Angola opposition Unita on Friday contested at the Constitutional Court landmark elections in the capital, Luanda, where chaos resulted in a second day of voting last week. The former rebel movement last week accepted the result of nationwide parliamentary elections, with the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) guaranteed a large victory.

35th Annual Conference
April 15-19, 2009
University of Vermont

Second call for panels, roundtables, and papers

General Theme: Africa and Blackness in World Literature and Visual Arts

The past two ALA conferences focused on various ways African and African Diaspora literature has functioned as a cultural catalyst that nurtures black people's subjectivity in the age of globalization. As a conclusion to the series, the 35th Annual ALA Conference will focus on the ways creative writers and artists from other cultural traditions imagined Africa and blackness in the past as well as the extent to which that imagining has evolved and can be said to foster intersubjective dialogue in the age of globalization. As always, the conference will also welcome panels on other unexplored or inadequately explored aspects of African and African Diaspora literature.

Pamberi Trust and African Synergy are independent registered charitable trusts, governed by constitution, and under authority of Board of Trustees.

Today free expression in Zimbabwe is bloodied and torn. Crisis and repression have trampled basic tenets of our social and cultural life. Some of us inside the country have decided to create the kind of life we wish to live; our chosen power is the arts. The humanity and freedom of African arts and its role in fostering social cohesion, is upheld at Book Café in Harare.

At Book Café we have created a place of beauty, joy, togetherness and tolerance; an arts centre that celebrates free expression, where artists work with dignity and audiences appreciate a diverse multitude of perspectives.

During the 2007 election campaign period and beyond some of the most virulent hate messages of an ethnic kind were to be found spilling over in Kenyan online communities, largely populated by young to middle aged Kenyans living in places like the United States, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, India and other places overseas. I was once one of those Kenyans living for years and years in Toronto and Montreal

For the almost two decades that I resided in Canada I became quite perplexed and intrigued by the reckless display of rabid ukabila on display at various online Kenyan forums.

Many of the worst Kenyan tribalists in cyberspace have lived for years in such cosmopolitan and liberal urban locales such as Oakland, Boston, Toronto, Leeds, Dallas, St. Paul, Chicago and Washington DC.

Offline, these Kenyan immigrants and naturalized citizens in the West share the collective plight of other people of colour when it comes to systemic racism and discrimination. Some of them are married to Asian-Americans, Jamaican- Canadians, Zambians, Greeks and Iranians not to speak of fellow Kenyans from the very same ethnic groups they bash online about.

This book is about a little known branch of the African Diaspora—Afro-Mexicans. It discusses their conditions of arrival and establishment in Mexico within the context of Spanish colonialism, and the race-based socio-economic hierarchy known as sistema de castas which provided a basis for the contemporary socioracial terms that are the focus of the main study: indio, blanco, negro and moreno. Today, these terms are used ubiquitously in variable ways as tags of social identity in Mexican discourse. An ethnographic sketch of a representative Afro-Mexican community located in the state of Guerrero then provides a setting for the analysis of their contemporary uses. These are then tied to concepts of “race” and identity in Mexico, all within the wider context of modern global Diaspora formations.

On July 14, after much advance publicity and fanfare, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, on charges that included genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Important questions of fact arise from the application as presented by the prosecutor. But even more important is the light this case sheds on the politics of the “new humanitarian order.”

The conflict in Darfur began as a civil war in 1987–89, before Bashir and his group came to power. It was marked by indiscriminate killing and mass slaughter on both sides. The language of genocide was first employed in that conflict. The Fur representative at the May 1989 reconciliation conference in El Fasher pointed to their adversaries and claimed that “the aim is a total holocaust and no less than the complete annihilation of the Fur people and all things Fur.” In response the Arab representative traced the origin of the conflict to “the end of the ’70s when ... the Arabs were depicted as foreigners who should be evicted from this area of Dar Fur.”

The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has uncritically taken on the point of view of one side in this conflict, a side that was speaking of a “holocaust” before Bashir came to power, and he attributes far too much responsibility for the killing to Bashir alone. He goes on to speak of “new settlers” in today’s Darfur, suggesting that he has internalized this partisan perspective.

At the same time, the prosecutor speaks in ignorance of history: “AL BASHIR…promoted the idea of a polarization between tribes aligned with him, whom he labeled ‘Arabs’ and...the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa...derogatory [sic] referred to as ‘Zurgas’ or ‘Africans’.” The racialization of identities in Darfur has its roots in the British colonial period. As early as the late 1920s, the British tried to organize two confederations in Darfur: one Arab, the other black (Zurga). Racialized identities were incorporated into the census and provided the frame for government policy. It is not out of the blue that the two sides in the 1987–89 civil war described themselves as Arab and Zurga. If anything, the evidence shows that successive Sudanese governments — Bashir’s included — looked down on all Darfuris, non-Arab Zurga as well as Arab nomads.

Having falsely attributed to Bashir the racialization of the conflict, Moreno-Ocampo focuses on two consequences of the conflict in Darfur: ethnic cleansing through land-grabbing and atrocities in the camps. He attributes both to Bashir. He is again wrong. The land-grabbing has been a consequence of three different, if related, causes. The first is the colonial system, which reorganized Darfur as a series of tribal homelands, designating the largest for settled peasant tribes and none for fully nomadic tribes. The second is environmental degradation: according to the United Nations Environment Program, the Sahara expanded by 100 kilometers in four decades; this process reached a critical point in the mid-1980s, pushing all tribes of North Darfur, Arab and non-Arab, farther south, onto more fertile Fur and Masalit lands. This in turn led to a conflict between tribes with homelands and those without them. The imperative of sheer survival explains in part the unprecedented brutality of the violence in every successive war since 1987–89. The third cause came last: the brutal counterinsurgency unleashed by the Bashir regime in 2003–04 in response to an insurgency backed up by peasant tribes.

It is not just the early history of the conflict that the prosecutor is poorly informed about. In his eagerness to build a case, Moreno-Ocampo glosses over recent history as well. He charges Bashir with following up the mass slaughter of 2003–04 with attrition by other means in the camps: “He did not need bullets. He used other weapons: rape, hunger and fear.” This claim flies in the face of evidence from UN sources in Darfur, quoted by Julie Flint in the London Independent, that the death rate in the camps came down to around 200 a month from early 2005, less than in South Sudan or in the poor suburbs of Khartoum.

The point of the prosecutor’s case is to connect all consequences in Darfur to a single cause: Bashir. Moreno-Ocampo told journalists in The Hague, “What happened in Darfur is a consequence of Bashir’s will.” The prosecution of Bashir comes across as politicized justice. As such, it will undermine the legitimacy of the ICC and almost certainly will not help solve the crisis in Darfur. It is perhaps understandable that a prosecutor in a rush would gloss over all evidence that might undermine his case. But we must not. A workable solution to the conflict requires that all its causes be understood in their full complexity.

Darfur was the site of mass deaths in 2003–04. World Health Organization sources—still the most reliable available information on mortality levels then—trace these deaths to two major causes: roughly 80 percent to drought-related diarrhoea and 20 per cent to direct violence. There is no doubt that the perpetrators of violence should be held accountable, but when and how are political decisions that cannot belong to the ICC prosecutor. More than the innocence or guilt of the president of Sudan, it is the relationship between law and politics—including the politicization of the ICC—that poses a wider issue, one of greatest concern to African governments and peoples.

THE NEW HUMANITARIAN ORDER

When World War II broke out, the international order could be divided into two unequal parts: one privileged, the other subjugated; one a system of sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere, the other a colonial system in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Post-war decolonization recognized former colonies as states, thereby expanding state sovereignty as a global principle of relations between states. The end of the cold war has led to another basic shift, heralding an international humanitarian order that promises to hold state sovereignty accountable to an international human rights standard. Many believe that we are in the throes of a systemic transition in international relations.

The standard of responsibility is no longer international law; it has shifted, fatefully, from law to rights. As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the “war on terror.”

This new humanitarian order, officially adopted at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, claims responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations. That responsibility is said to belong to “the international community,” to be exercised in practice by the UN, and in particular by the Security Council, whose permanent members are the great powers. This new order is sanctioned in a language that departs markedly from the older language of law and citizenship. It describes as “human” the populations to be protected and as “humanitarian” the crisis they suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even anti-political. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is not a global but a partial transition. The transition from the old system of sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as “failed” or “rogue” states. The result is once again a bifurcated system, whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East.

The Westphalian coin of state sovereignty is still the effective currency in the international system. It is worth looking at both sides of this coin: sovereignty and citizenship. If “sovereignty” remains the password to enter the passageway of international relations, “citizenship” still confers membership in the sovereign national political (state) community. Sovereignty and citizenship are not opposites; they go together. The state, after all, embodies the key political right of citizens: the right of collective self-determination.

The international humanitarian order, in contrast, does not acknowledge citizenship. Instead, it turns citizens into wards. The language of humanitarian intervention has cut its ties with the language of citizen rights. To the extent the global humanitarian order claims to stand for rights, these are residual rights of the human and not the full range of rights of the citizen. If the rights of the citizen are pointedly political, the rights of the human pertain to sheer survival; they are summed up in one word: protection. The new language refers to its subjects not as bearers of rights—and thus active agents in their emancipation—but as passive beneficiaries of an external “responsibility to protect.” Rather than rights-bearing citizens, beneficiaries of the humanitarian order are akin to recipients of charity. Humanitarianism does not claim to reinforce agency, only to sustain bare life. If anything, its tendency is to promote dependence. Humanitarianism heralds a system of trusteeship.

It takes no great intellectual effort to recognize that the responsibility to protect has always been the sovereign’s obligation. It is not that a new principle has been introduced; rather, its terms have been radically altered. To grasp this shift, we need to ask: who has the responsibility to protect whom, under what conditions and toward what end?

The era of the international humanitarian order is not entirely new. It draws on the history of modern Western colonialism. At the outset of colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading Western powers — Britain, France, Russia — claimed to protect “vulnerable groups.” When it came to countries controlled by rival powers, such as the Ottoman Empire, Western powers claimed to protect populations they considered vulnerable, mainly religious minorities like specific Christian denominations and Jews. In lands not yet colonized by any power, like South Asia and large parts of Africa, they highlighted local atrocities — such as female infanticide and suttee in India, and slavery in Africa — and pledged to protect victims from their rulers.

From this history was born the international regime of trusteeship exercised under the League of Nations. The League’s trust territories were mainly in Africa and the Middle East. They were created at the end of World War I, when colonies of defeated imperial powers (the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Italy) were handed over to the victorious powers, who pledged to administer them as guardians would administer wards, under the watchful eye of the League of Nations.

One of these trust territories was Rwanda, administered as a trust of Belgium until the 1959 Hutu Revolution. It was under the benevolent eye of the League of Nations that Belgium hardened Hutu and Tutsi into racialized identities, using the force of law to institutionalize an official system of discrimination between them. Thereby, Belgian colonialism laid the institutional groundwork for the genocide that followed half a century later. The Western powers that constituted the League of Nations could not hold Belgium accountable for the way it exercised an international trust, for one simple reason: to do so would have been to hold a mirror up to their own colonial record. Belgian rule in Rwanda was but a harder version of the indirect rule practiced to one degree or another by all Western powers in Africa. This system did not simply deny sovereignty to its colonies; it redesigned the administrative and political life of colonies by bringing each under a regime of group identity and rights. Belgian rule in Rwanda may have been an extreme version of colonialism, but it certainly was not exceptional.

Given the record of the League of Nations, it is worth asking how the new international regime of trusteeship would differ from the old one. What are the likely implications of the absence of citizenship rights at the core of this new system? Why would a regime of trusteeship not degenerate yet again into one of lack of accountability and responsibility?

On the face of it, these two systems — one defined by sovereignty and citizenship, the other by trusteeship and wardship — would seem to be contradictory rather than complementary. In practice, however, they are two parts of a bifurcated international system. One may ask how this bifurcated order is reproduced without the contradiction being flagrantly obvious, without it appearing like a contemporary version of the old colonial system of trusteeship. A part of the explanation lies in how power has managed to subvert the language of violence and war to serve its own claims.

SUBVERTING THE LANGUAGE OF GENOCIDE

War has long ceased to be a direct confrontation between the armed forces of two states. As became clear during the confrontation between the Allied and the Axis powers in World War II, in America’s Indochina War in the 1960s and ’70s, its Gulf War in 1991 and then again in its 2003 invasion of Iraq, states do not just target the armed forces of adversary states; they target society itself: war-related industry and infrastructure, economy and work force, and sometimes, as in the aerial bombardment of cities, the civilian population in general. The trend is for war to become generalized and indiscriminate. Modern war is total war.

This development in the nature of modern war has tended to follow an earlier development of counterinsurgency in colonial contexts. Faced with insurgent guerrillas who were simply armed civilians, colonial powers targeted the populations of occupied territories. When Mao Zedong wrote that guerrillas must be as fish in water, American counterinsurgency theorist Samuel Huntington, writing during the Vietnam War, responded that the object of counterinsurgency must be to drain the water and isolate the fish. But the practice is older than post–World War II counterinsurgency. It dates back to the earliest days of modernity, to settler-colonial wars against American Indians in the decades and centuries that followed 1492. Settler America pioneered the practice of interning civilian populations in what Americans called “reservations” and the British called “reserves,” a technology the Nazis would later develop into an extreme form called concentration camps. Often thought of as a British innovation put into effect during the late-nineteenth-century Boer War in South Africa, the practice of concentrating and interning populations in colonial wars was in origin an American settler contribution to the development of modern war.

The regime identified with the international humanitarian order makes a sharp distinction between genocide and other kinds of mass violence. The tendency is to be permissive of insurgency (liberation war), counterinsurgency (suppression of civil war or of rebel/revolutionary movements) and inter-state war as integral to the exercise of national sovereignty. Increasingly, they are taken as an inevitable if regrettable part of defending or asserting national sovereignty, domestically or internationally — but not genocide.

What, then, is the distinguishing feature of genocide? It is clearly not extreme violence against civilians, for that is very much a feature of both counterinsurgency and interstate war in these times. Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different “on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion” is that violence termed genocide. It is this aspect of the legal definition that has allowed “genocide” to be instrumentalized by big powers so as to target those newly independent states that they find unruly and want to discipline. More and more, universal condemnation is reserved for only one form of mass violence — genocide — as the ultimate crime, so much so that counterinsurgency and war appear to be normal developments. It is genocide that is said to be violence run amok, amoral, evil. The former is depicted as normal violence, and the latter as bad violence. Thus the tendency to call for “humanitarian intervention” only where mass slaughter is named “genocide.”

Given that the nature of twentieth-century “indirect rule” colonialism in Africa shaped the nature of administrative power along “tribal” (or ethnic) lines, it is not surprising that the exercise of power and responses to it tend to take “tribal” forms in newly independent states. From this point of view, there is little to distinguish between mass violence unleashed against civilians in Congo, northern Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and so on. So which ones are to be named “genocide” and which ones are not? Most important, who decides?

There is nothing new in legal concepts being used to serve the expedience of great powers. What is new about the “war on terror” is that action against certain forms of violence is simultaneously being moralized and legally deregulated. Is it then surprising that these very developments have led to violence run amok, as in Iraq after 2003 or, indeed, in Bashir’s own little war on terror in Darfur in 2003–04? As the new humanitarian order does away with legal limits to pre-emptive war—thus, to the global war on terror—it should not be surprising that counterinsurgency defines itself as a local war on terror.

The year 2003 saw the unfolding of two counterinsurgencies. One was in Iraq, and it grew out of foreign invasion. The other was in Darfur, and it grew as a response to an internal insurgency. The former involved a liberation war against a foreign occupation; the latter, a civil war in an independent state. True, if you were an Iraqi or a Darfuri, there was little difference between the brutality of the violence unleashed in either instance. Yet much energy has been invested in how to define the brutality in each instance: whether as counterinsurgency or as genocide. We have the astonishing spectacle of the state that has perpetrated extreme violence in Iraq, the United States, branding an adversary state, Sudan, as one that has perpetrated genocidal violence in Darfur. Even more astonishing, we have a citizens’ movement in America calling for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur while keeping mum about the violence in Iraq.

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

The emphasis on big powers as the protectors of rights internationally is increasingly being twinned with an emphasis on big powers as enforcers of justice internationally. This much is clear from a critical look at the short history of the International Criminal Court. The ICC was set up by treaty in Rome in 1998 to try the world’s most heinous crimes: mass murder and other systematic abuses. The relationship between the ICC and successive US administrations is instructive: it began with Washington criticizing the ICC and then turning it into a useful tool. The effort has been bipartisan: the first attempts to weaken the ICC and to create US exemptions from an emerging regime of international justice were made by leading Democrats during the Clinton Administration.

Washington’s concerns were spelled out in detail by a subsequent Republican ambassador to the UN, John Bolton: “Our main concern should be for our country’s top civilian and military leaders, those responsible for our defense and foreign policy.” Bolton went on to ask“ whether the United States was guilty of war crimes for its aerial bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan in World War II” and answered in the affirmative: “Indeed, if anything, a straightforward reading of the language probably indicates that the court would find the United States guilty. A fortiori, these provisions seem to imply that the United States would have been guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is intolerable and unacceptable.” He also aired the concerns of America’s principal ally in the Middle East, Israel: “Thus, Israel justifiably feared in Rome that its pre-emptive strike in the Six-Day War almost certainly would have provoked a proceeding against top Israeli officials. Moreover, there is no doubt that Israel will be the target of a complaint concerning conditions and practices by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza.”

When it came to signing the treaty, Washington balked. Once it was clear that it would not be able to keep the ICC from becoming a reality, the Bush Administration changed tactics and began signing bilateral agreements with countries whereby both signatories would pledge not to hand over each other’s nationals — even those accused of crimes against humanity — to the ICC. By mid-June 2003, the United States had signed such agreements with thirty-seven countries, starting with Sierra Leone, a site of massive atrocities.

The Bush Administration’s next move was accommodation, made possible by the kind of pragmatism practiced by the ICC’s leadership. The fact of mutual accommodation between the world’s only superpower and an international institution struggling to find its feet on the ground is clear if we take into account the four countries where the ICC has launched its investigations: Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic and Congo. All are places where the United States has no major objection to the course chartered by ICC investigations. Its name notwithstanding, the ICC is rapidly turning into a Western court to try African crimes against humanity. It has targeted governments that are US adversaries and ignored actions the United States doesn’t oppose, like those of Uganda and Rwanda in eastern Congo, effectively conferring impunity on them.

If the ICC is accountable, it is to the Security Council, not the General Assembly. It is this relationship that India objected to when it—like the United States, China and Sudan—refused to sign the Rome Statute. India’s primary objection was summed up by “The Hindu”, India’s leading political daily, which argued that “granting powers to the Security Council to refer cases to the ICC, or to block them, was unacceptable, especially if its members were not all signatories to the treaty,” for it “provided escape routes for those accused of serious crimes but with clout in the U.N. body.” At the same time, “giving the Security Council power to refer cases from a non-signatory country to the ICC was against the Law of Treaties under which no country can be bound by the provisions of a treaty it has not signed.”

The absence of formal political accountability has led to the informal politicization of the ICC. No one should be surprised that the United States used its position as the leading power in the Security Council to advance its bid to capture the ICC. This is how The Hindu summed up the US relationship to the court: “The wheeling-dealing by which the U.S. has managed to maintain its exceptionalism to the ICC while assisting ‘to end the climate of impunity in Sudan’ makes a complete mockery of the ideals that informed the setting up of a permanent international criminal court to try perpetrators of the gravest of crimes against humanity.”

LAW AND POLITICS IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES

Human rights fundamentalists argue for an international legal standard regardless of the political context of the country in question. Their point of view is bolstered by the widespread and understandable popular outrage, not just in the West but also throughout Africa, against the impunity with which a growing number of regimes have been resorting to slaughter to brutalize their populations into silence. The realization that the ICC has tended to focus only on African crimes, and mainly on crimes committed by adversaries of the United States, has introduced a note of sobriety into the African discussion, raising concerns about a politicized justice and wider questions about the relationship between law and politics.

In no country is the distinction between legal and political issues self-evident. In a democracy, the domain of the legal is defined through the political process. What would happen if we privileged the legal over the political, regardless of context? The experience of a range of transitional societies — post-Soviet, postapartheid and postcolonial — suggests that such a fundamentalism would call into question their political existence. Several post-Soviet societies of Eastern Europe with a history of extensive informing, spying and compromising have decided either not to open fully secret police and Communist Party files or to do so at a snail’s pace. Societies torn apart by civil war, like post-Franco Spain, have chosen amnesia over truth, for the simple reason that they have prioritized the need to forge a future over agreeing on the past. The contrast is provided by Bosnia and Rwanda, where the administration of justice became an international responsibility and the decision to detach war crimes from the underlying political reality has turned justice into a regime for settling scores.

Those who face human rights as the language of an externally driven “humanitarian intervention” have to contend with a legal regime where the content of human rights law is defined outside a political process—whether democratic or not—that includes them as formal participants. Particularly for those in Africa, the ICC heralds a regime of legal and political dependence, much as the postwar Bretton Woods institutions began to pioneer an international regime of economic dependence in the 1980s and ’90s. The real danger of detaching the legal from the political regime and handing it over to human rights fundamentalists is that it will turn the pursuit of justice into revenge-seeking, thereby obstructing the search for reconciliation and a durable peace. Does that mean that the very notion of justice must be postponed as disruptive of peace? No.

SURVIVORS’ JUSTICE

If peace and justice are to be complementary rather than conflicting objectives, we must distinguish victors’ justice from survivors’ justice: if one insists on distinguishing right from wrong, the other seeks to reconcile different rights. In a situation where there is no winner and thus no possibility of victors’ justice, survivors’ justice may indeed be the only form of justice possible. If Nuremberg is the paradigm for victors’ justice, South Africa’s postapartheid transition is the paradigm for survivors’ justice. The end of apartheid was driven by a key principle: forgive but do not forget. The first part of the compact was that the new power will forgive all past transgressions so long as they are publicly acknowledged as wrongs. There will be no prosecutions. The second was that there will be no forgetting and that henceforth rules of conduct must change, thereby ensuring a transition to a postapartheid order. It was South Africa’s good fortune that its transition was in the main internally driven. South Africa is not a solitary example but a prototype for conflicts raging across Africa about the shape of postcolonial political communities and the definition of membership in them. The agreement that ended the South Sudan war combined impunity for all participants with political reform. The same was true of the settlement ending Mozambique’s civil war. Had the ICC been involved in these conflicts in the way it is now in Darfur, it is doubtful there would be peace in either place.

© 2008 Mahmood Mamdani

* Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, was director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. This article is excerpted from the conclusion to his book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Pantheon in January 2009.

* This article also appeared in The Nation 29 September 2008. The article is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

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

On average in South Africa over the last five years there are ten shack fires a day with someone dying in a shack fire every other day. Shack fires are not acts of God. They are the result of political choices, often at municipal level.

Shack settlements are a poor people’s solution to a lack of affordable housing, especially in cities. In eThekwini municipality, a third of the population, and around half of the African population live in shacks. This is around 920,000 people. 16.4 per cent or about one in six of all South African households live in shacks. The number of South African households living in shacks is increasing at more than double the rate of population growth and is now nearly two million.

People live in shacks for many reasons. People move to the cities from rural areas in search of work, tertiary education, and health care. People also leave formal housing to live in shacks when they can no longer afford that housing after a breadwinner dies or loses a job. They may also come to live in the shacks because they wish to escape family violence or to have their own home independently of their parents. Some people came to avoid political violence in the 1980s. However, it is hard to find work in the cities, and when people find it, they often don’t get paid enough to afford rent in formal housing. 60.7% of people in eThekwini live on less than R427 a month. Rent might be R500 a month plus bills.

Shack communities are often referred to as ‘informal’, as ‘temporary’ and as ‘camps’, but a survey in 2001 found that “over half of the household heads with informal dwellings have lived in their homes for between five and ten years and a quarter have lived in them for over eleven years”. Shack communities are not temporary. But because they are not in places that city officials call ‘suitable’, they are refused basic services and prevented from taking their proper place in the city. The lack of services is seen as a deliberate attempt to force people to leave their homes and accept relocation.

More than 63 residents were arrested Monday morning for public violence and were to appear on Tuesday at the Vereeniging Magistrate court (they have since all been released without charge). A strong crowd of more than 2000 residents organised by the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee took to the streets in the early hours of Monday morning, 15 September 2008, to blockade traffic on the Golden Highway. Police opened fire with rubber bullets injuring demonstrators and arresting residents randomly.

In May 2008, a group of civil society activists launched a campaign to reform Kenya's archaic abortion laws, sparking a countrywide debate. Now, as a new draft bill on women's reproductive health and rights seeking to decriminalise abortions is set to be tabled in parliament, the battle lines between opponents and advocates of abortion are clearly drawn.

The international cotton trade has been a sad tale for West African countries. The region produces five percent of the world’s cotton and 15 percent of the global cotton fibre trade. Yet West African cotton farmers are among the poorest in the world. Their purchasing power is only five percent that of farmers in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Purchasing power refers to the value of goods (cotton) compared to the amount of money paid.

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride down the troughs of capitalism and up the peaks of radical social activism. Glancing around the world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual.

First, look to Wall Street where Monday's stock market crash was worse than any since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and where one investment bank after the other faces ruin or bale-out – three of the USA’s five largest flushed down the toilet.

Fourteen years ago, these same New York financiers put extreme pressure on Nelson Mandela’s new African National Congress government (a time I worked in his reconstruction and development program ministry and saw first hand). Mandela was defeated by neoliberal strategies - nicknamed ‘Freedom next Time’ and ‘Shock Doctrine’ by John Pilger and Naomi Klein, respectively, in their excellent South Africa chapters in recent books.

The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law at the University of Ottawa would like to announce an upcoming conference: "Climate Law in Developing Countries Post-2012: North and South Perspectives" from September 26th to the 29th. This conference will examine the legal and policy challenges that developing countries face in mitigating and adapting to climate change while meeting their social and economic needs.

Dibussi Tande reviews this weeks blogs, including

Moses Paul Sserwanga
Thinking Aloud
Blackman Time
Abesha Bunna Bet
Scribbles from the Den

The first African Broadcast & Film Conference, will be held in Nairobi over 23-25 September, 2008. The event is being organised by AITEC Africa and held under the auspices of the Ministry of Information and Communications.

We stand at a crossroads. The facts are clear. Global climate change, caused by human activities, is happening, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people and the existence of millions of species. Social movements, environmental groups, and scientists from all over the world are calling for urgent and radical action on climate change.

The Blogoma, or Moroccan blogosphere, was buzzing over news of Moroccan blogger Mohammed Erraji's acquittal. Erraji was arrested last week for writing on his blog that the King or Morocco's charity toward his people encourages them to remain helpless rather than work hard. Under local media laws, it is illegal to criticize the monarchy.

Swaziland is holding its first parliamentary election under a new constitution, amid growing protests calling for more democracy. Political parties remain banned in the tiny African mountain kingdom, one of the world's last absolute monarchies. The government says it expects a good turnout at the polls, to be watched by foreign observers for the first time.

Angola’s parliamentary elections on September 5, 2008, reportedly won by the ruling MPLA party, were marred by numerous irregularities, Human Rights Watch has said. Preliminary results indicate that the MPLA won more than 80 percent of the vote, the first held in Angola since 1992.

Fourteen abuse victims, backed by a coalition of African and international rights groups, have filed complaints with a Senegalese prosecutor accusing the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré of crimes against humanity and torture. The charges mark a new phase in the long-running effort to bring Habré to trial for atrocities committed during his 1982-1990 rule.

President Thabo Mbeki is expected next week to lead a high-level meeting with African leaders to review the continent's developmental needs as well as the implementation of its development goals. Addressing reporters at the Union Buildings on Thursday, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said the meeting, held on the sidelines if the 63rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), will seek to discuss the remaining challenges facing the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

No single person or institution has a monopoly of solutions to Africa’s development challenges. What is worse, ‘business as usual’ has not helped Africa in the last 40 years and is not going to help Africa in the foreseeable generation unless we change our way of thinking. We need to ‘think outside the box’ for new ideas, argues FW Kwoba

Paul Abayomi Ogundeji, a member of the editorial board of the Lagos-based private daily, Thisday newspaper was on August 17, 2008, at about 10.30pm local time, shot dead in Dopemu, a suburb of Lagos metropolis by unidentified gunmen. Mr. Ogundeji, was ambushed by the bandits while returning home. Nothing was removed from the Kia Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) which he was driving.

The ecological impact of natural resource exploitation on the lives of the poor in Africa and other regions is not being addressed sufficiently in aid effectiveness and development discussions, aid experts say. ”Africa is known as one of the richest parts of the world when it comes to natural resources, yet it is also the poorest region -- despite the natural wealth and the aid flow,” said Charles Mutasa, executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) û a Zimbabwe-based NGO working on Africa's debt problem.

Following the entry into force in June 2008 of the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in Africa’s Great Lakes region (the Great Lakes Pact), the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) released The Great Lakes Pact and the Rights of Displaced People: A Guide for Civil Society. The Guide aims to help organisations use the Great Lakes Pact to promote the rights of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in the region.

What can a mother of six do when her husband’s sporadic contributions to the household run dry? Thirty-five-year-old Amina created a job — an extraordinary achievement for a previously unemployed woman living in Djougou in northwest Benin. A micro loan from a local organisation helped her create a successful business. Today she is selling cooked rice at the nearby school. One day, Amina says, she will open a restaurant.

More than 800,000 people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance in Haiti in the wake of hurricanes Fay and Gustav and tropical storm Hanna. Houses, medical facilities, main roads and bridges have been destroyed, and an estimated 100,000 people have sought refuge in temporary shelters.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is scaling up existing emergency programmes in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where increased fighting has forced over 100,000 people to flee their homes, social services to close, and humanitarian organizations to suspend aid.

Scientists at a Senegalese university are the first to benefit from a United Nations-backed project aimed at providing colleges in five African countries with the technology and tools needed to prevent the migration of graduates and reduce the continent’s “brain drain.” The installation of the first computing grid at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar is part of a joint initiative by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Hewlett-Packard and the Grid Computing Institute of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has proposed that the Security Council consider sending 6,000 United Nations troops to replace a European Union force in eastern Chad and north-eastern Central African Republic (CAR), which have both been wracked by violence and civilian displacement in recent years.

The Liberian Government and the United Nations have launched a new school feeding programme in the capital Monrovia for 150,000 children going hungry because of high food prices. Another 400,000 rural school children are already benefiting from joint feeding programmes organized by the Government and the World Food Programme (WFP), according to a press statement issued by the UN

Cholera has killed 122 people and new cases have been reported in the last three weeks alone in Guinea Bissau. The epidemic is uncontrollable in the capital Bissau and elsewhere, experts told IRIN. The hardest hit regions are Bijao Island 158 cases, Biombo 836, Quinara 216, Oio 215 and Bissau 4,500.

Zimbabweans are once again having to wait for details of the new government, this time the cause of the delay is the composition of the new cabinet. The political leaders Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai met on Thursday morning to decide who controls which of the 31 ministries up for grabs, but MDC spokesperson Nelson Chamisa said the issue of the “key ministries is really becoming quite problematic.”

South Sudan's military accused Ugandan rebels on Friday of attacking them on the Congo border, killing one soldier and the son of a local chief. Major General Biar Ajang of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SLPA) said the attack by Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas took place on Thursday in Sukure Payam district.

An analysis by Global Fund Observer published this week shows that just under half of the countries eligible to apply to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are providing antiretroviral therapy to less than 25% of those who need it, or still have more than 25,000 in need of treatment despite higher levels of coverage.

The scaled–up delivery of antiretroviral drugs through primary healthcare offers an important opportunity for health care systems to manage the transition towards caring for people with chronic illnesses as populations age and cancers and cardiovascular disease become more common, according to the authors of a South African study looking at causes of death over 13 years in rural South Africa.

Algerian women do most of the work at home, and Ramadan is no exception. They go to work, shop, cook, and prepare the table for iftar. By end of the month, they are exhausted, but their work continues.

The UN Refugee Agency and the governments of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this week intensified efforts to encourage the last 51,000 Congolese refugees in camps in northern Zambia that the time is right to go home.

Zimbabwean women have experienced higher levels of trauma, including violence and lack of food, after the country's independence from Britain in 1980 than before. This is one of the findings of a study conducted by the civic movement Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) on trauma in the collapsing southern African state.