Jon’s Africa Column

“More Like a White Man Than a Brother”: As Obama Opens His Monument, Kenya Reckons With His Legacy

By Jon Jeter ● World ● June 19, 2026

Eleven years ago the streets of Nairobi filled with song for their native son. This Juneteenth, as his $850 million Obama Presidential Center opens on Chicago’s South Side, Kenyans from the slums to the statehouse have reached the same verdict as much of Black America. They expected investment and got AFRICOM. They expected a brother and got a man more loyal to his mother’s country than his father’s.

Latest in Jon’s Africa Column

The Trump Administration’s Extortion Plan to Harvest African Biological Data

By Jon Jeter ● Jon's Africa Column ● May 6, 2026

This is what colonization looks like in the biotech century. In the latest dispatch of the Plunder Papers, Defender Africa Correspondent Jon Jeter investigates America’s push to extract the cells, pathogens, and medical records of millions of Africans. Countries that refuse are told their HIV patients will die.

500 Years, No Pay Raise: The War on African Wages and the Economy Fighting to Break Free

By Jon Jeter ● World ● April 2, 2026

They took the land, the labor, and the minerals. They left behind an economy where working 89 hours a week earns you $77 a month, and you still owe your boss a cut for hiring you. The Plunder Papers follow the money from a Nairobi father to the extraction machine the West built and never turned off.

‘Everything Must Go!’ Blacks on the Continent and in the Diaspora Experiencing a Crisis of Ownership

By Jon Jeter ● World ● March 2, 2026

From Kenya’s fire sale of Safaricom to skyrocketing utility bills in Black neighborhoods across America, privatization is reversing the gains of liberation movements worldwide. The second installment of Jon Jeter’s Plunder Papers.