Welcome to Political Science Level 2, Lesson 2: The Ghetto 2. If you haven’t studied the previous lesson, check out The Ghetto 1

In this lesson, you will learn about:

Black people in British ghettos
Black people in French ghettos
The favelas of Brazil
The war on favelas
Financial institutions
The militarisation of police
The growth of slums in Africa
Slums in the Caribbean
Colonial laws

Primary Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will understand:

How European ghettos differ from the US
What the “colour bar” was
How Black people in Britain ended up in ghettoised neighbourhoods
How the favelas emerged
How the Brazilian government attacked the favelas
The similarities between Brazil and the USA
How colonialism created African ghettos
What role the IMF and World Bank play in the maintenance of ghettos
The similarities shared between worldwide Black ghettos
How Caribbean ghettos emerged in Jamaica and Haiti

Additional Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you may understand:

How French and other European ghettos differ from British ghettos
How large the Brazilian favelas are
How police throughout the world maintain the existence of ghettos
The relationship between the Brazilian government and Israel
The monetary divide that exists in Brazil
How Western nations colluded with neo-colonial leaders to expand African ghettos
How sharecropping led to the ghettos of Southern Africa
What laws and legislation led to the ghettos of South Africa
How structural adjustment creates and maintains ghettos

THE HOODS OF EUROPE

Like in the US, the nations of Europe orchestrated policies that kept their Black population in poor, neglected areas. However, unlike the US, these nations had class systems in place prior to an increase of Black people within their borders, complete with ghettoised neighbourhoods.

Britain saw an increase in its Black population after WWI. Within British industry, a system of segregation was in place called the “colour bar.” This meant that Black people were legally refused jobs within factories, refused services within cafes and restaurants, often banned from public transport, and prevented from renting property.

Black people were seamlessly slipped into the bottom of Britain’s class system. Many Black families had to settle for dilapidated apartments near the docks, as ship work was the only employment available. It wasn’t until after WW2 that the colour bar became less enforced due to Britain’s need for labour.

However, housing discrimination was still rife. In major cities, Black people were housed in apartments on estates that were severely cramped. These were areas that had been neglected for years by the British government, and had previously housed white working class residents. Although formal segregation was not practiced after WW2, Black people were deliberately confined to specific areas by the government. Black people remain in these areas to this day, mainly in high-rise tower blocks, and are four times more likely to live in houses deemed “overcrowded” than white people.

However, the structure of British cities such as London meant that complete segregation was impossible. A lot of the poorest parts of London border the richest houses, meaning along both racial and class lines, integration was far more common than in the USA. However, the proportion of Britain’s Black population confined to the poor parts of the major cities was, and still is, huge. When paired with ever-increasing rents, deliberately racist employment policies and racist school expulsion rates, the estates that house Black people in Britain resemble those of the USA in many ways.

In other British cities such as Birmingham, racial segregation is more visible.

Like in the US, virtually none of the businesses within the hoods of Britain are owned by Black people, with the exception of course being the barber shops and a handful of restaurants. Due to the high volume of private landlords and estate agents in Britain, racist housing discrimination is commonplace. When coupled with racist political policies and employment, this makes it easy to confine Black people to certain areas within a city.

In other European nations such as France, Black people who migrated from the French African and Caribbean colonial territories were placed outside of the major cities in large suburban districts. This enabled France to keep the centres of their cities, such as Paris, as white as possible. Although Black people would often work within the cities, they were not permitted to live there. This trend is still very apparent today.

The urban racial segregation seen in European cities such as Paris and the surrounding districts has been described as a “ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly” under the guise of “social justice for the poor”, “progress” or “beautification.” In reality, it is gentrification and exclusion, as segregated boundaries are drawn up to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class white people.

THE FAVELAS

Residents of ghettos are approximately 6% of the city population in Western countries, with this of course varying greatly between cities. London for example may have a higher percentage of its population housed in the poorest areas. However, in underdeveloped countries, residents of ghettos constitute a staggering 78.2% of the overall population. This equals fully a third of the entire global urban population!

One of the places this is most apparent is Brazil, home of the favelas. More than 52 million people live in Brazil’s slums - the third highest slum population after China and India. And almost all of these residents are Black.

During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Black people were forced into enslavement in Brazil at a higher rate than anywhere else. Slavery also went on for a longer duration in Brazil than anywhere else, lasting until 1888. This meant that the African population in Brazil was huge, and it remains so to this day. In fact, Brazil has a higher population of Black people than every other country except Nigeria! However, due to the overt white supremacy practiced in the country, colourism is rife and many Black residents are ignorant of their racial heritage.

Favelas are Brazil’s ghettos; settlements that house the poorest residents and are terrorised by the police. Brazil is littered with favelas throughout, and the population within them has grown in the last few decades due to urbanisation. Brazil’s first favela, Morro de Providencia, was unsurprisingly founded in the 1880s - just as enslavement was abolished - and freed Africans were confined to this ghetto.

In the 1960s, the Brazilian government declared war on the favelas, using coded language that is so often spouted by authorities when talking of the ghettos created by their society. The favelas were portrayed as hubs of crime, without any explanation for their existence or poverty. Militarised police began a war of terror on the favelas - a war that has not stopped since. Other favelas were bulldozed out of existence, leaving hundreds of thousands of Black Brazilians homeless. With financial support from USAID (the USA’s foreign aid administration), the Brazilian government cleared the way for industrial expansion in these areas, and to “beautify” the borders of upper-income areas for European migrants.

The militarised police act with complete impunity in Brazil. In a month, Rio police murder over 2.5 times more people than the New York Police Department kills in a whole year. Much of this occurs in Rochina, Brazil’s largest favela. Just like in the Black ghettos of the USA, drugs are pumped into the favelas, as are Israeli submachine guns. Of course, the police do not even attempt to stem the flow of these drugs and weapons, but instead use them as an excuse to murder the poor Black residents.

The government has even authorised the use of helicopters, snipers and drones to shoot down whoever they deem suspicious or criminal. The drones in use today are the same drones that are used by Israel on Palestinians. The Brazilian government in fact has a special relationship with Israel, maintaining close political and military ties, and Brazil is a full member state of Israel Allies Caucus, a political advocacy organisation that mobilises pro-Israel parliamentarians in governments worldwide. This is how so many Israeli weapons find their way into Brazilian borders.

In Brazil, the median annual income for the richest 20% is $21,134, roughly equivalent to that of France, and 26 times greater than median income of the poorest 20%, which is $828, less than half that of Ghana. The richest 20% of the country, who are almost exclusively colonial descendents or European immigrants, have 64% of the total national income, while the poorest 20% have only 3% of the total national income.

AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN SLUMS

The slums of Africa and the Caribbean have grown massively in the last five decades. The deliberate underdevelopment of these nations has forced a huge increase in migration towards urban centres, and structural adjustment programs, privatisation of industries and sanctions have all created a downward spiral of poverty for the majority of the population.

Dilapidated slums that were built during the colonial era from the ruins of empires are where the majority of the urban poor live in Africa. Today, these slums have not been renovated, but rather have expanded to cope with the increasing population. For example, Kinshasa and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950! Around 80% of Nigeria’s city dwellers live in slums, and over 90% of Ethiopia’s city dwellers!

The policies of agricultural deregulation and financial restrictions enforced by the IMF and World Bank continue to leave many of Africa’s rural population - farmers and fishermen for example - jobless. This in turn generates an exodus of surplus rural labour to the slums of the big city - even as cities cease to provide employment. This has caused overcrowding in terrible housing conditions, which often leads to many people grabbing any work they can - much of which is deemed illegal.

Kinshasa, the capital city of DR Congo, has been described as a “city of ruins”, wrecked by a cocktail of colonialism, kleptocracy, Western occupation, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war. Mobutu’s 32-year long dictatorship - supported by Washington, the UN, the IMF and World Bank - plundered the country. The IMF’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) eliminated the welfare state, as imports flooded the country, home industries closed down, and hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in Kinshasa. This caused the city to crumble, becoming one huge ghetto with a population of 10 million.

From the time of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, to Mobutu’s dictatorship, to Kabila’s coup, to Paul Kagame’s predatory activities and beyond, soldiers throughout the ghettos of Kinshasa, Goma and Lumumbashi regularly open fire on the civilian population, keeping the people in slums terrorised. The constant genocidal practices that the Congolese people have faced since the 1880s have led to some believing that their situation is a supernatural curse. However, it is purely the engineered poverty by the West and neo-colonial puppets that have caused an explosion in the Congolese ghettos.

In Lagos, Nigeria, two of the largest slums in the world exist: Ajegunle and Agege, with a combined population of more than 2 million. Many of the awful housing in these areas is private property, with landlords charging extortionate rent that often takes a person's entire paycheque. Within these ghettos, the wealthy will even rent out wheelbarrows as beds for the homeless!

In 1972, Ajegunle contained 90,000 people in an area of 8 square kilometres of swampland. Today over 1.5 million people reside on a slightly larger surface area. This huge overcrowding has made the Lagos slum a very undesirable living space. Other Nigerian ghettos, like in Brazil, have been destroyed to make way for luxury compounds for European and Asian tourists and the richest Africans, leaving thousands homeless. Like in the Congo and throughout Africa, the IMF-imposed SAPs have left Nigeria a superhub of ghettoised poverty and hardship, described by the Nigerian writer Fidelis Balogun as “the equivalent of a great natural disaster, destroying forever the old soul of Lagos and re-enslaving urban Nigerians.”

The 1980s - the decade that saw the IMF and the World Bank use the leverage of debt to restructure “Third World” economies - were when African slums became a reality for millions, engulfed by the violence of so-called adjustment. Nairobi’s slums in Kenya, which are huge rent plantations owned by politicians and the upper class - many of whom are white descendants of colonisers - is one of thousands of examples.

In Southern Africa, colonial Britain enforced the African population into a form of neoslavery called sharecropping - just like in the USA after abolition. In the nations of South Africa, South West Africa, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, it was illegal for Black people to own their own land or learn a trade or a skill. Consequently, many Africans were forced to live in terrible conditions, earning far less money than what was required for adequate shelter and nutrition.

The British have been called “the greatest slum-builders of all time”, as their policies forced their African labourers - who were all but enslaved - to live in dangerous shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. When Zimbabwe gained independence after military action, many economic restrictions were placed on the country from the West. Although finally Africans were legally allowed to own homes in the city, these economic restrictions meant that a complete elevation in lifestyle was impossible. Most had no choice but to remain living in the slums built by the British colonists. Various sanctions were also imposed on the nation by the USA and Britain after independence as well. The legacy of this is apparent today, as many residents are still confined to the slums of Zimbabwe.

After the 2005 elections, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe authorised the use of violence against the residents of the cities of Harare and Bulawayo, where the poor had voted in large numbers against him. The first stage of what was called Operation Murambasvina (“Drive Out Trash”) was a police assault on the city’s 34 flea markets. One police official reportedly stated: “From tomorrow, I need reports on my desk saying that we have shot people. The President has given his full support for this operation so there is nothing to fear. You should treat this operation as war.” Like in the ghettos of the USA, the favelas of Brazil and the hoods of Europe, the police are poor African people’s primary tormentors.

South Africa’s policies were initially closer to that of European cities such as Paris, as Black people were kept in poor districts outside of the cities. In fact, South African legislation not only criminalised urban migration, but also removed many from their historical inner-city communities. Almost one million Black people were brutally uprooted from newly established “white” areas. “Pass laws” were created, as an internal passport system allowed the white minority to limit the movement of African citizens within their own land. Black people were placed in townships, bordering mining belts - the most famous of these being Soweto, which is home to over 1.5 million Black people and is considered the second largest slum on the continent behind Ajegunle in Lagos.

In Johannesburg, towards the end of apartheid, big downtown businesses and affluent white residents fled the urban core for northern suburbs. Places such as Sandton, Randburg, and Rosebank were transformed into high-security replicas of American “edge cities” - attempting to recreate Beverly Hills and Bel-Air on African land. However, just like in the USA under urban renewal, the white people that left took much of the country’s money with them, leaving the Black population to face further poverty.

As in the USA and Brazil, when slavery was abolish in the Caribbean it merely shifted form. Africans were kept on the plantations under the scheme called apprenticeship. The supposedly freed and their descendants remained trapped within impoverished areas, and the various colonial laws that were enacted in Africa were used throughout the Caribbean. Many squatter settlements emerged around wealthier centres, and these were turned into ghettos by the colonial governments. In Jamaica, the British colonial government created the Central Housing Authority which forced the poor to pay rent. From 1943 to 1970, transnational corporations from the USA and Canada displaced 560,000 rural Jamaicans from the countryside, forcing them into ghettos so they could secure the island's bauxite reserves.

Today, these ghettos remain largely unchanged, thanks to the same IMF and World Bank restrictions that are placed on nations throughout Africa. In Jamaica, the cost of servicing debt - which was more than 60 percent of the annual budget in the late 1990s - absorbs all potential resources for social programs and housing assistance. The white supremacist institutions developed by the USA keep the entire Black world in the ghetto.

Nowhere in the Caribbean have these effects been felt more than Haiti. The capital city of Port-au-Prince has been called a battlefield - consistently ground zero for occupation from white supremacist powers. Since France demanded reparations of 90 million francs in the 19th century, the once most profitable island on the planet has economically suffered. The US occupation between 1915 and 1934 kept the people of Haiti impoverished, and their interventions in support of various coups have made sure almost everybody Black on the island remains trapped in the slums. US trained assassins, military personnel and police have murdered countless people in Haiti’s ghettos. A handful of families from Lebanon, the USA and France control almost all of Haiti’s wealth, lining their pockets as the people starve.

More than 50% of Haitian households are forced to survive on just 44 US cents a day thanks to corrupt NGOs, phoney charities, USAID and, of course, the IMF and World Bank. The leverage that these bodies acquire from their economic meddling makes it impossible for Haitians to get out of the ghetto, as 90% of the government's capital projects budget comes from them. Even when progressive leaders emerge, it becomes almost impossible to alleviate the citizens from the pits of poverty. From Port au Prince to Pretoria, Chicago to Sao Paulo, Black people are systematically placed in areas that are designed to eliminate them.

Further Reading:

Rasta and Resistance, Horace Campbell
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Policing the Planet, Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton
The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, Ron Ramdin
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney