It’s time to get Canada out of Tanzania

Written by Adisa Owusu, an agronomist, multi-disciplinary artist and anti-imperialist organizer based in Canada

Canadian mining company, Barrick Gold, the second biggest gold mining company in the world, is being sued by Tanzanian residents for hiring local police killings, torture, and other violence. The violence is arguably financed and sponsored by Barrick Gold as they house, feed, and pay the local police of North Mara Acacia, Tanzania. They are basically the company’s personal security, a small army. They are personally responsible for upwards of 100 murders since 2010, including that of a 5-year-old girl and the 4 women who proceeded to gather around the dead girl.

Much of the [Canadian] media has ignored this story or has left out details that illustrate how Canada’s barbaric mining imperialism continues to this day. Canada is Tanzania’s biggest foreign investor as Canada has had its capitalist tentacles gripping the country’s economy for over 100 years. The entire national Tanzanian GDP in 2020 was $62 billion USD while Canada’s profits from its top 40 mining companies were $126 billion USD.

After Julius Nyrere’s resignation as President of Tanzania in 1985, and the subsequent partial failings of the agrarian component of his ujamaa philosophy, as well as having conflicts with Idi Amin from Uganda, the country was primed for foreign aid. It should be noted more often that Canada, along with Britain, the U.S., and Israel, in fact, backed Idi Amin. Canada then offered food aid in 1985. With Nyrere’s nationalized ujamaa controlling the mines and Nyerere out of the picture, they said they would give the food aid only if Tanzania quit refusing to open up their
economy to foreign mining ‘investments’.

In 1996, after the IMF reforms, Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania, Verona Edelstein, continued to apply traditional colonizer pressure on the Tanzanian government into evicting small-scale miners so a Canadian mine can be built. The evictions were violent and at least 60 artisanal ujamaa-conscious miners were buried alive in their mines by bulldozers. Barrick then moved in.

Barrick Gold security is also responsible for up to 200 rape cases in Papua New Guinea mines. None of this has deterred the national Canadian Pension Plan (the pension contribution of workers that is deducted from every paycheque) from ending its investments with the raping, pillaging, and murderous gold mining company. The only thing they were worried about was how Barrick was paying out their executives, with a brief mention of the environmental impacts and no mention of the violence. Or the fact that for literal decades, Barrick had been reporting 3kg of gold concentrate per container but a Tanzanian government audit discovered the gold content had been 7.3kg per container. They stole as much as they declared and paid taxes on! This is
an example of how only one precious mineral and one foreign company in one African country has been instrumental in the plundering of African resources. Canada’s 1348 mining companies operate in 93 countries, half of those countries are African and Canada makes up 75% of the global mining companies. How will Barrick pay for their crimes? How will the resource extraction bases succumb to their own treason against humanity and the Earth? Names, numbers, and addresses?