Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah 1965
THE ‘end of empire’ has been accompanied by a flourishing of other means of subjugation. The British Empire has become the Commonwealth, but the proceeds from the exploitation of British imperialism are increasing. Profits of British tin companies have ranged as high as 400 per cent. The latest dividends to British diamond shareholders are close to 350 per cent. ON one occasion Mr Nehru declared that British profits from independent India had more than doubled and British capital investment in his country rose from Rs. 2,065 m. in 1948 to Rs. 4,460 m. in 1960. Total British investments in Africa have soared to $6,500 m., the French to about $7,000 m. and American to $1,100 m. A recent survey made plain the plunder of British monopolies. It listed 9 out of 20 of Britain’s biggest monopolies as direct colonial exploiting companies: Shell, British Petroleum, British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Burmah Oil, Nchanga Copper, Rhokana Corporation, Rhodesian Mines and British South Africa, five of which are directly engaged in chiselling away Africa’s natural resources. The others are busily increasing their trading. Their total of £221 m. net profits was over half the combined net profits of the top twenty monopolies. Incredibly the list leaves out two of the world’s greatest combines, those states within a state- Unilever and IMperial Chemical Industries – whose operations are based heavily in their overseas exploitations. The United Africa Company leads for Unilever in Africa; about a third of I.C.I. and its subsidiaries operate overseas.
Sir Alec Douglas Home, former Prime Minister of Britain’s Tory government, in a speech made on 20 March 1964, professed himself ignorant of the meaning of neo-colonialism. While Sir Alec was talking, Britain was engaged in what its press was busy describing as ‘major crisis areas’ all over the world, putting down ‘troubles’ inspired and perpetrated by neo-colonialism: Aden and Southern Arabia against Yemen; Borneo and Sarawak against Indonesia; Cyprus, British Guiana; ‘maintaining law and order’ in Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, for the recently independent governments. Is this the end of imperialism? Not according to The Economist, mouthpiece of Britain’s business interests, which felt compelled to comment:
‘Military bases, routes to the East, frontier skirmishing, putting down mutinies – all this has a nineteenth-century ring quite naturally disturbing to those who had hoped that the end of colonialism meant the end of military involvement east of Suez. The knobbly truth of the matter turns out to be that for the moment Britain has as many military commitments in that area as it ever had before colonies were replaced by Commonwealth.’ (Economist, 23 May 1964.)
The intention is to hold back the progress of the developing countries. Where circumstances favour the establishment of ventures of a more than token industrial character, the aim is to see that they are made haltingly. The over-riding objective is to induce a merely fractional increase in the industrial scope of the new nations in order that they may continue to provide the sinews of imperialism’s greater concentration of forces for the final tussle of strength within itself and against socialism. What is remarkable is that the major part of the less developed world, and here we must include the U.S.S.R., chose and is choosing the socialist road to national progress. There are, in addition, countries like India where the political system, though patterned on the bourgeois democracies of capitalism, nevertheless proclaims socialism as the socio-economic objective. The nations that have reached their present peaks by passing through the various stages of capitalism cling desperately to the system that has brought them to the heights of imperialism. Each, perched perilously on a narrow summit, must put up a constant battle to guard its own pinnacle.
Greater intensity is infused into the struggle by the resurgence of rivals, of whom Germany and Japan are the most virile. Both of them have benefited from strong injections of American capital, and U.S. monopolies are drawing off considerable profits from the running that is being made by these two countries in world competition, pointing the contradictions [sic]among the interests involved. Competing against American imperialism, German and Japanese monopolists are frequently in alliance with their U.S.A. opposites, who often put them forward in imperialism’s general offensive against Africa, where open United States private investment might be regarded with more suspicion than others. Germany, moreover, is now second to the U.S.A. in the scale of so-called assistance to the developing countries. Since capitalism is the embodiment of the philosophy of self-interest, the ostensible allies of America’s monopolists must use the position of strength into which they are being thrust to promote their own growth.
This struggle for ascendancy among the imperialisms is continuous and involves a constant search for renewal of the sinews of strength. Alongside the battle for imperialist supremacy, there wages the fight against the ideological camp of socialism, into which the warring imperialists make an all-out effort to trail the developing countries as their appendages. In this way the anti-communist campaign is used to further imperialist aims. Leaders of monopoly capitalism everywhere build up in the public mind an image of the system in socio-cultural terms by which they transform it into an idealised harmonious civilisation that must be cherished at all costs. They harp upon a way of life that may be altered only to its detriment, and stress its continuity as a major principal in the fight against communism. When Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister of Britain told the South African parliament that ‘what is now on trial is much more than our military strength or our diplomatic and administrative skill – it is our way of life’, he epitomised the metaphysical transmutation of economic impulses into a social philosophy. This, in spite of his reference to ‘winds of change’ blowing across Africa. He echoed the several statesmen of the West, any of whom could have made the statement and, indeed, have at different times and in almost identical words, ‘The great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West.’ All the powerful imperialist nations are decided that the new States shall develop along the capitalist path, the provisioners of imperialism’s vital needs, the source of its super profits. National liberation and the obvious advantages of socialist development for nations evolving out of a colonialist domination and without the capital means for making that development, are major factors determining imperialist strategy towards these nations, in both the interests of its internal struggle and in the fight against socialism.
All countries, even the most deeply involved in monopoly imperialism, have a State sector. Indeed, State involvement in private economy has become an essential part of its process. It should cause no surprise, therefore, that developing countries, particularly in view of the small accumulations of local private capital, are obliged to centralise their economies. The size of the State sector and its planned expansion, however, must depend on the economic system which is chosen, capitalist or socialist. The aim of the imperialist powers, in the application of their aid programmes, is to turn the State sector into an appendage of private capital. In view of the process that has been evolved in the imperialist countries, it would be surprising if this were not so. The declared basic policy of the Agency for International Development (formerly International Co-operation Administration) is ‘to employ United States assistance to aid-receiving countries in such a way as will encourage the development of the private sectors of their economies. Thus I.C.A. will normally not be prepared to finance publicly owned industrial and extractive enterprises, although it is realised that there may be exceptions...’
Development in the new countries along non-capitalist lines must be frustrated in the interests of Western imperialism. A series of articles which appeared in The (London) Times in April 1964 outlines the pattern and made no secret of its reasons: ‘The two great objects of Britain’s foreign policy must be to prevent the non-communist world from being penetrated by Communism ... and secondly, to prevent her own access to trade and investment in any part of the world from being barred or limited.’ Naturally enough, as the articles conclude, ‘both these objects lead straight into the “neo-colonial” issue – the struggle for influence, commercial and political, over the non-communist countries outside Europe and North America’. Thus succinctly does the writer in The Times expose the true character of the ideological struggle between monopolies. Leading the ideological struggle, because she leads the inter-imperialist struggle, is the U.S.A. As the world’s leading imperialist power, America lays successor claim to the so-called vacua which the retiring colonial powers are said to leave behind as they give way to nationalist governments. Vietnam and Congo are very obvious symbols of this policy of rabid neo-colonialism. They are also examples of bitter antagonisms between American and other imperialisms. According to France Observateur (issue of 4 June 1964), ‘The darkest accusations are made by the U.S. against French business circles operating in S. Vietnam. ... American experts in Asian affairs assert that French planters are not content with paying their mite to the South Vietnam National Liberation Front. They will even lend assistance and hide the guerillas pursued by the Government’s army.’
In spite of its policy of open aggression in many parts of the globe, the United States frequently poses as the ‘anti-colonial’ power in the condemnation of British imperialism. ‘The pose is thin, and the mask continually falls, even often over critical anti-colonialist resolutions pressed by the Afro-Asian and socialist majority in the United Nations, when the United States and Britain find themselves alone, or only with France, Portugal, South Africa and Australia voting against or abstaining.’ [British Colonial Policy and Neo-Colonialist Rivalries, R. Palme Dutt, International Affairs, Moscow, August 1964.]In the last nine years American investments on this continent have trebled, growing at a faster rate than in any other area. In 1961 alone American monopolies profited by some £11·2 m. which they took out of Africa.
The rising tide of nationalism in the colonial territories was remarked by the shrewder operators of United States finance capital as America’s opportunity to insinuate itself into what were the jealously guarded preserves of rival imperialisms. Anti-imperialist stirrings had begun to show themselves in Asia and Africa before the outbreak of the last world war. As hostilities progressed, America came out more and more openly for the ending of colonial rule. Press and other public propaganda harked back to America’s own fight against colonialism. The remembrance was linked in people’s minds with the budding nationalist movements that were bringing overt pressure for independence around the globe. War-torn Europe would provide part of the answer to America’s need to export investment capital and goods; but territories newly released from the political power of rival imperialisms would offer practically virgin fields.
A fabulous growth in American monopoly capitalism occurred during the first forty years of the present century. United States foreign investments vied with those of Europe, overtook and surpassed them. In 1900, American private foreign investments were small by comparison with Europe’s – $500 m. to Britain’s $12,000 m. and France’s $600 m. By 1930 the growth rate of America’s foreign investments had already overleaped those of Britain, standing at $17,000 m. against the latter’s $19,000, and way ahead of France’s $7,000 m. America’s foreign investment position was supreme by 1949 – $19,000 m. against Britain’s $12,000 m., the level at which it had opened the century. France’s level had sunk to $2,000 m. The first world war eliminated Germany’s foreign investments and reduced those of France; the second world war eliminated Germany, Italy and Japan. The American Government, moreover, had added $14,000 m. to its monopolists’ $19,000 m. of private foreign investments. The Government loans ‘are political loans rather than direct profit-making investments. But they enhance the position of United States finance-capital, by providing markets for surplus goods and by increasing profits of private American investors in the borrowing countries’. [See American Imperialism, Perlo, pp. 28-29.]The second world war gave explosive momentum to American capitalism and helped it to increase its overseas investment and exports of manufactured goods to the colonial preserves of European and Japanese imperialism. In the decade 1938-48 America’s share of the imports into these territories rose from 11 per cent to 25 per cent. Her African trade in the period went from $150 m. to $1,200 m., at which figure it represents almost 15 per cent of all Africa’s foreign trade.
American monopoly’s appetite was whetted by the income $18,000 m. by which it had profited from its foreign investments in the period 1920-48. The prospects in 1948 looked even richer, and proved so. Between 1950 and 1959 private American firms invested $4,500 m. in the developing countries and made three times as much. Net profits came to $8,300 m., to which can be added millions of dollars in trading profits, interest on loans, freight charges and other ancillary operations. All of this was helped along by Marshall Aid (the Economic Co-operation Administration), born out of the marriage between the American State and monopoly. The dollar was brandished as the universal cure-me-quick for Europe, bringing fat super profits to its American owners. In the confusion and devastation left by war, they were to slip unobtrusively into the cosy corners from which the European imperialists would be edged out both from Europe and its territories overseas. American financial and industrial capital used the opportunity which Europe’s post-war weakness offered to draw upon its resources. It fed on war-ruined Europe, though not to the same degree as Western imperialism exploited the colonial and semi-colonial world. The powerful German metallurgical and chemical trusts, Vereinigte Stahlwerke and I. G. Farben, were broken down. The West German State established in 1949 came under a military occupation that controlled its foreign trade, its foreign policy and defence. Of the factories which had escaped wartime destruction, some were dismantled. Many of Germany’s best scientists and technicians were lured to America and Britain. The secrets and patents of the large trusts were appropriated, the archives of the most important bank, the Deutsche Bank, turned over to the occupying forces by Dr Hermann J. Abs, Hitler’s despoiler of Yugoslavia, who was saved from the death to which he was condemned first by the British and then by the American military authorities. Germany was being made safe for the democracy of its imperialist conquerors. The Marshall Plan was used to push American imperialist penetrations into the fragmented German industries and financial institutions, into which it bought heavily. Large sums were also handed out to French and Belgian mining concerns in order to tighten the links with American capitalism and support its domination.
An eye also had to be kept on the socialism that was advancing in Europe and Asia. Before the opening of the 1950s the cold war began to hot up. It was felt that the threat of heavy German competition which had inspired the limitations put upon it by the victorious imperialisms could be cushioned by drawing Germany into Western strategy and by greater participations from United States capital. Germany’s position in the metallurgical and chemical fields began to change as that country was drawn into the over-all pattern of Western defence.
More energetic exploration for metal and mineral resources was undertaken in Africa and elsewhere. Africa’s raw materials are an important consideration in the military build-up of the NATO countries, in which are included those of the European Common Market. Their industries, especially the strategic and nuclear factories, depend largely upon the primary materials that come from the less developed countries. Post-war Europe sustained a precarious shortage of basic supplies for its steel manufactures. Belgium needed more rich ores, Sweden more coal and coke, which America supplied in return for fine ores. Britain lacked pig iron and scrap, her coke was short and inferior. Both France and Germany had fallen behind in coke supplies. Production of Lorraine coal was declining because of lack of equipment, German coal because the Ruhr was producing less. Investment in industries ‘with a high value production’, that is, the mineral transformation and heavy industries, while providing the opportunity to influence the European economies and hence their policies towards United States’ ideological domination, did not give the same scope for the quicker and larger profits that production of primary products in the emergent countries offered.
The Point Four Programme supported the Marshall Planners in opening up Africa to United States capital and its European associates. Before the second world war only three per cent of America’s foreign investments were in Africa and less than five per cent of the continent’s trade was with the United States. Firestone interests in Liberian rubber and small participations in South African and Rhodesian mines accounted for most of the $200 m. invested in Africa. As the war pushed into this continent, military bases and trade connections were established by the Americans, from which they pursued their greater penetrations after the end of the war. E.C.A. (Marshall Plan) funds financed American exploration groups, sent in the best colonial tradition to prepare the way for mining companies and military expeditions. It was announced by E.C.A. in July 1949 that ‘American experts with Marshall Plan aid are probing Africa from the Atlas Mountains to the Cape of Good Hope for agricultural and mineral wealth’, and later on that ‘opportunities for American capital participation were disclosed in French North African lead mining, French Cameroon tin mining, French Congo lead-zinc mining. ...’ An E.C.A. loan to Mines de Zellidja, a French concern under the aegis of the Penarroya company, the fourth largest lead and zinc producer in the world, enabled Newmont Mining Corporation (an American mining and crude oil concern with 30 per cent of its interests in South Africa and Canada) to buy into the company and manage its operations.
Europe’s post-war instability was turned to United States’ account in the new division of Africa. In the fall of 1949, after America had forced currency devaluation upon the European countries, a committee of leading British and American bankers was formed to push U.S. investments in Africa and other parts of the still remaining British Empire. A similar committee with similar purpose was established two months later between American bankers and those of France. The hand of these establishments is seen today all over Africa in the consortia that are fast laying a grip on the continent’s riches. Rockefeller, Morgan, Kuhn Loeb and Dillon Read institutions; the big British banks, Barclays, Lloyds, Westminster, Provincial, the investment houses pivoted around Hambros, Rothschild, Phillip Hill; the French banks, Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, Banque de l'Union Parisienne, Banque de l'Indochine, Union Européen Industrielle, Banque Worms, Crédit Lyonnais, Lazard Frères, etc., and the leading German and Italian banks.
These and their associates are the financial institutions that dominate the monetary and fiscal sectors of many of the newly independent States. They support the new industrial revolution of automation, electronics and nuclear and space development, in which America plays the lead and which has swept U.S. imperialism to its present ascendancy. American groups dominant in the mining and ore processing and finishing industries are involved directly or through their bankers and financing houses in ventures with leading European producers and their financial backers. The finance-capitalists who control the leading corporations in the extractive, metallurgical, chemical, nuclear and space industries of the west are to be seen stretching out across the seven seas and taking command of the sources of primary materials in Asia, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, Central and South America, and Africa. U.S. investments in Canada in 1962 went up by nearly $700 m., mostly for developing iron ore properties. An additional $270 m. invested in other developed countries went mainly to Australia and Japan. Latin American investments of United States capital increased by $250 m. in 1962. In the previous year the increase was over $400 m. The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that private American investments and assets overseas reached $60,000 m. at the end of 1962 and advanced a further $3,000 m. in the first six months of 1963. Private investors in the United States added $4,300 m. in 1962 to their holdings of assets and investments abroad.
Direct private American investment in Africa increased between 1945 and 1958 from $110 m. to $789 m., most of it drawn from profits. Of the increase of $679 m. actual new money invested during the period was only $149 m., United States profits from these investments, including reinvestment of surpluses, being estimated at $704 m. As a result African countries sustained losses of $555 m. If allowance is made for grants for ‘non-military’ purposes, estimated then by U.S. Congress at $136 m., Africa’s net total losses still reached $419 m. Official American statistics put the gross profits made by U.S. monopolies in Africa between 1946-59 at $1,234 m., though other estimates place them at $1,500 m. Whichever way they are looked at, it requires no great mathematical mind to make out from these figures the almost hundred per cent profitability on investment in Africa.
The avid explorations that have gone on apace in the last two or three decades for additional reserves of all the metals and minerals that are important for modern industrial supremacy have been instigated by the drive for monopoly, upon which supremacy and its super-profits rest. A recent example makes the principle clear. Alcan Industries, a British associate of Alcoa (Aluminium Company of America) through Alcan (Aluminium Ltd. of Canada), according to a Sunday Times headline (issue of 18 October 1964), wrapped up ‘the last of the foil’. That is, Alcan Industries paid £6 m. to take over the last independent firm (Fisher’s Foils) in British aluminium foil making, having already swallowed most of the rest. This was done, it is said, to bring about ‘rationalisation’. But in boardroom talk it has another meaning, ‘sewing up the industry’.
Part of the objective of gaining control of industries and new-found raw materials’ sources is to deprive rivals of their use. The manipulation of artificial scarcity is another of monopoly’s tactics for maintaining profits. For three years until mid-1964 the big copper companies were running production at between 80 and 85 per cent of capacity to keep up prices. Steel production, too, was held back to something like 80 per cent of capacity. Exploitation under imperialism does not, nor will, always follow upon the finding of new sources of raw materials. Whoever monopolises the major sources of supply controls output by having the decisive voice in what deposits shall or shall not be worked, and to what degree.
Monopoly allows the monopolists to manipulate the economies of other countries in their interests. In the case of bauxite, for instance, Mellon-dominated Alcoa is sovereign and has drawn into its orbit the other major producers, Kaiser and Reynolds. Because of the tremendous cost of building power plants, upon which the conversion of bauxite into alumina depends, the exploitation of all known reserves of this ore by private capital would defeat the prime incentive of monopoly – profit – for the super-abundant production that would result would depress prices. West Africa is exceptionally rich in bauxite, but the individual countries are not equally favoured with the power to develop resources. Ghana is providing hydro-electric power which could be used to convert alumina in both Ghana and Guinea. This would be a welcome cooperative effort within the framework of a united continental economy.
Another weapon that is held over the heads of the primary producing countries is the threat of using synthetic alternatives, and the replacement of traditional metals by others. Synthetic diamond plants have been established by De Beers, the world’s monopolist in natural diamonds, by the Belgian company, MIBA, which controls Congo’s natural diamonds, the largest supplier in Africa, by the General Electric Corporation in the U.S. and by Japan. The price of copper was held down by the main producers on the London metal market at a period of recession in its marketing because of the likely use of aluminium in its place for certain purposes, while plastics, on the other hand, are frequently proposed as an alternative to aluminium. Vast sums are expended in research for new materials and in scientific invention of labour-saving machinery and equipment. Thus metals that are being threatened with substitution are at the same time being developed for a wider variety of finished goods. Such research projects and the resultant re-equipment of factories and industries which must be done if the original investment is to be justified, calls for tremendous capital sums which frequently can only be met from the assets of financial and insurance establishments. Consequently, banks and insurance companies dominate industrial finance and exercise a leading role in the push for monopolist ascendancy. The banks and insurance companies have been foremost in the process that has brought monopoly to its present peak, and it is their financial power that supports the increasing movement towards greater and greater concentration of monopoly.
Today, competition in the thrust to secure and hold monopoly over whole industries and sources of raw materials has intensified to the point where mergers are taking place at a dizzy rate. The struggle is grimly tense and in the ding-dong battle for domination a truce is arranged at critical points, by which influence is divided with mutual consent. Harmony, however, is more apparent than real. The struggle for re-division is proceeding all the time, and the changes that take place within the combining organisations are observed to be more and more frequent.
Present-day monopoly is highly variegated and spread out. While it draws its strength from its monopolistic position, it is on the other hand seriously exposed to the dangers that face a multiple organism that stretches its limbs to extremity in different directions. A fracture at any one point can lead to a disjunction which may unbalance the structure. And the monopoly’s rivals are always on the alert to spot its most exposed parts in order to deliver a blow that will enable the most relentless competitor to insinuate into the broken organ. Hence monopoly, having passed through the stages of cartelisation, combine, trust and syndicate, is today more and more making use of a further protective safeguard. That is the consortium, through which it aims at immobilising the rivals and disarming the associates who are permitted to join this most ravishing of imperialist contrivances. Usually in a consortium there is a dominant party, either directly or through (and with) affiliates and associates, which enables it to exert the largest influence upon the affairs of the consortium. Furthermore, each of the parties to the consortium will have its own string of appendages or even a principal standing outside the consortium. All continue the fight outside, while those within exercise their efforts to enlarge the importance of their share of the group activities. For example, as a monopoly it will be in control of a complex of companies connected at many levels with the production of primary materials, their processing from the original state right through all the stages of transformation into a variety of semi-finished and finished goods from the most ordinary article to the most complicated and delicate equipment and heavy plant and machinery. The monopoly does not restrict itself to a single raw material, though it will be pre-eminent in one or two. Nor does it restrict itself to any particular department of manufacture or enterprise that may be ancillary to its basic activities, though here again it may specialise in certain lines. Many monopolies branch into real estate and land development projects, as construction and contracting work bring quick and high returns and high rents. This form of capital investment is growing rapidly in the present era of enlarging industrialisation and the growth of new towns, and extends to large-scale agriculture.
In Africa the consortium is making the most sinister penetrations. It extends from the monopolistic amalgamations of American and European finance-capital, particularly those combined within the European Common Market, where financial consortia have been set up as the most effective means of profiting from the competitive struggle that is spiralling within this so-called unifying organisation. The prime objective is to monopolise Africa’s sources of raw materials, not, as it is claimed, to assist the African countries to develop their economies. For the materials are carried off largely in their raw state or as concentrates to enhance the productive output of the imperialist countries and to be returned to them in the form of heavy equipment for extractive industry and the infrastructure for carrying the resources away.
It is out of revenue from the trade in these materials that the African countries look to amass part of the capital that will make it possible for them to utilise these same commodities in the service of their own development. Paradoxically, however, these precious counters in Africa’s future are meantime being used to widen the economic gap between her and the highly industrialised countries, which are hurriedly exploiting the opportunity to make good deficiencies in their economies. Since those who are carrying on the exploitation are also the monopolists who manipulate the markets for primary products at the one end and the price for the final products at the other, the countries of origin must be pinned down to a long wait before they can tackle on a major scale the capital problem facing all the developing countries of seriously raising the standard of life of their people, if they make no effort to gird their resources in a more practical and self-supporting manner. This is the answer to those pious economists who assure us that what matters is not what is taken out of our lands but what is left behind.
The reply has been given by the Commission for Aid to Development of O.E.C.D. in its estimate that if the industrial countries continue to increase their gross national product by three per cent per annum, it will take the less developed countries two hundred years at least to catch up with their standard of living, assuming that the unindustrialised nations reach an annual increase of five per cent. Yet how problematical the achievement of this five per cent remains in the light of the drain on resources from the less developed countries to the highly developed ones. In most African countries the rate of rise in the domestic product has barely kept pace with the rate of population growth of two and a half to three per cent. It is the less developed countries that continue to carry the burden of the increasing development of the highly developed. Firestone, for example, has taken $160 m. worth of rubber out of Liberia in the past quarter century. In return the Liberian Government has received a paltry $8 m. The average net profit made by this American company is three times the entire Liberian revenue.
From south to north, financial and industrial consortia have spread across Africa, busily staking out claims to mineral, metal and fuel resources, to forest and land produce, and erecting extractive and primary conversion industries in which they are entrenched as stanchions. In Algeria, for example, the really big investment stampede coincided with the war of national liberation. Between 1951 and 1955 there was an inrush of French and French-American investment greater than ever before. Win or lose, the financial and industrial interests were entrenching themselves within the Algerian economy. Throughout Africa the industrial giants are supported by financial institutions which dominate the monetary and fiscal sectors of so many of the independent States. Most heavily engaged are the mammoth banking and insurance institutions and the multi-millionaire companies they control, bolstered by the international institutions like the World Bank and its affiliates. These formidable alliances radiate from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Sweden. They move around the metallurgical and chemical combines with the E.C.S.C. (European Coal and Steel Community), such as Sollac, G.I.S. (Groupement de l'Industrie Sidérurgique), Sidelor (Union Sidérurgique Lorraine), Usinor (Union Sidérurgique du Nord de la France), Krupp, Thyssen, Kuhlmann, Pierrelatte, Farbwerke Hoechst, Bayer, BASF (Badische Anilin & Soda Fabrik), I.C.I. They are in the assemblages of bankers such as Consafrique (Consortium Européen pour le Développement des Ressources Naturelles de l'Afrique), situated at the same address as the International Bank in Luxembourg; Eurofin, Compagnie Bancaire, Finsider, Cofimer, Union Européenne Industrielle et Financière, and others.
Powerful American corporations like Bethlehem Steel, United States Steel, Republic Steel, Armco Steel, Newmont Mining, Johns Manville, Union Carbide, Olin Mathieson, Alcoa, Kaiser, crop up among all the post-war primary materials producing projects on this continent. Their alliances are spread among the leading metallurgical and financial companies of Europe in combinations that mask the underlying competition. This competitiveness erupts to the surface when circumstances cause a breakdown in the facade of peaceful co-existence between rival imperialists operating in the sovereign States of others, to which they make assumptions of power and use as pawns in the struggle for monopolistic supremacy. Gabon is vocal testimony to these assertions. Mass discontent with the existing regime which led to the disorders of February 1964 was the occasion utilised by France to warn the United States that she would brook no encroachment on the claims she lays to the manganese, uranium, and oil riches of this, her former colony. Neglected under the colonial regime, these resources have assumed inestimable value to France in the struggle against the advance of American imperialism in Europe in the new epoch of atomic rivalry. France sent in paratroopers to force the issue of whose pawn Gabon would remain. United States Steel may have been the dominant participation in Comilog (Cie de l'Ogooue), which is working on the bed of the vastly rich Franceville manganese deposits, but France, through the Cie de Mines d'Uranium de Franceville, controls the uranium field at Mounana, and is urgently occupied in the attempt to foil the aspirations of the American oil barons to undisputed access to Gabon’s offshore petroleum reaches.