The US Militarization of Africa Is Well Underway and Nothing Good Will Come of It

By Nick Turse, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt 

TRUTHOUT - Friday, 29 May 2015

The following is an excerpt, "Finding Barack Obama in South Sudan," from the book Tomorrow's Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa:

Juba, South Sudan. The camp is a mess of orange muck and open earthen sewers. A single wood plank provides passage over a roughhewn trench. Children peek out from tarp-tents. Older men and women sit in homes of mud-speckled plastic sheeting that become saunas in the midday heat. Young women pick their way through refuse, some with large yellow jerry cans of water balanced atop their heads, others carry their homes in similar fashion - a mess of wooden poles and a folded tarp - as they set out for another camp hoping for better to come.
As I walk down the main thoroughfare of this camp for internal exiles, I suddenly see his smiling face, the one I'd know anywhere. Here, in Juba, the capital of South Sudan amid tens of thousands of people crammed into a fetid encampment visibly thrown together in haste, out of fear and necessity; here, as huge water tanker trucks rumble past and men in camouflage fatigues, toting automatic weapons, stride by; here, in the unlikeliest of places in the heat and swirling dust and charcoal smoke, the air heavy with the scent of squalor, is a face I've seen a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million times before. Here in a camp where hopelessness is endemic and despair reigns, is a face that, for so many, was once synonymous with hope itself. It's a sight that stops me in my tracks. Here, 7,000 miles from my home, Barack Obama is smiling his familiar smile amid the results of a decades-long American project in Africa.

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