Pambazuka News 814: Israel's apartheid crimes
Pambazuka News 814: Israel's apartheid crimes
World Poetry Day was marked on Tuesday, March 21. Throughout Africa, spoken word art is taking firm roots, especially when it explores social issues. Spoken Word artist Valentine Onyeka Ogunaka aka Brainbox from Nigeria shares his experience.
Black people are quickly labeled racist any time we raise our voice against white supremacy. It is racism fighting back. It is meant to silence us. We should not openly express what we feel and know. As Black people we should not own our experiences and history. No. We are instead supposed to become complicit in our oppression by attributing our suffering to everything else except white supremacy.
Pambazuka News 813: Invasions, protests and fifth columnists
Pambazuka News 813: Invasions, protests and fifth columnists
As the head of Nigeria’s elections body, Prof Attahihu Jega is widely acknowledged to have delivered a credible election, with abiding lessons for Africa. For him, a credible election requires planning, effective organisation, focus, resilience, relative autonomy of the electoral body, as well as its impartiality and integrity.
Not only was she involved in the development of the first national television network in Ghana, Graham Du Bois worked on a high level within the CPP government as an administrator within the state publishing house. She worked directly with President Nkrumah and was a part of his inner circle of advisors.
The 13th Israel Apartheid Week continues in Kenya, March 20-25, 2017. The event, organised by Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement, will feature films, poetry and discussions. In this poem, Shailja Patel shares her thoughts on why Kenyans - and Africans - should support the struggles of the Palestinian people against Israeli apartheid.
In order for Africa to assume responsibility for its own transformation and elevation, and be able to undertake self-reliant development and create secure domestic prosperity, it must create its own specific ideology and strategy of self-development. To do this there are 5 irreducible components that have to be designed and put in place.
Last week in six Caribbean countries - Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago - survivors of gender based violence and their supporters took to the streets for International Women’s Day in solidarity with the #LifeInLeggings movement to raise awareness and to demand adequate measures to end the vice.
The National Coalition for Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) and the Pan-African Institute for the Study of African Societies (PAISAS) have signed an MOU as part of a process of strengthening relations between Africa and its Diaspora. Here is the document:
Israel summoned the South African ambassador for an official reprimand after two SA officials condemned Israeli policies in Palestine. During the Israel Apartheid Week, SA Minister of Water and Sanitation called the Israeli Defence Forces "a murderous machine" and accused Israel of conducting a "water apartheid" against Palestinians. Here is Nomvula Mokonyane's speech:
The Rwandan dictator has mastered the philosophy of the big lie: if you keep repeating a falsehood over and over again, people will sooner or later believe it. Kagame has grossly exaggerated his social and economic accomplishments of the past 23 years. He says he has built the Singapore of Africa. In reality, though, Rwanda is the poorest country in East Africa, except for Burundi.
Morocco’s newfound interest in Africa is linked to NATO’s attack on Africa and the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. NATO’s destruction of Libya completely humiliated the African Union. It tore the heart out of an alternative African future. And left Africa seriously exposed once again to the Western imperial virus: a virus contemporary Morocco carries.
Britain will have no problem explaining to the world why it accepts 5 million Scots to exercise their right to self-determination which could cause the collapse of a union of 310 years of willing partners, but is unrelentingly instrumental in supporting a 51-year-old genocide campaign against 50 million Igbo people, forced into a conquest agglomeration of a “state” created and called Nigeria by Britain, but who, equally as the Scots, want their freedom.
Somalia’s president has declared the famine ravaging the country a national disaster. There has been little response from the world. Drought is a natural calamity that can happen anywhere, but what makes it more deadly in Somalia is the continued conflict that prevents relief aid from reaching the needy or makes it difficult for affected nomads to travel to other places to find help.
Security forces shooting dead unarmed protesters, arbitrary arrests, detentions, torture, disappearances, harassment and intimidation are some of the reported human rights abuses that have been continuing for more than four months now in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon.
President Donald Trump’s declared agenda is to put America first in world affairs. That seems to have frightened some people as it suggests the so-called leader of the free world is not interested in promoting multilateralism. But, as a matter of fact, when has America ever been interested in internationalism? When has America ever championed interests other than its own?
Kenya’s rulers and some elite commentators frame the ongoing occupation of indigenous lands grabbed by colonialists in Laikipia as a criminal invasion of private property by lawless bands of tribal herders. Really? Those white ranches - in land-hungry Kenya, half-a-century into “independence” - are nothing more than ample proof of neocolonialism. The dispossessed indigenous people must take back their land. By any means necessary.
Pambazuka News 812: No Revolution without women!
Pambazuka News 812: No Revolution without women!
Biafra’s sons and daughters must cease to represent genocidist Nigeria in all conceivable competitions. Never again should we be treated to the grotesque scene of witnessing some Igbo athlete, some Igbo writer, some Igbo academic, appearing at some world stage carrying or wrapping themselves around a Nigerian flag. Enough! Order a Biafran flag for the occasion.
Before the start of a public lecture by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in South Africa, student activist Kolosa Ntombini requested the renowned Kenyan writer and academic to ask white people in the audience to leave the hall as only black people could meaningfully discuss decoloninization. Kolosa recounts the episode.
The Pan-Africanist movement harbours some African men who conceal patriarchal attitudes. These “Man-Africanists” are cancerous to the advancement of the movement that needs to engage in developing new men who are genuinely anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, empathetic, connected to a radical political concept of self-awareness, and guided by an ethical sense of equality, justice and freedom for all.
International presence and pressure is necessary to ensure a fair re-trial, set to continue on March 13, against the Gdeim Izik Group from Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, who Amnesty International says were “unfairly convicted.” The Group strenuously denies the charges, claim that they are politically motivated, and insist that confessions used at the trial were obtained using torture.
What good is Ngũgĩ, revered as a literary great, if he is unable or unwilling to respond to the most basic of decolonial questions: Can the oppressor leave so that the oppressed can engage? The time for grandstanding and sloganeering about decolonization has come to an end. The time for praxis is now.
To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its first-ever report on the human rights of African women. The report celebrates important achievements such as provisions on sexual and gender based violence, economic, social and cultural rights and the principle of non-discrimination in constitutions, polices and in legislations across the continent.
On what would have been indigenous and environmental movement leader Bertha Cáceres' 45th birthday [March 4, 2017], we reproduce this letter from her daughter Laura. Cáceres was assassinated in her native Honduras just before midnight one year and one day ago. Her birthday party had already been planned.
Development capacitation through local resource exploitation, mass industrial production and domestic prosperity-generation is what Africa requires to become the self-actuated mover of its own development that does not depend on the vagaries of external demand for primary commodities. But sometimes even such initiatives are resisted by anti-African development leaderships.
In this final essay of a seven-part series, Yash Tandon depicts fascism as a systemic phenomenon arising from the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism. For capitalism to persist, as is the case now, democracy is dispensed with. Hegemonic imperialist powers embody fascism in their relations with the rest of the world. Leaders of African neo-colonies administer the fascist system on behalf of the global corporate and financial fascism.
Despite widespread vociferous opposition by citizens, the government of Somaliland has granted a military base to Abu Dhabi. There is no credible justification for this decision in terms of Somaliland’s national security or economic needs. The decision is one more example of the culture of impunity, entitlement and mendacity of the Kulmiye government.
It is wrong history to teach that Africa was named by Greeks or Romans when these colonialists illegally occupied this unique continent through aggression and invasion. This was in 332 B.C. until the Roman invasion in 30 B.C. Africa got its name from Africans.
Government statistics show that Kenya’s public universities and counties are largely ethnic ghettos. The universities are often headed by academics - and have a majority staff - from the ethnic communities where these institutions are located and whose names they bear. Same thing with the country’s 47 devolved units. The names of universities and counties should be changed to de-ethnicize them.
As American contradictions get sharper in the coming four years, what is needed is a rich Islamic selfhood that abides by the law of the land, is at ease with quarrelsome heterogeneity, and is confident enough to enter into open, vigorous and respectful dialogue.
Women played an instrumental role in the formation of the Pan-African Movement and in the national liberation struggles. Inside Africa, women were at the forefront of the independence movement in the areas of mass mobilization, political education, armed struggle and national reconstruction. In the U.S., numerous women provided the impetus for the reemergence of the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles.
Western Sahara stands out today as Africa’s last colony, occupied illegally and forcefully by Morocco with the backing of France. Everyday Saharawi people suffer horrendous human rights violations by the occupying power. This is one of the world’s forgotten conflicts. The only peaceful solution is for Morocco to accept the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination.
Kenya’s much-awaited elections on August 8 have thrown up the usual crowd of crooks in designer suits shouting themselves hoarse with the well-worn promises to deliver a sparkling new nation of milk and honey. It is all nonsense.
A record of some visits, different moments, several episodes, significant speeches, various events and testimonies, as part of the international work of President Chávez to Africa between 2001 and 2013. Download the publication below.
The business community, oil companies, government officials, residents of Port Harcourt and non-governmental organizations need to come together to find a lasting solution, which borders more on structural and systemic issues associated with the oil and gas capitalist economy than with any flimsy explanation being given.
Pambazuka News 811: Exclusion: Afrophobia, war criminals and tribalists
Pambazuka News 811: Exclusion: Afrophobia, war criminals and tribalists
Does the ANC leadership, many of whose members lived in exile in other African countries for many years, bother to tell their stories to the new generation that is growing up in South Africa and who know almost nothing about the role played in the struggle against apartheid by the poor African countries whose people constitute the “immigrants” they now despise and harass?
The Tanzanian activists had entered Malawi legally for a cross-learning trip with Malawian colleagues at the defunct Kayekera uranium mine in the Karonga region. Malawian authorities had approved the mission beforehand. The arrest and detention comes at a critical time during Malawi’s own domestic debates about the harmful impacts of mining on local communities.
In Africa the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet block had profound implications. At that time in the late 1980s and early 1990s Africa, and particularly Southern Africa, was involved in a process of decolonization by way of armed struggle, in which the Soviet block played a decisive role. The contribution of the Soviet block and Cuba to the decolonization of Africa remains a testament to the progress of humankind.
A year ago, one of the world’s boldest and loudest woman voices in defense of the rights of indigenous people against capitalist theft and destruction of Our Planet was assassinated by the government of Honduras and a multinational company, with the support of the US. The daughters of Berta Cáceres speak out about their mother’s glorious legacy.
Unity in Rwanda is part of a rehearsed consensus. The government has established a monopoly over the country’s history, to the extent that alternative histories cannot be articulated. Debate about the past is actively policed. The regime’s authoritarian approach has prevented the emergence of potentially more complex identities from below that could form the basis for more inclusive forms of citizenship.
South Africa recently discovered that 17 banks were colluding to manipulate the national currency to make super profits. Often, government officials are part of such scandals. What is needed is a unified, Africa-wide solidarity network from below and beyond borders working together to get governments and institutions to ensure that damaging profiteering is stopped.
February 27 was the national day of Western Sahara, Africa’s last colony that is illegally and forcefully occupied by Morocco with the support of France. In this interview, Malainin Mohamed (Lakhal), a Saharawi journalist and translator and a member of Saharawi Natural Resource Watch, reflects on his people’s struggle for freedom and the role that Africans and other people in the world should play in solidarity.
The people of Sudan, victims of one of the most murderous regimes in the world today, appear to have been abandoned to the terror of Omer al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal. The Sudanese despot has taken advantage of the vagaries of geopolitics and the so-called war on terror to consolidate his regime and protect himself from international justice. For how long with the Sudanese suffer?
As the IMF discusses a new programme with Mozambique, an important debate with and within the IMF becomes relevant. After the secret debt fiasco, the IMF has the upper hand, but donors and civil society will need to monitor the discussions to ensure that a hard-nosed IMF negotiating team actually follows the new guidelines emerging from Washington.
Xenophobia is fear of strangers. Afrikans cannot be strangers or “foreigners” in Afrika. What is happening in South Africa is an extreme form of an element we can trace in all Black societies across the world: self-hatred expressed as rage against our own. White Supremacy has disempowered the Afrikan being to such levels that it only reacts with violence: Us killing us.
On January 18, 2017, the regime in Ethiopia signed a Memorandum of Understanding to pay SGR Government Relations, Lobbying (Washington, D.C) $150,000 per month for lobbying services for a total of $1.8 million. Why is the regime in Ethiopia spending so much money to lobby the Trump Administration, when some 20 million Ethiopians are starving?
“The actions by our siblings here in South Africa, particularly in Pretoria, when they target those black persons who are from other parts of the continent, are anti-black actions stemming from self-hatred caused by white supremacy.”
Co-founder of the UNIA-ACL, the first wife of Marcus Garvey worked tirelessly for women’s rights and inter-continental unity from the Caribbean and Central America to the United States, Europe and Africa.
That a government which vigorously campaigned that it would do things differently and was ushered in on the wings of an ear-splitting mantra of change could not put the slightest dent on the acquisitive and thieving tendencies of federal legislators readily explains how deeply ingrained the culture of corruption is in that parliament.
Zimbabwe is heading to elections next year, but anyone who hopes that the polls will translate into a better life for the majority of the people is deluded. Elections are merely contests for state power and never about finding the best vision and leadership for the country. With the ruling ZANU-PF party determined to remain in power, the likelihood of election-related violence in Zimbabwe is high.
Pambazuka News 810: Overhaul the African Union
Pambazuka News 810: Overhaul the African Union
In their blind rejection of tragedy, in their fear of that dreadful genre that tells us the truth of our failures as individuals and as a people, in that lack of knowledge that our public lives are doomed to destruction because our private lives are warped, Americans have condemned themselves to an unforgivable innocence. Nowhere is this innocence more clearly revealed than in their foreign policy in the third world.
Eunice Songa, a Kenyan medical doctor, died on January 27, 2017, aged 34. Shortly before her passing she had published a long blog post expressing her deepest frustrations about the miserable living conditions of most Kenyans. She attributed the situation to the political apathy of the middle and upper classes who should champion change. Will Kenyans listen to Eunice’s trenchant voice and heed her impassioned call to revolutionary struggle?
Morocco is back in the African Union unconditionally while illegally occupying Western Sahara, the continent’s last colony. This raises troubling questions about the Union’s commitment to its own principles. Morocco has no intention of giving up its occupation. Its return to the Union is intended to eventually push Western Sahara out of the AU in connivance with friendly member states and foreign powers, thus silencing the voices of the Sahrawi people .
The 2017 South Africa budget is not redistributive towards the working class nor is it progressive. Rather it is a standard neoliberal budget, delivered by a state that benefits the ruling class – white and black capitalists and top state officials – and that is controlled by that very same class.
Tanzania wants compensation from Germany for atrocities committed during colonialism. Colonial authorities under the direction of Karl Peters, the founder of the German East Africa Company, imposed a draconian system of land theft, forced labor, economic exploitation and unjust taxation. Some 75,000 Tanzanians were killed during the Maji Maji rebellion. The African Union should back Tanzania’s demand.
South Africans who agree that government policies must enjoy popular support, who believe that peace is a desirable value which society ought to collectively and actively aspire towards and who admit the possibility that nuclear technology could be incompatible with the genuine pursuit of peace, should object to the government proceeding with its current nuclear plans without comprehensive public consultation.
The fundamental problem of the African Union is ideological. And no one typifies this crisis better than Paul Kagame, the terrifying tyrant and imperialist stooge of Kigali. His new report proposing remedies for reforming the Union belongs in the dustbin. The AU does not need reform. It needs a radical transformation taking it back to its Pan-Africanist roots.
There was something quite different with Malcolm’s approach to human rights that distinguished him from mainstream civil rights activists. By grounding himself in the radical human rights approach, Malcolm articulated a position on human rights struggle that did not contain itself to just advocacy. He understood that appealing to the same powers that were responsible for the structures of oppression was a dead end.
Friday, February 24 is the anniversary of the 1966 coup against leading Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. Canada played a key role. Following the coup, the Canadian High Commissioner in Accra C.E. McGaughey, wrote that “a wonderful thing has happened for the West in Ghana and Canada has played a worthy part.”
As Babsy confronted the duty nurse, he saw his neighbour, still bent, exhausted, over the stretcher on which her son lay motionless in the deadly grip of meningitis. He had not moved since he had been brought to St Patrick’s. Babsy wondered if he would ever move again.
Public office in Nigeria is nothing but a feeding trough. This state robbery is not a new phenomenon. It dates back to the colonial period when the political elite who opposed British colonialism saw themselves as heirs to the throne of the departing rulers. After independence, very little was done to shake off the feeling of entitlement and bridge the gap that existed between the rulers and the ruled.
Fadumo Dayib became Somalia’s first woman candidate for the presidency in the recently concluded election. Of course she did not win in the deeply patriarchal society. But her decision is courageous and inspirational. Lots of work needs to be done to disrupt firmly rooted beliefs and practices against women in Somalia.
Mining is a major economic activity in South Africa. But it is entangled with the atrocious legacies of apartheid. It benefits mostly elite whites to the exclusion of the black majority who suffer most from the harmful effects such as environmental degradation and poor health. Black resistance against the evils of mining has a long history. Now it needs to be strengthened.
The government of Cameroon must immediately halt the on-going military operations in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon, withdraw the army, restore internet services and desist from any further actions that may worsen the human rights plight of the inhabitants of these two regions. On the longer term, it should take steps to address the underlying roots of the conflict.
Fellows earn either a master’s degree or a professional development certificate in peace and conflict studies at one of the Rotary Peace Centers, located within seven leading universities around the world. The over 1000 program alumni are working in over 100 countries as leaders in national governments, NGOs, the military, law enforcement, and international organizations.
While the IMF loudly boasts “good governance” and demands the highest standards of discipline from states that it puts into debt with adjustment plans, Christine Lagarde endorses the theft of 403 million Euros of public money and emerges with a clean record, an improved image and remains at the head of one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.
Pambazuka News 809: From deference to defiance: Arise
Pambazuka News 809: From deference to defiance: Arise
Many African nations are mired in huge debts arising from foreign loans that have hardly benefitted the people. The citizens need to audit these debts. Odious debts should be repudiated, damn the consequences. Moreover, as Thomas Sankara demonstrated in the four years he was president of Burkina Faso, African nations do not need foreign loans to meet the needs of their people.
Now that the Gambian story has been put back on the shelf, with everyone waiting to see whether President Adama Barrow will run an administration that will prove worthy of the amount of words expended on its emergence, I feel I can tell my story of The Gambia.
While President Robert Mugabe was on annual leave in China, Zimbabwe’s acting president changed twice. In a one-party state that has seen the same leader for 30 years, this temporary see-sawing is an annual pattern that is part of the country’s increasingly complex leadership terrain.
Prof. Campbell, a long-time contributor to Pambazuka News, is a distinguished voice in the struggles for freedom and justice of the African people. His inaugural lecture focused on African unity - a theme at the centre of Nkrumah’s political philosophy - and the need for a truly liberated Africa, so that the people can enjoy the wealth their land is endowed with.
Calm in deportment, methodical, quiet spoken and serious looking – though his sincere smiles could be disarming - Mbeki was Mandela’s loyal, efficient controller of day–to-day-government business as deputy president. The media found him to be austere and lacking in the warmth of Mandela and perhaps unfairly expected him to walk in the shoes of Mandela.
“Your nuclear arsenals give each of you the power to end civilization. You also have the historic opportunity, should you choose, to become the leaders of the most momentous international collaboration of all time, dedicated to ending the nuclear weapons era over the course of a decade or so.”
The evidence available contradicts the propaganda the South African president and his backers are attempting to disseminate: Zuma has been, not a victim, but a friend of both white monopoly capital and organisations linked to Western intelligence agencies when it suits him.
All that remains for British PM Theresa May is to announce to the world that Britain has terminated all support – military, political, diplomatic – for the prosecution of the Igbo genocide, apologise to Igbo people, pay reparations on behalf of the 3.1 million Igbo murdered and the tens of thousands murdered subsequently, pay reparations to the survivors, and pay reparations to reconstruct the shattered nation of Biafra.
The first Congolese to earn a doctoral degree in law from the University of Kinshasa, Tshisekedi is considered the most important leader in the central African nation after the iconic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. He was a very principled man; an incorruptible politician whose single interest was the wellbeing of the Congolese people.
The Somali people are sick and tired of seeing their fate decided by neighboring countries, of their political leaders genuflecting to the whims of foreign leaders and measuring their success by their degree of servitude to their bosses in Addis Ababa and Nairobi. Somalis want their country back.