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Saying no to the Israeli massacre

Lovers of freedom must unite for Palestine

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/53063

On Saturday 3 January, defying the atrocious cold weather ravaging Britain at the moment, I joined several thousand other protesters marching from Embankment to Trafalgar Square in London to protest the massacre of Gaza’s Palestinians. This is a massacre perpetrated by the mighty, merciless Israeli army, a force armed and actively supported by the US and NATO with the supine collaboration of Arab leaders, including the so-called moderate Palestinian leadership under the main Fatah organisation from its Bantustan enclaves in the West Bank.

There were initial fears that the cold would deter many from turning up for the march, but so deep is the outrage of many that they poured out in their thousands in all the major cities of Britain to call for an immediate ceasefire and end to the blockade. These protestors want to find a lasting, peaceful solution that recognises the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to exist in viable states with dignity.

Neither the organisers nor the protesters thought that their marches would produce an immediate result, or that the powers that be in their own government or Israel would take note of their demands. Over a million British people protested against Tony Blair’s playing cheerleader to George W. Bush in the unlawful invasion – based on blatant lies – of Iraq, but it did not stop the poodle from standing shoulder to shoulder with the Texan cowboy.

The point is that protests need not have an immediate impact, but they can have a cumulative effect in changing public view and instigating political change. Think of the many marches, demonstrations, one-man strikes, hunger strikes, and work to rule across South Africa and elsewhere in support of the country’s liberation from apartheid at a time when many – including other Africans – thought the system was impenetrable. But the will, determination and sacrifice by the peoples of South Africa, supported by wider pan-African and international solidarity, tore down the apartheid dungeons. No force on earth can defeat a people’s yearning for liberty and freedom.

The protests against the Gaza massacre are an expression of solidarity. Though powerful countries may be backing Israel – as indeed they supported apartheid South Africa – and though other countries may have been silenced by Zionist censorship, these protesters are saying ‘Not in my name!’ While I may not be able to do much to stop the bombs from raining down on innocent children, women and men, at least in my heart I know it is wrong and on my lips and limbs I protest the injustice.




Israel has successfully intimidated even the most powerful countries and leaders, arguing through its propaganda that the crimes against humanity it is committing have been forced upon it because Hamas has been firing rockets at Israeli cities. From Bush to Brown every Western Leader who has spoken out has blamed Hamas for causing the massacre. While every unlawful loss of life – whether Palestinian or Israeli – is unjustifiable, why can we not compare like with like? How many Israelis have these crude rockets killed? And how many Palestinians have so far been murdered en masse by Israel? How can it be fair that Israel uses a caterpillar to kill flies?

By the time we were folding our banners in Trafalgar Square Israel had invaded with ground troops. Indeed, its army has been on the rampage since Saturday. Murderous and bloodthirsty politicians like the Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, well-dressed and even smiling, are presented on our TV screens justifying the massacre of women and children. This while Israel’s rival politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak – who, if there were any justice would have been declared war criminals – are ecstatic at the huge number of casualties in Gaza and are threatening more.

Meanwhile, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called for an immediate ceasefire and suggested that the Israeli response was disproportionate. But who is listening? All George W. Bush will say is that Hamas should stop sending its largely symbolic rockets, and he will dare not ask for Israeli restraint. In the midst of the Israeli military, political, diplomatic and propaganda hegemony, it is easy to forget that Hamas won a parliamentary election and defeated Al-Fatah. You may not like them, but it is up to the Palestinians to change them, not Israel, not the Arab leaders, the US or anybody else.

Israel had been hoping that the blockade would strangle Hamas, but instead support has grown. When will Israel and the US learn that you cannot help people through strangulation? You cannot bomb your way into the hearts and mind of your victims.

To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, Israel will have many Palestinian bodies to add to those it has killed since 1948, but it will never have their obedience.

It is not enough for us to just look on and say to ourselves that what is going on is bad and simply change the channel. You can join the protest or organise one wherever you may be, write letters to newspapers and make use of feedback sessions in the media. You can also boycott Israeli goods in the shops like Jaffa oranges. Even if our governments, much like their Arab counterparts, are too compromised and cowardly to stand up to Israel, what about you and me?

There are many Africans who are confused about the Israel–Palestine conflict, believing it to be purely a case of Islam vs Judaism or Arab vs Jew. As a people who have known slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, how can we be so complacent about the right of others to a life of dignity and sovereignty over their own affairs? Palestinians are not dangerous but they are endangered by their powerful neighbour, a neighbour supported by the most powerful nations on earth and the collaboration of other leaders in the Arab world and beyond.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is general secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda, and is also director of Justice Africa, based in London, UK.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Africa takes to the streets on Israel massacres in Gaza

Joshua Ogada and Firoze Manji

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/53074

Algeria /Mauritania: Algeria will try to help unify Palestinians ahead of a possible Arab summit to support conflict-torn Gaza, Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci said.
http://www.moneybiz.co.za/africa/africa.asp?story=35405934-7685-4932-babd-f42bea4f29f2

Botswana has broken her silence on Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip by calling on the Jewish state and Hamas to sit down and resolve their differences.
http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=1&aid=20&dir=2009/January/Wednesday7

Egypt: mass protests against the government's response to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza but police moved to quell street protests over the issue.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-01-03-voa3.cfm

Gambia: Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has called on "civilized members of the human race" to rise up against "this holocaust that has been unleashed on the helpless Palestinians, whose lands, human dignity and right to peaceful and dignified existence in their own country are being blatantly violated with impunity."
http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/jammeh-decries-%22palestine-holocaust%22-2009010218671.html

Mali: Several hundred people took to the streets of Bamako, the Malian capital, to protest against the Israeli bombings in the Gaza strip and show support for the Palestinian people. The protesters condemned the "savage" bombings of the Gaza strip and deplored the "indifference" of the international community in the face of the tragedy. http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/bamako-residents-protest-against-gaza-bombings-2009010218682.html



Mauritania: The Mauritanian Press Association (RPM), Wednesday organised a sit-in, in front of the United Nations' country office in Nouakchott, Mauritania's capital, to protest against Israeli attacks and massacre on Gaza, in Palestine.
http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/mauritanian-journalists-protest-israeli-attacks-on-gaza-2009010819038.html

Namibia: The Namibian Government has joined the ranks of countries condemning the Israeli incursion on Gaza, describing the operation as a "disproportionate use of force" and calling on Israel to withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip.
http://www.informante.web.na/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3263&Itemid=100

Niger and Nigeria
In Nigeria and Niger, tens of thousands protested the Israeli bombings that marked their 12th day, with roughly 23,000 people marching in the main city of Kano in Nigeria's mostly Muslim north, police said. Organisers estimated the number at 30,000.
http://www.france24.com/en/20090107-anger-aid-israeli-offensive-gaza-rolls

Nigeria: The Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) has called on the United Nations to take decisive actions against Israel as was done against Yugoslavia in the case of Kosovo. http://www.dailytrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2365&Itemid=19

South Africa: http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8710160863
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053793.html

South Africa: Thousands of demonstrators marched to Parliament in Cape Town on Thursday to call for an end to Israel's offensive in Palestine's Gaza Strip.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=6&art_id=nw20090108134034634C423345

Sudan: Thousands of Sudanese marched through Khartoum on Thursday to vent their anger at the Israeli offensive in Gaza, carrying banners and shouting slogans in support of their "Palestinian brothers". http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gdgQSUDJCxBBWQPUcRjKjuGhon8wD95FCK7O0

Tanzania: Hundreds take to the street in protest at Israeli attacks on Gaza
http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=9627


Tanzania: President Jakaya Kikwete has urged Palestinian and Israeli authorities to find an immediate solution to the conflict between them and halt the ongoing hostility that has so far claimed hundreds of lives.
http://dailynews.habarileo.co.tz/analysis/index.php?id=9393

Tunisia: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) claimed that independent journalists were assaulted by Tunisian police on December 30th. The reporters were covering a demonstration in Tunis by the legal opposition Progressive Democratic Party against Israel's Gaza offensive. Victims of the alleged police violence were Al Jazeera correspondent Lotfi Hajji and Al-Maoukif reporters Ismail Debara and Mohammed Al Hamlouny. http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2009/01/04/newsbrief-05?pollresult=yes&answer=no&id=awi-2008-12-11

Global: Mobilized on six continents—Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North and South America—millions of people have demanded that Israel cease its attack and lift the siege on Gaza.
http://www.workers.org/2009/world/global_anger_0115/

Declaration of support for the Palestinian people

African people in the United States

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53065

cc. Michael RamallahWe, black people in the United States, condemn the criminal Israeli attacks on the people of Gaza. We understand that these war crimes are being conducted with the overt material and unapologetic political backing of the government of the United States of America . Most importantly, we have learned the lessons of four centuries of racist oppression in the Western hemisphere; that the liberation struggles of the oppressed must not be divided by language, geography, gender, religion or race; that if they come for Gaza in the morning, they will most certainly come for Harlem at night.

In 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr spoke out against the US war in Vietnam. He called out the US as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world’. For speaking this truth, Dr King was condemned by the rulers of the US and their loyal servants in the mass media, who arrogantly and condescendingly told him that the Vietnamese war had nothing to do with the black struggle for equality. Dr. King refused to be intimidated.

The stand taken by former US congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in escorting the humanitarian supplies being taken by ship to break the Gaza siege is another example of black people's support. Her response after the ‘Dignity’ was rammed by an Israeli military boat was not to cower but to ‘organize’.

In the spirit of all those who have fought in our centuries-long river of struggle, we will fight by all means necessary to ensure that this genocidal attack on and blockade of the Palestinian people is ended. We demand that:
- Our elected officials, in particular, the Congressional Black Caucus, stand in opposition to the Israeli assault
- Sanctions be brought against Israel as they were brought against the racist apartheid regime of South Africa
- Disinvestment in US corporations which support Israel.

* The Blacks Against Genocide Coalition is composed of groups and individuals who have come together in response to the criminal Israeli assault on the Palestinian people. Please read and circulate the statement below. Please let us know if you or your organisation will sign on to it.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Reflections on African responses to Israeli Gaza invasion

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53073

cc. Amir Farshad EbrahimiMukoma Wa Ngugi reflects on the absence of action by African governments against the Israeli invasion of Gaza and lambasts the divide between African Muslim and non-Muslim populations, calling for a solidarity of action.
In rounding up and reflecting on the various responses coming from Africa on the now widely condemned Israeli Gaza invasion that has left 700 Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead, it is best to begin with Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, an Anglican Archbishop Emeritus, and an anti-apartheid activist who in December of 2006 was blocked by the Israeli government from “investigating the killing of nineteen Palestinians in Gaza .

Tutu does not mince words when in a statement he notes that “in the context of total aerial supremacy, in which one side in the conflict deploys lethal aircraft against opponents with no means of defending themselves, the bombardment bears all the hallmarks of war crimes.”

Sherine Bahaa, in Criminals vs cowards, might as well be writing about Africans and African governments when he speaks to the disconnect between rhetoric and action from Arab governments. He writes that “Judging by past summits, Arab heads of state are unlikely to fulfil popular aspirations, especially if that would put them in conflict with Israel and Washington.” This is the plight of African governments. They are too dependent on Western and Israeli foreign aid to do more than express indignation where what is needed is action.

So when the African Union “strongly condemns the ongoing air raids on the Gaza Strip by Israel, since 27 December 2008” and notes that the “massive and disproportionate attack constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law and will further aggravate the suffering of the civilian population,” one can only praise the words as strong and beautiful, then ask – Where is the action? If the AU truly believes that “international humanitarian law” has been broken, isn’t it morally beholden to take a collective action against the invasion?

Phandu Skelemani, Botswana’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has a watered down condemnation however: “The Botswana position is that we don't need war…War has never brought any solution to problems. The downside about war is that it affects innocent elderly people, women and children, not those who initiate it." Can one imagine a more general and useless statement?

So in Botswana it has been left to Bawood Khonat, Deputy Chairman of the Botswana Muslim Association, to put things in perspective: For the Botswana Muslim Association (BMA), "Israel is an apartheid state" and it is “ironic that ‘Zionists,’ who were victims of horrible atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, should become perpetrators of similar horrors themselves.”

Scouring the news, it is immediately evident that African Muslims are more vocal than non-Muslims. From Nigeria, one reads that “the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) is disturbed by Israeli intransigence.” MURIC goes on to warn that “this type of attitude can only serve as fuel for terrorism,” noting that “by aiding and abetting Zionist aggression, the West has become a major recruitment sergeant for terrorists.”

Kenya’s largest newspaper, the Daily Nation, describes Muslims marching, protesting and urging “President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to cut ties with Israel as a show of Kenya’s commitment to human rights.”

That African Muslims are more vocal than non-Muslims is a huge problem in a continent that has so many divides along ethnicity, religion, colonial monikers of Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone, and along the so called Sub-Saharan and Northern Africa divide that in practice demarcates a racialized line between Arabs and Non-Arabs.

This difference in response captures a larger problem when it comes to Africans and other peoples’ struggles. Africans have come to believe they have the monopoly of suffering and as a consequence expect others to struggle on their behalf, without Africans showing the same solidarity to others. For example, we expect African Americans to struggle on our behalf but not we for them. We expect them to rally around our political prisoners, yet Mumia Abu Jamal, who has been a political prisoner since 1981, has more support in France than in most African countries.

In the same vein, where are the Palestinian solidarity movements and campaigns? Is Middle Eastern geography, history or literature taught in African schools?

South Africa is an exception. The ANC, both as a liberation movement and as a ruling party, is an exception perhaps because the anti-apartheid movement was a national and also a truly international struggle. One needs only to recall Mandela’s refusal to disown Cuba at the insistence of the United States and his response that no one would dictate to South Africa whom its friends are going to be.

So one also reads in Business Day that in addition to condemning the Gaza killings, the ANC has also “said it was time for the Israeli government to accept that there would be no peace or a lasting solution in the region as long as it continued to occupy land that rightfully belonged to the Palestinians.” In South Africa one finds officially sanctioned fact finding missions to Gaza, and the organization Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The South African Communist Party, in a statement that calls the invasion genocidal, goes further than the ANC and “condemns the criminal complicity of the US administration, the major backer and arms supplier to the Zionist state, and the hypocrisy of all major western governments.”

In the same statement quoted previously, Bishop Tutu goes on to say that the plight of Palestine in the face of Israeli aggression is “a blight not only on the Middle East, but on the entire world - and particularly world leaders who have consistently failed the people of Palestine and Israel over the past 60 years.”

What we need as Africans is a re-examination of the term solidarity. Solidarity should not be measured against future military and economic aid – or even simply making common cause against a common enemy. Solidarity should be about, collectively, doing what is morally right when, as the AU puts its, international humanitarian law is violated. Solidarity is making common cause with a common humanity. Solidarity is a revolutionary act.

Recently, solidarity and action have come from a rather unexpected source. Mauritania has recalled its ambassador to Israel. If it takes a government installed through a coup and led by a military junta to do the right thing, it is indeed a blight on the entire continent.

*Mukoma Wa Ngugi is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine and Assistant Editor of Pambazuka News

Africa’s hyprocrisy on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity

Lawrence M. Mute

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53072

cc. See Ming LeeOn the 18th of December, 2008, a Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity with the backing of 66 states including six African countries, was read at the General Assembly. The statement reaffirmed “the principle of the universality of human rights amongst other things. But a counter-statement arguing against the statement supported by 60 states including a multitude of African countries.

In this essay that shows the discrepancy between universal human rights and their selective application, Lawrence M. Mute asks: Why did the whole of Anglophone Africa decline to support the Statement? Why did such little empathy flow from many discriminated groups to LGBTI communities? Why would many a group discriminated on grounds of race, disability or gender still find it rational to perpetuate discrimination on homosexuals or lesbians?
Africa’s hyprocrisy on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity

Lawrence M. Mute



During the month when the World celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, an extremely rare, indeed one-time event, was witnessed at the United Nations General Assembly. On the 18th of December, 2008, a Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity [1] with the backing of 66 states including six African countries [2], was read at the General Assembly.

The Statement drew its message exclusively from human rights normative frameworks such as the International Bill of Rights and interpretive statements from Treaty Body Committees. Among other things, it:

- Reaffirmed “the principle of the universality of human rights, … that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of human rights without distinction of any kind, ... (and) the principle of non-discrimination which requires that human rights apply equally to every human being regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity”;

- Raised concerns about: “violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms based on sexual orientation or gender identity ... (and) that violence, harassment, discrimination, exclusion, stigmatisation and prejudice are directed against persons in all countries in the world because of sexual orientation or gender identity, and that these practices undermine the integrity and dignity of those subjected to these abuses”;

- Condemned “human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity wherever they occur...And;

- Urged “states to take all the necessary measures … to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention …, to ensure that human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are investigated and perpetrators held accountable and brought to justice ... (and) to ensure adequate protection of human rights defenders, and remove obstacles which prevent them from carrying out their work on issues of human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity [3].”

The symbolic and actual importance of this Statement was dramatised by the reading of a counter-statement arguing against the Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, supported by 60 states including a multitude of African countries. The counter-statement was based on classic stereotyping, prejudice and disinformation most often articulated by homophobes and transphobes. It, among other things, stated that: protection of sexual orientation could lead to the social normalisation and possibly the legalisation of deplorable acts such as paedophilia and incest. It charged that the Statement was an attempt to create « ‘new rights’ or ‘new standards’ by misinterpreting the Universal Declaration and International Treaties to include such notions that were never articulated nor agreed by the general membership [4].

A High Level Side Event on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity [5] to commemorate the Statement’s reading was addressed, among others, by Rama Yade, France’s Secretary of State for Human Rights; Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands; Sunil Pant, an MP from Nepal; Michael O’flaherty, Raporteur of the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights in Relation to Sexual orientation and Gender Identity and member of the Human Rights Committee; Navanethen Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Lawrence Mute, a Commissioner with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The Event sought both to celebrate as well as reflect on the way forward for ensuring the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) communities around the World.

But, back to the Statement itself, where one is bound to query why countries and mainstream civil society organizations which espouse human rights as universal, indivisible and interdependent still fail to acknowledge the unacceptability that fellow human beings should be killed, violated, discriminated or excluded from society simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In particular, why did the whole of Anglophone Africa decline to support the Statement? Why did such little empathy flow from many discriminated groups to LGBTI communities? Why would many a group discriminated on grounds of race, disability or gender still find it rational to perpetuate discrimination on homosexuals or lesbians? Was it that human rights are guaranteed to some and not to others?

States, as enjoined by the United Nations Charter and the plethora of Human Rights Treaties to which they are party, are the ultimate bastions for ensuring respect, protection and fulfillment of the rights of all individuals and communities, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Article 2 of the African charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights replicates anti-discrimination injunctions in other Human Rights Conventions when it requires that: “Every individual shall be entitled to the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms recognized and guaranteed in the present Charter without distinction of any kind such as race, ethnic group, colour, sex, language, religion, political or any other opinion, national and social origin, fortune, birth or other status [6]. (Emphasis added) The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has interpreted the phrase “other status” in Article 2.2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) to include the ground of sexual orientation [7]. Then again, the Human Rights Committee has interpreted the word “sex” in Article 2.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) , in Toonen v. Australia [8], as: “to be taken as including sexual orientation”.

So, why did so many African countries prefer to sign a counter-statement purveying homophobia and transphobia rather than support a cogent anti-discrimination and anti-violence position? In my address to the High Level Side Event, I noted that the discourse for ensuring that the rights of LGBTI communities are respected, protected and fulfilled has over the years been framed as a decidedly Northern/developed countries agenda, with minor exceptions at the legal if definitely not the popular level in developing jurisdictions such as South Africa. IN my assessment, five dynamics continue to dictate the manner in which developing countries in Africa and perhaps other regions interact with the rights of LGBTI communities.

First, is the dynamic of criminalization under which sodomy laws were nearly a century ago legislated into colonial Africa to criminalise homosexual and related acts. By the time that Africa’s colonizers began to expunge sodomy legislation from their statute books (through processes such as the 1956 Wolfenden Committee in the United Kingdom) [9], sodomy laws in Africa had become entrenched in a value ethic of their own sheathed in culture and religion under which homosexuality was touted as “un-African” and “unholy” [10]. This is the basis upon which sodomy laws today remain on the statute books of countries such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania as “offenses against morality” [11], and are being legislated most recently in countries such as Burundi [12].

Second, is the dynamic of discrimination and violation. The legal plight of LGBTI people is not determined as such by sodomy laws, for these laws tend to be difficult or inconvenient to prosecute successfully. Far more pressing is the discrimination or the violation of LGBTI peoples’ rights to life, liberty, education, health or employment on account of their sexuality. A lesbian person in East Africa today fears to be “outed” because her homophobic employer may then engineer dismissal, in clear violation of the ICESCR as well as a host of other international, regional and national laws. “Outing” might also incite groups on the fringes of some cultural or religious traditions to hurt or kill such lesbian person in breach, among other norms, of the ICCPR.

Third, is the dynamic of political mobilization against LGBTI peoples. African experiences during the last two decades include a procession of heads of states – from President Moi, President Museveni, President Mugabi and President Nujoma - making decidedly homophobic statements equating homosexuality with beastliness and Western-derived baseness, and as a consequence mobilizing popular opprobrium against homosexual people. Our Legislatures have responded either through stony silence and prevarication or rabid rejection of LGBTI issues as policy or legislative concerns. The effect of this, for example, was a proposal in the Draft Constitution of Kenya, 2005, specifically stating that marriage may happen only between a man and a woman.

Fourth, however, is the dynamic of pragmatism which has increasingly informed the administrative actions and responses of our states’ bureaucracies. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has forced administrators in our Ministries of Health to realize that they must craft interventions specific to groups such as men who have sex with men (MSM’s) and commercial sex workers. The plans of our Ministries of Health now include express or implicit strategies on how to ensure that MSM’s conduct of sex is safe.

Fifth, the human rights discourse has finally began to impact the lives of Africa’s LGBTI peoples. The last few years have seen LGBTI communities beginning to “claim” their rights as rights-holders. When the World Social Forum was held in Nairobi in January 2007, the LGBTI communities socialized in the ‘Q-Spot’ tent where they articulated their rights concerns with conviction and courage. In East Africa, one notes the particular courageous activism of organizations like Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) [13].

A more specific commentary must be made regarding the behaviour of South Africa in this matter. It was greatly disappointing that by “abstaining”, South Africa failed to show political and diplomatic leadership when its Constitution [14] as well as its Judiciary (for example its Constitutional Court) [14] have spoken so resoundingly against discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. South Africa’s credentials as a “non-racist” and “non-sexist” nation had to be found wanting when her politicians and diplomats failed to stand alongside other World leaders in condemnation of homophobia and transphobia; a paradox that totally impeaches the philosophy of equality and non-discrimination. Could it really be that South Africa’s political leadership tolerates the dehumanizing violence so graphically meted out on lesbians in that country? South Africa’s silence at the General Assembly on the 18th of December was compounded when the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a South African, while addressing the Side Event, recollected with warmth South Africa’s firm anti-gay constitutional provisions and past supportive statements from South Africa’s Minister of Health at the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference.

During the Side Event, Mr Verhagen urged the Human Rights Committee to prepare a new General Comment on Article 2 of the ICCPR covering non-discrimination. Mr O’Flaherty urged states and mainstream human rights organizations to provide the UN’s Treaty Committees and Special Procedures’ holders information with relevance for LGBTI communities. This would enable these human rights mechanisms to ask more searching questions and make more incisive recommendations in the areas of women’s rights, torture, etc, as these relate to LGBTI communities. I warned that as much as we may desire and rhetorise constitutional and legislative reforms including decriminalisation, this would be unlikely to happen in the immediate short term. I hoped that in the medium term our Judiciaries had limitless possibilities of making enlightened decisions to enhance the rights of LGBTI communities [16]. I urged activists to deploy the intersectional approach to leverage the technical and lobbying capacities of all groups which are discriminated on grounds such as race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation or others to work together to combat discrimination. Our experiences thus far have tended to range one discriminated group against the whole society such that such group’s gains or losses have also to be borne singly. I noted that even as we acknowledge that human rights are universal, strategies for the realization of human rights may be localized to particular regions. Northern advocates on the rights of LGBTI communities and backers from the North must not presume that the strategies of their peers from the South must coincide with theirs. It should not be about how rights are realized; it should be that rights do become realised.

In conclusion, African states must acknowledge that there is an irreducible minimum of rights which must apply to LGBTI peoples simply because they do apply to all other human beings in our various jurisdictions. As articulated in the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to sexual Orientation and Gender Identity [17], this irreducible minimum of rights that must be protected does not envisage the promulgation of new rights, but rather stresses the imperativeness of ensuring already existent rights, including protection of LGBTI people from discrimination, respect of the right to privacy and ensuring their rights to life, liberty, expression and movement. The Yogyakarta Principles are a critical component in the toolkit of states and advocates as we seek to ensure that the rights of LGBTI communities are realized; and their localization in an African context should happen.


* Commissioner, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights; email: lmute@knchr.org
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/


Notes:


1. Available at www.ilga.org/news_results.asp?LanguageID=1&FileID=1211&FileCategory=44&ZoneID=7 (accessed on 24 December 2008).

2. The African states were Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, and Sao Tome and Principe.

3. Supra footnote 2

4. Available at www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/domestic/10617078.asp?gid=24 (accessed on 24 December 2008).

5. Held at UN Headquarters, New York, between 1:00 and 3:00 pm on 18 December 2008

6. For the approach of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights on sexual orientation and gender identity, see Rachel Murray and Frans Viljoen, “Towards Non Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation: The Normative Basis and Procedural Possibilities before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union”, available at https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2263/4092/1/Murray_Towards(2007).pdf (accessed on 25 December 2008).

7. This is the case, for example, in General Comment Nos 18 of 2005 (on the right to work), 15 of 2002 (on the right to water), and 14 of 2000 (on the right to the highest attainable standard of health). (See Michael O’Flaherty and John Fisher: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and International Human Rights Law: Contextualising the Yogyakarta Principles, Oxford University Press, 2008)

8. Available at: www1.unnedu/humanrights/undocs/html/vws488.htm (accessed on 25 December 2008).

9. This Committee concluded that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private was part of the “realm of private morality which is not the law’s business” and should no longer be criminal”. For relevant analysis, see Philip Dayle with Alok Gubta: “Beyond the Polemics: The Continuing ‘Gay’ Rights Project and the Post-Colonial South”, paper presented at the Experts’ Meeting on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights, Yogyakarta, 6-9 November 2006.

10. For an erudite discussion on the manner in which colonial Britain forced its sodomy laws on its colonies and the consequences of that, see: This Alien Legacy: The Origins of (Sodomy) Laws in British Colonialism, Human Rights Watch, 2008, available at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/12/17/alien-legacy-0 (accessed on 27 December 2008).

11. Kenya’s Penal Code still stipulates punishments of 14 years for the offense of having carnal knowledge on or by another “against the order of nature”; Tanzania’s sentencing in this regard is 30 years while that of Uganda is life imprisonment (see Sylvia Tamale’s reflections in: This Body: Supporting LGBTI Organising in East Africa, Urgent Action Fund, 2006).

12. See “Burundian Gays Oppose New Anti Homosexual Penal Code”, available at www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=burundi&id=2015 (last accessed on 26 December 2008).

13. Even the electronic and print media nowadays carries some programming content discoursing around the concerns of LGBTI communities. This year, a private TV station with national reach carried a discussion programme under its Hatua series where Kenyans expressed diverse views on the legality, morality and rights contexts of concerns of LGBTI communities. Perhaps paradoxically, even the homophobia witnessed within the Anglican Church has engendered public consciousness on the rights of LGBTIs.

14. Section 9(3) of the South African Constitution of 1996.

15. Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie, 2006 (3) BCLR 355 (CC), which found the prohibition of gay marriage to be unconstitutional; also, the National Coalition of Gay and Lesbian Equality v. the Minister of Justice, 1998 (12) BCLR 1517 (CC)(S.Afr), where the Constitutional Court declared sodomy laws unconstitutional.

16. Apart from specifically listed grounds for which discrimination is outlawed, East Africa’s anti-discrimination constitutional provisions include the ground of ‘other status’, (in Kenya referred to as “other local connexion”) which progressive judicial interpretation would quite easily read as a basis for excluding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Committee on Rights of the Child] interpretation); or the ground of “sex” which could be similarly interpreted (Human Rights Committee) interpretation). (See Lawrence Mute, “Sexual Rights as Human Rights: Operationalisation by Stealth”, in Sex Matters, Urgent Action Fund-Africa, 2007). 17. Available at www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.htm (accessed on 25 December 2008).

Mass media in Angola: Hegemonic power or power to be subverted?

Rafael Marques de Morais

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53064

For the past nine years, an alternative media has been challenging the status quo of the former Marxist-Leninist regime of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in power for 32 years in Angola, the oil-rich and yet poverty stricken southern Africa country. In reaction, the authorities initially embarked on widespread arrests, threats, harassment and legal actions against the dissident media which, in turn, had a boomerang effect on the regime, for it attracted greater public solidarity, networking and legitimised such media outlets as the ‘weapons of the weak’, and beacons of democracy.

As a brief political context, it is important to highlight that the country has not held elections since 1992, and therefore constitutionally the state institutions hold no legitimacy, for the constitutional law requires universal suffrage every four years.

This essay explores a new kind of approach to mass media, in Angola, in which subversion has become a two-way street. I will make a comparative analysis with the guerrilla media in Taiwan of the 1970s (Lee, 2003), to argue that the subversion of mass media, as a site of contestation against hegemonic power, is effective when it is part and parcel of strong social and political movements that challenge the status quo.

In contrast, I elaborate on a specific case study of the alternative media campaign, in early 2008, against the takeover of one of the two public state television channels by the president of the Angolan republic’s children to expand their business interests and pleasure. In so doing, I demonstrate that because the campaign has occurred in a social vacuum, efforts to challenge hegemonic power have been be re-appropriated by the regime as useful tools for self-legitimisation in the absence of democratic legitimacy.

MASS MEDIA

For clarity and a better understanding of the mass media role in Angola, both as a tool of the hegemonic power and as a site of contestation against that hegemony, I locate the media in two different, at times overlapping, camps: media power and alternative media.

I refer to media power, a concept broadly articulated by Couldry (2003:39) to encompass chiefly the state and corporate influences over media institutions and productions. I narrow the term here to the state ownership and iron-fist control of the only TV station (Televisão Pública de Angola – TPA), nationwide radio broadcaster (Rádio Nacional de Angola – RNA), the only daily newspaper (Jornal de Angola), and the only news agency (Agência Angola Press – ANGOP) in the country. To this, I adduce the overlapping and influential three commercial FM radios and a recently launched weekly newspaper, Novo Jornal, co-owned by politburo members of the ruling MPLA and the Portuguese Bank Banco Espírito Santo (Semanário Angolense, 2008a), which all serve the regime.

As alternative media I adopt Couldry and Curran’s (2003:7) assertion of it being media production that challenges, at least implicitly, actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may take in different contexts. Currently, I also use, within the same category, the guerrilla media concept, for it is embedded in the current forms of political contestation in Angola. For Lee (2003:163) guerrilla media comprises mainly the resource-poor, low-cost, and small-scale media outlets, in which political activism takes primacy over professional journalism. Moreover, these media outlets engage in ‘“hit and run” battles with state censors and the mainstream media by constructing counter-hegemonic realities’. (ibid.) Such outlets in Angola are the Catholic-run Rádio Ecclésia, which only broadcasts in the capital Luanda, the weekly newspapers Semanário Angolense,[1] Folha 8, A Capital, Agora, Angolense and Cruzeiro do Sul, which together print up to 40,000 copies a week for a circulation also mostly limited to the capital.

Lee (ibid.) characterises the guerrilla media as the primary site of contestation in Taiwan (1976–86) for the dissenting voices and protest groups to challenge the legitimacy of the authoritarian party-state and system of patronage-clientele. The Taiwanese guerrilla media, as explained by Lee (ibid.) was an integral part of strong social and political movements. The latter sought to galvanise mass support for the causes of the oppressed, and to undermine power domination by using such media as privileged vehicles of political communication. The Angola case is one in which the guerrilla media is what there is of a consistent social and political movement of contestation, for the mainstream political opposition has been co-opted into a token Government of National Unity and Reconciliation in place for the last 16 years.

Moreover, the existing civil society organisations are, on the one hand, integrally dependent on foreign funding and their often restricting and conflicting agendas, for primary donors like USAID, DFID also represents the interests of the government’s main business partners in the oil sector, the US and the UK. On the other hand, such organisations are either induced and fully patronised by the ruling elite as a counter-measure to thwart the emergence of a genuine movement of contestation or co-opted.

Hence, by way of illustration, I briefly analyse how isolated alternative media is and how the regime re-appropriates its subversive coverage to further strengthen its own hegemonic power. I empirically sample the recent alternative media outcry on the rumoured privatisation of the second channel of Televisão Pública de Angola, in favour of two of President José Eduardo dos Santos’ children, namely Ms Welwitchia and Mr José dos Santos. This channel has been running for a few years with a view to providing the masses with more entertainment, while the first one retains, as its main feature, news information.

There is an element of curiosity here that calls for an explanation and a theoretical framework, which makes this empirical sample more remarkable. The alternative media takes the stand to defend the wholesome maintenance of the most important medium of state propaganda, the state television. This move should be contextualised within the concept of mass media and popular culture as ‘the most important and powerful institutions’ that, according to Strinati (2004:205) control and shape all other types of social relationships.

As a political propaganda tool, TPA has become fossilised by decades of tight censorship and self-censorship. Although no research has been done yet to assess its impact on people’s mindset, empirical evidence contends that a significant number of people tune into it mostly to watch Brazilian soap-operas and a few other entertainment programs. Therefore, one can say that there is a view that it does not have much impact on socio-political relations.

However, the outsourcing of the TPA’s Channel 2 to the president’s children aims at producing the highest possible impact on the masses by introducing a radical agenda of locally produced entertainment programs, never experienced before, since Angola became independent in 1975. Another aim that is clearly articulated in the programming, which includes one on holidaying abroad and motoring, is the promotion of a Western style consumerism, targeting the youth. This is set to construct an image of a prosperous and trendy society, and, as the alternative media has consensually labelled, to be a ‘social anaesthetic’ against the pain of the political and economic exclusion of the majority. Nonetheless, the star programme focuses on sexual fantasies and marketing of sex toys – Sexolândia (Semanário Angolense, 2008b). It is co-hosted by a former Angolan model and Big Brother Africa participant, Tatiana Durão. In an editorial Semanário Angolense pulls no punches in attacking the programme:
‘It is clear that with Tatiana Durão (who performs sex in front of the whole Africa, in the Big Brother house) and certain guests of her kind, we have the Televisão Pública de Angola, paid for by the Angolan people, turned into a den of pornography.’ (Semanário Angolense, 2008c)

For Strinati (ibid:220) consumerism and television have similar effects in disrupting the ‘possibilities for solid and stable identities’, for the first fosters self-centred individualism while the latter is equally individualistic and universal. As a major consequence of this media strand, Strinati (ibid.) posits that ‘the wider collectivities to which people might belong, and the legitimate ideas in which they might believe, tend to be ignored, eroded or fragmented’.

Furthermore, Hall contends that ‘identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, and to render “outside”, abjected.’ In this particular case, their erosion can perform the naturalisation of socio-economic and political exclusion.

Another particular element of concern for the alternative media is the hiring of an ‘army’ of seasoned Portuguese and Brazilian journalists and producers to revamp the media landscape both public and private, which obviously includes Channel 2. This threatens the ability of the alternative media to maintain its mainly political news agenda as the main focus of debate as far as mass media is concerned, and to survive. The emerging private media projects bankrolled by the regime have the financial resources and know-how to drive the insurgent media out of the market, by also poaching their staff. Semanário Angolense (2007) claims that such a strategy, overseen by the president of the republic’s spokesperson, Aldemiro da Conceição, entrusts the defence of the president’s image, the most castigated by the alternative media, in the hands of foreigners and that it will reverse the gains made in terms of freedom of press and of expression.

This is where the workings of hegemony come into play. In a Gramscian sense (Gramsci, 1991:258-9) hegemony here represents the efforts by the ruling elite to dominate the society by consent. In this case it is the consent of impotence by the dominated groups to effectively challenge the status quo.

There was a fierce barrage of attacks on the presidential family by the alternative media for widening its business interests to the media sector, in what is regarded as wholesale privatisation of the state. Instead of responding with violence, as in the past, the authorities decided to respond to the attacks by letting the opposition take the case to parliament. Thereby, the government clarified that it did not privatise the Channel 2, but simply outsourced it to the company owned by the president’s offspring to manage it, and develop a new range of quality programmes (Carlos, 2008).

Then, parliament concluded that there was nothing improper in the affair, giving its seal of approval to the deal, entirely funded by the state. Meanwhile, the opposition, led by the former rebel movement UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), provided an apparent chorus of legitimacy to the president’s children’s business enterprise by lending credibility to the proceedings.

For a further humiliation of its critics, the MPLA’s chief whip, Bornito de Sousa, read out, during the session, a letter sent by the president’s offspring, to reiterate their interest only in the ‘private management’ of Channel 2, and not on privatisation. The end result was that the state now integrally funds a private enterprise, which makes not a single digit capital investment into the project.

An intervention made during the parliamentarian debate, and amplified by the state media, is illustrative of the re-appropriation of negative press to disarm it:
‘A certain media has been portraying the idea that the families of the rulers, such as brothers, children and spouses have no right to work and feeding. This is the idea they [the alternative media] want people to believe in, by manipulating the population.’ (Tany Narciso, quoted by Carlos, 2008)

The alternative media’s summary of the parliamentarian debate, as articulated by Carlos (ibid.), is also telling of its feeling of echoing in the desert:
‘to slip into apathy, and have such lard speeches…it would have been better if the opposition let the matter as it was, and just kept quiet. The opposition had in its hands one of those issues to rally the society and the voters alike, an issue that could as well have catalysed the solidarity of the media. However, the media was defrauded.’

To make matters worse for the alternative media, in April 2008, the government completed the poaching of all the relevant journalists from the Catholic-run Rádio Ecclésia (Costa, 2008) to Televisão Pública de Angola and Rádio Nacional de Angola. It offered far greater financial and material rewards in the face of the priests’ poor management (ibid.), and the bishops’ public disavowal of ‘troublemaking’ journalists to appease the authorities (Semanário Angolense, 2008d). Rádio Ecclésia came to be known as the people’s radio for it gave voice aplenty to the disenfranchised and victims of the system. As a consequence, the position of the alternative weekly newspapers is much weaker, for their outreach is extremely limited to a small urban fringe of Luanda’s five million inhabitants. The radio used to magnify, through reviews and other creative ways, the most critical coverage of the papers.

Hountondoji (1992:361) offers a more practical answer to the conundrum presented by the Angolan case on media and power relations, in the context of Africa’s political curses:
‘The reminder of the everyday may produce the salutary effect of demystification, of a return to what is real beyond the pretentious stream of discourses that obscure it. There is still so much to be said, so many crimes to be uncovered, so many myths to be destroyed; so much suffering to be brought to light, that one finds oneself here almost constrained to begin at the beginning: the purely journalistic reconstruction of facts.’

* Rafael Marques de Morais, an Angolan, is a journalist by training. He is currently studying for the MSc in African Studies and is based at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

[1] On local media sources, the author exclusively references Semanário Angolense, the leading weekly alternative newspaper, for it is the only alternative media with a technically reliable and up-to-date website. This is to facilitate consultation, for an external audience, on some of the issues raised here and without prejudice for the other media outlets as trustworthy sources of information. Nonetheless, the issues hereby addressed are representative of a common mindset of the abovementioned alternative media outlets, as I have observed while in Angola, and through my professional contributions to such media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Couldry, Nick (2003) Beyond the Hall of Mirrors? Some Theoretical Reflections on
the Global Contestations of Media Power in N. Couldry and J. Curran (eds.) Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 39-54.
Couldry, Nick and J. Curran (eds.) The Paradox of Media Power in Contesting Media
Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 3-15.
Gramsci, Antonio (1991) Selections from Prison Notebooks, Smith, Geoffrey Nowell
and Hoare, Quintin (eds.). Lawrence & Wishert,Ltd.
Hall, Stuart (2002) Who Needs Identity? in S. Hall and P. Du Gay, Questions of
Cultural Identity. Sage.
Hountondji, Paulin J. (1992) Daily Life in Black Africa: Elements for a Critique in The
Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of the Otherness, 1947-1987. The University of Chicago Press.
Lee, Chin-Chuan (2003) Liberalization without Full Democracy: Guerrilla Media and
Political Movements in Taiwan in N. Couldry and J. Curran (eds.) Contesting
Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 163-176
Strinati, Dominic (2004) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. Routledge.

INTERNET (All webpages last accessed on 11 May 2008)

Carlos, Severino (2008) A Tónica Dominante na Interpelação sobre a Gestão do
Canal 2 da TPA: Nos Filhos do Chefe Ninguém Toca! in Semanário Angolense, Edição n° 254, de 1 a 8 de Março.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9610&edit=254
Carlos, Severino (2008) Debate Parlamentar sobre o Canal 2 da TPA: Uma Jornada
de Má Política in Semanário Angolense, Edição n° 254, de 1 a 8 de Março.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9608&edit=254
Costa, Dani (2008) João Pinto Saiu da Ecclésia, in Semanário Angolense, Edição n°
261, de 16 a 26 de Abril.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9984&edit=261
Semanário Angolense (2007) Por Conta de um Controverso «Boom» Mediático
Defesa do Presidente Confiada a Estrangeiros, Edição n° 187, de 28 de
Outubro a 4 de Novembro.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=5797&edit=187
Semanário Angolense (2008a) Nasceu Mais um Privado: Novo Jornal nas Bancas,
Edição n° 249, de 26 de Janeiro a 2 de Fevereiro.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9368&edit=249
Semanário Angolense (2008b) Meninas Solteiras: Comprem ‘Pilas’ de Plástico, para
as vossas Fantasias… A Nadi, a Tatiana e a Depravação Total no ‘Sexolândia’ da Tpa-2, Edição n°257, de 22 a 29 de Março de 2008.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9772&edit=257
Semanário Angolense (2008c) Valeu-nos a Dra. Natália do Espírito Santo: Fantasia
Sexual é Perversão, in Semanário Angolense, Edição n° 257, de 22 a 29 de
Março de 2008.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9773&edit=257
Semanário Angolense (2008d) Zacarias Kamwenho, Edição n° 247, de 12 a 19 de
Janeiro.
http://www.semanarioangolense.net/full_headlines.php?id=9290&edit=247

The struggle of women and HIV and AIDS

Janah Ncube

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53071

Secondly, I discovered that Norman, after knowing his status, did not tell his wife (about 10 years his junior) and proceeded to have unprotected sex with her and thus infected her. I felt betrayed. How could he do this to his wife, someone else’s sister? How would he feel if some guy did this to me his sister? I thought he would always look out for me but by this he indicated otherwise. What would stop some guy from doing to me this that my brother did. How cruel I thought (Hutsinye chaizo!). This cruel man was my brother! Anyway, Norman’s young wife found living with Norman (whom she had to take care of during his bouts of sickness attacks) too painful, so she mustered courage and left him, illegally crossed over to South Africa to start a new life as an economic migrant worker where she can access drugs. During Norman’s funeral, our family discovered that Norman had secretly married another young woman in her early 20s whom he left pregnant. One more person he knowingly passed on the HIV virus to.

What kind of man does this? Norman was a great everyday guy, hard working, a loving brother and son. Clearly, it is the everyday guy who is part of the cycle that makes stopping the spread of HIV and limiting the devastation of AIDS difficult. The patriarchal nature of our societies, politics and economies continuously victimizes women and makes them vulnerable and susceptible to poverty, insecurity and infection with the HIV virus.

The magnitude and the consequences of HIV and AIDS in Africa have taught us that it is not only a health problem, it is also a governance and development problem. It is about States that are badly managed and whose interests do not address the needs and priorities of their populations. It is about patriarchal societies that refuse to transform themselves to their present realities and truths and rather draw on the past in the guise of culture and tradition to direct present and future contexts. Young men like Norman go about marrying and lording it over naïve and desperate women to all their peril. The two young girls became victims of society’s conspiracy against women which projects marriage as a woman’s ultimate moment of glory and so many get into it at any cost even if their lives are highly at risk as a consequence. We are killing our own young people across this continent!

The worst hit by the HIV virus are the peoples of Africa and because of poverty, conflict and geo political inequalities our continent is the most vulnerable. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), off the 33 million people living with the HIV virus world wide at the end of 2007, 22 million (two thirds) were Africa’s children. Of the 2 million who died in 2007, three quarters were in Africa and of the 2.7 million new infections in 2007, 70% were in Africa. These are facts African peoples and leaders have to wake up to. We cannot hold on to the beliefs and practices that landed us on this mess anymore. Things have to drastically change.

The 15 to 49 years age group which is our most productive age group is the most desecrated by this virus. When they get sick and/or die we loose their skills, experience and dent our economies. The 2005 Human Development Report identified AIDS as the factor inflicting the single greatest reversal in human development history. Between 1990 and 2003, many of the countries severely affected by AIDS dropped sharply in the global ranking of countries on the Human Development Index. For example South Africa fell by 35 places, Botswana by 21 places and Zambia by 16 places. Adult deaths place an especially high economic burden on societies. The loss of working-age adults represents a loss of human capital and has a profound effect on household economic well being. A cross-sectional study of the effects of adult mortality on small farmers engaged in cotton and maize production in Zambia found that an adult death resulted in a decline in crop output of roughly 15 percent. Experiences in most highly affected countries in SSA show that key skilled personnel particularly teachers, health workers, civil servants and artisans are most affected leaving skills gaps for the country negatively impacting economic growth and reversing development (SADC Secretariat 2008).

The gender discrimination in our societies has had dismal consequences for women and girls. Women have become the victims of our societal values not just as the infected but as having to bear the burden of the consequences HIV and AIDS. 59% of the adults with HIV and AIDS are women. For every 1 young man age range 15 – 24 years old there are 3 young women with HIV within the same age group. A UNDP report of 2003 showed how young girls in Zimbabwe were dropping out of school to take care of infected parents. So really, the AIDS virus is corroding women’s bodies, demands women’s time, energy, sanity, steals young girls’ childhood, future and innocence. These are results women and girls struggle with because our world still perpetuates social, economic, cultural and political systems that are grounded in patriarchy and thus dis-empower women, legitimate inequality and exclusion. This is why the regional protocols, the national laws, the policies that exists across the continent to address HIV and AIDS have not haltered its spread or cushioned the most vulnerable from its invasive and destructive impact. Norman was able to get away with infecting his two wives in a Zimbabwe that has a law which persecutes and punishes anyone who knowingly infects another with the HIV virus (the Sexual Offences Act 2002).

A comprehensive study was carried out by the Physicians for Human Rights called ‘Epidemic of inequality: women’s rights and HIV and AIDS (2007). The study focuses on Botswana and Swaziland the countries who have the highest prevalence rates in the world 23.9% and 26.1% respectively. Botswana was highest all along until 2004 when Swaziland overtook it. The study shows how entrenched societal gender discrimination perpetuates HIV and AIDS prevalence. Both countries until recently had legalized gender inequalities where women had a lesser status than men in the eyes of society and the law; restricted property rights, minimal inheritance and hardly any autonomy. I recall my shock during my first stay in Botswana in 2005, when I filled out the form to open a water account. The form clearly indicated that if a married woman is wanting to open a water account she must produce evidence of consent from her husband. Clearly gendered values, norms and practices make women extremely vulnerable and as a study carried out in Zambia expressly shows subjects them to risky sexual behavior (Human Rights Watch 2007). Where women are disempowered and viewed as less in society, they are most likely to suffer the most from stigma if their status is discovered and are likely unable to make decisions in regards to their sexuality. This increases risk to themselves and spreads the infection.

Gender based violence (GBV) or fear of is another societal evil women struggle with which exacerbates the risk to HIV infection and/or affects women’s access and adherence to treatment. 1 in 3 women in SSA has experienced some form of violence. 1 in 5 women has been coerced or forced into a sexual act. The Human Rights Study, ‘Hidden in the Mealie Meal: Gender Based Abuses and Women’s HIV Treatment in Zambia’ (2007) shows that 1 in every 2 women who have ever been married has experienced GBV and abuses in the hands of her husband. Violence against women is a social crime that has been perpetuated over generations and coupled with the HIV virus deals a double blow to many women and girls. Turning deaf ears and blind eyes to wife battering, abuse of the girl child and pretending there is no rape of a wife by her husband or of young girls by their fathers or brothers/uncles had put many women and girls at risk. Treated as ‘domestic issues’, governments have been reckless and are responsible for the pain, the broken limbs and destroyed lives of women and girls who have been victims of GBV. Further to this is the escalated use of rape as a weapon of war. Rape be it in the marital bed or under a shrub in a conflict zone is a crime of hate, is violent and seeks to rob the victim of her or his humanity. Women and girls in the DRC, Northern Uganda, Darfur, Zimbabwe just to name a few of the currently on-going conflicts have been subjected to the violence of rape as their bodies became battle grounds in a war between a few men. As an ACORD seminar report of March 2007 ‘Exposing Hidden War Crimes: Challenging Impunity for Sexual Violence in times of Conflict’ remarks that it is the silence on GBV in times of peace that legitimate SGBV in times of war.

The ABC campaign has failed to halt and reverse the spread of HIV especially where gender dimensions are not considered. A rape victim has no multiple choice luxury. A wife in most African society does not have the luxury of choosing A or B or C. She cannot Abstain, it is her duty to give her husband sex and it is his right to take it from her if she wont give it. She can only Be as faithful as he is. Most African societies tolerate and look aside when married men have sexual relations with other women other than their wife. Should a married woman dare do the same, she is humiliated, insulted and becomes a social outcast. She can not chose a Condom, she would have to explain to her ‘lord’, her husband why she needs it. The call for ‘behavioural change’ means absolutely nothing when the playing ground is skewed against one side of the sexes, women. My late brother Norman and his two wives are a good example of how information provision and calls for testing are just not enough. They lived in a country with a massive education campaign on television, radio, billboards on HIV and AIDS.

The political will of African governments must now be made willing to deliver women’s rights. Our economic growth and rate of development heavily depend on it. The legal, social, cultural and economic environments of our countries have to change and guarantee gender equality! We unfortunately can’t afford the cost of no or slow change. Our beliefs, attitudes and norms that have relegated women to a lower position in society have to go, in every aspect of our lives and must not be tolerated. We must empower women legally, socially and economically. We acted against slavery, we acted against racism, we acted against colonialism and apartheid, we certainly have the capacity to act against gender discrimination.

The approach of prevention, control and treatment adopted by most countries in its general sense is correct. However governments have to rethink what they mean by each of these approaches and engender them through gender mainstreaming. Women’s unequal status in society gravely undermines their ability to participate effectively in the dimensions of this approach. As long as governments are paying little attention to the gender dimensions of prevention, control and treatment especially the impact of entrenched discrimination, GBV and abuse the destruction caused by the HIV virus shall continue. Adopting legal instruments and policies to deal with the HIV and AIDS pandemic is a good thing as SADC did by adopting the Maseru Declaration in 2003. However if the broader legal and social environment relegates a woman to a lesser being than a male there is no prevention and control that will happen. If the woman has no real autonomy, no capacity to be economically secure, if she can not be safe in her bed, her home or in her community then there is no controlling or preventing HIV and AIDS’ impact on our continent. If unemployed males can be free to harass a woman because they think her skirt is too short, they will feel free to access her body at will and terrorise any other female they encounter. Most African States have adopted international instruments that secure women’s rights and guarantee their enjoyment of all rights due to them as citizens. Almost all countries in SSA have signed CEDAW, the AU Protocol on women’s rights (2003) is now in force, in the Southern African region in August 2008, they adopted a SADC region Protocol on Gender and Development and most countries have national laws that give rights to women. This means that the legal and policy frameworks have been put in place, what remains it to make them work and deliver for women.

If our governments are recklessly spending resources on military hardware and not on health care then surely we wont be able to treat the millions living with HIV and AIDS. Over 70% of PLWH in Africa are not accessing treatment. If a government will be as irresponsible as recently reported of the Zimbabwe government to divert resources intended from the Global Fund to assist those with HIV and AIDS then all must condemn such recklessness that prioritises political interests over the lives of people. African governments must be serious about the people of Africa and the agenda for development. No more rhetoric, only real people centered action. The Human Rights Watch (2007) study further illustrates how gender discrimination, GBV and abuse of women (or the fear of) prevents women from accessing or adhering to treatments thus governments must ensure there is gender mainstreaming in all aspects of governance.

Regional Bodies must provide leadership and practical solutions to their Member States showing how gender mainstreaming and HIV mainstreaming are not just ‘cross cutting issues’ rather are intrinsic issues which are at the core of our developmental challenges. These issues are intertwined. It is not clever to approach them individual as if they have nothing to do with each other. We can’t talk regional integration, trade liberatisation, free trade area, food security if we don’t address gender discrimination and the dynamics presented in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

We need a vibrant women’s movement that is able to make demands and pressure for accountability from those with power to effect the needed change. While there is much that needs to be done to strengthen the women’s movement including taking proactive actions to engage with political, economic and social issues and processes beyond the traditional women’s issues, refine strategies and tactics, re-articulating messages to adapt to a changing context and environment. However for this to happen, women’s NGOs and the movement require resources, they need money. The least funded organizations in most SSA are women’s organizations. AWID in 2005 carried out an action research initiative entitled “Where’s the Money for Women’s Rights?” and found that funding for women’s rights work was the least funded and women’s oganisations are the least funded with most on survival mode. For the citizens to grow to a state of consciousness so as to demand accountability resources need to be applied into local groups’ organizing. Local NGOs, CBOs dealing with HIV and AIDS issues and/or women’s empowerment issues must be resourced. Policies to divert resources by donors to the fashionable political/ policy issues must recognize that without this ‘mass’ base the demands for policy implementation are not taken seriously by governments who respect and respond to numbers as numbers mean votes.

Therefore there is need for a huge change particularly by governments, political leaders, the donor community, inter governmental organizations such as the United Nations, The Africa Union, sub regional RECs. These institutions are extremely influential in supporting change processes and have been instrumental in encouraging the building of democratic institutions in most African states. They can exert the same influence on women’s rights and the gender equality agenda. However, current practice is when it comes to gender equality and women’s issues, they, like most political leaders, say all the right things and do not act according to their speak. A shift from rhetoric to implementation of the principles of gender equality and pushing for women’s rights is needed. If we are serious about wanting to halt the spread of HIV and AIDS and reverse its spread then we have to be serious about gender equality and women’s rights.

REFERENCES
ACORD (2007) Exposing Hidden War Crimes: Challenging Impunity for Sexual Gender Based Violence in Times of Conflict
Human Rights Watch (2007) Hidden in the Mealie Meal: Gender Based abuses and Women’s HIV Treatment
Physicians for Human Rights (2007) Epidemic and inequality: women’s Rights and HIV and AIDS
SADC Secretariat (2008) The Economic Cost od the three communicable diseases TB, Malaria and HIV and AIDS
UNDP (2005) Human Development Report
World Heath Organisation www.who.org

* Janah Ncube is a Zimbabwean activist and works in southern Africa.

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

Tractors not tanks: Ending investment in arms

Chuma Nwokolo

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53062

This is one of the most important issues of our time.

As the DR Congo erupts again, future generations may find our blindness to a clear and apparent evil in our time just as incomprehensible as we found the silence of the beneficiaries of apartheid, and further back, the connivance of millions during the three hundred years of the slave trade.

The cycle of conflict and war is doubly tragic because there is little sense in building schools and bridges if your neighbours – or the rebels in their jungles – are building arsenals. In large areas of Africa, reconciliation by dialogue has fallen noticeably out of fashion, thanks in no small part to the higher profile of armaments and to the tens of millions of weapons – from pistols to landmines – on streets and farms across the continent. In many territories, generations have grown up against a backdrop of war.

We must now recognise that in countries with weakened institutions, where arms are stockpiled they will eventually be used, and development is impossible in the face of such private and public stockpiles.

We need to invest in seeds and tractors rather than Kalashnikovs and RPGs. The shipment of armaments from Europe to Africa was one component of the triangular trade in slaves that survived the abrogation of slavery. Back in those days, the supply of European arms was critical to the harvesting of African slaves. The intervening centuries subsequent to the end of slavery have not much improved the morally dubious practice of supplying lethal arms to short-sighted brigands preying on their own communities.

The overall proportion of GDP officially spent by particular African governments on the military is worrying. According to CIA World Factbook figures, Angola, for instance, spent a mere 2.4% of its 2005 GDP on education but 5.7% on defence and military expenditure. Eritrea, for its part, spent 2.4% of its GDP on education and 6.3% on defence. This contrasts markedly with Japan, which spent 3.5% of its GDP on education and 0.8% on military expenditure. Even the US, with the largest military in the world, barely spends 4% of GDP on Defence, compared with 5.3% on education. What is more, the billions of dollars officially spent by African governments on armaments comes on top both of funds lost to endemic corruption in the arms sector and the resources invested by rebel groups in black market transactions (in war diamonds, for instance).

These figures are a scandal and are part of Africa's overall problems: the fact that the list of 25 countries with the highest death rates in the world is solidly African, as is the list of countries with the highest infant mortality, lowest life expectancy, smallest proportion of literate citizens, or highest number of HIV/AIDS-related deaths, to stop at five indices.

The great tragedy is that the bleeding of vital resources from education, health and infrastructure into armaments creates more civil unrest, and the weapons purchased by governments frequently end up in the hands of rebels and warring factions. The 2002 Ivorian conflict is a case in point, where disloyal soldiers simply opened up the government's arsenal to start their mutiny. In this sense, large arsenals actually worsen the security of the relevant countries, while increasing their levels of national debt. Of course this is not a peculiarly African problem: the $600 billion so far spent in the latest Gulf war did not exactly bring security to Iraqi streets.

If the annual spend on arms is halved across Africa and by all sides in the continent’s perennial conflicts, and the savings applied to health, education and infrastructure for a start, Africa will see improvements in the opportunities of millions. In many cases all that is necessary for communities to feed themselves is for them to be allowed to plant and harvest in peace. In many cases, if countries around the world could keep their bombs at home, they could keep their food aid as well.

This strategy requires concerted action to be taken regionally to:
- Reduce the proportion of GDP invested in armaments
- Eliminate the black market and surreptitious flows of armaments into the continent
- Invest substantially in community mediation, infrastructure, and employment generation in regions recovering from conflict.

For this to take root, the African Union and its members must step up to take responsibility and ownership of the process of ridding Africa of the heritage of arms. In five centuries, the force of arms has proved an overwhelmingly ineffectual defence by African nations against non-African invaders. In the 21st century, armaments play a largely local and regional role as ethnic, local and national tensions are stoked and fed for selfish purposes. We must act regionally to actively buy back and decommission arms caches, create robust reconciliatory structures and networks, and strengthen regional peacekeeping in which the role of armed intervention is increasingly reduced.

The role of the West is to pursue those running illicit arms into Africa from their shores with the same rigour that they would pursue them were the arms destined for armed riots on the streets of London or Paris or insurrection in the inner cities of New York or Berlin.

It is necessary to invest substantially in ridding the African countryside of armaments. It is important that no part of the continent remains aloof to this problem. For decades, Ivory Coast was the regional exception to the rule of west African turmoil, but a season of war and conflict arrived and years of progress were swept away. Even where hostilities do not actually break out within the borders of a country, war is traumatic for both refugees and host communities alike: witness South Africa's recent xenophobic riots. The UNHCR (office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) currently reports over 5 million refugees and internally displaced people in Africa.

My poem, Crying Blood, presents the perspective of an angel on Judgment Day, but we do not need a religious persuasion to empathise with the millions locked in cycles of suffering. Uganda's war has raged on for two decades, as has Somalia's. In Sudan, in Angola, everyday, in another forgotten thicket in Africa, another shell will blow up a community, replacing the very ordinary dreams of a very ordinary family with another extraordinary nightmare. It is time to link the iniquity of the arms industry to the crying blood on the ground.

Make no mistake, Africans and their governments bear primary responsibility for the situation. At their best, they are acting: the west African moratorium on the import, export and manufacture of small arms was the first regional moratorium in the world, and it has now evolved into a convention. Eleven east African countries signed the signal Nairobi Protocol on Small Arms and Light Weapons. But at their worst, they can also be venal accomplices to the arms industry. Yet, in all cases, the dead and dying are the powerless victims, so it is also time for all of us to recognise the hypocrisy of countries that ship cluster bombs to Africa in the spring and food aid in the summer, sometimes on the same ships. We must reach beyond the remote control switch that turns off the inconvenient news to call time on this madness, right now.

There is of course no landscape in the world, no market square, that can be improved by a bomb. The arms issue is not an exclusively African one. It is only the crushing coincidences recounted here that make the status quo on the continent peculiarly obscene. There are simple steps to take:

- Everyone can support the worldwide Arms Trade Treaty and impress on their governments that they do so too
- African Governments can sign a convention prohibiting the purchase, sale and manufacture of small arms
- African Governments can sign a moratorium committing them to bring defence spending down to 1.5% of GDP or less
- African Governments can actively fund community mediations, to employ people in peacemaking rather than war
- All governments can legislate a moratorium against the sale of arms to areas of conflict
- Companies and individuals can cease investing in the arms industry generally and can support global efforts to regulate and administer the sector
- Arms exporting countries can update legislation to enable arms brokers who circumvent sanctions to be prosecuted.

If you are African, tell your government you'd rather your taxes bought tractors than tanks. If you are a citizen of an arms manufacturing state, ask your MP how many bombs have been shipped to Africa in your name.

Do join the campaign today. It is the right thing to do.

* Chuma Nwokolo is a writer and advocate from Jos, Nigeria.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Will the poor COPE? South Africa and the Congress of the People

Mphutlane wa Bofelo

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/53067

There is a great likelihood that the newly formed Congress of the People (COPE) in South Africa will be in control of the local government in my hometown of Zamdela in Sasolburg in the Vaal Triangle area after the national general elections of 2009. On my recent visit to Zamdela I found out that almost every prominent leader of the tripartite alliance that I have known in the area – from the turbulent 1980s to the euphoric post-1990 era of the prominence of the exiles – is either an overt or covert leader, member or sympathiser of COPE. Even some dyed-in-the wool South African Communist Party (SACP) members and die-hard socialists – including my former comrades in the black consciousness movement – are actively campaigning for COPE in the area. In taxis and in the streets, at shops and at funerals and wedding ceremonies in Zamdela and the surrounding areas there is hardly a conversation that ends without the name of COPE being mentioned. A friend of mine who attended the launch of COPE and is in the middle of the mobilisation project insists that the whole Free State will be governed by COPE come next year. It seems his optimism about the performance of COPE in next year’s elections is shared by people in other parts of South Africa. In a bus, on my way back to eThekwini, I overheard a young man talking to a friend on the mobile phone. Speaking in Sepedi, he invited his friend to join COPE: ‘We will be the government there next year. Come on board, we want to give you a position in the municipality.’

Speaking to people on the streets of Zamdela, I discovered that frustration and disappointment with the current lethargic, almost non-existent delivery of services is the main reason for the popularity of COPE in the area. None of the people I spoke with cited ideological or policy issues as their reason for jumping out of the tripartite alliance into COPE. The majority of people I talked to said they have simply given up on the ability and willingness of ANC councillors to improve the pace and quality of the delivery of services. Amongst those disgruntled with the ANC-run local government are members of the 800 households in Chris Hani Park – including my own family – who still live in shacks after almost two decades of ANC rule. Chris Hani Park emerged as an informal settlement and squatter camp in 1990 after the ANC-aligned Zamdela Progressive Civic Organization encouraged residents to illegally occupy the area in a bid to upstage the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)-dominated Zamdela Civic Association, which was involved in negotiations with the municipality for the area to become a legal residential zone. Both civic formations are now defunct and the rest of the residents of Chris Hani now live in ‘RDP [Reconstuction and Development Programme] houses’.

Squatter settlements that emerged after Chris Hani have all been done away with, as the local government has successfully resettled residents and has built RDP houses for them in new settlements. At the moment there are plans to build RDP houses as of early next year at Amelia, the new settlement in which people still leave in shacks. But there seems to be no hope for the 800 families of Chris Hani who are still in shacks. Residents say concerted efforts to get a clear explanation about why these families are still in shacks and when they can expect their houses to be built have only yielded vague utterances and empty promises from the local government and their ward counsellor. People in my ward told me that the main reason why they are neglected is that they have a useless, erratic counsellor. Now, these residents and others in Zamdela pin their hope on a COPE government.

But here lies the problem: the same councillor in whom residents have lost hope has jumped on the ship of the same COPE that they believe is their only hope for a real better life for all. There is almost certainty within the circles of COPE that this man will be retained as a councillor in our ward, or may even get a mayoral post or some big position. The situation is the same in most wards and other townships. The very people under whose leadership and administration the residents were faced with lack of service delivery have joined COPE and are likely to be in the hot seats next year. This includes disgruntled former councillors who were laid off by the African National Congress and those who are still in council or are in administrative positions. Simply put, we have a tragic situation where the masses of our people who have joined COPE hoping to escape the poverty trap in which they are confined due to incompetent, unscrupulous, self-enriching leadership and inefficient civil servants, will wake in 2009 to find the same people being in control of their fate. For instance, the provincial organiser of COPE is our former mayor. Under this gentleman’s tenure in office many families had to spend years relying on the generosity of their neighbours for water because of the religious way he executed the ANC’s cost-recovery policy, turning off the taps in many households. I have first-hand experience of this because my family has been on the receiving end of this approach several times.

The practical reality is that many families would like to pay for water and other services but simply cannot afford to. The majority of us are unemployed or part of the large army of the under-employed, struggling to eke a living as hawkers and artisans, temporary or casual labourers, and informal workers. As is the case in many African countries and the global South, in our country the majority of workers operate within the informal economy and the NGO sector, with those employed in the formal economy underpaid and under-employed. Yet the same COPE is waging a vociferous war against social grants, grants which several pieces of research have indicated have provided relief for many families and have resulted in some households beginning to move away from the bottom-end of the poverty line. Were it truly for the poor, COPE would be saying it would address the inadequacies and shortcomings of present policies and programmes by improving on the reach, depth and accessibility of these social grants. It would be talking of making the social grants part of a holistic and integrated social policy and economic strategy that would include improving the livelihoods and income of communities, through, among others initiatives, land transfer, subsidies and capacity-building for small-scale farmers, farming cooperatives and small businesses, as well as an intensive public works programme, investment in industrial development and socio-economic reconstruction projects, skill development programmes and improving the access and quality of social services. Instead of this, COPE promises to tighten its screw on social spending and even to be much harsher than the ANC in handing people over to the invisible hand of the market.

While COPE presents itself as the hope for South Africa’s poor – and millions of our people seem to see hope in COPE – the million dollar question is in reality whether the poor will COPE. Unless its policy trajectory changes from its current neoliberal paradigm, it seems that COPE will remain just another capitalist dope that will dupe people for a while, until false promises ultimately become known for what they are. My fear is that given the high expectations and the tremendous hope the emergence of COPE has given the masses, when their expectations are unsettled and ‘the new beginning euphoria’ – or what my comrade and brother in Conscious Hip Hop, rapper and emcee, Icebound calls the ‘BMW fever’ – disappears, this country is likely to go on fire. If those in power continue to subject our people to the short-end of the capitalist stick, the previous massive and widespread civil protest against lack of service delivery, as well as the recent outbreak of violence with xenophobic and regionalistic undertones, will prove but a taste of things to come.

* Mphutlane Wa Bofelo is a writer, activist, life-skills facilitator and performance poet who has been published in several journals, websites and anthologies and has performed at various events.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Zimbabwe: Who is to do the suffering?

Hans Öhrn

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53032

Horace Campbell, it is understandable that you are very upset with professor Mamdani, who so eloquently puncture all the lies you are peddling about Zimbabwe. But please, stop portraying yourself as a friend of Zimbabwe and an anti-imperialist. You are neither in the way you act in the case of Zimbabwe.

In your article you are mixing up things in order to pretend being an anti-imperialist.

You are of course totally right when you talk about the “pseudo-humanitarianism of the so-called international non-governmental structure." I suppose you have in view the so called international NGO-community, heavily supported by Western governments. In Sweden for example, the most NGOs engaged in developmental business are funded by the (conservative) government (between 80 to 95 percent). Western governments in many cases use the NGOs as a tool and human rights as a pretext to destabilise intransigent countries that oppose a neo-liberal agenda. Zimbabwe is a showcase and WOZA epitomize these organisations, wholly funded by the British as it is.

But you are deadly wrong when you talk of the “Mugabe dictatorship” and blame it for all the malice in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe has been ostracised from normal economic relations with the most powerful nations and financial institutions in the world for more than a decade. That is now taken its toll.

Then you mix things up. I follow you when you write that Idi Amin was manipulated by the British and eventually removed by Tanzania. A justified intervention, it seems.

But then it is not easy to grasp you. Do you really mean that the end goal of the present British Zimbabwe policy is, in connivance with Mugabe and Bredenkamp, to rob the Zimbabwean people? And that they will force Tsvangirai into a coalition government in order to perpetuate the scam? Isn’t there a spin to much in your machinations?

And in order to stop this heinous piracy you are calling on the Obama administration and US Justice department to prosecute the Britons who have been involved in corruption and fraud in southern Africa? Jesus! Aren’t you a little naïve here, Mr Campbell?

More interestingly and revealingly is that you are calling for the blocking of all international payments to Zimbabwe. Economic ostracism is partly to blame for the predicament in Zimbabwe and it is obvious how liberals change colours when they scent blood.

Recently Dagens Nyheter, the largest morning paper and leading liberal paper in Sweden, wrote:

“If the (Zimbabwean) borders were totally blocked, making it impossible to get food or money into the country, Mugabe would have difficulties to salary “his cronies” and would run the risk they may turn against himself.”

This way of putting things reveal of course a (white) liberal pipedream, namely that a deluge of blood would purify Zimbabwe from Mugabe and at the same time teach all the Africans and anti-imperialists elsewhere a lesson: stop support the cancer* in your midst or you will face the same destiny!

I remember when Madeleine Albright once got the question if the sanctions against Iraq were worth the price of 500.000 dead Iraqi children and answered: It’s a hard choice, but I think, we, think, it’s worth it.

Now, if the economic strangulation of Zimbabwe will succeed and the government of President Mugabe removed by this way of foreign intervention to the price of hundreds of thousands dead Zimbabweans, we will ask the Campbells around the world; Can you really justify such a price for the removal of Mugabe?

And most likely they will answer us: Yes, we can!

Mamdani is skirting the issue!

Keith Harmon Snow

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53034

Mahmood Mamdani in Lessons of Zimbabwe skirts the Gukurahundi, never named, and completely dismisses the extent of it at some level:

"The Shona-Ndebele divide so conspicuous in the two guerrilla movements produced great tension after independence between the mainly Shona government and the mainly Ndebele labour movement, with Mugabe's ferocious repression in Ndebele areas in 1986 remaining the bloodiest phase in post-independence Zimbabwean history."

But Gukurahundi began in 1981 and it was at its worst, if I recall, between 1983 and 1985 -- though 1986 was no picnic for the Ndebeles. It continued in "relaxed" forms from 1986 to 1990 and into the next decade. Mamdani paints it as something that happened in 1986. He doesnt call it genocide, which it was/is.

Later Mamdani (recent citation on Zimbabwe) says:
"The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986."

Why 1986? This is like the recent book by gerard Prunier on Congo that cites the beginning of the war as 1998. There's something at work here, and its called "interests."

Perhaps the best analyses from which to situate Mugabe is that by UCSD professor Francis Njubi Nesbitt, whose definitions of collaborators with white power would cast Mugabe in the "comprador class".

An excellent article, especially for white people. Of course, Njubi doesn't get into the "silences" produced by Mahmood Mamdani, especially as pertains to the great lakes. (Mamdani was --is? -- very close to Museveni and Kagame and Jacques Depelchin).

Generalized statements on Zimbabwe

Issachar Mukucha

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53031

Horace Campbell in Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community makes too many generalised statements not supported by facts e.g. "Zimbabwean workers are being assaulted every day." This is a clear exaggeration coz I'm also a worker and have not witnessed the daily occurrence of this.
-on homophobia & virginity tests, how many people have actually been killed because they were gay? What's the extent, in numbers PLEASE, of the problem of virginity tests?

"It is scientifically NOT correct to say cholera is caused by "unsanitary conditions." The disease is, in fact, caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae. Unsanitary conditions catalyse the spread of cholera but do NOT cause it. That's why you can have dirty slums but without cholera ravaging there.

"If Mugabe is only popular "OUTSIDE of his own country" then in the March 29 elections why didn't the MDC win by a landslide margin like 95% to 5%?

Why is Campbell sanitizing the role of whites in the DRC mess? While he is happy to link Mugabe's military to the Rwanda genocide (itself questionable) why does he opt to be silent on the part played by Belgium, France, UK & the US?

While "African dictators" are associated with grand theft which requires the UN to lead repatriation of stolen wealth, how about the the daylight robbery of African resources by white former colonialists? How about reparations for the slave trade?

If Campbell thinks the sanctions imposed by the US, UK & EU are "targetted" at Mugabe & his cronies, he is either not being sincere or he is not serious! It's the common man who is suffering, not Mugabe. The German withdrawal of printing paper from the RBZ affects the poor man in the street who has to queue for days on end at the bank to get his meagre earnings. In short those sanctions are neither "smart" nor "targetted"

Zimbabwe: Who is who?

B. Batanai

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53036

Thank you Prof. Mamdani for, Lessons of Zimbabwe one of the few comprehensive articles on Zimbabwe. My focus, however, will be a point by point rebuttal to some of the falsehoods that Farai Kashiri had in response to your analysis.

1) Kashiri is correct, Mugabe IS the patron for the war veterans, has been since their organization's inception. However, it is also true that by 1997, the war veterans were not only operating independent of Mugabe, but AGAINST him! They humiliated him with their violent marches in 1997 Africa/African-American Summit. Their leader, medical doctor Chengerai Hunzvi, famously forced Mugabe to pay $50 000 (a very large sum them) to each war veteran and war collaborator (over 60 000 people in total). Many opposition supporters mark this as the beginning of Zimbabwe's economic descent.
So, when land invasions started, in 1996, Mugabe was against them and the war veterans were agitating for more. It's only after Mugabe turned around to the war veterans' land position in early 2000 than a new alliance between these two was sealed.

2) True again, Mugabe gave many white farmers "expressions of no interest" letters. Kashiri however lies on why he did so. The agreement with the UK was that any farm available for sale in which the Zimbabwe of government(GOZ) had an interest, the UK would pay 50% of value, with the GOZ paying the balance (in the currency of the white farmer's choice). As Kashiri knows, the GOZ was always strapped for cash (the major reason why they had to reluctantly go to the IMF for ESAP money). Mugabe let the farms be sold between white farmers because his government did NOT have the other 50% purchase money. Any careful student of Zimbabwean land reform since 1980 will see the intense commitment Mugabe continued to show for land transfers, Time magazine has a lot of reference to this as they wrote on Zimbabwe and Mugabe's "hard-headed" drive on land in the 80s and 90s.

3) Kashiri is correct. The constitutional project was in response to the NCA. And no, the NCA was not, and is not a "democratic force". 100% of its funding comes from the US and the EU. While many members honestly believe they are fighting for democracy, their sponsors have always been focused on regime change. The NCA gained prominence when the West decided Mugabe had to go for disturbing western economic interests by fighting off the invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Back then, there was no other credible political organization to use to get at Mugabe, thus the NCA became that vehicle.

4) True, there were Ndebele leaders/peasantscitizens in the liberation struggle.

5) True again, gukurahundi lasted between 1983 to 1987. While the atrocities that occured then (from both sides) were inexcusable, the war itself was justified. Many western nations SUPPORTED Mugabe during that dissident era. There is evidence to show that elements within Zapu were unhappy with being led by the "junior" that was Mugabe from the "inferior" Shona tribe. Sustained uprisings by these elements at Entumbane, Connemara, and the discovery of massive arms caches at Zapu farms (which Zapu now claims were for ANC use!!), made it imperative that Mugabe execute that campaign against the dissidents. Nkomo signed the Unity Accord (with the dissidents suspiciously dropping their arms at the same time!), not because he was pressured to (he was living good in exile in the UK), but because he saw the futility of this war.

6) ZCTU did not distance itself from Mugabe because of "corruption" and the other nonsense Kashiri says. I was there, I know!! Many of us were opposed to ESAP from the IMF and the low salary raises Mugabe's neoliberal Finance Minister, Dr. Chidzero, was recommending. He was trying to control inflation on the backs of the poor and was protecting business (largely white) as any neoliberal of that era would do. We broke away from Mugabe (who had agressively nurtured and helped grow the ZCTU since 1980) because he was now, thru ESAP, deviating from the socialist principles we all wished for (especially our leader, the now neoliberal Morgan Tsvangirai {an almost communist at that time}!)

7) Kashiri creates fiction here. The people of Zimbabwe were NOT strongly anti-Zanu in 2000. Sure, there were many who were against the party, but nowhere near a majority! If Kashiri remembers well, less than 900 000 out of a possible 6 million people participated in the referendum. While the opposition did their greatest campaigning amoung the 300 000 laborers at white-owned farms, Mugabe neglected his rural base and assumed they would still vote with him. The NO vote won with only about 480 000 people voting for it.
And no, there was no evidence of "rigging" in 2000 as Kashiri says. The commonwealth report on those elections clearly says so. However, they also claimed that because Zanu had unhindered access to the media, was more aggressive in its campaigns, and that the farm invasions had brought a "climate of fear", therefore they declared the elections "would not be free and fair". What the commonwealth forgot to include was the illegal funding of the opposition by foreign forces, a blatantly pro-opposition locally listened to foreign media (BBC, CNN, SABC, etc) and the strongly pro-opposition foreign-sponsored local "independent" media.

8) Prof. Mamdani is infact correct. Land reform as of 2000 was designed to go after underutilized land, lands near rural areas and multiple farm owners. The CFU (white farmers union) would not compromise, they took an all or nothing posture. Needless to say, Mugabe then took them on their challenge, where he obviously won!

9) Kashiri confuses "fast-track" with the longer-term land reform. "Fast-track" allowed for land occupiers to seize lands and remain on them. The reforms that Kashiri talks about which has gone on into 2008 no longer involve ad hoc peasant occupations, but are deliberative transfers that go thru cumbersome documentation processes before one is offered a farm or relieved from it for failing to be productive.

10) Food shortages in Zimbabwe have largely been due to "droughts" since 2001. I put "drought" in qoutations because of the unique nature they have occured. The total annual rainfall in Zimbabwe has not been that different from before. However, what seems to have changed over the past 10 years the the SPREAD of rainfall intervals. Rains continue to fall normally between November and early January. However, between January and late February, these rains have consistently disappeared, only to come back later in March, by which time the crops that were once vibrant have suffered from moisture stress and have withered.

Kashiri knows that pre 1999, Zimbabwe's rural population was 70% of the population and did not buy processed maize meal. That fact alone is enough to convince anyone that these peasants therefore produced at least 70% of the nation's food needs (for themselves, off course). Not only did they produce enough to feed themselves, they also had a little surplus that was sold for urban consumption, and in some good years for export. Kashiri also knows that most white farmers stayed away from maize production because of the controlled prices, limited profits and the better opportunity costs offered by cash crops such as tobacco.
If Kashiri knows this, and also knows that land reform ONLY affected commercial farms, not rural plots, what other reason besides drought does he think these hitherto very productive peasants were suddenly failing to produce the food they could before?

11) Kashiri's question has already been answered in 10) above.

12) Kashiri, here is your answer, one can buy sugar made in Zimbabwe from MOZAMBIQUE or ZAMBIA!! If you live in Zimbabwe, you fully well know that production of many Zimbabwean products has hardly decreased at all. What has changed is that many of our manufacturers are smuggling their produce to neighboring countries, prefering to sell their product in us$ there than at the controlled zim$ within the country! Now that the economy is dollarizing, I expect this trend to reverse and most of these goods to eventually start competing with the foreign imports currently on our store shelves.

13) Kashiri obviously looks like an opposition supporter, judging from the talking points he spews here. The opposition called for sanctions against the country. The country's education, healthcare, transportation system, etc was partly financed by NGOs and western aid. How does Kashiri expect the same standards of life to maintain once this source of financing was removed? Zimbabwe is now on its own, and unsuprisingly, its hospitals, schools, roads, etc will not be as good with sanctions imposed on it, and deliberate economic sabotage against it.

It seems Kashiri believes that if the rich in Zimbabwe stopped driving Mercedes Benz and Hummers, then there will be enough money to cover our current deficits!

What also needs to be made plain to readers here is that while there are a few rich Mugabe "cronies", the vast majority of people driving the posh cars Kashiri is talking about are infact opposition supporters in the NGO industry and in corporate Zimbabwe!! The remainder are alleged credit card criminals, stealing cards in the UK and using those funds to return to Zimbabwe in a life of luxury. Most of these people went to these western countries on the back of the opposition, claiming "prosecution" from Mugabe.

To be honestly scholarly

Samuel Kimani Ndegwa

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53038

In response to Horace Campbell's Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community: I can see where you are coming from. All the aspects of African Kleptocracy and neoliberal capitalist influence you describe are familiar for an African like me. I was in Harare 2001 and I had travelled there severally before.

When one reads such opinions as yours and compares them to Mahmood Mamdani's, it is easy to be confused. But here is my question, given that most African countries are ruled by Neoliberal kleptocrats, why is Zimbabwe special? Reading your article,

I would have liked to see data, schorlarly, right? showing how the 2001 ZIDERA has less impact on Zimbabwe as opposed to Brendenkamp and co. Since Kleptocracy was there before ZIDERA, are you saying what we see in Zimbabwe today is solely because of Kleptocracy? A historical review from 1979 and the issue of land redistribution could help set the context.

Otherwise, it sounds like you are saying Mugabe has no moral basis to fight imperialism without honestly analyzing the effects of ZIDERA on the people of Zimbabwe. In addition, how does Mugabe's support to Congo's Government feature here? The war in Congo, the imperial and capitalist interests in Congo are as much a factor here. Furthermore, South Africa has to face complex land redistribution issues sooner or later and how they deal with the Zimbabwe issue is critical. This is true of Namibia.

Now be honestly scholarly.

On South Africa's flawed education policy

Feppie

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53033

In response to South African education crisis: Call in the people: I am a teacher at a high school on the Cape Flats and have been teaching for the past 20+ years.

I find it particularly disgusting how many teachers of SADTU, who actively helped organise and vote in the ANC government, now PRIVATELY voice concern about the state of affairs in education.

The very least you should do is to withdraw your support and membership from the ANC/SADTU and their flawed educational policy!

Or shut your mouth and look the other way at school as many other SADTU-members are in fact doing!

I think the network of concern is a valuable outlet for those in education that's GATVOL of the political direction in SA.

Time for Zimbabweans to unite!

Lois Davis

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53035

Mary Ndlovu’s Zimbabwe on the edge of the precipice analysis of the situation in Zimbabwe is the clearest I have seen yet and reflects what many in civic society have been saying since well before the March elections.

WOZA, the NCA and the 3,000 civil society representatives who gathered at a People's Convention in Harare in February this year have all called for a transitional authority to address the humanitarian crisis in the country and create an acceptable climate for elections.

The opposition called for a transitional authority and NOT a government of national unity in the stale-mate following the March elections. Alas, the International community with it's lazy media and ill informed advisors did not seem to be able to tell the difference between a government of national unity and a transitional authority. But Zimbabweans know the difference only too well; just as they know about the 20,000 massacred in order to coerce into existence the last government of national unity with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU.

To avoid the crash that Ms Ndlovu sketches in her article, those with responsibility for Zimbabwe's future; SADC leaders, international diplomats and our own national politicians need to take a long hard look at our country's recent history and accept that power sharing in Zimbabwe died with the victims of Gukuruhundi. It is now time for all Zimbabweans at home and abroad to unite with one single voice and call for an internationally approved transitional authority with a limited and clearly defined remit to establish the conditions needed for terror free elections in Zimbabwe.

Devil is in the details!

I. Langalibalele

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53037

Ah, Prof. Nabudere, the devil is in the details! However, the details here provide a red herring. The world economic crisis derives from the simple logic of capitalism itself, based upon concentration of capital. In this period, the capitalists have concentrated huge amts of wealth in their hands, for what purposes we can only speculate. Yet it is the hoarding of liquidity in their coffers which has dried up cash and cause the shortages across the globe. For a more comprehensive breakdown, read, A Slave-Eye View of the Meltdown.

Declare your interests!

Rotherham Ethnic Monirity Alliance

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53039

This article, Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community, is either pure revisionism or taking history over the top. Your recolaction of events seems to be both under-researched and seriously flawed, if not juts enthused by a desire to sound better and occupy a better moral high-ground.

Declare your interests!

Good analysis but...

Akua

2009-01-07

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/53040

Good analysis,
Ghana's electoral run-off, but please note that the Ghanaian opposition presidential candidate is John Atta Mills not Arthur Mills

Global: Chronicles of a Refugee - Now available

2009-01-08

http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/films/chroniclesofarefugee.html

Chronicles of a Refugee is a 6-part documentary film series looking at the global Palestinian refugee experience over the last 60 years. Starting with 'al-Nakba' (catastrophe) in 1948 (part I) and continuing through repeated community and individual expulsions (part II) and enduring discrimination by virtue of being Palestinian (part III), the first three episodes are more historical and informative, presenting an almost comprehensive review of 60 years of dispossession.

Review of Duncan Clarke’s Crude Continent: the Struggle for Africa’s Oil Prize

Lara Pawson

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/53066

Duncan Clarke is quite right: thanks to impressive oil deposits there exists today ‘an Afrique utile’. African oil comprises 12.5 per cent of global output – significantly less than the Middle East's 30 per cent – but a glance at recent statistics demonstrates how the author of Crude Continent can insist Africa has become ‘the world's greatest frontier in oil exploration’. The United States, for example, wants a quarter of its crude imports to come from Africa within the next six years; already, Algeria, Angola and Nigeria combined supply almost 20 per cent. In 2007, almost a third of Chinese oil imports came from Africa, with Angola overtaking Saudi Arabia as the Asian giant's number one supplier. A wide array of other countries, including some you probably never knew existed such as the Republic of Tatarstan, are investing in African oil. Add to that the flood of 500 companies from around the globe currently scrambling for Africa's dark sticky stuff, and you start to get an idea of what ‘useful’ means.

Oil exploration in Africa began more than a century ago, and production about 50 years later, but only during the past 10 years has the wealth of the continent's acreage been fully recognised. This decade of oil flow has overlapped very neatly with a steep rise in global oil consumption. BP's Statistical Review of World Energy reports that from 1995 to 2007 oil consumption leapt from 69.5 million barrels a day to 85.2 million. In five years' time, that figure is predicted to rise to 94 million. Good news for African oil producers, you might say – and Clarke, who's spent 30 years networking across the industry, would agree. As head of the international firm Global Pacific & Partners, he is a consultant on the exploration business and organises some of the biggest international oil gatherings on offer.

The thrust of Crude Continent is precisely (and often, not so precisely) this: oil, far from being a curse, could actually save Africa. It is oil that will modernise Africa and oil that will lead it out of what Clarke dubs – without ever defining – ‘African medievalism’. Clarke argues that those countries without oil are the ones that are truly cursed, for they will be left ‘largely backward’. So the real tragedy of Burkina Faso, the third poorest country in the world, is that ‘there is no imminent “oil curse” on the horizon to relieve this dire predicament’. Likewise, ‘If Swaziland is cursed, it is by an absence of hydrocarbons, not any abundance.’ Clarke even encourages the tiny West African archipelago nation of Cape Verde to ‘encroach’ into its neighbours' territories to filch a piece of the hydrocarbon cake. In Africa's horn, he regrets Eritrea's ‘lost decade’, a reference to the young state's lack of interest in the author's annual Africa Upstream Conference on oil exploration. During 10 years of absenteeism, apparently Eritrea made no advances at all. Clarke's conclusion: ‘Oil discovery and development could offer salvation.’

This intriguing notion is preached throughout Crude Continent, with Clarke seeking to expose as fools those who argue that Africa's oil-rich countries are being poisoned to the core by the so-called ‘resource curse’. Our candid author is particularly incensed by two experts' ‘scribblings on oil’, both released last year: Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an Oxford lecturer; and Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson, an associate fellow at Chatham House, London.

Chunks of Crude Continent are devoted to debunking Shaxson's deterministic view that oil is a ‘corrupting substance’ which makes African people poorer and their leaders richer. Shaxson argues that multinational oil companies in the 1990s became ‘like giant banks’ offering large loans to presidents like Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema in return for generous operating contracts. Foreign bankers followed, setting up a range of shielded schemes and shell companies into which the greedy leader could stuff his expanding stash. ‘Just as heroin addicts lose interest in work, health, family and friends and focus increasingly on the next fix,’ Shaxson writes, ‘so politicians in oil-dependent countries lose interest in their fellow citizens, as they try to get access to the free cash.’ His other real concern is the way in which the international financial system – especially all those bankers and accountants based in the City of London, Washington and tax havens across the globe – helps to hide the ill-gotten gains of oil.

Clarke, however, says the real problem is less ‘corporate [oil] malevolence’ than the continent's ‘medievalism’, flawed politics and troubled history. African states, he points out, haven't been around as long as Europe's. We must get to grips, he suggests, with its past. At times the author seems to pick fights with imaginary enemies, arguing aggressively about assertions that no one – at least not these experts – has ever made. He tangles himself up refuting the suggestion that pre-oil Africa was a utopian world. Whoever said it was? And he exhausts the reader, if not himself, with repetitive statements insisting that coercive regimes existed before oil. Nobody with a cursory knowledge of the continent would deny that. So what, exactly, is Clarke trying to say?

While acknowledging that corruption and bad governance are a problem, he wants us to ponder the benefits of oil, particularly ‘corporate oil’. Contrary to the ‘curse’ literature, Crude Continent insists that most corporate oil deals are not ‘contaminated’. Clarke asks us to consider what he calls the long-term ‘multiplier effects’, the direct and indirect benefits of the oil and gas industry, including employment creation, foreign exchange inputs and capital inflow, technology transfers, fiscal funding and ‘indirect supply chain effects’. These are much more significant than the ‘palliative band-aid…of corporate social investment’ that Clarke clearly detests. He berates the fact that no one has ever ‘properly identified and measured’ the social and economic benefits of oil and gas projects in Africa. Why not? It's a pertinent question, and one that is tempting to throw back at the author himself.

Wading through Crude Continent's 567 pages (643, if you include the notes), the irony is that the reader gets the distinct impression that oil is indeed a bit of a curse. For all his banging and shouting about other authors' alleged analytical failures, Clarke explains how oil provokes conflict in African states. ‘Nigeria's political order,’ he writes, ‘remains fragile, with the struggle over oil and its control at the heart of the power nexus in Abuja and elsewhere.’ He seems to support Shaxson's ‘curse’ thesis that people living in oil-rich Africa are getting poorer: excluding a select elite, real income in Nigeria has fallen by 1.5 per cent per head every year for the last three decades. That's Clarke's information, not mine.

In Gabon, where President Omar Bongo celebrates 41 years in power this month, we learn that ‘petroleum remains king’. Clarke warns that the extent of centralised presidential power ‘may bode ill for a future with less oil, one that risks greater impoverishment at the bottom of the income ladder while pressures emerge on oil reserves’. The conflict between north and south Sudan that began in 1984 was ‘as much an oil war as anything else’, and petroleum exploration will remain limited while the country's political problems continue. Regularly tumbling into appalling metaphor and analogy, Clarke nevertheless concludes: ‘North and south Sudan may be bound by the umbilical cords of a chequered politics and oil history, but as with Siamese twins these links can also be severed.’ At the time of writing, Hope Williams, one of the conjoined twins that underwent an operation to be separated at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, has just died.

So much for salvation.

Clarke's literary and analytical skills clearly do not match the ambitions of this bulky book, but the shame is that his experience in Africa is indeed considerable. Parts three and four provide the reader with 140 pages of comprehensive information on corporate oil operations in Africa and the global scramble for the big prize. Leaving aside his irritating penchant for metamorphosis – lions becoming countries, rhinos turning into multinationals – Clarke offers readers the chance to delve into his vast wealth of knowledge. Together with a comprehensive index, these two sections make it easy to find out which company is drilling what wells, where and with whom. Our expert guide also leads us around the world explaining how different nations are capturing Africa's oil and gas potential. All fascinating stuff.

The trouble is Crude Continent is presented to us as a history book. From the start we are hectored and lectured by Clarke, who promises he will reach the parts other writers – a whole host of them – cannot. In fact, part two, in which we are taken on a tour of the entire continent, rarely refers to any African history prior to independence, and only cursory references are made to colonial let alone pre-colonial times. Earlier in the book there is a strange if well-meaning chapter in which a spurious link is made between corporate oil's discovery of hydrocarbons in Africa and the travel and scholarly work of the 16th century Muslim, Leo Africanus. Meanwhile, Clarke boasts that the task of ‘writing Africa’, as he calls it, is easy for him thanks to his special relationship with the continent as an ‘autochthonous white’. He was born in Salisbury, as Harare was then known, the grandson of an Irishman who moved to southern Africa in 1895. Today, he carries an Irish passport. None of which should really matter – except that Clarke makes such a fuss about his claims to the continent, as if place of birth somehow lends weight to the work. It does not.

Instead of devoting so many pages to slagging off other people's books, asserting absent historical insight and tirelessly defending corporate oil, couldn't Clarke have dug a little deeper into the contradictions inherent in the global oil industry? He may be right to dismiss Shaxson's notion that oil is intrinsically evil, but he ought to provide us with the facts that show how oil extraction is helping Africa. Given his global insider knowledge, Clarke is in a position to help us understand how African countries might follow the lead of Scandinavia, or Alaska and the Gulf, where resource wealth has been put to relatively effective public use.

And it would have been interesting to read his thoughts on the pertinent debates surrounding our addiction to cheap energy. It is common knowledge that ravenous oil consumption in Western Europe, the United States and, increasingly, China, is the main reason the planet is starting to overheat. So it seems astounding that a book published in 2008, written by a man who is said to be passionate about Africa, could fail to mention how oil is damaging the environment, with poor people affected first and foremost. The perpetuation of the petroleum age might make the current crop of oil executives and certain political leaders happy, but it is dangerously optimistic to suggest that the future well-being of African people depends primarily on drilling oil.

* Lara Pawson is a writer, commentator and blogger. She is currently working on a book about Angola.
* This review was first published in The National.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

African Writing Lite

Guest editorial

2009-01-10

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/53175

African literature has, like the continent, been Balkanized. Just as the continent was fractured into 50-odd states, the literature of the continent has been sieved and funneled into French, English, Portuguese and other containers.

Of course we cannot blame Berlin for all of this. Africa has two thousand home-grown languages after all. Yet, there is an altogether different stricture that surrounds the modern language blocs. Just as passports are required to negotiate our modern political borders, the modern literatures of Africa seem to grow in hermetic zones, and even with modern communications, the average African is increasingly unaware of the great literatures flowering just across his borders - especially where it is written in an ‘alien’ language.

African Writing magazine, with its 'many literatures, one voice' vision, tries to redress some of this in its print and online incarnations. African Writing Magazine will try to do that little extra, in its new berth in Pambazuka, Africa's electronic brainstorm. We will serve up a literary takeaway - without for one moment suggesting that anything but a savour of literary Africana can be gleaned from here alone. To be sated, one can look forward to the hours of application at the many watering holes of African literature.

In this interview conducted by Jarmo Pikkujamsa for African Writing Magazine, Mamadou N'Dongo, a Senegalese writer and filmmaker and author of Bridge Road and L’Errance de Sidiki Bâ, talks about the roots of Bridge Road in Black American struggles, the art of film in relation the craft of writing, and much more.

Chuma Nwokolo,
Publisher, African Writing.

"Without form there is no meaning"

Interview with Mamadou N’Dongo

Jarmo Pikkujamsa

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/53061

In this interview conducted by Jarmo Pikkujamsa for African Writing Magazine, Mamadou N'Dongo, a Senegalese writer and filmmaker and author of Bridge Road and L’Errance de Sidiki Bâ, talks about the roots of Bridge Road in Black American struggles, the art of film in relation the craft of writing, and much more.
Jarmo Pikkujamsa: What prompted you to write Bridge Road?

Mamadou N’Dongo: There are two elements: Representations of identity and the lynching of James Byrd. For several years I had been writing L’Errance de Sidiki Bâ. I had just finished it and I wanted to carry on exploring a similar theme. What I had in mind this time was not a uniform identity, rather I wanted to approach the question of identity from the perspective of society, and the American society imposed naturally. Before you call yourself American, you are member of an ethnic group, Black, Latino, WASP, Native American, Italian, Polish, Chinese… And even more so I wanted to address the question of one’s own identity in regard with the Other. In other words: What kind of space am I ready to allow to the other so that he can live by my side?

JP: How does the American influence take shape in your novel?

MN: Firstly, the position of the Black Americans was achieved at a price through fights, through combat - from slavery all the way to positive discrimination, and between these two extremes. The civil rights movement made the black people conscious of their identities, which is reflected through the character of Cyrus Carter in my novel. It is about the appropriation of history.

Secondly, in 1999 I saw the documentary Sud by Chantal Akerman. It recounts the lynching of James Byrd. This event evokes my story together with the photographic reportage of Alain Norton, a black man who decides to write a book on a lynching that happened in a town that shares the name with my novel. This town, Bridge Road, has also been the stage of a pogrom in the 20’s. I am of course referring to the event of Tulsa, which took place on the 1st of June 1921 when Oklahoma town witnessed the only pogrom in the history of the US: over three hundred African American citizens were killed then by the white inhabitants of the town. I want to show that there is a genealogy of racial hatred and that in 1998 you simply do not lynch a man without being prepared, without being disposed to commit such an act. Atavistically, it is one of the elements that make up your identity. The constitution of identity is one of the crucial elements in a narrative and this is happening to the narrator-inquirer in the story; he is on the look for Alain Norton because of the disappearance of the latter. This investigation turns into a quest, a quest of his self.

JP: The narrative of Bridge Road is built on fragments. What is it that attracts you to this type of story telling?

MN: My answer to you is spontaneous without being clever: The story decided over the form and style. I quickly realized that I needed witnesses, voices. I wanted to work on restoration and interpretation of collective memory. The history is told by the winners and as a consequence history is often truncated, and I am revealing this with the help of the narrator-inspector of the novel. He works for the secret police who spy on their co-citizens. In France they are called RG (Renseignements Généraux, general inquiries), and the character in my novel is a specialist on tapping conversations. So all the testimonies collected by him constitute only fragments of what has been said. Or, to be more precise: they constitute fragments of what has been overheard by my inspector. Yet I also recognize that indeed this is my writing style: I love to write in scraps, it’s like breathing. Now in Bridge Road, just like in L’histoire du fauteuil qui s’amouracha d’une âme and in L’Errance de Sidiki Bâ, the reader recognizes my style, but I would like to insist on the fact even if I am a stylist, what counts is the story, the unity: without form there is no meaning.


JP: Why do you think this style suits your stories better than a more “traditional” way of describing a series of events?

MN: In Bridge Road the plot is in the first person singular, in a traditional form of enquiry: What happened? Where is this character? Who is the narrator? And so on. In the end of the story you have all the answers, and as far as the form is concerned, I’m coming after the 19th century novel, after Proust, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Zamiatine, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Borges, nouveau roman, Burroughs, Jim Thompson, Gombrowicz, Arénas, Bruno Gay-Lussac, Kourouma, Ted Lewis, Bolaño, Gabrielle Wittkop…These writers have shaken the genre and they did not do so by provocation. Every writer is a contemporary of his own time and in order to have a future, also the past is needed. That’s what Malraux said: “In order to write, one needs a library.” As far as writing is concerned, I am in a well-off situation; I am lucky to come after all these great writers, among whom William S. Burroughs is the most important of all. When I read The Naked Lunch (1959), I knew I could be free. This text emancipated me. Just as did one of my more recent readings: La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette is much more modern and humorous than some of the contemporary moral novels.

JP: Bridge Road is currently being adapted to cinema. It will be interesting to see how this novel, inspired by a film, finds its way back to the big screen. How does writing and film making fit together in your professional life?

MN: I am very fond of Maya Deren, Derek Jarman, Jean Cocteau, Tarkovski, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Buñuel, and Patrick Bokanowski. What I like about films is their element of plasticity and I particularly love expressionist and surrealist cinema. My films are different from my books, despite the fact that they are, to some extent, convergent. I certainly do not consider literature and film as art forms that complete each other. For me they are two different types of media, two ways of expression that share writing as a common denominator. The differences are immense. On the one hand you may have a collective work par excellence, and on the other hand you may have a work of art that is the most individual creation ever. I think that Bridge Road, a novel inspired by a documentary, now to be adapted to a film, is an excellent mise en abyme of different art forms.

JP: How are you involved in the film adaptation of Bridge Road?

MN: I am the writer of the novel that inspired the film. I have kept myself at a distance of the project in order to allow both the scenarist and the director to appropriate the work at hand. It is not easy to make an adaptation, especially when the writer is still alive. Film people tend to have a certain inferiority complex towards writers, and there are so many around who have published a book, and keep publishing more. You see, a director always takes the role of a writer, but when two writers share a story in one book, there is always one writer too many. I am of course available for the adaptation of the novel, and at the same time I am aware of the fact that everything depends on the re-interpretation of my novel in the same way that I myself was able to re-interpret Chantal Ackerman’s documentary. And to be honest, everything I wanted to say in this particular case, I have already written in Bridge Road. It took me six years to finish the novel.

JP: What is the symbolism behind the Helium eater, perhaps the most unordinary one of your characters?

MN: It is Ogre, Minotaure, Chronos, who all are anthropophagic. That’s what the Helium eater is about. He does not feed only by the air that we breathe - he suffocates us.


JP: Sidiki Bâ’s memoirs always begin with numbers: what do they stand for? Are they referring to the effacement of the names of individual soldiers?

MN: I had not given it a thought in a similar manner and your idea gives a new approach to the text. For me the symbolism behind the numbers is topography of wandering that is at the same time physical and metaphysical. I would like to call it topography of peregrination into remembering, into memory – topography of one story in History. The numbering system is like memory: it is random because memories come back in a scattered way, and they are rarely in a chronologic order. They relate to kilometres, scales of values, distances, statuses, newspapers, days, persons; they reflect a way of making sense of the world and of oneself. I put this system in line with the military and their strategy, in which everything is figures, everything is mathematics. Incidentally, the numbers also follow the way they were used in the camps where corpses where numbered, it is Shoa.

JP: Has there been more recent (or any) public discussion on the tirailleurs?

MN: When my novel was published it was not put in context with the tirailleurs. It was considered more a sequel of stories of war. As far as the tirailleurs are concerned, it is one of the popular topics that keep appearing in conversations; in the family there is always an elderly man who took part in the war and who tells his memories. Especially, if they find out that you come from France, they show their medals and photographs, and talk to you about the war.

JP: Are Sidiki Bâ’s impressions from the past actually drawn from real combatants?

MN: Yes, these topics appeared very often in the conversation: the cold, the ”funny” way of combating, the digging of holes, the hiding, the racism, the friendships, the violence of the combats, the guns, the shells, the aeroplanes, the amputations, the French landscapes…

JP: Do you consider yourself a Senegalese writer?

MN: I consider myself a writer who writes in French. Yet, I welcome the idea to be considered a Senegalese writer. I spent my early childhood in Pikine in Senegal and I came to Drancy in France at the age of six. I speak my language fluently and I know the history of my country very well because it is tied to my family history. I belong to the caste of the nobles, a fact which from my early childhood onwards has kept me asking from myself: what does the status that has been appointed to us in advance in the Senegalese society mean? To be more precise: I am a Fulani aristocrat with French nationality and I live in Paris and in Amsterdam. The question of belonging is not stupid at all. Look at the case of Edmund White for instance: He is generally categorized as a gay author in book shops. Then there are writers such as Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco who are Irish, Russian, or Romanian and who chose to write in French, yet they are considered French writers, not francophone writers. Isn’t that absurd?


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

The night gave birth to Jesus

Extracts one and two

Mamadou N'Dongo

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/53060

EXTRACT ONE
CÉLIA DANIELS

Lord, will you never have enough of the crying and the screaming of your people? His Calvary became ours. His chains, our chains. The night gave birth to Jesus. The son of God was black. The hair of Christ is frizzy, the night gave birth to Jesus. The son of God was black, did you know that? Black as charcoal.
They tied up my father, beat my mother. They tied my father. Beat my mother. My mother. Beat my mother. My mother died in the arms of my father. I saw my beaten mother. My mother was beaten to death by the owner of the laundry. The man refused to pay the money he owed to my mother. My mother broke the window of his shop and the man, together with other men, came on the Night of the Fire. They tied up my father, beat my mother.

They tied up my father. Beat my mother. My mother. Beat my mother. My mother died in the arms of my father.

The hair of Christ is frizzy, the night gave birth to Jesus. The son of God was black, did you know that? Black as charcoal. They tied up my father, beat my mother. They tied up my father. Beat my mother. My mother. Beat my mother. My mother died in the arms of my father.

Lord, will you never have enough of the crying and the screaming of your people?

EXTRACT TWO
CYRUS CARTER

I was born in 1954

I was born in 1954, the year that the Supreme Court made segregation illegal in schools. I grew up with hastily effaced signs in front of my eyes, signs that used to read “Whites”, “Blacks” “Colored”, “White Women”, “Black Women”. All these names make the history of my race. Nigger, Man of color, Black American, Afro-American. I was born in a country where my place was never mine, where everything was taken away from me, my name, my history, down to the colour of my skin. My name is Carter. I had to adapt myself to this name that was given to me. Nothing is given in America, everything has to be taken. The way you looked when these people told you their stories. In every black American family there is a crime committed by white Americans. We endured for such a long time. Everything is forgotten, especially the fear, the pain, the grief… But some do remember, or rather, they are made to remember. Norton was sacrificed on the altar of our collective history.

Norton wanted to make up for our history. This is how I explain his gesture, and his madness, it did not start yesterday. There is no use Jennings saying that young Norton was out of his mind. He is mistaken. I am filled with anger. Anger against our country. We the Afro-Americans, we are on our way to extinguish ourselves, we are not accepting ourselves.

How many generations does it take to be in peace with ourselves? We are like those isolated soldiers, who did not hear about the armistice and who go on with the war. From time to time this defiance is justified, especially in a society which today has more subtle ways of still keeping you in a subaltern position. But we are also the actors of this society. Nothing is given in America, everything has to be taken.

You don’t know what it is like to live in America when you are a Black American. The story of Clarence Brown, for people who do not know America, is detestable. For Americans, it is current affairs.


*Mamadou N'Dongo is a Senegalese writer and filmmaker. He is the author of Bridge Road and L’Errance de Sidiki Bâ,. His latest novel is El Hadj (Serpent à Plumes; 2008). The above translations by Jarmo Pikkujamsa are extracts from his first novel, Bridge Road.
** Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Unfamiliar potatoes

Elizabeth Joss

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/53068

UNFAMILIAR POTATOES

We used to scrub and shine
those soiled potatoes
until they looked alien
to the earth
you once called me a potato
one before the scrubbing
a slob
rounded and out of
proportion
I locked myself up for days
uncomfortably looked down
at my reflection
in the glass door to the house
which distorted my
figure even more so
and now years later I laugh
and think of you as the potato
mouldy green and brown
with wrinkles, misery,
sharp stench and frown
all alien to me
and now I smile
I am long past the stage
of rotten potato
HOUSES I HAVE LIVED IN

Fingers
Frail and bony
Touch the side of the dark
green suede chair
a magician caressing a
velvet cape
the dense smell of old oak
musty cupboards
which I open
in the cold passageway
furniture piled up high
inside
someone left in a hurry
those bony fingers
tigers eye stone ring
my glaring hazel eyes
as I watch the brass
you clean
smell of furniture polish
and potpourri
books stale from the sun
their pages yellowing
the tobacco walls
cleaning –
your attempt
to replace any loss
the dusk cannot settle
as the sun slowly dims
I think of the houses that
I have lived in

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

To father for leaving
me at the bosom
for raging wars inside
my shriveled heart
for not knowing me
like I know me
To father for staying
Put. Amongst the plastics
Of your factory
Your
me-chan-i-cal
family life
Hitler reincarnated
For being right
always…
for being right
no in-between
black and white

TO KILL SOMEONE

He sat on the balcony dazed in the actuality of the reciprocating gesture her face held. Every few minutes he would break, gently placing his fingers between the crystal stem of the wine glass. Its imbalance on the wicker laundry basket made her feel uneasy. She observed him carefully. The Aryan eyes, the sensitive skin which showed promise of a beard. She delighted in those little sprouting hairs around his mouth and when he kissed her she felt them rub against her bottom lip gently. He was not harshly or terribly manly in any regard. His nature delicate, elegant, as he dipped his back slowly to place his hand in hers. Her hand uncurled to let his in. At times she struggled to read the constituents of his thoughts, piece by piece, but could rather almost quite make sense of them all as a whole, as a body, as a pulse. Knowing the outcome as though being with him was something of a permanent déjà vu. But it was in essence his words, his accent that lured her into his being, into his wonderful web of rapture. Time was precious, they both knew that. And as he looked up at where the tree had been, he looked into a view of wine farms on the hill, which were fading into shadows now. Her eyes were focused on his, darting at his long eyelashes as he looked over from the dark green hillside and then to the left where tin shacks with tiny lights shimmered on the landscape. On nights like these, they would sit and love. Sit and dream. He would tell her stories of his travels and they would mesmerize her, divulge to her all that she has missed in him. And then her thoughts would suddenly accumulate clay bricks that would press her shoulders down, bricks of unaccomplished desires, unsatisfied longings. How she yearned to travel with him, how she struggled to wait until the time was right. Her mind ventured off with his into realms, which she had never dared to venture. Realms which they would dream of and explore together that night. He noticed that her breathing became slower now as they both moved to the bedroom inside and switched off the lamp. He lowered her carefully down and made sure a glass of water stood nearby on the wooden table. As they both lay there, she sighed, he sighed, and together they fell deeper and deeper into a whirlwind of dreams. In those dreams she would play out the longings, the unfulfilled desires. Fragments of which would build up inside her subconscious. And she would run. From one town to the next, one village to the next, one road to the next. In her dreams she was geographer, English teacher, choreographer, publisher, sufferer. And he would breathe together with her, inevitably, always. She appeared content now, her head tilted towards his, her toes clutching his as she moved between fragments of dream, chapters unresolved and absurd. Such a young couple fast asleep in this room with no curtains. And the stars were brightly now and lit up the room. As the night became more and more still, she grabbed his hand in her sleep and cried, “To kill someone”. And he was silent.

* Elizabeth Joss was born in Cape Town, where she studied for a BA in Socio-Informatics and English Studies at the University of Stellenbosch (2004). She completed her Honours degree in English Studies and Teaching in 2007 and is currently reading for her Master’s degree with a focus on gender and transnational translocation.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Our babies, their dogs

Natasha I. Shivji

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/53069

His head wrapped in bandages
His face scared
With blood
Oozing out of the wounds
His eyes shut
Unconscious maybe dead
His arms high
High enough to surrender
No. He will never surrender
He is a terrorist
He is a murderer
He is an extremist
He must die
10-month-old baby?
A baby who cries for his mother's milk
A baby whose hands wave in the air
Who clutches at your thumb
Is he your terrorist?
Is he who you are targeting?
Because he is who you got.
He will never surrender,
How can he surrender
For a crime he has not committed
Open his eyes
Raise his arms
Restore his brain
But for what?
How can he open his eyes
When his mother is laying dead in the house
When his father is laying dead in the mosque
When his streets stink of rotten flesh
When the walls are splattered with blood
Leave now you barbarians.
And let the baby cry
Let him cry, let him mourn
And may he grow up to resist
Your dogs.
But you have made sure that will not happen.



A million more will be born
How many can you kill
How many can you stop from crying
How many can you stop from raising their arms

They will resist your dogs
By any means necessary

* Natasha I. Shivji is a student from Tanzania currently working on her Masters of Arts. She holds a Bachelor's degree in History and English literature from the University of British Columbia (2008), where she was awarded the UBC President's entrance scholarship.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Africa Blogging roundup, January 6, 2009

Sokari Ekine

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/53048

As we watch the horrors taking place in Gaza, it’s difficult to say the words “Happy New Year” though of course this is what we all wish for each other – a new beginning and some hope for a positive change. However, as in January’s past we are faced with yet more violence, death and injustice. African blogs especially those in Egypt have been very vocal in their commentary and reports on the “War in Gaza”.

Sokari Ekine reviews the following blogs:
Ushahidi
“War On Gaza”
Arabawy
From the Rock
Rantings of a Sand Monkey
The Moor Next Door
SubZero Blue
Egyptian Chronicles
A Socialist in Egypt
Black Looks
Al Jazeera is now using the site developed by Kenyan bloggers after the 2008 outbreak of election violence. Ushahidi is being used to map and document the “War On Gaza”. This is extremely good news for Ushahidi which now enters the global stage

“Al Jazeera is estimated to be the second largest international news/media house, reaching 100 million households. That kind of organization testing Ushahidi gives us a lot of insight into what we need to do in the future for enterprise-level deployments. This is our first Arabic language deployment, which the Al Jazeera new media team has been working on in the last week - more to come on that soon. ...............Benjamin Doherty has also played a role in helping get the site up. He also brought up an interesting point that he’s helping us figure out how to work into the system. How do you deal with synonymous names of locations? That’s an especially good question to ask in Gaza, as there are multiple names for the same place used by different groups.”

Egyptian blogger, Arabawy has been blogging consistently since the invasion started on 27th December. The main focus of his reports have been on the pro-Palestinian demonstrations across Egypt and a critical commentary of both the actions of the Israeli’s and the Egyptian government’s crackdown on the demonstrations.
“The 12 October photographers’ protest against police brutality was aborted after the Interior Ministry approached the heads of the Photographers’ Association, begging them to cancel the protest in exchange for assurances from General Hamdi Abdel Kareem (the head of the Interior Ministry’s PR Department) that the photographers would not be touched during protests… Many photographers including myself were PISSED OFF by the cancellation, and knew these promises were bullshit. Now my question to Mr. Amr Nabil and Mr. Hossam Diab the heads of the association: What do you think of the ongoing crackdown? Are you planning to do something about it? If not, then please leave the young photographers to take action and don’t stand in the way of those who are calling for a photographers’ strike…”

Libyan blogger From the Rock approaches the war from outside the “chicken and egg” discourse that tends to dominate in depth analysis. Neither does she hope for a “swift and just solution”. Rather she discusses the conflict through a poem by Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish , “O those who pass between fleeting words"
“0 those who pass between fleeting words
As bitter dust, go where you wish, but
Do not pass between us like flying insects
For we have work to do in our lands
We have wheat to grow which we water with our bodies' dew
We have that which does not please you here
Stones or partridges
So take the past if you wish to the antiquities market
And return the skeleton to the hoopoe, if you wish,
On a clay platter
We have that which does not please you: we have the future
And we have things to do in our land.”

Rantings of a Sand Monkey asks why Egypt does not get involved in “this war/ holocaust/humanitarian crisis?" and goes on to provide some answers of his own:
"No problem, let me just get the "stop the middle-east conflict" remote control and I will… Oh, wait. Where did it go? Must've left it in my other Jacket!"
"Cause we are tired of outshining everybody else when it comes to this issue. We want to give someone else a crack at this. Spread the credit around, you know?"
"Cause our Mamma told us that minding one's own business is the mark of a mature human being. You calling our Mamma a Liar?"
"Cause we are Evil. We really are. You wanna whine some more about it? You wanna start wailing as well? Maybe burn an egyptian flag or two while you are at it?"
"Hey man, just because you are hung like a Bull, doesn't mean you have to do porn!"
"Cause only someone really really really stupid would get between two crazy people having a knife-fight to the death. Don't you agree?"

The Moor Next Door reports from Mauritania whose government has withdrawn it’s ambassador to Israel as thousands have been demonstrating on the streets.
“Mauritania has seen large street demonstrations against the offensive, like other Arab countries. These protests have been more intense in Nouakchott because of the country’s relations with Israel: Mauritania is one of three Arab states with full, normal diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. This has always been to the displeasure of the country’s Islamist movement, led by Tawassoul (the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), as well as others.”

SubZero Blue comments on an article by Robert Fisk “Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored”
“We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we don’t offend the Israelis. It’s not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel’s side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.”

Egyptian Chronicles reports on flyers distributed by Israeli planes calling on Palestinians to collaborate with the IDF.
“To the people of Gaza
You hold the responsibility for your own fate!" It invites Palestinians to call or email the Israeli army "
to inform us about the location of rocket launching sites and the terrorist gangs that made you hostages of their actions.
For your own safety, please maintain secrecy when you call us.”

A Socialist in Egypt keeps his anger and disgust simple with the picture and words
“To the mother fucker How would you look in the hands you shaken and don't see the blood in each hand?”

Black Looks also uses graphics to speak out against the war against Gaza

China, Africa and the global downturn

Stephen Marks

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/53070

The new year was an occasion for the world’s pundits to review the global economic shock and its impact, including its implications for China and Africa. Former Chief Economic Advisor to the IMF Professor Nouriel Roubini was one who did not mince his words.

‘‘The global financial system in 2008 experienced its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. ...Unfortunately, the worst is ahead of us. The entire global economy will contract in a severe and protracted U-shaped global recession that started a year ago. The U.S. will certainly experience its worst recession in decades, a deep and protracted contraction lasting at least through the end of 2009. Even in 2010 the economic recovery may be so weak -- 1 percent growth or so -- that it will feel terrible even if the recession is technically over.
‘A hard landing for emerging-market economies may also be at hand. Among the so-called BRICs, Russia will be in an outright recession in 2009. Growth in China will slow to 5 percent or less, representing a hard landing for a country that needs expansion of close to 10 percent to move 10 million to 15 million poor rural farmers into the urban industrial sector every year. Brazil will barely grow in 2009. Even India will experience a sharp slowdown. Most other emerging market economies will suffer a similar hard landing’.

The German news magazine Spiegel was equally apocalyptic:

‘Never before in postwar history has there been an economic slump that has dragged down so many economies at the same time, from the major players of the G-7 to economic midgets, from high-tech economies to developing countries. And all of this at an incomprehensible pace...

These developments have rolled across the global economy like shock waves. They affect the carmakers in Detroit, where employees are worried about their jobs. They have spread to the city of Guangzhou in southern China, where textile factories are laying off workers by the thousands. ...And the hope that the emerging economies could disengage themselves from the economic slump and grow on their own proved to be deceptive. The world has become multipolar, just as the crisis itself is multipolar.

And it saw a greater threat on the horizon; ‘now the threat of a new protectionism is taking shape’.

So the first threat to Africa could be an end to the world commodities boom which has boosted earnings for many African countries, as the hope that demand from China and India would sustain global demand is undermined.

But one analysis has also suggested that China’s African presence may not be as stable and long-term as many had hoped. Jeff Herbst and Greg Mills claim that ‘In practice, Chinese entrepreneurs have been the first to leave when the market turned. More than 60 Chinese mining companies have left the mineral-rich Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past two months, as cobalt and copper prices have more than halved. More than 100 small Chinese operators are reported to have left Zambian mines for the same reason’.

They describe the impact of falling prices on Zambia, where the Kwacha lost 75% of its value in 45 days, and ‘the mines are closing as many cannot produce at the current cost, and unemployment is soaring’. They also claim that China’s ambitious $5bn infrastructure and mining package in DRC has ‘gone very quiet as the copper price has plummeted’.

On the other hand while smaller private Chinese operators may be pulling out, the attitude of larger state-owned companies which can afford a longer-term view, could be more consistent. They would be more likely to maintain their African stakes, while also taking the opportunity to use their cash balances to take advantage of bargain prices across the board, including in wealthier countries. As the Financial Times reported; ‘Mining executives say that with no need to answer to shareholders, many state-backed companies can take a long-term view on the country’s demand for metals. Although industrial activity is slowing sharply in China, the government will step up spending on infrastructure as part of a fiscal stimulus package’.

But will the $586bn stimulus package be enough to enable China to buck the trend as the ‘deficit world’ cuts its demand for China’s exports? Figures for China’s falling exports, falling industrial output, falling property prices, and rising bankruptcies and factory closures [url= ]http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb20081231_014969.htm] suggest otherwise[/url].

If China reacts by relying on a cheaper Yuan to boost exports, conflict with the incoming Obama Administration, also under protectionist pressures, could be on the horizon.

There have been official admissions of the danger of greater unrest as factory closures and unemployment mount and jobless migrant workers return to their villages. Perhaps as an attempt to make the best of a bad job, local officials in Guangdong have seen the wave of factory closures as an opportunity to retool, upgrade, and reorient to the domestic market.

And there continue to be new policy announcements aimed at improving the social safety net for rural communities and migrant workers. As well as the oft-announced and oft-delayed prospect of [url= ]http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/12/29/chinas-elusive-land-reform/] land reform[/url], there is also an expansion of the rural anti-poverty programme to cover an extra 28m residents: a more flexible [url= pension]http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/biz_commentary/2008/12/24/124845.shtml]pension scheme for migrant workers[/url] and a boost for spending on [url= ]http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aKavX7Xi2RfI&refer=asia#] vocational training in rural areas[/url].

As the Financial Times reported last week, there is also help on the way for China’s car industry:

‘The Chinese government plans to support the car industry, the second-largest in the world, with the aim of ensuring sales growth of about 10 per cent in 2009. The move is part of the continuing effort to stimulate the economy and shield the country from the effects of the global economic crisis’. The measures will include ‘cuts in car purchase taxes and incentives for the development of clean fuel cars, to help support the flagging local car market’

Government bodies would be required to buy cars developed by domestic carmakers when making fleet purchases, and Beijing will encourage further consolidation in the domestic car industry, according to a report in an official Shanghai business magazine.. China has 45 carmakers compared with 15 in the US, the world’s largest car market.

Premier Wen Jiabao also announced plans to help the automobile and steel sectors. Beijing also took steps to support the local metals industry, announcing that it will allow tax-free imports of copper, nickel and cobalt concentrate, provided the finished products are exported, according to a statement on the Ministry of Commerce website.

Lawyers expose names of abductors in court

2009-01-09

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news080109/lawyers080109.htm

With an increasingly laughable judicial system conniving to illegally detain abducted activists, defence lawyers and rights groups are using name and shame tactics to apply pressure for their release. This week lawyer Alec Muchadehama, who is representing 7 MDC activists charged with plotting to overthrow Mugabe’s regime, named several state agents who abducted his clients.

Zimbabwe may have received Chinese weapons via Congo - UN

2009-01-08

http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-12-22-voa2.cfm

The United Nations says it has "credible information" that Zimbabwe may have received Chinese weapons by way of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The U.N. Security Council says Boeing aircraft delivered 53 tons of Chinese ammunition, meant for the Zimbabwean army, from the DRC to Zimbabwe last August.

Zimbabwe Crisis: What should African journalists do?

2009-01-09

http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=3977

For some time now the West through its media has focused its attention on Mugabe and Zimbabwe. Aside their giant media houses like the BBC and CNN, Aljazeera have lately joined the bandwagon, running daily documentaries on the impoverishing state of Zimbabwe. They have even been innovative enough by stepping into the world of adverts and clutching such opportunities to further demonize Mugabe and Zimbabwe.

Jestina Mukoko still in custody as case postponed again

2009-01-09

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news060109/jestina060109.htm

The case against human rights activist Jestina Mukoko and her eight other co-accused was once again postponed in the Harare magistrates court on Tuesday, in order for a superior court to rule on the group’s arrest. On Monday a judge ordered that Mukoko receive medical attention before the case proceeded - the second such order after police failed to comply with a previous one, stating Mukoko should be taken to hospital so allegations of torture could be investigated.

Tsvangirai seeks crucial Mugabe meeting

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7bcstp

Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has requested a meeting with President Robert Mugabe in a last-ditch effort to salvage a power-sharing deal, an opposition spokesman said on Friday. Tsvangirai and Mugabe signed a unity pact last September, but the agreement appears to be unravelling following a dispute over the control of key ministries and the abduction of several opposition and human rights activists.

Sudan: It takes more than a law to stop the cut

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82197

A law passed in November 2008 prohibiting female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in the state of Southern Kordofan is unique in Sudan. But for it to translate into genuine abolition, deep-seated attitudes and misinformation will have to be overcome. More than two-thirds of women in the state have undergone FGM/C, according to a 2006 household survey conducted by the Ministry of Health.

Mali: Government to cut female circumcision to 65% by 2012

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7mlry2

Mali's National Programme to fight Female Circumcision (PNLE) plans to reduce the practice from 85% to 65% by 2012, PANA reported Thursday. The plan resulted from an action plan that evolved from a workshop that involved the Malian technical services, the civil society organisations as well as technical and financial partners.

Uganda: Domestic violence discussed on FM Radio talk show

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7unakm

The current rate of domestic violence in our community, has at long last hit ‘Talk Back’, a prime radio talk show on a prime FM radio station called Radio One. Radio One, is an FM radio station that largely targets people in Kampala. ‘Talk Back ’, is broadcast every morning from around 8.15 to 8.45 am. Most of the topics discussed on ‘Talk Back’, are a continuation of what transpired on the previous evening’s radio talk show called ‘Spectrum’. Both Spectrum and Talk Back capture the elite in Kampala.

Africa: Devising approaches to demanding accountability from AU

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/8m5yok

To strengthen the effectiveness of African Women's Regional Networks in participation in African Union (AU) Policy formulation and implementation processes, UNIFEM has organised a consultative and planning forum for Regional and Sub-Regional Women's Networks and Organisations.

Chad: “They’re going to exterminate us”

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82271

Cécile Moutouba marched with a knife in one hand, a stick in the other. She said her husband has used both against her. Moutouba was among some 100 women who recently walked for more than 2km, their hands on their heads (a sign of mourning), in the Chadian town of Guelendeng, 153km from the capital N’djamena.

Ethiopia: New Law Ratchets up Repression

2009-01-09

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/08/ethiopia-new-law-ratchets-repression

Ethiopia's parliament enacted a new law on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that criminalizes most human rights work in the country, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch said that the law is a direct rebuke to governments that assist Ethiopia and that had expressed concerns about the law's restrictions on freedom of association and expression.

Global: Nigeria Gives Myanmar $500,000

2009-01-08

http://www.innercitypress.com/joy1myanmar122508.html

Two days before Christmas, Myanmar's mission to the UN got a gift with no strings attached. In the dimly-lit Indonesia Lounge next to the General Assembly chamber, Nigeria's Permanent Representative Joy Ogwu handed her counterpart from Myanmar Kyaw Tint Swe a check for $500,000. This was Nigeria's response to the UN's plea for funds to continue to respond to Cyclone Nargis, which hit in May.

Kenya: Anger over massacre burial

2009-01-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7815597.stm

There is confusion in Kenya over how to deal with bodies piled in the town of Eldoret's morgue for more than a year. The deceased died in a church burnt down by a mob during ethnic violence after elections in December 2007. Thirty-seven bodies were to have been buried on Wednesday but after the first 10 were interred they had to be dug up amid furious protests from relatives.

Uganda: Drop treason charges against abducted child

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7yjfhl

Human Rights Watch has asked the Ugandan government to honor its international obligations to rehabilitate child soldiers in the case of Bushobozi Irumba, who was abducted by the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) rebel forces at the age of 9. Arrested at the age of 15, Bushobozi was charged with treason and is due to face a court in Uganda on January 8, 2009.

Togo: How to improve a “worst form of labour”

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82159

A private sector-employment agency in Togo that trains, places and advocates for domestic workers said it is trying to improve notoriously abusive work conditions for domestic workers. In October 2007, the Togolese government classified domestic work as one of the worst forms of labour, making it illegal for anyone younger than 18 to be employed as domestic workers.

Togo: Law of silence trumps anti-trafficking rule

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82260

Parents, police and even judges are hesitant to press charges against human-traffickers because of fear of punishment, concern for the community and confusion about Togo’s 2005 anti-trafficking law, according to an NGO analysis of the law. Any abuse of power that leads to a child’s migration and exploitation constitutes trafficking, according to the 2000 UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Africa: 50,000 fleeing Somalia risked sea crossing in '08

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/a3rwpf

More than 50,000 people fleeing chaotic conditions in Somalia and neighbouring countries crossed the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden to Yemen in 2008, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday. At least 590 drowned and 359 were reported missing among the 50,091 known to have made the perilous voyage in Somalia-based smugglers' boats last year, UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond said.

Egypt: Government deports Eritreans despite torture risk

2009-01-08

http://tinyurl.com/759a6b

Egypt deported a group of 32 Eritreans on Wednesday, most of whom had tried to flee across the Egyptian desert to Israel, security sources said. The Eritreans had been arrested over the past two months and were flown back to their country's capital Asmara, the sources said.

South Africa: End strain on asylum system and protect Zimbabweans

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/9gotr7

The South African government should end its sole reliance on an overburdened asylum system that protects only a tiny fraction of the more than a million Zimbabweans who cannot return to the humanitarian disaster in their home country, Human Rights Watch has said.

Africa: 9.1 million inrternally displaced in E. & Central Africa

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29474

There were 9.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Central and Eastern Africa region as of December 2008, according to a United Nations report, 400,000 less than at the end of June, but because of the fluidity of the situation officials advised against laying too much store on the reduction. They noted that IDPs are sometimes continually moving, either returning home or being uprooted a second time.

DRC: UN still assisting displaced

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29467

The United Nations is continuing to rush assistance to help those uprooted by clashes in the war-torn far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including victims of violence at the hands of the notorious Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Kenya: Thank you Mr President for beginning to listen to the people!

2009-01-08

http://www.bulamwa.co.ke//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=115&Itemid=39

President Kibaki’s decision to cancel the traditional New Year’s Eve state festivities at State House Mombasa is a laudable and encouraging move towards people sensitive leadership. For a long time, the Kenyan civil society has been vocal in condemning the unnecessary, spendthrift and morally irregular expense of holding grand state festivities in the same country where citizens are suffering grand social injustices and unaccountable unresponsive leadership.

Ghana: Opposition leader Mills sworn in as president

2009-01-08

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5060EZ20090107

Ghana swore in opposition leader John Atta Mills as president on Wednesday in a democratic transfer of power that has won plaudits from Africa and the world. President John Kufuor stepped down after serving the maximum two four-year terms in office in the West African state. His party's chosen successor lost a cliffhanger presidential election run-off to Mills last week by less than 0.5 percent.

Kenya: Ex-African leaders for peace summit in February

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/6tmxsr

A galaxy of former African leaders will attend a peace c onference to discuss the political transformation of Kenya from an ethnic-divisions-ridden state, into a more tolerant democracy in the region.The conference, dubbed "The Kenya We Want," will be held in Nairobi on 2-4 February to chart the way forward for the country, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, has announced.

Mauritania: Opposition rejects outcome of dialogue

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7ak8q9

The leader of Mauritania's opposition Rally of Democratic Forces (RDF), Mr. Ahmed Ould Daddah, has said the outcome of the country's national consultations, held 27 December to 6 January by the ruling junta, is against the principles of democracy and Mauritania's national interest. In a declaration which was made public Thursday in Nouakchott, the RDF leader also said the conclusions reached at the consultations could not guarantee peace and national unity, adding that the consultations were held under an atmosphere of utter confusion.

Nigeria: Opposition draws inspiration for Ghana poll

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/8r9njq

Apparently drawing inspiration from the success of Ghana's opposition in the recently-concluded parliamentary and presidential polls, Nigeria's main opposition Action Congress (AC) party has hailed the polls, saying they have shown that a ruling party can be defeated in a free and fair election.

Guinea: Francophonie delegation to visit

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/9enz3d

A delegation from the International Organisation of the Francophonie (OIF) was due here on Thursday for talks with the leader of the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power 23 December in Guinea, a official source told PANA. The delegation will also meet with new Prime Minister, Kabinet Komara, as well as with several Guinean social and political stakeholders.

Kenya: Mwananchi letter to former activists now legislators!

2009-01-08

http://www.bulamwa.co.ke//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Itemid=39

Honourable citizens, Bunge la Mwananchi remembers with nostalgia that the very ideals that we fight for today such as human rights, equality, democracy, freedom, democratic constitution, political accountability and transparency, sustainable development and people sensitive leadership, were ideals that you once believed in, spoke eloquently about and worked hard to achieve before you entered the August house.

Côte d’Ivoire: Election process moving ahead, UN official reports

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29487

Despite some problems, voter identification and registration in Côte d’Ivoire have been positive overall in the run-up to elections, a key element in resolving a political crisis that in 2002 divided the West African country into a rebel-held north and Government-controlled south, a top United Nations official has said.

Somalia: Puntland state elects president

2009-01-09

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/22561

Abdurahman Mohamad Farole has been elected as the new president of Puntland, a regional autonomy. Before his election to the presidency, he was the finance minister and close ally of the outgoing president Adde Musa.

South Africa: Appeal court to rule in Zuma case

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/7c4gav

The South African Supreme Court of Appeal will hand down judgement in Zuma case that witnesses a face-off between the corruption-tainted Zuma, leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), and axed president Thabo Mbeki. Zuma will hear his fate two days after the ANC releases its 2009 election manifesto in the Eastern Cape on Saturday which names him as its presidential candidate.

Benin: Corrupt microfinance institutions profit from poorest

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82247

Local NGOs subcontracted by a multi-million-dollar microfinance programme are taking bribes from borrowers, according to the fund’s directors. Aboubacar Aboudou, the first director of the government-run “microloans to the poorest” programme, told IRIN a lack of oversight and the programme’s rapid growth since its creation in February 2007 has left it open to “unscrupulous intermediaries” hired to process loans.

Africa: Accruing benefits from mining in Africa

2009-01-09

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=41468&type=Document

Today’s resource boom in Africa, driven by Asian economic growth, offers new opportunities for resource-rich African countries. Contrary to the experience of previous booms, however, most mining profits now accrue to foreign companies, leaving little room for governments to use revenues for pro-poor investments or to mitigate adverse distributional impacts.

Africa: Continent may face 'centuries of poverty'

2009-01-09

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=6930

Extreme poverty will continue to blight sub-Saharan Africa for another 200 years unless action to overcome it is intensified, a new report has suggested. Social Watch, a network of campaigning groups, has devised a measure known as the "basic capabilities index" to assess the level of hardship throughout the world.

Africa: Region in big step towards African Economic Community

2009-01-09

http://www.sardc.net/Editorial/Newsfeature/09010109.htm

Three regional economic blocs have made a giant step towards the long-conceived goal of an African Economic Community, approving the expeditious establishment of an enlarged Free Trade Area (FTA) encompassing 26 Member States in three sub-regions. Meeting at a Tripartite Summit in late 2008 in Uganda, leaders of Member States of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) agreed on what many have described as an important milestone towards continental integration as envisaged by the African Union (AU).

Africa: No credit due: the World Bank and IMF in Africa

2009-01-09

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=41265&type=Document

This paper questions the lending progammes of the World Bank (WB), and discusses the significance of its engagement with developing economies. It analyses the history and economics of international development policy vis-à-vis developing economies, and critiques the political economy of the policy-based intervention of the WB and IMF in the developing world in general and Africa in particular.

Africa: Strengths and limitations of agriculture in delivering poverty reduction

2009-01-09

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=41498&type=Document

This paper presents key findings from a study of pro-poor agricultural growth (PPAG). Over the past few decades changes such as those surrounding ecology, liberalisation and HIV and AIDS have increased the challenges facing the rural poor. The authors outline a framework for new responses to these challenges in the context of PPAG.

Cameroon: Measles outbreak strikes

2009-01-09

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/22574

Measles outbreak has hit the town of Maroua in northern Cameroon, leaving two dead and over 160 infected. Medical officials in the town are on high alert to abate the progress of what they now refer to as an epidemic.

Global: Maximising the benefits of AIDS funding

2009-01-09

http://www.awcfs.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=541&Itemid=1

Significant new investments in the fight against the AIDS pandemic could have positive impacts on broader health systems in Africa if governments handle them right. A study of six countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda -- by the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), titled "Missing the Target 6 - The HIV/AIDS Response and Health Systems" indicates that new investment in AIDS services has exposed existing fragilities in health systems.

Zimbabwe: Cholera cases rise

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29493

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) says the number of suspected cases of cholera in Zimbabwe has now reached almost 36,000 while nearly 1,780 people have died from the infection since the outbreak began over five months ago. The relief community has boosted its response capacity and coordination in order to manage the outbreak, the worst ever in the country’s history, amid a collapsing health system and worsening humanitarian situation.

CAR: New campaign aims to reduce child deaths

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29479

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has embarked on one of the largest vaccination campaigns in the history of the Central African Republic (CAR), aiming to give 800,000 children the tools they need to address the three leading causes of preventable death: malaria, measles and diarrhoea. “UN agencies and non-governmental organizations run campaigns all the time, but this is a big one and we want it to stand out,” UNICEF Representative in CAR Mahimbo Mdoe said of the 10-day initiative.

Kenya: Deaths of most vulnerable may lead to drop in prevalence

2009-01-09

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/AD7F6011-6C98-445C-806F-6D68B12ACC04.asp

The declines in HIV prevalence and incidence seen in recent years in some countries may be largely due to differences in people’s susceptibility to the virus rather than behaviour change, according to a mathematical model based on a survey of Kenyan sex workers, published in the January 14th edition of AIDS.

Uganda: TB doesn't always increase HIV viral load

2009-01-09

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/74FB86D5-5BCD-400F-A8A7-267F075D704B.asp

A quarter of Ugandan HIV-positive patients with active tuberculosis (TB) had a viral load below 10,000 copies/ml, investigators report in a letter published in the December 1st edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. Furthermore, the investigators found that viral load increased in a significant proportion of patients whose viral load was below 1000 copies/ml after they started treatment with anti-TB drugs.

Malawi: AIDS-related mortality and marriage

2009-01-09

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=41441&type=Document

This paper examines the effect of AIDS-related mortality of the prime-age adult population on marriage behaviour among women in Malawi. A rise in prime-age adult mortality increases risks associated with the search for a marriage partner in the marriage market.

Uganda: Government to match health research to local needs

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/984uk9

Uganda's largest university will begin a two-year study this month (January) of how to improve health research and health service delivery in the country. The two-year needs assessment will define how to align Makerere University's activities with the goals and needs of the country's health system, and devise teaching and research strategies for the university.

Benin: Voodoo community remains impenetrable to HIV outreach

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82281

Voodoo rituals have long been inaccessible to anyone except disciples and priests. Even though certain practices like scarification carry a high risk of HIV infection, outsiders to the voodoo community have largely been unable to penetrate the secrecy that health officials say can be deadly to its followers.

Kenya: Desire for children eclipses HIV fears

2009-01-09

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82288

When Mary Muli and her husband failed to conceive a child, they followed the long-held tradition among the Kemba in Kenya's Eastern Province and brought another woman into their home to bear children for them. "We were married for 30 years when we realised we would die without children," Muli, 60, told IRIN/PlusNews from her home in Kitui District. "I brought Teresia to bear us children and to one day remain behind when we are all gone."

Kenya: Teachers plan nationwide strike

2009-01-09

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/22564

Kenya teachers' plan to go on strike looks imminent as a scheduled talk between them and the education minister hit a snag. The minister Professor Sam Ongeri failed to convince leaders of the teachers' body - Kenya National Union for Teachers - on Tuesday to rescind their decision.

Ethiopia: Donkeys boost literacy

2009-01-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7777560.stm

In a bamboo and matting shelter on the edge of the town of Awassa, rows of tiny children are struggling with Ethiopia's fiendishly complicated Amharic alphabet "Huh - HUH! Hoo - HOO! Hee - HEE! Ha - HA!" they chant in unision after their teacher.

Zimbabwe: No reopening for schools

2009-01-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7815625.stm

The reopening of schools in Zimbabwe after the Christmas break has been delayed by two weeks. Education Minister Stephen Mahere said teachers needed to mark last year's exams before the new term can begin.

Senegal: Shock at gay jail terms

2009-01-09

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7817100.stm

The jailing in Senegal of nine gay men for eight years over "indecent conduct and unnatural acts" has been condemned by an international gay rights group. Homosexual acts are illegal in Senegal but the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) told the BBC it was "shocked by the ruling".

South Africa: Appeal for donations - Lesbian and Gay Equality Project

2009-01-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/53104

The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project has been following the case into murder of Eudy Simelane (31), a former Banyana-Banyana soccer player, and an out lesbian, whose body was found stabbed and mutilated in an open field in Tornado - one of the sections in the Kwa-Thema township - on the 28 April 2008. The LGEP is mobilizing at least 120 people from the East Rand to 'camp' for three days in Delmas (Mpumalanga) for the duration of the trial
ACCUSED FOR MURDERING LESBIAN SOCCER PLAYER GO TO TRIAL

LESBIAN AND GAY EQUALITY PROJECT APPEAL FOR DONATIONS

The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project has been following the case into murder of Eudy Simelane (31), a former Banyana-Banyana soccer player, and an out lesbian, whose body was found stabbed and mutilated in an open field in Tornado - one of the sections in the Kwa-Thema township - on the 28 April 2008.

Five young men were initially arrested for the crimes of robbery, gang rape and murder of Simelane, due to her sexual orientation. Four of these men will stand trial at the Delmas Circuit Court in Mpumalanga from 11 to 13 February 2009.

The LGEP is mobilizing at least 120 people from the East Rand to ‘camp’ for three days in Delmas (Mpumalanga) for the duration of the trial; mobilizing the community of Delmas to join the public demonstrations during the trial; challenging all political parties on taking a stance against hate crimes targeted at LGBTI people; and developing educational and visible symbols against hate crimes and specifically around the killing of Eudy Simelane for the trial.

For this, we have an estimated budget of R200.000. MAGI has donated
R25.000 towards this initiative.

We request everyone to consider personally donating for this course. By doing so, you will be joining LGBTI activists and rights organisations in addressing:
i The backlash faced by LGBTI people in SA, which manifests itself through blatant homophobic sentiments and the killing of mostly black lesbians from the township.
ii. The State’s failure to provide overarching solutions to the endemic problem of violence.
iii. The urgent need of a change of mindsets and transformation to be supported by broader progressive movement.
iv. The possible precedent setting through convicting the men standing trial for robbing, gang-rapping and killing of Eudy Simelane and its impact on the social and political spheres in our country and hopefully internationally; and
v. Mobilising LGBTI people and activists to defend the
Constitutional and legislative guarantees, including equality, freedom and dignity in our democratic South Africa.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE DIRECTED TO

Name of account: National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality
Name of bank: NEDBANK
Branch code: 190805
Account number: 1979 367 809
SWIFT CODE: NEDS ZA JJ
Type of account: Current Account



MAKE A STATEMENT! DONATE AND ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO DO THE SAME!

SUPPORT US IN DEFENDING THE RIGHTS TO AUTONOMY AND SELF DETERMINATION!

NO TO HATE CRIMES!

For further information, please contact

Phumzile S. Mtetwa
Executive Director
Cell: 072 795 9194

Mazibuko Jara
Acting Chairperson
083 651 0271


Nonhlanhla Mkhize
Board Member
083 748 9565

Lesbian and Gay Equality Project
36 Grafton Road (Corner Hopkins Str.); Yeoville
P O Box 27811; Yeoville; 2143
Tel: +27 11 487 3810/1
Fax: +27 11 487 2332
Email: phumi@equality.org.za <mailto:phumi@equality.org.za>

South Africa: Foreign nationals attacked in Durban

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/82j5ug

A Tanzanian refugee, who escaped death by hiding in a bathroom, is reeling after losing a second brother to alleged xenophobic violence in less than a year. Zane Omari's younger brother, Said, died on Monday as a result of injuries he sustained when he was allegedly forced out of a sixth-floor window at Venture Africa, a shelter for refugees in Broad Street in Durban.

Global: Climate warming means food shortages, study warns

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/89rha9

The warming climate is likely to put stress on crops and livestock alike and could cause serious food shortages for half the world's population, U.S. researchers predicted on Thursday. The worst effects will be in the regions where the poorest people already live -- the tropics and subtropics, the researchers wrote in the journal Science. But temperate regions will see very warm average temperatures, they added.

Global: UK Government buildings emit more CO2 than all of Kenya

2009-01-08

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/23/carbon-emissions-uk

Public buildings in England and Wales are pumping out 11m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, more than Kenya's entire carbon footprint, the Guardian can reveal. Unpublished findings of an energy efficiency audit of 18,000 buildings including ministerial offices, police stations, museums and art galleries reveal that the 9,000 buildings audited so far produce 5.6m tonnes of CO2, with one in six receiving the lowest possible energy efficiency rating.

Senegal: Lead for car batteries poisons town

2009-01-08

http://tinyurl.com/9odsu8

First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared. Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed.

Senegal: Forecasting the future in an erratic climate

2009-01-09

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=82201

In the darkness after pre-dawn prayer a village elder would squint at the sky overhead, tilting his head back until his cap fell off, looking for a cluster of bright stars that signalled the middle of the rainy season. Now many traditional methods are becoming increasingly unreliable predictors of the weather due to climate variability, and African farmers already facing fluctuations need scientific data to help them adapt, farmers and climate experts say.

Malawi: Possibilities for successful land reform

2009-01-09

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=41444&type=Document

It is estimated that up to 84% of Malawians earn their livelihoods directly from agriculture - it contributes over 90% to export earnings, 40% to GDP and accounts for 85% of total employment. While the advent of democratisation in May 1994 provided a rare opportunity to address the chronic imbalances in the patterns of land ownership and distribution, the major development strategies that the government has since implemented have shied away from addressing the land question.

South Africa: Evictions of women and children, police intimidation in Wes Bank

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/74bvut

At least 20 families, mostly women and children, have been evicted from their homes in Wes Bank, Delft. As has routinely been the case in other sections of Delft, the evictions were carried out under police intimidation and a heavy police presence.

Gabon: Journalists, civil society members arrested

2009-01-09

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=29905

“The current climate of fear is without precedent in recent years in Gabon and is indicative of President Omar Bongo’s readiness to hunt down all those who show too much interest in such subjects as the Bongo family’s possessions and the government’s handling of public funds,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The persecution of journalists must stop at once and the detainees much be released, as they have not been charged.”

Somalia: IFJ condemns killing of journalist

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/8kfx5x

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the murder of Hassan Mayow Hassan, a Somali journalist, who was shot dead in the Afgoye District of lower Shabelle region in southern Somalia. "We strongly condemn this killing which marks a violent start of the year for journalists in Somalia," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. "There is an urgent need to end violence against journalists in Somalia and all warring factions must refrain from targeting the media.

Cameroon: IFJ welcomes Collective Agreement in the media

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/53041

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has welcomed the signing last November of the Collective Bargaining Agreement for journalists and media workers in Cameroon. In a letter to the Prime Ministre of Cameroon on Wednesday, the IFJ expressed "confidence that the implementation of the agreement will contribute to the professionalisation of the media sector and to the promotion of ethics in the media in Cameroon."
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has welcomed the signing last November of the Collective Bargaining Agreement for journalists and media workers in Cameroon.

In a letter to the Prime Ministre of Cameroon on Wednesday, the IFJ expressed « confidence that the implementation of the agreement will contribute to the professionalisation of the media sector and to the promotion of ethics in the media in Cameroon. »

In July 2005, journalists’ unions and media employers started negotiations which, after three years of difficulties have produced the desired results on November 12, 2008 to organise and improve relationships between working journalists, media workers and employers.

« This agreement is a prerequisite for the improvement of conditions of life and service in the media businesses » said Jean Marc Soboth, President of the National Union of Cameroon Journalists.

The IFJ, which represents the unions of journalists in the world, calls on the Government and the employers to fast track the implementation of the agreement in order to ensure the professionalization of the media sector in Cameroon.

Global: Power of the press can spark war – and peace

2009-01-09

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=45336

In 2003, two journalists from Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines were convicted of war crimes in the Rwanda genocide -- illustrating the dangerous role media can play by relaying hate speech or rumours during times of violent conflict. RTLM, which broadcast from July 1993 to July 1994, was found to have "fanned the flames of hate and genocide in Rwanda". It was the first such conviction since that of Julius Streicher at Nuremberg for his anti-Semitic publication Der Stürmer.

DRC: Talks making progress

2009-01-09

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29497

The latest round of United Nations-supported Government-rebel political negotiations seeking to quell the violence engulfing the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continued today, with the co-chair reporting slow but steady progress.

Somalia: To move beyond the failed state

2009-01-08

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5836&l=1

This latest International Crisis Group report, argues that the announced withdrawal at year’s end of the Ethiopian army, which intervened in December 2006, opens a new period of uncertainty and risk but also provides a chance to launch an inclusive political process. “The world is preoccupied with a symptom – piracy – instead of concentrating on a political settlement, the core of the crisis”, says Rashid Abdi, Crisis Group’s Somalia Analyst. “There is no quick fix to Somalia’s tragedy, but this opportunity must not be missed”.

DRC: Angola widens border closure over Ebola

2009-01-08

http://tinyurl.com/8u7rv9

Angola has increased border restrictions with the Democratic Republic of Congo where an outbreak of the highly contagious and deadly Ebola virus is believed to have infected 40 people and killed 13. State-owned daily Jornal de Angola said migratory movements between part of Angola's eastern province of Moxico and the DRC were suspended, days after authorities closed the border of its Lunda Norte province with the DRC.

Sudan: Ugandan rebels kill 38 in the South

2009-01-08

http://tinyurl.com/96twem

Ugandan rebels have killed 38 people since Christmas in a wave of attacks on southern Sudanese villages, a senior Sudanese official said on Thursday. Jemma Nunu Kumba, governor of south Sudan's Western Equatoria state, said thousands of civilians had fled the area fearing more raids by Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) fighters.

Sudan: Darfur rebels accuse government of fresh bombings

2009-01-08

http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE5070HJ20090108

Darfur rebels accused Sudan's army of bombing their positions on Thursday, breaking a period of relative calm in the country's violent west. No one was immediately available to comment from Sudan's armed forces. International sources, who asked not to be named, said they had heard similar reports.

Somalia: EU forces prevent Somali pirate attack

2009-01-08

http://euobserver.com/13/27342

EU forces in the Gulf of Aden have prevented several pirate attacks in the last few days and arrested more than 25 pirates. Somali pirates gave up a raid on a Greek oil tanker on Friday (2 January) after the intervention of EU forces, the Greek merchant marine ministry has reported.

Egypt: Government pulls down the shutters on aid

2009-01-09

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=6929

Egyptian authorities have almost fully sealed the border with Gaza, preventing delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid. "The government has expressly forbidden the entry of aid convoys laden with food into the Gaza Strip," Emmad al-Din Moustafa, member of the Popular Committee for Aiding Gaza told IPS. "The continued border closure -- like the Israeli assault itself -- constitutes a crime against humanity."

Africa: Investors mount ambitious plan for African satellite

2009-01-09

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

African investors have hatched an ambitious plan to launch a dedicated satellite to beam more bandwidth to the continent. Africans will supply 90 per cent of the funding, with global satellite company Intelsat providing the experience and credibility to get the project done. The main local backer is Convergence Partners, a hi-tech investment fund chaired by Andile Ngcaba, a former Director-General of South Africa’s Department of Communications.

Angola: W3C Workshop

Role of Mobile Tech in Fostering Social/Economic Development

2009-01-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/53117

As part of its mission to ensure that the Web is available to all, W3C invites participation in a public Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development in Africa in Maputo, Mozambique, on 1-2 April 2009. Participants will explore ways to fulfil the potential of mobile phones as a platform for deploying development-oriented ICT services towards the poorest segments of populations in developing countries, with an emphasis on the African context.
W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Tech in Fostering Social/Economic Development

Maputo, Mozambique – 1st and 2nd April, 2009.

As part of its mission to ensure that the Web is available to all, W3C invites participation in a public Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development in Africa in Maputo, Mozambique, on 1-2 April 2009. Participants will explore ways to fulfil the potential of mobile phones as a platform for deploying development-oriented ICT services towards the poorest segments of populations in developing countries, with an emphasis on the African context.

"The penetration and low cost of mobile telephony in developing countries, combined with its ability to provide Internet access, gives us the possibility of providing Internet-based services to billions of people who would not otherwise be able to afford it," explains George Sadowsky, co-chair of the Workshop. "The potential to use the mobile Internet for providing real social and economic benefits to such people is immense, and deserves to be explored and exploited."

Participants will explore ways to lower existing barriers faced by both content providers – grassroots NGOs, governments, and local entrepreneurs seeking to develop and deploy services, and users who face issues related to illiteracy, internationalization, accessibility, and usability.

W3C invites all stakeholders who wish to support the event to become Workshop Sponsors. Athree-tier Sponsorship Program has been designed both to showcase the sponsor organization and to support the participation of those with expertise who might not otherwise be able to attend due to travel or other costs.

The Ministry of Science and Technology of the Government of Mozambique will host this Workshop. This Workshop is organized as part of the Digital World Forum project (European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme - FP7) which seeks to understand how low-cost technologies can help bridge the digital divide.

The event is the third organized by W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) about the mobile Web and social development; see previous meetings in Bangalore, India, and continued in São Paulo, Brazil. MWI aims to identify and resolve challenges and issues of accessing the Web when on the move.

Anyone may attend and must provide a statement of interest in order to participate due to limited space; more information about participation is available. The meeting will feature real-time simultaneous translation in Portuguese, English and French.

Uganda: Housewife designs phone charger

2009-01-09

http://www.wougnet.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=1

Mrs. Muyonjo is a housewife in a remote village of Ivukula in Iganga district, Eastern Uganda. She used to ride her bicycle for twenty miles in order to come to the nearest small town with electricity to charge her mobile phone battery. Not any more. One day, she fell victim to unscrupulous individuals. “I will never give my telephone to the village battery chargers again. I gave them my new phone for charging, and they changed my battery and instead returned to me an old battery whose battery life can only last for one day.”

Global: The Susie Smith Memeorial Prize for writing on HIV and Aids

Call for Submissions

2009-01-09

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/susiesmith/index.html?ito=2771&itc=0

Susie Smith, a pioneer in the fight against HIV and AIDS, worked for Oxfam GB for 30 years. With this prize, Oxfam wants to acknowledge her commitment to sub-Saharan Africa and her constant willingness to challenge conventional thinking. The prize of £3,000 will be awarded for a single piece of writing on HIV and AIDS from sub-Saharan Africa, which has already been published. Any writing – possibly an article, poetry, fiction or a chapter of a book – of up to 10,000 words and published in English since 2006 will be eligible. The judges will focus on the quality of the submissions and on the impact the writing has had. All submissions must be received by March 31st 2009. Please include a cover letter outlining the impact your piece has had. We expect to announce the winner in July 2009. To enter, send your submission, with a cover letter, to: susiesmithmemorialprize@oxfam.org.uk

Global: System Dynamics-based Development Planning Course

March 23 - May 8, 2009 - Bergen, Norway

2009-01-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/53106

This course is an intensive and practical introduction to System Dynamics, a unique framework for understanding and managing complex development problems. Participants will be introduced to a variety of tools, including mapping techniques and the Threshold 21 simulation model developed by Millennium Institute, which will help them to understand the sources of persistent development problems and identify the best approaches to mitigate them. The course is designed for policy advisors, planning technicians, advocacy and civil society groups, policy research institutions, private foundations, and bilateral development agencies.
System Dynamics-based Development Planning Course
March 23 - May 8, 2009
Bergen, Norway


This course is an intensive and practical introduction to System Dynamics, a unique framework for understanding and managing complex development problems. Participants will be introduced to a variety of tools, including mapping techniques and the Threshold 21 simulation model developed by Millennium Institute, which will help them to understand the sources of persistent development problems and identify the best approaches to mitigate them. The course is designed for policy advisors, planning technicians, advocacy and civil society groups, policy research institutions, private foundations, and bilateral development agencies.

Full Course Description

The current global economic crisis, the recent food crisis, and increasing evidence of global warming collectively demonstrate that the fundamental aspects of today?s working world are not well understood.

These global challenges demand a different way of looking at the world, the challenges we face, and of mapping effective solutions. They demand experts who think systemically and who can use system dynamics-based tools to analyze the complex and interdependent social, economic, and environmental systems that impact our world.

Millennium Institute?s seven-week System Dynamics-based Development Planning Course equips participants with the knowledge and skills required to effectively analyze these challenges and determine the best approaches to mitigating them. The course is designed for policy advisors, planning technicians, advocacy and civil society groups, policy research institutions, private foundations, and bilateral development agencies.

The course is based on the Threshold 21 framework, developed by Millennium Institute. This framework has received favorable evaluations from UNDP, the Carter Center, Conservation International, and is being used by government institutions of several developing, private corporations, nonprofit organizations and advocacy/civil society groups.

COURSE FEE
High income countries: $8500
Low/Middle income countries: $4500
Students: $3500
Discounted rates are available for groups of three or more.


DATE : March 23 - May 8, 2009
VENUE : University of Bergen, Norway

For further information and application materials or visit www.millennium-institute.org/courses or contact ao@millennium-instititue.org

A New Paradigm of the African State: Fundi wa Afrika

Mueni wa Muiu & Guy Martin

2009-01-09

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/publications/53099

The authors introduce a new paradigm to study the African state, Fundi wa Afrika. According to this paradigm, the current African predicament may be explained by the systematic destruction of African states and the dispossession, exploitation, and marginalization of African people through successive historical processes: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, and globalization.
The authors introduce a new paradigm to study the African state, Fundi wa Afrika. According to this paradigm, the current African predicament may be explained by the systematic destruction of African states and the dispossession, exploitation, and marginalization of African people through successive historical processes: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, and globalization. In this book, the authors argue that a new, viable, and modern African state based on five political entities--the Federation of African States--should be built on the functional remnants of indigenous African political systems and institutions and based on African values, traditions, and culture.

Mueni wa Muiu & Guy Martin
A New Paradigm of the African State: Fundi wa Afrika. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; 271 pages (including notes, bibliography & index); harcover; $79.95; ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60780-4; ISBN-10:0-230-60780-2.

Global: Bloggers - Amplifty your voice

2009-01-09

http://tinyurl.com/8olmt8

Amplify Your Voice is currently hiring a team of front page bloggers for our site, and are down to one position left. We are hoping to find a talented young woman from Africa who might be interested in this position, as sexual and reproductive health is such an issue for young women on the continent.

Global: Regional Coordinator - JASS Southern Africa

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/53058

JASS (Just Associates), a fast-growing global organization dedicated to strengthening the voice, visibility and collective organizing power of women, is looking for an experienced African women’s rights activist with at least 7 years of experience working on HIV/AIDs in Southern Africa and beyond. Application deadline: January 26, 2009.
Position: Regional Coordinator, JASS Southern Africa

Application deadline: January 26, 2009
Location: TBD. Must be in Southern Africa. Virtual office is ideal
Start Date: March 1, 2009
Salary: Competitive and commensurate with experience

JASS (Just Associates), a fast-growing global organization dedicated to strengthening the voice, visibility and collective organizing power of women, is looking for an experienced African women’s rights activist with at least 7 years of experience working on HIV/AIDs in Southern Africa and beyond. This is a great opportunity for an African professional who is deeply committed to building activist democratic leadership and organizational models in the region and who is interested in coordinating feminist organizing strategies that address both women’s practical needs and their rights in relation to HIV/AIDS. The ideal candidate offers relevant strategic and programmatic experience, combined with vision and passion; demonstrated leadership; and interpersonal, organizational, administrative and financial management skills.

Since 2006, JASS women’s movement-building efforts – combining leadership and advocacy training with organizing, communications and knowledge-generation – have set in motion rapidly growing regional initiatives and alliances that are carried out through minimal, flexible structures and a tightly knit network of activists operating in different parts of the world. JASS Southern Africa, now in its second year, works with women living with and affected by HIV/AIDS – many of whom are young women. The program is driven by a core group of 5 women who have been engaged since the beginning in 2007. Working very closely with the JASS global team, the JASS Southern Africa core team is comprised of one full-time Program Associate based in Cape Town, a part-time Communications Associate based in Zimbabwe, and three others contracted for specific projects. During 2009, the Regional Coordinator would work closely with and report to the JASS Executive Director, as well as with JASS regional staff and allies while gradually taking over the leadership of the regional processes with the core Southern African team, the broader group of JASS movement-builders (JMBs) and strategic allies in Southern Africa. The Regional Coordinator will also interface with JASS initiatives in the Americas and in Asia, and explore opportunities for mutual learning and coordinated advocacy. Concrete responsibilities are to:

* Oversee and direct consultative processes for designing, planning and implementing JASS Southern Africa strategies and programs in line with JASS’ overall mission and strategic priorities;
* Maintain regular/weekly communication with global team and regional core team to ensure that programs and relationships are on track;
* Establish/consolidate regional systems for planning, coordination, reporting, etc. in close coordination with the core team and global JASS;
* Identify and pursue strategic opportunities to deepen and broaden the impact of the JASS Southern Africa movement-building process;
* Represent JASS Southern Africa and involve other core team members and JMBs in representing JASS at important events and among allies, donors, etc.;
* Provide leadership, mentoring and support to the broader group of JMBs, while managing the Program Associate, Part-time Communications Associate and other JASS regional facilitators.

Qualifications:

- Minimum 7 years’ experience with political activism and/or advocacy on women’s rights, HIV/AIDS and related issues;

- Substantive knowledge on policy issues related to the core themes;

- Demonstrated commitment to facilitative leadership and management principles;

- Experience in promoting teamwork and working collaboratively in a multigenerational, multicultural context;

- Ability to think critically and politically, and problem-solve with minimal resources;

- Proven ability to operate in a virtual, global organization where e-mail and phone communication is paramount;

- Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively in writing and orally; public speaking skills are important;

- Administration and financial management experience are necessary; ability to produce and coach others to produce monthly and quarterly workplans and reports;

- Experience working effectively with limited budgets and a corresponding ability to draft and implement budgets for regional projects and initiatives;

- Experience organizing and facilitating events;

- Capacity to be self-directed but also consultative; willingness to accept and give constructive criticism;

- Sensitivity/awareness of difference, power and privilege as they shape interaction and of multigenerational processes.


How to Apply: Please submit a cover letter and resume via email, fax, or mail (email is preferred) to:

Carrie Wilson
Cross-regional Program Coordinator
Just Associates (JASS)
2040 S St NW
Third Floor
Washington, DC 20009
Email: cjw@justassociates.org
Fax: (202) 232-4715

No phone calls please.

JASS is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants with diverse backgrounds and members of the queer/transgender community are strongly encouraged to apply.

Global: Senior Manager of Finance & Operations - Just Associates (JASS)

2009-01-08

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/53057

JASS (Just Associates), a fast-growing global organization dedicated to strengthening the voice, visibility and collective organizing power of women, is looking for an experienced Senior Manager of Finance & Operations (SMF&O) with at least 10 years of experience, including at least 4 years working with an international organization with multiple offices and partners. Deadline for application submission: January 26, 2009.
SENIOR MANAGER OF FINANCE AND OPERATIONS - Just Associates (JASS)

Type: Permanent – Full-time

Location: Washington, DC

Deadline for application submission: January 26, 2009

Start date: March 2009, or sooner if possible

Salary: Competitive and commensurate with experience


JASS (Just Associates), a fast-growing global organization dedicated to strengthening the voice, visibility and collective organizing power of women, is looking for an experienced Senior Manager of Finance & Operations (SMF&O) with at least 10 years of experience, including at least 4 years working with an international organization with multiple offices and partners. This is a great opportunity for a motivated professional who is interested in taking on a leadership role with a growing and innovative organization where interpersonal relationships and common vision are as important as financial systems and management.

Since 2006, JASS women’s movement-building efforts – combining leadership development, advocacy, organizing, communications and knowledge-generation – have set in motion regional programs and alliances that are carried out through minimal, flexible structures and a tightly knit network of activists operating in different parts of the world. Our office environment is informal yet fast-paced because of the global and dynamic nature of our work.

The SMF&O will have responsibility over all of the accounting and finance functions of an organization comprised of 5 full-time staff based in our cross-regional office in Washington, DC, 9 full-time and part-time staff members based in regional offices in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica, and an annual budget of $1 million (and growing!). In addition to the ongoing accounting and finance functions, the OFM will take the lead role in evolving our financial policies and processes, including financial planning, fundraising and day-to-day process improvement.

The SMF&O will be based in JASS’ Washington, DC office and will report to the Executive Director and work closely with the bookkeeper and part-time accountant as well as with JASS’ global and regional staff.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Financial

* Leader, manage and oversee all fiscal activities including general accounting, auditing, cost accounting, budgetary controls, financial analysis and forecast, budget plans, sub-grants, moving of money, cash flow monitoring, and all necessary fiscal grant close-out activities including final reports and financial statements.
* Manage and design financial planning, policies & controls, and budgeting processes.
* Take direct responsibility for the accurate compilation of grant-specific financial statements, working closely with the ED to ensure compliance and transparency of grant activity and to oversee financial performance of our regional offices and collaborating partners. Also, responsibility for drafting related sub-grant agreements with partners and monitoring regional offices’ and partners’ fiscal performance and reporting compliance.
* Manage the financial aspect of relationships with collaborating partners including the preparing and submission of grant draw-down requests and other financial reports as required.
* Routinely compare budget projections with actual program spending in order to identify potential areas of concern and recommend necessary budget modifications based on project development.
* Provide analysis and risk management around contracts and other financial instruments.
* Support and coach staff (including those based in our regional offices) on financial decision-making, record-keeping and bookkeeping functions.



Operational and Administrative

* Support JASS’ organizational development by creating and managing operating systems, policies and procedures that improve organizational effectiveness.
* Serve as JASS’ human resources specialist, with responsibility for establishing and implementing appropriate policies, recruiting and hiring, drafting and managing consultant contracts, administering payroll, overseeing employee benefits, maintaining personnel files.
* Develop and manage efficient information systems, including JASS database.
* Oversee office and facilities management, including coordinating equipment purchases, maintenance and tracking, accounts management and coordination with co-tenants/landlord.
* Ensure smooth administrative operations including the supervision of administrative staff, and coordination of volunteers.
* Provide general administrative support as needed.

QUALIFICATIONS

* Bachelor’s degree required and Master’s degree preferred, in accounting, finance, or business administration or other related field.
* 10+ years’ financial management experience including grant monitoring and reporting experience and at least 4 years with an international organization with multiple partners and locations.
* Ability to prepare, audit, and monitor closely grant budgets.
* Ability to interpret program fiscal activity and systems for staff, board and partners, (both those who are and those who are not financially inclined). .
* Experienced and demonstrated ability to learn quickly:
- Management and understanding of broad organizational accounting and financial functions;
- Advanced bookkeeping;
- QuickBooks or equivalent accounting software.

* Strong communications skills, both verbally and in writing across-cultures with regionally based staff and consultants.
* Accuracy, thoroughness and attention to detail and follow-up.
* Self-direction – effective in driving own work and priorities without direct, close management. Propensity to seek out and capture opportunities for improvements and change with minimal direction.
* Ability to problem-solve and respond to changing deadlines and priorities.
* Analytical and decision-making skills – an ability to identify and frame situations; and take decisions with minimal oversight.
* Spanish and/or other language proficiency preferred.
* Commitment to social justice and experience with, or knowledge of, women’s rights.
* A sense of humor!

How to Apply: Please submit a cover letter and resume via email, fax, or mail (email is preferred) to:

Carrie Wilson
Cross-regional Program Coordinator
Just Associates (JASS)
2040 S St NW
Third Floor
Washington, DC 20009
Email: cjw@justassociates.org
Fax: (202) 232-4715

No phone calls please.

JASS is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants with diverse backgrounds and members of the queer/transgender community are strongly encouraged to apply.

Fahamu