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Pambazuka News Editors

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/highlights/38362

FEATURE: Wangui wa Goro discusses the importance and the role of culture in today’s society. She argues that culture should be viewed as the pulse which can feed blood into the arteries of justice, peace, democracy and development.
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Milton Allimadi interrogates the presentation of Africans in the Western media.
- According to the Slam Poetry movement, the performance of poetry is an art -- just as much an art as the art of writing it. However, is it possible to draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in Africa? asks Mphutlane Wa Bofelo.
- How does a post-colonial state undermine oppressive racial categories without unintentionally replacing diversity with homogeneity? Neville Alexander points out that Sub-national identities can be based on many different factors such as religion and linguistics.
PODCASTS: Pambazuka News celebrates the culture of resistance in Africa.
* Ngugi wa Thiong'o speaks to Pambazuka News about language and culture
* Emerging South African rapper PlanBe explores with Sokari Ekine violence and rape in South Africa.
* Omékongo wa Dibinga, Congolese poet, shares three of his poems with us exploring the attitudes towards Africa, aid and development
BLOGGING AFRICA: Sokari Ekine reports on a new documentary film called “NO” which highlights the realities of rape in the African American community and also focuses on the healing process for victims
BOOKS & ARTS: A poem from the urban music award winner, Omékongo Dibinga.
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Procedures to apply for media accreditation
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Links to news on Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Chad and DRC
HUMAN RIGHTS: Ghana forced to ban blood diamond trade
WOMEN AND GENDER: Campaigning against gender violence
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Expulsion of illegal immigrants begins in Tanzania
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Kabila has won Congo elections
DEVELOPMENT: Oil industry sees Africa as most promising
CORRUPTION: Future of fair trade
HEALTH AND HIV/AIDS: Zambia mortality ratio about highest in the region
EDUCATION: Blogger dismissed from University
ENVIRONMENT: Changing climate, changing lives
LAND AND LAND RIGHTS: Ugandan government can’t sell Acholi land
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Urgent reforms to the DRC state-owned radio and television required
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: Critical view on communication for development
PLUS: e-Newsletters and Mailings Lists; Fundraising and Useful Resources; Courses, Seminars and Workshops
JOBS: Fahamu seeks Director for Education for Social Justice

Special Issue: Culture and social justice

Pambazuka News Editors

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38361

The first Pan African Cultural Congress was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia this week (13 to 17 November 2006). The Congress was organised by the African Union (AU), and its purpose was to “review and assess the cultural sector in Africa, and consider challenges and opportunities in order to draw strategies and appropriate programmes,” according to the AU press statement.

To coincide with that conference, Pambazuka News publishes today a special issue on the theme of Culture and Social Justice. It is a ‘multimedia’ edition, with a series of audio-recordings accompanying the written word.

Culture is frequently seen as something that is either peripheral to the struggle for social justice, or as entertainment or fashion. In many cases it is seen as something embedded in history, immovable and sacrosanct, referring to some idealised vision of the past, confining creativity and limiting freedoms. The continued oppression of women, for example, is frequently justified on ‘cultural’ grounds. But culture is a living form: it is rooted in our histories, but constantly evolves. It reflects the deeper spirit of humans, but also serves as a tool for emancipation. As with all aspects of human existence, whether it is art, literature, music, economics, personal relationships, and science (yes even science), culture expresses the underlying social relationships: the ‘culture’ of those who sit comfortably in the back of the Mercedes is different from the culture of those over whose lives the wheels churn. Culture has many languages, even in a society that appears homogeneous.

In this collection of essays and poems, accompanied by a series of audio-recordings that we are distributing as ‘podcasts’, Pambazuka News celebrates the culture of resistance in Africa.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the renowned Kenyan writer and thinker, discusses in his recorded interview with Robtel Pailey the critical role of language and its potential both to free thought as well as imprison it, a theme that is developed further by Neville Alexander, interviewed by Mandisi Majavu, who cautions against using race discourse in our quest for social justice.

Wangui wa Goro argues that to talk of the African Renaissance when Africans go without food and die unnecessarily of curable diseases, when children have no access to clean water and basic education, compels us to ask ourselves who this renaissance is intended for. “… unless we can meet the fundamental needs of the majority of African people,” she argues, words like Renaissance (rebirth) in the face of death for many sound like a mockery.”

From the Harlem Renaissance, to the Negritude Movement, up to the present day African Renaissance, black people have always struggled to find ways to redefine themselves, while in the process creating sites of cultural resistance. From literature, to the movies, history, and to fine art black people have struggled to create spaces, “wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see.” (hooks,1992:116) The ‘gaze’, as bell hooks argues, is the actual site of resistance for culturally colonised black people globally.

Mphutlane Wa Bofelo points out that when it comes to poetry, one of the sites of resistance is the global slam poetry movement. However, Bofelo problematizes the issues by asking: “How do we relate the slam movement to our own history of using poetry in particular and literature and theatre in general to open the space of discourse and critical engagement with prevailing socio-economic, political and cultural conditions? Can we draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in [Africa]?”

It is in the same spirit of resistance that Milton Allimadi writes that the overall Western attitude towards Africa is that the continent is trapped in a tribal time warp. Allimadi states that the Western media plays a vital role in perpetuating this misconception. Western journalists and editors, writes Allimadi, still have the same colonial attitude towards Africans. “…Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis.”

In a podcast interview, emerging rapper PlanBe explores with Sokari Ekine violence and rape in South Africa and he performs his rap Stand Against. And in another podcast, Congolese poet Omékongo wa Dibinga shares three of his poems with us exploring the attitudes towards Africa, aid and development (the text of the latter is also reproduced here).

This issue was guest edited by Robtel Pailey, to whom we express our thanks.

Deconstructing culture in Africa

Wangui wa Goro

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38357

Wangui wa Goro writes that to talk of the African Renaissance when Africans go without food and die unnecessarily of curable diseases, when children have no access to clean water and basic education, compels us to ask ourselves who is this renaissance intended for. “That unless we can meet the fundamental needs of the majority of African people, words like Renaissance (rebirth) in the face of death for many sound like a mockery.”


It is easy to forget that culture is ever evolving and we are what we are today. Some may want to hark back to a specific historical model of culture in the eighteenth or nineteenth century or some other period which appeals to their desires. Some may have profound knowledge of their desired historical culture, while others may just be armed with nostalgia which they acquired through a variety of ways. Neither is invalid, nor undesirable.

Recently, in an imaginary African country, some people in their mid forties and fifties have taken to occasionally donning an animal skin to show their ‘elder’ status. Some are probably four wheel driving drunkards, rapists, thieves or murderers living in secluded areas of the city in gated properties with little or no connection with their rural communities.

Others are steeped in religious or cultural sentimentality acquired dubiously for social mobility, acceptability or political or economic expediency. This is then promoted as “our way of life”, as if culture cannot be contested, as if the values of tradition and modernity cannot be put to the test to scrutinise who they serve; for what purpose and to which ends.

Most worryingly, is the fixing of tradition as something staid that will never change and which condemns the majority into servitude or slavery. For me, culture should answer the question whether it can promote and deliver democracy, equality and social justice for the majority. A pro-people culture would bode well for peace, justice and democracy in Africa; a culture that would enable a re-engagement with the self that has been lacking - a re-engagement with our neighbours and the world in ways that are powerful and which would yield tremendous wealth, enjoyment, creativity, learning and exchange.

Amnesia and denial

Instead, on the whole, we have been living with our heads in the sand like the ostrich. But the ostrich compensates for this behaviour in that it can run, and run very fast when it needs to. What has struck me as absurd is a wilful forgetfulness of what has happened to Africa in the recent and not so recent past such as the colonial era and its aftermath. We have forgotten our heroes and role models.

In Kenya for instance, years after independence, the question of freedom fighters sits uneasily with the nation as does its colonial and post colonial history. Practices which women and men have fought against such as female genital mutilation, and entrenched views about women’s roles in society, are yet again up for contestation. Coming from a former settler colony and having visited several countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, I am struck by how patriarchal and colonial our cultures still remain, from our means of production, our means of consumption and our participation in the production.

All of these are directed as they are at somebody else rather than ourselves.In another example in Kenya people have been forced to wear used underwear from second hand stocks in Europe! What happened to the thriving textile industry? It has been decimated by cheap second hand used imports and Kenyans are wrongly forced to wear used underwear.

What happens in the name of culture?

In most African countries and in the Diaspora, owing to the lack of attention paid to this significant field of African culture much is done quietly on the cultural scene through the efforts and sacrifice that individuals and small groups make. This is true of most art forms which are produced in private and painstaking ways, with little public support. Occasionally, interested private or foreign investors such as the British Council, the French Cultural Centre or the Goethe Institute (who see their linkages with Africa and promotion of African culture as integral to promoting their own cultures) enable us to catch a glimpse of what is possible! The gesture is not reciprocated! Imagine, African cultural institutes sponsored by African governments in every key capital of the world!

Here, in London, where you would expect to find thriving cultural institutions displaying the long links between Africa and the UK, you will be hard pressed if you can point to one. The only institution which is supposed to broadly represent Africans which has existed for a while, is one you will want to run a mile from. It is currently shamefully closed and dilapidated after several years of struggling to survive. Although it has played an important role in democratic struggles for Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora, its governance remains shrouded in mystery and secrecy and many people have gradually been put off from going there as they do not wish their culture to be promoted in this impoverished way. It sits there, right in the heart of the thriving Covent Garden, 200 yards from the UK’s prestigious multimillion Opera House. This sorry state of affairs is a travesty, to both British and African Heritage. It is a general measure of how we see ourselves at home and abroad and how we want to promote ourselves. It is also a measure of how we are seen by others, alienated. Changing this perception may be the way to that much-vaunted renaissance.

Elsewhere for instance in fashion, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria continue to impress with a sense of dress all their own, and what is even more refreshing is that it is not for tourist appeal. Yet what is worrying for even these thriving economies, heritages and creativity, is their reliance on Brick Lane or Switzerland for lace and for designs (sold as African) but produced in India or somewhere further away, thus creating jobs for others elsewhere.

This is all well and good for south-south or any other collaboration. However, the question of how the relationships are defined, the moral, social, cultural and economic cost for Africa and the loss of the possibilities to replenish creativity is one we must be concerned about. As they say, practice makes perfect and we have been forever perfecting everybody else’s things which are then directed at us for consumption whether we like it or not. There is a subtle and not so subtle disparaging of anything home grown that does not pander to somebody else’s appeal or taste.

What is Kenyan? Is it the donning of animal skins and harking back to some golden era in the 19th Century before the Europeans came? And whom is this supposed to appeal to?

What is popularised and cheap is the man-eat-man culture of the bourgeoisie, both Western and African which is often crude and vulgar as it is dependent on making a mockery of the dignity of majority of the people and allowing them to forget that what is theirs is being siphoned off slowly and sold back to them repackaged (cheaply) at ten times the price. The mass media, often Hollywood oriented, continues to dominate the nations’ outlooks on themselves and it is rarely kind about who Africans are, or what our aspirations are.

African Cultural Production and alienation

But what is the real lived experience of cultural production in Africa? I work as a translator and challenge anyone reading this article, to name me ten African literary translators and the titles of their books. You will be hard pressed. This phenomenon is replicated across all cultural production, with perhaps the exception of music by the greats - Baaba Maal, Angelique Kidjo, Hugh Masekela, Fela Kuti, Miriam Makeba and others. Ask any African which 10 books by an African writer they have read outside academia, or who our ten leading painters, sculptors or film makers are and you will be faced with blank faces. I learnt this the hard way, through being a member of the jury of Africa’s 100 best books. The majority of the books that came through the list were foreign-published and in European languages. They were written mainly for academic purposes and for adult consumption.

Port Louis and the ideals of the Cultural Charter for Africa
Such moments make you realise that, as Africans, just how alienated from ourselves we are. This alienation makes one wonder what happened to the OAU’s Charter on Culture and the mandates, aspirations and ideals that brought independence to Africa.

The OAU had made a brave attempt in 1976 in St Louis in Mauritius to define a vision for an African Cultural Policy. The ideals then articulated still remain relevant today and it is pleasing that this debate is set to continue in Addis Ababa, and better still that we might live to implement it. For culture must belong to people and their governments, as government departments will not themselves produce culture, but facilitate it.

My hope is for the debate on national and regional policies to be a continuous one and the lessons that have been learned from festivals, exhibitions, competitions, creativity and interactions across the continent and the globe to be shared more widely. Wonderful initiatives and models exist but only linking them and the wider populace will make a difference. Engaging in the debate of what democratic culture is and what it can become and its links to schooling, arts, sport, entertainment, heritage, leisure and general socio-economic and political production in every arena, is crucial. It should engage the practitioners and policy makers but most of all, it should engage the consumers.

Arts, culture and heritage are seen as a luxury, as a world apart from the real. They are not seen as the pulse which can feed blood into the arteries of justice, peace, democracy and development. Talent and achievement can be nourished and nurtured through state support for arts, heritage and culture in meaningful ways. Young and old people should be allowed to discover their heritage, and here, I recall the work of a wonderful scholar George Senega Zake who spent most of his lifetime trying to retrieve the dying musical art forms of East Africa as well as educate new generations to appreciate their heritage through music. Like him, we should become not only curators and archaeologists, but take up our responsibility to make the past a thriving part of the present and the future.

It seems that the task of excavating must go hand in hand with the task of creating new and vibrant cultural industries which are pro people: sustainable and economically viable. Projects which engage the majority and contribute to national development and democracy, hold up a mirror to society, allowing us to see a true picture of ourselves. Instead, we have exiled, jailed, tortured and killed our artists by smashing the mirror into thousands of fragments because we do not like what we see. The freedom to culture is an important arm of the freedom of expression. It is a fundamental human right.

Elsewhere, culture is what makes the humanity pulsate. One of the things about Britain is the amount of thriving traditional and global cultures represented there. They do not threaten what the nation thinks of its own heritage. I am thinking here of the museums on slavery and colonialism in Liverpool and Bristol which tell unflinchingly (although sparsely) about those chapters of British history! Such institutions have come out of people’s struggles for these spaces, and so their story is told, and in that way, the story of Britain is holistically present. In similar ways, Africans must continue to strive for their ways of life, past and present, to not to be deleted off the page.

Vision

I do not ask for much as we look forward to the outcomes of the AU conference on culture in Addis Ababa. I hope that the conference yields deliverable outcomes that will engage the minds of the young and the old through modern and traditional means, through technology, through information, communication and through travel. We have a right to ask for as much as we wish, but equally, we must be willing to play our part in bringing it into fruition.

A first step in acknowledging our heritage is through its most important medium, our languages, whether, visual, oral, physical or musical. The AU has taken the bold step of adopting Kiswahili as the all African lingua franca.

But language, whether the mother tongue or nation tongue or neighbour tongue, must be a democratic tongue that allows people to express their aspirations and imaginings without demeaning others. What is important, is that these languages enable us to confidently excavate the past as well as yield new possibilities for today and tomorrow. For what then are we wearing borrowed clothing?

Culture is about dignity and self worth. It is about knowledge and confidence in knowing the good, the bad and the ugly. In Africa, as elsewhere, culture emerges through our understanding of this soil, its fauna and flora, through its numerous waters and skies, through unfurling the secrets that it harbours through our ancestors, and through us and our dreams for the future.

Culture is universally compelling in its call to a moral duty which can engage every human being. It is a fundamental human right and a very fulfilling one. Hear the songs, watch those films, go to those bookshops and readings. Go to those museums, produce those crafts, participate in the production of art, consume it or produce it. Marvel at how rich our heritages are. Marvel at the artefacts that were looted and are stashed in vaults across the world. Feel the desire to demand their retrieval, or share in the secrets which only a dying few can decipher. Engage them with trips to this heritage sites of looting, physically or through technology. Touch these totems. Let the totems or replicas be restored and returned. There is so much that we can do and that must be done.

Our attitudes towards education are as important as the paramount questions of justice and equality. In our own case, the question of restorative justice is one which we must pay close attention to so that the ghosts of those genocides, holocausts, dictatorships and theft do not visit us again. What upholds our dignity and our humanity today has to be central. It cannot be a case of “this is how our ancestors did it so we must do it in the same way” if this means violating women’s rights, children’s rights, the rights of one ethnicity or the privileging of one section of society over another. It should uplift us all into valuing each other for what we are and for what we can become.

African Renaissance

Measuring the African Renaissance is a perilous task. When people go without food and die unnecessarily of curable diseases; when children have no access to clean water and basic education, then we have cause to ask ourselves who and what this renaissance is intended for. Unless we can meet the fundamental needs of the majority of African people, words like Renaissance (rebirth) in the face of death for many, sound like a mockery.

Yet without being cynical, there are many promising initiatives such as the journal Kwani, the Paa ya Paa gallery in Kenya, Xarra, the only black bookshop in South Africa, the various Africa wide, book, cultural, music, film and theatre festivals and many other events that are good examples of initiatives trying to place a different kind of culture on the map.

For me, these institutions/events represent different ways to culture, and even then, I ask Kwani and Xarra: where are those African language narratives? What medium is best to disseminate these? Nollywood may hold an answer but even so, where are those technicians and publishers, like the Henry Chakavas, the Aseneth Odagas, the Aminatta Sow Falls, the Ayebia Clarkes and Kassahun Checoles who are brave to risk a different kind of economy by publishing Africa? Where are those film makers who are willing to bring the oral traditions on to our screens without apology while making films that feed contemporary culture and document our heritage? Where are those musicians and painters and sculptors? Where are the beautiful ones? The reception and funding of their work, and how governments, citizens and policy makers engage with them, will tell you even more about who we are.

The continuity of African Centred initiatives promise a re-awakening breed, a different breed trying to nurture out of the postcolonial vacuum, the kind of vision that Port Louis began as initiatives such as FESPACO and FESTAC. This vacuum was interrupted by the abyss of repressive regimes and apartheid on the continent. And although it is always easy to blame somebody else, those years were a product of global culture which was vehemently anti-African. Our governments aided and abetted the denigration of African humanity. The perilous work and courage of cultural activists was key to restoring some sense of normality to Africa today. So our task is to support these initiatives as a part of democratic norms.

Pan-African global heritage

The contribution and role that the traditional and new diasporic communities have played in contributing to continuity in the face of that vacuum cannot be underestimated in the economic and cultural value they have continued to offer. That is why we must embrace our multicultural global heritage instead of being myopic and ethnocentred. We must enjoy wider global Pan African heritage. In this way, everyone stands to gain, through sharing of skills, through trade, through promoting excellence, through dialogue, through linking the various trajectories of culture in their new locations whether on the continent or beyond.

But further, we must see our African culture as part of a thriving global heritage. Living internationally as I do, I have been privileged to dip into the numerous cultures of Africa, Asia, North or South America, Europe, Australia, the Atlantic, the Pacific and from the African Ocean and their collaborations. I readily eat my fufu, aloco, ‘chapoo’, couscous, tchiabu jdian, mukimo, attieke and rice and peas as if I have done so all my life.

Appreciating other cultures makes you appreciate what belongs to you and also allows you to enjoy the wealth and beauty of the human heritage of which we are a part. Global democratic culture should be encouraged as a wealth, as it gives new perspectives on others and on the self, but it should be done on terms which edify, not denigrate.

Our legislators must create a platform for our heritage for which they can be remembered. Our governments must contribute to it, embrace it and run with it. Most importantly, the everyday practitioners and artists have a moral obligation to safeguard, nurture and defend our cultural heritage for peace, justice and development as they have always done. For without them, there can be no culture to speak of.

• UK based Kenyan, Wangui wa Goro is a public intellectual, academic, writer, translator, and cultural promoter. She is currently the director of Amber Cultural Productions as well as the president of the African literary translators and subtitlers association (ALTRAS) and (TRACLA) Translations Caucus of the African Literature Association (ALA) wagoro@netscape.net
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Language and Culture in a Postcolonial State

Neville Alexander

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/38360

How does a post-colonial state embrace diversity without risking perpetuating the racial categories of Apartheid South Africa? How does a post-colonial state undermine oppressive racial categories without unintentionally replacing diversity with homogeneity? Neville Alexander argues that it is not necessary to create racial categories, for ‘sub-national’ identities can be based on many different factors such as religion and linguistics.


Pambazuka News: In an essay you presented at the Human Science Research Council earlier this year, you postulate that language could be used to promote social justice. What do you mean?

Neville Alexander: What I mean is that rather than using race as a means of determining affirmative action, which translates to the danger of perpetuating racial identities, it is better to find other ways of using redress in an organic way. One of these is language.

In the South African context, language communities tend to coincide with those previously classified in certain racial categories. Most African language speaking communities have been disadvantage in one form or the other. And that means if one were to use language to promote social justice, one would give preference to those who can use an African language. That would be an organic way of promoting redress. It would also give market value to African languages and generally raise the status of these languages. In this way people would be rewarded for their linguistic skills.

Pambazuka News: In a country like South Africa, where English is practically the official language, do you think that’s a realistic view?

Neville Alexander: The point is that the political and cultural leadership must have the vision and the political will to make sure that English does not continue to operate as the de facto only official language. We have to begin to use other African languages in powerful ways. The reason for this is not just for some nationalistic nonsense, rather, the reason is that this is the only way we can guarantee and entrench a democratic dispensation. The masses of the people in South Africa are not English speaking, they are not comfortable speaking English.

Further, to promote African languages is not going to be costly at all. We have done research and costing on this, and our research shows that to promote African languages will not be costly at all, but, on the contrary, it would be better in terms of preventing waste through the use of English only or mainly.

Pambazuka News: Is it for this reason that you argue that Affirmative Action unintentionally perpetuates the racial categories of apartheid South Africa?

Neville Alexander: This is a very fundamental issue and it needs to be discussed very carefully so that people do not get the wrong impression. I am not opposed to affirmative action. My view is that affirmative action is essential in the absence of the social revolution.

If we had a social revolution we would not need affirmative action, we would simply expropriate the wealth and resources of the oppressors. However, in the absence of such a revolution affirmative action is essential.

The crucial question, however, is, does one implement affirmative action in a country like South Africa where the majority of the people are black, in the same way that affirmative action is implemented in the United States of America (USA)? To implement affirmative action on the basis of a minority paradigm is not necessary in South Africa. To implement affirmative action in such a way is negative, and it actually perpetuates the racial categories that one wants to undermine and weaken. The point is not to address race but to address social disadvantage, irrespective of colour. Given that the majority of disadvantaged people in this country are black people, we do not have to approach it the way the affirmative action is implemented in the USA, for that model is very negative, even for the USA it is a negative approach.

Further, affirmative action in this country applies only to a very few people. To be eligible for affirmative action one needs to have necessary qualifications and experiences. And so, because of apartheid and colonialism, very few black people have the necessary qualifications to benefit from affirmative action in this country.

Pambazuka News: By wanting to downplay racial and cultural difference are you not necessarily against diversity? There is a difference between cultural/racial differences and cultural/racial oppression. And the fact that there are cultural/racial differences does not necessarily mean that there is oppression going on. Don’t you think the ‘task is to remove oppression, not to obliterate difference’.

Neville Alexander : Firstly, you need to understand that racial identities are the reason we are where we are in this country. Secondly, in the very short term you can’t obliterate “racial” differences. Further, it is not necessary to create racial categories, nor does one have to perpetuate racial categories. Sub-national identities can be based on many different factors such as religion and linguistics.

Pambazuka News: What is the difference between racial and linguistic categories?

Neville Alexander : The difference is that in South African history, languages have not yet been abused in the same manner as “race” for purposes of oppression and social conflict, if one excepts the two critical historical events around the Milnerist suppression and the Verwoerdian imposition of Afrikaans. Secondly, linguistic categories are not permanent. One can get in and out of linguistic categories whereas one can’t do the same with racial categories.

Pambazuka News: One can argue that there is no reason that a society will not find it easy to linguistically oppress those who don’t sound like us, just like it was easy to oppress those who do not look like us.

Neville Alexander: That is why I do not insist on a standard isiXhosa or a standard English. If one is able to decipher a particular text at a certain level, then one should have the same opportunity just like everyone else. To use racial categories, one risks perpetuating the kind of oppression one witnessed in the past.

Pambazuka News: Don’t you think that given the South African social context, racial categories such as ‘Indian’, ‘White’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Black’ are useful if we do not want to obscure the racial hierarchies and racial privileges that still exist in this country?

Neville Alexander: We can never obscure them for they are terribly obvious. However, what needs to be done is to address them openly, not by perpetuating these racial categories but by questioning racial categories.

Pambazuka News: What is the difference between ‘non-racialism’ and ‘anti-racism’?

Neville Alexander: In my view, ‘non-racialism’ means the non-existence of race as a biological entity to begin with, and the constructedness of race as a social category and therefore the potential to deconstruct race as a social category. Anti-racism is the struggle against racial hierarchies and against the use of racial ideology to exploit people’s labour power. I do not see the concepts as mutually exclusive in any way, but rather as concepts that complement each other.

• Interview conducted by Mandisi Majavu.
* Neville Alexander is the Director of the Project for The Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA). He has done much pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa since the early 1980s via organisations such as the National Language Project, PRAESA, as well as the LANGTAG process. He has been influential in respect of language policy development with various government departments, including Education. His most recent work has focused on the tension between multilingualism and the hegemony of English in the public sphere.

• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The Tribalization Of Africa In Western Media

Milton Allimadi

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/38358

The overall Western attitude towards Africa is that the continent is trapped in a tribal time warp. The Western media plays a vital role in perpetuating this misconception. Milton Allimadi points out that Western journalists and editors still have the same colonial attitude towards Africans. “…Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis,” writes Allimadi.


Africans must insist that Western media stop referring to Africans as “tribesmen” and to conflicts in Africa as “tribal.” Not only is it demeaning and racist, but it clouds many complex issues and exonerates incompetent journalism, with even deadly consequences.

For example, when the Rwandan civil war erupted in genocide, Time magazine and most major Western publications, including The New York Times, referred to the conflict as ‘tribal’. Moreover, the Clinton Administration, as part of its argument against major international intervention to halt the killings, reasoned that ‘tribal’ conflicts could not be halted. Western reporters were then absolved from terrible reporting which ignored the fact that the war had been going on for four years before the genocide; that Uganda had trained and armed Tutsi refugees into a guerrilla army and sent them into Rwanda because it wanted to get rid of them from Uganda; and, that the French had for years armed the Rwandan army, giving its government the false belief that they did not have to seriously negotiate with the refugees who wanted to return home. All these factors were subsumed under the rubric of ‘tribalism’.

When Africans ask another African what tribe he or she is from, it does not have the same meaning or carry any of the racist and demeaning connotations as when the word is used by Westerners, especially by journalists. There is no better way to explain this than to borrow from the late Okot p’Bitek, the Ugandan author. “Western scholarship sees the world as divided into two types of human society,” wrote p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), “one, their own, civilized, great, developed; the other the non-Western peoples, uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other tribal.” P’Bitek added, “And when we read of ‘tribal law,’ ‘tribal economics,’ or ‘tribal religion,’ Western scholars imply that the law, economics or religion under review are those of primitive or barbaric peoples.”

Western journalists and editors, I maintain, still have the same attitude towards Africans. Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis.

Although articles about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times date back to the 19th Century, it was only after the Independence movement swept across the continent in the 1960s that most Western publications started sending reporters to Africa on a consistent basis. Many lessons can be learned from that early engagement. For example, when The New York Times sent Homer William Bigart to cover decolonization in West Africa, the reporter expressed disdain for Africans in a personal letter to his foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman, back in New York, in early 1960s.

“I'm afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics,” Bigart, a respected reporter who had already twice won America’s highest journalistic honour, the Pulitzer Prize, wrote. “The politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork…I vastly prefer the primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population explosion everyone talks about.” Wallace was a racist Southern politician in the United States at the time.

One might wonder how Freedman, editor at America’s most prestigious newspaper responded to this instance of undiluted racist expression from his correspondent. Was he admonished? Was he recalled from his assignment? Hardly. On the contrary, Freedman chimed in with his own celebration of alleged African barbarity. “This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public,” Freedman wrote to his reporter in a letter dated March 4, 1960. “By now you must be American journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in the New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?” The reference to a nickel was to the fact that the Times in those days cost five cents.

These repugnant views towards Africans, held by the reporter and his editor, correlated perfectly with the “articles” published about Africa. The Times’ foreign editor, and his reporter did not take Africa seriously, to say the least, and this attitude, and disposition towards Africa is still very much reflected in much Western writings about the continent.

For example, after Bigart left Ghana and “reported” from Nigeria, an article was published in The New York Times, on January 31, 1960, under the contemptuous headline, “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” In the news article, Bigart expressed the same disdain contained in his personal letter: “A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi,” he wrote. He further added, “A momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra…”

There were several other articles written by Bigart, and published by The Times, during this period. On the most momentous period in Africa’s history, America’s premier newspaper decided to ridicule and insult the continent, and generate feelings of contempt towards Africans amongst its readers.

This essay will not explore the many reasons that occasioned this so-called ‘journalism’. Suffice it to say that by the time reporters like Bigart arrived on the continent, the Western psyche had been conditioned by centuries of Western writing to accept only the worst from Africa, therefore the ‘journalism’ had to conform to the readers’ expectations of cannibalism, savagery, backwardness, primitiveness, diseases, and all the other negative attributes.

For example, today when we read the ‘journals’ of the so called ‘explorers’ such as H.M. Stanley, Samuel Baker, and others, who chronicled their adventures in Africa, it is clear that many of the accounts and encounters and conquests over African ‘savages’ were concocted - figments of their imagination. Yet, these were the writers whose books are still consulted by ‘modern’ Western reporters today.

So conditioned were writers and editors to expect the ‘backwardness’ that when the ‘savages’ did not cooperate, the ‘journalism’ was simply manufactured to fit. For example, when Lloyd Garrison, a Times reporter and descendant of the famous American abolitionist once filed a story from Nigeria in the late 1960s, he received the shock of his life. By the time his article was published in The Times, editors had taken it upon themselves to insert a scene about “primitive” Nigerians, even though the reporter himself had not encountered them - it was purely imagined and concocted by his editors in New York.

“The reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running around half naked,” Garrison complained, in a letter to the infamous editor, Freedman, dated June 5, 1967.

“Tribesmen connote the grass-leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive, which in a country like Nigeria just doesn't fit, and is offensive to African readers who know damn well what unwashed American and European readers think when they stumble on the word,” he added.

It is therefore ironically tragic that 40 years later, The New York Times and most other Western publications are yet to take the advice and warning of the then New York Times correspondent. One also wonders how many ‘tribal’ scenarios are still concocted by Western writers who travel to Africa. That is why it is even more important that Africans insist that Westerners stop using the ‘tribalism’ as an excuse for lack of in-depth reporting.


• Allimadi is the publisher of The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York, and the author of The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (Black Star Books, 2003).
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Beyond The Fad To Poetry For Social Change

Mphutlane Wa Bofelo

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/38359

Poetry is defined differently by different people. How do Africans define poetry? Is it possible to draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa? asks Mphutlane Wa Bofelo.


The emergence of Slam Poetry as a competitive, theatrical, participative and entertaining presentation of poetry and a social event involving a vibrant interaction between the poets is attributed to construction worker and poet, Mark Smith and the bunch of blue collar eccentric intellectuals who gathered at the Chicago Jazz Club, and the Get Me High Lounge for a series of poetry sessions in 1985. They continued the tradition under the framework of the Uptown Poetry Slam at another Chicago Jazz Club, the Green Mill from July 25,1986 to date. Looking for a way to breathe life into the open mic poetry format, construction worker and poet, Mark Smith (Slampapi) started a poetry reading series in 1985 at a Chicago jazz club, the Get Me High Lounge; which was owned by finger-popping’ hipster, Butchie (James Dukaris) who allowed anything to happen. The series' emphasis on performance laid the groundwork for a style poetry and performance which would eventually be spread across the world.

In 1986, Smith approached Dave Jemilo, the owner of the Green Mill (a Chicago jazz club and former haunt of Al Capone); with a plan to host a weekly poetry cabaret on the club’s slows Sunday nights. Jemilo welcomed him, and on July 25 that year, the Uptown Poetry Slam was born. Smith drew on baseball and bridge terminology for the name, and instituted the show’s basic structure of an open mic, guest performers, and a competition. The Green Mill evolved into the Mecca for performance poets, and the Uptown Poetry Slam still continues 18 years after its inception. Explaining the slam poetry craze and vibe at The Green Mill, the Idiot’s Guide to ? declares: “The experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night.”

Poetry in the Boxing ring

But in Chicago itself the idea of reading poetry in non-literary settings and in a theatrical and sporting and somewhat eccentric and experimental style often bothering on the break with conventions, could be traced to as early as the late1970s and early 1980s. Sometimes in 1978 (or 1979) Jerome Salla and Elaine Equi got for readings at Facets Multimedia. Elaine Equi recalls, “Jerome was getting bigger audiences, drawing from bars, the Art Institute scene, from clubs such as O'Banyon's, La Mer, artists, and publishers. The people around the Body Politic were one scene. But when Jerome and I would read, it was not really a literary crowd. By 1980 Salla constructed his own poetry competition based on a boxing match and the crowd was rowdy. Elaine Equi explains how this started "My husband was reading at some space in Chicago... His readings were always accompanied by a lot of audience participation. There was one particular musician, named Jimmy Desmond, who got irritated easily when he was drunk. He grabbed a chair and swung at Jerome. There was a fight, but it didn't actually come to blows." Jerome Salla continues, "A couple days later I got call from Al-Simmons. He was involved with the old poetry scene in New York’s lower east side, and in Chicago too, and hung with Ted Berrigan. He said, 'Jimmy Desmond would like to challenge you to a ten-round poetry fight to the death...” (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

Pioneer of the Slam Poetry scene in New York, Bob Holman recalls seeing Ted Berrigan and Ann Waldman in a poetry bout dressed in boxing gear, around 1979 but indicates that he didn't first communicate with Mark Smith until after he visited the Green Mill in person. Elaine Equi proposes that Simmons might have got the idea from professional wrestling, but also adds that Simmons told her that he saw a couple poets in a boxing ring in New York and would love to stage a poetry fight between her and Simmons. The first fight took place in 1980 at a fly-by-night club. Equi has very fresh memories of these ‘poetry fights’: “I read a poem called 'Give Piss a Chance' shortly after the death of John Lennon, and the crowd booed..!" They had a stage like a boxing ring and girls in bikinis, holding up cards for the number of the rounds. They also had and judges... each round Jerome and Jimmy reading one poem. Jerome won." It was not a fluke. They had a rematch and he won again. About two hundred people witnessed the second match. There match was at Tut's on Belmont at Sheffield, now The Avalon. I read in leather boxing shorts, had a robe that said Baby Jerome. Jimmy had a nickname too. We didn’t really hate each other. It was just a funny, kind of weird event we threw to make money," says Salla. "There was little story in the Trib. We were with the punk scene. A lot of forces were converging in Chicago at the same time. Suddenly there was an audience for poetry. There really isn't anything that close to the experience today except in rap music." (Kurt Heintz, 1996)

The philosophies of slam

Equi’s reference to rap in relation to the late 1970’s Chicago poetry phenomenon is interesting given the link that today’s slam poetry has with hip hop, of which rap is one of the components. It is noteworthy that Mark Smith took the name from the game of basketball which is also having some cordial relations with hip hop. Based on this information, one can say with Slam Poetry, Mark Smith and his crew of convention-busting poets and lovers of the spoken continued a tradition that -in Chicago-started in the late 70’s, and gave it a format and name in tune with the times.

Perhaps confirming the communal spirit of slam and the universal nature of its ideal of creating an open space for expression, Mark Smith declares on his website that Slam does not belong to him but to “the thousands of people who have dedicated their time, money, and energy to this Chicago-born, interactive format for presenting poetry to a public that has a zillion other barks and belches and flashes to hold its attention”. However he expresses his wish that the slam phenomenon should grow in accordance with the philosophies that have become what I consider to be the backbone of what we call the "Slam Family". These include:

- The purpose of poetry (and indeed all art) is not to glorify the poet but rather to celebrate the community to which the poet belongs. (This idea is paraphrased from the works of Wendell Berry)
- The performance of poetry is an art -- just as much an art as the art of writing it.
- The Slam should be open to all people and all forms of poetry.
- We must all remember that we are each tied in some way to someone else's efforts. Our individual achievements are only extensions of some previous accomplishment.
- Success for one should translate into success for all.
- The National Slam began as a gift from one city to another. It should remain a gift passed on freely to all newcomers.www.slampapi.com/new_site/background/philosophies.htm

Towards an organic South African Slam Movement

These are lofty communal and humanistic ideas that in the dog-eat-dog individualistic and materialistic society might be easily dismissed as too idealistic and utopian indeed! Mark Smith himself confesses that “the idealism and cooperative forces of the Slam are in constant conflict with the competitive and self-serving appetites of its ambitious nature”. He asserts that the struggle between the idealism of slam and its competitive spirit has taught the slam family much but also threatens to obliterate all that has grown to be. And unequivocally and unambiguously declares that he is “on the side of idealism and hope.”

How many of us who have latched on the slam poetry buzz share the idealism and pro-humanism spirit? And to what extent are we able to contextualise the slam movement within the tangible and concrete realities of Azania, and locate it within the particularities and peculiarities of the Azanian\South African situation? How do we relate the slam movement to our own history of using poetry in particular, and literature and theatre in general, to open the space of discourse and critical engagement with prevailing socio-economic, political and cultural conditions? Can we draw from the experiences of pre-colonial African oral traditions in developing an organically grown and contextualised slam poetry movement in South Africa\Azania?

In South Africa\Azania the idea of doing poetry in a non-literary setting and of moving away from eurocentric conventions in as far as the stylistic concerns of poetry and the manner in which poetry is delivered, is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 1970’s, groups like Dashiki fused poetry with jazz. The Allah Poets, Mihloti, Medupi Writers and others recited their poetry over the beat of the drum and sounds of horns. People like Muthobi Motloatse and Gamakhulu Diniso of Busang Thakaneng used the term Proemdra to refer to a fusion prose, poetry, music and drama, and promoted the notion of participatory theatre. Muthobi Motloatse’s theatre piece, ‘Nkosi –the Healing song’ is a typical example of the fusion of the language of story telling, music, dance and drama. Here the barriers between the audience and the performer were broken, and in the words of a character in ‘Nkosi- the Healing Song’, “myths, legends and facts are interwoven and the story can “begin in the ending and end in the middle.”

The concept of participatory theatre gained ground in the 70’s and 80’s. Participatory theatre was informed not only by ‘the anti-poetry theory’ of the of Bertold Brecht, Jerry Grotowsky’s ‘poor theatre’ and Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed”, but also by pre-colonial African of cultural and artistic forms of expression where there were no rigid borderlines between music, poetry, dance, etc. When groups like Ujamaa (in Sharpeville), Rakgalema Medupi Arts Commune and Arts in Motion (in Sebokeng), (Mafube in the East rand) and Makana Poets (in Zamdela) emerged in the 1980’s and 1990’s, they followed the same trend began by their predecessors. These groups performed poetry at political rallies and social events like wedding ceremonies and birthday parties, at schools, in churches, in beer-halls and in stadiums. Poetry was performed in prisons, hostels, squatter camps, refugee camps, and in the trenches and guerrilla training camps in exile. In the words of Muthobi Motlaotse, this kind of literature and theatre deliberately shit on conventional English-English literary forms.

It mixed languages and genres and knew no holy cows. In as far as its dare-devil, passionate and energetic, genre-crossing, convention-defying multi-media spirit and its efforts to open up the space for self-expression and dialogue between the writer and society are concerned, the slam poetry phenomenon shares stylistic and thematic concerns with the poetry, literary and theatre movement of the 1970’s up to the early 90’s in South Africa\Azania. The efforts of many slam poets\ hip hop activists in Azania today to attune their artistic expressions to the historical-material experiences, politico-economic conditions and the cultural and linguistic heritage of our country is in many ways a continuation of the tradition and legacy of the 1970’s generation that was in the main inspired by the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Conclusion

What is missing is a conscious and well-coordinated programme to link up the present literary and cultural movement with the past and to educate the current crop of poets and cultural activists about their predecessors. The ignorance of the present-day generation of poets and spoken word activists about the contributions and achievements of their predecessors and ancestors in the literary world is reflected by the scant respect shown to the legendary Mafika Pascal Gwala during his recital at Poetry Africa. The impatient audience heckled when Gwala recited on the opening day of Poetry Africa. The presenter of the programme is to blame for not informing the audience that Gwala was entitled to recite for more than the four minutes allocated to other poets, as he was the featured poet of the day. He also introduced Gwala with just one sentence whereas he went on and on about the other poets. Given proper direction, the poetry movement and the cultural movement in South Africa have a lot to offer to this country. And acknowledging the struggles, contributions and efforts of the ancestors of South African literary and theatre movement and learning from them would be the first step in the right direction.

Names that come to mind are Mirriam Tladi, Fatima Dike, Fikile Magadlela, Nardine Gordimer; Richard Rive, James Mathews, the late Strini Moodley (who founded the first union of Black theatre and upon whose request Gwala wrote the classical piece, ‘The Children of Nonti’), Mafika Gwala, Mazisi Kunene, Farouk Asvat, Benjy Francis, Athol Fugard, John Kani, Lefifi Tladi, Lesego Rampolokeng. The list is endless. The passion of most of these individuals for literature and theatre was fanned by the desire to use the word as an instrument for transformation and social change. Their works were part of the quest for a South Africa and a world with a more humane face. It is this understanding that will motivate the present-day writer, poet and artist to use podiums like the slam poetry\spoken word scene as mediums of self-expression as well as a platform for social dialogue and an instrument for social change. When this happens, the word will not cower to the dictates of capital, but will place the collective dignity and collective interests and aspirations of the people before narrow materialistic individual gains.


• Mphutlane Wa Bofelo is a writer, activist, life-skills facilitator and performance poet who has been published in several journals, websites and anthologies and has performed at various events. He won the Slam Poetry Champion of Championship organized by the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT) in 2003. He also published the booklet, ‘The Journey Within' with Yaseen Islamic Publishers. In 2005, he won the Durban Slamjam at the 9th Poetry Africa held at the BAT Center. In June 2006, Mphutlane performed at the first Cape Town International Bookfair. He co-founded the Makana Poets with Sello Hlasa in the late 80's and is currently a member of the Nowadays Poets, the Live Poets Society (LiPS), the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT), and the Open Stage Society.
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org


Sources

1. www.slampapi.com/new_site/background.htm(accessed on 10\11\06)
2. http://www.slampapi.com/new_site/background/philosophies.htm(accesses on 13\11\06)
3.3. www.e-poets.net/library/slam/converge.html (accessed on 13\11\06)

Bye bye brother Sikiru

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem

2006-11-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/38385

Friday (ranar Jumaa in Hausa) is supposed to be the holiest of holies and the most blessed of all the blessed days for all believers in the Muslim faith. But last Friday 10th of November has given us cause to rethink this belief. For members of my family and me it has become a day of infamy. Instead of being a day of strengthening faith it is a day during which our faith in Allah was tested and some of us may have momentarily failed. It was the day we were robbed of one of the more gregarious siblings in our family of 10 brothers and 8 sisters from four mothers. Our dad passed away at a very mature age of 90 in 2000 but my mum, the youngest of the four wives from whom all 18 of us came died very young, at less than 60 years old when she died in 1997. We thought then and still do now that death was most cruel taking my mum at such a young age, in a life that was full of sacrifice for all her surviving 9 children. I said surviving because we could have been 12 (to the best of my knowledge). The girl before me died before she was one month old and at least twice when I was old enough to know what was happening my mum had lost one baby through still birth at full term and another child at slightly more than one year, a brother, Suleiman, after whom our last born boy, Sule, was later renamed. It is possible my mum had more than the 12 I could recollect but never bothered to tell me, her first surviving child because these things are not talked about both culturally and religiously.

However if my mother had been alive the death of my second brother, Sikiru (popularly known as Parrot) last Friday, would have killed her instantly. And I am not sure I could cope with losing both of them at the same time given how rotten I still feel 9 years since my mum passed away and how bad I am feeling at the moment for Sikiru’s death. Even though my mum had many children and had been luckier than all the other wives(most of us survived and made her a posthumous 50 % stakeholder in my Dad’s estate, her children being exactly 50% of all surviving children of my Dad) . Other wives always believed that we survived in that huge numbers because the Old man loved our mum most as the youngest wife but really my educated guess is that we survived because both the material situation of the family and access to medical facilities when my Mum joined the Harem was much better than when the older siblings were born, many of whom died when they were under 3 years old. Sikiru was her favorite. It is difficult for mothers to choose between their children but emotionally they tend to be more attached to the weaker ones. Sikiru was a very sickly child as a toddler. I could recollect his having concussions almost every week and my mum screaming to the whole neighborhood and everyone bringing one concoction or the other to ‘wake him up’. The hawkish eyes of a loving mother became so focused on this sickly boy and remained so throughout my mother’s life, something that Sikiru got accustomed to and used to good effect in all kinds of sibling rivalries as we grew up. As the first child my tasks and obligations were cut out for me. I had to be the responsible one and look after all those who followed me. . Between Sikiru and I there was a special bond because he looked like me and together with Amina , our last born, the number 9 for my mum and the 18th of the whole family, the three of us were the ones who looked most alike. When he came to Kampala for the 7th PAC he caused so many breaches of protocol and security as many (including our Chairman then Colonel Kahinda Otafiiremi and our then Chief of Staff one young Lt. Mayombo) misstook him for me! Through choices that he made consciously and those made for him by accident of birth by being my brother Sikiru became like a clone to his older brother following in my footsteps to go and study Political science at Bayero University Kano after secondary education at the notoriously harsh, seniority-obsessed Rimi College in Kaduna and A levels at Kwara State College of Technology, Ilorin. It was in Ilorin that the mustard seeds for his Student Union activism and political activism were planted and came to gregarious fruition at BUK where he was elected Publicity Secretary of the Student Union. By this time I had left home for further studies in the UK and had become a political exile against successive military dictatorships in Nigeria from Buhari/Idiagnon dual autocracy through IBB’s corrupt patrimony and Abacha’s sadistic regime. Sikiru was vocal, very eloquent and gifted writer who had no problem committing his views to paper. I have always thought he could have been a more successful journalist than anything else but he was too energetic and spread himself in different directions as though he had foreboding that he would not live long. He packed many things into his restless life: politics, PR, education, entrepreneurship, sponsorship of sports, promotion of theatre, Cinema, music promotion, journalism and more. And he did all of them with gusto. If God had a fixed address Sikiru would have found him and He would be impressed. But no sooner HE makes his acquaintance Sikiru will disappear! He would have moved on to other hobbies and challenges. When my mum passed away in 1997 he was in Funtua managing a private secondary school. It was on his advice and persuasion that we bought out the previous owners of the School and renamed it after our late MUM: Hauwa Community College. It was through his creativity, diligence and ways and means that we were able to buy the school change the name and he nurtured it to become the first ever private College to have been given full College Status and registration for both NECO and WAEC in Katsina state. He was a trail blazer but a restless spirit.

We were to later fall out on his management of the College leading to his exit. Unfortunately this is what everyone will remember. Whatever our disagreements though I never stopped loving him as a brother. I was very happy that he bounced back (yet again , as anyone who knew Sikiru knows, ba kasawa, i.e. no surrender) in one of his abiding loves, journalism, representing first , The Independent Group of Newspapers as Katsina State Correspondent and later till he died THE VANGUARD. . I followed his progress on the net but we never met or talked much in the past two years. I regret this because now it is too late for us to make any amends. But we are thankful to Allah that he is survived by Three Children from two wives. May Allah rest his soul, forgive his sins and bless the children to continue the good works that he had started. I would have wished to hold him, shake his hands and tell him how sorry I am about what happened between us but it is too late now. If you have any member of your family or friend with whom you may have fallen out please make amends because there is no guarantee that you or them will be here later today or tomorrow.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Global: 16 DAYS of activism against gender violence

2006-11-16

http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/kit06/theme.html

2006 marks the 16th anniversary of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign! Since 1991, the 16 Days campaign has worked to increase the visibility of violence against women as a human rights violation. The campaign has been utilized by groups all over the world to demand support services for survivors, enhance prevention efforts, press for legal and judicial reform, and use international human rights instruments to address violence against women as a human rights violation, a public health crisis and a threat to human security and peace worldwide.

Global: Elimination of Violence against Women

2006-11-16

http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/violence/

By resolution 54/134 of 17 December 1999, the General Assembly designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and invited governments, international organizations and NGOs to organize activities designated to raise public awareness of the problem on that day. Women's activists have marked 25 November as a day against violence since 1981.

Global: Global Fund to Fight AIDS

2006-11-16

http://www.aidspan.org/globalfund/index.htm

Global AIDS is the worst public health crisis that mankind has faced in 700 years, and no end to its escalation is in sight TB and malaria also kill millions annually. In 2001 Kofi Annan proposed a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Fund started operations in January 2002. Even though Kofi Annan is Secretary General of the United Nations, the Fund is not part of the UN.

South Africa: World AIDS Day

Press Statement: World AIDS Day Event Hosted By Slam Poetry Operation Team

2006-11-14

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/38243

In recognition of the critical role that the literary, visual and performing artists can play in combating the spread of HIV\AIDS in the country and specifically in Kwazulu-Natal, which has escalating numbers of people living with HIV\AIDS, HIV\AIDS Orphans and child-headed families, the Slam Poetry Showcase, a sub-project of the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT) hosts Be Positive & Stay Negative Slamjam on the 1st December 2006 from 17:00 to 20:00 at the Open Air Theatre, Drama Department –Howard College-UKZ.
PRESS STATEMENT: WORLD AIDS DAY EVENT HOSTED BY SLAM POETRY OPERATION TEAM

In recognition of the critical role that the literary, visual and performing artists can play in combating the spread of HIV\AIDS in the country and specifically in Kwazulu-Natal, which has escalating numbers of people living with HIV\AIDS, HIV\AIDS Orphans and child-headed families, the Slam Poetry Showcase, a sub-project of the Slam Poetry Operation Team (SPOT) hosts Be Positive & Stay Negative Slamjam on the 1st December 2006 from 17:00 to 20:00 at the Open Air Theatre, Drama Department –Howard College-UKZ.

The event is aimed at using the spoken word to highlight the escalation of the scourge of HIV\AIDS in the province and to promote pro-active measures towards combating the spread disease and also explore ways of ameliorating the conditions of people living with HIV\AIDS and of offering support and care to families affected by the disease. It will feature Spoken Word performances by Miracle, Blaq Hitla, Uninvited Guests and a Slam poetry jam in which four poets will battle in four rounds, each round centered on a theme related to HIV\AIDS.

The Slamjam will feature HipHop Mc, Lexicon, seasoned slam poet, Leo Jansen and three Durban-based rising stars in the Spoken word scene, Pygmy, Sakhile and Ayanda. In the first round the slam poets will express themselves on the spread of HI\AIDS in Kwazulu-Natal, focusing on the numbers of people living with HIV\AIDS, the mortality rate of people living with HIV\AIS, the number of HIV\AIDS orphans and child headed families in the province.

In round two they will articulate themselves on pro-active initiatives and choices people can make to combat the spread of the disease, and in round three they will focus on how to help people living with HIV\AIDS to cope in society, focusing on de-stigmatization of the disease, support and care, life skills and access to treatment and other social services.

In round four the audience will choose a topic for each poet and the poets will do impromptu performances\recitals on the topic suggested by the audience. The choice of the medium of entertainment to pass the message is in itself a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit and aimed at emphasizing that people living with HIV\AIDS can still enjoy life and live long if, they choose to live positively and have the support of the society and the government.

The interactive format of the Slamjam will be helpful in getting the community to have a sense of ownership of this project geared at increasing the participation of the community in initiatives aimed at halting the spread of HIV\AIDS.

Issued by the SPOT on 08\11\06 For more information contact:
Wandile: 0723092411 Cool fire: 0733511405 Mphutlane: 0765586123\ 031 306 2427
Slam Poetry Showcase – A division of the Slam Poetry Operation Team Presents Be Positive & Stay Negative

Slamjam 1st December 2006 @ Open Air Theatre, Drama Department –Howard College-UKZ Venue: 17:00 to 20:00 Featuring Slam Poetry Show (Leo Jansen, Pygmy, Ayanda, Lexicon, Sakhile) Spoken Word Hip Hop: Miracle, Bullet, Blaq Hitla, Uninvited Guests, and more. Deejays

Pambazuka: Good work!

Farmserve

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/38363

I have been reading the Pambazuka Newsletter for two years, and will carry on doing so - good work!

The 1st African Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration Seminar

Gitura Mwaura

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/38364

With their flags fluttering in the background, it might have been a mini-UN where 28 countries were represented in a compelling meeting amid the picturesque hills in Nyakinama in the Northern Province of Rwanda.

The gathering sought to test the newly developed UN international standards against the African realities in post-conflict reconstruction and reintegration of ex-combatants. The 1st African Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) Seminar looked at what has derived from post-conflict Africa and the social dimension in integrating ex-combatants, as well as familiarized the attending countries with the UN international standards.

At issue was that “no DDR guidelines had existed before, yet there was also a wealth of experience in Africa of which countries could learn from each other,” explains Ms Susanne Brezina, who coordinated the international meet under the aegis of the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and is the organisation’s Expert Advisor seconded to the Peace Support Training Centre (PSTC) in Nairobi, Kenya.

The concept behind the DDR process is a recent one, as it only became current after the Cold War, which had fueled many of the conflicts in Africa. In post-conflict situations then, emphasis mainly tended to be placed on structural reconstruction neglecting the plight of ex-combatants and their re-integration back into society. As a DDR rationale, it offers a peace dividend in that “war uses resources for destruction, while peace should free them for construction,” says Colonel Ahmed Mohamed, Commandant PSTC Kenya.

This dividend is the expectation at full reintegration, where reintegration is the culmination of the process by which victims of conflict, including women, children and ex-combatants acquire civilian status and gain sustainable employment and income. The idea behind the DDR process is to apply the universal principles of human rights for social harmony and sense of community, both for individual and collective development of the reintegrated communities.

Pulse of the Motherland

Omékongo wa Dibinga

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/38356

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover
But it has become appallingly clear
That you can judge an entire continent
By its media coverage

You can color a whole continent dark
With the paint of poorly placed perception
When you rely on the media
To teach you your Africa lessons

Because I come from a continent,
That the world thinks is a country
And to put it bluntly,
We’re all HIV positive
Until proven negative
In the eyes of the media

It’s like Africa is either one big safari
Or Kalahari with seethin’ heathens
With no sense of religion
And home to animals and animism

Because TV renditions of African afflictions
Have created a depiction
Of a land of savages
Where the world’s most dreadful diseases
Exceed the law of averages
And since American TV
Only shows the ravages of a select few nations
Most Americans juxtapose the mother of civilization
With phrases like “damnation” and “starvation”

So if we don’t control our own images,
We can’t expect to see
A true representation of our beauty

Most non-Africans believe that the most
Africa has given to the world
Are phrases like “Hakuna mtata”
And “Asante sana squash banana”
Along with exotic vacations in remote locations
‘Cause I’ve never heard an American TV news station
Even say we’re made up of 54 nations

In the eyes of the media,
We’re just underdeveloped wannabe Caucasians
Still searching for civilization
If you buy the media’s interpretation
Of who we are
But am I taking this too far?

Because to me,
The real problem be the WB, ABC, & NBC
Which are the real WMD:
Weapons of Mind Destruction

Because too many people
Including many Africans
See what they see
Through the smart bombs they call TV
And it’s not just the newscasts,
It starts at age 3

Because I grew up
Watching images of Bugs Bunny
Dressed in grass skirts and black face
Speaking in “African dialects”
And every 10 years,
There’s a new version of Tarzan on the TV set

And I don’t know about y’all,
But I recall seeing gorillas pass for Africans
In those “Tin-Tin” cartoons
And if you remove
Marvin Martians’ helmet from Looney Tunes
He’s probably an African illegal alien
Or a fallen, faithless, famine-stricken African child
With his stomach protruded

And it’s these convoluted characterizations
That have helped in creating grown-up policy makers
Who partially base their opinions of our homeland
From films such as “Congo”,
“Gorillas in the Midst” and “The Air up There”
And we can’t forget “Tears of the Sun”
Which left too many tears on the sons and daughters of Africa,
Searching for a beautiful representation
Of our native land

But that won’t happen until we Africans
Take responsibility for our portrayal
Because the betrayal of our friends
From FOX, CBS, and CNN
Means we will never see-an-end
To caricatures of the continent of human creation
Which has been made to look
Like she’s on her deathbed
And ready for cremation

But we will show the world
That our Mother Africa is strong, vibrant and defiant
Because the pulse of nearly a billion people can never die
When WE control what the world sees,
So we must never comply
To pictures painted by pessimists on TV of our homeland
For we are the pulse of Africa
And we will now show the world
How proudly we will stand!


• Urban Music Award winner Omékongo Dibinga, M.A., is a motivational speaker, rapper, and poet. He is the Founder & CEO of Free Your Mind Publishing. A first generation Congolese-American, Omékongo writes and performs in English, French, Swahili, and occasionally has used Wolof. He has released 4 CDs, 2 books, and 1 DVD. He is the host of “Flava,” an international satellite hip-hop radio show in Asia, Europe, and Africa. He has performed/lectured in the United States, South Africa, England, Congo-Kinshasa, Tanzania, France, Cuba, and Canada. His work has been televised in over 130 countries. For more information, please visit www.omekongo.com
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Review of African blogs

Sokari Ekine

2006-11-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/38295

**********************************************************************************************
Blacklooks.org, run by Sokari Ekine, has won the public choice for the Best Weblog in English by the Bobs Award (http://www.thebobs.com/). She is far too modest to mention this herself. But Pambazuka News is proud of this well deserved achievement! Congralutions, Sokari.

The Editors
*********************************************************************************************

This is a well deserved award

'African Painters' - African Painters africanpainters.blogspot.com/2006/11/issac-adjetey-sowah-ghana-fantasy.htmlhas a feature on ‘fantasy coffins’ made in Ghana which are fast becoming tourist attractions.

“Coffins crafted as hammers, fish, cars, mobile phones, hens, roosters, leopards, lions, canoes, cocoa beans and several elephants”.

However despite the fanciful wooden carved coffins, the business of death is still taken seriously at prices ranging up to $400.

'Jewels in the Jungle' - Jewels in Jungle jewelsnthejungle.blogspot.com/2006/11/china-africa-summit-2006-view-from.html reports on the China Africa summit which he heads as “The Battle for Africa’s Hearts and Minds… and Black Gold – Round 2.” His report focuses on the World Bank’s reaction to the summit:

“The World Bank on Thursday welcomed China's increased involvement with Africa but urged the rising Asian power to learn lessons from past donors when helping the impoverished continent. ‘My summary take on the Chinese engagement in Africa is that it is broadly positive,’ said John Page, the World Bank's Chief Economist for Africa. ‘We witnessed the emergence of one of the most significantly successful developing countries as a development partner for Africa, and therefore perhaps a source of ideas and innovation,’ he told reporters in Tokyo after attending China's weekend summit with delegates from 48 African nations.”

Jewels is very much on the pro-China/Africa investment side and though his report is highly informative and interesting it does not address issues of how China’s investments in Africa will filter down to the masses. Nor does he address China’s possible influence on national government policies, press freedoms and human rights.

'Kenyan Pundit' - Kenyan Pundit www.kenyanpundit.com/?p=247 comments on the growth of the ICT sector in Kenya where, as recently as 2003, VOIP and Wi-Fi were actually illegal in the country.

“In a case over the issuance of a competing gateway license, the Communications tribunal ruled that the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) was to ignore any policy guidelines of a specific nature coming from the Ministry as the [Communications] Act was clear that CCK was to give ‘due regard to policy guidelines of a general nature’. This means that CCK’s independence as a regulator has been reemphasized and underlined. This is HUGE. Most regulatory bodies in Africa suffer from a lack of independence due to constant interference from the government, ICASA is South Africa is a good case in point.”

'Grandiose Parlor' - Grandiose Parlor grandioseparlor.com/2006/11/nigeria-impeaches-the-fifth-governor-in-12-monthsreports on the fifth Nigerian Governor to be impeached in 12 months. The latest victim is the Governor of Plateau State, Chief Joshua Dariye:

“Dariye’s impeachment saga was a long-drawn battle that started sometime in January 2004, when he jumped bail following his arrest in London for money laundering. Since then he has been able to manipulate and checkmate all impeachment moves by the state legislature. His capitulation may not have been possible without the interference of the feds, particularly the EFCC.”

Increasing the drama is the Governor of Ekiti who has actually disappeared and is believed to be in hiding – is this really possible in a modern day democracy? What kind of leaders do we have in Nigeria?

'Kiuyumoja’s Realm' Kiuyumoja's realm shows how to make a water filter using alternative technology using every day household products.

“Almost all supermarkets in Kenya sell bottled water, and many also sell special water filters with about 1-3 filter candles inside. These filters are available in different sizes, often made out of stainless steel and will cost about Ksh. 1800/= (~ US-$ 25,- // EUR 20,-). To filter the water, all you have to do is put a litre of it on the top container and wait for it to percolate through the ceramic filter element into the container below which of course takes some time.

“I also wanted to have such a filter system to filter the tap water, but I wasn’t willing to invest so much money. Also, I’ve seen this alternative filter system at use in our office - so it became clear that I had to build my own and see that I don’t spend too much money on this DIY project. Many households all over the country use these water filter systems these days - which is good!"

Kiuyumoja provides full instructions, plus lots of diagrams, so if you need a simple cheap water filter I suggest you try this one out.

'This is Zimbabwe' - This is Zimbabwe www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/archives/451reports that 129 out of 1000 children in Zimbabwe will not live beyond the age of five. In the US the number is eight out of 1000 and six out of 1000 in the UK.

"Those statistics are for 2004, and things have no doubt got worse since then. By contrast, in 1985 the rate was only 59 deaths per 1000…In human terms, that means that for every 1000 children born in Zimbabwe, only 871 will make it to their fifth birthday."

'Black Looks' - Black Looks [url]http://www.blacklooks.org/2006/11/we_always_have_the_right_to_say_no.html[/ur] reports on a new documentary film called “NO” which highlights the realities of rape in the African American community and also focuses on the healing process for victims.

“This is one of the most important films on sexual violence against women which is endemic in our communities. Silence is no longer an option on sexual abuse in our communities and this film exposes the realities of rape but also addresses ways in which healing can take place. In South Africa the rape statistics are unbelievably high - where POWA reports that a woman is raped every 26 seconds. Rape in our communities speaks to how society perceives Black women’s bodies. The policy and system of Apartheid constructed the Black woman as the lowest of the low, denigrated and despised condoning our bodies to zones of violence and abuse.”

• Sokari Ekine produces the blog Black Looks, www.blacklooks.org
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Language and culture

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

2006-11-16

http://www.pambazuka.org/media/PZ0009.mp3

Renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o talks to Robtel Pailey from Pambazuka News about the importance of language and culture.

Violence and rape in South Africa

PlanBe

2006-11-16

http://www.pambazuka.org/media/PZ0010.mp3

Emerging rapper PlanBe talks to Sokari Ekine from Pambazuka News and explores violence and rape in South Africa with emerging rapper PlanBe. He performs his rap Stand Against.

Congolese poet Omékongo wa Dibinga on aid and development

Omékongo wa Dibinga

2006-11-16

http://www.pambazuka.org/media/PZ0011.mp3

Congolese poet Omékongo wa Dibinga shares three of his poems with us exploring the attitudes towards Africa, aid and development. For more information see www.omekongo.com

What Does Development Aid Really Mean?

Omékongo wa Dibinga

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/podcasts/38355

What does development aid really mean?
Does it mean managing money to mobilize against HIV
Or driving through southern Sudan in an SUV?
Does it mean the improvement of life,
Since many join the development enterprise to improve their lifestyle?
Does it mean giving 1/10 of 1% of your GNP
And having 1/3 of that funnel its way to those in need,
Since most of the aid goes to pay aid agency staff salary?
What does it mean?
Development aid is well-intentioned
But in this new millennium we have to learn our lesson
Because I'd rather have no aid than slow aid or low aid
If it means that development agencies will give funds
To governments for pipelines and pesticides
But indirectly support a genocide
Or have we forgotten the extreme case of Rwanda,
Where 80% of development aid went to the pre-genocide government
Even though all of the signs of the genocide were in place
But agencies for aid
Paid it no mind as long as that well-water became potable
...or that fertilizer ferry became floatable
... or that minimal rise in literacy became notable
Just noticeable enough to give uplifting quotable statistics on report backs to donors
Please!
Misguided, top-down development enforces the politics of exclusion
Because in collusion with repressive governments,
The poorest of the poor never receive assistance in fields like subsistence farming
And it's quite alarming
Because aid agencies never realize their agency in societal conflicts
Because they claim to take an "apolitical" approach
But they fail to see how misdirected, top-down aid can encroach
On a politically fragmented society
And exacerbate it by further disempowering the disempowered
Primarily by working with government-appointed elites
So we have to rethink development
Because many of us don't understand what to "develop" meant in the first place
I'm calling for a structural adjustment program of Structural Adjustment Programs
And other policies that claim or claimed to assist developing homelands
Because development doesn't mean that we can have Afrikan Growth & Opportunity
When the resources we use don't come from our own community
It doesn't mean fancy dinners in classy hotels
With money given to decrease mortality rates for newborn children
And if aid can’t be given to a government
Without a care for ensuring the rights of every child, woman and man
Then I'll be damned before I say that everything is “ok” with development aid

It's time to ensure that our dollars are being spent on education and public health
As opposed to Safari vacations and private wealth
For foreign experts and host government hierarchies
And if we can have vouchers at home
Why not have developing country vouchers
So good governments can choose the best development projects for their land
Instead of generic plans from those claiming to know what's best for the destitute?
Development aid can't be looked at as a Wall Street business transaction
Where investors are only worried about the comeback
We need to come back and revise our strategy
Because we'll all be glad to see the day
When development aid is not only concerned
With promising statistics on cocoa revenues, crop distribution,
And more village midwives
Because few lives will be improved or saved
Unless the poorest of the poor truly receive the majority of the aid
So until the day when underdeveloped development dreams
Are redeveloped for developing countries
Development aid will never be what is seems
And if we continue to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to this preventable predicament
Then the poorest of the world's poor will continue to ask:
"What does development aid really mean?”

*Partially inspired by Dr. Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence


• Urban Music Award winner Omékongo Dibinga, M.A., is a motivational speaker, rapper, and poet. He is the Founder & CEO of Free Your Mind Publishing. A first generation Congolese-American, Omékongo writes and performs in English, French, Swahili, and occasionally has used Wolof. He has released 4 CDs, 2 books, and 1 DVD. He is the host of “Flava,” an international satellite hip-hop radio show in Asia, Europe, and Africa. He has performed/lectured in the United States, South Africa, England, Congo-Kinshasa, Tanzania, France, Cuba, and Canada. His work has been televised in over 130 countries. For more information, please visit www.omekongo.com
• Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Trade and justice: movement of the people

Karen Chouhan, Salma Yaqoob and Tony Benn speak to Pambazuka News

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/podcasts/38369

In our series on trade justice, Pambazuka News was at Levellers Day in the small village of Burford in Oxfordshire in May 2006. This annual event marks the anniversary of the execution of three soldiers who were part of the Leveller pro-democracy movement in 17th century England. Pambazuka News caught up with Karen Chouhan from the National Assembly Against Racism, Salma Yaqoob from Birmingham Stop the War Coalition and ex-MP Tony Benn to get their thoughts on what trade justice means to them.

Africa: Freedom of Expression Checklist

2006-11-15

http://www.article19.org/

ARTICLE 19 has published a checklist designed for civil society organisations who wish to conduct analyses of the implementation status of the African Union’s ‘Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa’.

SUDAN: African Union to probe Darfur massacre

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56357

The African Union is to investigate the killing of at least 30 civilians on 11 November by hundreds of armed militiamen, who attacked a camp for internally displaced people at Sirba near Kulbus in the Sudanese state of West Darfur, a source said.

Africa: Muslim clerics meeting on gender violence

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56361

Muslim clerics from 25 African countries have begun a five-day population and development meeting in the island of Zanzibar, focusing on issues such as HIV/AIDS and gender violence from an Islamic point of view. The participants, from member countries of the Network of African Islamic Faith-based Organizations, are also focusing on social and development problems.

DRC: Plight of Girl Soldiers “Overlooked”

2006-11-15

http://www.iwpr.net/?p=acr&s=f&o=324983&apc_state=henpacr

As the trial at the International Criminal Court of a Congolese rebel leader approaches, some fear that the voice of girls forced into militias may go unheard. While human rights organisations welcome the fact that Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga will soon stand trial at the International Criminal Court for conscripting child soldiers, some are concerned that the scope of the official charge is inadequate.

Global: Human Trafficking worse than slavery

2006-11-16

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111400451_pf.html

Human trafficking, including women forced to become prostitutes or minors forced to do child labor, is worse now than the trade in African slaves of past centuries, a top Vatican official said Tuesday (14 November 2006).

Kenya: Women can save country from incessant conflicts

2006-11-15

http://www.sarpn.org.za/newsflash.php

A group of women met this week to consult on the draft national policy on peace-building and conflict management. Some participants had been involved in drafting the policy, spearheaded by the National Steering Committee on Peace Building and Conflict Management.

South Africa: ANC Women Call for Head of Goniwe

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140230.html

In an unprecedented move, the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League yesterday (13 November 2006) demanded the head of the party's chief whip, Mbulelo Goniwe, following a meeting of its national working committee, which studied a report regarding sexual harassment allegations made against him.

Tanzania: Gov't to amend girls' age consent for marriage

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56314

The Tanzanian government is reviewing the country's Marriage Act with the aim of raising girls' age consent for marriage from 15 to 18 years, Deputy Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Mathias Chikawe has said. "The Law of Marriage Act of 1971 allows the marriage of girls at the age of 15 years; at this age the girls are still biologically and psychologically immature," Chikawe, said.

Zambia: Campaigning Against Gender Violence

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150316.html

As stake holders embark on the 16 days of gender activism against gender violence to help eliminate all forms of violence, it is important to reflect on what is currently at stake such as gaps in the laws addressing gender based violence to protect children.

Africa: Ghana forced to ban blood diamond trade

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22585

Ghana found itself in a quagmire of choosing to get rid of blood diamonds or risk its Kimberly Process status. After a careful thinking, Ghanaian representatives at the just ended international Kimberly Process plenary meeting in the Botswana capital Gaborone have agreed to get rid of blood diamond trafficking in its territory.

Africa: Political prisoners held in Equatorial Guinea

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22436

In different prisons around the country, the government of Equatorial Guinea in October 2006 is still holding at least 63 political prisoners, according to human rights groups. Many of these have been subjected to heavy torture and most have not been through a fair trial.

Global: Water is a human right

2006-11-15

http://www.sarpn.org.za/newsflash.php

In the 1970s, the Club of Rome and others warned of the coming dire scarcity of food, oil and other essentials - the seemingly inexorable consequence of rising demand for limited resources. More recently, we have heard forecasts of inevitable “water wars”, predictions rooted in fears that there is simply not enough fresh water to meet the needs of an expanding and quickly urbanising global population.

Mozambique: Human Rights League Denounces Prison Abuses

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150293.html

The Mozambican Human Rights League (LDH) has called for an urgent "integrated and multi-sector methodology" to eradicate or diminish the problems affecting the country's prisons. LDH lawyer Nadja Gomes warned on Wednesday that the way in which the justice sector operates, and particularly the prisons, has led society to distrust the administration of justice.

South Africa: Civil Union Bill Passed

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150029.html

The African National Congress (ANC) wheeled out some of its heavyweights during debate on the controversial Civil Union Bill and also offered an olive branch to the Christian and traditional lobbies by promising a review of the Marriage Act next year. Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota and Deputy Justice Minister Johnny de Lange joined Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in urging the National Assembly to approve the bill.

Swaziland: Child abuse declining

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56383

A year after establishing a specialised unit to combat domestic violence and child abuse, Swaziland is claiming to have reduced crimes against children by a third. At the launch of the first annual report by the Royal Swaziland Police Force's Domestic Violence and Child Protection Unit, Leckinah Magagula, head of the unit, told IRIN: "Last year, we recorded three abuse offences committed against children every day.

Uganda: Country's Laws Favour Execution

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140611.html

In 2003, Corporal James Omedio and Private Abdullah Muhammad stood before a public firing squad for killing Irish Catholic priest Declan O'Toole, his driver Patrick Longoli, and his cook Fidel Longole. They were executed after they were found guilty by a field court martial, following a trial that lasted two hours and 36 minutes.

Algeria: Sahrawi plight must not be forgotten

2006-11-14

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/WFP/3ceb3992f35e855a0391374ca159c6c3.htm

The Executive Director of WFP, James Morris, has called on the international community not to forget the plight of the Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, tens of thousands of whom are still entirely dependent on external assistance to survive, some three decades after fleeing a territorial dispute.

Egypt: Mixed Eritrean-Ethiopian families in Cairo

2006-11-14

http://www.aucegypt.edu/fmrs/documents/Mixedfamilies.pdf

This report, based on interviews conducted with refugees from mixed Eritrean-Ethiopian families in Egypt, seeks to explain the uniquely difficult situation still faced by this group. It contends that because of their family relations with both Eritrea and Ethiopia, people from mixed families find themselves in limbo legally, socially and psychologically, and should therefore be of concern to UNHCR's international protection regime.

Kenya: Floods leave trail of destruction

2006-11-14

http://www.eastandard.net/archives/cl/hm_news/news.php?articleid=1143961032&date=13/11/2006

The heavy rainfall that has continued to pound Coast Province has caused extensive flooding, displacing more than 50,000 people in Kwale District and leaving a trail of destruction on roads. There are fears that some 200,000 people could be affected if the rains do not subside.

Kenya: Kenya flooding

2006-11-14

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-6VJEKK?OpenDocument

Two refugees are dead and more than 78,000 people have been uprooted by flooding that engulfed refugee camps in eastern Kenya over recent days as rising waters destroyed hundreds of homes in the mainly Somali camps near Dadaab.

Tanzania: Expulsion of illegal immigrants begins

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56376

Tanzanian authorities have started sending back immigrant pastoralists in the northwestern region of Kagera, who had moved into the area from neighbouring Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, the deputy Livestock Development minister, Charles Mlingwa, has said.

Uganda: Sudanese refugees persuaded to go home

2006-11-14

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=qw1163411103997B235

United Nations and Sudanese officials have arrived in Uganda in an effort to persuade tens of thousands of reluctant Sudanese refugees to return to their homes in the south of Africa's largest country. The UN refugee body, UNHCR, began the repatriation programme early this year but then stopped the exercise on October 20 after gunmen killed dozens of people in a series of attacks on highways in southern Sudan.

Africa: Ambush in Mauritania polls

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22658

While not properly recognised, the once-persecuted Islamists are being tolerated in the electoral campaign going on in Mauritania. After Sunday's (12 November 2006) poll, Islamist candidates could enter the Nouakchott parliament for the first time, but the radicals find only a narrow audience among Mauritanians.

DRC: Bemba rejects results

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22622

Congo Kinshasa (DRC) seems poised to fall victim to a new round of election violence as Vice President, Jean-Pierre Bemba, outrightly has rejected the published results which place his contender, President Joseph Kabila in a winning position in the ongoing count of the presidential elections. A group of politicians backing Mr Bemba's presidential bid declared Tuesday (14 November 2006) that their candidate was leading the bitterly contested second-round polls.

DRC: Citizens Sent On National Service Against Their Will

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140056.html

417 people, including women, children and street children, who were arrested by the Congolese National Police (PNC) after the November 11 2006 unrest in Kinshasa, have been detained and will now be sent on national service against their will.

DRC: Kabila "has won Congo elections"

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22659

Transitional President Joseph Kabila has been declared the winner of the first democratic elections in Congo Kinshasa (DRC) in 45 years. The electoral commission said Mr Kabila had 58.05 percent of the vote, while Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba won 41.9 percent.

DRC: Police arrest 337 over Kinshasa clashes

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56347

Police in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have arrested 337 people, including 87 children, over violence that rocked the city on Saturday (11 November 2006), Interior Minister Denis Kalume said on Monday. At least four people died when fighting broke out between security forces and supporters of Jean-Pierre Bemba, the challenger to President Joseph Kabila in presidential elections on 29 October.

Madagascar: Hoping for fair and transparent elections

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56384

As campaigning for December polls gets underway throughout the island, Madagascar has the opportunity to show it can hold presidential elections that work. The polls are key to Madagascar's recovery after the last election in 2001, which descended into violence that split the country.

Swaziland: Parliamentarians go on 'strike'

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56308

Swaziland's parliamentarians have embarked on an unprecedented stayaway to protest against Cabinet's inability to get grants paid to the elderly. "These people [Cabinet ministers] are well-paid to do some work, but they are doing nothing," said MP Marwick Khumalo during a raucous meeting of the House of Assembly on Wednesday night (8 November 2006), when the members of parliament (MPs) gave Cabinet one week to start paying out stipends to people aged 60 and over, and voted unanimously to suspend all parliamentary work until then.

Global: The future of fair trade

2006-11-16

http://interact.newint.org/have-your-say-on-the-future-of-fair-trade

Fair trade business is booming across the Western world, which can only be good news for the millions of poor farmers struggling to survive in the face of collapsing commodity prices and ruthless multinationals, right? Maybe, but as fair trade goes mainstream, formerly-clear distinctions about who really benefits are getting blurry.

Tanzania: Donors Decry Dar Delays

2006-11-15

http://www.nationaudio.com/News/EastAfrican/current/Regional/Regional1005200431.html

Donors have expressed "grave concern" over the Tanzanian government's commitment to combat corruption and fear that the fight against graft has been put off until 2006, when President Benjamin Mkapa will leave office.

Africa: China Reaches Into Europe's Resource-Rich 'Backyard'

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150529.html

The new African-Chinese economic and diplomatic partnership, manifested in the pact signed by China and 48 African countries in Beijing this month, is unsettling European leaders and analysts, who continue to see Africa as Europe's backyard. French analysts and politicians have been calling attention to China's growing presence in Africa for many months.

Africa: Oil industry sees Africa as most promising

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22642

At the 13th Africa Upstream conference, which opened today (15 November 2006) in Cape Town, optimism is present all over. Record oil prices and the world's least explored continent have it in for lucrative investments. International oil companies, hungrily flirting with African states, say the continent holds the key to steadily rising energy demands, and governments eagerly respond to the flirt.

Africa: Pledges to Give Special Attention to Africa

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150803.html

The United Nations Secretary-General-elect, Mr Ban Ki Moon, yesterday pledged to work relentlessly towards helping to end violent conflicts and other challenges facing Africa. "I personally feel strongly attached to the African continent. I will literally pour down my attention and passion towards Africa to resolve the problems on the continent, while fulfilling my duties as the UN-Secretary-General," Mr Moon, who is also the out-going Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea, said.

Global: Do more to aid remittances

2006-11-15

http://www.blackbritain.co.uk/news/details.aspx?i=2322

A new report by the World Bank predicts that remittances to developing countries will rise to almost $ 200 million by the end of this year, but is enough being done to make that money stretch even further to aid development? People in developing countries do more to help themselves than they are given credit for, despite the desperate images of a poverty-stricken Africa projected by aid agencies and charitable organisations.

Mali: U.S. Aid Agency Signs Millennium Challenge Agreement

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150327.html

The United States signed an agreement November 13 with President Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali to provide $461 million over five years to fund three sustainable development projects in the West African democratic nation. The $461 million agreement -- or compact -- with Mali "embodies ... our commitment to democracy and development," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a signing ceremony at the State Department.

Africa: Global Fund As Legacy of Innovation

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150580.html

After more than 20 hours of deliberations early this month, the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was unable to agree on a new executive director. Despite the resulting delay, some observers say the failure actually indicates how seriously the Fund is taking its mandate to build a consensus between developed and developing countries.

Africa: Religious Leaders Meet in Zanzibar Over HIV/Aids

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150310.html

Religious leaders from all over the world are meeting in Zanzibar to discuss several issues including the fight against HIV/Aids in their respective countries.According to a statement from the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, signed by its Media Relations Officer, Hajji Nsereko Mutumba, the conference that opened yesterday will end on November 17.

Africa: Students Turn to Internet for HIV/Aids Information

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140060.html

The Internet may be a promising strategy to deliver low-cost HIV/AIDS risk reduction interventions in resource-limited settings with expanding Internet access. This is according to a November 7 report appearing in Plosmedicine, a peer reviewed open access journal, published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Liberia: Fight Against HIV/AIDS

2006-11-15

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm#41030

Post-conflict recovery is affecting efforts to fight the spread of HIV in the Liberian town of Ganta, which has become "emblematic of the AIDS challenge facing the country" as it recovers from a 14-year civil war, PlusNews reports. According to PlusNews, Ganta is the "hub of trade and travel" with neighboring countries Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, and the factors fueling its reconstruction also threaten to jeopardize its long-term stability.

Nigeria: Nigeria govt warns against bird flu vaccinating

2006-11-16

http://www.afrol.com/articles/22461

In a somewhat surprising move, the Nigerian government asked poultry farmers and veterinary doctors to desist from vaccinating poultry against the avian influenza better known as "bird flu". Nigeria's poultry industry has over 140 million domestic birds and the sector contributes 9 percent to the country's Gross Domestic Product.

Nigeria: Plans to Build Center for Research on Diseases

2006-11-15

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm#41030

The Nigerian government plans to build a National Clinical Research and Training Center in the capital, Abuja, to conduct research on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, as well as on avian and pandemic influenza, Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo said recently, Xinhua News Agency reports. The $11.4 million center will aim to conduct HIV tests on roughly 10,000 people annually, Lambo said.

South Africa: Costly Solidarity With Developing Nations

2006-11-15

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=35476

As concerns continue to be expressed about the departure of African medical professionals for wealthy countries, South Africa says it is not recruiting health workers from developing nations -- something that also reflects the country's own experience of the medical "brain drain". "Many of our doctors are, for example, moving to Canada," said Sibani Mngabi, a spokesman for the Department of Health. Health workers typically find work abroad through recruitment agencies.

Zambia: Mortality Ratio About Highest in Region

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150312.html

Zambia's maternal mortality ratio is 728 per 100,000 live births, Health minister, Angela Cifire, has disclosed. Speaking yesterday (14 November 2006) when she received surgical and medical supplies to the department of obstetrician and gynaecology worth US$150,000 from UNFPA goodwill ambassador, Geri Halliwell, on behalf of the University Teaching Hospital (UTH), Ms Cifire said it was Government's intention to expedite the health agenda for Zambia for it to be beyond reproach.

Africa: Commonwealth Education Ministers to Meet in Cape Town

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140399.html

The 16th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers (16CCEM) will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 11 to 14 December 2006. The theme of the conference is 'Access to Quality Education: for the Good of All'. Held triennially, these conferences provide an opportunity for Commonwealth Education Ministers to exchange views and discuss developments in education, review progress over the past three years, and develop strategies for future work.

Egypt: Blogger Dismissed From University

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611131236.html

On 8 November 2006, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Alexandria extended the detention of Egyptian blogger Abdel Karim Suliman Amer, also known as Kareem Amer, for an additional 15 days. This follows an original 7 November decision to hold him for four days pending investigation. HRinfo considers his detention to be a violation of his right to hold and express opinions without interference, stipulated in the Egyptian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Egypt is a party.

Nigeria: Commissioner Blamed for Education Crisis

2006-11-16

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150173.html

The Imo State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Gloria Chukwukere has been accused of stifling education in the state due to her unpopular policies, which led to the recent three-day protest of secondary school students in the state.

Nigeria: Decay dims Africa's once-proud universities

2006-11-15

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=289977

A visitor to Ibadan University in pre-independence Nigeria more than 50 years ago was impressed by its modern structure and 100 000-book library. "I might have forgotten that we were in tropical Africa," wrote globe-trotting journalist John Gunther in 1953. Since then, Nigeria's premier university, which started in 1948 as a University of London college, has come down in the world.

South Africa: Apartheid legacy haunts SA's schools

2006-11-15

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/&articleid=289951

Expletives are scrawled across the classroom walls, the library ceiling has collapsed and up to 45 pupils cram into each filthy classroom -- when the teachers turn up that is. But despite the shoddy state of her school, 14-year-old Constance Mpho has even bigger worries. "Smoking and killing people," said the pupil from Veritas Secondary School in Soweto.

South Afria: Skilled foreigners tied up in red tape

2006-11-15

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=289614

Businesses which need foreign language-speakers for call centres are reluctant to employ foreigners because of the work permit process. A number of South African firms refuse to employ skilled foreigners because of nightmarish immigration bureaucracy, say recruiting agents and immigration experts.

Africa: Changing Climate, Changing Lives

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140150.html

Marginalised communities attending a United Nations conference on climate change being held in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, have given accounts of how their lives are being altered for the worse -- something they blame on climate change.

Africa: Deforestation exacerbates droughts

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56315

Frequent droughts and floods in eastern Africa can partly be blamed on widespread deforestation in the region, experts have said. "Trees actually do two processes. They drill water into the ground. They funnel water into underground aquifers where it is stored to supply rivers during drought," Nick Nuttal, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said.

Africa: Disease outbreaks blamed on climate change

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56366

Climate change is to blame for health problems such as increasing epidemics of malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa, heat wave-related deaths in Europe and the high incidence of cerebral-cardiovascular conditions in China, specialists said on Tuesday (14 November 2006) while calling for appropriate public-health responses to tackle the problem.

Africa: Green muscle test is beating locusts

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56349

Squadrons of aeroplanes dumping pesticides on agricultural land to head off locust invasions could be a thing of the past if a fungus-based organic product currently being tested in Mauritania is successful.

Global: Membrane cuts costs of water treatment

2006-11-15

http://www.scidev.net/gateways/index.cfm?fuseaction=readitem&rgwid=4&item=News&itemid=3220&language=1

Water treatment such as desalination and wastewater reuse could become much cheaper for developing countries, thanks to a purification membrane developed using nanotechnology. Researchers in the US have designed nanoparticles to create a membrane that does not clog easily, allowing the water to be pumped through using less energy.

Namibia: San conservancy 'at risk'

2006-11-15

http://www.sarpn.org.za/newsflash.php

Margnalised San communities living in the Tsumkwe West area are in danger of losing a proclaimed conservancy area of 10 000 square kilometres. Plans are in the pipeline to carve up the area into small-scale farms for resettlement. During a recent visit to Tsumkwe, Lands Minister Jerry Ekandjo told people that Government planned to push ahead with the smallscale farming project, sparking widespread concern that people from other rural areas might be settled there.

Uganda: Government Can't Sell Acholi Land

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150259.html

Lands Minister Daniel Omara Atubo has strongly denied claims, mostly by politicians that the government plans to parcel out Acholi land to investors. Atubo said the government would not allocate any land in Acholi to investors without the consent of the owners.

Chad: State of emergency declared

2006-11-15

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/79099/

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the imposition of prior censorship on the print media and a ban on sensitive issues on private radio stations under a state of emergency in the capital, N'Djamena, and six of the country's regions, which the government decreed on 14 November 2006 in response to the serious intercommunal violence of the past few weeks.

DRC: Leading Anti-Corruption Campaigner Detained

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611150010.html

Christian Mounzeo, a leading campaigner against corruption in Congo Brazzaville and member of the Board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was arrested yesterday (14 November 2006) and accused of defaming the country’s President. The arrest is the latest move in a campaign of judicial harassment against activists denouncing the looting of public money in Congo, sub-Saharan Africa’s fifth largest oil producer.

DRC: Ten radio and television stations suspended

2006-11-15

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/79074/

World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) condemns in the strongest terms the broadcast suspensions carried out against Kinshasa-based Radio Réveil FM, along with six other radio stations and three television channels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

DRC: Urgent reforms to state-owned media required

2006-11-15

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/79081/

Journaliste en danger (JED) calls for a radical reform of state-owned radio and television stations so that they might effectively serve the public interests. In a report on media coverage during the election period, JED noted that a large number of Congolese media failed to live up to their role.

Eritrea: Allegations of journalists' deaths

2006-11-15

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/79097/

Reporters Without Borders has called on the Eritrean government to urgently produce evidence that three journalists illegally held since September 2001 are still alive, as information from credible sources indicates they died in the course of the past 20 months in a detention centre at a place called Eiraeiro, in a remote northeastern desert.

Lesotho: Broadcast journalist threatened

2006-11-15

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/79095/

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) correspondent in Lesotho, Thabo Thakalekoala, who is also the regional chairperson of MISA, has been inundated with threatening anonymous calls that complain about his reporting, ever since the former minister of communications, Tom Thabane, defected from the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) to form the All Basotho Convention (ABC) on 9 October 2006.

Chad: Communities Turn On One Another

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140418.html

Chadian human rights groups say what began as cattle raiding has become "a veritable armed conflict" in southeastern Chad as inter-communal clashes escalate, imperiling efforts by aid agencies to help the wounded and displaced. Meanwhile, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) on Tuesday (14 November 2006) confirmed that the recent violence, which started on 4 November, had left more than 220 people dead and appeared to mirror that of the unrest in the neighbouring Darfur region of Sudan.

Côte d’Ivoire: Solving conflict on a smaller scale

2006-11-15

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56351

As Cote d’Ivoire’s political leaders struggle with the conflict that has divided their country for the past four years, Ivorians at the grass-roots level have managed to resolve festering, deadly battles over land rights. Authorities this year completed a pilot programme to record rights to land after lengthy consultations with villagers, elders, chiefs and local officials.

DRC: Hearings in case against militia leader

2006-11-13

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56303

The Hague-based International Criminal Court began on Thursday (9 November 2006) its first pre-trial hearings of a case against a former militia leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Referred to as "Confirmation of Charges Hearing", the court's sessions are presided over by a bench of three judges, led by Claude Jorda of France.

DRC: This Country Must Not Return to War

2006-11-13

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611100024.html

William Swing, the UN Special Representative for the Secretary General in the DRC, met Archbishop Monsengwo, the president of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO), on Thursday November 9, 2006.

Global: Protocol Requires Nations to Clean Up Deadly Leftovers of War

2006-11-15

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/11/10/global14549.htm

A law that will enter into force on November 12 mandating that states clear their territory of explosive remnants of war will help reduce civilian casualties following conflict, but states should go further and agree to a treaty on cluster munitions, Human Rights Watch said today.

Sudan: Ceasefire Needed in Darfur

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140737.html

All sides must stop fighting immediately in Darfur, the top United Nations peacekeeping official said today (14 November 2006), as he outlined increasing diplomatic efforts over the next few weeks aimed at ending the spiralling violence and the "very tragic" situation in the strife-torn region.

Uganda: Release Women and Children

2006-11-15

http://allafrica.com/stories/200611140272.html

The top United Nations aid official has called on the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) to release children, women and other non-combatants during a landmark meeting with rebel leaders in a remote jungle outpost, stressing it was "make-or-break time" in the peace process to end 20 years of brutal conflict with Uganda's Government. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland met Joseph Kony yesterday (12 November 2006) on the border between southern Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Global: Critical view on communication for development

2006-11-15

http://www.apc.org/english/news/index.shtml?x=5044327

In October 2006, The Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome hosted the first-ever international Congress on Communication for Development. Scott Robinson from the Metropolitan University in Mexico City has attended and offers here a few indications on how he thinks the WCCD should be rethought. As part of his reflections, he offers new ways forward.

Zimbabwe: Bid to control cell-routing stumbles

2006-11-15

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html#computing

Zimbabwe's privately owned cellular companies last week won a court order against a government attempt to force them to route international calls through a state-controlled gateway. High Court judge President Rita Makarau granted the interdict to Econet Wireless and Telecel.

Zimbabwe: SMS-Based classified launched

2006-11-15

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html#useful

The Financial Gazette has, in partnership with leading mobile telephone operator, Econet, launched a hassle-free classified advertising solution called 'TXT Classifieds', which enables advertisers to place their adverts with the Fingaz straight from their mobile phones. The service takes off from next week, November 16. Pilate Machadu, the Fingaz sales and marketing manager, confirmed the development, saying the service was created with convenience in mind.

Africa: AMUCHMA-Newsletter on the History of Mathematics

2006-11-16

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/AMU/amuchmapdf/amuchma32.pdf

The AMU Commission on Mathematics Education in Africa and the Tunisian Association of Mathematical Sciences host from November 6 to 9, 2006, in Hammamet (Tunisia) the first Pan-African Space on Mathematics (PASM). The specific theme of PASM 2006 is innovation in mathematics education.

Africa: Welcome to the Dimitra network!

2006-11-16

http://www.sangonet.org.za/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=69&Itemid=418

The Dimitra database contains profiles on organisations based in Africa, Europe and the Near East that have projects or programmes involving or concerning rural women and development. The database does aims to showcase the development trends in the different countries, with descriptions drawn from information submitted by the organisations concerned.

Global: The Ethiopian American

2006-11-16

http://www.theethiopianamerican.com/index1.php

In this issue, we turn our attention to Ethiopia's development in the 20th and 21st Century. Lily Yokye's profile of Addis Alemayehu details the life of a young Ethiopian from the Diaspora who is assisting Ethiopia's private sector to expand their export to the developed world. Addis urges Ethiopians in the Diaspora to do their bit by investing their money and know how in the development of our beloved country.

Africa: 4-day Dakar Film Festival

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/38326

The UN Population Fund is organizing a film festival in Dakar on gender-based violence. Filmmakers from around the continent of Africa have been invited to submit films and documentaries in English or French for a film festival devoted to ending endemic violence against women in Africa.
4-day Dakar Film Festival Inaugurated To Fight for the Elimination of Violence against Africa's Women.

Includes post-conflict surges in violence November 23-27 2006 The UN Population Fund is organizing a film festival in Dakar on gender-based violence. Filmmakers from around the continent of Africa have been invited to submit films and documentaries in English or French for a film festival devoted to ending endemic violence against women in Africa.

Themes include Gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict and post-conflict countries (there are more deadly conflicts raging in Africa at any one time than any other Continent), domestic violence, female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/FGM) and vulnerability due to extreme poverty, which can force women into sex work.

Monetary prizes will be awarded to the top films, which will be judged on the potential to play a positive role in eliminating violence and reducing the stigmatization of its victims. Films and documentaries selected for the festival will be shown at various sites around the city including open air locations for the public at large.

In conjunction with the Dakar film festival, a two-day journalist training session on sensitizing journalists covering gender violence in the media (22 and 23 November) will be conducted by international Gender expert Lesley Abdela (herself a professional journalist, see search engines such as Google). lesley.abdela@shevolution.com <mailto:lesley.abdela@shevolution.com> Workshop participants include Heads of TV stations, editors, and senior correspondents from Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, DRC, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

The festival coincides with 25 November, the 'International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women,' which focuses attention on the alarming rise in gender-based violence around the globe and recognizes efforts to rid societies of this scourge. The UNFPA, the Senegalese Government, donors, NGOs, civil society and other partners are joining forces to sponsor the four-day festival beginning 23 November 2006 Further information: Angela Walker UNFPA, tel. +221-869-5856 or Alia Nankoe at UNFPA-Senegal tel. +221-508-0745 . A study released in New York recently by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan found that "In all countries of the world, violence against women persists as a pervasive scourge, endangering women's lives and violating their rights. Such violence also impoverishes families and communities, drains government resources and restricts economic development."

Global: Knight Fellow

2006-11-16

http://knight.stanford.edu/application/index.html

Isn't it expensive to be a Knight Fellow in Palo Alto? Yes, and for that reason, in addition to a $55,000 stipend (paid in10 monthly installments, September through June), we provide supplements for housing, childcare and health insurance. The housing supplements are $2,500 annually for single Fellows, married Fellows and those with domestic partners; $8,500 annually for Fellows with one child and $11,500 annually for Fellows with two or more children.

Global: The United Nations Human Rights System

2006-11-16

http://www.hrea.org/courses/10E.html

The aim of the course is to provide information on the United Nations (UN) human rights system by looking at the work and outcome of the Human Rights Council. The course is scheduled parallel to the fourth session of the Human Rights Council (12 March-6 April 2007).

Global: Procedures to apply for media accreditation

2006-11-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wsf2007/38287

Bona fide representatives of the media –print and electronic, photography, radio, television and film- will be accredited for coverage of the World Social Forum 2007, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, 20-25 January 2007.
The first step is to complete the individual registration form available at our website http://wsf2007.org/registrations This form must be filled and sent as an attached document in a mail to registration@wsf2007.org

In segment number 3 of the Individual Registration FORM (PREPARING YOUR
PARTICIPATION IN WSF), make sure that you answer affirmatively (Yes) to the question “Will you need press accreditation?” A few days after you will receive a CODE that you need to fill the MEDIA ACCREDITATION FORM.
For more information on the WSF Nairobi 2007 please visit our website at www.wsf2007.org or sent your questions and comments to:

Media & Communication Commission of the World Social Forum 2007
Msanduku Lane, Off Vanga/Gitanga Roads
P.O. Box 63125 00619 Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254 20 3860745/6
Fax: +254 20 3872671
E-mail: media@wsf2007.org

Africa: Programme Director: Education for Social Justice

2006-11-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/38368

Fahamu, Networks for Social Justice, is seeking a dynamic, entrepreneurial and socially committed educator to join us as Programme Director of Fahamu’s Education for Social Justice programme. Based in Nairobi, you will have national, continental and international responsibilities for developing, managing and expanding distance-learning and other capacity building initiatives. Further details see below.
JOB DESCRIPTION

PROGRAMME DIRECTOR – EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

Fahamu (www.fahamu.org) is a not-for-profit organisation that supports social justice advocacy in Africa through the innovative use of information and communication technologies.

Fahamu has developed a wide range of courses for human rights organisations, including courses on investigating and reporting on human rights violations, conflict prevention, prevention of torture, fundraising, financial management and others. Fahamu’s distance-learning methodology, involving CDROMs, email-based facilitation and workshops, has been widely used in collaboration with institutions such as the University of Oxford, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Article 19, the UN-affiliated University for Peace and others.

Fahamu also publishes Pambazuka News, a weekly electronic newsletter on social justice in Africa with a readership of hundreds of thousands.

The organisation’s programme is expanding rapidly. To enable Fahamu to manage this expanding programme, we are seeking a dynamic and socially committed educator to join us as Programme Director of Fahamu’s Education for Social Justice programme (formerly known as Learning for Change programme). You will be based at Fahamu’s office in Nairobi, Kenya.

You will be an imaginative, enthusiastic and entrepreneurial educator and have at least three years experience in delivering training in the not-for-profit sector. You will have a passion for promoting social justice in Africa and internationally.

RESPONSIBLITIES

Reporting to the Director, you will be responsible for:

• Managing, developing and expanding Fahamu’s Education for Social Justice programme, with a particular emphasis on enabling women to access open learning for social justice.
• Identifying potentials for the innovative use of technologies to make education for social justice widely accessible.
• Identifying and developing funding sources, including the preparation of proposals.
• Serving as principal point of representation and liaison with external constituencies on operational matters.
• Preparing reports to funders and for the board.
• Providing day-to-day professional guidance and leadership in your area of expertise.
• Establishing and implementing short- and long-range goals, objectives, policies, and operating procedures in relation to the Education for Social Justice programme.
• Ensuring effective delivery of courses, both residential and open learning.
• Developing collaboration with other relevant institutions, programmes, or projects, to consolidate resources and enhance the effectiveness and reach of the Education for Social Justice programme.
• Ensuring effective learning methods are employed in courses developed by Fahamu and ensure reasonable compliance with international quality assurance standards.
• Overseeing the translation and delivery of existing course materials into appropriate languages.
• Financial, operational, administrative and human resource management.

As part of the team, you will contribute to the development of Fahamu’s strategy and the nurturing of new initiatives in all of Fahamu’s programmes.

MINIMUM JOB REQUIREMENTS:

At least 5 years of work experience that can be demonstrated to be applicable to the duties listed on the job description. You must have an established track record in developing, managing and delivering effective learning, preferably with experience of working with grassroots women’s organisations, and a have a demonstrable commitment to social justice in Africa. Experience in the use of open and distance learning methodologies will be an advantage.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES REQUIRED:

Essential:
• Skills in the commissioning of effective educational materials.
• Skills in delivering effective training, especially using participatory methods.
• Skills in organizing resources and establishing priorities.
• Knowledge of contracts and grants preparation and management.
• Ability to interact and develop relationships with funders and donors.
• Strong negotiation skills.
• Ability to identify and develop potential opportunities for promoting accessible learning.
• Ability to provide technical coordination and management of projects in your area of expertise.
• Skill in the use of computers and common office software.
• Ability to work effectively with a wide range of constituencies in a diverse community.
• Ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines.
• Ability to foster a cooperative work environment.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills

Desirable:
• Skills in the development of open and distance educational materials.
• Skills in examining operations and procedures, formulating policy, and developing and implementing new strategies and procedures.
• Knowledge of management principles and practices.
• Ability to gather data, compile information, and prepare reports.
• Ability to develop and maintain recordkeeping systems and procedures.
• Ability to supervise and train employees, to include organizing, prioritizing, and scheduling work assignments.
• Knowledge of budgeting, cost estimating, and fiscal management principles and procedures.

APPLICATION PROCESS

Applications should be sent to fahamujobs@googlemail.com and should include a cover letter indicating why you think you are suitable for this position, a detailed CV, and contact details of three referees. Applications should reach us by 15 December 2006. Only those shortlisted will be contacted.

Fahamu is an equal opportunity employer.


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Programme Director: Education for Social Justice

Fahamu, Networks for Social Justice, is seeking a dynamic, entrepreneurial and socially committed educator to join us as Programme Director of Fahamu’s Education for Social Justice programme. Based in Nairobi, you will have national, continental and international responsibilities for developing, managing and expanding distance-learning and other capacity building initiatives. Further details from info@fahamu.org or http://www.fahamu.org/jobs

Africa: Recruiters & Employers

2006-11-16

http://www.jobs-sa.com/

Fill your vacancies in South Africa today - Jobs-SA is one of the Countries fastest growing online Jobs site for South Africans! We have a mass growing online database of South African Jobseekers in all job categories.

Africa: Short-Term Vacancy

2006-11-16

http://www.wsf2007.org/

The 7th edition of the World Social Forum will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, beginning on the 20th of January and wrapping up on the 25th of January 2007. The WSF is a space as well as a process where actors in civil society worldwide express solidarity, benefit from collective action and develop initiative.
SHORT-TERM VACANCY
(December 2006 – February 2007)

MEDIA LIAISON

The 7th edition of the World Social Forum will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, beginning on the 20th of January and wrapping up on the 25th of January 2007. The WSF is a space as well as a process where actors in civil society worldwide express solidarity, benefit from collective action and develop initiative.

Nairobi 2007 is poised to be the first WSF event to benefit from a steady and systematic build-up of national, sub-regional and polycentric social forum processes, being constituted as a unique milestone in the militant history of the Forum.

The event is managed by a 68-member organizing Committee comprising representatives from Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda through the Social Development Network (SODNET) -For more information on the event, please visit our website www.wsf2007.org

Job Description/Summary
The Media Liaison will be responsible for coordinating the World Social Forum Nairobi 2007’s overall communications efforts of the Organising Committee in Nairobi with particular emphasis on media relations. This position is intended to promote and increase public understanding of the WSF mission, objectives and accomplishments. The Media and Information Coordinator is expected to develop productive, pro-active relations with local, national and international press. S/he has a major role in ensuring a strong local and national awareness on the upcoming event as part of local, national, regional and continental processes. The position will be based in Nairobi.

Specific Responsibilities
The Media Liaison will:
• Serve as the lead expert and the Secretariat point of contact for local, national and international media in Kenya; alternative and mainstream.
• Design, implement and manage a comprehensive media relations strategy that includes crisis communications management.
• Write and pitch press releases and other media announcements to targeted media outlets.
• Arrange and coordinate all media sensitization activities for the Secretariat of the Organising Committee.
• Facilitate and follow up the work plan of the Media Commission of the Organising Committee.
• Create a database of local, national and international media in Kenya (print, radio, television and internet).
• Develop a proactive positive relationship with international journalists.
• Develop and implement media monitoring and evaluation activities.
• Strengthen media relations capacities of the Secretariat through training and on-going guidance.
• Fully understand and be able to articulate for public audiences the WSF mission, vision and programme for the Nairobi Event.
• Coordinate the writing of position papers and articles for publications.
• Write and edit news for the web site content.
• Write and edit presentations, e-newsletter stories, web site home page features, and develop other informational tools as needed.
• As needed, may supervise media relations volunteers or other media related staff.

Qualifications
The Media Liaison will have all of the following:
• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college/university
• Five years of post-graduate professional experience in media relations with civil society and social movements in Kenya
• Advanced English and Swahili language writing and speaking skills
• Excellent orientation to detail
• Ability to perform her/his duties with enthusiasm and in a collaborative environment
• Working knowledge of basic computer programs to include Excel, Microsoft Word, Power Point, Access and Outlook.
• Flexibility to work weekends and nights as needed.
Desired qualifications include:
• Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, Communications or related course of study
• Advanced degree or certificate in Journalism, Communications, Social Marketing or a related field.
• Experience working in a civil society organization in Kenya or any Eastern Africa Country.
• Experience and/or significant understanding of internet-based public and media relations strategies.
• Experience in desktop design tools and software (e.g. Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator)

Work Relations
The Media Liaison will report directly to the Executive Director of SODNET. Close collaboration with the different members of the Secretariat, Volunteers and other members of the Organising Committee of the WSF Nairobi 2007 will also be required.

Conditions
The initial contract period for this position is 2 months.

How to Apply
Applicants should send a resume, a letter explaining their interest, qualifications for the position and salary expectations. Names and contacts of three references (e-mail address), until November 17th 2006, by e-mail or post to:

Executive Director
Social Development Network
P.O. Box 63125-00619
Nairobi
E-mail: Sodnet@sodnet.or.ke

Interviews will take place on two week time and only short listed candidates will be contacted.

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Fahamu