Back Issues

This week's highlights

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/highlights/42395

FEATURES: Francis Nyamnjoh interrogates 'Barbie doll democracy'
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Marie Huchzermeyer on anti-poor legislation in KwaZulu Natal
- Stephanie Kitchen discusses Chinua Achebe and the Man Booker International Prize
- Sokari Ekine reflects on the US Social Forum
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeeen Abdul Rahameem – Another wasted opportunity at the Africa summit in Accra
LETTERS: on the removal of African agency by David Soori
BOOKS AND ARTS:
- Review of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
- Review of 'Migritude' - an oral poetic performance by Shailja Patel

WOMEN AND GENDER: Egypt bans female circumcision
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Consolidating the peace in Congo
HUMAN RIGHTS: Ethiopian crackdown punishes civilians
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: South African slum dwellers oppose bill
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Funding sought for hungry refugee children
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Nigerian party rejects coalition
AFRICA AND CHINA: China to search for oil in Sudan
DEVELOPMENT: Africa in the new millennium
HEALTH AND HIV/Aids: Algerian imams join in fight against Aids
EDUCATION: Higher education drives Uganda’s development
LGBTI: Radio show back on South African airwaves
ENVIRONMENT: Why Uganda hates the plastic bag
LAND & LAND RIGHTS: Reducing poverty in rural Uganda
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Gabonese publisher jailed
NEWS FROM THE DIASPORA: African Americans celebrate Lumumba’s birthday
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: Rwanda leads Africa in ICT revolution
PLUS: e-newsletters and mailings lists; courses, seminars and workshops and jobs

*Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit http://del.icio.us/pambazuka_news

Africa in the new millennium: Interrogating Barbie democracy

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

2007-07-04

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/42387

Inspired by the market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. Francis Nyamnjoh assesses the lessons Africa has learned from the implementation of Barbie democracy and examines alternatives to the market model for Africa.


The idea of writing a paper on Barbie democracy came to me from reflections on the idea of ‘The Market’ and the sort of socio-political institutions this model has tended to inspire. In neoliberal circles, The Market is packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation. By downplaying the positive dimensions of its sacred aura, The Market has demonstrated it has little tolerance for human sentiments of compassion, solidarity, sociality, conviviality, negotiation, and community, which render one vulnerable in the face of it. The Market comes across as an autocratic and demanding catalogue of insensitivities. As a God-substitute, it trains its followers to develop hearts of stone, which it prescribes to people seeking a better life and to those merely committed to staying alive. Disciples present The Market as the one best solution for the predicaments facing individuals and communities globally. They blame everything and everyone but The Market in case of falls and detours on their way to Calvary. The logic and motto are simple: in victory The Market takes credit, in failure or mitigation, The Market is not to blame. Heads or Tails, The Market always wins.

Among external factors championed in the face of The Market are values that insist on success as a collective pursuit, where achievement is celebrated when it accommodates the dregs of humanity as well. Although portrayed as a constraint by The Market, these values and the notions of success they engender are informed by ideas of personhood and agency that see the individual in the community and the community in the individual. Following this view, people cannot be considered successful individuals independent of the relationships forged with others in their communities. Such an understanding discourages the distinction between the rich and the poor, since it refuses to endorse the privatisation of talent, luck and success, even when these can be traced to particular individuals and communities. This outlook is, instead, informed by a view of humanity as simultaneously free and constrained, and therefore subject to a negotiated, interconnected and interdependent existence.

The Market thus equates success with the actions of those who discipline and punish their own humanity and that of others. The Market recognises sterile accumulation and celebrates individuals who sacrifice the sociality and humanity it perceives as standing in the way of individual self-fulfillment. Hence the slogan: there are no sentiments in business. The Market privileges statistics over people, just as it does profit, and is more comfortable with figures than with actual cases of human victims of its exploits. This makes of surveys and quantification methodologies of collusion and subservience, and ethnographies and qualifications methodologies of emancipation vis-à-vis The Market and its diktats.

The Market, in a way, is comparable to the psychoanalyst. The couch is to The Psychoanalyst what structural adjustment is to The Market. Both The Market and The Psychoanalyst are insensitive to external factors (except when it comes to apportioning blame), and are stubbornly standardised, routinised and predictable in their assumptions and prescriptions. While ready to claim success, both refuse their share of failure. To both, there is no possibility that the structures and assumptions which inform their existence and functions could be part of the problem for which their patients are seeking solutions. The formula for success and failure are to be found in the patient, exclusively. Every individual or community must look within for inspiration to overcome predicaments.

It is within this framework of the real or assumed omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of The Market that this paper examines Barbie democracy in Africa, where states have inadequately asserted themselves vis-à-vis orthodoxies informed by The Market, despite popular and ongoing processes to harness the continent’s distinctive creativity, adaptiveness, sociality and conviviality in relationships.

Inspired by The Market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. With a focus on consumption as the ultimate unifier, a supreme indicator of cultural sophistication and symbol of civilization, individuals are seen and treated as autonomous agents glued together by a selfless Market slaving away for their cultural freedom, development and enrichment as global citizens. By emphasising the ‘unregulated flow’ and ‘transnationalisation’ of the streamlined, standardised and routinised cultural products of the global media industries, The Market is able to slim all differences down into Barbie proportions. Barbie-like celebrities are recruited to endorse slimming diets, which more ordinary people are then persuaded to follow, with results that entail varying degrees of disappointment.

Its rhetoric of benevolence and munificence notwithstanding, The Market is more about closures than free flows. The agents that sustain it globally promote a largely one-way flow in consumer products that favours a privileged minority as it compounds the impoverishment of the majority. The Market and its corporate media police global material possibilities and consciousness, mostly by denying access to creativity perceived to stand in the way of profit, power and privilege. The result is a Barbie-like socio-cultural, political and economic world devoid of complexity, richness and diversity. In the light of such an impoverishment of difference, plurality is mistaken for diversity, as if an appearance of plenty could not conceal a poverty of perspectives.

Ordinary individuals and marginal communities are thus left literally at the mercy of the Barbie-like information and entertainment burgers served them in the interest of profit. There is a tendency towards convergence in outlook and content, regardless of the nationalities or cultural identities of individuals and communities at the beck and call of The Market and its global gendarmes, the corporate media. The Market and its advocates are most comfortable with passive, depoliticised, unthinking consumer zombies who guarantee profitability at the least possible cost in the name of consumer sovereignty.

Seen in terms of democracy, Barbie (slimness) is imbued with the mission of freeing the individual of relationships or the excess bulk (obesity) of responsibilities standing in the way of personal consumer success. Salvation is to be found in slimness. According to this perspective, the slimmer an individual’s burden of relationships and responsibilities, the better their life chances. Instead of encouraging the rich to get fat with responsibilities and relationships of support to the hungry, consumer capitalism systematically invests in the rich to be thin and unburdened, as it fattens the poor with unfathomable responsibilities, dependencies and a pounding sense of worthlessness and self-persecution.

This Barbie model takes the form of a dictatorship that makes a misery of ordinary lives. But Barbie-isation is at best a bazaar to which millions are drawn but few rewarded or given real choices. Just as obesity is considered an abnormality, so are relationships and sociality seen as dangerous if not watched at close range. A real or false sense of success means that people need not be obsessive about coping with deprivation. In the words of The Economist, [1] ‘People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies’ [2]. Persuading people to get thinner becomes an obsession to be supported with public-health warnings and media pressures.

In America for example, the risks notwithstanding, obesity-related stomach stapling operations are on the increase, as people desperately seek to lose weight [3]. According to Dr Trisha Macnair, the despondency of many people who are overweight ‘means that they will go to extremes to reach their goal, try wacky diets which defy common sense, pay large amounts of money for dubious “quick fix” remedies, and even turn to drugs from anonymous clinics, in the hope that somewhere there is an easy answer’[4]. It seems so easy: if only ordinary, overweight or overburdened consumers could follow the slimming menus prescribed by those who know best, they just might realise their dream body, beauty, health, comfort and freedom. In this way, relationships or ties with others are seen as fat that stands in the way of a perfect dream: something that must be burnt out of existence with health foods, slimming pills, fitness exercises, etc. The bulk and bulky are, at the end of the day, mostly disillusioned and disaffected, as the more they strive, the less the satisfaction that comes their way. Instead of learning meaningful lessons on how to bear the burdens of life, they are being schooled on how to shed the burdens of life.

If Barbie has been sold to the rest of the world as an American icon, to most Americans she remains a distant dream and a constant source of embarrassment. Obesity is the order of the day, spawning an industry that generates billions of dollars from products and services consumers hope will help them keep fat in check. According to a recent article on ‘the obesity industry’[5] , nearly one-third of adult Americans ‘are thought to be obese’, and ‘American girls today shop for clothes that are roughly two sizes bigger than those worn by their mothers’. While ‘most Americans are well aware of the risks of obesity’ and believe themselves ‘personally accountable for their weight’, and while ‘miracle slimming drugs and the latest dieting fads become best-sellers’, ‘people are not prepared to give up taste as their solution to this problem’. They refuse to translate Barbie into reality through embracing ‘more healthy lifestyles’, even if they would rush to try out new ‘easy and tasty ways to lose weight’ proposed by those seeking ‘fat profits in fat people’. Sales of healthier foods may be booming, but few are getting thinner as a result. As The Economist observes [6], ‘once people get fat, it is hard for them to get thin’. The future, far from being one of slim Americans paying tribute to Barbie in their fantasies or realities, The Economist foresees ‘a growing herd of fat people’ providing ‘lots of demand for firms supplying everything from bigger towels to bigger beds and, alas, bigger coffins’ into ‘an early grave’[7]. Everywhere, bulk seems to be winning over slimness, with global estimates rising from 200,000,000 adults in 1995 to 300,000,000 in 2003. Whether motivated by culture or by gene, Americans, like everyone else, are, to quote The Economist [8] once more, ‘constantly trying to pack away a few more calories just in case of a famine around the corner’. The same is true of communities and cultures, hence the resilience of relationships and responsibilities even amongst those individuals, communities and cultures most rigorously committed to shedding the burdens of life.

Barbie may well not be anyone’s reality after all, even as she is projected, celebrated, appropriated, and aggressively marketed as an icon. Indeed, those who most passionately pursue the Barbie ideal, quite paradoxically, never really become Barbie at the end of the day. If they don’t simply grow into a muscular Ken as global gendarme high off imperial dogma, they become sickly (as in the case of anorexia, for example) from all the sacrifices they have made, and are hardly, at a closer look, worth all the investments, torture and deprivations endured [9]. The pursuit of Barbie is at best a mirage, at worst a consumer misadventure. If Barbie epitomises consumer capitalism, obesity is to be likened to the community of ties, which individuals are under sustained pressure to break in order to realise consumer success. But since individuals, even in the worst of circumstances, are social beings above all else, shedding relationships and responsibilities is seldom an easy option, and very few succeed in being happy when their ties with others are dead and buried.

Barbie democracy in Africa

What lessons has Africa learnt from its encounters with the Barbie import labelled ‘liberal democracy’? It is commonplace to claim that liberal democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a well-built, well-fed person, truly rich in bulk and all the cultural indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie-like figure. But instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty for emphasising too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker questioned, nor their audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform their peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty obtain. This insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand their coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail. The history of difficulty at implementing liberal democracy in Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal democracy towards greater relevance. And this call for domestication must resist the ploy by opportunistic agents that have often hidden behind nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate high-handedness and intolerance.

The greatest shortcoming of liberal democracy is its exaggerated focus on the autonomous individual, as if there is anywhere in the world where people can exist outside of communities or in total absence of relationships with others. Losing the weight of community, solidarity and culture is not an easy feat even to the most dedicated disciples of the Barbie model. By investing so much rhetoric in the rights of the independent, liberal democracy is left without a convincing answer pertaining to the rights of the dependent. Although in principle liberal democracy promises rights to all and sundry as individuals, not everyone who claims political rights is likely to have them, even when these are clearly articulated in constitutions and guaranteed legally. The American democratic system for instance, which champions the Barbie model, offers some interesting examples of how Americans, assumed to be autonomous individuals by law, find themselves bargaining away their political, cultural and economic freedoms in all sorts of ways under pressure from the consumer capitalist emphasis on profit over people.

Notwithstanding the Barbie rhetoric, The American Dream does not come true for everyone who embraces it. The citizenship and consumer sovereignty promised all Americans, can in reality be afforded only in degree and by those who manage to harness the limited economic, cultural and social opportunities that translate into reality, legal and political rights or abstract notions of the autonomous individual. The rest, to get by, must negotiate themselves various levels of subjection and alienation, often with devastating costs to their humanity and that of their dependants or others. Being a rights-bearing individual ceases to be as automatic in reality as is claimed in principle. For those who succeed after hard struggle, the tendency is to monopolise opportunities, since it is, quite paradoxically, only by curbing the rights of others that advantages are best guaranteed in effect. Like with fighting obesity, the majority are those who struggle on a daily basis to fulfil themselves, with varying degrees of failure. This is an effort which, under consumer capitalism, is blamed on the individual to the extent that he or she has failed to sacrifice others through the sacrifice of history, memory, relations or community. Most acquire few advantages despite the profound alienation, inequality, violence, cultural and social malaise, psychic and emotional disorders and exploitation taking place in America today (and increasingly elsewhere) linked to consumer capitalism’s suffocating grip on human imagination and creativity. These limitations of Barbie democracy in the American context may well appear a more palatable form of subjection to some Africans by comparison, but the need to address the rights of the casualties of independent success is no less compelling in America.

Since Barbie democracy appears uncomfortable with salient relationships, community and creative diversity, Africans who subscribe to its rhetoric as leaders find themselves reduced to a Jekyll-and-Hyde democracy: tolerant in principle but muffling in practice. Such African leaders, whether in government, the opposition or civil society, are forced to keep up appearances with Barbie democracy in a context where people are clamouring for recognition and representation as cultural, religious and regional communities. The competing claims for their attention by internal interest groups and external forces explain the apparent contradictions, hypocrisy and double standards that ensue when their actions are appreciated exclusively from the standpoint of Barbie democracy.

Africa’s alternative to Barbie democracy

Despite the noted shortcomings of Barbie democracy, the quest for the missing cultural link in African democracy requires serious negotiation and flexibility, to avoid throwing the Barbie baby out with the bath water. It requires a creativity and nuance that emphasise interdependence between the individual and the community, and between the state and the various cultural configurations that dwell within it. The vision should be a democracy that guarantees not only individual rights and freedoms, but also the interests of communal and cultural solidarities, big and small.

A compelling argument can be made to the effect that the problem in Africa has been undomesticated Barbie democracy, not democracy as pursued in broader forms and possibilities. For democracy to be meaningful in the new millennium, there is a need for honesty about the limitations of the Barbie model, and for recognition of the complex realities, interconnections, and diversities that animate the lives of social actors everywhere. The direction and quality of democracy in the new millennium would depend on an open marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community interests, since individuals continue to belong to solidarities despite attempts at conversion by Barbie. It is a fact of life that most people are committed to primary forms of belonging, to which state and country are only secondary, and promoters of Barbie democracy ought to be more honest about this, to avoid opportunism. It is by acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who straddle different margins of identity and belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’, that democracy stands its greatest chance anywhere. If harvesting rights and entitlements requires the denial of rights and entitlements, the only democracy that would make sense in the new millennium is one that reconciles autonomy with dependency, citizenship with subjection. And as the most subjected continent where opportunism has blossomed, Africa should play a leading role in bringing about a democracy more in tune with the rights of dependants.

REFERENCES

This is an updated version of an earlier paper in Dutch published in Internationale Samenwerking (Publication of Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Development Cooperation), No.12, December 2003, pp.28-30.
1] December 13, 2003, p.11
2] I would extend it beyond people to include communities and solidarities of various kinds.
3] http://www.asbs.org/html/rationale/rationale.html
4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/features/obesity_surgery.shtml
5] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69
6] December 13, p.11, 2003
7] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69; December 13, 2003, p.11.
8] December 13, p.11, 2003
9] Just by way of a quick example, the UK Daily Mail of October 22, 2003, pp.24-25, carried the confessions of five women who tried celebrity diets for six weeks, and all complained about the disturbing unseen effects on their bodies. One found the diet a nightmare that didn’t seem healthy, made her feel nauseous, and gave her stomach pains all the time. To another, her diet was horrible, tiring and difficult to follow because too prohibitive. A third branded the diet an expensive hassle, and a fourth, who was ‘incredibly tired and desperately missed tasty, easy food such as pasta and rice’, wondered if ‘anyone could live like this for long’



* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: Nyamnjoh@gmail.com, Website: www.nyamnjoh.com

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

Elimination of the poor in KwaZulu Natal

Marie Huchzermeyer

2007-07-04

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/42386

The proposed Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act by the Provincial Government of KwaZulu-Natal is the latest in a long list of anti-poor legislation in South Africa dating back to the period of apartheid rule. Marie Huchzermeyer asserts that the Bill is anti-poor, not in the interest of the 'slum dwellers' and is unconstitutional.


The proposal for an Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act by the Provincial Government of KwaZulu-Natal was preceded by seven years of slum eradication rhetoric. Since the launch of United Nations Millennium Development Project in 2000, which includes as Goal 7 Target 11 to improve the lives of 100,000,000 slum dwellers by 2020, President Mbeki has mandated the national Department of Housing to work towards achieving ‘shack-free cities’. The aim to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 has since been a controversial element of housing politics at national, provincial and city level throughout South Africa.

100,000,000 slum dwellers, the target of the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) was a mere 10% of slum dwellers globally in the year 2000. Why was this modest goal to improve the lives of some slum dwellers translated in South Africa into slum eradication or elimination? Why are Provinces not instead preparing legislation to ensure the improvement of the lives slum dwellers?

The South Africa government are not the only culprits for having misinterpreted a global commitment. UN-Habitat, the United Nation’s Human Settlement Programme based in Nairobi, officially refers to the slum MDG as the ‘Cities Without Slums MDG’. The slum improvement MDG target of 100,000,000 slum dwellers by 2020 was drawn in 2000 from an inappropriately titled programme, ‘Cities Without Slums’, of Cities Alliance, a UN-Habitat and World Bank supported initiative. Its promotional material, which advocates for participatory city- and country-wide informal settlement upgrading, is branded with the ‘Cities Without Slums’ slogan.

As any marketing expert could have predicated, the brand said more than the content. Many country governments have failed to differentiate between the normative principle of the slogan, that cities should not have slums, and the operational target of improving the lives of 10% of slum dwellers. Instead, tragically, the slogan became the target, namely to eradicate slums – through mass evictions in Zimbabwe in 2005 and Abuja, Nigeria, in 2006 and through slum elimination legislation in South Africa in 2007.

Measures taken in most provinces to eradicate informal settlements are not constitutional. Illegal evictions are rampant, be they through the use of force, in the absence of court orders, or in contempt of court interdicts. Very few informal settlement dwellers have access to legal representation and can fight for their rights in the courts. And yet, numerous court records exist to prove the proliferation of illegal and unconstitutional slum interventions.

To improve the lives of slum dwellers in this country requires in the first instance strengthening and enforcement of the legislation that prevents illegal evictions. Any new legislation must focus on ensuring that the state fulfils its constitutional obligations in relation to the right to housing, and in particular, as required by the Grootboom Constitutional Court ruling in 2000, in relation to those living in intolerable conditions.

New legislation should mandate (a) the recognition of informal settlements and other so-called ‘slums’, (b) emergency preparedness and (c) participatory upgrading as promoted by UN-Habitat as ‘best practice’, with relocation as a last resort. Chapter 13 of the National Housing Code provides the methodology and funding for such intervention, including rehabilitation of informally occupied but unsuitable land. This may be land that is waterlogged, threatened by floods, unstable due to mine or refuse dumps or geotechnically compromised through steep slopes, clay or dolomitic soils.

Instead, the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature has approved a Bill that, while mentioning the progressive realisation of the right to housing in passing, introduces draconian measures to remove the phenomenon of informality from the urban landscape and to prevent it from re-emerging in any possible form. Owners of informally occupied land are mandated to institute evictions within a period stipulated by the municipality, and owners of vacant land are mandated to prevent informal occupation through measures such as fencing off and posting of security guards.

These measures were contained in the notorious 1951 ‘Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act’ of the apartheid government. They were unacceptable then, and remain so today. According to UN-Habitat (and Cities Alliance/Cities Without Slums for that matter), the first and most important measure for improving the lives of slum dwellers is to ensure security of tenure, i.e. to put an end to evictions. While the Bill does not recognise tenure insecurity as a criteria for identifying slums (whereas UN-Habitat does), by approving the Slum Elimination Bill the Provincial Legislature has overnight reduced tenure security for millions of slum dwellers in the Province, increasing fear and uncertainty and thereby worsening their lives.

Indeed, most slum dwellers are aware that the Bill is approved. Many official ‘hearings’ were held on the Bill, although none of the objections that were raised were taken seriously by the legislature. The process and content of the Bill, as well as experience of tenure insecurity and illegal interventions, have increased the mobilisation of slum dwellers. Media coverage on the Bill has been extensive and critical, contrasting the phenomenal public relations exercise of the MEC for Housing, who pulled wool over the eyes of the Legislature and of many influential experts and commentators regarding the intentions and measures of the Bill. Slum dwellers, as often argued by Abahlali’s leaders, are the real experts of poverty – and they are rightly living in fear because of the Bill.

The Bill undoubtedly is not in the interest of slum dwellers. It does not recognise insecurity of tenure as a problem and deepens the insecurity of slum dwellers as a first step to eliminating slums. By prohibiting and preventing unlawful occupation of unutilised land or buildings, the Bill pushes responsibility for sheltering the poor onto already under-housed people – relatives and acquaintances living in formal but already overcrowded units. It is they, and not the middle class, that may open their doors in solidarity when informality is no longer tolerated as an option.

Preventing the invasion of unutilised land through fencing off and guarding is exclusionary, and rewards those that hold undeveloped strategic land for speculative purposes. It indicates that despite a decade of Brazil-South Africa dialogue on urban policy (particularly in Ethikwini/KwaZulu-Natal, facilitated at great cost and funfair by Cities Alliance/Cities Without Slums), South Africa has still not grasped the concept of a social function of land, which the Brazilian Constitution and subsequent legal statues use to ensure that strategically located, unutilised, privately owned land is developed for the poor.

What KwaZulu-Natal has also still not learnt from Brazil is that slums, as embarrassing as they may be to city managers, must be understood as temporary relief to the housing crisis, and that improvements must involve the occupants rather than displace them. Instead, the Bill signals scepticism about the viability of improving or upgrading slums. In its preamble, it suggests that formal housing projects require protection from ‘slums’, ignoring the reality that slum dwellers are, more often than not, threatened by housing developments for which they make way, or to which they are forcefully removed and which have little relevance to their lives and economies.

The Bill, if not rejected outright, requires fundamental revision (and renaming) so as to centre on the protection of poor communities from state and market driven displacement. This is particularly pertinent in the wake of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The Bill needs to be sensitive to what it really means to improve the lives of slum dwellers.

The Bill is as yet not gazetted. It is the Constitutional responsibility of the Premier to ensure that the Bill does not contradict the Constitution. Social movements and housing rights groups are already preparing to challenge the Act in court, should the Premier ignore their advice and go ahead with gazetting the Bill.

* Marie Huchzermeyer, School of Architecture and Planning - Wits University

Achebe: redefining colonial values?

Chinua Achebe: Man Booker International 2007

Stephanie Kitchen

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/42390

Recently, Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for 2007. Stephanie Kitchen argues that although the prize is decided by the literary establishment and still embodies the values of the former colonial power, African writers are fighting back as 'active definers and custodians of society’s values'.


‘The colonialist critic, unwilling to accept the validity of sensibilities other than his own, has made particular point of dismissing the African novel…did not the black people in America, deprived of their own musical instruments, take the trumpet and the trombone and blow them as they had never been blown before, as indeed they were not designed to be blown? And the result, was it not jazz? Let every people bring their gifts to the great festival of the world’s cultural harvest and mankind will be all the richer for the variety and distinctiveness of the offerings.
…
My people speak disapprovingly of an outsider whose wailing drowned the grief of the owner of the corpse… One last word to the owners…most of what remains to be done can best be tackled by ourselves.’ – Chinua Achebe[1]

At a ceremony in Oxford on 28 June 2007, Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s great living novelist, for some, the greatest, ‘the founding father of African literature’, and the founding editor of the groundbreaking African Writers Series, was awarded the second Man Booker International Prize (http://www.manbookerinternational.com/home).

Achebe has written over 20 books, including novels, short stories, essays, collections of poetry and children’s books. Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, has sold over 10,000,000 copies around the world and been translated into 50 languages. Achebe is the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees and numerous awards for his work. Now 77, and paralysed from the waist down in a car accident in 1990, he did not attend the ceremony.

In conjunction with the award, the prize hosted a public panel discussion of the jury, comprising Elaine Showalter (the chair), Colm Toibin, Nadine Gordimer and Ion Trewin, the Booker prize administrator. It was an extraordinary moment, a rare opportunity to listen to Nadine Gordimer, one of Africa’s greatest authors pay tribute to the work of another whom she deeply and publicly admires. Gordimer’s participation on the jury was doubtless instrumental in this much deserved, for many, too long delayed, recognition of Achebe by the international literary establishment.

The Man Book International Prize is intended as a ‘global’ literary prize, awarded to a writer ‘whose body of work has make a major contribution to world literature’, rather than to an individual book. It may be awarded to any writer whose work is available in English and deserves to be better known or more widely translated. In the words of John Carey, chair of the judges for the inaugural prize ‘This new prize will reward high international achievement, but unlike other global prizes, it will target fiction in English, or translated into English, and so will celebrate English-language fiction as a major cultural force in the modern world’.[2] The prize differs from other book prizes in that the judges, not publishers, authors or academics, nominate the candidates. Each year, the jury inherits and may discard or add to the shortlist from the previous year. The prize does not have hard-coded standards or criteria.

This new ‘international’ Booker prize should not bypass debates about its legitimacy unchecked. Once again, it raises questions about the British establishment’s all too familiar tendency to slide from national, parochial literary concerns into uncritical notions of the ‘international’ or ‘universal’ (for which, read London, Oxford, New York, Washington…). Worse, arguably, it plays to colonial and neo-colonial practices of the literary and publishing industries, whereby it is deemed not unethical, at least acceptable and inevitable, for the former colonial power to sit in judgement and exercise power over the books, authors and literatures produced by descendants of the empire. As the prize develops, these suspicions must be kept under scrutiny.

But for the moment, such a happy and imaginative choice doubtless increases the stature of this nascent award in the eyes of the international literary and publishing communities. The International Man Booker may raise lesser known writers out of the ghetto, for example the dubious, and for many discredited - on literary and ethical grounds - Commonwealth Writers Prize (which, for example, has disqualified Zimbabwean writers from entry - imagine, African literature without Shimmer Chinodya, Yvonne Vera, Dambudzo Marachera...), and into the mainstream. No one can be more deserving of that than Achebe after all he has given as enrichment to our different and shared cultures. If the award leads to the revival, promotion, translation and dissemination of all his works, then it will have made its mark.

The jury had begun with a longlist of 70 names, around 250 novels, collections of short stories, which included writers from 29 countries in 20 languages. They had met three times, in Washington, Toronto and Dublin. At the second meeting, the list was reduced to 30 names. At the final meeting, the shortlist drawn up and winner decided. The final shortlist comprised Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michel Tournier.

The judges were keen to respond to anticipated media criticisms, such as the dominant presence of Anglo-Saxon writers on the shortlist, of their own national prejudices and the fact the list included few authors of books in translation. They asserted that they had made an enormous effort to be as wide-ranging and inclusive as possible, acknowledging the genuine difficulty that whilst one of the missions of the prize is to encourage translation, they could only review writers whose books had been translated into English, reflecting the challenge more generally for more books from languages other than English to be translated.

Nadine Gordimer was keen to keep the discussion focused on the shortlist, the purpose of the prize being to make important works better known, and to give them as much publicity as possible. Anthills of the Savannah has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987; this award gave opportunities for wider promotion of the book. ‘It would be presumptuous to say we chose the greatest writer in the world’, but nevertheless ‘Chinua Achebe’s early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature. He has gone on to achieve what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: “a new-found utterance” for the capture of life’s complexity’. Achebe’s books ‘explore the mystery of life…bringing ‘a new found utterance’ to what we are as human beings, to what life is and its changing circumstances’. Additional to the famous trilogy of novels, Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), she spoke warmly of A Man of the People (1966), ‘a prophetic book, an exposure of corruption in a newly independent African state after colonial oppression; in its attendancy to the corruption, not only in Africa, also in other parts of the world, eating away at our humanity…preventing the establishment of true democracy’.

The other judges commented on Achebe’s achievement in his original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence traditions and arriving at a new prescription thereby out-dating any prescriptivity. They commented Achebe describes changes taking place that are momentous. He had written books that could be given to anyone in the world, to any general reader who loves books. Elaine Showalter described Achebe as ‘a wonderful choice’. It had been ‘the year of judging dangerously…in the current state of the world, we can’t pretend fiction does not have some political repercussions’. Gordimer added that governments feared literature because it makes people think, ‘true thought is a danger to governments that are oppressive in the weight of propaganda’.

The judges stressed they had not been overtly concerned with ‘politically correct’ categories of the gender, sexuality or nationality of the writer. There had been no discussions about ‘balancing the list’. ‘What matters is the quality of writing…writing is the important issue…nor did we sweep anything under the bookcase’. Nadine Gordimer stressed that concerns of sex or race had been irrelevant to the literary question of ‘new found utterance’, and ‘literature being about the mystery of modern life’ – echoing and inversing Achebe’s thoughts on the matter, expressed elsewhere: ‘it is not even a matter of color. For we have Nadine Gordimer’.[3]

James Currey, the eminent African studies publisher and inspirational force behind the African Writers Series (AWS) asked about the extent to which the judges had taken into account the ‘general literary situation of the writer’. After all, Achebe’s contribution to literature had not only been his own books, but the ‘massive contribution he had made to the African Writers Series’. In this sense, the award celebrated not only Achebe, but the body of literature, not always uncontested, he had inspired. Gordimer agreed about the importance of the publication of the AWS, which had brought African literature ‘out beyond the borders’. It had been ‘an assertion of the freedom of expression’ and had served as ‘an encouragement to younger writers’. In the end though, she felt Achebe’s lasting and greatest achievement remained his ‘new found utterance’. It is ‘all there, he synthesises all these things’. From all ideas and thoughts about what it takes to be a writer, ‘there must be some special quality’. For as the writer, you are ‘going to bear the chalk around your eye’. Writers are engaged in the endless task of finding new modes of telling our stories as human beings, and ‘Achebe has gone very far in that’.

Gordimer, now 84 years old herself, is one of the most exceptional novelists and short story writers in English. She won the Booker Prize in 1974, whose work has been translated into over 20 languages. With acute intelligence and her deep, long and intimate understanding of the art of writing and literature, she spoke in almost mythical proportions. For many of us present, and for others throughout the world, she has helped shape and deepen our understanding of apartheid South Africa and the human dimensions of its injustices and horrors. Her now canonical and classic texts will doubtless go on elucidating that period of history and lived present for generations to come.

African literature and its appreciation are currently in rude health from our perspective in Britain. There has been Achebe’s Booker prize award; the passing of Sembene Ousmane to accolades of his massive contribution to literature, film and culture globally; Wole Soyinka’s multitude of appearances in conjunction with his new work You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s marvellous success at winning the Orange Prize for her new novel Half a Yellow Sun, and achieving popular status, including TV recognition.

This said, there remains a long way to go to achieve true cultural exchange and dialogue between North and South, ‘…the problem of dialogue which has plagued Afro-European relations for centuries’ that will persist ‘until Europe is ready. Ready to concede total African humanity’. But in the literary domain – involving ‘the active definers and custodians of society’s values…literature giv[ing] us a second handle on reality; enabling us to encounter…the same threats to integrity that may assail...in real life’[5] – Achebe’s prophecy is being fulfilled: ‘I have no doubt at all about the existence of the African novel. This form of fiction has seized the imagination of many African writers and they will use it according to their differing abilities, sensitivities and visions without seeking anyone’s permission. I believe it will grow and prosper. I believe it has a great future.’[6]

Stephanie Kitchen
July 2007

References
1 ‘Colonialist Criticism’ in Chinua Achebe: Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003 edition, 1st publ. 1989, p. 89
2 Press release of the inaugural prize, http://www.manbookerinternational.com/home
3 ‘Thoughts on the African Novel’, in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003, p. 93
4 ‘Impediments to dialogue between North and South’ in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, p. 23
5 ‘What has literature got to do with it’, in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, p. 170
6 ‘Thoughts on the African Novel’, in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 2003, p. 99

* Stephanie Kitchen is Publications Manager for Pambazuka News.

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

Reflections on the US Social Forum (USSF)

Sokari Ekine

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/42393

Last week Atlanta, Georgia hosted the first US Social Forum. Sokari Ekine provides some reflective thoughts on the gathering.

10,000 people came together last week in Atlanta to celebrate grassroots activism across the United States (US). This was the first social forum to be held in the US. That it was held in Atlanta Georgia, home of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King was not lost on many participants. On the downside, there was the overbearing presence of the Market Place; exclusion of some citizens; over-representation of the Latino community and under-representation of other immigrant communities. However as good opportunities to network and some valuable issues emerged, such and the need to be less self-congratulatory and more reflective.

The opening march was attended by about 10,000 people. It was an uplifting experience to be amongst so many mainly African American and Latino activists from across the US. The main focuses were Katrina/the Gulf Coast, immigration, sexuality and social justice. In contrast to the World Social Forum (WSF), the US forum was not hijacked by the large NGOs, though there were a fair number of smaller US based ones present. Still, the majority of participants appeared to be from truly grassroots community organisations.

Logistically the forum was spread out across various hotels as well as the main Civic Center. This made it difficult to move from one workshop to another, with only a 30 minute break allocated between each one. It also felt very strange to be discussing neoliberalism and anti-imperialism in downtown Atlanta hotels, such as the massive phallic design of the Westin, where the only food available was provided by Starbucks. Atlanta is a city dominated by Coca Cola, the headquarters of Coca Cola with its own museum round the corner from the downtown hotels. Similar to the WSF, the issue of exclusion, cost of hiring space for organisational tents (as high as US$1000), exorbitant cost of food and the excessive Forum Marketplace were all features of the USSF. To enter the Civic Center you had to pass through not one, but a group of ‘guards’ who demanded to see your pass, thus preventing local Atlanta citizens, including a large homeless population, many of whom where just round the corner, from participating. Rumour had it that there had been a discussion over searching people’s bags but fortunately this idea was abandoned.

The $15 minimum entry fee also added to the exclusion of the homeless. You had the ironic situation of activists supposedly working with the marginalised communities having to walk past the homeless everyday as if they were a group of invisible men and women. Close by there was a sign reading ‘Commercial solicitation prohibited. No direct verbal address allowed’, presumably aimed at preventing the homeless from engaging with the rest of the public.

Three notable sessions were the on Gulf Coast reconstruction in the post-Katrina era, ‘Race and Immigration – Immigration Rights’, and from the Africa Tent, ‘Zimbabwe: The Way Forward?’. The Gulf Coast panel brought the house down with reports and moving testimonies from all the activists working on the ground. The main issue was that of the ‘Right to Return’, the right to land and housing as per pre-Katrina, and the struggle against developers and forced removal of local people.

Like the Gulf Coast session, these sessions were well attended. However it was clear that the US immigration activists’ movement is very Latino-centric and even within the Latinos it is very ‘Mexican’ centric. This is something that seriously needs to be addressed, as large numbers of immigrants are being marginalised and made invisible within the movement. African Latinos from across South America, people from all parts of the Caribbean, African and Arab immigrants were very much under-represented. A number of participants felt they had no voice whatsoever. Despite their speaking out, one still left wondering whether or not there needs would be addressed.


The discussion on Zimbabwe was excellent, though very polarised between those who supported the Mugabe regime and those that felt Africans and African Americans needed to condemn Mugabe and other dictators across the continent and work towards democracy and human rights, with social movements and civil society groups taking a lead. There was an assumption amongst some people that because Mugabe was condemned by America and the West that Mugabe himself was the victim; rather than of the reality, which is that the ordinary people of Zimbabwe are the victims of Mugabe’s repression and face resultant daily economic misery.

I missed the People’s Movement Assembly but attended the closing ceremony which was basically a couple of hours of self-congratulatory speeches around the forum with very little reflection and self-critique. I spoke with many participants. There were complaints that too many of the workshops were like lectures with short question and answer sessions and not solution orientated and participatory enough. The real success of the forum was outside the workshops, and the networking that took place between groups and individuals. For many grassroots groups this was the first opportunity to meet with people from other parts of the US working on similar issues. If contact between the various movements can be maintained, then there is hope that the forum will be the beginnings of a strong grassroots opposition to mainstream America, neoliberalism, racial oppression and criminalisation of the poor and immigrant population.

Future social forums must seriously address the issue of exclusion whether through the cost of participation, or as in Nairobi and Atlanta, the physical prevention of sections of the local community being refused entry and by virtue of being economically challenged, prevented from eating, let alone having access to water. Water was being sold outside the Civic Center at the USSF for $1 for a small bottle of water – people would not have had to buy this if sufficient water barrels were available. Two friends of mine who had applied for ‘camping space’ from the list of accommodation provided by the USSF website. On arriving they were told by the ‘commune’ that they had to pay $10 each per night – an amount they could not afford. They were then in the position of having to look for alternative space to stay. Eventually they found a household that agreed for them to stay in their backyard but refused them the use of any of their facilities. Thus to use the toilet they had to sneak into the ‘commune’ and use the bathrooms in the Civic Center. This is not acceptable at a social forum whereby so called progressive peoples take advantage of their comrades by adopting the very same market principles that they claim to object to.

Despite all this, I did however feel privileged to have met many US grassroots activists working on a range of issues and from across the country. It is important to know that there are people living in the ‘belly of the beast’ that are fighting from within and are aware of the impact of that beast on the people of the global South.

* Sokari Ekine is online editor of Pambazuka News


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

Death by committee

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/42392

African leaders have again squandered yet another opportunity, an historic one, to lead decisively. Instead they have gone for the least common denominator, the line of least resistance, by deciding not to decide. The all-important issue of a Government of the Union that was billed as The Grand Debate at the recently concluded AU summit, has been referred to yet another committee that will report at the next summit in January in Addis Ababa.

We are all familiar with the saying that the best way to kill an idea is to form a committee about it. How many more committees do we need to make this decision?

The so-called debate itself was the result of a study presented to the heads of state that has taken almost two years to complete. All the arguments for and against were contained in the report and the three options were clear. One, immediate formation of a Union government. Two, a gradual process leading to Union Government by consolidation of regional economic communities and economic convergence. And last, the formation of a Union Government that gives political authority to the AU in specified areas, aligns national policies to continental policies, and rationalises the RECS to become affective building blocs for the Union Government.

Wherever one stands on this debate, deciding on these issues is vital to move forward. Too many decisions, agreements, protocols have been made, agreed or signed at the continental level without any implementation at the national level. The suggestion of a Union Government was meant to give an effective legal and political framework to these agreements and a mandatory enforcement mechanism.

Unfortunately, the huge ego, razzmatazz and showmanship of the brother-leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the champion of the accelerated Union-track, has beclouded the real issues feeding the prejudice of all Gadaffi-phobic and Arab phobic and sub-Saharan obscurantists. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa who is leading the anti-Gaddafi and anti-Union Government charge, liberally exploited these sentiments to actually subvert the debate due to the interests of South African capital and its expansion across this continent without any obligation towards our social commune.

The South African manoeuvre also tapped into the deep-seated alienation of many Africans about our governments, their distrust of political leaders, and cynicism that our leaders don't mean what they say or say what they mean.

Unfortunately, Mbeki's neoliberal agenda was unwittingly aided and abetted by the ambiguity displayed by Nigeria's new President, Umar Musa Yar' Adua. Yar' Adua was obviously not properly briefed by his benefactor and the Nigerian foreign policy elite about a third position championed by former President Obasanjo, and supported by Uganda, Senegal and other leaders in the Heads of State committee set up to look into the issue. They were supposed to report to the Summit but with clear timelines and concrete steps about what will be Union issues, further reforms of the charter, strengthening of representational institutions like the Pan-African Parliament and also taking a decision on the RECS.

But when Yar Adua spoke in his maiden Summit address, he sounded like all he was interested in were the RECs, thereby strengthening the Mbeki supporters.

Obasanjo was too busy trying to get Yar' Adua to Aso Rock to update him on Nigeria's position on African and global matters. The enemies of the Union Government are not just neoliberal governments but also must be some of the bureaucrats in the Union and NEPAD. The old OAU bureaucrats were afraid of the Union and fought its restructuring before and after the extraordinary summit in Shirte in 1999. Now they are fighting to defend the Union they opposed because we now want to reform it further to create a viable institution with political authority.

Many of them are incompetent and got their positions due to political barter and horse-trading and want to maintain them at all costs. But all is not lost yet. At least no one dares to argue against the Union and the Union Government in principle any more. What they are arguing about is when and how.

Therefore, the debate in the next six months in all our countries should shift to the streets, seminar halls, parliaments, county halls and at all levels to challenge our leaders and democratise the discussion so that by the January Summit there is a clear and unambiguous message that we are ready for a Union Government with a clear timetable. South Africa is happy for its businesses to be free to exploit the rest of the continent. Their attitude is like that of Britain towards Europe. However, British reluctance did not stop the Germans and the French and other Europeans to move forward.

Those countries that are willing and ready should begin to take the necessary steps that will make unity concrete for our peoples and not wait until everybody agrees.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

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


We are all familiar with the saying that the best way to kill an idea is to form a committee about it. How many more committees do we need to make this decision?

The so-called debate itself was the result of a study presented to the Heads of State that has taken almost two years to complete. All the arguments for and against were contained in the report and the three options were clear. One, immediate formation of a Union government. Two, a gradual process leading to Union Government by consolidation of regional economic communities and economic convergence. And last, the formation of a Union Government that gives political authority to the AU in specified areas, aligns national policies to continental policies, and rationalises the RECS to become affective building blocs for the Union Government.

Wherever one stands on this debate, deciding on these issues is vital to move forward. Too many decisions, agreements, protocols have been made, agreed or signed at the continental level without any implementation at the national level. The suggestion of a Union Government was meant to give an effective legal and political framework to these agreements and a mandatory enforcement mechanism.

Unfortunately, the huge ego, razzmatazz and showmanship of the brother-leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the champion of the accelerated Union-track, has beclouded the real issues feeding the prejudice of all Gadaffi-phobic and Arab phobic and sub-Saharan obscurantists. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa who is leading the anti-Gaddafi and anti-Union Government charge, liberally exploited these sentiments to actually subvert the debate due to the interests of South African capital and its expansion across this continent without any obligation towards our social commune.

The South African manoeuvre also tapped into the deep-seated alienation of many Africans about our governments, their distrust of political leaders, and cynicism that our leaders don't mean what they say or say what they mean.

Unfortunately, Mbeki's neo- liberal agenda was unwittingly aided and abetted by the ambiguity displayed by Nigeria's new President, Umar Musa Yar' Adua. Yar' Adua was obviously not properly briefed by his benefactor and the Nigerian foreign policy elite about a third position championed by former President Obasanjo, and supported by Uganda, Senegal and other leaders in the Heads of State committee set up to look into the issue. They were supposed to report to the Summit but with clear timelines and concrete steps about what will be Union issues, further reforms of the charter, strengthening of representational institutions like the Pan-African Parliament and also taking a decision on the RECS.

But when Yar Adua spoke in his maiden Summit address, he sounded like all he was interested in were the RECs, thereby strengthening the Mbeki supporters.

Obasanjo was too busy trying to get Yar' Adua to Aso Rock to update him on Nigeria's position on African and global matters. The enemies of the Union Government are not just neo-liberal governments but also must be some of the bureaucrats in the Union and NEPAD. The old OAU bureaucrats were afraid of the Union and fought its restructuring before and after the extraordinary summit in Shirte in 1999. Now they are fighting to defend the Union they opposed because we now want to reform it further to create a viable institution with political authority.

Many of them are incompetent and got their positions due to political barter and horse-trading and want to maintain them at all costs. But all is not lost yet. At least no one dares to argue against the Union and the Union Government in principle any more. What they are arguing about is when and how.

Therefore, the debate in the next six months in all our countries should shift to the streets, seminar halls, parliaments, county halls and at all levels to challenge our leaders and democratise the discussion so that by the January Summit there is a clear and unambiguous message that we are ready for a Union Government with a clear timetable. South Africa is happy for its businesses to be free to exploit the rest of the continent. Their attitude is like that of Britain towards Europe. However, British reluctance did not stop the Germans and the French and other Europeans to move forward.

Those countries that are willing and ready should begin to take the necessary steps that will make unity concrete for our peoples and not wait until everybody agrees.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

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

The removal of agency from Africa

David Soori

2007-07-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/42363

The assets of the African and Third World exceeds all the capitalisation of all the major stock markets, which in turn are capitalised by legitimised instruments in traded paper (Fiat money). The only way for Africa and the rest of the Third World to lift themselves is to address the Money Supply. If there is a desire as to how this can be done, please come back.

Half of a Yellow Sun: book review

Tola Ositelu

2007-07-04

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/42381

I greeted the news from a friend of Chimamanda Adichie winning the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction for Half of a Yellow Sun with ambivalence. It was more in regards to the book than the talent of the author. I must preempt the following explanation by stating how much I admire Adichie as a writer. I think without question she is one of the most gifted and refreshing authors to come out in recent years. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus took me unawares and left me with no doubt that it was a seminal piece. It was one of those books that became a yardstick by which I measured other novels and writers. Its beauty is in its simplicity. Ask me to tell you what it’s about and it’s a stretch – in short not a lot happens. Through it’s main character Kambili, it deals with very familiar topics like domestic violence, religious zealotry and hypocrisy and coming-of-age. Here lies the genius of Purple Hibiscus. In the hands of any ordinary writer the book would have been derivative but Adichie masters the art of taking age-old issues and presenting them in a refreshing, sensitive and accessible way. Not overly reliant on elaborate imagery and with a similar prosaic narrative-voice so effectively used in Chinua Achebe’s Things fall Apart (one of Adichie’s literary heroes) her first outing managed to be at once empathetic and emotive without the reader feeling they were being manipulated to react this way.

I cannot however say the same for Half of a Yellow Sun. Having held her debut in such high esteem I could not wait to get my hands on the follow-up and pre-ordered my copy. It soon became apparent to me that what made Purple Hibiscus so special was missing in the second novel. There was a sense of self-consciousness in the writing that was not apparent in her debut, as if she wanted this to be regarded as an epic piece. The young author admitted in a recent interview with BBC Africa Beyond that there was not the same sense of expectation with ‘Purple Hibiscus’, obviously because she was a new kid on the block. This self-awareness made the book seem less sincere in parts.

‘…Yellow Sun’ ticks all the boxes of what makes a controversial and sensational novel – sex, war/violence, issues of class, badass language – and yet it lacks the soul of Purple Hibiscus. The debut did not need to resort to these plot devices to be such a worthy read. If you think this is coming from a socially conservative standpoint think again. I recently discussed the book with a friend who is not prone to prudishness by any count. To my surprise he commented the book was overly reliant on graphic scenes when he said, and I paraphrase, that he doubts any one anywhere would have been so liberal sexually even in the swinging 60s, let alone a middle class family in Nigeria. This is a country that still has a very conservative outlook on many things, as I experienced on my recent trip there.

‘…Yellow Sun’ is told from multiple viewpoints but the characters in the first novel seem a lot more 3-dimensional and easy to relate to despite the fact it is told from one perspective. Now this could be down to my own predilection for character as opposed to plot-driven stories. However the majority of people I know who have read both novels, with the exception of one, found it easier to connect with ‘Purple Hibiscus’ and an altogether better book. And whilst the first novel was short and sweet and got to the point, ‘…Yellow Sun’ seemed too long in parts and much was superfluous to the novel’s needs. Ironically I think it’s Adichie’s skill as a writer that saves ‘…Yellow sun’ from being barely-readable melodrama.

Now Adichie should be commended for tackling such a sensitive topic as the Biafran war. She has certainly achieved what I believe she set out to do in raising awareness of the war especially amongst young Nigerians of her generation, like myself. As a result of reading the book I started to take an active interest in researching the causes of the war although finding texts with a non-Biafran bias has proved difficult indeed. I don’t doubt that her desire to deal with this subject has been a long time coming. In a recent interview in the Guardian Miss Adichie reflects on how she started writing about Biafra at 16. Being of the Igbo tribe of eastern Nigeria, who suffered great loss of life prior to and as a cause of the war, she felt the need to explore this dark and seldom-discussed part of the country’s history.

Nevertheless I have my own cynical view as to why she chose such a monumental and ambitious subject matter and it is the same reason I believe the Orange Prize judges decided to award her with the prize this year. It seems little do with the actual quality of writing but more to do with literary politics. Adichie was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and short listed for the UK Orange Prize for Fiction with 'Purple...’ in 2004 but lost out on the latter to another epic novel Andrea Levy's 'Small Island' which also had a good dose of sex, war and questionable language in parts. Don’t misunderstand, ‘Small Island’ is a great novel but Levy had several books to her credit by this time. Yet even as a debut novel ‘Purple…’ was in a league of its own. But it seems that for the panels judging these book awards the more sensational the novel and ambitious the topic the better and more likely it is to win. I imagine Miss Adichie felt slighted and cheated when she did not win the prize 3 years ago – and so she should. Miss Adichie wants to win awards too and it's my estimation she feels the need to play 'the game' – hence a change of tack. But surely it takes more dexterity to write a novel that takes the simple and mundane aspects of the quotidian, makes the reader care about the protagonist(s) daily struggles without it all becoming a bit too self-indulgent. The debut novel had that quality –despite it’s ‘ordinary’ subject matter.

I cannot say I am familiar with most of the other books short-listed for this year's Orange Prize except the ‘Inheritance of Loss’ by Kiran Desai, which won the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Ms Desai has undeniable skill but I found the novel less inspired than it was acclaimed to be. Once again we find the author deals with major issues such as class conflict in post-colonial India, the repercussions of colonialism, disenchantment with the American dream, romance, cultural displacement and anything else that has plagued man since the dawn of the modern age. The novel tried to deal with so much at once I was distracted and much of the sympathy and sense of engagement that I should have had for the characters didn’t have a chance to develop. But what do I know? ‘Inheritance…’ is an epic novel and the Man Booker judges duly rewarded Ms Desai for her efforts.

The same theory could be applied to Zadie Smith. One of the most prodigious and distinctive writers of the new millennium and a personal favourite, Smith’s gift of characterisation is second to none. She is also very adept at writing books, which are not big in the way of story line but make compulsive reading nonetheless. Her characters are so believable the reader could be convinced they have always known them and that they are merely a phone call away. She won the Orange Prize 2006 for ‘On Beauty’. This too is a good book – I believe Smith is incapable of writing an unengaging read – but not necessarily her best work. Yet it has a healthy dose of sensationalism, graphic scenes and yes, ticks those all-important boxes. I also think Smith’s winning of the Orange Prize last year was to compensate for her two previous books, the iconic ‘White Teeth’ and ingenious but underrated ‘Autograph Man’ being snubbed by the prestigious award. That leads to the second reason I feel Miss Adichie won this year – a consolatory gesture for what was denied her in 2004.

Of course all of this is conjecture and without a signed confession from the judges of these awards, hard to prove. But there does appear to be a pattern forming for what it takes to win these awards – and quality of work I fear is not always the paramount consideration.

There is hope that the simple but effective novel can sometimes triumph. Diana Evans was awarded none other than the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2005 for the sublime ‘26A’. Once again this is not a book so heavy on plot and more interested in exploring the diverse personalities of the two main characters, twins Bessie and Georgia, the dynamics of their relationship with each other, their family and the big wide world around them. Not to say that there are not meaty issues addressed in the book but these are discussed and driven by way of the characters and not vice versa.

I should be ecstatic that Miss Adichie is being recognised for her indisputable gift as a writer even if I do not feel as strongly about her second book as I do about ‘Purple Hibiscus’. Still it seems a phyrric victory that ‘…Yellow Sun’ is receiving so much attention compared to her, arguably, superior debut. Perhaps Richard & Judy and the like feel obligated to laud her efforts due to the topic of the Nigerian civil war and how it’s packaged in the book as oppose to the quality of writing itself. It is my hope that Miss Adichie’s third novel will see a return of the style and magic that set ‘Purple Hibiscus’ apart.

* Tola Ositelu is a trainee solicitor living in London - blestchica@hotmail.com

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

Migritude as cultural spirit of our times

Justus Siboe Makokha

2007-07-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/42345

An in-depth reading of Shailja Patel's Migritude alongside new work from Ngugi wa Thiong'o sets both in the context of new cultural production from the African diaspora.

In the past two weeks lovers of literature in Nairobi and Mombasa have had the exceptional chance of celebrating the official homecoming of Migritude, a powerful, one-woman oral poetic performance by Kenyan-born, US based Shailja Patel. The gifted artist entertained and educated enthusiastic spectators for four days at the Phoenix Theatre, Nairobi a week ago. She then staged her show in Mombasa at the Aga Khan Academy, Likoni this week. Her homecoming performances are courtesy of Ford Foundation, which is doing a laudable job supporting the revival of the arts and literature in post-Nyayo Kenya.

Shailja represented Kenya during the World Social Forum and has performed Migritude in East Africa before. She thrilled crowds at the Zanzibar International Film Festival as well as at the international Kwani LitFest last year. A third generation East African Asian who defines herself as both an Asian and an African, an 'Asian African', Shailja coined the term Migritude in 2005 from three cultural terms: migrancy, attitude and negritude. She uses it to name the spirit of 'a generation of migrants who do not feel the need to be silent to protect themselves'. Migritude then is a spirit of envoiced migrants who take up the challenge of making themselves narrators of their own (hi)stories to their nations and the world.

This nomadic narrative spirit comes to Shailja naturally considering East African Asians are the quintessential symbols of postcolonial migration from East Africa. Descendants of South Asian migrants who have in successive waves immigrated to East Africa, 'Asian Africans' are beginning to audibly challenge (n)atavistic accounts of the national histories and cultures of countries they have called home in Africa for more than a century.

Whether from East Africa or from the new homelands where they now live in Europe, America or Australia, East African Asians' efforts to 'remember Africa' and 're-membering themselves to Africa' are now becoming increasingly visible especially in the area of culture. In 2000, the Asian African Heritage Trust hosted an exhibition on the community's identity and culture at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. Kenyan-born, MG Vassanji, has been awarded twice the prestigious Giller Prize for his novels: The Book of Secrets (1994) and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003). His writings which include a new novel coming out in September, The Assassin's Song, treat the experiences of East Africans of South Asian descent through pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial times.

Zahid Rajan and Zarina Patel, the biographer of A. M. Jeevanjee as well as Makhan Singh, run an informative Nairobi-based journal on South Asian personalities, histories and cultures in East Africa called, Awaaz. They also organize the annual South Asian Mosaic of Society and the Arts (SAMOSA) cultural festival at the GoDown Art Center in Nairobi. Mubina and Sanaula Karmali have collected an anthology of diasporic oral literature, The Oral Literature of the Asians of East Africa, published by the East African Educational Publishers in 2002.

Shailja's solo artistic work further strengthens this East African Asian self-identification through art, culture and lifestories of an otherwise often misunderstood community; a misunderstanding evident in the April Anti-Asian riots in Kampala. Her poetic work traces the contours of her identity as an Asian African, as a woman and as a migrant East African living in the Diaspora. The Asian exodus out of Africa of the 1960s and 1970s occasioned by racialist nationalization programs and policies as well as racially-instigated (post)colonial gender violence are some of the major themes that run throughout the collection of poetic works that make up Migritude.

As a literary text therefore, Shailja's rich performance questions issues of history, politics, identity, place, culturo-racial diversity and migration. Structurally, Migritude takes the form of fourteen episodal poetic pieces, which hatch out of a multiracial yolk spiced with synchronized movements, stage effects manipulation and topical themes dramatically narrated in-between the lifestories and memories of the artist and her motherland.

However, the term 'migritude' can actually be expanded to capture the spirit of African peoples through their more than two thousand years history of migrations, settlement and re-migrations that continue to date. Loaded with memory, estrangement, history, politics and both local as well as global forces, 'migritude' appears to be the right word to describe that experience of present day Africans as they quest for their identities through the rubbles of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and globalisation.

When Ngugi wa Thiong'o delivered his official homecoming public lecture, Re-Membering Africa: Burial and Resurrection of African Memory at the University of Nairobi early this year, one could discern that his literary politics and cultural ideology have also migrated beyond his standpoints of yesteryears. The renown writer appears to be shifting beyond examinations of the internal dynamics working against African nation-states towards the re-examination of those global forces identified under the mantra of globalization that continue to obstruct ways forward for African countries.

A keen reading of Ngugi's cultural politics beyond Moving the Centre (1993) locates his concerns beyond the scope of the limiting boundaries of African nation-states. He is no longer interested in national cultures and national languages as such. In the transnational spirit of migritude, the writer is embracing the whole continent as the arena of twenty-first century cultural contestations.

This spatial expansion is further illustrated through the critical observation that the fictional setting of the new novel, Wizard of the Crow. The 'Free Republic of Aburiria' is a metonymic post-colonial nation-state that could be many a post-colonial state in Africa and even Asia or Latin America. Aburiria is not easily identifiable as a former African settler colony (read Kenya) like the fictional settings of Ngugi's earlier novels. This spatial expansion can also be observed in his choice of abstract names such as His High Mighty Excellency the Ruler, Machokali (Sharp Eyes) and Sikiokuu (Great Ear) that cannot be typically identified with Kenya.

Characters from his early works had names such as Waiyaki, Mugo, Wanja, Njoroge that give cue to a reader familiar to East Africa as to which particular post-colonial African state Ngugi treats in the 1960s-1980s. This early period arguably reveals the novelist's interest in the welfare of former settler colonies in general, specifically Kenya, where issues of land, race and neocolonialism combine to produce postcolonial disillusionment, injustice and inequalities.

More than two decades of forced exile and university teaching away from East Africa has led the professor to reexamine cultural politics in deeper and broader terms. His magisterial lecture in January shows that the professor who now lives and works by choice in the Diaspora, finds clarity in post/transnationalist concepts such as Negritude, Pan Africanism, African Renaissance and Globalization when describing the complex cultural past, present and future of African societies and peoples. His recent most essay on the language question in Africa, 'Europhone or African Memory: The Challenges of the Pan-Africanist Intellectual in the era of Globalization' published in 2003 further attests to the metamorphosis.

Colonialism to Ngugi is no longer the preserve of Western Europe and its twentieth century oppression of Africa. His colonial discourse analysis has migrated deeper into history and farther away from Africa to also engage the subjugation of Ireland and New Zealand under the Great Britain as well as the colonization of some Far East nations under imperial Japan.

Ngugi's reexamination of twenty-first century Africa in light of growing interconnectedness betwixt and between African nation-states and the rest of the world is necessary in our incessant efforts to understand the emerging phenomena that is transnational African culture. In fact his new novel is a dramatization of the two thousand year epic journey Africans have made to the present as they get buried by local and global pressures only to resurrect and forge on towards their elusive homecoming—-their true Uhuru.

As diasporic artists such as Shailja demonstrate, this epic African quest for a place and time where Africans can finally feel at home is still on today. New African diasporas are mushrooming in Western Europe, the Far East, America and Australia as Africans continue to emigrate from the continent due to the political activities of post-independence African governments like that of the Ruler in Wizard of the Crow.

Seeing that more Africans such as Shailja and Ngugi find new homes outside the continent whether by volition or compulsion, the need for them to re-member themselves to the continent through remittances and the arts becomes urgent. To us in Literature, this urgency is already being reflected in celebrations of what is being referred to as the 'new diasporic African literature'.

Over the past ten years, 'Re-membering Africa' types of writings have grown into an amazing cultural enterprise supporting writers, publishers, critics and teachers of African/Postcolonial Literary Studies. For artists, diaspora themes, diasporic narrations and coming-home-from-diaspora homecomings are en vogue. For publishers, identifying and associating with potentially award-winning diasporic writers is considered a smart commercial venture. For critics, most of them being teachers, privileging diasporic theories in literary criticism is a strategy of identifying oneself with the avant garde of contemporary literary theory such as Homi Bhabha.

Respected outlets of learned discussions on African literatures such as Research in African Literature and English Studies in Africa celebrate the rise to prominence of diasporic writings of Abdulrazak Gurnah, Moses Issegawa, Jamal Mahjoub, MG Vassanji, Binyavanga Wainaina, Leila Aboulela, Doreen Baingana,Yvonne Owuor and Shailja Patel among other prominent East African as well as other new African writers. Kwani? currently East Africa's liveliest literary outfit, has brought some of these internationally-acclaimed writers to Kenya besides supporting that cosmopolitan literary spirit diaspora writers espouse.

Avtar Brah in her brilliant book, Cartographies of Diaspora (1996) tells us postcolonial Diasporas sustain that limited sense of belonging to any particular nation or culture, which in turn accentuate diasporic critiques of the postcolonial nation-state besides generating desire for new kinds of identification. In Africa today, these new kinds of identification can be discerned in most Africans who increasingly view themselves as citizens of the continent (i.e Pan Africans), citizens of the world (transnationals) or citizens of two or more nations (leading to calls for dual citizenship in Kenya). In the later case the first citizenship is usually ones country of birth and the second that of ones country of flight.

Diasporic literature with roots in post-independence Africa, to quote Brah once more 'offer a critique of discourses of fixed origins while taking account of a homing desire, as distinct from a desire for a homeland'. In light of these developments, we can venture the view that quests for new homes are not the main preoccupation of African migrants, writers or otherwise. Rather, it is quests for those places where African people will feel at home that really lead to the 'homing desire' epitomised by Ngugi's own emblematic rather than enduring homecomings since 2004.

Shailja's just concluded homecoming goes beyond the artistic effort of bringing Migritude to lovers of literature. It seems to suggest an invitation to expand the temporal and spatial dimensions of our narrations of African nations in the manner of Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow. In such expanded narrative spaces both indigenous and migrant memories and buried (hi)stories can be resurrected and given a long overdue homecoming.

* Justus Siboe Makokha, B.Ed, MA Dept of Literature, is a literary critic based at Kenyatta University.
* Read more on Shailja Patel at www.shailja.com
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

World water crisis: A challenge to social justice

Book review

Humphrey Sipalla

2007-07-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/42359

Although the earth is awash with water, the world is facing a global water crisis. Global freshwater supplies are dwindling fast. Climate change, rapid urbanisation, environmental degradation, the growth of industries that either pollute water sources or consume vast water volumes like agro-business and hydro generation of power, climate change and our very modern lifestyle are contributing to an increase in demand that outstrips supply. For instance, 'Lake Chad has shrunk to 20% of its size in 1962', and 'one flush of a toilet takes as much water as a person in 30 of the world’s poorest countries'. It is expected that inter-state violent conflict in future will be waged to secure water supplies.

The environmental degradation that is characteristic of many urban areas necessitates water supply networks, and anything in short supply, and therefore high demand, is fodder for profit maximisation. Thus enters water privatisation and its attendant failures.

World Water Crisis: A Challenge to Social Justice brings together articles by various authors from different fields and backgrounds, offering wide perspective on the world water crisis. Including economic, sociological and theological reflections on water, the articles also propose solution to the supply and management of water in ways that address the crisis sustainably.

Mobile phone activism in South Africa

Sindy Mkhize

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/broadcasts/podcasts.php

Sindy Mkhize of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Shackdwellers Movement of Durban speaks to Sokari Ekine of Pambazuka at the Pan African Mobile Activists workshops held in Nairobi in June. Sindy who is a member of the Abahlali Women's League discusses the pressure of living under constant attack from local government and local police and also the recent detention of members of the Kennedy Road location on charges of murder. Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement is the largest organisation of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa and is presently engaged in fighting the proposed "KwaZulu-Natal Elimination & Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Bill".

For more see the Abahlali website.

Music in this podcast is brought to you by Busi Ncube from Zimbabwe, kindly provided by Thulani Promotions.

South Africa: The problem with 'Made in China' textiles

2007-07-05

http://132.203.59.36/NEW-PEP/Group/papers/papers/MPIA-2007-01.pdf

An important debate is underway in South Africa, on whether it should protect its deteriorating textile industry. A paper published by South Africa's Poverty and Economic Policy Network examines whether implementing trade barriers will result in better domestic policy objectives. It provides a dynamic analysis on the link between textile protection and poverty.

Sudan: China to search for oil in Sudan

2007-07-06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6261418.stm

China's biggest oil company CNPC has reached a deal with Sudan to search for oil and gas in the north of the country on the coast of the Red Sea. The exploration will be carried out jointly with the Indonesian state oil and gas company PT Pertamina.

Zambia: Miners 'see little reward'

2007-07-06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6267754.stm

African nations are used to being plundered - the West perfected the art. Now the new scramble for Africa's resources is coming from the east. With a voracious economy to feed, China is devouring raw materials - oil, copper, cobalt and zinc. And it is wooing governments, including those who trample on human rights, with soft loans, aid and arms sales.

African citizenship for all

Hakima Abbas

2007-07-05

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/AUMONITOR/C12

During the opening of the African Union Executive Council on June 28, President Alpha Oumar Konare, Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union (AU), referred to the issuance of the first diplomatic African Union passports in May 2007 as a symbolic gesture toward African citizenship. Civil society organisations (CSOs) attending the summit called for the AU to move beyond symbolism to action.

Launching a campaign to demand full freedom of movement across the Continent for every African, CSOs created African Citizens’ passports “valid until the member-states of the African Union issues an African Passport as required to fulfill the vision of a people driven African Union and a United Africa”. The passports were personally issued to the Hon Nana Akufo-Ado, Foreign Minister of Ghana, Hon Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, Foreign Minister of Senegal, Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo and South African artist Hugh Masekela as well as being distributed to 53 national delegations attending the Executive Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the AU.

The African Citizens’ passport is a response to a growing demand for an end to the humiliations and violations of rights suffered by Africans at borders throughout the Continent. Millions of African refugees, travelers and undocumented workers currently living outside of their countries of birth are exposed to discrimination and the denial of the rights to an identity, to freely work and access essential services. Women are disproportionately affected by arbitrary arrest, harassment, extortion and intimidation at border crossing as they represent the majority of cross-border and informal traders.

“We make all the noise about African unity yet Africans live within their Continent as refugees”, stated a young Ghanaian poet, DK Oseir Yaw on the need for African citizenship.

Mrs. Julia Dolly Joiner, Commissioner for Political Affairs of the AU Commission stated the benefits of freedom of movement across Africa at the Launching of the African Union Diplomatic and Service Passports. She noted that “free movement in the Continent will ultimately have a positive impact on the political, social, economic, cultural and developmental fronts, and contribute to greater integration, increased trade, investment, tourism, technological advancement, labour mobility and employment opportunities, student exchange through diverse educational opportunities, peace and security, larger markets for African goods and services, reduced brain drain, greater unity and prosperity, amongst others.”

The pan-Africanist vision of a unified Africa with one identity and one citizenship was espoused by leaders from Nkrumah to Nyerere but has yet to find concrete undertaking other than in national laws. Renewed momentum was given to the call for African citizenship and the establishment of the African passport during the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, organized by the AU Commission in October 2004 in Senegal. Indeed, the right to freedom of movement is enshrined in several international and African instruments including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community.

The launching of the African Union Diplomatic and Service Passports in May was part of the AU's Priority Programme on Free Movement of Persons detailed in the 2004 - 2007 Plan of Action to Speed Up Integration of the Continent. The objective of the Plan of Action is said to be the promotion of rapprochement between the people of Africa and their interests and the building of collective awareness through free movement of people, goods and services across the Continent. As the Grand Debate on a Union Government concluded this week with the Accra Declaration, Heads of States recognized “that opening up narrow domestic markets to greater trade and investment through freer movement of persons, goods, services and capital would accelerate growth thus, reducing excessive weaknesses of many of our Member States” but failed to take concrete action to enable this freedom of movement. In order to move the debate into action, Heads of States of the AU could begin by abolishing the need for visas for African citizens traveling within Africa. Currently, an African from Kenya requires a visa to travel to Senegal and is forced to submit to the colonial paradigm by having to apply for such a visa from the French embassy. Conversely, a Senegalese citizen traveling to Kenya is forced to apply for the visa from the British embassy in Dakar. Yet, the abolition of visas is not unprecedented in Africa. In the ECOWAS region, citizens of West African States can travel without visas throughout the 15 countries. It is only this type of action that would directly and concretely affect the lives of millions of Africans and capture the imagination of the people which would revive a faith in the pan-African sentiment of State leaders. As Emmanuel Akwetey of the Ghana AU Civil Society Coalition argues, “We cannot have a union of African states or even a continental government without continental citizenship. If citizenship is the fundamental basis of any democratic national state, why shouldn’t it be so at the level of the Africa Union?”

Accra Declaration Concludes Grand Debate

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/272/

The Accra Declaration was (www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/images/uploads/ACCRAJuly2007AUSummitDECLARATION.pdf) adopted by Heads of States at the conclusion of the African Union Summit. The Declaration reflects some of the demands of civil society, particularly in regards to “the importance of involving the African peoples in order to ensure that the African Union is a Union of peoples and not just a “Union of states and governments”, as well as the African Diaspora in the processes of economic and political integration of our continent” and the need for “freer movement of persons, goods, services and capital” as were elaborated in the final CSO Communique on the Grand Debate (www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/images/uploads/Final_Accra_CSO_communique.pdf).

Adopt It Without Delay

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/276/

Daily Graphic - The President of Liberia, Mrs Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, has urged African leaders to endorse without delay the concept of a United States of Africa. She has also prodded them to instruct, in no uncertain terms, all regional economic commissions and community institutions to formulate and adopt the road map and the time table for the achievement that goal.

“This will allow institutions to move forward in peace with progress.” she added.

Repatriation in the Context of the Grand Debate

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/271/

A statement from the Rastafari People at the African Union Grand Debate was issued on July 2, 2007. It states: “The World Conference Against Racism declared the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. This year, Britain and America have celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the end of that wickedness. The Republic of Ghana, for its part, has also seen fit to do something to atone for this crime against humanity and the complicity of some chiefs in the deportation of their own people into what became the MAAFA - an African Holocaust.

If it is morally and spiritually correct to talk about the wrongness of forcibly transporting African people from Africa to the Americas, then it is absolutely correct at this time to talk about the rightness of transporting African people from the land of their captivity to their ancestral homeland which is this continent known today as Africa."

Gender Mainstreaming in the African Union Government

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/273/

As part of the ongoing ‘Gender is My Agenda Campaign,’ aiming to mainstream gender in the African Union (AU), the women’s civil society networks have organized the 10th AU Pre-Summit Consultative meeting which was held in Accra, Ghana, on the 23rd and 24th June. This meeting precedes the 9th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union and will be the 10th in a series of consultative meetings of civil society networks concerned with gender issues and the promotion of women’s human rights in Africa.

Diaspora Needs Voice in Africa Government

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/275/

The African diaspora needs a voice in the African Union and any future African unity government to reflect the influence it exercises across the world on the continent’s behalf, civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson said.

But while he supported a push for greater African integration, Jackson said issues like the conflict in Sudan"s western Darfur region and the crisis in Zimbabwe must be tackled if unity was to carry moral authority.

AU Adopts Accra Declaration to Plan Integration

Lavinia Mahlangu

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/270/

Timelines and the method for Africa’s integration are to be set out according to the Accra Declaration, adopted late on Tuesday night by the 9th Ordinary Session of the African Union Heads of Summit.

“We emerged from the Grand Debate with a common vision,” AU Chair John Kuofor and President of Ghana said on Tuesday, minutes before midnight.

World Bank Provides US$5.7b Grants, Loans to Africa

2007-07-06

http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/comments/266/

The World Bank announced Monday that it provided a record US$5.7 billion in credits and grants to Sub-Saharan Africa in the fiscal year ending 30 June 2007, up from US$4.7 billion in fiscal 2006.

A statement from the bank in Accra, venue of the ongoing 9th AU Summit, said the development arm of the bank – International Development Association (IDA) - provided the funding.

Egypt: Egypt bans female circumcision

2007-07-06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6251426.stm

Egypt has announced that it is imposing a complete ban on female circumcision, also known as genital mutilation. The announcement follows a public outcry after a young girl died during the operation. A ban was introduced nearly 10 years ago but the practice continued to be allowed in exceptional circumstances.

Global: Global forum for women with HIV

2007-07-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73092

IDS does not only travel with truckers along African highways; it flies business class with men in dark suits, crawls into marriages and lurks in playgrounds. It smiles at you every day at work and, disproportionately, affects African women and girls because of gender inequalities.These were the words of activist Deborah Williams, from Tobago, at the one-day Forum for Women Living with HIV and AIDS in Nairobi, Kenya.

Mauritania: Female journalist challenges status quo

2007-07-05

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3227

Hindou Mint Ainina presses for women's rights and political reform editing a weekly paper that regularly makes enemies. With her Quill, though, she has found ways to prod for change amid censorship and a culture where women have little power.

Sirerra Leone: New laws give women unprecedented rights, protections

2007-07-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73072

Women in Sierra Leone stand to enjoy unprecedented rights under new laws making wife-beating a criminal offence, allowing women to inherit property, and protecting young women against forced marriage. One human rights coalition said the three laws, enacted by Sierra Leone’s parliament 14 June, will “help to radically improve the legal position of women in Sierra Leone.”

Swaziland: Empowering women to beat abuse

2007-07-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73057

Most Swazi women who face domestic violence do not take their children and walk out of the house. "They say, 'who is going to feed me?'" Nonhlanhla Dlamini, Director of the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse (SWAGAA), told IRIN. But this is changing. An innovative SWAGAA programme to empower women economically in Swaziland's patriarchal society is helping many out of a cycle of abuse and dependency.

Africa: Who polices the UN?

2007-07-05

http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/39839/2007/06/5-161516-1.htm

The United Nations is supposed to play global policeman, but what happens when its own peacekeepers break the law? That's a question raised by a string of incidents allegedly involving Pakistani and Bangladeshi peacekeeping troops in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005.

DRC: Military trial acquittals raise concern

2007-07-05

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23139

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has voiced concern at the recent decision by a military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to acquit all defendants of killings, torture and other abuses that occurred during an operation by the country’s armed forces.

Ethiopia: Crackdown in East punishes civilians

2007-07-05

http://www.hrea.org/lists2/display.php?language_id=1&id=5168

The Ethiopian military has forcibly displaced thousands of civilians in the country's eastern Somali region in recent weeks while escalating its campaign against a separatist insurgency movement, Human Rights Watch has reported. Both the government and rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) must protect civilians and ensure their access to humanitarian relief.

Global: New report on Rights performance on commonwealth countries

2007-07-07

http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/publications/hradvocacy/easier_said_than_done.pdf

The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) has released a new report: "Easier Said than Done: A report on the commitments and performances of the Commonwealth members of the UN Human Rights Council". CHRI has been monitoring the performances of the 13 Commonwealth members of the Council (Bangladesh, Canada, Cameroon, Ghana, India, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, UK and Zambia) and compared them with the pledges the Commonwealth countries made prior to their election in the Council.

Kenya: Human rights-based development at the grassroots level

2007-07-07

http://www.equalinrights.org/content/HRBD_Kenya.html

In April 2007, equalinrights facilitated and supported a five day workshop for 21 representatives of grassroots organisations in Vihiga, Kenya. The main theme was: ’Empowering rural grassroots stakeholders to confront poverty through human rights-based approaches‘

Rwanda: Former army major gets 20 years in genocide trial

2007-07-05

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN547002.html

A Belgian court sentenced a former Rwandan army major to 20 years in prison on Thursday for the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeepers and an undetermined number of Rwandan civilians at the start of the 1994 genocide. Bernard Ntuyahaga was earlier acquitted on two other charges of involvement in the murder of then Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and killing civilians in the Butare district.

Uganda: Rebel deal leaves questions over justice

2007-07-05

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L05631257.htm

It is not often that families of murder victims petition the courts to forgive their killers. But in Uganda, almost an entire tribe whose relatives were slaughtered and children kidnapped by Lord's Resistance Army rebels are lobbying for them not to be tried before an international tribunal. Fugitive LRA leader Joseph Kony and three deputies are wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges including mass killing, mutilation and using child soldiers. But in northern Uganda, few want them jailed.

Côte d’Ivoire: Displaced persons need more help - UN rights expert

2007-07-05

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23111

An independent United Nations human rights expert has called on Côte d’Ivoire’s Government to ensure that the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the divided West African country have the necessary means to make a safe and sustainable return to their home towns and villages.

Ethiopia: Refugees leave for the US

2007-07-05

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/468d0f88c.html

The UN refugee agency has begun the resettlement in the United States of some 700 ethnic Kunama refugees from Eritrea, flying out a first group of 29 from Addis Ababa after years of exile in northern Ethiopia. The refugees left Shimelba camp earlier this week and flew out from the Ethiopian capital on Wednesday evening after a pre-departure briefing by staff of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is handling the logistics of the resettlement operation.

Horn of Africa: Organizations urge action to prevent rising death toll at sea

2007-07-05

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/468a7bd82.html

Amid a rising number of deaths among boatpeople making dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Aden and other stretches of water, the UN refugee agency and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) are calling for more action to prevent this humanitarian tragedy.

Kenya: Funding sought for hungry refugee children

2007-07-05

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23122

Three United Nations agencies are seeking $32 million from donors to help cut malnutrition rates which they warned have reached “crisis levels” among children under five living in refugee camps in Kenya.

Somalia: Puntland struggles to aid refugees

2007-07-06

http://tinyurl.com/34otc2

Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven from their homes by almost daily fighting in Somalia's capital Mogadishu. The UN says more than 400,000 Somalis fled the city in the last five months, many of those have headed north towards Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in the north east of the country. Al Jazeera's Mohammed Adow reports that Bosaso, the region's largest city, is now struggling to provide for its growing refugee population.

South Africa: Slums Act

Abahlali Shackdwellers

Richard Pithouse

2007-07-04

http://www.abahlali.org/node/1629

Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slum Act - Abahlali baseMjondolo is committed to opposing the Slums Bill via legal and political strategies
Abahlali baseMjondolo is committed to opposing the Slums Bill via legal and political strategies and would like to invite everyone interested in building a coalition against the Slums Bill to attend a meeting at the Kennedy Road Hall, at 9:00 a.m. on Friday 13 July.

Abahlali does not have money to fly people from other cities to Durban for the meeting but would like to invite people and organisations who cannot fund their attendance themselves to send written submissions to the meeting.

For further information on the Bill and contact information please see: http://www.abahlali.org/node/1629

Nigeria: Government list seen as modest break with past

2007-07-05

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN523866.html

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua's list of 35 proposed ministers was announced on Thursday and political insiders said it was a tentative break with the era of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The portfolios were not specified, prolonging the suspense over who would get the key oil and finance jobs.

Nigeria: Party rejects coalition

2007-07-07

http://tinyurl.com/2sqok6

One of Nigeria's main opposition parties rejected an offer to join a coalition government on Friday because it considers the ruling party's victory in a recent election was illegitimate, reports Al Jazeera. Umaru Yar'Adua, the new president, has invited the three main oppostion parties to join the government to give him greater legitimacy.

Western Sahara: UN amends report

2007-07-06

http://tinyurl.com/2nwvrn

The UN has admitted that a report on the disputed Western Sahara region, a long-standing row between Morocco and the Polisario Front, was biased in favour of Morocco, Al Jazeera reports. A new report was issued on Monday, after Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, acknowledged the bias.

Africa: Africa in the new millennium

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

2007-07-05

http://tinyurl.com/2wv2pe

In neo-liberal circles, The Market is packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation, writes Francis Nyamnjoh in his paper, "Africa in the New Millennium: Interrogating Barbie Democracy, Seeking Alternatives".

Africa: New EU Head Portugal to Focus on Africa

2007-07-05

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=38428

Portugal, the new holder of the European Union's rotating presidency, has promised that Africa will be one of its key priorities for the next six months. Prime Minister José Socrates, whose government took over the Union's helm Jul 1, is hoping to fulfil a long-standing Portuguese ambition of hosting a summit between the EU and African heads of state in Lisbon this December.

Cost of Living in Nairobi Slums

Humphrey Sipalla

2007-07-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/42360

Cost of living in Nairobi slums higher than minimum taxable income
Families in Nairobi’s slums are finding it harder to survive as the cost of living has gone up by 24%. These are among the key findings in an independent household survey conducted by the social justice advocacy centre, Jesuit Hakimani Centre (JHC).

According to the survey, families now need Ksh 2,693 to survive through one month. This figure is the monthly average over the January-June 2007 period. This continues a rising trend from 2006 where families needed Ksh 1,332 more every month, compared to 2005. The cost of living is now at Ksh 13,704 in Jan-Jun 2007 up from Ksh 11,011 in 2006 and Ksh 9,678 in 2005. The survey also shows a 4% increase in expenditure on food items alone compared to 2006.

This means that more people have therefore dipped below the absolute poverty line. These figures are significant as the minimum cost of living is above the minimum taxable income.
Education is making little impact in reducing poverty incidence as households headed by those with better education (secondary and above) are not economically advantaged. However, the findings affirm the value of women’s empowerment: households headed by women were faring better (poverty incidence was 17.81%) than male-headed households (41.25%). Bigger households were also found to be poorer than smaller ones.

Five items account for over three quarters of the non-food budget. These are education, non-durables, clothing, health and lightning and cooking. These items alone account for about 48% of the expenditure, but house rent, accounts for the largest proportion of their expenditure (22%).
The survey uses several indicators of social well-being: employment, size of the household, gender, health, educational levels, housing, access to water and sanitation, and social networks like merry-go-rounds. JHC publishes its household survey every year as The Nairobi Basic Needs Basket.

The survey records the cost of living in twelve informal settlements in Nairobi. These findings are fourth in the series, continuing the documentation done in 2006, 2005 and 2004. It also establishes food poverty levels and overall poverty levels in these informal settlements. It rejects a static absolute poverty line, and adopts the actual average amount spent by households as the absolute poverty line.

Sudan: "1,000 wells for Darfur"

2007-07-04

http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=3711&language=1

The president of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir, has agreed to an initiative to tackle the problem of water shortage in northwestern Sudan. The "1,000 Wells For Darfur" initiative was agreed on during a meeting (20 June) in Khartoum between Al Bashir and the Egyptian scientist Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at the US-based Boston University, who proposed the initiative.

Africa: No evidence war fuels HIV crisis - study

2007-07-07

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73045

Experts have long assumed that the violence, wide-scale rape and refugee crises are the inevitable by-products of war that fuel HIV/AIDS epidemics, but an analysis of HIV prevalence surveys from seven sub-Saharan African countries with similar recent histories found no evidence that higher HIV infection rates accompany conflict.

Africa: Vigilance prevents costly prevention work

2007-07-05

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/ADF9157F-71CC-4646-9802-827437C6A570.asp

HIV prevention campaigns in Africa and Asia are often tilting at the wrong target and wasting money because of a basic lack of information about who is becoming infected in a country, David Wilson of the World Bank told the 2007 HIV Implementers’ meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, last month.

Algeria: Imams join in fight against Aids

2007-07-05

http://tinyurl.com/ypq7xf

In a departure from tradition, religious communities in Algeria have become increasingly involved in AIDS education in the country. To this end, the Ministry of Religious Affairs organised a seminar on Monday (July 2nd) in Algiers, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on the role of religious leaders in the fight against AIDS.

South Africa: 'irrational fear' and 'stigma' feed calls for criminal HIV transmission laws

2007-07-05

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/094CF705-32F1-460F-9F58-406968FFC4E9.asp

Laws criminalising behaviour that may transmit HIV are “the product, not of rational public health choices, but of irrational fears, which provide an inveterately poor basis for rational law-making,” according to South Africa’s Justice Edwin Cameron. Speaking last night at Birkbeck College in central London, at an event co-hosted by NAM and the National AIDS Trust, Mr Justice Cameron argued that the law’s current place in the AIDS epidemic is primarily to create “legislation specially protecting the rights of those with HIV.”

South Africa: Infant ARV treatment study shows advantage for immediate treatment

2007-07-05

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/89CA2C4D-D598-45C1-91C8-28CFA08ACD32.asp

A large study of immediate versus deferred antiretroviral treatment in South African infants has found a significant advantage to immediate treatment after just eight months of follow-up, and researchers monitoring the trial have decided that the `deferred treatment` arm of the study should be closed and all children not yet receiving treatment should be evaluated to determine whether they should start antiretroviral therapy.

Swaziland: New HIV figures reveal extent of epidemic

2007-07-07

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=72999

Swaziland's first Demographic Health Survey has found that 26 percent of sexually active Swazis are infected with HIV. The last prevalence survey, based on tests of pregnant women at antenatal clinics, had found a 38.6 percent HIV infection rate. The new figure was derived from a house-to-house survey by the Central Statistics Office for the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

Uganda: Higher education drives development

2007-07-05

http://www.eprc.or.ug/pdf_files/researchseries/series48.pdf

Recent evidence suggests higher education is both a result and determinant of income. A report by Uganda's Economic Policy Research Center examines the impact of higher education in Uganda’s development process and identifies ways to enhance its impact.

South Africa: LGBTI radio show returns to the airwaves

2007-07-05

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=southafrica&id=1615

A national gay radio show, Tuesday Night, which was elbowed by the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 2005 returns to the airwaves in July. The show was off-air for almost two years after “the SABC placed unreasonable terms” that lead to closure broadcast, according to producers. The show promises a variety of educational, informative and entertaining programmes such as current affairs, community events, arts and talk.

Uganda: Ugandan gays in email row with minister

2007-07-05

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=uganda&id=1616

Gays in Uganda call upon Minister of Ethics and Integrity James Nsaba Buturo to disclose emails expressing animosity that he claims to have received. The allegation is being condemned by a couple of gay organisations in Uganda. Victor Juliet Mukasa, chair of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), has denied knowledge of such hate mail but advised that if Buturo “is really receiving the mail, let him expose it so that it can be addressed.”

Global: Policymakers must rethink desertification - UN

2007-07-04

http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=3717&language=1

A new policy report from the United Nations University (UNU) urges governments to adopt a more coordinated approach to desertification. The report, 'Rethinking Policies to Cope with Desertification', was presented on 28 June at the United Nations headquarters in New York, United States and is based on the input of 200 experts from 25 countries.

Liberia: Uncontrolled trash greatest public health threat

2007-07-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73065

As mountains of garbage expand in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, the UN Environment Programme has called on the government and private sector to repair the country’s broken system for collecting trash. “Solid waste management is arguably the greatest public health threat in Monrovia,” UNEP’s Michael Cowing told IRIN. “There is virtually no waste management secto

Uganda: Why Uganda hates the plastic bag

2007-07-06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6253564.stm

This weekend Uganda joins the growing number of East African countries which have banned the plastic bag in an attempt to clean up cities and prevent environmental damage including blocked drains.

Uganda: Promised land: a key to reducing poverty in rural Uganda

2007-07-05

http://www.eprc.or.ug/pdf_files/researchseries/series49.pdf

Rising poverty in rural Uganda is linked to increasing landlessness, as the latter drives land degradation and reduces agricultural productivity. A paper published by Uganda's Economic Policy Research Centre examines the complex relationship between owning land and poverty. It identifies effective strategies and land policy guidance to address this concern.

DRC: Journalist detained

2007-07-07

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/84672/

Esther Wakilongo, a journalist with privately-owned Vision Shala Television (VSTV), was detained by Lieutenant-Colonel Anicet Muhimuzi, head of intelligence for the national police, while she was covering the parade organised for the anniversary of the country's independence in Bukavu (the largest city in South Kivu province, in the country's east). Although she presented her press card, the lieutenant-colonel seized her camera on the grounds that she did not possess "the badge granting authorisation to take pictures."

Ethiopia: Journalist dies in attempt to flee to Sudan

2007-07-07

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/84679/

Ethiopian journalistPaulos Kidane, a journalist with the Amharic-language service of state-owned Eri-TV and radio Dimtsi Hafash (Voice of the Broad Masses), died in June 2007 in an attempt to flee on foot across the border into Sudan.

Gabon: Editorial critical of president lands publisher in prison

2007-07-07

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/84671/

An editorial critical of Gabonese President Omar Bongo, Africa's longest-serving head of state, has led authorities in the capital, Libreville, to arrest a publisher and suspend his newspaper, according to news reports and local journalists. Guy-Christian Mavioga, director of the private periodical L'Espoir, has been in police custody since Thursday on accusations of offending the head of state in connection with a June 14 editorial headlined "The last days of Bongo," local journalists told CPJ.

Sierra Leone: Editor out on bail

2007-07-07

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/84604/

Philip Neville, the editor of the privately-owned "Standard Times" daily newspaper, was released from Pademba Road prison late on 3 July 2007 after paying bail. No date has yet been set for his trial. On 2 July, a Freetown court charged Neville with "libel", "malicious propaganda" and "publishing false news", and set very tough conditions for his provisional release.

Tunisia: Blogging for freedom of expression and against bad journalism

2007-07-05

http://tinyurl.com/2andk6

Tunisian bloggers were angered recently by police intimidation of independent magazine Kalima starting May 17th, raising questions once again about the lack of press freedom in the country. In his post, "Kalima Tunisie: libérez la parole," Tunisian blogger Cos-Maux-Polis joined the World Association of Newspapers in its condemnation of "the intimidation and repression of the independent press in Tunisia".

Global: African Americans celebrate Lumumba's birthday

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/diaspora/42447

Patrice Emery Lumumba (July 2, 1925 - January 17, 1961) was the first freely elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Beloved by his people, he was assassinated by western interests for advocating that the Congo's vast mineral wealth be used first and foremost, to benefit the people of the Congo. A monument by Nijel PBG will pay tribute to the vision and legacy of Patrice Emery Lumumba.
African Americans celebrate Lumumba's birthday

Patrice Emery Lumumba (July 2, 1925 - January 17, 1961) was the first freely elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Beloved by his people, he was assassinated by western interests for advocating that the Congo's vast mineral wealth be used first and foremost, to benefit the people of the Congo.

A monument by Nijel PBG will pay tribute to the vision and legacy of Patrice Emery Lumumba. Based on his 17 inch tall bronze sculpture, the monument will feature a realistic, over life-sized bronze statue of the Prime Minister; tall, stately, left foot stepping forward, and looking ahead.

Lumumba's right hand rests lightly on a globe of the earth. Africa is the centerpiece. Jutting out of the continent are gems symbolic of gold, diamonds, and other strategic minerals.

The globe is held aloft by additional symbols of resources that were expropriated from the Congo during decades of Belgian rule. These resources include ivory from elephant tusks, rubber, a collection of Congolese art and sacred wood carvings.

In Lumumba's left hand is a scroll dated "June 30, 1960". The scroll represents his famous Independence Day speech delivered on that day before the nation, and the Belgian monarchy.

The Lumumba Monument Project Overview The Lumumba Monument Project based on Nijel's "Patrice Lumumba: The Vision, The Legacy" sculpture will be undertaken in three distinct and complimentary phases designed to support the success of each following phase.

In Phase 1 the artist has created a limited edition of seven (7) Artist's Proofs.

"The Vision" is a 17 inch tall sculpture of Lumumba. It is finished in a bronze and black patina. The statue stands on a black granite, rectangular base with a sloping front. A black name plate is attached. The date on the scroll Lumumba holds is highlighted in gold leaf. Lumumba's trademark glasses are included and are removable.

"The Legacy" contains a globe, rubber plant, wood carvings and ivory tusks. Each globe includes a different semi-precious mineral inside. The structure sits on a rectangular onyx, or brown marble base.

The ivory tusk in the two remaining Artist's Proof edition contains a very special, and rare feature. Engraved in the bronze and highlighted with gold leaf is the signature of Guy Patrice Lumumba, the youngest son of Patrice Lumumba!

Only two (2) statues are left in this edition. They are available for $3,500. each. Each statue is numbered and signed by the artist Nijel BPG and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. To purchase one of the remaining statues please send a check or money order to "Nijart International, 2131 So. Hoover Street, Suite #101, Los Angeles, CA 90007. Please allow 2 to 3 weeks for delivery.

DRC: New report on Congo by International Crisis Group

2007-07-07

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=4933

Congo: Consolidating the Peace, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines President Joseph Kabila’s new government and warns that the real gains that have been made are at serious risk. While the transition helped unify the divided country and improved security in much of it, governing institutions remain weak, abusive or non-existent, and the national army is still the country’s worst human rights abuser while another crisis is looming in the East.

Somalia: Government executes two as blasts strike

2007-07-05

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN546693.html

The Somali government on Thursday carried out its first formal executions, killing two suspected Islamist insurgents convicted of murdering a government official just three days earlier. But even as the administration meted out capital punishment for the first time since its formation in late 2004, rebels kept up a campaign targeting government officials with a trio of blasts.

Somalia: Mine kills 5 children

2007-07-07

http://www.afrol.com/articles/26021

Five Somali children were killed by a land mine in the capital Mogadishu. The children were reportedly playing with the device when it suddenly exploded. The children came across the land mine when they were asked to attend the Friday prayers at the mosque. Instead, they decided to play football and in the process, they came across the device. One of the children caused the explosion by throwing it against a wall.

Somalia: NGO suspends relief work due to security concerns

2007-07-07

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=73093

International Medical Corps (IMC) has announced a temporary suspension of all its activities in and around the Somali town of El-Berde, 420km northwest of the capital Mogadishu, citing security concerns. "All IMC staff members employed in El-Berde have been urged to relocate immediately and have been offered help in evacuating to safer areas," the medical charity stated.

Sudan: UN Envoy set for fresh talks

2007-07-07

http://www.afrol.com/articles/26018

A special envoy of the United Nations Secretary General, Jan Eliasson, today arrives in Sudan to open fresh talks which aims to foster political negotiations among parties to the Darfur conflict. Mr Eliasson met the African Union-UN Joint Mediation Support Team in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. His discussion with the team had centred on preparations for the proposed joint international meeting on the Darfur political process in Libya.

Africa: Africa needs 3Es not 3Gs

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/42451

The Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, says what Africa needs at the moment is 3Es rather than 3Gs. Speaking at the recently concluded 18th annual session of the Crans Montana Forum in Monte Carlo, at the ministerial panel on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), that took place in Monaco, Dr. Spio-Garbrah said that the 3Es needed urgently by the continent is "education, empowerment and employment" of the citizenry.
Highway Africa News Agency

The Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, says what Africa needs at the moment is 3Es rather than 3Gs.

Speaking at the recently concluded 18th annual session of the Crans Montana Forum in Monte Carlo, at the ministerial panel on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), that took place in Monaco, Dr. Spio-Garbrah said that the 3Es needed urgently by the continent is "education, empowerment and employment" of the citizenry.

A press statement from CTO and endorsed by Communications Officer, Toby Davies, and made available to Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), indicated that while lamenting the burgeoning misuse of Third Generation (3G) licenses on the continent, Dr. Spio-Garbrah noted that though the high frequencies had been allocated in some countries for the transmission of audiovisual entertainment content, its has been hijacked for other purposes.

"Invariably the frequency is being used for the transmissions concentrating on girls, games and gambling," he noted.

He therefore solicited for a change of heart if Africa is to meet up with the pace of development, insisting that the 3Es are the most important areas of development Africa needs at this time.

In support of Spio-Gabrath's voice, Cameroon's Minister, of Posts and Telecommunications Mr. Bello Bouba Maigari, outlined progress made by his country in respect of ICT development and availability to the populace, re-echoed that what is most desired by the continent is how to go about achieving the 3Es for development.

Mr. Maigari also called for the sharing of infrastructure by ICT operators, stressing that there needs to be an aggressive strategy to penetrate rural communities, and the need for lower prices for telecom services.

Equally contributing, Minister of Posts and Telecoms of Burundi, Mrs Marie-Goreth Nizigama, cited the importance of inter-departmental cooperation, sub-regional and regional cooperation in advancing the objectives of ICTs for development (ICT4D).

She further noted that landlocked countries, such as Burundi, have the special challenge of getting access to undersea fibre-cable projects in Africa, which usually were designed to first satisfy coastal communities.

Mrs Nizigama also drew attention to the special needs of the disabled, women and other marginalised communities, especially in post-conflict countries.

Gambia: Rural wireless expansion in crisis

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/42452

The Gambia's efforts to provide wireless telephones to 350 villages have been hampered by insufficient funds, the country's Communications and Information Technology Minister, Nenneh Macdouall-Gaye, told parliament.
Highway Africa News Agency

The Gambia's efforts to provide wireless telephones to 350 villages have been hampered by insufficient funds, the country's Communications and Information Technology Minister, Nenneh Macdouall-Gaye, told parliament. She said for the completion of the rollout of wireless links to the rural communities, Gambia Telecommunications Company Ltd (Gamtel), the country's telecommunications provider, needs to raise D50 million (US $1.9 million). In 2005, Gamtel first rolled out fixed wireless local telephony services using CDMA technology with a local brand name of Jamano. Most Gambians, especially those in the urban areas, questioned the security of Jamano. They saw it as the government's scheme to tap private calls and internet communications in and out of the country. Apparently, the government opted for the Airspan without explaining the reasons. But according to Mrs Macdouall-Gaye, the Airspan wireless installed by Gamtel in rural and semi-rural Gambia has proven to be costly, hence the delays. She said the residential lines provided by Airspan each cost US $3,000, which is why the government is planning to provide and to install CDMA, which is cheaper and affordable for some rural communities. Mrs Macdouall-Gaye said while the Airspan project is being reviewed, the government has halted connection work for the earmarked villages and is also making efforts to borrow additional funds from banks in the country.

Global: Africans top Internet Governance participants in 3 years

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/42454

The Maltese-based international non-profit organisation, the DiploFoundation has trained a total of 265 persons on its Internet Governance Capacity Building Programme (IGCBP) from developing countries since 2003 with 45.5 per cent coming from Africa.
Highway Africa News Agency

The Maltese-based international non-profit organisation, the DiploFoundation has trained a total of 265 persons on its Internet Governance Capacity Building Programme (IGCBP) from developing countries since 2003 with 45.5 per cent coming from Africa.

This shows that Africa is on top of the beneficiaries, leaving the rest of the developing countries with a total figure of 182, about 55 per cent.

Diplo, an independent foundation established in November 2002 by the governments of Malta and Switzerland as a joint project, focuses on assisting all countries of the world, particularly those with limited human and financial resources to use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for diplomatic activities.

Head, Internet Governance Projects at DiploFoundation, Ms Yasmeen Ariff, while making this known to Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), noted that ICT tools have become an integral part of everyday work for diplomats and others involved in international relations in developed countries.

She said that IGCB programme has been streamlined with resources to develop the skills and knowledge required to participate meaningfully in the global debate on Internet Governance (IG). Ms Ariff also said that the programme, which began in 2005, embodies support from partner institutions and individuals with expertise in Internet Governance-related issues.

According to her, the 2005 IGCBP was an innovative pilot programme, which provided a timely low cost-effective training as the first of its kind and consisted of an online training phase, a research phase and fellowships awarded to the top participants.

HANA checks at the time of filing this report revealed that Nigeria topped the number of beneficiaries from the continent, since the programme commenced with nine (9) participants, followed by Kenya 8, Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tunisia 5 respectively, while South Africa got, Egypt, Gambia 4 in that order.

The West African countries of Ghana, and Cameroon led those with three (3) participants in addition to Congo, Congo DRC, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, while Morocco, Sudan, Togo and Tanzania got 2 each, even as Somalia, Guinea, Mali, Liberia, Burkina Faso and Benin as well as Botswana had 1 respectively.

This year alone, a total of 120 participants were selected with 48 coming from Africa, Asia 16, Europe 15, Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) 15, Spanish LAC 15, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 14, and South-Eastern Asia Pacific (SEAP) 15.

Meanwhile, a virtual graduation ceremony has been slated to hold on Wednesday, July 4 after completing a 16-week of online training.

Kenya: 1,000 managers to be trained for digital villages

2007-07-05

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

The Kenya government is launching a Digital Village Project to establish information and communications technology centres throughout the country. To jump-start the process, the programme is designed to train 1,000 digital village managers to manage the centres in the 210 constituencies in the country.

Rwanda: Rwanda leads Africa in ICT revolution

2007-07-05

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=38423

Less than fifteen years after the genocide that destroyed much of Rwanda's human capital, infrastructure, and socio-economic fabric, the country is set to become sub-Saharan Africa's hub for information and communications technology (ICT).

West Africa: Benin to host first West African E-content Summit

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/42453

A summit to discuss e-content strategies for the West African region under the theme:"Improving Digital Lifestyles in Sub-Saharan Africa" is due in Benin. The e-content summit is expected to be opened by the President of the Republic of Benin, H.E. Dr. Thomas Boni Yayi. Meanwhile the Benin-based World Summit Award (WSA) partner, Afrique Emergence and the Government of the Republic of Benin will be the co- hosts.
Highway Africa News Agency

A summit to discuss e-content strategies for the West African region under the theme:"Improving Digital Lifestyles in Sub-Saharan Africa" is due in Benin. The e-content summit is expected to be opened by the President of the Republic of Benin, H.E. Dr. Thomas Boni Yayi. Meanwhile the Benin-based World Summit Award (WSA) partner, Afrique Emergence and the Government of the Republic of Benin will be the co- hosts.

The summit starts from July 12-14, 2007, and will be the first West African E- content summit in Cotonou.

The 'Benin e-Content Summit 2007' is a unique gathering which primarily aims at giving to African ICT Leaders an opportunity to discuss how e-Content can help to foster developments in the western region of the African continent.

High-level representatives from the ICT industry (Internet service providers & mobile operators), governments, civil society, academia, private sector and international organizations from over 42 countries are expected to discuss on topics set around the theme: 'Improving Digital Lifestyles in Sub-Saharan Africa', in order to identify specific needs of people in least developed and developing countries in the fast-growing digital content industry from the user's point of view, and what it takes to deliver appropriate e-Content models for today's marketplace in Africa.

The participants to this summit, the first of this kind in Benin, will also explore current and future lifestyles in Sub-Saharan Africa and how they could be more effectively shaped by ICTs.

According to Mr. Hermann Rodrigue APLOGAN, President of Afrique Emergence and WSA Representative in Benin, the E-content Summit will serve as a starting point for the launching of official discussions that would lead to the establishment of the 'Pan African Agency for New Media', advocated to provide training courses in new media management for young people in Africa in order to help them to bridge the Content Gap.

Among the keynotes speakers to the summit, the organizers expect the presence of H.E. Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary General of International Telecommunication Union, Dr. Cheick Modibo Diarra, President of Microsoft Africa, and Mr. Etienne Sinatambou, Minister of Information Technology and Telecommunications of Mauritius.

The President of Afrique Emergence said that the World Summit Award network will be actively involved and special emphasis will be placed to present WSA winners and to meet with each other. This will help to create new partnerships in Africa's main regions, and share experiences with both African and international producers.

The West African E-content summit will be closed by a pre-selection ceremony of Benin best E-contents to be presented to the final competition of World Summit Award in November 2007.

Africa: Call for Authors - Africa History and Culture

2007-07-07

http://sociolingo.wordpress.com/tag/academic/african-jobs/

ABC-CLIO is in the process of developing a comprehensive 21-volume Encyclopedia of World History. We are looking for interested scholars to prepare 500-1500 word articles with a global perspective in the area of African History and Culture. contributors will have their names associated with the entries they contribute, and will receive access to the e-book version of the entire encyclopedia (list price $1,800) for personal use. Contributors assigned 3,000 words or more will also receive a credit of $300 towards purchase of ABC-CLIO books.

Call for Abstracts - AGENDA

Rape Journal

2007-07-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/42364

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS - RAPE JOURNAL Call for Abstracts. Abstracts and contributions must be written in English language and a style accessible to a wide audience. Please submit abstracts to editor@agenda.org.za

All abstract submissions must:

* Specify the specific key area you would like to write on;
* Count 200-300 words;
* Include contact details: your name, institution/organisation, telephone, email and the country in which you reside/country of origin.

Deadline: Please submit no later than 11 July 2007.

Global: Codesria South-South Comparative Research Seminars

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/42441

The Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA), the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) are pleased to call for applications for participation in the South-South comparative research seminar series they are organising within the framework of the initiative. The seminar will take place in Accra, Ghana, from 21 to 23 September, 2007.
APISA – CLACSO - CODESRIA South-South Comparative Research Seminars
Theme: Regionalism in the South and the New Global Hegemony Dates: 21 - 23 September, 2007
Venue: Accra, Ghana.

Call for Applications
The Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA), the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) are pleased to announce the Africa/Asia/Latin America scholarly collaborative initiative encompassing joint research, training, publishing and dissemination activities by researchers drawn from across the global South, and to call for applications for participation in the South-South comparative research seminar series they are organising within the framework of the initiative. The theme that has been selected for the third seminar being hosted under the auspices of CODESRIA is: Regionalism in the South and the New Global Hegemony. The seminar will take place in Accra, Ghana, from 21 to 23 September, 2007.

Within the ambit of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA collaboration, a series of activities and programmes has been scheduled for implementation over the period to the end of 2007, among them three annual comparative research seminars. The seminars are designed to serve as a research forum for the generation of fresh and original comparative insights on the diverse problems and challenges facing the countries of the South. In doing so, it is hoped also that the seminars will contribute to the revival and consolidation of inter-regional networking among Southern researchers, foster a culture of Southern scholarly cross-referencing, and contribute to a type of theory-building that is more closely attuned to the shared historical contexts and experiences of the countries and peoples of the South. The seminars are rotated among the three continents where the lead collaborating institutions are located, namely, Africa, Asia and Latin America. This way, participants in the seminars who are also drawn from all three continents are exposed to the socio-historical contexts of other regions of the South as an input towards the broadening of their analytical perspectives and the improvement of the overall quality of their scientific engagements. The inaugural seminar was held on the African continent, with Pretoria, South Africa, serving as the host city; other seminars have been held in Kampala, Uganda; Caracas, Venezuela;Bangkok, Thailand; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and San Jose, Costa Rica.

1. OBJECTIVES:

The underlying objective of the comparative research seminars is to offer participants an opportunity to transcend the limitations of received wisdom emanating from structures and processes of knowledge production and dissemination that are characterised by various degrees and layers of inequality. In doing so, it is hoped both to motivate and equip participants in the seminars with the critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that might be appropriate for gaining a full understanding of the specific situation of countries and peoples located outside the core of the contemporary international system. The main premise for this effort is the glaring inadequacy of the theories and methodologies developed in the North, and crystallised in the mainstream social sciences, to provide the required instruments for the attainment of a sound and holistic understanding of the problems confronting – and, in many cases, overwhelming the countries of the South. Through the seminars, it is hoped to be able to mobilise scholars from across the South to reflect on the alternatives that are available for overcoming the present situation. This way, the seminars will contribute to the promotion of a better understanding of the theories and methodological approaches developed in different regions of the South as alternatives to the dominant, Northern-biased paradigms that have shaped the social sciences. It is also expected that participants will become acquainted with the local intellectual environment in the regions where different sessions of the seminar are hosted, and strengthen their comparative research capacities in the process. In sum, the seminars are structured to serve as a unique forum for enhancing a deeper understanding among Southern scholars of the history, politics, economy and culture of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and offer an opportunity to participants to develop long-lasting collaborative relationships with their counterparts from other Southern countries.

2. ELIGIBILITY FOR PARTICIPATION:

Scholars resident in countries of the South and who are pursuing active academic careers are eligible to apply to participate in the seminars. Each applicant should have an advanced university education and an established track record of research and publishing in any of the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Selection for participation will be on the basis of a competitive process. All together, 12 people will be selected for participation in the institute on the basis of four each from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The full participation costs of the selected laureates will be covered, including their travel costs (economy return air tickets), accommodation and subsistence.

3. COORDINATION:

Each seminar in the series is convened and coordinated by an experienced Southern scholar recognised for the versatility of his/her knowledge, acknowledged for his/her skills in applying the comparative methodology, and known either for the depth of work s/he has done in different regions of the South or for his/her capacity to draw on experiences from across the South in his/her writings. The convenor/coordinator will be responsible for establishing the comparative framework for the seminar and will work with each participant to determine his or her primary area of focus. S/he will also undertake the task of synthetising results produced by the researchers into one major publication that will be designed to serve as a major statement on the theme of the seminar.
4. THE 2007 SEMINAR: For the 2007 session of the South-South comparative research seminar that is to take in Africa, it has been decided by APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA to host it in Accra, Ghana. CODESRIA will assume overall responsibility within the tri-continental partnership for the session. The local institutional host in Accra that will be working closely with CODESRIA in managing the seminar is the Third World Network (Africa). The seminar will run from 21 to 23 September, 2007. It is a requirement that prospective laureates should have a demonstrable working knowledge of the English language. APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA will work together with the local host to facilitate the procurement of entry visas to Ghana for the prospective participants whose applications are successful. At the end of the seminar, each participant will be expected to produce a publishable article which will be considered for inclusion in the book of proceedings that will be issued.

The theme of regionalism is one which has enjoyed a new lease of life in research and policy circles over the last decade or so, after a period of lull – even outright disinterest – premised on various considerations, including the lackluster performance of some of the regional integration and cooperation schemes that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, political conflicts/rivalries among some of the cooperating partner-countries as the fervour of the struggle for independence waned, and the ideological hostility that was manifest in the 1980s and 1990s towards South-South regional schemes. In the context of the structural adjustment programmes that were vigorously promoted across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, regional integration and cooperation projects were distinctly discouraged as a strategic policy option that was passé, particularly for developing countries. The political and geo-strategic sources of opposition to South-South integration and cooperation schemes were clear enough; during the 1980s and 1990s, an array of new technical arguments was deployed to complement pre-existing political hostility to regional cooperation among the countries of the South. South-South regional schemes were not only considered to be inefficient and sub-optimal, they were also treated as trade-diverting and market-distorting; global economic welfare, it was argued, would be better served by the World Trade Organisation framework and mixed North-South cooperation schemes structured around a hub-and-spoke model.

The discouragement of South-South regional cooperation during the 1980s and 1990s went hand-in-hand with the vigorous promotion of structural adjustment programmes across the South. However, the poor record of the structural adjustment programmes themselves, together with the international geo-political and economic re-alignments arising from the end of the old East-West Cold War, the worsening of the structural imbalances in the international economic system by the rapid push for the liberalization of local markets and international trade and financial flows, and the emergence of new global hegemonic pressures combined to revive the idea of regionalism and to spur the investment of new energies in various kinds of integration and cooperation schemes across the international system, North and South. This revival was manifested across the global South through the revamping and/or rationalisation of existing cooperation and integration schemes, as well as the launching of new initiatives. Some of the cooperation and integration schemes were launched or revived as part of the generalised responses in different parts of the world to the real and/or anticipated pressures of globalisation. But at the same time, global hegemonic forces in the North also introduced a variety of cooperation and integration schemes that promised the expansion of some existing trade and investment zones and the creation of new ones even as they pressed for the application by key countries of the South of the WTO’s provisions for trade in services, including but not limited to financial services. Several of the schemes that were introduced were led by the key Northern powers and were meant to incorporate countries of the South; they constituted a central component of the new hegemonic processes in the post-Cold War global system. From the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas which seemed designed to rival - if not undermine the MERCOSUR arrangement – to the EU’s scheme for Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with various African and Caribbean sub-regional groupings, and the pursuit by the US of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the notion of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) zone, the exercise of new hegemony has mainly expressed itself through trade- and investment-based integration and cooperation schemes that are also designed to produce big power geo-political and strategic security dividends whilst preserving economic dominance. The response in the South to this new expression of hegemonic power by the United States and the European Union has been fragmented and dispersed, evidenced most clearly in the stymied debate over the restructuring of the international development/financial architecture and the reform of the United Nations system. Within this fragmented and dispersed Southern response, there have been elements of defiance. The most prominent of these are centred on the World Social Forum movement and its campaign for an alternative, people-driven globalisation, Hugo Chavez’s counter-hegemonic Bolivarian alternative for the Americas, attempts at the revival of the spirit of Bandung, and the pursuit of tri-continental strategic coordination as in the case of the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa). Nevertheless, in a majority of cases, acquiescence to the projects of the hegemonic forces borne out of various factors and considerations seems to be the dominant policy response in the South to the new global hegemony, an indication of the weakened position of much of the global South in the post-Cold War global order. Participants in the 2007 workshop will be invited to reflect on these issues, drawing examples from the different regions of the global South to examine on-going processes of regionalism, the range of issues arising from them, the new patterns of hegemony that underpin the international political economy, attempts at the development of counter-hegemonic responses, and what the new hegemonic processes mean for the future of integration and cooperation in the South.
5. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS:

Every researcher wishing to be considered for selection as one of the 12 scholars to be invited to participate in any of the comparative research seminars organised within the framework of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA tri-continental partnership is required to submit an application that will comprise the following key items of documentation:

a) An outline research proposal, written in English, on the subject on which s/he would like to work. The topic selected must be related to the theme of the seminar and should have a demonstrable comparative potential. Proposals should not exceed 10 pages in length and should have a clearly defined problematic which can be followed through further research and culminate in a publishable scientific paper; b) A covering letter, of one-page, which should indicate the motivation of the prospective researcher for wanting to participate in the seminar series and explaining how they envisage that they and their institution will benefit from the programme; c) An updated Curriculum Vitae complete with the names of the professional and personal references of the researcher, the scientific discipline(s) in which s/he is working, the nationality of the applicant, a list of recent publications, and a summary of the on-going research activities in which the applicant is involved; and d) A photocopy of the highest university degree obtained by the applicant and of the relevant pages of his/her international passport containing relevant identity data;
6. APPLICATION PROCEDURES AND DEADLINE As the comparative research seminars involve the participation of researchers from Africa, Asia and Latin America, it has been decided that applicants resident in Africa should submit their applications to CODESRIA, those resident in Asia to APISA and those resident in Latin America to CLACSO. The full contact details for APISA, CLACSO AND CODESRIA are reproduced below for the attention of all prospective applicants. The deadline for the receipt of applications is 17 August, 2007. Applications found to be incomplete or which arrive after the deadline will not be taken into consideration.

An independent Selection Committee charged with screening all applications received will meet shortly after the deadline for the receipt of applications. Successful applicants will be notified immediately the Selection Committee completes it work. Notification of results will be dome by e-mail, fax and post. The results of the selection exercise will also be published on the websites of APISA, CLACSO and CODESRIA.

Latin American and Caribbean applicants should send their applications to:

CLACSO, (2007 South-South Comparative Research Seminar)

Callao 875, 3º (1023) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA Tel: (54 11) 4811-6588 / 4814-2301; Fax: (54 11) 4812-845 E-mail: programa_sur-sur@campus.clacso.edu.ar Website: www.clacso.org Asian applicants should send their applications to:

APISA, (2007 South-South Comparative Research Seminar)

Strategic Studies and International Relations Program Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, MALAYSIA Tel: 603- 89213647; Fax: 603-89213332 E-Mail: secretariat@apisanet.org Website: www.apisainfo.org African applicants should send their applications to: CODESRIA, (2007 South-South Comparative Research Seminar), BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, SENEGAL Tel: (221) 825 9822: Fax: (221) 824 1289 E-mail: south.seminar@codesria.sn Website: http://www.codesria.org

Global: International Course Training the Trainers (Radio, Television & Internet)

2007-07-04

http://www.rnw.nl/rntc/studyatrntc/rntc_ttt_2008.php

The course runs from 19th May to 28th June 2008, and aims to strengthen the capacity of trainers, training organisers and educators working in or for the broadcast sector to assess training needs and design, develop and deliver effective and efficient training solutions. These training solutions will enable broadcast organisations to meet the challenges of increased competition, technological change and professional mobility and to improve the quality and appropriateness of their output.

Global: Migrants and making of Indian Ocean cultures - conference

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/42446

School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London will be hosting a conference on Migrants and making of Indian Ocean cultures on Wednesday 11 July 2007. Cross-cultural Outcomes from the dispersal and movement of peoples and cultures within the Indian Ocean will be the main theme of this Conference.
MIGRANTS AND THE MAKING OF INDIAN OCEAN CULTURES

WEDNESDAY 11TH JULY 2007

10.00 am to 5.30 pm School of Oriental & African Studies (Room G50, Ground Floor)
University of London Russell Square London, WC1 (Underground Stations: Russell Square, Euston, Goodge Street)

Cross-cultural Outcomes from the dispersal and movement of peoples and cultures within the Indian Ocean will be the main theme of this Conference. Given the focus on transAtlantic slavery in 2007, we have decided to bring to the fore, the eastwards migration of Africans and also the multidirectional movement of other ethnic groups in the Indian Ocean.

PROGRAMME
10.00 am Registration & Welcome: Shihan de Silva & Clifford Pereira
10.10 am Animals as Ambassadors between India and Africa Richard Pankhurst (Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia)

10.30 am Early European Voyagers in the Indian Ocean Bernhard Klein (University of Essex)

10.50 am Migrants and the Maldives: Mapping Island Cultures Shihan de Silva (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London)

11.10-11.25 am Discussion
11.25-11.40 am Coffee
11.40 am Middle Eastern cultural brokers in the Philippines from the 18th century William Gervase Clarence-Smith (School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London)

12.00 am From Rigging to Boiler Room: The history of the East African seamen employed by the British Royal and Merchant Navies Clifford Pereira (Royal Geographical Society, London)

12.20 pm The East India Company and the Lascars in India Marika Sherwood (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London)

12.40-12.55 pm Discussion
12.55-2.00 pm Lunch Break
2.00 pm From the Ocean to the Lakes: Cultural Transformations of Yemenis in Kenya and Uganda Susan Beckerleg (University of Warwick)

2.20 pm The Myth of the Sultans in the Western Indian Ocean during the 19th century: A New Hypothesis Beatrice Nicolini (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy)

2.40 pm The novel form and Indian Ocean modernity: the portrayal of migrant cultures in the works of M. G. Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah Stephanie Jones (Southampton University)

3.10-3.25 pm Discussion
3.25 pm Social and Intercultural Relations in 19th century Zanzibar Ivan van der Biesen (Katholik University, Leuven, Belgium)

3.45 pm Indian music and taarab in Zanzibar Janet Topp Fargion (British Library Sound Archive, London)

4.05 pm Tawaif Singers and the Gramophone Company: Technologies of the Self and Music Recording in Colonial India Shweta Sachdeva (School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London)
4.25 pm-4.40 pm Discussion
4.40-4.55 pm Tea
4.55 pm A Discussion on the Spread and Practice of Buddhism in the Indian Ocean*
Richard Gombrich (Balliol College, University of Oxford)

5.15 pm Concluding Session: Marika Sherwood
5.20 pm Indian Ocean Galleries at the National Maritime Museum John McAleer (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

*Please e-mail your questions for the discussion session with Professor Richard Gombrich to Shihan de Silva (shihan.desilva@sas.ac.uk) or Clifford Pereira (cliffjpereira@hotmail.com )

Limited number of places available. For reservations e-mail the above. Registration at the Door

Kenya: Digital Storytelling!

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/42391

APC-Africa-Women, in partnership with Women'sNet, invite you to submit an application to participate in a digital storytelling workshop. This workshop is aimed at women who document (as content developers, librarians, archivists, journalists, mediators, translators, information activists etc.) the lives of women affected by violence in Africa.

Deadline 19th July

For more information see the APC website at: http://www.apcwomen.org

Silences in NGO discourse: The role and future of NGOs in Africa

Issa G Shivji

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/publications/42397

Issa Shivji has long been one of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence.

In two extensive essays in this book, he shows that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. Aid, in which NGOs play a significant role, is frequently portrayed as a form of altruism, a charitable act that enables the wealthy to help the poor. As structural adjustment programmes were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programmes to minimise the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished – and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa.

If social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, argues Shivji, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today.

Issa Shivji is one of Africa’s most radical and original thinkers and has written frequently for Pambazuka News. He is the author of several books, including the seminal Concept of Human Rights in Africa (1989) and, more recently, Let the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neoliberalism (2006).

ISBN: 978-0-9545637-5-2. 84pp, July 2007, Oxford: Fahamu
Price £7.95

For further information and details of how to order, please see http://www.fahamu.org/pzbook.php For review or inspection copies, or any additional information, please contact Stephanie Kitchen, Publications Manager, stephanie@fahamu.org

From the slave trade to ‘free’ trade: How trade undermines democracy and justice in Africa

Edited by Patrick Burnett and Firoze Manji

2007-07-05

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/publications/42396

Leading up to the 200th commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade and the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, Pambazuka News carried a series of four special issues during 2006 and 2007 that included articles designed to raise awareness and debate on issues of trade and justice. These and other articles from Pambazuka News have been gathered in this book.

We have chosen a deliberately provocative subtitle for this book: ‘How trade undermines democracy and justice’. Two years ago saw large mobilisations around the world, calling for ‘trade justice’. The campaigners were lobbying for the introduction and implementation of new world trade rules, ones that would work for all people, instead of benefiting those who already have the most. They argued that the global trading system should be rebalanced, taking into account the needs of the poor, human rights and the environment.

But, can trade in the era of globalisation be ‘fair’ or ‘just’?

Drawing on lessons from the slave trade, studies of the international finance institutions and the struggles of many African people to make a living, these essays provide insights into how free trade policies have a profoundly negative impact on democracy and justice in Africa. Whether it is the effects of trade policies on informal street traders, who in Africa are often women, the decimation of a country’s health system as a result of the World Bank’s obsession with low inflation, or the sacrificing of community rights in the interests of multinational corporations, it is clear that ‘free’ trade policies impose a profit first and people last regime in Africa.

Many of the book’s contributors will be familiar to the readers of Pambazuka News. They include Charles Abugre, Tope Akinwande, Soren Ambrose, Nnimmo Bassey, Patrick Bond, Jennifer Chiriga, Cheikh Tidiane Dièye, M.P. Giyose, Manu Herbstein, Mouhamadou Tidiane Kasse, Salma Maoulidi, Stephen Marks, Mariam Mayet, Henning Melber, Winnie Mitullah, Patrick Ochieng, Oduor Ongwen, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Liepollo Lebohang Pheko and Jagjit Plahe.

The publication of this book was made possible with the support of HIVOS, www.hivos.nl

ISBN: 978-0-9545637-1-4. 180pp, July 2007, Oxford and Nairobi: Fahamu
Price £11.95

For further information and details of how to order, please see http://www.fahamu.org/pzbook.php For review or inspection copies, or any additional information, please contact Stephanie Kitchen, Publications Manager, stephanie@fahamu.org

Paulin Houtondji (ed): La rationalite, une ou plurielle

New titles from CODESRIA

2007-07-06

http://www.codesria.org/Links/Publications/new_publ/Hountondji.htm

Edited by one of Africa's foremost intellectuals, former deputy chair of CODESRIA and deputy chair of the International Council of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (ICPHS), this work investigates how reason, an attribute of all of humanity, expresses itself in different cultures, in diverse, plural and unified forms.

The extensive and comprehenive work is divided into three parts, on explorations of 'rationality', rationalities and cultures, and theoretical and social practices. Essays in both French and English are included.

The work stems from a conferences organised by Unesco and the Centre africain des hautes etudes in Porto-Novo, Benin to coincide with the 26th general assembly of the ICPHS.

The contributors of over 36 chapters include Richard Rorty, Bonaventure Mve-Ondo, Honorat Aguessy, Abdoulaye Elimane Kane and Ariane Djossou-Segla.

ISBN: 978-2-86978-181-8, 476pp., 2007 CODESRIA
Orders - Africa, www.codesria.org
N.America - Michigan State Univ. Press, www.msupress.msu.edu
Elsewhere - African Books Collective, www.africanbookscollective.com

Africa: Executive Secretary - AAWORD

2007-07-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/42449

The Association of African Women for Research & Development (AAWORD) invites applications from suitably qualified African Women scholars/administrators for the post of Executive Secretary (ES). This position is the highest management post in the Secretariat and the successful candidate shall be responsible for the overall day-to-day management of the Secretariat and the affairs of the association. The deadline for applications is July 20th, 2007.
AAWORD Vacancy Announcement
Executive Secretary

The Association of African Women for Research & Development (AAWORD) invites applications from suitably qualified African Women scholars/administrators for the post of Executive Secretary (ES). This position is the highest management post in the Secretariat and the successful candidate shall be responsible for the overall day-to-day management of the Secretariat and the affairs of the association.

Established in 1977 with its headquarters in Dakar, Senegal, AAWORD is a Pan African, Non-governmental and Non-profit making association of African women researchers and activists. Its membership is composed of twenty-two National Chapters with eight regions representing East Africa, West Africa (Anglophone and Francophone), North Africa, Central Africa, Lusophone Africa, Europe and America. The goal of the Association is to work towards the creation of value-driven, democratic and egalitarian societies in Africa, that recognize in their constituencies women's fundamental rights on the basis of the principle of equality of women and men and as individuals and as citizens.

The position of the Executive Secretary is strategic within the association both in the development of the programme mandate of AAWORD and the realisation of the strategic institutional objectives set by the General Assembly of its members. The successful candidate will:

• Take a lead role in designing and developing the Association's programme of work, schedule of activities, networking with National Chapters, maintaining communication with members of the Association and carrying out the tasks in according with existing constitutional rules and strategies.

• Be responsible for undertaking advocacy, public information and public relations roles in the interest of the Association
• Undertake fund-raising and mobilisation of other resources to secure the growth and sustainability of the Association.

• Implement the strategic plan of the Association for the realisation of the institutional mission and objectives; and
• Develop proposals for the funding of the work of the Association in liaison with the Executive Committee

QUALIFICATIONS Applicants must:

• Have a sound university education and at least 10 years of Post-doctoral experience in a research environment or 10 years experience in administration at a similar level.

• Have a good knowledge of theoretical and empirical debates concerning gender-related issues in Africa.

• Possess a demonstrable ability to mobilise and promote the work of the Association.

• Have a proven experience in fund-raising, resource management, proposal preparation and budgetary forecast.

• Have demonstrable skills in the management of personnel in a diversified, multi-cultural environment; and
• Be fluent in French or English and have a good working knowledge of the other language
• Knowledge of Arabic, Spanish or Portuguese will be an added advantage.

Applicants with the qualifications set out and wishing to spend sabbatical leave will be seriously considered.

WORKING CONDITIONS The salary level that will be offered will be attractive and comparable to those of similar posts in international NGOs.

HOW TO APPLY Please send a written application, detailed curriculum vitae describing your professional experience; three to four samples of scholarly work; and three references to:

The President AAWORD/AFARD Sicap Sacre Coeur 1 Villa No. 8798, B.P 15367 Dakar-Fann, Senegal Email: aaword@orange.sn / cc : malikabenradi@yahoo.fr Fax No.: (221) 824 20 56 CLOSING DATE: July 20th, 2007

Global: Armed Violence and Peace Process Consultants - Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue

2007-07-07

http://tinyurl.com/yt8ck4

The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue’s Arms Programme is seeking expressions of interest from consultants to take on assignments varying in length from one to three/four months. Application deadline is 27 July 2007

Global: Litigation Director - Open Society Justice Initiative

2007-07-07

http://www.justiceinitiative.org/about/positions

The Justice Initiative is seeking a Litigation Director to develop, oversee, and refine as needed the strategic direction and implementation of all litigation activity by the Justice Initiative. In carrying out this cross-cutting activity, the Litigation Director collaborates closely with staff in each of the thematic and geographic programs of the Justice Initiative. Start Date: October 2007.

Kenya: Program Officer - Research Matters

2007-07-07

http://www.idrc.ca/ev_en.php?ID=113410_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

Research Matters is recruiting a Program Officer to join the team, based out of IDRC’s Nairobi office. S/he will develop and implement projects and activities approved under the Research Matters project description and Governance, Equity and Health (GEH) prospectus, with particular emphasis on liaison with research users and close collaboration with SDC staff and partners in the field and in Berne. Closing Date is July 19, 2007.

Fahamu