Tom Dispatch.
They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the
medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if
today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or
silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and
ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing
maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of
supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a
fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa.
Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of
training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in
nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have
any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo
and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in
Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous
imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”
In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the
everyday necessities for a military on the make. They’re then loaded
onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and
distant outposts.
On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see
the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local
drivers take a break from their long-haul routes. The same is true in
other African countries. The nodes of the network tell part of the
story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in
Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South
Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African
base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden,
among others.
