that area. And so it's a lot. just interesting to sort of, you know, coordinate between the history of Africa and then, like, French reaction and the French far right and how those, that legacy of French colonialism is still, you know, at play and shaping a lot of the, you know, ideas and, you know, forces in both countries, in both regions, really. So that's just a little interesting thing tying into a recent episode that we did on the French elections, which you can go check out if you're interested in that. Yeah, I think that that's also something that we also kind of talked about that a little bit in the episode about how the Westall, what was it, how the Westall democracy from the Arabs with Elizabeth Thompson,

one of our very early episodes. We talked about the role of France, both all the way back then, which was 1920, as well as in more recent days. And we did bring up Macron briefly during the interview. And then we had a discussion about Macron in the wrap up section of that as well. that it'd be interesting. I haven't listened to that episode in, you know, about a year at this point, but I do remember having a conversation about that. It would be interesting to see how things have changed in the last year or so since we have recorded that.

But yeah, I'm really looking forward to this interview. The professor has interests that I'm sure the listeners are going to be very interested. And she teaches courses on Africana political economy, gender and development in sub-Saharan Africa, African feminisms, international development theory and praxis, research methods and Africana studies. So this is somebody that we would like to talk about all of these aspects with. And it's something that perhaps we'll be able to talk to Professor Harpership and again in the future on this show about related topics, future work that she does.

Because these are very important topics and these are things that are underserved in the media. We don't hear about these different aspects. When was the last time that you went into a popular press and you saw something about African feminisms? When was the last time that you heard about gender and development in sub-Saharan Africa? These are not things that we hear about. And they're critically important in, again, the second biggest continent, both in terms of size and population, critically important, and we don't hear anything about it.

So I'm really looking forward to the interview. And Brett, any other final words before we wrap up? I think we're good. Yeah, I'm just excited to get to the conversation. Excellent. Looking forward to it. So listeners, we'll be right back with Professor Takeda Harper Shipman on Gorilla History. And we're back on Gorilla History,

and we are super happy to be joined by Professor Tekia Harper Shipman, who, as I said, is an assistant professor at Davidson University. We talked about some of the books and chapters that she, She had written earlier, and I definitely recommend that everybody check them out. Now, interestingly, the professor told us that she is also a fan of guerrilla history. So we weren't the only ones that were gushing over each other. We're fans of her and she is a fan of us, which is really nice to hear. So, yes, Davidson College.

Thank you for the note, Professor. I already made a mistake. Here we go. This is going to be great. All right, professor, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. It truly is a pleasure to be here with you both.

Yeah. So we have a really, I have a lot of things that I want to ask. But I guess as we get off underway when we're talking about development, female development and ownership of development in West Africa, in Burkina Faso, in Ghana, I think that it would be useful for us before we start talking about these specific contexts and the history to perhaps lay down just a very basic set of terminology or indexes that are useful for people to understand when we're talking about development. Because for the completely uninitiated, they might not know even what the term development

means. They might not know what you're talking about when you're talking about ownership in your work because it's not quite as straightforward as one may think. So perhaps you can just give us the bird's eye view of the kind of terms. in the frame that you're setting out here. Yeah. Thanks for that. I think that is really important to kind of establish from the outset, right?

So I always like to think of it as, there are multiple ways that we can talk about development, right? So the kind of dominant way that we come to know international development is through this kind of unique arrangement of bilateral, multilateral, multilateral donors and institutions that have kind of set as their goal, if you will, increasing economic growth around the rest of the world and kind of supporting or implementing liberal democracy in a lot of the global South through various types of interventions from concessional loans to, you know, all types of conditionalities and programming,

right? So that's kind of like the broader dominant view of development. And that's, you know, what I'll talk about later, what I end up critiquing and what people like Sankara and others kind of are critiquing. Because the underlying logic for a lot of it is a kind of modernization. Right. So this is really where the modernization theory that kind of came out of the 1960s is fully being implemented, you know, through government structures and through kind of capitalist structures around the rest of the world in a very contrived way. But I don't like to always leave it there, right? Because I like the kind of people's history of development too, right? And that is, you know, the processes that humans have always been engaged in, whereby the, they find resources to address the issues that plague their communities, right? And I think so, you know, there's a kind of less top-down, less Western-driven way in which we can think about development when we look at the different strategies that indigenous communities and

marginalized communities use to address their own issues without necessarily moving through the government, right, or without necessarily moving through donors or capital to kind of get that done. So I try not to always leave it for, you know, the U.S. aid and the World Bank to kind of monopolize the term development, but also finding space to think about how we've always been engaged in development, right? And that term we can kind of take back as one of my colleagues Melker Hall talks about, right, taking back the concept of development. Can I just jump back in and hit you a little bit harder on the term ownership? What are we talking about when we're asking about ownership?

Like, what does it mean in the context of development? What does it mean in the African, West African context of development? Because this is a term that is going to come in handy during the conversation, for sure. Yes. Okay. So this is the fun stuff. So in the 1990s, when structural adjustments failed, right, let's, you know, it was very clear that, you know, structural adjustments were supposed to kind of stabilize the economies, right, at the macro level, they were supposed, knowingly, it was like, you know, there was going to be all of this pain, you know, Jeffrey Sachs is one of the key architects.

Let's call that out, right, since now he's, you know, I hope you're listening, reference, right? But, you know, this understanding that you, there's going to be all of these austerity measures whereby, you know, for the masses, right? So not austerity measures for the capitalist and for the wealthy, but that the masses will have to cut back on their consumption, you know, essentially neoliberalized policies. That, again, the end goal was to increase economic growth through stabilizing the national economy. and decreasing inflation. Part of what ended up happening was that we know it didn't work,

and the World Bank and the IMF came under intense scrutiny, right? There was backlash around the world because, you know, this is the effects of stagflation from the 70s isn't really ease. And in fact, now at this point, it's actually worse by the 90s in the late 2000s. And so, you know, it was so bad that even the U.S. Congress considered getting rid of the World Bank, right? And so the World Bank and the IMF really had to rethink their image, right? And mainly the World Bank, because the IMF kind of like fully adopted the role of like the global villain, I guess, if you will, right? But the World Bank had to re-envision itself because, again, after McNamara in the 1960s, you know, they were supposed to be poverty reduction, right?

And if your goal is supposed to be poverty reduction, which is the way in which the bank was supposed to distinguish itself from the IMF, then you're not actually reducing poverty, then what are you good for? And so in the early in the late 2000s, or the late 90s, early 2000s, the president James Wolfenson of the World Bank comes up with this new framework, right, called the Comprehensive Development Framework. And this is the World Bank's attempt to like re-envision itself as a kind of responding to the global backlash for structural adjustments. and without actually fundamentally dealing with the problems of development, right, the problems that fully created the issues that led to structure, or even questioning structural adjustments themselves. And so part of what the CDF does is say, it's the World Bank saying, like, okay, okay, we're going to do things differently now, right?

So we're no longer going to do these like five-year development plans, which is a lot of what countries were doing previously. They're like, we're going to do long-term development. development. So we, everyone's going to produce like a vision 20. This is like in the 2000s. They're like, everybody's going to produce a vision 2030, right, for like the next 30 years. And everyone's going to have, you know, more civil society participation. And more importantly, there's going to be country level ownership. And the concept of ownership in that moment was this, this kind of discursive mechanism whereby states would take accountability for the policies, right,

that they were in these development plans that they were supposed to be producing. The key, though, is that the poverty reduction strategy papers, which are the documents that come out of this, that are tied to the CDF in this moment, have to be approved by the World Bank and the IMF. And they're essentially all the same thing. They're still. structural adjustment policies or structural adjustment papers, but now they're just called poverty reduction strategy papers, right? Because it sounds nicer. Now the bank is doing what it said it was doing in the first place. It's reducing poverty. But there are scholars who pointed numerous scholars at this point, who pointed out how the World Bank still required the same

types of conditionalities, right, in those loans. And in order to have the poverty reduction strategy papers approved as well. Because if it wasn't approved, then these same governments could no longer get access to the concessional loans. Concessional loans, just to be clear, right, are the loans that are supposed to be coming from multilateral and bilateral donors that don't have the same types of interest rates or the shorter kind of payback periods as if governments were to get these loans from regular banks, right? So at market rates, concessional loans are supposed to be kind of softer lending. There's like, you know, maybe a 50-year payback period.

And there's maybe zero or very, very low interest on those loans. And so ownership kind of starts with this, right? It starts with the World Bank trying to reimagine itself in the face of this kind of global backlash. The funny thing is that the way in which ownership is talked about, it's attributed to a different kind of history. And this is part of why my work is important because I'm trying to actually re-center the actual history, right, which is with the World Bank responding to this backlash,

and not the one that everyone usually talks about, which is the OECD high-level forums, right? And so the OECD-high-level forums are these, four different conversations that are had. I think the first one, I believe it's like, it's Bucharest. I can't remember the first two right now. I'm blanking on the first two, but the second two, it's the Paris Declaration in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. But the first one, the first OECD comes in like 2001, And again, this is after the CDF. But still, the concept of ownership is really what comes out of the 2005 Paris Declaration, right? So this Paris Declaration is considered this moment where the international community comes together, donors and civil society and aid recipients, et cetera. And they say, we want a change in development architecture. We want

aid to be effective now. And how can we make aid more effective? Well, we need ownership. And who says we need owner? Oh, well, the people who are receiving the aid, they're the ones who say they want ownership, right? And so the parent's declaration becomes this kind of like grandiose articulation of everything that the World Bank stated in the CDF in the early 2000s, right? But it's pushed as if it was a global effort, right, to re-envision development. And it's the global South that wants ownership now. But it's almost the exact same language and the exact same requirements. In fact, the Paris Declaration actually says, like, the way in which we'll know there's ownership,

how is it measured by whether or not you have a PRSP? We measure ownership by whether or not you have a poverty reduction strategy paper. And so it becomes this kind of this really interesting rewriting of history, but also this insidious way in which the World Bank gets to kind of like reimagine but can itself and continue to kind of be the architect behind like the international aid enterprise. But so ownership itself becomes a matter of governments from the OECD is governments being able to lead in the development policies for their own countries, right, if that makes sense. It does not say anything about them designing it. It says nothing about them actually creating anything outside of what's already the framework that's already been established for them, right? But it's very much measured by whether or not they actually commit to the poverty reduction strategy papers or the papers that come from the

World Bank and the IMF. And this part is really important if I can't. I know I know I can just kind of go on and on. But the reason this is also super important is because go back to what I was saying about this global backlash, right, around structural adjustment policies. the World Bank and the IMF did not believe that there was anything actually wrong with structural adjustment policies, right? And a lot of respects, the problem was the people. The people, how dare they not suffer and just waded out so that they too can see, you know, the little bits trickle down to them from these austerity measures. And so the goal really was to just repackage structural adjustment policies under the guise of like ownership, like, ownership.

under this new paradigm and to get people to accept it because it's no longer coming from the World Bank anymore. Now it's coming from their own capital, right? Their own governments are the ones who are signing off on these papers and their own governments are the ones who are supposedly owning these policies. And this was also the former chief economist for Africa from the World Bank actually stated this like in an interview, but if you look at it, structural adjustments work. The issue, because what we're doing right now is structural adjustments. He's like, the World Bank never actually changed anything. The only difference is instead of the whole Washington consensus from the 90s, right, and everything being created on 14th Street

in D.C. It's like now it just comes from Bangui, right? Or it comes from Dakar. But it's the same exact thing, right? And so there's a kind of, again, a more pernicious way of getting people to kind of buy into or assume that they're buying into these same policies because it's now coming out of their governments without consideration for how, again, the World Bank and the IMF are still producing them and still have to give the OK on, you know, on the final version of the PRSP's. Well, it's like it's a win-win. And I'm sorry, Brett, I'll let you go in with your question in one second. It's a win-win for the IMF and the World Bank because they get the policies that they want one way or another. But by framing it in the terms of

ownership now, they are able to, one, push it on the population of the people of the country saying, hey, this is coming from your government. Of course, only if it's approved by us, but we don't mention that part, right? It's your government. But also, because of that new, that new mode of ownership that they're pushing, it allows the IMF and the World Bank to reap all of the successes when it works, quote unquote, works by the metrics by which they are, you know, considering to be working. But anytime that there's a failure, they are able to shift the blame onto the country that has the ownership of those poverty reduction mechanisms, despite the fact that it had to be written by basically, you know, approved by in terms of what

they would actually say, but, you know, basically written by the IMF and the World Bank. They get all of the benefits and they're able to shift all of the blame for the failures onto the countries with the people that are having to bear the brunt of the failure. It's a win-win. Anyway, sorry for that interjection, Brett. Feel free to go ahead. Yeah, well, you know, there's lots of different directions we can take this conversation in from here. But the stuff that popped into my head as you were speaking about the IMF and the World Bank is, you know, the old type of classic colonialism, you know, evolves into this newer, more subtle form of neo-colonial. And the IMF and the World Bank are tools of this more subtle neocolonialism, like, you know, this sort of bait and switch stuff, like it's coming from your own government.

It becomes more subtle, but it still is a perpetuation of this history of colonialism. And, you know, there's that famous quote by Michael Parenti that says countries in Africa or in the global south are not underdeveloped. They're over-exploited. Walter Rodney's amazing masterpiece, how Europe underdeveloped Africa. And so with all of this stuff in mind, the image of Sankara rises to mind as just one of the many figures that Africa has produced that pushes back against this exploitation, against this violence, against this meddling and this intervention and this exploitation and extraction. So my question is, with all of that in mind, how did you personally become interested in Sankara? And what exactly does he represent in the face of a lot of the issues that we're talking about here with neo-colonialism and what? not. Yeah, I think this is really, this is a really good question. And I really, I appreciate the

bringing up the, the, the, the, the, you know, mainly because people read, um, when you talk about neocolonialism, people are really kind of, especially when talking about, um, in Krumah, right? They're really kind of thinking about like all European powers, right? And this kind of, as being the, the agents that are recolonizing Africa. But, you know, in. reading neocolonialism by encumas, he's actually talking about the rise of U.S. empire and the rise of U.S. colon- like the U.S. kind of supplanting a lot of European powers as a kind of neocolonial force, right? If you read it, you know, for what he's actually saying. And so this is super important because that's exactly what you see, right, is that it's the U.S. even though we know

about the relationship between like France and its colony, its former colonel. colonies with, you know, like currency, continuing to be pegged to, like, France and, you know, the reserves that have to be kept in French banks, you know, the kind of economic colonial relationships that still exist. A lot of what you see, though, especially in West Africa, is USAID as the driving kind of neo-colonial force, right? You have USA, you had like the Millennium Challenge accounts. We have Africom, which I'm sure we'll have to talk about at some point, right, in this conversation. And so I really appreciate you bringing this up because to really kind of read in Krumah for what he's saying, he's actually talking about what we see today, which is the rise of

U.S. empire and U.S. footprint kind of being established on the continent, right? How did I come into the song? So how I came into Sankara is actually a very funny, interesting story. I didn't know who Sankara was until I date Peace Corps. again, another, and Krumma talks about Peace Corps, right? It's an agent of empire. I was an agent of empire, if you can't believe it or not. And so after I finished undergrad, I did Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, and I hadn't heard of Sankara. And if I did, I didn't remember it. And I remember being in, I was with one of my host family in Kudagu, which is about 100 kilometers west of the capital. And Kudagu is kind of known as a very hotbed for like political activism and and, you know, art and all these things. And my family there, someone had brought up. My host father had was in the military under Sankara. And he was talking to me at the time about, um, Sankara and Sanko Tore and I was like, who are these people? I'm like, is my French just not good enough yet? But like, how could I? I, could there have been a person like this, and I never heard of him, right? And he's, he's like, you know, if Sankar hadn't been assassinated, the whole world would know where Burkina Faso was today, right? And I thought that was interesting because, yeah, before being assigned to Burkina Faso for Peace Corps,

I knew about, like, Fespaco, right? That was the first time I had heard about Burkina Faso, but again, it's not a well-known country. But anyway, as my, as my host father was talking, talking about Sankara, I remember thinking like this, he almost sounds made up, right? This man who was, who kind of, who came to power, but was very, in the 1980s was very vocal about imperialism and about global capitalism and, you know, even like you called out, you know, the Israeli occupation of Palestine in front of the UN, like all these things before. anyone even knew who he was. And so that was what really kind of started my interest in finding out who

Sankar was. And that was before I had ever read anything. So a lot of what I came to know about him was through conversations with people. I mean, I'm not supposed to say that, I mean, I'm not in Peace Corps anymore now, but they tell you like, you're not supposed to have political conversations with people, right? And I was like, well, too bad, right? You know, I would, I would ask people like, who was Sankar? And at the time, Blaise Kompari was still president.

Now, Blaise Kompare was Keith in the assassination of Sankara, right? He was his closest ally. You know, they had trained together in the military. You know, Sank, Comparre led the attack to kind of to ensure that Sankara was released from prison, right? When he was, he was in prison under Weidrago. Right. So it became this really fascinating story about, you know, just about revolution and brother fraternity and betrayal and all these things that I was just getting from regular conversations with people, like drinking a beer and being like, so what happened with Blaze and the stories you get, though, are very different from what gets captured in the textbooks, right? So, you know, people, this is when people would talk about, you know, like, you know, Compari knew too much of Sankara's secrets. And so that's how he was able to betray him. Or it was because of Chantal Compare, who was really close to Huwet Buoyi, who was the president of, quote, Duvoir, who did not like Sankar. He could not stand Sanker up, right? Because Huft Bwaini was like, you're Francophile's francophile, right? And built his his reputation off of being a Francophile. You know, he made, like, Leopold Sidar Sengor seem radical, right?

Like, just in case you don't know who Fuayet was, right? But people would also talk about that it was Chantal, Comparre, Blaise Compari's wife, who was Sankara's downfall. And so I kind of, that's a long way of saying that, like, that's how I came to Sankar, which is a very different way to kind of come and learn about this leader than to, to read it in a textbook. And the reason I give that roundabout explanation is because I came to learn about Sankara as a man, right? Like, even though the way people were talking about him was in this kind of apotheized way, there were still these very human and regular stories about him, right, that kept

his image very grounded. And I think that was what Sankara always want. That's how he always envisioned himself, right? He never wanted to be seen as someone who was grander than the revolution itself, right? He always wanted to be seen as a regular person. And that was really embedded in his, even in his practices, right? So, you know, there are all the stories about how he only owned, like, a bike and a guitar in, like, two pairs of shoes, right? Like, these things, like, even as he was the, you know, the president of Burkina Faso. So I'm glad that he mentioned USA, Aid and Afri-Com. We have a whole episode that we did on U.S. Aid. We've talked about Afri-Com on and off and on, but we definitely should have an entire episode devoted to it.

But before we turn towards either of those two routes, because I feel like as soon as we start going down those routes, we'll spend the rest of the time, like, everybody exploding, like brain on fire, you know, that's generally what happens when I talk about USAID or Afri-com. Like, I just go on a rant that takes for the rest of the episode. So instead, let me just make sure that we get to the main point of what we were bringing you on today for. And I know that we're, you know, we don't have as much time as we wanted to today, but you can come back anytime, hint, hint, female development in West Africa. So we've talked a little bit about development.

We've talked a little bit about the framework of ownership. But we haven't talked about the situation of women in West Africa in Burkina Faso. So I'm wondering, and I'll just put this out as broad as possible, so you can take it any way that you want it. If we're looking at the context of Burkina Faso, what was life like for women? What was development like for women pre-Sankara, during Sankara, and what has happened post-Sankara? And then I know that you also do work in Ghana, for example. How does that compare to the context of Ghana in each of those timeframes and how do things stand today? So that's a very big question.

So feel free to go anywhere with that. Yeah. I think I do do work in Ghana. The other context I know almost as well as Burkina, though, is Senegal. And so I'll add that in there a little bit. But because Burkina Faso, funny enough, does stand out starkly in contrast with both of these countries in its colonial sense. And then, you know, around the same time in the 80s and then afterwards. And so basically, in Burkina Faso, the situation with women during the colonial context is very much driven by the way in which the French kind of conceived of the upper Volta, right?

And the upper Volta, which is now Burkina Faso, is landlocked. And it sits at these very interesting kind of like temperate zones, right? It's like the Sahel and then mainly Savannah and just a very very. little bit of wetland. So this is super important because of what that means for natural resources. And we know that colonialism was predicated on the extraction of natural resources. But it was also very much reliant on labor, right? So we know that like mercantilist capitalism, which is essentially colonialism, as Eric Williams

tells us, right, relied heavily on labor and wherein one could find surplus labor. Burkina Faso was considered a labor reserve for the French, right? And so what ended up happening was that because there were no other natural resources there, again, water was scarce, it's landlocked, the French intentionally kind of migrated labor. This is outside of, of course, the slave trade, which was also this mass migration of labor down towards the coast and out of West Africa, right? But under the French, for the purposes of colonial resource extraction, Burkina Fossel was a labor pool and there was forced migration of labor down into Cote d'Ivoire and then down into, and then there was voluntary migration a lot of sense into Ghana. This becomes important later.

But essentially, what that does, though, is kind of reconstruct the household, right? And this is a situation that happens repeatedly, right, around the continent through colonialism, right? Is that the migration of labor and the gendering of labor, right, as Oyerankhi, Oyewumi articulates in the invention of women, creates these gender dynamics that did not necessarily exist prior to, because now you have the labor that men were doing traditionally for the community, right, or for the clan, et cetera, is now no one. longer there. And so you have this kind of void that women now have to kind of step into. Burkina Faso is especially known for this, right? And still today, where large numbers of men are

migrating now is primarily to like Italy to work in like the field, like the tomato fields and things like that. But all, of course, like manual agricultural labor, highly precarious, highly exploited labor. But this is the case. This is really, this kind of institution is set up under colonialism. And what that means, though, is that there's no infrastructure being built in Burkina Faso, like in the Upper Valta, right? And the French were already terrible about setting up infrastructure in their colonies compared to the British, right? Not as bad as the Portuguese. We all know. Cabral tells us this, right? The Portuguese were like the worst. But the French aren't far behind. The only places where they do kind of develop some amounts of infrastructure are

actually like Senegal, right? And it's because Senegal kind of gains this very privileged status as a colony, as a French colony. And so they get, you know, some railroads and all these other things and are kind of semi-autonomous for a large portion of under colonialism, etc. But you'll come back to that what this does though is um leave a lot of traditional institutions intact as well right alongside so not gendered and not just the gendered institutions um but it leaves the kind of um so like a strong presence of um like chiefs right so the the in more a it's the dominant indigenous language in Burkina Faso for the Mosei, but like the Naba, which is the chief, there are different nabas that are still very powerful in Burkina Faso. And so the kind of

social institutions that were also derived under like the chief dyncies are still kind of there as well. And they're working alongside and through the legacies of gender labor, gender labor conditions under from colonialism, if that makes sense. And so what that means, though, is that Burkinaabe women are doubly worked, right? They're overworked in terms of being agricultural producers, and they're also in terms of their productive labor, but they're also overworked in terms of their reproductive labor, right? This situation was created under,

this is a key situation that was created under colonialism, and again, exists alongside some of the traditional institutions that were already there. In fact, there's a saying in Moray called, Pagalajiri. Pagalajiri means it's the woman that makes the home, right? The woman is the foundation of the home. And that statement gets kind of reused and recasted over time, right, to keep women in their kind of reproductive roles that have been tied to like, you know, high birth rates. But again, kind of like keeping up the, not just the maintenance of the home, but also we know like that work gets externalized to the community, right? So there are all these ways and which the home is not just the house, right, but gets expanded into like the community and then the nation, right? This last part, right, about the nation, I do want to make this point quickly and to demonstrate how this happens today. So when I was doing field work for the book,

Rethinking Ownership of Development, I was in Tinkgo and, which is a city in the southeast of the capital. And again, you are. I was asking about ownership of development, something completely not related to reproductive labor or anything. And I would ask people, you know, do you think Burkina Faso is developed? And people would say, well, we would be, but women keep having too many babies, right? And if women would stop having so many babies, then maybe Burkina could develop. And people would also say, like, well, no, because we're not going to meet at this point, it was still Millennium Development Goals.

We're not going to meet the MDGs because women just won't stop having babies, and so our maternity mortality rates are too high, right? This is one example of how, again, the reproductive labor that the Birkenabe women are engaged in gets extrapolated to this imagined national community, whereby their decisions to have or not have children, right? And then the ways in which they even die in childbirth get recasted as having broader implications for whether or not the country gets developed, right? And so this is the role of Burkinaabe women that's kind of, I know I'm moving kind of quickly through this. And I'm going to come back to Sankara, though, but to just show how there's this, how it's always the women's, Burkinaabe women's reproductive labor is always still kind of anchored in the development of the nation, right?

and also the development and consolidation of capitalism, right, in Burkina Faso. Sankara does not differ from this necessarily, right? I know we love Sankara, and I'm going to talk about the great things about him as well. But when we look at his creation of the Birkenabe Women's Union, right? It kind of reproduces this in a lot of ways, right? Because he's very much kind, even though he does not identify as a Marxist, he's still very much identifying how the freedom, women's liberation, comes from being proletarianized, right, and then being organized in this particular way so that they can, again,

kind of serve and work towards the aims of the national, the CNR, right, the Council of National, the Council of National Revolution. But Sankar is very different in that he challenges a lot of the colonial and traditional tradition, the traditional institutions that were gendered and oppressive, right? So Sunker is not just talking about and trying to address the legacies of colonialism that led to the mass migration of male workers and left women to do the double reproductive and productive labor. He's also dealing with like he abolishes the fees to chiefs, right? Like that was also established undercolonians.

So there's no more required fees to pay. chieftencies. He's also heavily critical of like female genital cutting, right? He's also very much critical of the gender roles that come with women, like this notion of Pagalajiri, right? He even says in his international, his March 8th speech in 1987, right? He's like, you know, you don't, women, you don't have to get married if you don't want to. It does. So he's even criticizing, like, like, forced marriage, arrange marriages and child marriages, right? He's like, you don't have, if you're not in love and you don't want to be with it, you don't have to actually get married.

This is radical at the time, right? It's very radical for the president of a country like Burkina Faso that was left to very much kind of reproduce a lot of the traditional institutions, especially the ones that coalesced around the need, the exigencies of colonialism. to stand up and say you don't have, the female genital cutting is not accepted. You don't have to be a part of an arranged marriage. And that you are,

that part that your liberation will come through formalized labor, right? Being formally included in the workforce, right? So that you can then organize, right? And have the same types of, make the same types of demands on capital that men are making, right? And so under Sankara, while the conditions of women do begin to kind of improve, I think a lot more of the implications were symbolic, right? So for example, you know, again, there were women who were a part of, who became a part of these associations. And actually, I think under Sankara, so there was a larger number of, between like 1958 and 19. 99, if I'm not mistaken, there were like 41 women's groups and associations that were created in Burkina Faso, something like 44% of them were created under Sankara, right, but during the Burkinaabe revolution, right? So there was a real emphasis on like organizing women and encouraging women to do collective work, right? And collective, these kind of community-based and revolution-based projects. Now, the other

thing, again, I will say this, is that the, even for the women's union, which was created under Sankara in 1985, there, it was, there was, it was well known that women who had clear allegiance to the revolution gained preferential treatment, right? So it was, it, it had to be necessarily political, like politically aligned with the revolution, a lot of these organizations. Sankara was still, was also very critical of the women's, organizations that existed under prior to him. So especially some that were created under Lamianzana, like the Federation of Voltaic women, right? They had a lot of difficulty gaining resources under Sankara, right? Because they considered themselves a political and had a different

kind of orientation towards like what women's, what kinds of development needs women kind of articulated and their willingness to just overtly partner with like U.S. aid and peace corps and things like that. So let me just bring us to a little bit more today because, you know, we wanted to talk a little bit about how things have changed since then as well. And when you mentioned contraceptives, I had to pull open your chapter in a certain amount of madness because I do remember something very vividly in there that I think ties together a few of the things you have. And I'm quoting here. One sign stated, you want your. wife to help you work, support her in choosing a contraceptive, paid for by USAID.

So this is, you know, when did this work take place? When did you see that sign? And how is that indicative of a change in policy from the Zonkra era, which you said, you know, as you mentioned, wasn't perfect. But how is it that we went from those collective work models of development to, you know, your wife, if she has her contraceptive, she can help you work. How did that happen? Yeah. So this happens in a number of ways. So under Sankra, he was very critical of the types of aid that came into the country, right?

And, in fact, was very intentional about organizing and redirecting the foreign aid and or expelling, right, in suspending foreign aid programs. did not align with the, the revolution. So Sankar was also critical of the population development jargon at the time, right? So in his speech on the trees, I'm forgetting the title of it, right, but in his speech on, you know, planting trees in the environment and how the environment has been destroyed under capitalism, he actually says, like, you know, Africa is one of the least populated regions, continents in the world. So, you know, demanding that we reduce our population, right, seems to be, you know, kind of, again, insidious at best. And, you know, so he's very,

he's actually very critical of this. He's not critical of family planning itself because he actually is very much supports it, right, and tries to find programming to, to make it accessible, similar to like vaccines and things like that. But that family planning be tied to population, he's very critical of this. After his after he's assassinated and in I believe it's October of 1987 by Blaise Compare and some of his closest associates, Blaise Comparre takes over. and one of the first things he does is dissolve the CNR and he starts a new program, right? Like completely resets Burkina Faso on a different course and immediately adopt structural adjustment policies, right?

So that was one of the things Sanker was not trying to do. Blaise Kampari immediately accepts this. one of the primary conditionalities that you would find in the structural adjustment programs around the continent was requirement for family planning, right? And not just family, again, not just contraceptives in and of themselves, but contraceptives that went along with a particular message, right, about, you know, being able to afford a certain number of children and being able to allow it, being tied to like women's emancipation and their empowerment and the workforce and all of these

other discourses. And so USA becomes the number one peddler of birth control around the world, but especially in Africa by the end of, what is it, the 1970s, right? And a lot of this has to do with the Cold War, right? So it's a kind of soft power approach to dealing with the supposed problems that could come from these left-leaning governments in the global South that might align themselves with the Soviet Union at the time. And it's very much articulated as being more cost-effective and more cost-efficient than actually restructuring capitalism so people have better lives, right? Because this is a time when in the 60s, 70s, 70s, and 80, well, by the 80s, like Sunker is one of the last people, but in the 60s and 70s where people are very vocal

at the, as colonialism is ending, about the material conditions that have been left for them, right, in the aftermaths of colonialism, right? And so, again, you have like Cabral, you have Incuma, you have La Mumba, right? You have, I mean, even people who are as, you know, pro-Western, it's like Jomo Kenyatta, right? And again, like Sengor, right, they're still making these clear claims about the, the kind of the ravages of colonialism, right, in terms of the material conditions that people are met with, right? And also, again, to go back to this statement about neo-colonialism in its broader implications, is how no matter what they do domestically, as long as the international economic architecture is structured in such a way that the natural resource extraction, right,

and the kind of dependent relationships that were, it created under colonialism, remain intact, then there's nothing that they can do to improve the lived experiences and improve the material conditions for the people in their country, right? So it's not a matter of domestic level policy. It needs to be a global reordering of the world. Right. And this is part of what people like Adam Gittachu point out in like world making after empire, right? So this is about more than just national development. Burkina Faso, though, takes the same approach, ends up taking the same path that a lot of other countries do that take structural adjustments. USAID becomes the dominant pusher of family planning with an attendant kind of discourse about how it will lead to women's empowerment.

how it will allow them to better participate and be productive, right? You also now have like the demographic dividend, which by the 80s becomes like the dominant theory for how countries are supposed to navigate their maldevelopment, right? It's, well, you can't, we're not, you can't stop extracting natural resources and you can't, and you can't industrialize the way that Europe did. And you don't have a population to exploit at the same level that Europe and the U.S. did. So give your women birth control and restructure the population so that you have less dependent portions of the segments of the population, like the young and the elderly, and the bulk of your population is productive, right? It becomes to some extent the underlying theory.

And from there, you'll be able to capture what's called a demographic dividend. And so this is where that discourse comes from, right? when you're in, but at this point, it's in Burkina Faso, this time, this is around 2014, 2015, it was right after the revolution, the 2014 revolution actually. It was 2015. The revolution was October 2014 and I was there in June 2015. So only a couple a couple months later. And similar to Senegal, right? There's not a reproductive health care health service providers office that you can walk into that does not have USAID somewhere. I mean, even down to the phones, right? Like the phone, everything has a USAID stamp on it. And everyone is

parodying the same exact narrative about family planning leading to women's liberation. and women's economic freedoms without, and this is part of what I talk about in the book I'm working on now, especially in the Senegal chapter, but it's very aproposed to Burkina Faso, is that, again, it's a different type of proletarianization of the female workforce, right? This notion that it's through, by having less children means that you can be more productive and you can have greater economic freedom without considering the, extremely high rates of unemployment in these countries, right? The likelihood of actually gaining gainful employment is very slim. But then to think about having employment that actually has the

type of social safety nets that are required, right? So even if you want it to have a child, right, there's still, you know, no child care. Maternity leave is very rare to find for employment positions in Burkina Faso and in Senegal. In fact, I saw some figure that that, like, less than 1% of jobs and less than 1% of women working in Burkina Faso, even in the formal sector, have maternity leave, right? That's abysmal, right? So, again, to suggest that family planning will then lead, like, they can then have better more productive work lives and have more freedom through work,

again, it reproduces the fallacy that allows. us to move our focus away from the structures of capitalism and kind of atomize them onto the reproductive decisions of women, right? And African women, especially in this context. Yeah, absolutely. Incredibly well said. And thank you for taking a huge question and just going through it like that is systematic. For those that don't know, and I think, you know, there's probably a large percentage of like Americans, even on the left that might have heard the phrase, but not quite sure what it means or what it is. So like, what is Afriacom? How does it operate? And what are some of the primary criticisms of it?

Okay. Yes. This will be a primer for a continuation. I was just about the first part of part too. Yes, exactly. This will be the cliffhanger. Let's start it, though. Totally.

Okay. So, Afri-Com is short for the U.S. Africa Command, which is headquartered in Germany, actually. And it was signed into law in, like, 2007. actually implemented in 2008. And what the AFRICOM does, or, you know, is a U.S. military operation that is supposed to be targeting and combating extremists, right, in West Africa. Okay. That's as fair as I can be on that, right? Now, what it actually does and what it actually did was completely destabilized West Africa and create radical factions, right, that are now terrorizing large swaths of the population. And this is especially important for Burkina Faso.

So I talk a little bit about this in my article in the Journal of Asian and African Studies on materiality and security in Africa. And so in Burkina Faso, especially, when I got to Burkina Faso in 2010, we were training in Waiguya, which is in the north, near Mali and near, near the border of Mali. And within a week when we were there, there was news that there were terrorists, right, where there was a kind of radical group that had planned on taking Americans, right? And this word got out. We were on shut. We were locked down. We'd only been in the country for a week. And then we were relocated to Kudagu. So that's how we got to Kudagu. At that point, the North was no longer, we were no longer allowed to go to the north, right, as Americans.

But it was still open to the general, you know, Birkenabe. While we were there, though, I will say Burkina Faso was a very, very peaceful country. There had never been a terrorist attack in that country ever, right? You know, as a country that's gone through like 50,000 coups and a tentative coup since 1960, right? they were all internal and it was all targeted for the executive power if you were a civilian you were straight right the first that attack that happened um with the at the at cappuccino right with the in what year was that 2016 i believe i can't remember right that was the first terrorist attack that the country had ever experienced right africom

when I destabilized West Africa in ways that are deeply impossible to imagine from, especially if you have not been on the continent and to have seen, you know, because by 2010, it's not fully there yet, but people are responding to it, right? That's part of what, you know, that organization, what I talked about when I was in Yahuya-Guyah. That's part of what they were responding to because the U.S. had just done a military training in Burkina Faso, and they were upset, like, again, here's this invasion of the U.S. military, right? And this is not to justify it, of course, but to say that it is a reaction, right? Without the U.S. having been there, the impetus for this kind of radicalization was not yet possible.

What ends up happening, though, is that Burkina Faso, after Blaise-Compire is removed in 2014, the only upside, if you will, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm putting a pin in it. The only upside to despots and authoritarians, right? This was the same with Gaddafi, is that they keep the small radical factions at bay, right? It was the same with Iran, right, under Saddam Hussein, right? It's an unfortunate truth is that under authoritarian, the small radical factions are, it's very difficult for them to kind of spring out and to terrorize, right? You know, despots are like, there's only one terrorist here, right? Can't compete for it.

Once Compari leaves, and he's escorted out by France, which is another thing, the government that's put in place is completely inept, right? And they're backed by the U.S., France, et cetera. And all of these radical factions start coming out of everywhere, right? the north becomes unstable for every any even birkenabe cannot go to the north at this point um and it starts to move throughout the rest of the country Burkina Faso becomes a has so many internally displaced people it's actually been projected that it's around now would be about the point they would have more internally displaced people than Syria right because of what's taken

place through africom and africom continues right so there's like operation flintock or Yeah, I believe that's what it's called, right? Which is like this U.S. training, right, in Niger and a part of Africom, right, that's continuing to train these soldiers. The other thing about Afriqom is a number of these coups that have been taking place have been through soldiers trained through Afriacom. Yeah, that's something we've been mentioning on recent episodes, and we had an episode with Pan-African Newswire talking about the coup in Guinea, for example, another example

of a U.S. trained military soldier that carried out a coup in West Africa. Like, this happens over and over. I think that the recent, the recent coup in Burkina Faso, right? The Amoeba. He was trained under Africa. Well, I think that there's been, correct me if I'm wrong, hasn't there been seven coups in the last 12 months in West Africa? And I think that like five of them have been U.S. trained individuals.

I might have the exact number wrong, but it's along those lines. Yes. And the other part of this, because. it's important. People forget about Mali, but a lot of this started with Mali. The destabilization in the region that ended up spreading started in Mali. And in fact, like, so even while I was there, this is when the, you know, the terrorists in the northern region of Mali around Timbuktu came into power. So this is when France in 2011, when France was fighting, you know, with the terror. And then essentially Mali became bifurcated, right, the north, which is no longer has any kind of like government oversight. I mean, it never kind of really did, but, and then there's this out, then there's Bamako, right? A lot of what took place in the northern region of Mali spilled over into Burkina Faso, and a lot of what took the, the relationships between Mali and Burkina, which have always been contentious, even down to when Sankara is in power, right?

And Sankra kind of actually came to power through the Burkinaabe Mali wars, right, in the early 1980. That's actually how people kind of really came to know him, which he later admitted, he was like, This is the stupidest war ever, right? But this, what happens in Mali has drastic implications for Bertina. And that's actually where by 2010, 2011, a lot of what's taking place starts to spiral and trickle down and trickle over into Burkina Faso. One of the things I talk about in that article, though, is the rise of the Cogolo Weiogo. And the Kogolo Oweogo is a moose, more a term for, is it like men of the bush.

But it's basically a kind of a vigilante group that came, that rose out of the lack of state oversight and lack of state ability to grapple with the rise of extremist violence in Burkina Faso. Right. So then these armed men who also were like dispossessed and, you know, moved into the these precarious positions of labor through, you know, under the blaze compire after blaze, under the blaze compire regime, like the continued reliance on like gold extraction, et cetera. Anyway, so they create their own kind of, um, vigilante group throughout the country. And they, then the communities now have vested power in them in a vigilante group to provide some kind of security.

This is, of course, problem. This is a problem because they're, they're not necessarily. legitimate, right? So you have issues where they themselves are violating people's human rights, right? And the state now is not just tackling the extremists, but now they also are trying to put at bay these vigilante groups, right, who, again, for good or for bad, are able to better fight off the extremists than the state is, right? All of this is because of Afriacom. Afriacom still hasn't been able to, and that's part of why when, you know, the global response to the coup in Burkina Faso back in January was like, oh, this is

illegitimate and Burkina Faso was like banned from Echowaz and the African Union. Same with like Mali, right? They're like, oh, you know, but people, the Burkinaabe were okay with it, right? They were like, we believe, when I call my friends and people, I was like, how is they were like, as anything that will deal with this insecurity and this instability, people are willing to try, right? Because at this point, it's easy to look from abroad and say, we denounce this, that, and a third. But it's another thing to live in constant fear, right? It's another thing to know that the state is not capable of actually providing you the security

that it's supposed, that it's quote unquote supposed to be providing, but to have another kind of organized group that can actually provide some security, right? That's the lived experience. So, people have been like you know we absolutely are okay with the coup if they can actually and that's the platform if you platform that they ran on when they took power was the government can deal with the extremist but we can it's quite the note to end on but i know we've only scratched the surface and there's a lot more that we want to talk about so can we get you on the hook like on tape that you know will you come back for a future episode in the near future see if i ask it on tape you're more likely to say yes i've learned a thing or two. Yes, you have learned a thing or two. Yes. No, no, no, I would, I would absolutely love to come back on and go back into some of these questions and unpack, because I know I had to speed through it. Yeah. Yeah, but I absolutely will. We can, as soon as we get off, I'll be driving and texting. For sure, I will be looking forward to that. I can't wait for the next conversation. I had so much fun. Listeners, again, our guest was Professor Tekea Harper

Shipman from Davidson College. Got it right this time. And we'll be right. back with the wrap-up, and hopefully we'll be back with Professor again very soon. We're back on guerrilla history. We just finished our interview with Professor Takiah Harper Shipman, and it was an excellent interview, and I'm really looking forward to the next part of it. We were planning on this being this behemoth of an episode, And I had so many things ready. And due to time constraints, we had to cut it short. But I'm really happy that we'll be able to come together again soon with the professor and hopefully with Adnan to talk more about all of the topics that we've been talking about today and more.

Brett, what are your initial reactions to it? And we'll try to keep it short since we will be having another conversation with her in the near future. But what are your initial thoughts? Yeah, well, yeah, first of all, you know, we only got to scratch the service. So it's more of a prelude than even a part one, but we'll definitely have a follow up. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. I learned so much and even that short amount of time. She took huge questions and was expertly going through them.

And I really appreciate anybody's ability to do that and to share their knowledge with us. One of the things that really sticks out to me is even just how destabilization can be a strategy of imperialism can be a strategy of the United States. They have these proxy organizations in certain regions in West Asia and Africa and many other places in South America. where sometimes the goal is simply to destabilize, simply to make misery and chaos the norm so that there's not a balance of power, there's not an emerging power or whatever it may be. So I think that's really helpful to remember,

especially like when we talk about American actions in certain wars, like Vietnam or Iraq, there's a part of us that wants to say, you know, you lost those wars, America, ha, ha, ha. And that's true to some extent. But at the other extent is they did succeed in brutally, destabilizing the area and sometimes that's just as good as

an out and out victory for American or Western interests. So once again, you know, it's a matter of ripping the fingers of colonialism and neo-colonialism and imperialism off of these countries so that they can self-determine and the rise of

these small terrorist organizations in Africa that are a direct product of Africom and of the West I think is really enlightening and really worth knowing about and studying and being aware of because it's true in Africa, but it's true in many other regions of the world as well. Yeah, I like to mention that how destabilization can oftentimes serve imperialism just as much as an outright victory. And you mentioned Vietnam, but another

one that just jumps to mind is Cuba, for example. You know, the U.S. has failed time and time again to overturn the Cuban revolution. And you recently had an interview with Helen Yaffe about Cuba and the revolutionary spirit of Cuba, despite all of the efforts of 62 years now of economic blockade, of attempts of coups and assassinations, despite all of that. The U.S. has failed time and time again. But yet, those economic blockades and those other coercive measures that have really destabilized Cuba, at least economically, even if not disrupting the revolutionary feeling of the people, those are still used as tools of imperialism. Think about how it's used as propaganda in the United States. Ah, look at Cuba. Look how poor this country is. Communism is a failed

ideology because of the people are poor. The country is poor. Well, yeah, it's poor because you have an economic blockade on it. You have for 62 years at this point. It's poor because you're not allowing them to export. It's poor because you're not allowing them to import required goods. Like there are these externalities at play that nobody accounts for. But because the U.S. is an imperialist country and the hegemon, and because the people in the country are so heavily propagandized without knowing that they're propagandized, simply having Cuba destabilized and simply having Cuba have these economic problems that are enforced by the United States is still able to be used to enforce imperialism, even just at the level of propaganda

within the U.S. So that was just a little digression on my part, but it was something that jumped to mind. But I do like that you mentioned organizations that are at play in the country as well, because this is something that starts to tie together some threads from previous episodes that we've had. So we did have our USAID episode. We have had episodes that talked about NGOs. We talked about NGOs with Vijay Prashad in our first episode. And so we're understanding how these organs of imperialism, even soft imperialism, these non-governmental organizations, and these governmental organizations, how they act in these countries. But we can also now start to connect these things that we've talked about in the past with

different people. And so the listeners of the show that have listened to all of the episodes have the same kind of baseline knowledge of the things that we've talked about. We can use that understanding on these topics to start to connect things and think about how it impacts women disproportionately in places like West Africa. And this is something that I'm really going to try to drive. much harder at in the continuation with Professor Harper Shipman when she comes back is how does the destabilization? How do these organizations impact women disproportionately? Because of course

it does. And of course it will. Women are always disproportionately affected anytime that any situation happens, really. But when we're talking about the sorts of destabilization that soft imperialist mechanisms like USAID cause. It seems like these sort of soft imperialist mechanisms are in other neo-colonialist mechanisms that are exerted upon former colonized countries. These mechanisms seem to have even more pernicious effects that it disproportionately affect women than more openly explicit imperialist means. But that's just something that strikes me. and I would like to have professor's thoughts on that the next time we get together with her. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that, Brett?

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that in general. One of the things I thought about that when you were talking, and plus what we talked about in our intro is how Africa is often treated as a singular entity, whereas, you know, like, Europe will be divided. Like, the Madovins are different than the Romanians and different than the Ukrainians, but then it's like, oh, yeah, Africans, you know? And so that is, I think, obvious chauvinism and everything, but one of the ways that we can help break that down is by learning about the similarities and differences and challenges between different countries. So one of the things I definitely want to do in the next episode is talk a little

bit more about the differences between Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ghana, in particular, her three major countries of focus, and see, just do a little compare and contrast to the stuff that they've gone through, where they're at now, where they're going, et cetera, as a way to kind of break down that monolithic idea that many people in the West have of Africa and learn more about it in the meantime. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that really hits the nail on the head and something that I also would like to talk about because understanding how even within the same region, how these different countries and different state, different culture, you know, they're in the same region, but they still have distinct cultures, how these different situations have

different effects in terms of the effects on women as well as any other effects that we may see. That's a really important point, something that I am also looking forward to hearing. Brett, I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say as we close this out? Yeah, thank you so much to Professor Harper Shipman for coming on. Can't wait for the next one. Again, this very much feels like a conversation paused. So I'm very much excited to dive deeper very soon with her.

Yeah, I will be sending her an email as soon as we get off of this because I also am really looking forward to it. And hopefully Adnan will be here for the next one because I know that he would contribute a lot to the conversation. Oh, yeah. So, Brett, as we close out, can you tell the listeners how they can find you and all of your excellent work? Sure. Thank you. Yeah, you can find me at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. It has all of our stuff on RevLeft, Red Menace, and Gorilla History centralized at that website. Right now, Rev. Left is going through a best-of month.

So every other day for the month of April, we're releasing a best of. But by the time this more or less comes out, we'll be past that. And we'll have a bunch of new episodes ready for people to listen to. Yeah, great. And I'm also going to just plug that Helen Yaffe interview again. It was one of the last ones before the best of month and really tremendous. And kind of a funny story is that Manny Ness had been emailing me saying, you need to bring Helen Yaffe onto guerrilla history.

And then I brought it up in our group chat. And you're like, oh, yeah, she's going to be on Rev Left next week. Great. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Like, yeah, at least, you know, we're getting it out there because it's a really great work and she's an excellent scholar. So folks really do need to check out that episode. You know, an interesting thing, too, is we could have, I could have a full conversation

with somebody on Rev. Left, they'd come over, and even when we talk about the same exact book on Grill of History, it will be a different interview based on our different interests and our different background. So that's always an option, too. Yeah, of course. Yeah, for sure. It was just really funny because it was right after he, like, he had sent me two or three emails. And then I was like, yeah, it's about time. We should look at this book and you're like way ahead of you. Yeah. This happens more often than the listeners may think. Like, we have that happen pretty frequently here. That does happen, yeah. Yeah. So listeners, I'll do the readout for Adnan, even though he wasn't here today, you can follow Adnan on Twitter at Adnan A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N.

You should follow his podcasts, the Mudgellis, which talks about Middle East and Islamic world, as well as Muslim Diaspras. You can find that on any podcast app by looking for the M-A-J-L-I-S. And as my caveat that I've been making recently, do not click on the radio-free Central Asia version of the M-Gh-Lis. Click on Adn's. It's from Muslim Society Global Perspective project at Queen's University. And then for me, listeners, and I'm sorry that we're doing this rushed, but everybody is in a rush today. You can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995.

I also will tease that I have another media project that I'm going to be getting off the ground relatively soon with my partner. We've got all of the infrastructure set up. We just have to actually start recording once. She's back from Moscow. So we'll be doing that anytime, and hopefully maybe by the time we have the next full episode, that'll be up and off the ground. So I'll give you more details then.

You can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And you can support the show to keep the lights on here by supporting us at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Until next time, listeners, solidarity. You know what I'm going to do.