Prince Blackwater of China

This is big: Blackwater has set up a new Africa-focused military contractor, partnering with one of China's largest state-owned conglomerates.

U.S. Army Soldiers conduct a test near Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 28, 2007, of a new delivery system for getting Class I, III, and V items to troops on the ground for extended missions (U.S. Army, via Wiki Commons).

The paroxysmal ethics of private military ventures are in the news again after The Wall Street Journal’s recent “Saturday Interview” with Erik Prince. He is now “chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group.” If you read the interview, then you know Prince is a savvy businessman, because he is a savvy like that. Why? Chinese trade surpassed American trade in Africa back in 2009. And, as The Walll Street Journal‘s David Feith is quick to point out, China-Africa trade could reach $385 billion by 2015. It also comes with a video.

It is genuinely surprising that Prince would admit his motive for starting a business is to make money. Blackwater’s ex-CEO became a celebrity using liberal media platforms for his own unrevealing confessionals, self-improvement segments, and philanthropic forays into world affairs. Remember when he told Charlie Rose that the world needs private military contractors to prevent another genocide in Rwanda?

Of course he’s not the only one to try this angle: We have extensively documented  this kind of thing (the link is to the the actions of journalist-cum-adventurer Robert Young Pelton). And I’ve written here on this site about the actions of Eeben Barlow, the former Apartheid soldier turned private military contractor.

Ironically, Feith seems concerned that Prince will start entrenching the world’s most oppressive governments now that he’s working with Beijing. There’s a long list of repressive regimes the US and its allies support because they are good for trade.

As for private contractors, it is useful to recall Eeben Barlow’s logic:

If a government anywhere in the world is recognised as “the government”, regardless of where they are or what political system they adhere to, are they then actually not legit? After all, the USA recognised all the governments that contracted us as the legitimate governments of those countries – and note – they contracted us to help them. We didn’t invade them – and we still remain friends years after we left. But are you also telling me that these governments are therefore, in your opinion, not legitimate?

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.