Back Issues

Liberia ratifies African Women's Rights Protocol

2008-07-18

The African Union has acknowledged receipt of Liberia’s instrument of ratification of the African Women’s Rights Protocol bringing the total ratifications to 24. Congratulations to all!

Mandela on my poster

2008-07-16

Bill Fletcher

It is humbling and unsettling attempting to appraise the significance of an icon, especially at the time of that icon's 90th birthday. Nevertheless, we must honor Nelson Mandela while at the same time situating him in a broader and complicated context.

In important respects there are several different 'Nelson Mandelas.' For many of us who were active in and around the anti-apartheid support movement, Nelson Mandela became the face of the South African liberation struggle. This was true not only for activists, but also for much of the rest of the sympathetic world. In this respect the campaign to free him was much more than a demand for the freedom of one individual, but represented a mass means of protesting the illegitimacy and injustice of the apartheid regime.

The 'second' Nelson Mandela was the post-prison/pre-president Mandela. Here we witnessed Nelson Mandela serving as the hero, negotiator, and unifier. Taking charge of the African National Congress's efforts to bring about democratic rule, he, ultimately, decided upon significant compromises that ended apartheid. Mandela should not be credited or criticized for the decisions of this era as if they were done by one individual alone. The ANC had concluded that a military victory over the apartheid regime was unlikely and, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a new international political situation had emerged. The 1994 democratic elections are a tribute to the work of Mandela and the ANC leadership, but the compromises that were made during the period of negotiations were controversial. Political rule was turned over to the Black majority, but the economy remained largely in the hands of the whites who had dominated the country.

The 'third' Nelson Mandela could be seen during his term as President of South Africa. While steps were taken immediately to eliminate all vestiges of the apartheid regime, the ANC--under his leadership--chose to reject a previous progressive economic development approach and, instead, institute a very pro-privatization/pro-"free market" program known as "Growth, Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR). GEAR turned the entire pre-liberation approach of the ANC on its head and instead emphasized integrating South Africa into the capitalist global market, removing trade barriers, and promoting privatization. It did little to address the mammoth wealth divide in the country or the burning land question (which would later explode in neighboring Zimbabwe). Although GEAR is often blamed on (or credited to, depending on one's point of view) then Deputy (and now current) President Thabo Mbeki, the reality is that it was under the watch of President Nelson Mandela that South Africa opted in a direction that many international observers and friends found surprising and unsettling. It should be added that during this time period, President Mandela, despite the pressure of the USA and others to repudiate friends of South African freedom such as Cuba and Libya, stood firm and attempted to strengthen the forces in the global South advocating peace and self-determination. Nevertheless, South Africa was increasingly drawn into the web created by global capitalism, inhibiting its ability to complete what the ANC had described as the "national democratic revolution."

The 'fourth' Nelson Mandela is the post-Presidency Mandela. Generally speaking he has been an outspoken human rights advocate taking very strong and public stands against the US invasion of Iraq, as well as stands against his successor--Mbeki--on the failure of the South African government to fully confront the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He has been among a group of world leaders, such as former US President James (Jimmy) Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have spoken out on behalf of human rights, whether in the Darfur region of the Sudan or in occupied Palestine. Mandela, though weakening with age, has reemerged as a beacon of hope and struggle for true justice.

All this said, it is important for us to recognize that the triumphs and challenges faced by Nelson Mandela are illustrative of the contradictions we are living through with the collapse of what Egyptian theorist Samir Amin terms the "national populist projects." This is an expression referring to the post-World War II efforts at national independence and liberation in the so-called Third World that chose not to travel down the path toward socialism, but also attempted to be non-aligned in the Cold War. The crisis, to which Amin refers, hit South Africa in the mid1990s over the question of the path toward reconstruction and development. The leadership of the African National Congress apparently concluded that it had to cut the best deal that it could with global capitalism and that charting a truly independent and transformative path was unrealistic. Many people inside and outside South Africa hoped--and continue to hope--for a different conclusion and different route.

Nevertheless, Nelson Mandela remains my hero. Precisely because Mandela is human, rather than a god, he is not perfect and not above contradictions. He has been, however, a voice for rationality in a world that seems to increasingly succumb to the irrational; a voice for justice, in a world that often seems to tolerate some of the worst forms of injustice. He has also been a person of tremendous courage who resisted pressures to give up or to despair that many others would not have been able to withstand. For whatever else he will always be the Nelson Mandela imprinted on my old--but preserved--anti-apartheid poster: Defiant and dignified always.

Happy birthday, comrade Mandela!

*Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of BlackCommentator.com. He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum. He is the co-author of the recently published "Solidarity Divided" which analyzes the crisis of organized labor in the USA.

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

Mandela: A diaspora view

2008-07-16

Walter Turner

"I understand that there are South Africans here tonight - some of whom have been involved in the long struggle for freedom there. In our struggle for freedom and justice in the United States, which has also been so long and arduous, we feel a powerful sense of identification with those in the far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa. We know how Africans there, and their friends of other races, strove for half a century to win their freedom by non-violent methods. We have honoured Chief Lutuli for his leadership, and we know how this non-violence was only met by increasing violence from the state, increasing repression, culminating in the shootings of Sharpeville and all that has happened since…Today great leaders - Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe - are among many hundreds wasting away in Robben Island prison.

-Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (London 1964)

In the eyes of the African Diaspora Nelson Mandela came to represent an image that was “larger than life.” In his years of prominence Mandela represented the deep historical voices of Black Nationalism and the Pan African dreams of a cross Atlantic Ocean connection. Nelson Mandela was a voice for a world wide struggle for African liberation and a global movement that would by 1990 secure his release from the prisons of South Africa.

The roots of the Pan African connection extend well beyond the beginnings of the Pan African Congresses of the early 20th century. These early efforts would be continued in the organizing of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Harlem Renaissance, the Council on African Affairs, and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. As the African American movement increased its challenges to racism and exclusion the voices of Black Nationalism were fueled with the three visits of Malcolm X to Africa, the leadership of Kwame Ture, the Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the consistent presence of Queen Mother Moore.

Malcolm X emphasized the urgency of a Pan Africanist struggle when he presented his last major speech of 1965 “The Last Message”- one week before his assassination. In that speech Malcolm highlighted the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and spoke clearly on the complicity of the United States and Western powers in the events in South Africa. A few years earlier the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had declared in its founding manifesto that “we identify ourselves with the Africa struggle as a concern for all mankind. “ If there was one African leader that represented that Pan African struggle in the latter part of the 20th century, it was indeed Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

African Americans in the Diaspora knew well of Kwame Nkrumah, the Mau Mau in Kenya, Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Samora Machel in Mozambique, and Amilcar Cabral in Portuguese Guinea. Mandela’s legacy for African Americans was that he was one part of a growing awareness of southern African and the entire African continent. The same zeal that African American communities and their supporters brought to the anti apartheid struggle was manifested in support of SWAPO, FRELIMO, ZANU, ZAPU, and the PAIGC. It was however, South African that was seen as the almost invincible levee that ensured white privilege and colonialism throughout the “Motherland.” At times we chose to debate our allegiances to either the PAC, the ANC, ZANU or ZAPU. At the end of the day our goal was to ensure that there was a victory for African people on the African continent.

It was a remarkable nation wide movement with Nelson Mandela as the “stamp” that reached into churches, labor unions, universities, organizations, and grassroots communities. When we sponsored anti apartheid benefits , and raised high the demand of freeing Nelson Mandela it was in many senses about finishing some parts of a Civil Rights Movements that had been left semi done.

Perhaps it is too early to make a thorough analysis of Nelson Mandela and his transition from liberation fighter to president to diplomat. The liberation that we all fought for of the African continent is not yet in its final stages-either in Africa or abroad. It is not however too early to realize that African liberation and self determination will require much more than timely rhetoric. Its mandatory that Pan Africanists remain engaged with Africa and the struggles throughout the Diaspora with the same principles that we utilized to ensure the release of Nelson Mandela.

Happy 90th Birthday!

*Walter Turner is host of Africa Today, KPFA Radio (www.kpfa.org), co- author of "Africa Libertation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000" and Chairperson of the Social Sciences Department, College of Marin.

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

Mandela as South Africa's metaphor

2008-07-16

Andile Mngxitama

Mandela is, in some ways the perfect embodiment of post colonial Africa, a continent blessed with so many possibilities but consistently producing so much disappointment. The African dream of liberation has become a long nightmare. As Mandela turns 90 the country he helped found some 14 years ago is in a mighty mess. Its hatred of black people has reached the apex with the mass slaughtering and displacement of black Africans (apparently a good 20 or more of the more than 60 dead are South Africans). Post 1994, has been much celebrated for the benefits it bestowed upon a few, silence has befallen the fate of the black majority which has been bequeathed a bestial existence.

Mandela’s 85th birth day was a Coca Cola affair. The multinational corporation was given full rights to throw a party for our founding father. Coke milked his name dry, everything was branded, serviettes to programme - the whole affair was televised live. This forced a friend to remark that we need another “Free Nelson Mandela Campaign." At 90 Mandela must be allowed his well deserved rest. But it’s hard to think of this likable man of the 20th century Africa outside politics. He is resistance, Robben Island, freedom, magnanimity, compromise and hope for many, but what is his real legacy?

A few years ago Chinweizu wondered loudly about the icon of liberation who voluntarily builds his house as a replica of the prison house he was kept him during the last days towards his release. Who build a prison for a house? Our Mandela is a symbol, like his country, of things shiny and good and things horrendous.

Prof Wole Soyinka was moved to comment on the “soulless truly horrendous” sculpture of Mandela which presides over the Mandela Square in Sandton our Mecca of consumption, which lives cheek by jowl with the sprawling Alexandra township. Sandton feeds on the blood of Alexandra, the place from which the recent spade of Negrophobic attacks emanates. Cornel West, firstly praised Mandela as a the Socratic spirit of “going against the grain” then on reflection from the distance of the USA he warned against the “Santa Clausification of Mandela - Big smile, domesticated, tamed, defanged with toys in a bag."

At 90 Mandela is all these things, but more, he is the African dream that never became. His 90th bash will be held in London, what the official website says is his second home, images of Toussaint Louverture perishing in the loving embrace of his friend Napoleon Bonaparte flashes by. Now we wait for Barak Obama to conclude a circle started in 1994 in South Africa, White Supremacy today needs a little melanin too. Black suicide is endemic, 1803 it was Haiti, 1994 South Africa, and maybe 2008 December the USA. Happy 90 Tata!

*Andile Mngxitama is a Johannesburg based land rights activist and member of the We write editorial collective.

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

Mandela as reminder and symbol

2008-07-16

L. Muthoni Wanyeki

Thinking about Nelson Mandela’s birthday, what comes to mind is how I felt—how the world felt—watching his release over a decade ago. Watching him walk down the road, hand in hand with his now ex-wife, Winnie Mandela. Watching South Africa prepare for its first full elections in 1994. Watching him assume the Presidency. Watching him re-marry, this time Graca Machel, the former wife of his slain Mozambiquan comrade, Samora Machel.

There were so many moments that made me cry. Cry that they, we, Africa, the world had done it. South Africa was free. We could all therefore aspire to freedom—believing, knowing it could be achieved, in our lifetime. And Mandela had finally found personal as well as political peace. Meaning that we could all find love, even in the setting of our lives—with whole histories, legacies behind us.

Hope was what Mandela symbolised then. He represented the very best of us. And he symbolised our hope that Africa as a whole could—and would—realise the best of itself.

Today, however, not so many years later, I wonder what has become of those aspirations—for freedom, for love, for hope in the best of us. The electoral process—so important in 1994 for South Africa and the rest of us as we moved back towards political pluralism—is now a travesty. From Ethiopia to Uganda to Nigeria and, most recently and tragically, to Kenya and Zimbabwe, it is clear that even those most basic of human rights were not won definitively in the 1990s. And South Africa has now well lost the moral high ground that it had assumed in 1994.

So the question that comes to mind now, thinking of Mandela’s birthday, is how he can use his own moral authority to help us aspire again. He is just one individual—but he’s an individual who transformed himself from being the founding member of the Africa National Congress (ANC)’ armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), to being one of the most beloved personages on this planet. His own beliefs and ideals did not change. But his tactics necessarily did, even though MK’s existence arguably helped force the settlement reached. And the world’s perceptions of him changed as well. How do other individuals respond to that transformation? Other Africans in positions of leadership? Us all? How do we maintain our beliefs and ideals, while changing tactics when necessary and forcing change in perceptions of us?

This is the challenge that we all face, as Africans wanting to aspire again in freedom, love, hope. As Africans wanting to believe it is all possible—and in our lifetime.

Happy birthday Nelson Mandela. Thank you for existing. Thank you for making your own existence worthwhile. Thank you for becoming the reminder, the symbol that you have.

*L. Muthoni Wanyeki, is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

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

A luta continua!

2008-07-16

Ruth Castel-Branco

February 11th 1990—for me, an unforgettable day. I was 7 years old; he had been in prison for 27 years. Sunday morning was just getting started when the phone rang and after a brief conversation, my mother turned around to inform us that Nelson Mandela had been freed. I can remember wondering if I’d heard right. Nelson Mandela? The Nelson Mandela whose face, adorned with the ANC colors, was glued onto one of our empty kitchen cupboards? The ANC leader who had been in jail for more years that my imagination could grasp?

I concluded that indeed miracles are possible and chose to hope a little more. Maybe this means that the Boers will stop will stop their terrorist attacks on Mozambique; that a new South African government will take down the electric fence on the border, a fence which has maimed so many of us fleeing the economic and military hardship perpetrated by the Apartheid regime; maybe our “civil” war will end and I will be able to go to the outskirts of Maputo, or even my grandfather’s home in Inhambane, without fearing that the “bandidos armados” (Apartheid-sponsored RENAMO troops) will kidnap me and take me to one of their army camps; and last but not least, maybe I will no longer have to share the same Eastern European plastic airplane toy with every other kid in the city.

Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment was my imprisonment, and his freedom, my freedom because Mandela, along with comrades Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo articulated a vision that placed the anti-Apartheid struggle in the context of a broader regional struggle against colonialism and imperialism.

Now in my mid-twenties, it is clear to me that vision is insufficient. The Freedom Charter lies by the wayside and South Africa has fomented and embraces its status of hegemon in the region. As 32,000 Mozambicans fled South Africa this May, in many cases leaving everything they owned behind, the South African government continued to deport undocumented Mozambican migrant workers, further taxing the Mozambican emergency relief operations. In fact some reports suggested that South African farm owners were calling the immigration services at the end of May to avoid paying farm workers’ monthly wages. Is this what post-Apartheid regional cooperation has come to be? The front-line states paid a tremendous cost for the anti-Apartheid movement and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans to South Africa is the result of this cost.

Sunday, February 11th will be imprinted in my memory for the rest of my life and I know I owe something big to Mandela, but I also know that the anti-Apartheid struggle is not over. On the occasion of Mandela’s 90th birthday, it is important to take stock of the fundamental economic, political and social structures of Apartheid that continue to thrive in South Africa and the Southern African region.

A Luta Continua!

*Ruth Castel-Branco is an organizer for DC Jobs with Justice.

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

The Pogroms in South Africa: a crisis in citizenship

2008-07-17

Richard Pithouse

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue.

In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People’s Movement. These are all poor people’s movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid.
Here in Harry Gwala forced removals started in 2004. That was also the year in which the Landless People’s Movement declared a boycott of the local government elections and were subject to severe repression, including the police torture of some activists. In August of the following year 700 residents marched on the Mayor demanding an end to forced removals and the immediate provision of water, electricity and toilets. Provincial Housing Minister Nomvula Mokonyane declared that the evictions “marked another milestone for housing delivery” and explained that “We are doing all this because we are a caring government and want to give you back your dignity”. The Municipality’s website responded to the march by noting that “Although there was an initial reluctance on the part of the Harry Gwala residents to move, the metro and the [private housing] company met them to work through any objections and give them reasons why such a move would be worth their while.” But in May 2006, when the Municipality tried to move ahead with the forced removals in earnest, it became clear that residents were determined to hold their ground. The Johannesburg Star reported that “police fired rubber bullets and bulldozed their way into the Harry Gwala informal settlement near Wattville after residents barricaded themselves in with burning tyres. Shots rang out and people scattered in all directions as metro police fired at them. Twelve people were injured and were taken to hospitals in the area.”

In Harry Gwala the evictions are remembered as a war. Now the settlement is recovering from a different kind of eviction, a different kind of war. It is to this that the discussion soon turns. The Freedom Charter adopted in Johannesburg in 1955 as the manifesto of the struggle against apartheid declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” But for two terrible weeks in May people unable to pass mob tests for indigeneity were intimidated, beaten, hacked, raped and burnt out of shack settlements and city centres across South Africa. The attacks began in the shack settlements around Johannesburg. In Harry Gwala the homes of two Shangaan families, one whom had come from Maputo in Mozambique and the other from Giyani in South Africa, were burnt and demolished. All that is left is squares of burnt earth. The local Landless People’s movement moved swiftly to condemn the attacks and to work with the local police, with whom they have often been in conflict, to stop them from spreading further. In the nearby Makause settlement, which is not organised into an oppositional movement autonomous from the state, things were far worse. Here the settlement is dotted with burnt out and demolished buildings. There is also a terribly empty 200 metre long strip where, in February last year, 2 500 shacks were unlawfully demolished at gunpoint by the state and the residents forcibly moved to a ‘transit camp’ 40 kilometres out of town.

In the second week the pogrom spread to the city centre and there were clashes at the Central Methodist Church, a well known haven for undocumented Zimbabweans, where residents successfully barricaded themselves in with piles of bricks for defence. In January there had been a much more damaging attack on the church. On that occasion the attack came from the police. They stormed in with dogs, pepper spray and batons and arrested 500 people. The church told the media that people were assaulted and robbed in the attack and that even those with documents were arrested.

In the second week the pogroms also spread to Durban, Cape Town and the small towns in the hinterland. In Durban the first attack was on a down town Nigerian bar and was followed by attacks on Rwandese and Congolese people living in city flats and then attacks on Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Malawians living in shack settlements. In Cape Town it began with the Somali shopkeepers, who have been murdered at an incredible rate for years. The state has dismissed the clearly targeted nature of the ongoing killing of Somalis as ‘just ordinary crime’.

Some of the mobs were singing Jacob Zuma’s campaign song, Bring My Machine Gun. Some came out of shack settlements and migrant worker hostels linked to Inkatha. Some were just drunk young men. The most widely reported tests used to determine indigenity, such as seeing if people know the formal and slightly archaic Zulu word for elbow, were taken straight from the tactics that the police have used for years. The mob definition of foreigner always centred on foreign born Africans but in some instances Pakistanis and South Africans of minority ethnicities, especially Shangaan, Venda and Tsonga people, were also targeted. There are a number of credible allegations of police complicity in the pogroms but in some places community organisations were able to work with local police stations to bring the violence under control. There are many accounts of individual acts of brave opposition to the attacks by both South Africans and migrants. In the Protea South shack settlement in Johannesburg migrants were able to successfully organise themselves into self-defence units and to protect themselves with round the clock patrols. It is striking that in many, although not all, of the areas under the control of militant organisations of the poor that have been in serious conflict with the state there were no attacks at all.

After two weeks 62 people were dead, a third of them South African citizens, and figures for the number of people displaced ranged from 80 000 to 100 000. Some had fled the country and others were sheltering in churches, at police stations and in refugee camps. Conditions in the camps are often grim. Human rights organisations have issued strenuous condemnations and there have already been threats of collective suicide, clashes with the police and demands for the United Nations to take over management of the camps from the South African state.

Thabo Mbeki’s Presidency was, in the spirit of Pan-Africanism, animated by a vision of an African Renaissance that would finally redeem the world historical promise of the Haitian Revolution. On the first day of 2004 he resisted considerable international pressure and stood with Jean Bertrand-Aristide in Port-au-Prince to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of that Revolution. Six months later Mbeki welcomed Aristide to Pretoria with an uncharacteristically warm hug on a red carpet. This followed Aristide’s kidnapping and removal to the Central African Republic by the American military on the last day of February. Aristide still lives in Pretoria.

Some saw these acts of solidarity as a concrete step towards Pan-African solidarity. Mbeki’s detractors on the left pointed to the voluntary adoption of a structural adjustment programme in 1996, or the decisive moves to bring popular politics under party control from 1990, to argue that he was merely Africanising domination. But others argued that he, in the spirit of realpolitik and mindful of the fate of Toussaint l’Ouverture, Bertrand Aristide and their revolutions, had made a tactical decision to use the wealth of South Africa to make his global battle against anti-African racism a bourgeois initiative secured by the technocratic management of the poor.

Most of the slaves that made the Haitian Revolution were born in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their revolution offered citizenship, black citizenship, to everyone who fought in it, including Polish and German mercenaries who deserted their posts to join it. Citizenship became a political question rather than a matter of indigeneity or ethnicity. But for those two weeks in May it wasn’t safe to be Congolese in many of the poor neighbourhoods in South African cities. There are still places where Aristide, whose excellent but French accented Zulu could easily mark him as Congolese or Rwandese, would be unwise to tread without security.

Contrary to much of the discussion in the media this state of affairs is not new. Indeed a month before the recent attacks 30 shacks were burnt and 100 people displaced from the Diepsloot settlement in Johannesburg. When the police eventually arrived their only response was to arrest twenty Zimbabweans for being undocumented. Migrants have been driven out of shack settlements in sporadic conflagrations since October 2001 when hundreds of Zimbabweans were hounded out of the Zandspruit settlement, also in Johannesburg. Three weeks before the attacks in Zandspruit the Department of Home Affairs had announced ‘Operation Clean Up’ in which people in the settlement were asked to support the Department in ‘rooting out illegal immigrants’. Between 600 and 700 people were rounded up and deported to Mozambique and Zimbabwe. When many of the people deported to Zimbabwe found their way back a few days later, and refused a demand to leave within ten days, they were driven out by their former neighbours.

The extreme hostility with which the post-apartheid state has responded to African migrants is well documented in numerous human rights and academic reports. Migrants to South Africa confront a notoriously ungenerous policy regime that is compounded by a bureaucracy and police force that are both systemically corrupt and prone to extorting money from migrants, documented or not, on the threat of arrest and deportation. There are many cases where South Africans have also been arrested and deported to countries they have never previously visited because they could not speak Zulu well, didn’t have the ‘right’ inoculation marks or were ‘too black.’ If the police suspect that someone may be an ‘illegal immigrant’ and she doesn’t have papers on her she will be detained in a holding cell and then sent to a repatriation centre to await deportation. If she is documented but doesn’t have papers on her she may still end up being deported as it is people picked on suspicion of being illegal that have to prove their legal right to be in the country. There is no burden of proof on the state. There is a right to one free phone call from the police holding cells and another from the repatriation centres but that right is routinely denied. Sometimes people whose presence in South Africa is perfectly legal just disappear. Their families only discover what has become of them after they have been deported. One consequence of this is that any one who thinks that they may be under suspicion has to carry their papers with them at all times. The similarity with the apartheid pass system has not escaped the notice of migrants.

The Lindela Repatriation Centre looms with a particular malevolence in the fears of migrants. Set in an old mining compound on the outskirts of Johannesburg its function is to hold illegal immigrants while they wait to be deported. The phrases ‘gross violations of human rights’ and ‘concentration camp’ role out with the word ‘Lindela’ in the language of human rights organisations as naturally as the word ‘criminals’ goes with ‘illegal immigrants’ in the language of the politicians, police and much of the popular media. Yet none of this resolute condemnation, much of which is undergirded by exhaustive empirical detail, has had any significant difference. Detailed human rights reports going back to 1999 describe routine violence, deliberate sleep deprivation, sexual assault, the denial of the right to a free phone call, appalling and appallingly limited food, a total lack of reading and writing materials, endemic corruption, unexplained deaths and extended periods of detention with out judicial review. There have been riots in Lindela going back to at least 2004. It is still hell. Senior people in the ANC Women’s League, including Nomvula Mokonyane, have financial interests in Lindela.

The state has not been alone in this. On radio talk shows, in newspapers and university lecture theatres it quickly becomes clear that the fears and stereotypes that white people projected onto black people under apartheid are now often projected, unapologetically, onto the poor in general and shack dwellers and migrants in particular. Things that can no longer be publicly said about black people can still be said about the poor, with and without papers. It is not unusual for middle class black people to take this up with enthusiasm. It’s been an open season for a long time. The fear and hostility of the old order have been redirected rather than overcome in the new order.

The most important attempt to theorise xenophobia in South African is a book by Michael Neocosmos called From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa. The book was published by Codesria in Dakar, Senegal in late 2006. Codesria do not have a distribution network equal to the quality of the work that they have published over the years and it has been more or less impossible to get a copy of the book in South Africa. But Codesria have put it online and a book that seemed to have fallen stillborn from the press is suddenly being widely read and discussed in the wake of the May pogroms.

Neocosmos rejects fashionable attempts to explain xenophobia in terms of postmodernity and globalisation and notes that it was in 1961 that Frantz Fanon described the kind of situation where “foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.” For Neocosmos, following Fanon and the work of the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, the essence of the problem is in the structure of the post-colonial state.

Neocosmos, following Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also takes Alain Badiou very seriously. He rejects the largely economistic understanding of politics that has typified influential sections of the academic left in South Africa in favour of a political understanding of politics. He argues that the debates on the academic left have largely been in favour of the state against the market and have tended to exclude any consideration for the agency of ordinary people. He sees in the statist orientation of this left a considerable complicity with the politics of liberalism which, in his diagnosis, can only see rights as something to be awarded and secured by the state.

His book gives a history of how apartheid denied South African citizenship to Africans and attempted, via the Bantustan system, to manufacture foreigners as a political and cultural identity. He also shows how this was continually challenged by popular democratic conceptions of citizenship. For instance Black Consciousness posited the lived experience of blackness as a principle of unity rather than ethnicity and so, against both the apartheid idea of ethnic Bantustan citizenship and the multi-racialism of the ANC, included Africans, Indians and people of mixed race in one non-racial political movement. Some trade unions, and in particular the National Union of Mine Workers, developed an understanding of citizenship based on place of work rather than place of origin. The mine workers’ union was even able to take this principle into the first moments of the post-apartheid state by securing citizenship for workers from Lesotho. And in the 1980s the United Democratic Front posited a citizenship based on opposition to apartheid which saw white and black people on both sides of its conception of the nation and its enemy.

For Neocosmos the radicalisation and democratisation of the popular struggles against apartheid in the second half of the 1980s, a process that in his analysis was forced on the leadership from below, created a new nation in struggle. He argues that the demobilisation and corporatisation of that politics, a process that began in 1989 and was more or less concluded by 1993, enabled a return to the exclusive power of the state to define citizenship.

In his view this was the worm that hid in the rose of the new democracy from the beginning. He points to the distinction in the constitution between citizens and persons and notes the consequent logic in frank statements by the ANC that it “can’t extend human rights to non-citizens.” But he is not replacing economism with legalism. He also argues that a considerable part of the motivation for the immediate commitment to the idea of ‘fortress South Africa’ was driven by an assumption that ‘hordes of foreigners’ would threaten South Africa’s aspiration to build a powerful modern state that could take its ‘rightful place on the international stage’. The continuities with apartheid thinking about South Africa as somehow outside of, superior to and endangered by Africa are clear. He also shows that the idea that the state could manage the poor by delivering basic services to a passive population led to an assumption that efficiency in this regard, and consequent gains in social cohesion, would be compromised by an increase in the number of citizens. For Neocosmos the ANC “is unable to think beyond the confines of exclusion and control...Popular organisational and militant democratic struggles are no longer within its ambit of thought.”

He acknowledges the work done by NGOs to catalogue the rights abuses suffered by migrants at the hand of the South Africa state and provides a harrowing overview. Some of the evidence adduced is particularly striking. For instance while many instances are cited of politicians ascribing crime to undocumented migrants and conflating the categories of ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘criminal’ the fact is that 98% of people arrested on criminal charges in South Africa are legal citizens. Equally striking are the statistics for the numbers of Germans, Americans and British people who overstay their visas but are not arrested and do not end up in Lindela and are not deported. In the first months of 1996 the figure stood at 26 000. Neocosmos does not shy away from the strength of popular xenophobic sentiment but stresses that empirical research indicates that “popular attitudes towards foreigners are much more contradictory and not as systematically oppressive as in the case of state agencies.”

While he accepts the symptomatic observations of the human rights NGOs he rejects their diagnosis of the cause of those symptoms and their prescription for a remedy. In his view their extensive and detailed cataloguing of state and popular xenophobia has been undertaken in order to ensure that migrants are able to access their human rights, something which is “seen as the responsibility of the state under pressure from those same NGOs”. Human rights discourse is orientated around appeals to the state, not a popular democratic politics. It therefore lacks both the capacity to issue compelling prescriptions to the state and to undertake the practical work of engendering better modes of life within communities. All it can do is to make requests. Although he does not say this, it is notable that neither the advances in this discourse, nor its institutionalisation in formal civil society, have resulted in meaningful progress from the perspective of someone picked up by the police for being ‘too black’ or speaking Shangaan or French.

For Neocosmos “xenophobia and authoritarianism” are “a continuation of apartheid oppression” that are, in the end, a “product of liberalism”. He proposes, against the state centric politics of liberalism, a recovery of popular emancipatory politics. This argument certainly has much more going for it than most of the views bandied about after the May pogroms, many of which took the form of simultaneous recommendations for firmer police action, better state intelligence and more projects to educate the poor about human rights. With some modifications it may also be able to explain some aspects of the other forms of popular reaction that have been growing in intensity.

In recent months there have, in some areas, been public attacks on lesbians and women dressed in trousers or in skirts deemed too short. It is certainly the case that as poor women are expected to take over more and more of the work needed to keep families and communities going there is an implicit gendering to decisions about the price of water, the numbers of taps and toilets that are provided to shack settlements, the need for volunteers to take on cleaning work, the care of the sick and so on. But it is certainly not the case that, as with xenophobia, these kinds of attacks can credibly be said to directly follow the logic and practices of the state or to be in any way complicit with the law.

While racist arguments about culture are often still used to explain the attacks on women progressives tend to argue that they are due to a general economic disempowerment. There is certainly a systemic disempowerment consequent to the endless economic crisis that ordinary people must confront, even in boom times. But there is also a systemic disempowerment consequent to both the complimentary authoritarianism of technocratic state and NGO responses to poverty and the top down party control over most of the political spaces through which ordinary people can access the state. It is notable that these kinds of attacks on women have not occurred, and are in fact simply unthinkable, in places where grassroots movements in which women are strong have created a political space for the collective self empowerment of the excluded. The fact that these are not the only spaces in which these kinds of attacks are unthinkable does not diminish the record of democratic grassroots political projects in this regard.

As Neocosmos has noted in a recent essay the popular movements that have rebuilt a democratic grassroots militancy were able to successfully defend and shelter people at risk in the May pogroms and, on at least one occasion, confront attackers head on. There was not one attack in any of the more than 30 settlements where the largely Durban and Pietermartizburg based shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo is strong. Despite being crowded into ever fewer bits and pieces of urban land, all of which remain under threat from a state determined to ‘eradicate shacks by 2014’, the movement was also able to offer shelter to some people displaced in the attacks. In a widely circulated and translated statement Abahlali baseMjondolo declared that “An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves. If you live in a settlement you are from that settlement and you are a neighbour and a comrade in that settlement.” The Landless People’s Movement in Johannesburg and the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town were also able to mount some opposition to the pogroms. In Khutsong, a town to the West of Johannesburg where popular conflict with the state has probably been most acute, the Merafong Demarcation Forum was also able to ensure safety. All of these organisations have, in the face of considerable repression boycotted elections and sought to build a militant grassroots politics outside of the party structures beholden to the state.

There is a sense in which crises are confrontation with the real. Certain kinds of assumptions, claims and speculations that can survive without a direct challenge melt away in the face of this kind of shock. Others emerge on a firmer footing. Neocosmos’ book has come out of the crisis with a lot more life than it had in April. But if the May crisis has appeared to offer some support to his analysis that analysis should certainly be extended. One obvious way in which the critique of the politics of liberalism should be developed would be to consider the various ways in which the South African poor are also excluded from substantive citizenship and the desperate rivalries that this can produce.

With an entrenched unemployment crisis that excludes around 40% of people from formal employment now compounded by the sudden escalation in food and transport prices there’s not much disagreement about the depth of economic exclusion. Of course people do invent new modes of solidarity and survivalist communalism to cope but a dangerous desperation is also rife. Not everyone is in a position to confront the prospect of entering their 30s without ever having had a decent job with equanimity. For people bent on plunder anyone who is vulnerable, as undocumented migrants living under a hostile state most certainly are, is at risk.

Exclusion from substantive citizenship is also a question of space. The South African state is seeking to reverse the popular desegregation of cities achieved since the 1980s. There are major projects to drive the poor out of flats in the city centres in the name of creating ‘World Class Cities’. Centrally located shack settlements are also under attack from a full fledged programme to ‘eradicate’ shacks by 2014. While most cities have one or two well funded projects to upgrade centrally located shack settlements they are the exceptions that legitimate the rule. The fact is that the state is beating the poor out of the cities in the name of ‘slum clearance’, the precise phrase used by apartheid, and before that colonialism, for the same purpose. The poor are being driven out of urban spaces over which there is sometimes a considerable degree of autonomous self management into regulated and commodified contemporary versions of the peripheral apartheid township – a space separate in every way from the fantasy of world class cities but far enough out of town for this fact to be tolerable. An often politically innovative urban proletariat which appropriated urban land, as well as electricity and water, and often, although not always, turned it into a commons organised with a considerable degree of popular autonomy from state power is being recomposed into an individualized set of consumers safely warehoused on the urban periphery. The return to forced removals is a direct attack on people’s livelihoods, access to education and health care, desire for an urban life and identity as citizens. With regard to the latter it is worth recalling that the denial of the right to the city was a central part of the denial of citizenship to Africans under apartheid. Every successful eviction increases the already severe overcrowding in the spaces that survive and escalates competition for space that can take all sorts of forms including ethnic and racial conflict amongst South Africans.

Despite more than 3 years of vigorous protests by the grassroots left across the country against local party councillors and their ward committees the reality of political exclusion doesn’t have much elite currency. Civil society doesn’t always easily recognise that democracy isn’t only about elections and NGOs. People who appropriated or forged substantive rights to citizenship through the insurgent popular struggles of the 80s, or who were promised full social inclusion in Mandela's image of the nation, now find that, what ever their identity documents may say, they have been excluded from a key aspect of substantive citizenship - the right to speak, to be heard and to co-determine their future. Developmental processes are overwhelmingly technocratic and expert driven and the party is, for the very poor, now a top down structure that is used more for social control than as a space for popular discussion.

In fact in many shack settlements party structures are the armed enforcers of state discipline. Many of the thousands of popular protests over the last few years (often clearly misnamed as 'service delivery' protests by both the NGO left and the state) were aimed at trying to subordinate local party structures and representatives to popular power. It has been very striking that in many of these protests the people organising them have declared that they have returned to struggle because they have, again, ‘been made foreigners in our own country'. This crisis in citizenship caused by a widespread exclusion from substantive citizenship has expressed itself in some remarkable mobilisations that have united people with and without legal citizenship to struggle to democratise society from below. But in the absence of democratic organisation it can also take the terrifying form of a desire to assert one's own citizenship by turning on the 'real' non citizens.

The popular democratic politics in which Neocosmos invests his theoretical hope is the practical politics that was able to defend and shelter people targeted in the May pogroms, and has previously, although covertly, offered the same protection from the state. It is a politics that moves from the bottom up and which the state and many NGOs, including those on the left, consider to be outside of professional civil society and its aspirations to manage the poor and, therefore, criminal. The police have been trying to beat it into submission since 2004.

Mbeki repressed the return of this politics and could travel to Haiti in his own jet. Aristide embraced this politics and was forced to leave Haiti in an American jet. But in Port-au-Prince and Johannesburg, against the odds, against the soldiers and the police, against the mob that have decided to become the police, against the expert and against the NGO it endures, fragile but alive.

* This article has appeared also in Sanhati
and in Mute.

* Richard Pithouse is an independent scholar in Durban.

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

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Resistance from the other South Africa

2008-07-17

Neha Nimmagudda

“Leaders are meant to lead and to be led [by those who elected them]” - Lindela Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo movement

Fourteen years since the transition to democracy, leadership in South Africa is in a state of flux—and South Africans know a thing or two about leaders. For every Mandela, after all, there is an Mbeki. In his seven years of presidency, Mbeki has mistaken denialism for leadership and appeasement for diplomacy. The liberation victors in the ANC have tied up the ruling party in its own historical mythologizing, determined to hold its grasp on the state. Now, for every Mbeki, there is the possibility of a Zuma.

In May, immigrants living in the townships and shack settlements of South Africa woke to find that they no longer had a place in their adopted homeland, as their neighbors chased them out of their houses and shops. Yet for ten days while pogroms burned, their country’s leader was nowhere to be found. Even afterwards, Mbeki and other leaders, in failing to acknowledge the profoundly xenophobic nature of the state, and blaming the violence on the poor themselves, did little to calm the storm. Thousands have since left in mass exodus.

Of course, turning to neighboring Zimbabwe to provide a shining example of good leadership in this dearth finds none as Robert Mugabe and his military junta continue their absurdist drama: struggle heroes turned autocrats, fighting their own people instead of fighting for them. For South Africans, whose roster of liberation fighters reads off names like Tambo, Sisulu, Biko, First and Hani, the present situation is somewhat of an anomaly.

But in midst of this crisis, hope for a new kind of leadership can be found in an unlikely place: the Kennedy Road shack settlement , in Clare Estate, Durban. In the middle of a Saturday night in June, a group of thirty odd women and men , some as young as 17, has gathered in a small room that serves as a community-driven crèche during the week. They are here to induct newly elected leaders of their organization of shack-dwellers who collectively call themselves Abahlali baseMjondolo. The Abahlali, since emerging in 2005, has grown to become the largest social movement in the country, with members in more than 40 settlements and over 30,000 active supporters in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
The Abahlali take leadership very seriously. For years since the transition, they have patiently waited for their leaders—in the government and in the ANC—to fulfill their promises for land, housing and development. What they received instead were violent evictions, demolishions, and forced relocations to the peripheries of cities away from access to jobs, schools, and health care. Their former comrades in the struggle against apartheid now began treating them with open contempt, condemning their lifestyle, and criminalizing their activities. The poor found that they were not welcome in the new South Africa that they had fought for.

In response, the Abahlali have said, “Enough is enough [1]." In the three years since its launch, the movement has carried out a series of large-scale protests and marches, but has also resorted to other, less public means of resistance within settlements: by using legal tactics to fight illegal evictions and forced removals, by knowledgably and safely connecting shacks to electricity and water, and by skillfully maneuvering the media, to ultimately advance a ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ [2] in response to a lack of state leadership.

The Abahlali workshops aim to facilitate a conversation on the qualities of good leaders and to teach leadership skills. Those who congregate come from settlements such as Foreman Road, Motala Heights, Jadhu Place and Joe Slovo, and they plan to stay (and stay awake) through the night. Standing in front of the packed room, in this particular workshop, President S’bu Zikode poses the question: “What makes a good leader?”

The gathered group forms the leadership of the newly elected Youth League, whose president Mazwi Nzimande has just turned 17. All are volunteers—for Zikode, full-time—sometimes sacrificing other opportunities, including jobs, and all are here tonight by choice. Some have traveled great distances to attend, coming in from the movement’s new branches in the settlements of Tongaat (EmaGwaveni) and Ash Road in Pietermaritzburg. Many of those present are also fathers and mothers, including Zikode. Philani Zungu and Ayanda Vumisa, husband and wife and active members of the movement (Philani is former Vice-President and Ayanda is the current Vice-Secretary of the Youth League), both arrive late from Pemary Ridge in Reservoir Hills, having waited until their children were asleep.

The wide demographic represented at this meeting also affirms the egalitarian nature upheld by the movement more generally. The Abahlali are proving that leaders are not of a certain age, gender, race or class. For them, leaders—holding foreign degrees, matriculating at elite universities and being well versed in the technocratic jargon that prevails in development discourses of the state—have all failed them. More important is for a leader to have intimate knowledge of their experience and of their plight: “They must feel what we feel,” participants at the meeting declare, “and only those who feel must lead.”

To this end, the Abahlali encourage affiliated settlements to democratically elect leaders from their own communities, and to ensure that all their decisions are taken in discussion with the people who chose them. Sihle Sibisi, from Joe Slovo, explains, “A leader is someone who listens to everyone, who respects everyone they lead.” They “do not take a position on behalf of or for the people but with the people.” Members express frustrations with the populist rhetoric of local politicians, who visit their settlements intent on gaining their votes for the next elections. Leadership cannot be reduced to this, they argue. It cannot be confined to a single term or a single meeting. Rather, it is an organic and “ongoing process” with no start or end.

“A leader is not born but made by those they claim to represent,” says Vice-President Lindela Figlan, a fact that they must not forget. Derrick Fenner from Motala agrees, stating, “No one can lead us without us.” They assert that a leader must replace the current lack of communication and interaction with “answers for those they lead…[someone] who shares and discusses the issues with all the people.”

Each leader here was elected through a democratic process held at their respective communities, or, as in the case of the Youth League (launched 16th of June 2008), in a forum of made up of the movement’s members from across the settlements. They are the faces of their communities; as Zikode tells them, as leaders they are “the hope of the hopeless, the homeless, the jobless, the poor and the marginalized.”

It is for these reasons that the Abahlali practice strict political autonomy from the state, political parties, churches and NGOs. They do work with organizations that can bring technical skills, such as lawyers, and are engaged in a constant battle to subordinate the state’s development project to the community committees in each area. But even here they demand that development or activist profesionals “ speak to us, not for us us” and insist on recognition, dignity and full partnership from anyone wishing to work with them towards developing their communities.

Moreover, the movement has consistently espoused a philosophy of ‘living politics’ that grounds the collective thought and action that drives the struggles specific to each settlement in the hands of the people in that settlement. A living politics requires that a community seeking to join the movement make the decision autonomously and collectively. Recently, settlements in the Northern and Western Cape were formally inaugurated into the movement after residents read about the movement in the press, made contact and then discussed the issues internally within their communities, coming to identify with the Abahlali.

By remaining context-specific, the Abahlali recognize that the movement and its struggle ‘must develop its own significance within each settlement' [4] whether it is responding to police brutality, government contempt, landowner intimidation, or shack-fires. Through Abahlalism—their self-deemed political culture—they are cultivating their own type of leaders, all of who come from the shacks and all of whom are accountable on a day to day basis to the people who elected them

When Zikode asks the new branches’ representatives to illustrate the difficulties of leadership in their respective communities, leaders describe repressive circumstances. Gugu Luthuli and Niza Chithwoya recount regular instances of police brutality and corruption in Tongaat. For Ash Road in Pietermaritzburg, Sibahle Dlamini explains that Abahlali organizing has gone underground because of municipality efforts to suppress the movement. Yet the result of this repression is that they have found support amongst themselves.

As they listen and respond to each other’s stories, a common refrain within the group is “Qina Bahlali qina!” reminding one another to stay strong. Mutual recognition and support drive their struggle, and through them the movement helps to cultivate a shared sense of responsibility within their communities. It was the Abahlali who responded swiftly to the xenophobic riots in May, issuing a strong rebuke of the attacks in a widely circulated press statement that declared, “A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person wherever they may find themselves,” and confronted the government for its role [4]. They actively worked against the attacks and there were no incidents at all in any of the Abahlali settlements. Bahlali were also able to take in some people displaced in the attacks.

Back at Kennedy Road, the meeting continues through the night and into the early morning. Members question movement structures, and debates emerge about the roles of the chairperson and other positions. They argue for greater transparency and challenge the current leadership of the Executive Committee, and the younger members composing the Youth League, to be up to the task. Throughout the discussion, every person’s opinion is respected and taken seriously.

It is because of rescinded promises and betrayals of their elected leaders that every year, when the country commemorates the first free and democratic elections in South Africa, the Abahlali mourn their continuing lack of freedom [5]. What the Abahlali have found instead is that leadership comes from within—within these communities and within individual members of the movement. In the absence of role models in the Party and State, they have looked to each other for help in overcoming the daily struggles of living in the shacks. Each umhlali is a leader in his or her own right. With daybreak the next morning, the group of men and women young and old, shake hands and hug and finally disperse.

Maybe now is the time for national leaders to learn a thing or two from the people they purport to lead.


*Neha Nimmagudda is studies Sociology and Political Science at Columbia University and has been working as a volunteer in the Abahlali baseMjondolo office in Durban.

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

Notes:

1. “Sekwanele!” in Zulu. For more writing on the context of their struggle and for articulations by the Bahlali, refer to http://www.abahlali.org
2. Bayat, Asef. “The Politics of Un-Civil Society”, available: http://www.abahlali.org/node/237
3. This point was shared with me by Mzonke Poni, newly elected chairperson of the Western Cape branch in QQ Section, Khayelitsha, during his visit to Durban on 13 June 2008
4. This press release and others can also be found on the Abahlali website, http://abahlali.org
5. 27th of April is known as ‘UnFreedom Day’ instead of ‘Freedom Day’ in these communities

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Xenophobia is a global phenomenon

2008-07-17

Chengiah Rogers Ragaven

Xenophobia, refugees and immigration politics in their own right have negative connotations when examined through the lens of universal values, moral truths or scriptural teachings which form the basis of our humanitarian civilization, but when translated and practiced through the lens of racism, religious chauvinism, cultural and ethnic ‘otherness,’ the consequence can be horrendous and catastrophic.

Matthew J Gibney (2004) examines the emergence of Xenophobia, Refugees and Immigration politics in liberal democracies and its response to the ‘crisis’ as framed by these states. Gibney cites the earlier work of Hannah Arendt, her sustained critique of Europe’s creation of nation states, thus depriving ‘ethnics communities’ of citizenship rights and ‘manufacturing’ them as ‘outcasts’ in their own societies. In so doing it established the fragmentation of peoples , thereby indelibly etching into modern civic politics, the concept of ‘otherness.’ Thus it also adds another hue to the many shades of ‘identity’ to the ‘rainbow of whitism’

In Africa, however, cultural, genocidal and hegemonic racism, has been and still is one of the primary social evil of our times, moreover so, systematically infecting caste, class and linguistic dissonance for over 500 years. More concretely racism has through its imperial, colonial and apartheid processes de-socialized and pathologized whole generations of ‘non-white’ peoples. The historical damage to the continent continues to be immeasurable. But all this has been the strategies of whitism – imperialism, colonialism and now globalization. The ‘white church, military, law and education’ have been the chemistry of this ‘culture of otherness’ and the hallmark of Globalism. The 5% of the world whose philosophy has been ‘manifest destiny’ own over 80% of the world’s wealth and power and are the gatekeepers of this super-state system.
What in fact one notices in the new millennium is the dialectical relationship between global racism with all its inequalities and international injustices interfaced with national forms of exclusion , xenophobia and refugees of countries like South Africa. It is this dialectic that makes Xenophobia, refugees and immigration politics international and local at the one and the same time.

In a paper prepared for the Institutes of Race Relations in London titled “The Dispersal of Xenophobia”, Liz Fekete (2000) describes the crises of Xenophobia, Refugees and public policies by European governments. A closer look and analysis of the paper makes it fairly obvious that consequences of the “chickens” of colonialism are now coming home to roost in the “mother countries” of imperialism , while further south the ‘poorer’ escaping to the ‘richer’ of the same neo-colonial continent, all victims however of the broader Globalization policy.

The restrictive immigration policies of both European and colonial countries, and in the latter case, encouraging “kith” and “kin” to the exclusion of non white people, have spawned a whole corpus of restrictive legislative enactments usually rationalized and legitimated through liberal disguise of ‘modern racialized economic policies’ of the likes of World Bank and IMF. Paradoxically however, with expanding markets by Western nations, cheap labor from “conquered” countries was always necessary, creating the two “solitudes” that are all too common in these societies.

The large influx of West Indians and Bangladeshis into England, Turks and Mediterranean Arabs to Germany and France, the Indonesians and East Timorese into Holland in the ‘50s and 60’s spawned the growth of right wing and pseudo-nationalist groups in these countries, encouraging and spreading xenophobia together with other shades of racial prejudices worldwide. African, Asian, and Latin American people forced into an inflated modernism of ‘white styles’ following the wealth trail . In other cases students are recruited through scholarship programs to be “indoctrinated” and to be later sent back ‘brainwashed’ to legitimate the imperialist structures in their home countries and in the meanwhile becoming unsuspecting victims of xenophobia and crime.

New variations of racial segregation, prejudice and rationalities have become the norm in Western countries, especially America by the settler society having decimated most of the indigenous native people to become guardians of ‘civilization.’

Note Friedman’s recent comments in the New York Times as regards Bush’s “xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing US Harbors." Prejudice of the ‘others’ become refined quite readily in the Oxbridge and Ivy League law schools where by a whole corpus of immigration restrictions are ‘manufactured’ and ‘policified’, and applied to any ‘alien’ randomly selected by a cadre of ‘profiling police’ The social science, business and theology departments for centuries structured language, ideology and rationality to legitimate this ‘ pure blood’ theory.

At the beginning of this century, as the ground swell of working class rose in Western societies, racial and xenophobic antagonism increased. The black labor force, first recruited through slavery, then later through indentured and contractual labor to work the machinery of capitalism, are now becoming the scapegoats of the white proletarian racism. Race riots, segregation legislations and restrictions on “foreigners” and whole panoply of ‘prejudices’ helped these governments to design and implement draconian immigration policies.

Politicians in western countries were quick to seize the opportunity of using the “numbers game” accusing each other for allowing immigrants to flood the country. Xenophobia was being given respectability and legitimated. Right wing newspapers and the media sensationalized the issues with negative stereotypes with semi-literate DJ’s and talk show hosts “playing/speaking to the audience”. Enoch Powell, for instance, the notorious Conservative British politician at the height of the “foreigners” Immigration debate called for the “repatriation of the immigrants”. From the ‘mother country’ this notorious policy was adopted by the ‘chickens country’ of South Africa where repatriation, became the solution for certain Nationalist Party leaders, to what was perceived then as the ‘Indian problem’ in the country in the 1950’s.

Fekete (2000) discusses the seriousness of the xenophobia syndrome unleashed in England, through Powell’s opposition to the number of ‘black immigrants’ coming to the country. The lasting damage to human, cultural and race relations since then has become national and foreign policy in most ‘white societies’. For instance his concentration on immigration birth rates and the threat they posed to the British way of life dominated media debate and led to outbursts of racial violence and racially motivated murder of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. For some time open xenophobia became subliminal only to surface frontally once again. The recent dispersal of asylum-seekers in Europe from the major cities to the rural areas as state policy has rekindled the overt form of racism and fascism. White communities across Europe incensed by the “foreigners” being “dumped” by government agencies have mobilized and rekindled the xenophobia culture. Media journalists especially of the tabloid kind are contributing to this unsavory phenomenon by using language such as “floods of refugees”, ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘aliens’ and the likes. So selective is the current xenophobia that one time race prejudice now includes ‘whites’ that are not so white such as the Kosovan refugees. The xenophobia rationality in the technological age has sanitized the white form with such refinement with the underlying logic such as “ a more socially accepted view that people from different races and cultures don’t mix”.

The tragedy of such a position has been, the hitherto cultural minorities, due to the prevailing culture of racial hegemony as separation and segregation in the host countries, tend to congregate in communities, often intermarrying and rationalizing exclusion, some claiming as such -to having special relations with God or and are chosen people. This of course enables the host country to maintain its racial control and implement its divide and rule policy, regulate employment and easily exploit the labor minorities of color This is all too prevalent in country like Israel

Given the kaleidoscopic nature of xenophobia, refugees and immigration grounded within the culture of historic racism, South Africa has over the centuries contributed significantly to the phenomenon. Race division, separation and cultural devaluation have been the hallmark of South African histiography since the arrival of settlers into the country.

The Nationalist Party In South Africa, since its inception and certainly since its ascendancy to power in 1949 perfected the policy of divide and rule which it inherited mainly from the British. Suspicion, stereotyping, and separation and segregation created its own culture of internal colonial xenophobia. Ethno-racism and further stratification with each cultural group added to the conflicts. The ‘innocent’ homelands policy along linguistic lines and the creation of elite black leadership were all ingredients of sowing suspicion, class race and cultural suspicions which were easily transferred to other Africans in the transforming South Africa post 1994.

In spite of the prejudices, scapegoat and labeling the “others” of the apartheid system, the majority of the indigenous South Africans were rural dwellers with a benevolent attitude towards strangers or foreigners. Wit the introduction of the free market economy and rampart urbanization of the population and with the arrival of new African expatriates, the global experience of the “other” is now being transferred on to the new arrivals to the country.

South Africa’s racial policies and their effect on African migration together with its isolation within the international world have had its impact on grassroots thinking of the people. Migrants and especially African migrants, travel around the world in search of employment transferring their marketable skills, like the earlier settler societies. They have no intention of remaining in foreign lands but rather serve functionally in the economic sector. They cross the border frequently as they have done for time immemorial and now ‘the culture of the other’ has reached South Africa.

The latter category has often been used against Nigerians, or indeed any other African whom the locals are unable to identify. Immigration policies in South Africa closely follow the labeling and category culture developed out from the street culture which the media seeking sensation soon write the by-lines. Political and economic refugees are seldom recognized let alone given the hospitality that were given to the South African refugees for several decades in Africa. It seems strange, but not altogether surprising that western “manufactured” rationality for Xenophobia, such as “foreigners” or ‘blacks taking our jobs, or using our ‘welfare system’ are prone to ‘criminality are responsible for our unemployment’ have all become an integral part of the “new South Africa” vision of its neighbors. Racism has become its full circle with South Africans now practicing ethno-racism or neo-racism on its own African people.

* Chengiah Rogers Ragaven is a faculty professor in the International Studies program at Central Connecticut State University. Ragaven was one of the foremost student leaders in South Africa in the 1960s. While under House Arrest and Banning Orders, he went into exile for over 25 years. He is currently organizing the Pan African International - a movement of African peoples worldwide - and the Pan African University - a university system for Africa.

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

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Zimbabwe and Namibia: The people betrayed

2008-07-17

Henning Melber

In 1980 the Zimbabwean “povo” (people) celebrated a victory over settler colonialism and Western imperialism. We celebrated with them. For us, this was a step closer to Namibian sovereignty, even though the overwhelming victory of ZANU was time-wise a detour on our long road to Independence. The unexpected result had taught Western imperialism a lesson. It shattered its manic assumptions that one could orchestrate and manipulate an election, even if the people are allowed to cast a secret vote at the ballot. Without major intimidation the “povo” used the weapon of an electoral process, by voting for the cock (the symbol for Mugabe’s ZANU), and not the archbishop (Abel Muzorewa, who was considered the blue eyed boy of the West). The people knew what they wanted: a government of their own choice, which they had reasons to believe would represent their interests.

Almost three decades later, 18 years into Namibian Independence, we have to face the sobering realities: Mugabe and his loyal clique in ZANU/PF messed it up. By the end of the 1990s they had lost the “povo.” While they blamed Western imperialism for this, it was in the first place their own elitist neocolonial project, which betrayed the liberation gospel and thereby the people. From the start, the new rulers were not shy of ruthlessly violent practices. Remember the genocidal mass violence in Matabeleland shortly after Independence (“Gukuhurundi”). Tens of thousand innocent people were tortured, maimed, raped, mutilated and slaughtered between 1983 and 1985 by the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade. Only because being Ndebele they were considered guilty of being in support of Josuah Nkomo’s ZAPU, a competing liberation movement finally coerced into the ZANU/PF alliance. With a few exceptions (notably the Catholic church inside Zimbabwe), those who knew remained silent and thereby endorsed if not encouraged the perpetrators to further cultivate their dehumanizing version of “chimurenga” against the people.
The violent nature of the new elite in control over the state displayed similiar features to the mindset of those “Rhodies” they were fighting against during the “chimurenga”. It was the language of coercion and oppression, which dictated the colonial reality and crept into the “liberated” society, where it prospered and flourished. By the time of Independence, the former victims had turned increasingly into perpetrators to achieve their goals. More than twenty years later the degree of violence and brutality with which they treated their fellow-Zimbabweans had exceeded the atrocities under colonial rule and made life for the majority of the people more miserable than before Independence.

When the self-enrichment schemes of the new elite alienated its members and their beneficiaries more and more from the “povo”, they blamed Western imperialism for the deterioration of legitimate rule and the erosion of credibility. But the anti-imperialist rhetoric, which became an opportunistic, populist effort to cover up the own failures, was merely a smoke screen. It worked for many among those, who were not at the receiving end of the government’s policy at home. Those, who could afford to identify with the pseudo-alternative discourse promoted by Mugabe at a time, when he had already lost the confidence and support of his very own people. In contrast to these privileged outsiders, who could cheer to the misleading tune without consequence for themselves, those who were supposed to benefit from the fruits of Independence now fled their home country in the millions. More than ever before under colonial rule have meanwhile ended in exile and wait for the time to return. That is in itself an outrageous scandal.

After twenty years under Mugabe’s ZANU/PF, Zimbabweans moved away in ever growing numbers from the liberation movement in power. Manipulated elections could not cover up the realities that Mugabe had lost the “povo.” Not because of an imperialist conspiracy, which sought to undermine a nationalist government challenging the West. But because those who pretend to uphold the banner of anti-imperialism had in actual fact betrayed the very same people whose interests they claimed to represent. As a matter of fact, the people did not even count any longer. As Mugabe stated just ahead of the scheduled runoff presidential vote to a group of businessmen in Bulawayo: “Only God, who appointed me, will remove me.” – The voice and vote of the “povo” had been eliminated from the justification of executing power.

In an act of betrayal, the Zimbabwean sell-outs posed as truthful revolutionaries, while they served foremost their own narrow class interests. Operation “Murambatsvina” (meaning “clean out the rubbish” or “sweep out the dirt”) destroyed in a large-scale operation during 2005 systematically the shacks of the urban dwellers, while Mugabe and his clan lived in the luxury of palaces. The poorest were even robbed of what was left to them. The derogatory term, in which reference was made to the tens of thousand of marginalized, as if they would be vermin, speaks for itself. This was the arrogance of power, alienated from the masses. The same masses, who once formed the basis for a successful struggle against the minority rule in control if not over the people, then at least over the state power and its repressive military and police apparatus.

How similar is the situation today. Again an estranged minority maintains rule by all means and at all costs over a majority yearning for change. Only that the minority regime is not foreign. The “intimate enemy”, as the Indian post-colonial theorist Ashis Nandy termed it, is born and bread under colonialism and socialized in a colonial context and its terms, no matter how much it poses as its alternative. It comes from the belly of the beast. It speaks the same language of power. It shows the same disrespect for human rights and democracy. It documents that the colonial legacy is not yet defeated. Imperialism, as the ultimate irony of the story, lives on in the pseudo-anti-imperialist postures of the regime, which has lost the people but tries to compensate for this by claiming to challenge imperialism.

If the project of liberation from foreign rule was more than mere lip service to cover up a neo-colonial elite project, we need to position ourselves in no uncertain terms in opposition to such betrayal. We need to re-define our notion of solidarity. It is not us, who turn our back to solidarity by taking the ZANU/PF regime to task and deny it any rightful claim to a continued existence. It is the words and deeds of the ZANU/PF regime, which show that they have lost any moral claim to any form of recognition and support. This does not mean that we end up as bedfellows to the Blairs, Browns, Bushs and Co., as long as we continue to condemn in no uncertain terms their double talk, their Guantanamo Bays, their invasions, their inherent racist immigration policies, their state terror dubbed as “war against terror”, their hegemonic global projects. We have little to nothing in common with them, even though we criticize like they do in certain cases the same violation of fundamental human values. Our motives are different. But if we compromise on this, we compromise our values and end up as bedfellows to the Mugabes. This cannot be the alternative.

Our position to Zimbabwe should be guided by our commitment to true liberation, which embodies a democratic, human rights oriented culture within a socio-economic system seeking to at least reduce (if not to eliminate) the indecent proportions of inequality. The struggle for political self-determination was a struggle for emancipation also in economic terms. It was a struggle for human dignity shared by all. Those who deny such human dignity to others, often for their own selfish interests and gains, forfeit any claim to support. If we continue to back them, or at least indirectly continue to allow them to literally get away with murder by remaining evasive or silent, we betray our own values and people. We betray our own project of liberation, which is one in no isolation from other people. It is a project, which applies to all people everywhere.

Imperialists the world over and in all colours and shades try to exploit the contradictions and conflicts we seek to come to terms with for their own gains. We have to live with this challenge, even if it means that we need to part with old companions. We do have to part because we have not given up the commitment and determination to contribute to a better future for more people. Because we remain convinced that this is the way forward, instead of compromising with the class interests of a new elite, which continues to exploit and terrorize the people just as the colonial masters of the past did.

It should not be pigmentation that ultimately decides over loyalties and common bonds. It should be the shared values and norms to pursue freedom, equality and dignity for as many people as possible with the aim to ever increase their numbers. If this means to part with some old friends, it also means at times to re-join the “povo”. The wretched of the earth are entitled to our empathy, our identification, and our solidarity.

“A luta continua” should never be accepted as a translation into “the looting continues”, as the East African scholar activist Firoze Manji warned a couple of years ago at a Southern African conference in Windhoek. Otherwise we sacrifice our own credibility and legitimacy, and betray the very same values, which motivated our struggle and the sacrifices of so many. As people, we deserve better. And political representatives of the people, who care about integrity, legitimacy and the “povo”, should learn from Zimbabwe and the writing on the wall.

*Dr. Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala/Sweden. He has been Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute (2000-2006) and Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek (1992-2000).

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

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Zimbabwe CSO's call for a transitional authority

2008-07-17

Zimbabwe Civil Society Organizations

We, civil society organizations acting on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe, today reassert our commitment to the struggle for a transition to democracy.  In doing so, we stand firmly by the principles of democratic constitutionalism that are embodied in the People's Charter and which represent the birthright of every Zimbabwean.  

Given the present environment of fear and oppression, we declare that democratic reform must be preceded by the cessation of violence, restoration of law and order, and facilitation of humanitarian relief.  If such conditions are met, we are prepared to support the installation of a transitional government created after consultation with all stakeholders.

We believe that a transitional government would provide an appropriate vehicle for ushering democratic reform.  The transitional authority would have a specific, limited mandate to oversee the drafting of a new, democratic and people-driven constitution and the installation of a legitimate government.  We wholeheartedly reject the suggestion of a power-sharing agreement that fails to immediately address the inadequacy of the current constitutional regime.

The transitional government must be established in line with the following:

1. Leadership by a neutral body.  The transitional government should be headed by an individual who is not a member of ZANU-PF or MDC.

2. Broad representation.  Individuals from a broad sector of Zimbabwean society should be incorporated into the transitional government.  This should include representatives from labor organizations, women's and children's rights groups, churches, and various other interest groups.

3. Specific, limited mandate.  The transitional government should be tasked with facilitating the drafting and adoption of a new constitution and then holding elections under the new constitutional framework. It should only govern the country until such time as the government elected under the new constitution is installed.  The negotiating parties should provide a very clear timeframe for this process, with no more than 18 months of rule by the transitional government.

4. People-driven constitutional development.  The process of drafting a new constitution must include broad-based consultation with the public.  Interest groups such as women, labor, churches, and media should be given special opportunities to provide input.  The draft constitution should not be enacted until it has been ratified by the public in a national referendum.

5. Restoration of good governance.  State institutions such as the judiciary, police, security services, and state welfare agencies should be depoliticized and reformed.  Steps should be taken to fight corruption and promote accountability for public officials. Restrictions on press freedom should be lifted and access to state media outlets should be opened.

6. Transitional justice initiatives.  The transitional government should design and implement a system to bring to justice the perpetrators of gross human rights violations.  This framework for transitional justice should be embedded in the new constitution. In the event of the above conditions not being met, civil society commits itself to continue in actions that increase pressure on whosoever will be holding state power to embrace people-centered democratic process.


*This press statement was issued by civil society following the national civil society consultative meeting.

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

They are all beggars now

2008-07-16

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem

I was born and brought up in a predominantly Muslim community but the best schools around were fee paying Christian missionary schools. Our parents were ambitious enough for us that they had no hesitation about paying (government Schools were free) to get us into these schools. They were strong enough in their faith to trust that we were there 'for their knowledge not their God.’ And so it was. I can recall only one Muslim pupil converting to Christianity for all the years that the school was run by the Baptist Missionaries.

By the time we finished our primary education, the school had become majority Muslim and taken over by the State government and renamed Shehu Primary School.

In those days there was a clear distinction between kids exclusively going to Quranic Schools (Almajirai) and those of us either going only to ‘western’ schools or a combination of both. The Almajirai were often children living far away from their homes having been sent away to seek Islamic knowledge and upbringing by their faithful parents - a decision usually reached by the fathers. But those of us ‘Yan boko’ (pupils in state or missionary schools) generally lived with our parents/guardians. We went to school during the day and returned to the warmth and security of our homes in the afternoon. Quranic schools would then be open in the afternoon during school days and morning and evening during weekends.

The Quranic schools were private initiatives designed to ensure that the student learned the whole of the 114 chapters of the Quran by heart. This was in turn followed by going further into the religion as a knowledge system including learning the Arabic language. Unfortunately for many of us 'yan makarantan boko' the higher you climbed up the western educational ladder the less likely you were to return to the Quranic schools. So you got into the incongruous situation of knowing the Quran or parts of it by heart without actually knowing the Arabic language. Our knowledge was thus short-circuited through the interpretations by Mallams and Sheiks (teachers and learned Scholars).
There is also a bifurcated expectation about both schools. While the Quranic education may be preparing the pupils for a spiritual life style and possibly better prospects in heaven, when and if you get there, the western education offered better prospects for the here and now in terms of career and often, exaggerated expectations of material well being.

Consciously and unconsciously two classes of kids have emerged. Almajirai generally live off menial jobs, in between their learning sessions, obligatory labour on their teachers’ farms and begging. The western pupils live as all children are entitled to: cared for both physically and emotionally by their parents and guardians. The Almajirai live on the whim of their spiritual masters and the goodwill of the community.

If you look at these two groups of children on the streets of any Muslim area of northern Nigeria, you can distinguish who is who from their appearance. Generally the ones going to western schools will be better dressed, neater, wearing at least slippers and looking well fed. The Almajirai will be wearing formerly white kaftans that have become so dirty that neither jik nor any stain remover can return them to the original color; their feet may be full of blisters or even jiggers because of going around without shoes or slippers, in rain or sunshine.

In the Oil boom days the communities were generally better off and able to share. Therefore most home prepared more food than was necessary for their household. The rationale is not just that visitors may come but also that ‘akwai Almajirai’ (i.e. the Almajirai will come). This kind of culture enabled the Almajirai to eke out a living, and get decent meals on most days. Also spiritual minded people with disposable income or the elite wishing to spiritually launder their ill-gotten wealth were more than generous in contributing to the welfare of the Almajirai and their minders.

However as the oil boom gave way to the oil bust and people began to tighten their belts, disposable incomes became less and lesser, the welfare of the Almajirai (being the marginalised among the marginalised or to use a term not used often these days, periphery of the periphery!) went crashing. The system was too dependent on a perpetual ‘trickle down’ voluntarism from the better off. The hours the Almajirai spend on learning the Quran became shorter as the exigencies of survival in this world before preparing for heaven took precedence. SAP hit everyone in the 80s and 90s as the rich got richer and meaner and poor became poorer and life more brutish and the elite wantonly rapacious.

For many ordinary working and peasant families there was not enough to go round inside the house let alone think of the wandering children on the streets. And the really rich became more distant from the community. Even if they do not move from their local communities they live behind garrisoned perimeter fences with all kinds of ‘security’ around them that the poor cannot see them.

The impact on the children was and remains devastating. As the economic situation became harder the old distinctions between the Almajiri and Dan boko of my childhood days have became very blurred. The Almajirai did not become 'Dan Boko' but the 'Yan boko' became Almajirai.

A few days ago I was in the neighbourhood where I grew up, Tsohuwar Tasha, now called Goya road, in Funtua, Katsina state. The same building has been our family home since 1965. I looked at the children milling around the same trees as my peers and I did over four decades ago and it was difficult to say who is Almajiri who is Dan Boko. They have all become Almajirai whether at home or in the street.

In fact they have all become street children because the Almajiri at home does not have enough to eat therefore no one can think of the Almajiri on the street. Sadder still those in Quranic schools are not learning the Quran properly while most of those in Western schools cannot be said to be receiving education. So we are neither preparing our children for this world nor the hereafter - or for both.

What kind of country and leadership dooms the future of its own children this way? Of what benefit is the accumulation of foreign reserves in Nigeria if most of the children are surrendered to hard fate like this, their dreams robbed, and forced to grow up in neglect and denied their innocence? Is our conscience dead?



* Tajudeen Abdul Raheem writes this column as a Pan Africanist.





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

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Mugabe: Stop press punitive taxes

2008-07-13

Wilf Mbanga

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the World Editors Forum (WEF) this week wrote to Robert Mugabe calling on him to repeal to immediately a punitive "luxury" tax on newspapers that are imported into Zimbabwe. The WAN and WEF said the punitive tax regime was preventing independent newspapers such as The Zimbabwean from reaching their audience.

The tax was imposed in early June in the run-up to the widely condemned presidential election won by Mugabe after his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai quit the race in the face of escalating violence against his supporters. The tax aimed at newspapers printed in South Africa such as The Zimbabwean, the Mail and Guardian, and the Sunday Times and is targeted to limit the circulation of the publications.

“Restricting access to information by punitive taxation constitutes a clear breach of the right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by numerous international conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the Paris-based WAN and WEF, which represent 18,000 newspapers world-wide, said in a letter to Mugabe.

The two organizations called on Mugabe to remove the illegal luxury tax on foreign publications and to end state intimidation of the independent media. The tax has already led to the suspension of The Zimbabwean on Sunday and the reduction in print run of The Zimbabwean from 200,000 copies a week to 60,000 – greatly diminishing access to information on the part of the majority of Zimbabweans.

In June alone The Zimbabwean was forced to pay SAR500,000 (£37,000) in punitive duties.

Wilf Mbanga

The Zimbabwean

Announcing the new "mobility" project

2008-07-13

Ken Banks

Over the past six months or so I have been talking with about a dozen high-profile mobile companies, IT companies and mobile specialists to gauge interest in a new project, one which builds on the work of Nathan Eagle in East Africa (see http://web.mit.edu/epromfor details). I have also been speaking with a major US Foundation, who have expressed interest in funding the initial scoping phase of the project.

The challenge was this. How do we empower individuals in developing countries to develop and build their own mobile applications? EPROM has already been teaching computer science graduates in a number of East African universities, but how can we scale this initiative, allowing universities in other parts of the developing world to do the same? And with software development largely taking place on desktop computers, how can we empower users to build applications on the phones themselves? And if we could, what would a mobile-based programming environment look like?

Within the next couple of months or so, “mobility” hopes to start exploring these questions. The potential is huge if we can find appropriate, sustainable solutions.

Chip off the old block

2008-07-16

Joseph A. Ushie

This, African Writing in Our Time is quite African, truly African and in the spirit and sense of the Africa some of us have been dreaming about for decades now.

I would be even much happier if the young-sounding writer is a son of our well-known Ngugi - because this would mean that there is certainty of continuity of that good fight the older Ngugi has been engaged in for these many seasons.

It would mean a lot to those of us who have been keen followers of the older Ngugi, who have continued to be inpsired by him even though we may not really have met him in person(though I had the rare opportunity of meeting with him in my undergraduate days at the University of Calabar in the early 1980s). This, then, would be a happy chip of the old block - not sure I got the idiom right, though.

Finally, I would love to be in touch with some or all of the journals/magazines mentioned in the article. As one who also writes, I buy and identify wholly with the position of this article. Best wishes - that's also the comment the older Ngugi made on my copy of Weep not, Child in that 1981 or 1982, as he autographed the copy for me. Again, best wishes.

Open letter to Mugabe

2008-07-16

Norah Matovu Winyi

9th July, 2008
The Office of the President
Cause Way
Harare
Zimbabwe

Your Excellency,

RE: WE STAND UP FOR DEMOCRACY IN ZIMBABWE

The African Women Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), a Pan- African Network working for the promotion and protection of the rights of women and children in the Africa Region is greatly disturbed by the unfolding events in this great African country Zimbabwe.

We note with concern the continued suffering of women and children in this country who have been victimized for no apparent reason or cause. Ironically their alleged crime is that they or their male relatives have participated in the democratic process of their country and expressed their choice of leadership for their country!!! The sham runoff election for presidency held on the 27th of June was marred with pre- and post election violence which has led to untold suffering for the people of Zimbabwe, loss of life (for example over 220 people linked with the opposition have died since March 2008), destruction of property and forced displacement of people majority of whom are women and children and in the process many have become victims of sexual abuse and other forms of violations of their body integrity.

Mr. Mugabe, you have a great history as one of the freedom fighters of Zimbabwe and you will always be acknowledged and remembered for the great contribution and sacrifice you personally made to bring freedom to all the people of Zimbabwe. We acknowledge the complexity of the situation in Zimbabwe. However, we believe that your continued unlawful stay in power as the President of Zimbabwe is not benefiting the majority of men and women of your country. Women and children of comrades in the opposition have been deliberately attacked, many have been forced out of their homes and fled the country, and others are currently in safe custody with embassies of foreign countries that still exist in your country. This is a real shame and a total mockery of democracy. We strongly believe that your autocratic leadership is a total disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and the whole of Africa.

FEMNET joins the Presidents of Africa countries and other civil society organizations in Africa to condemn in the strongest terms the undemocratic elections that took place in Zimbabwe on the 27th of June 2008. Your political conduct is unacceptable and shameful to the entire continent of Africa.

We therefore call upon you Mr. Mugabe to do the following:

- To lead a process not exceeding six months, that will result into a peaceful hand over of power to new leaders that have credibility in the eyes of the people of Zimbabwe, the African people and the international community;

- To ensure that an environment of peace, free from intimidation and political violence is guaranteed by the Government of Zimbabwe for all people both supporters of the ruling party and those in opposition. This is an essential prerequisite for the peaceful process of transfer of power and authority to the new leaders of Zimbabwe. It is a constitutional right for citizens to have protection of their rights to personal security and not to be subjected to any form of abuse, torture, or inhuman treatment;

- To respect the rights of the people of Zimbabwe to associate and form political parties as part of the democratic process and to choose their leaders. These rights are guaranteed in Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights to which Zimbabwe is a party. The Constitution of Zimbabwe also guarantees these rights in Article 20 and 21.

- To ensure that women and children of Zimbabwe are protected from unscrupulous elements in society that are taking advantage of the unrest and uncertainty and are abusing and disregarding their rights and freedoms.

- To work towards a legacy of facilitating a peaceful transfer of power to new leaders in Zimbabwe by the end of 2