Features

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM COMES TO AFRICA

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

2007-01-20, Issue 287

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/39303

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The World Social Forum (WSF) is holding its Seventh Session in Nairobi, for the first time in Africa, 20-25 January 2007.

This is a global Movement against globalization and the triumphalist neo-liberalism that underpins it. For any African who is casually aware of the painful history of this continent in relation to the rest of the world globalization should not be a new term. Slavery was global and so was colonialism. And Imperialism has always been global.

So why are we using globalization today as if it was discovered a few years ago? It is used as if it all has to do with technology, internet, freer movement of goods, services, people, skills, knowledge, etc. It is all these and more. It has both an ideological, political and class context. Technology is not neutral.

What is distinct about globalization today? One, it is happening in the context of a UNIPOLAR world that is dominated by an illiterate lone superpower: USA. Two, it asserts an end of ideology with another ideology: There Is No Alternative (TINA) thereby turning neoliberalism, into a gospel truth, from which there can not be deviation.

Democratization, progress and survival of humanity, in this discourse, become linked or even interchangeable with western political structures, capitalism and Western culture. Consequently the destiny of the world is to become Westernized and even more brazenly become Americanized!

If Westernization produced prosperity for all the peoples of the world and respect the dignity of all human beings there may not be much opposition to it and its hegemony. But slavery, colonialism, genocide, mass violence, expropriation of majority by the minority, destruction of cultures and peoples and many more atrocities in the pursuit of raw materials, profits and markets are the heritage and contemporary expression of this ideology. Hence it has always provoked resistance from its victims and other peoples who desire social justice and a better humanity.

The WSF movement has evolved from the late 1990s becoming organized expression of the peoples of the world at its first meeting in 2001 at Porta Allegro in Brazil. It brings together all kinds of anti-globalisation forces and social movements struggling against all kinds of class, racial, ethnic, religious, gender and other kinds of oppression at all levels of human existence. It is united by the twin ideology of opposition to the current imperialist anti –people globalization and the totalitarian ideology of there being no alternative to Neo liberalism.

Those may be the only two things they agree on because different groups, organizations and individuals decide where and how they go about confronting the two evils they identify. To the untutored in WSF dynamics it may look like an anarchists’ bazaar. But there is a method to the madness. These are people committed to changing the world they live in and are prepared to sacrifice for it. They may sound like lunatics and champions of lost causes but so did many thought of Mandela who, as a firebrand youth believed they could overthrow Apartheid and bring about Black Majority rule at a time when people thought White power was impregnable.

Winston Churchill infamously and loquaciously declared his opposition to Independence for Non White British Colonies in his rude reaction to Mahatma Ghandi’s mobilization of ordinary Indians against colonialism insisting he had not become the Prime Minster of ‘His Majesty’s government’ to hand over the British Empire ‘to a half-naked Kaffir’. But it came to pass in his life-time. Not only India, but also Ceylon (Sri Lanka now), and several Asian and African Countries became independent before Churchill’s life snuffed out and they were welcomed to England by the British crown in pomp and pageantry at Buckingham palace.

History is full of the contributions made possible by people who were regarded as ‘lunatics’ by their contemporaries and the powers that be that they challenged but with time many of these ideas and issues they fought on became common sense.

Many will snigger and even be amused by the clarion call of the Nairobi WSF: “Another World is Possible”. The cynicism will in part be due to many people believing that the world as we live it today has come to stay, that America will always gets its way and the west will always dominate therefore since you cannot beat them you had better join them or get lost. But this reading of the world’s history is so short sighted as it is ahistorical.

Most of the territory we now know as the USA today used to be a colony of Britain, but now Britain especially under TORY Blair has become a vassal state of Britain. Yet at the height of British Imperial grandeur in the 19th and up to the middle of the 20th century its imperial propagandists use to boast that: ‘The sun never sets on the British empire’ because the colonies stretched against all continents.

Those struggling against British Colonialism used to retort that the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire was because: God never trusted the British in the dark! The Empire did collapse. Why should the American empire be any different? Were not Rome and the Catholic Church imperial power before? What happened to the Egyptians and Greek civilizations? From generation to generations, from one epoch to the other human beings continue to seek alternatives making change the only permanent condition of humanity.

Empires rise and fall. Just imagine the next fifty years with China, India, and Africa, Latin America and other previously marginalized peoples and regions of the world on the rise. The apostles of neoliberalism want to put an end to our imagination but the ‘strugglists’ assembling in Nairobi from all corners of the world for the WORLD SOCIAL FORUM (which should really be World Socialist Forum) just as the beneficiaries of the current unequal and unfair global power structures gather for their annual vultures’ festival in Davos, for the World Economic Forum (really WORLD EXCPLOITERS FORUM) are defiantly reaffirming the truism that Another world , without hunger, poverty and greed is possible and desirable. But more than that they are prepared to work for it.

Karibuni to Nairobi to all of you. A luta continua

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director, Africa, for the UN millennium, Campaign. He writes this weekly column in his personal capacity as a concermed Pan Africanist.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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