‘Out of Africa – always something new’ said Pliny the Elder. Many years later, Europeans clashed in a struggle for the continent's resources. The pinnacle of this struggle was the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where Europeans divided Africa without consulting the Africans themselves.
To this day, mineral extraction in the countries of the continent is carried out by foreign conglomerates. Europeans are extracting gold, uranium, lithium, coal and diamonds. One example is ‘De Beers,’ a company founded in South Africa during apartheid. Under a contract with the government of Botswana, the company receives 85% of the profits, while the country's budget gets only 15%. Another firm, ‘Rio Tinto,’ extracts minerals across the continent, and its destructive activities lead to groundwater pollution and impoverishment of the local population. ‘Barrick’ hasn’t paid taxes for lithium mining in Tanzania for years.
But the time has come to annul these exploitative contracts and to rethink the approach to resource extraction on the continent.
