Andrew Berends, an established, award-winning American filmmaker and journalist from New York, was detained Sunday August 31st by the Nigerian military along with his translator, Samuel George, and Joe Bussio, the manager of a local bar. Andrew entered Nigeria legally in April 2008 to complete a documentary film. 

Andrew was held in custody without food, sleep, or representation, and with limited water for 36 hours. He was questioned by the army, the police, and the State Security Services in Port Harcourt. He was then temporarily released, with an order to the SSS office at 9AM Tuesday morning. The State Security Services has confiscated his passport and personal property. Andrew's translator, Samuel George, remained in custody over night.

The US State Department is aware of the situation, and an attorney has been retained on Andrew's behalf. We, Andrew's friends, family, and colleagues, are deeply concerned that he has been held without cause and are calling for his safe treatment and immediate release.

* Contact Aaron Soffin at Phone: 917.887.4063 / 212.712.2781 or by email at: [email][email protected]

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The following is taken from the introduction to Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko is edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel C Gibson and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

"This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs." - Steve Biko (1972)

The 30th anniversary of Steve Biko's murder in police custody (on September 12 1977) comes almost 15 years after the formal ending of apartheid in South Africa. This fact alone raises several fundamental questions: how do we remember Biko? What contributions did the black consciousness movement make to the course of black liberation in South Africa and the world? How does the conception of black liberation, as enunciated by Biko and his colleagues, square up against the realities of post-apartheid South Africa?

Indeed, Biko lives today in South Africa, but so do the material outcomes of colonialism, segregation, apartheid and - most recently - neo-liberal economic policies. South Africa continues to be characterised by sharply contrasting realities.

The third high level forum (HLF-3) convened in Ghana this week to discuss aid effectiveness. Aid agencies that attended the forum said donors have not made enough progress since the 2005 Paris Declaration in dealing with long-time problems related to aid effectiveness. During the forum, Ghanaian president, John Kufuor, called on developing and developed countries to deploy and manage development assistance so that poor countries can cease being aid dependent. He further urged stakeholders to come up with ‘ambitious resolutions, to minimise existing impediments to aid effectiveness in recipient countries’.

Civil society organisations note that ‘with all the attention given to High Level Forums on aid effectiveness, it is easy to lose sight of the simple fact that after all aid effectiveness is not about the effectiveness with which aid is delivered, managed, aligned or harmonised such as how much comes through budget support versus project funding; but the positive impact it makes on the lives of the people at the grassroots such as those of Accra’s Sodom and Gomorrah and South Africa’s Free State which at best remains subtle’. In addition, participants of the HLF-3 discussed the aid effectiveness in situations of fragile and conflict states, suggesting that donors, in order to have greater risk-bearing capacity, should channel funds through the budgets of recipient countries.

While formal publishing companies in Nigeria languished through the economic crises that accompanied the structural adjustment programmes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, young Hausa writers began writing about their lives and contemporary problems they faced. Bypassing formal publishers, they self-published their novels, often with the help of a writers' cooperative.

Although the books were dubbed ‘littattafan soyayya’ (romance novels) for the predominant themes of love and marriage, the novels -- written in colloquial Hausa that reflects the rhythms of everyday speech -- also serve as muckraking critiques of a corrupt elite and the failures of the older generation.

Women writers dominate the field, perhaps because of the large female readership; their work explores the daily life and tensions of women’s lives in contemporary Northern Nigeria. According to Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, the head of Kallabi Writer’s Association, a group of women writers, there are over 300 Hausa women publishing novels in Northern Nigeria.

The large female readership has caused anxiety, mostly from male authority figures, about a supposed negative effect the novels have on young girls. In May 2007, A Daidaita Sahu, the Kano state agency for the ‘reorientation’ of society, organized a book and film burning at a local girl’s school.

That book burning, however, was a tame threat compared to the new requirements that the Kano State Censorship Board, under the leadership of Director General Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, is seeking to impose on writers. In a letter to Kano's five writers' organisations dated Aug. 12, the board confirmed that it wanted each writer in the state to register individually before they can publish or distribute writing.

At 25, Sa'adatu Baba has twenty-three books in print and another twenty that are not yet published. She is also an executive committee member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and a student of Languages at Bayero University.

She spoke with IPS writer Amina Koki Gizo in Kano on 16 August about her writing and the current crisis Hausa writers are facing.