Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa. 
slavery
Mauritania: Slavery and state racism
Sy Hamdou
2011-08-03, Issue 543
cc MagharebiaTackling the racism and slavery inherent in Mauritania will rely on overthrowing ‘the ideological and religious foundations of slavery and racism with the state’, writes Sy Hamdou.
Reparations and the slave trade
Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua
2011-01-11, Issue 512
cc WikimediaDemands for reparations around the transatlantic slave trade have been absent from United Nations conferences on racism. Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua discusses the history and context behind them.
The hate and the quake
Hilary Beckles
2010-01-28, Issue 467
cc Gloria Mundi‘Haiti did not fail,’ writes Hilary Beckles, ‘it was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition.' Buried 'beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda', says Beckle, is 'the evidence which shows that Haiti's independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.’
Haiti ‘Year Zero’: The Afro-Americas and Africa
Time for a new kind of trans-Atlantic relationship
Marian Douglas-Ungaro
2010-01-28, Issue 467
cc United NationsHaiti’s earthquake has provided the first opportunity since slavery for slavery descendants in the Afro-Americas to alter and recreate the country’s socio-economic structures and physical infrastructure, writes Marian Douglas-Ungaro. But will former slave-owners and colonial masters hinder or assist with the process, Douglas-Ungaro asks, and will continental Africa notice or care?
New Orleans, France and slavery: A declaration in US Congress
Marian Douglas-Ungaro
2010-01-20, Issue 466
cc I EThe following 2006 congressional record of the United States Congress, entered by Representative Major R. Owens and drafted by Marian Douglas-Ungaro, praises the work of Christiane Taubira and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall in documenting France's role in the slave trade and recording the experiences of those enslaved across the Louisiana area.
Why I love-hate Euro-America
Chambi Chachage
2009-07-02, Issue 440
cc catface3Chambi Chachage doesn’t hate America, he actually loves it ‘a lot’. It ‘could be a model for deracialising the continents’, Chacage believes, as ‘probably the only habitable continent for humans that is not really seen as a continent that belongs to a particular “race”.’ But says Chachage, America is also haunted by what President Obama describes as the 'original sin of slavery and racism', epitomised by the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of native Americans. Chacage concludes that what he feels is actually what historian Colin Legum describes as a ‘disappointed love’ – the colonised ‘believe there has been no proper recognition of, nor retribution for, the injury of colonialism’, while the colonisers ‘feel let down because Africa has not lived up to the expectations of European liberal values.’
Reparations and regrets: Why is the US Senate apologising now?
Horace Campbell
2009-07-02, Issue 440
cc Murky1With the US Senate approving a resolution formally acknowledging the historic injustice behind slavery and the country's 'Jim Crow' laws on 18 June, Horace Campbell asks 'Why now?' Coming in the same week as a call for a new, multi-polar world order from the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the timing of the apology from a US Senate edgy about the internationalisation of reparations claims is no coincidence, Campbell argues. But with the Senate clear that the resolution offers no scope for any 'claim' against the United States, Campbell situates such action within an established tradition of pre-emptive apologies designed to inhibit further action. With political circles in the US keen to ensure the country's access to Africa's abundant resources, resolutions such as the US Senate's represent an attempt to replace crude conservative tactics with a more nuanced approach to imperial expansion, Campbell contends, an approach which must be countered by sustained will from progressive forces around the world to see reparative justice fulfilled.
They’d love to be in our shoes
Kenyans have benefitted from opportunities countries like Haiti can only dream of
Anne M. Khaminwa
2009-06-04, Issue 436
cc R MillerHaiti may have been the first black republic, but Anne Khaminwa is unconvinced by Kimani Waweru’s call for Kenya to learn from and emulate its history. Today Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, beset by environmental problems, violence and lawlessness says Khaminwa. Kenyans on the other hand ‘have benefited from education and development opportunities that countries like Haiti can only dream of’. Instead of remaining stuck in the colonial discourse of earlier decades, Kenyans should be fired up with ambition and vision of what we can make of the future given all the opportunities we have already had, Khaminwa argues.
Pan-Africanism in Mwalimu Nyerere’s thought
Being both king and philosopher
Issa G Shivji
2009-05-07, Issue 431
cc WikimediaOutlining the essential differences between the respective approaches of Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, Issa G. Shivji discusses the gradualist and radical positions of two pillars of the Pan-Africanist movement. Underlining the notion of an independent African state as a ‘national liberation movement in power’ as being at the very core of the movement, Shivji stresses that genuine African nationalism can only ever be Pan-Africanism. As both a head of state and leading Pan-Africanist intellectual, Nyerere found himself supporting contradictory ideas around contesting the imposition of colonial borders while emphasising the centrality of states' sovereignty, Shivji notes. While admitting that he is without a complete answer to the question of what intellectuals' role will be in the development of a new Pan-Africanism for today, Shivji stresses that the challenge will be to push forward a 'new nationalist insurrection', one which perhaps ultimately recognises African unity as a dream rather than a vision.
Why the West won't pay us reparations
Interviewed by Riaz Tayob
Roger Wareham
2009-04-30, Issue 430
cc Flickr.comAfricans and Africa suffer from planned underdevelopment, with colonialism and slavery providing economic benefits to one group at the expense of another, the International Association Against Torture’s Roger Wareham tells Riaz K. Tayob in an audio interview [mp3] at the Durban Review Conference. But the West won’t pay Africans reparations instead of aid, because then it couldn’t benefit from its ‘charity’, he adds. Wareham, ‘a black man who grew up in a racist country’, speaks about his lifelong commitment to the liberation of African people. International public opinion is important for influencing what happens on the ground as it isn’t possible to change a system from within, when its beneficiaries are also its gatekeepers.
The dawn of the Obama era: In memory of the ancestors
Paul T Zeleza
2009-01-22, Issue 416
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza does a reflective round-up on the different opinions surrounding President Obama’s inauguration. Zeleza argues that “The biggest challenge facing President Obama is how to manage the relative historic decline of American global supremacy in a world of new emerging powers and growing intolerance against authoritarianism whether within or between nations; in short, a more global and nationalistic world impatient with the old injustices and hierarchies of power and well-being and hungry for development, democracy, and self-determination.” That Obama has reached outside the race and national boundaries in an unprecedented way is not in question and the essay goes to emphasize the different ways different peoples in different parts of the world are responding to Obama - both as a challenge and as a promise.
Obama and the continent of Africa
Achille Mbembe
2008-08-11, Issue 393
Barack Obama might become the next United States president. Because of his African roots, this possibility has been met with euphoria and enthusiasm in the continent. In some instances, African expectations are the expression of racial pride. In others, they are simply irrational, unrealistic and misguided....
Third world prospects in an Obama presidency
Steve Sharra
2008-08-11, Issue 393
The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the presumed nomination of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones. Beyond the excitement, caution and ambivalence of what a possible Obama presidency might entail for Pan-Africa and the Third World, what Obama himself has said in his writing, and has not said, might prove to be revelatory in attempting to explore the discussion that has exercised many minds around the world. We take this exploration by examining some of the issues that have been raised by editorialists and columnists, bloggers and other commentators in Africa and beyond. We also delve into what Obama himself has said in his two best-belling books, as we ponder how the significance of a possible Obama presidency may be realized more in the symbolic transformation of perceptions of race, racism and racial identity in the US and in the world, than in what the office of the US presidency itself is capable or incapable of achieving.
Barack Obama, black agency, and the burden of history
Pius Adesanmi
2008-08-11, Issue 393
The timeline of black agency has been determined to a great extent in the last six centuries by the need to overcome man-made historical impediments, notably slavery, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism – and their new forms in the present – on the o...
Obama and Palestine
Sameh A. Habeeb
2008-08-11, Issue 393
We, Palestinians, are aspiring to any glimpse of hope to establishing our promising country of Palestine. Originally, that glimpse of hope grew when Israelis realized in the nineties that a real peace will not be achieved apart from an Independent Palestinian state. That time, the world agreed on that concept and peace deal (Oslo) was held in Washington D.C, after the first Bush had left office....
Obama's Speech and the Black Man's Burden
Paul T Zeleza
2008-03-20, Issue 355
Paul T. Zeleza while recognizing the historic nature and importance of the Obama speech argues that the circumstances that made the speech necessary reveal the extent to which the United States remains an arrogantly racist society
Afro-Venezuelans: An open letter to the Venezuelan National Assembly
Jesús "Chucho" García
2007-12-11, Issue 332
Jesús "Chucho" García calls for a greater recognition of Afro-Venezuelans in the country's constitution.
Gender approach to violence, labour rights and discrimination
Aboubacry Mbodji
2007-11-29, Issue 330
Aboubacry Mbodji proposes a gender approach in regard to violence, labour rights and discriminations against women in Senegalese working environment.