Angolan

• By the time the shooting stops the UN predicts that Ukraine will be one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world.
• According to Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, in March alone, “724 people have been blown up on Russian mines, 226 of them killed”.
• Landmines also make it very difficult for humanitarian organisations to move relief supplies in areas that may or may not have been cleared.

Case study: Angola

• This is a humanitarian tragedy that adds to the complexity of post-war development and presents huge environmental problems.
• For example, during a research trip to Angola in 2019, in Cuito Cuanavale, a town and municipality in Cuando Cubango province, my group of researchers encountered roads that are still inaccessible nearly 40 years after the conflict due to the presence of mines.
• During our visit, our safest option was flying, an option that is out of reach for most Angolans.

A land contaminated

• Many of the roughly 14 million people who are displaced and about 8 million who have fled to neighbouring countries will want to return.
• This will be impossible without surveying the land, getting rid of mines and declaring it safe.
• Once that is done, the public will need to be educated about the risks of unexploded ordnance.
• A report on de-mining from international thinktank Globsec has predicted a 45% reduction of arable grain land after two years of war.

Costly legacy

• As of July 8, the World Bank estimated that mine clearance and mitigation once the war was over would cost more than US$37 billion (£28.5 billion).
• This is huge – especially when you consider the cost of the continuing humanitarian crises and conflicts in other regions.
• Recovery will not be complete until these people’s streets and farms are cleared, their livelihoods restored and their children can go to school or play outside without fear of explosions.

• In total, the river basin covers 700,000km², encompassing a network of river systems across Angola, Namibia and Botswana.
• The Cubango and Cuito rivers, which originate from the Angolan highlands, join the Okavango River at the border between Angola and Namibia, and flow into the Okavango Delta in Botswana.
• The Okavango River sustains over half a million people in Namibia and Botswana.

Reasons to worry

• The current exploration licence in Namibia allows the company to drill exploratory stratigraphic wells.
• Drilling near the Omatako River in Namibia already endangers the groundwater since the drilling waste fluids have been discarded in unlined pits.
• This is despite the fact that the lease area includes parts of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Park and the Okavango River.

What we found

Our study illustrates the possible grim impact of the potential oil and gas extraction operations. This includes possible contamination of:
• We found that contamination could infiltrate the aquifer system and contaminate the groundwater near the Omatako River.
• Contaminated groundwater could take three to 23.5 years to reach the Okavango River system via the shallow, sandy aquifer.
• Contaminated groundwater from proposed drill sites could reach the Okavango Delta even faster along another route: certain geological structures underground.
• The geological structures in the area are associated with parts of the Earth’s crust that are tectonically active: they might change.

Need to revisit clearance certificate

• The Namibian government then awarded an updated environmental clearance certificate to the company.
• Even though there wasn’t enough data to determine the possible groundwater impact, the environmental impact assessment deemed contamination to be negligible.

• On one of them, the fragmented words “IAN NGOYI” recall a figure little-known in Angola but familiar to South Africans: anti-apartheid leader Lilian Ngoyi.
• As part of this research I visited some of the sites where liberation soldiers were trained in Angola.
• The liberation movements looked not only to their own countries’ histories but to earlier struggles in Cuba and Vietnam for ideas and inspiration.
• The apartheid regime in South Africa, determined to undermine the liberation movements, provided military support to Unita in order to weaken the MPLA.

Places of learning and solidarity

• Host countries like Angola allowed exiled movements to act, to a certain extent, like enclave governments with state-like powers over their own members.
• But they were also at the mercy of national and international strategic calculations, without the immediate prospect of returning home in triumph.
• Camps were places where liberation fighters came into contact with officials and soldiers from their host countries, as well as trainers from Cuba and the Soviet Union.

From King Cetshwayo to Ho Chi Minh

• South African history appears again with the name of Cetshwayo, the last Zulu monarch to resist the British Empire before conquest.
• This was likely painted in 1979, the ANC’s “Year of the Spear”, the centenary of the Battle of Isandlwana when Cetshwayo’s army resisted the better-armed British.
• On a similar building, the letters “…O C… MI…” point to the commemoration of the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.
• The Angolan ruling party had taken a firm stand against apartheid and Washington saw it as a bridgehead for communist influence.

Southern Africa liberation movements and geopolitics

• Trenches and the remains of underground bunkers remind us that this was the front line of the MPLA’s war against UNITA.
• Exiled movements were responsible for their own security within Angola.
• In their different ways, Camalundu and Caculama provide historians with evidence of liberation struggles and how they were entangled with the international politics of the time.

• As a historian focusing on the impact of abolitionism, I have studied this history and the founding of modern Sierra Leone.
• Sierra Leone’s role in the story shows, however, to enforce that abolition, the British navy had to rely on the support of African states and polities that had already turned against the slave trade.
• Africans played an overlooked role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.

The founding of Sierra Leone

• From 1763 onwards, the number of enslaved people shipped annually from the Sierra Leone coast by British, Portuguese and French traders rarely fell below 1,000 and was often closer to 4,000.
• And yet from 1808, it was Sierra Leone – rather than one of the other sites of slave trading – that became the site of British anti-slavery operations.
• This was because by then, Sierra Leone was the site of an established and growing colony made up of members of the black British diaspora, many formerly enslaved.

The settlement grows

• In 1791, another group arrived in the colony and sought out a new treaty of settlement.
• A new organisation, the Sierra Leone Company, took over the management of the colony from London.

African role in ending slavery

• As I found in my research, it was African demand that was shaping the success of the colony and its mission to shift the coast’s commerce away from the slave trade.
• He also worried that this was happening with “SLC” cloths.
• And a Susu leader’s deputy launched a verbal attack against the slave traders, telling them:
  It is you slave traders who cause all our palavers.
• The British based an anti-slave trade naval patrol in the colony, as well as a court for processing captured slave ships.

Conclusion

There is a misconception that Britain was the first to abolish the slave trade and that it brought enlightened anti-slavery ideas to Africa. This misconception was used to justify the spread of colonial rule in the 19th century. But the history of Sierra Leone shows that, in order to enforce their abolition decrees, the British had to rely on African states and polities that had already turned against the slave trade.