Men in blue overalls haul on the ropes alongside American crewmen sporting hardhats shaped as Stetsons and decorated in the stars and stripes.
“Pull harder! Coil the ropes!” one of the Americans barks at the “ship riders,” a term used for the West African sailors aboard the US amphibious landing vessel as she slips her moorings in the port of Dakar.
This is a floating academy, part of an effort by the US military to train local navies and coast guards to combat rising instability in the Gulf of Guinea — an increasingly important source of oil and other raw materials for Western markets which has drawn huge international investment.
The US says the destabilizing effects of piracy, drug smuggling, and illegal fishing in the area are also costing West and Central African coastal economies billions of US dollars each year in lost revenues.
“You have an area that is traditionally a landward-focused region which is awakening to the impact of the
maritime domain,” said Captain Cindy Thebaud, commander of the US Navy’s Destroyer Squadron Six Zero and head of the project.
After two weeks of training in Senegal, the African officers and deckhands will spend a week at sea
on the USS Gunstall Hall alongside their US counterparts learning skills ranging from basic navigation to anti-piracy techniques.
The training is part of US efforts to make Gulf of Guinea maritime security more robust but, with navies often coming low in the pecking order in African militaries, there is a need for increased investment in boats and
other equipment.
“There are challenges with resource allocations everywhere in the region,” Thebaud said. “But the education and the visibility is continuing to increase and, bit by bit, we are seeing increases in allocations in resources.”
The Gulf of Guinea, which runs down from West Africa through Nigeria and Angola, is important because of its vast potential energy reserves.
Ghana will soon join traditional Gulf of Guinea oil producers Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon, while Liberia and Sierra Leone have also made offshore energy finds.
Critics say US policy is purely in self-interest, as the world’s top consumer will rely on the region for a quarter of its oil supplies within the next five years.
But sailors said countries in the region were keen on the project as they understood the threat insecurity posed to governance and economic growth.
Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea “is not the same level as Somalia but it could have the same consequences,” said Lieutenant Commander Emmanuel Bell Bell, a Cameroonian officer onboard.
Earlier this month Cameroon partly blamed piracy for a 13 percent fall in oil production last year.
“In Cameroon we have shipping and oil. The slightest act of piracy creates an atmosphere of fear. It could lead to things shutting down,” Bell Bell added.
The training is part of Africom, the US command center for Africa, but European nations have begun to take part in an effort to broaden the program and cooperation.
Commander David Salisbury, a British naval officer, said a thwarted hijacking of a ship off Benin and a Ghanaian raid on a fishing vessel in December were evidence of improvements. But he warned that threats were “huge and had been largely ignored” and “we should talk about progress in decades”.
The size and power of the USS Gunston Hall — a heavily armed ship that can deploy smaller landing vessels, machine gun-mounted speedboats and hundreds of soldiers — is far cry from the kit most of the sailors onboard are used to.
“We are working with grandpa zodiacs with 42 horse power motors,” said Blawah Charles of Liberia’s newly established Coast Guard.
Some navies in the region are so limited in boats and fuel that their patrols cannot venture far out to sea and pose little threat to illegal fishing vessels or smugglers.
Instability in the Gulf of Guinea has also attracted the interests of private military contractors.
US private security company MPRI earlier this year announced it had won a multi-year contract worth US$250 million to improve maritime security for Equatorial Guinea.
Some fear this pointed to increased competition and the potential for military confrontation. But Thebaud said private military companies’ involvement would be “complementary.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and