The Blackwash Part Two: Crimes against Black people no obstacle for signing the BlackNorth pledge
The Chirano gold mine in Ghana is owned by Canadian mining company Kinross Gold. Image taken from a Kinross promotional video.
As Canadian mining companies sign the BlackNorth pledge to fight racism, they continue to attack, displace, and disenfranchise Black and Indigenous people in Africa and the Americas.
By El Jones and Desmond Cole
With files from Sakura Saunders and Rachel Small
As European colonizers installed slavery across the Americas in the sixteenth century, they shipped more Africans to modern-day Brazil than anywhere else. Labouring on sugar plantations, enslaved Africans were brutally tortured and murdered. Some were able to escape, forming communities that came to be known as quilombolo. Fugitive quilombolas faced repeated attacks by the Portugese, and after years of resistance, their communities were destroyed. They escaped deep into the Brazilian jungle, where they were presumed to be wiped out.
In the 18th Century, gold exploration began in the area around modern-day Paracatu. Thousands of enslaved African people were forced into the region. When mining output began to decline in the 1820s, the Europeans abandoned the area. The remaining Africans built free communities, in settlements known as Morro do Ouro or Golden Hill. They intermarried with Indigenous people and established a distinctive culture mixing African traditions with Indigenous and Portugese influences.
The quilombolo had little contact with others until the 1970s, when first logging companies and agribusiness, and then mining companies began deforesting and extraction activities. Eventually, the Brazilian government recognized the African descendants as distinct communities and granted them land rights.
For the quilombolo of Paracutu, recognition did not save them. First a British company owned the mine at Morro do Ouro, which was sold to Kinross, a Canadian mining company, in 2003. When Kinross bought the mine, it inherited the fifteen year resistance by quilombolo who complained about the loss of land, environmental damage, and the loss of traditional activity as the state outlawed the artisanal mining that sustained the community.
By the time Kinross acquired the mine, the quilombolo were formally recognized by the Brazilian government and were in the process of negotiating ownership rights over their traditional lands. But Kinross wanted to expand. A 2019 study by NGO Above Ground reports how residents were pressured to enter agreements with Kinross to sell their land without legal advice—in some cases residents could not even read relevant documents. quilombolas reported death threats and intentional division sown in the community. Although they attempted to legally challenge Kinross, the courts overturned their efforts and the community was displaced. Today, there are no quilombolo remaining in the area.
In July of 2020, Kinross, the mining company who removed the quilombolo from their land, signed the Blacknorth pledge to end anti-Black racism.
The pledge has become an opportunity for Kinross and numerous Canadian mining companies to rebrand their global reputations of anti-Blackness while maintaining the same racist practices.
An image of two quilombolas from the Above Ground report on Kinross’ Morro do Ouro mine in Brazil. The quilombolas are descendants of enslaved African peoples who have been fighting for land rights and legal title for decades
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BlackNorth founder Wes Hall is a financial shark who, as the Executive Chairman and founder of Kingsdale Advisors, has worked with numerous Canadian mining companies to build his fortune. Hall has recently rebranded himself as a human rights champion by creating BlackNorth, an initiative that claims to be fighting against anti-Black racism. BlackNorth has created a pledge enlisting corporations to rebrand too, and its signatories include Kinross Gold and many other Canadian mining and extraction companies who exploit Black and Indigenous people in Africa and across the Americas.
When BlackNorth Initiative launched in the summer of 2020, its premise seemed simple enough: Hall wanted to see more Black faces in high places.
BlackNorth released a corporate pledge, and asked signatories to commit to having Black people occupy at least 3.5 percent of executive and board roles by 2025 (according to the most recent census, Black people make up an estimated 3.5 percent of Canada’s population). The pledge also dictates that Black people must account for at least 5 percent of a company’s student workforce.
Hall speaks regularly about systemic anti-Blackness, and dubiously suggests we confront it by elevating Black individuals in the corporate boardroom. He doesn’t promise that these Black business leaders will change their companies’ racist practices, and neither does the BlackNorth pledge. Instead, Hall frames Black representation itself as the problem to be solved.
“We know where business goes, government and others will follow,” he told the Financial Post in February. “That’s where the jobs are. That’s where ingenuity is.”
Hall would have us focus on so-called corporate diversity, instead of examining how corporate practices harm Black and Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world.
BlackNorth boasts that “30% of the companies on the TSX 60 have signed the pledge and the total market cap of all committed organizations exceeds $1 trillion, representing almost one-third of the TSX’s total market cap.” BlackNorth has wooed Canada’s most powerful and wealthy companies, and is receiving support and funds tied to the exploitation of Black and Indigenous peoples.
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The exploitation in Brazil has been repeated by Canadian mining companies around the world, often funded by Export Development Canada (EDC). EDC is a Crown corporation owned by the government of Canada that funds Canadian companies to, as they put it, “succeed on the world stage.” EDC has invested an estimated $850 million into the Morro do Ouro project in Brazil—it is also a BlackNorth pledge signatory.
In Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritania, Peru, Guatemala—across the African continent and Central and South America—Canadian mining companies face credible charges of corruption, violence, threats, shootings, gang rapes, and murder.
Kingsdale Advisors, the company founded by Wes Hall, boasts on its website of “the most impressive client roster.” With a significant presence of companies in the extraction industries, the list is a virtual rogues’ gallery of the most destructive and harmful corporations on earth. Along with Kinross, Hall’s partners include Hudbay, Pan American Silver, Yamana Gold, Wesdome, Teranga Gold Corporation, Goldcorp and other mining companies, as well as oil and gas companies including Enbridge and TransAlta, the latter of which has faced years of resistance at the Shubenacadie River by Mi’kmaq people. Many of these companies have signed the BlackNorth pledge.
Alhassan Atta-Quayson, a Ghanaian scholar who studies the impact of mining on communities in Ghana, says the pledge will have no effect on the people displaced by Kinross’ mining operations.
I do not expect any meaningful change in ongoing operations especially in Ghana attributable to Kinross signing on to a petition to combat anti-Back racism.
The forced displacement at Sefwi and associated 10 years plus delay in paying compensation to affected farmers that took place under its watch (though it took over midway from Red Back mining) is a reflection of a deep-rooted way of doing business that has no respect for Black people in Ghana.
That incident could not in any way happen in North America where it has some operations, thanks to the fact that most people living there have a different skin colour from those of us in Ghana.
Atta-Quayson is referring to Kinross’ displacement of farmers around the company’s Chirano mine. The company has been accused of corruption related to Chirano, as well as its Tasiast mine in Mauritania. In October 2017, anti-corruption organizations issued a letter to Justin Trudeau, asking him to probe “serious bribery allegations” and provided evidence that the company seems “to have engaged in illegal business activities in its West African operations.” The allegations have never been criminally investigated.
It is not only Kinross that faces serious accusations. Hudbay Minerals, another Kingsdale client to take the BlackNorth pledge, is infamous for three lawsuits regarding a mine the company previously owned. The lawsuits allege murder, shootings, and gang rapes against the Mayan Q’eqchi’ population of El Estor, Guatemala. More recently, Hudbay has been accused of police repression against locals who are peacefully protesting stalled negotiations with the company. Hudbay has effectively privatized the local police force through direct agreements that disenfranchise the local population.
Given that Hall cites George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers as the reason he formed BlackNorth, his silence on police repression to assist Canadian mining is telling.
Kingsdale Advisors Executive Chairman and BlackNorth founder Wes Hall speaks to CBC in the summer of 2020. Image from CBC.ca
Hudbay’s Lalor Project in Northern Manitoba has been resisted by the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, on whose territory the mine sits. In response to peaceful gatherings at the mining site, the company obtained injunctions against the entire nation and launched a lawsuit against its chief.
Pan American Silver, owner of the Escobal mine in Guatemala, is another BlackNorth signatory and Hall client. The Escobal mine was suspended due to broad opposition, in particular from the Indigenous Xinka community, after years of violence, threats, and military-style surveillance against mine opponents. But Pan American refuses to cease its work in the community even as six members of the peaceful resistance to the Escobal mine have suffered attacks and death threats this year.
Topacio Reynoso, a 16-year-old girl leading the youth resistance against mining was assassinated in 2014, several land defenders have been shot, members of the Xinca parliament have been kidnapped (one of whom was killed), and hundreds have been criminalized for their resistance. A solidarity page for the mine details the resistance and the ongoing violence and repression.
It’s hard to imagine that Hall is unaware of the practices of these companies, especially since many remain listed as his clients.
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“Wes is one of Canada’s strongest voices advocating for human rights.” Dahabo Ahmed-Omer, Executive Director, BlackNorth Initiative
Before the summer of 2020 when he became, in his own words, a “reluctant activist” speaking out for the first time against racism, Wes Hall was known as a different kind of activist.
Global Mining Observer, a who’s who of the mining industry, describes Hall in glowing language:
When a Canadian board is under pressure it either hires Wes Hall or finds itself “staring at him on the other side of the table”, writes The Globe and Mail...Structuring stock options and poison pills, winning proxy battles, pillaring contested motions through AGMs, he works with the world’s biggest conglomerates, AirCanada to Barrick Gold. His mining roster includes Goldcorp founder Rob McEwen, investor Rick Rule and Yamana’s chief executive Peter Marrone. “He’s excellent,” one client says.
Barrick Gold may be the single most notorious Canadian mining company, having credible allegations of widespread gang rapes and killings at its mines in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania. After years of denial, Barrick set up an ineffective grievance mechanism to respond to these accusations, but the abuse continues and in 2020, ten Tanzanian people filed a lawsuit alleging serious abuse by Barrick’s security forces. In the Dominican Republic, communities surrounding Barrick’s Pueblo Viejo mine have accused the mine of polluting local water sources, poisoning local people and livestock, as well as causing the loss of over 80% in their cacao production. Black and Indigenous peoples around the world are resisting Barrick and have repeatedly taken legal actions against the company.
Working with mining giants has contributed to Hall's fortune, and his reputation for ruthless corporate activity has recently landed him a spot on CBC’s “Dragon’s Den.” Hall’s collaboration with mining groups makes him a bizarre figure to suddenly be advocating for the interests of Black Canadians living with environmental racism, gentrification, and health inequities. His attempt to move seamlessly from the boardrooms of the most controversial companies on earth to a self-appointed leader of social justice deserves far more scrutiny than he has received to date.
Jamie Kneen is the Communications and Outreach Co-ordinator and is also responsible for the Africa program at MiningWatch Canada, an NGO that monitors Canadian mining companies and works closely with people affected by their projects. He compares mining companies signing the BlackNorth Pledge to Barrick Gold’s support for the White Ribbon Campaign condemining male violence against women, “even as its security forces were assaulting and raping women in Tanzania and Papua New Guinea.”
Kneen says we must challenge our assumptions about racism, capitalism, and liberation: “It's a question of whether a business based at least in part on forced displacement of Africans, alleged participation in corruption, and ecological destruction for the profit of largely white shareholders can be redeemed by internal changes.”
Like Alhassan Atta-Quayson, he points out that BlackNorth’s diversity goals only target Black people entering Canadian boardrooms, and not the local people whose lives and livelihoods are actually destroyed. Even if we accept the premise that Black Canadians benefit from this Initiative, people like the farmers in Ghana get nothing.
Regarding the pledge, Kneen says, “I can't see this making a significant difference on the ground in the absence of a transformation in [companies like] Kinross' operations and the power relationship between the company and its workers and ‘host’ communities.”
For his part, Atta-Quayson rejects the idea that more Black representation in boardrooms leads to justice for Black people around the world. He points out: “At the time that Kinross was maltreating Black people in Ghana...the Government of Ghana had some representative(s) on its board yet that could not stop it. This reflects the extent to which abuse of human rights of Black people is rooted in their operations in their pursuit of profit.”
Atta-Quayson concludes, “signing onto the pledge to combat anti-Black racism is largely a PR effort to present the company in a way different from its true self.”
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We wrote to David Sharpe, Chief Executive Officer of Bridging Finance Inc. and a member of BlackNorth’s Board of Directors and Indigenous Observer Committee. We asked Sharpe for comment on the role of that committee and whether it has raised concerns about BlackNorth pledge signatories who face mass resistance by Indigenous Land Defenders. Sharpe did not respond. Our emails to BlackNorth, Kingsdale Advisors, and pledge signatory Hill + Knowlton Strategies (the media communications and public relations firm for the Initiative) went unanswered.
In recruiting the business world to the fight for Black advancement, Hall has taken an ethical position that deserves examination. Upon revealing the signatories to the BlackNorth pledge at the July 2020 Summit, Hall announced:
In just 47 days we have built the modern, Canadian version of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. The BlackNorth Initiative is purpose-built to be THE VOICE of Blacks and THE FORCE to drive measurable change for Blacks. Uniquely positioned, it has the reach, resources and approach needed to dismantle anti-Black systemic racism.
This change cannot occur without, at a bare minimum, challenging companies to stop killing, imprisoning, and preying upon Black people, and creating the global conditions that feed violence against Indigenous communities. The advent of slightly more Black corporate leadership has nothing to do with addressing racist corporate practices, especially when Hall and BlackNorth refuse to name these practices.
Black people in Canada surely owe ourselves more than BlackNorth is offering. We owe African and Indigenous peoples around the world more solidarity than a pledge that a few more of us will oversee their suffering. As professor and Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick reminds us, “in agriculture, banking, and mining, in trade and tourism, and across other colonial and postcolonial spaces—the prison, the city, the resort—a plantation logic characteristic of (but not identical to) slavery emerges in the present both ideologically and materially.”
The global racialized economy thrives upon impoverishing Black life, and putting more Black faces in high places won’t threaten the current racist order.
UPDATE, May 12, 2021: After publishing this piece, we learned that BlackNorth board member and Indigenous Observer Committee chair David Sharpe has been terminated from his employment with accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and is under investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission.
OSC staff allege Bridging Finance misappropriated about $35 million to complete an acquisition for its own benefit, that Sharpe received $19.5 million in undisclosed payments to a personal chequing account and that the firm lent $32 million to a borrower shortly before the party bought a stake in the private lender.
None of the allegations have been tested or proven in a court or before the Ontario Securities Commission.
Sharpe’s photo has been removed from the BlackNorth board of directors page on its website. It is unclear whether or not Sharpe is still a member of the group’s board, or the chair of the Indigenous Observer Committee. BlackNorth does not appear to have published any news regarding Sharpe’s status. We are reaching out to BlackNorth for clarification and will provide updates if we receive them.