The final interview of the Black History Month series is with Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies at Syracuse University, and author of Rasta and Resistance, from Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, and Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation.

This episode was produced by

After hundreds of books, documentaries, sermons, and even university courses on modern slavery and human trafficking, people have begun asking, "What can I do to help?" In his latest book, Kevin Bales responds to that demanding question. Ending Slavery surveys the history of various anti-slavery movements, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies, as well as their failures and successes.

The crisis of social exclusion in South Africa's cities is a key factor in the ferment in grassroots political society, argues Richard Pithouse. It has been central to much popular protest in recent years, to the emergence of well organised grassroots movements to the left of the ANC and, also, the catastrophic pogroms in May.

Sudan’s Anti-Terrorism Special Courts in late July sentenced 30 alleged rebels to death in trials that fell far short of international fair trial standards, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch urged the government to abolish the hastily created special courts and instead prosecute all cases in the regular courts according to the 2005 National Interim Constitution.

The Senegalese parliament has passed a law extending the presidential term to seven years from five, but the ruling will not apply to sitting President Abdoulaye Wade, a Justice Ministry official said on Tuesday.

The recent statement by the Minister for Lands, Hon. James Orengo that the National Land Policy is ready for cabinet deliberation and final approval is something that is overdue. But for the majority of Kenyan women who wallow in poverty and are destitute, the announcement has generated a lot of excitement as they have for a long time been culturally prohibited from inheriting this critical factor of production and source of wealth.

On October 4, 2007, Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, became the new President of the Foundation supporting the World Organization against Torture (OMCT). Kofi Annan has always demonstrated a strong commitment to human rights and has stated his total opposition to torture. In accepting to become the new President of the Foundation supporting OMCT, he expressed his wish to be actively involved in initiatives defending human rights.

The top United Nations envoy to Sudan has called for a review of the death sentences passed by the country’s counter-terrorism courts against 30 members of a Darfur rebel group found guilty of participating in an attack near the capital in May, amid concerns that they did not receive a fair trial.

A United Nations human rights expert has held talks in Côte d’Ivoire with senior officials from the UN peacekeeping mission in the West African country at the start of a week-long visit to investigate the illegal movement and dumping of toxic wastes.

Sierra Leone's Transport and Aviation Minister Mr. Kemoh Sesay has been sacked yesterday following the landing of an unauthorized antonov plane which forcefully landed at the Lungi international airport with 700kg cocaine, arms and ammunitions on July 12th this year.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will hold a make-or-break meeting in Harare on Sunday aimed at finalising a power-sharing deal, a South African newspaper reported on Friday.

Egyptian police have arrested 587 mostly African migrants caught trying to slip over the border into Israel since January, and shot and wounded a Sudanese man at the frontier on Friday, security sources said. The sources said Eritreans made up the largest group of those detained trying to sneak into the Jewish state, at 249 since the start of the year. Significant numbers also came from Sudan, Nigeria and Ivory Coast.

Mauritania's coup leaders have announced they will appoint a government to run the country until new elections, defying a chorus of international demands to restore the first democratically elected president. Soldiers in the northwest African country toppled Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi on Wednesday after he tried to sack senior officers.

There has been heated debate at the International AIDS Conference about how male circumcision should be promoted, following research that shows circumcised men have far less chance of getting HIV. The main fear is that, if promoted as a means of prevention HIV infection, men will believe that they are immune to HIV after circumcision.

To the poor of the world, to all people of good will who work for progressive change... We, the landless and homeless people and associated activists of South Africa, decry the secret campaign by the so-called Workers' Party (PT) government of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to criminalise, outlaw and otherwise illegitimately harass our landless comrades of the MST.

Recently, the digging started on Rwanda's new fibre optic network. Local telecom companies want their piece of the ICT pie. Rwanda is getting wired. By the end of next year, the government's new 2,000 kilometer fibre optic network should increase broadband access to the country, linking all districts to high quality voice, data, and video services, according to officials.

Moroccan politician Fouad Ali El Himma has long been a media sensation, thanks to his close association with King Mohammed VI. His announcement that he will lead a new political party is widely seen as a direct challenge to Islamist opposition party, the PJD.

Preaching abstinence to the young has not worked, nor has sex work been eradicated. Experts gathered in Mexico City for the 17th International AIDS Conference say it is time to put public policies under the microscope and see why they have failed.

While conflict diamonds or blood diamonds, as they are known, have gained attention the world over in terms of the role illicit gems play in fuelling warfare, the role that the timber trade has played in abetting conflict has received considerably less consideration. That may be beginning to change.

Funding support for women’s organisations and for non-governmental organisations working to achieve gender equality is an important element in many donors strategies. These organisations often have detailed knowledge of social and cultural barriers to gender equality. They can also recognise and address the impact of gender inequalities at local, national and international level.

The paper aims to provide information on the size, structure and significance of China-Zambia relations. It specifically studies the nature and scope of Chinese investment in Zambia, the pattern and magnitude of trade between China and Zambia.

At the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City this week, there has been a great deal of discussion about violence and discrimination directed at homosexuals and lesbians, often based on the mistaken assumption that they are responsible for the disease. Public health officials and organizations working to diminish the impact of AIDS around the world agree that more tolerant societies have better programs to combat AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases.

More than 50 women, some as young as 13 and others as old as 60, have been gang raped and tortured by government-backed militias in Zimbabwe because of their support for the opposition, rights groups and victims say.

At least 20 people have died after a bomb hidden under a pile of rubbish exploded in Somalia's capital, according to witnesses. Witnesses said the dead in Sunday's blast in Mogadishu's southern K4 neighbourhood were mostly female civilians, 10 of them street cleaners.

Shutting down clinical trial centres in Africa in response to continued failure of HIV vaccine candidates would be a big mistake, researchers warned at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City yesterday (5 August).

The fired managing director of The Gambia's pro-government 'Daily Observer' newspaper has been discharged by the court. Mr. Dida Halake, whose nationality remains unclear, was discharged by a local magistrates' court after the prosecution filed an application to withdraw criminal case against him. The prosecution said this will allow it to put its house in order.

Independent observers and civil society groups in Ghana say voter registration, the first major step towards landmark general elections in December, is being marred by violence and irregularities. In the north of Ghana supporters of the two main political parties – the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) - vandalised registration centres on 2 August and gun shots were heard in Tamale, the capital of the northern region, during voter registration.

Much of Somalia's displaced population has scattered across rural villages, which are hard to reach because of rampant insecurity and limited resources, an international agency said, impeding aid delivery.

Negotiations between the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOCZIM) and two international petroleum companies to supply fuel to the country have collapsed over pricing, sources told ZimOnline.

Mr. President,

4613 soon to be half a million Kenyans say you are greedy!!

Yes Mr. President and fellow cronies posing as leaders. There are over 4000 Kenyans across the world and more and more joining everyday with one simple message to you:

YOU ARE SHAMELESS!

Kenyans online have joined hands on Facebook:
* "How sad and frustrating is it to find that our MP's earn the highest salary compared to all the other countries in the world. While 20 million Kenyans are in abject poverty; living on less than $ 1.00 a day.
* As Kenyans we need to stand for our rights to live and prosper in our country.
* Therefore please join us to bring change in our country by reducing our MP's salaries and privileges, so as to improve the life of the mwananchi.

OUR GOAL IS TO UNITE AND GET HALF A MILLION KENYANS IN THIS GROUP.....can we do it?....lets try"

click to join the Facebook campaign
click

Wole Soyinka was addressing a conference on the issue of the ‘brain drain’ from African countries. He remarked on how many of the speakers before him had lamented the flight of millions of Africans to the West and how apparently desperate were these speakers, who included African heads of state, to reverse the trend so that the bright young minds and their skills could be retained on the continent. ‘Lucky drainees!’ Soyinka enthused, with a whiff of sarcasm. While they went abroad exploring new frontiers, ‘the brains of their stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures’ (Olaniyan, 2003).

You will understand then why, at a conference of writers in exile held in Vienna in December 1987, the award-winning Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah, spoke ‘In Praise of Exile.’ He was not disparaging his home country: he was seeking to challenge the perspectives of its leaders. Basically agreeing with Soyinka's opposition of lucky exiles to dead stay-at-homes, Farah said he himself could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a prisoner. Not for him the common idea that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity: ‘For me,’ he wrote, ‘distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing’.

Removed from Zimbabwe, many of us have now become, in positive terms, more critical analysts of the situation in our homeland; in negative terms, soppy armchair critics. But the fact is that, we have the liberty of doing so! This armchair critic, for I am one, has become pre-occupied with the segmentation of Zimbabwean transnational website communities. Racially-charged politics, a high rate of HIV-AIDS infection, the complexity of gender relations derived from a country context that mostly is culturally conservative, and settlement in Britain by Zimbabweans and the various sensitivities that surround it, in both countries, are some of the issues that are raised in these website discourses. But difference is an opportunity to negotiate identities and is not inimical to the historical particularities that have shaped a definitive and distinctive ethnic presence in the demographics of Zimbabwe and in its diaspora.

For Diaspora and Communication studies, Zimbabwean electronic fora – the ‘new media’ - and their associations in Britain represent an important interface - a ‘social embedding’ (Aarsaether and Baerenholdt, 2001:49) of Diaspora communities in the homeland agenda that has created of the websites ‘specific communal refuges’ based on networks of family and friends and ethnic associations. In a generation of émigrés witnessing their homeland’s political and economic ruin but possessed of enhanced media technologies, the facility to not just track, but respond to events has led to the emergence first of social networks, and later the source of Internet activism that irked Robert Mugabe (2003) who said it represented ‘the same platforms and technologies through which virulent propaganda and misinformation are peddled to de legitimise our just struggles against vestigial colonialism, indeed to weaken national cohesion and efforts at forging a broad Third World front against what patently is a dangerous imperial world order led by warrior states and kingdoms’.

Compatriots wanting to assuage anxieties and nostalgia created and contributed to a web of electronic activism that contributed meaningfully – and varyingly - to Zimbabwean communities as the discourses and their associations grew vivid, provocative, and productive. Creatively using new technologies to define themselves, the Zimbabwean Diasporic websites raise social and anthropological media properties bound to attract scholarly attention.

Secondly, the fora are a microcosm of Zimbabwean diversity which deconstructs the authoritarian nationalism that has been a signature of Mugabe’s 28-year rule. This study characterizes the Diaspora websites’ ‘production of difference within common, shared and connected spaces’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997:45). It fills a research void acknowledged by Mwangola (2007) regarding smaller Diaspora communities ‘considered by both their host countries and the African world to be insignificant because of their small numbers and lack of political and/or economic capital’. Diverse Zimbabwean identities and their expressions which convey not only data and meaning, but community building through communication, form a transnational public sphere of website communities and associations representing a vibrancy absent from the ‘intolerant’ and ‘dull…intellectual ghetto’ Zimbabwe had become (Nyamfukudza 2005:21, 23) .

Thirdly, there is a general lack of authoritative source material of a qualitative nature on which UK agencies can rely for assessment of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, in the UK and at home. Over a two-year period I have provided assessments for law firms pursuing asylum cases and was given access to not just the claims, but the material on which government agencies drew to make their determinations. The source material nearly always lacked comprehensive detail. In particular, the expectation that all hardship in Zimbabwe must have had a party political dispensation to be worthy of an asylum claim betrayed an insensitivity to other tensions existing in that strangled environment, which UK-based agencies in particular seemed to be uninterested in. My research has the potential to expand the value and the knowledge base of interested parties.

It makes diversity a factor of social research with its emphasis on ‘undigested minorities’ (Nyamnjoh 2006:94; Nyamfukudza, 2005:18). Despite the significance of ethnic and cultural difference to Zimbabwe’s distant and recent history, this has not been a priority area in the research there has been into Zimbabwean transnationalism. The odd scholarly observation in this direction has remarked on the ‘fragmentation’ (Pasura, 2006a), although to view the diverse representations of a country’s multi-ethnic make-up solely in that light is to potentially omit positive aspects which the diverse populations and their plural expressions might bring to the discourse, something the electronic media may have enhanced. Conceptualizing this multi-polar engagement, I use Appadurai (1996), Werbner (1997a), Wise (2006), Moyo (2007) and Habermas’ descriptions of the public sphere as the ‘epistemic dimension’ (2006:411) to the procedures of democratic discourse. The research hopes to demonstrate not only the extension of democratic space, but also the production and reaffirmation of marginalized cultures in the electronic fora. Zaffiro (2002), Raftopolous (2004), Ranger (2005; 2002) and Nyamfukudza (2005), among others, have tracked the Mugabe government’s attempts to forge a corporate Zimbabwean identity and history that either excluded or assimilated minorities, or distorted their historical roles and the entitlements of their Zimbabwean citizenship. The social and economic upheaval which ensued, notwithstanding political arguments in mitigation, were accompanied by a re-ordering of Zimbabwean historiography that replaced even-handed analysis with unbalanced and at times rabidly racist literature (Nyamfukudza, 2005; Ranger, 2005; Raftopolous, 2004). By contrast, the transnational websites may inform an alternative narrative that acknowledges Zimbabwe’s demographics in deconstructing history and re-defining the nation.

As it expands its functions and its properties become progressively more accessible to households and other non-institutional users in Britain (OfCom, 2004), Internet communication is being appropriated by various echelons of the society to serve diverse interests: to ‘encompass the cultural forms of marginal constituencies’ (Ebo, 1998:x) as well as ‘emphasize hierarchical political associations’ (1998:2); to ‘encourage broad participation and emphasize merit over status’ (1998:3) as well as create private media spaces for individual, group and culture aggregations (Burnett and Marshall, 2003:67-68). There is a sense of virtual spaces being freed up to ventilate the previously unventilated: the minorities and the marginalised, their aspirations, their political and social will all being articulated in the relative freedom of a media-savvy Western liberal democracy.

In Ebo’s words, internet technology allows groups ‘traditionally dislocated from mainstream social linkages …to develop communal bonding’ (1998:4) through virtual and real-life associations that ‘fulfil the same traditional essence of associations and bonding, and invariably promote social relationships that are orchestrated by inherent inegalitarian tendencies in society’ (1998:5). He concludes that the stratification in the online associations will continue, for ‘as long as communities on the Internet allow participants to engage freely in the creation of social realities, economic and social classifications rooted in race, class and gender…will invariably influence relationships in virtual communities’ (ibid., p6). Ebo refers to this property of online engagement as the ‘cyberghetto perspective’ (ibid., p5), betraying a fear of negation and inequality being extended to cyberspace. But the facilitation of self-propelled diverse interest groups which use Internet communication to gain leverage in a world of inequalities is the rather more positive intuition behind this research.

CONCLUSION

To foregrounds a plurality of ethnic, political and professional continuities to introduce a study that addresses the democratic deficit and counter-authoritarian discourses that co-exist in an extended public sphere which this thesis seeks to describe. It has introduced plurality as a key element in website production and usage and the real-life associations that are formed based on shared affinities to the respective websites.

*Clayton Peel is the Vice-Chairman, Britain Zimbabwe Society. This paper was presented at the Britain Zimbabwe Society Research Day, 2008.

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

Bibliography:

Apparently, January 1 2008 saw a breakthrough in Chinese workers’ rights, and a flight of employers to other lands where labour is cheaper and less protected. At least that is what must have happened if the rosiest [or most alarmist] interpretations of China’s new labour law, which came into force on that date, are to be believed.

But getting at the facts behind the reports is another matter - and of interest to African activists for at least two reasons. First, China’s competitive labour cost advantage is blamed for loss of employment in Africa especially in textiles. Second, Chinese firms in Africa are supposed to conform to local laws or failing that, to Chinese legislation. So if China’s labour laws are now to become a worker’s nirvana, could African workers in future hope to hitch a ride on the apparently greater rights of their Chinese brothers and sisters?

I was on a flight from Entebbe to Nairobi on June 30 when I read The New Vision's front page story titled "Mother cuts off defiler's penis."By the time I finished the story, my spirits were up and I have been in a great mood ever since.

According to the article, Angelina Kyomugisha was weeding her banana farm in Mbarara when she heard her 10-year old daughter cry out. She went over to have a look, only to find 40-year-old Geoffrey Mugarura defiling her little girl. Kyomugisha did what every mother ought to do in such situation - she pounced on Mugarura and cut off his penis. Then she flung it into the bush.

Neighbours helped search for Mugarura's severed penis till they noticed a dog running off with something in its mouth. They threw a stick at the dog till it dropped what was left of his snack. At this point in the story I had to control my laughter for fear being thrown off the flight. At hospital, a doctor confirmed that they would refashion what was left of Mugarura's penis so that he could at least urinate with it. As for any other business, the dog had taken care of that.

Ten years ago, in May 1998, I had the pleasure of meeting Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady of the US, for a few minutes in Geneva during the World Health Organisation's 50th Anniversary Assembly. She was one of the VIPs invited to celebrate this event at the WHO which had just passed under the leadership of its first woman Director-General, Dr. Gro Haarlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway.

Mrs. Clinton's presence was in recognition of her unsuccessful, but commendable attempt, during her husband's first presidential term, to convince her country's legislators to introduce some form of medical insurance for American citizens, some 40% of whom had no medical cover then, and still do not, to this day.

I love to travel. I enjoy visiting distant and new places and learning about new cultures. Of late, however, I have developed a dread for travel not because of a latent fear of traveling by air or road, but more so on account of my strong objection to the increasingly degrading treatment travelers, especially from the global south, are subjected to at embassies and in both northern and southern ports.

My primary objection lies with the fact that the traveler today is subjected to gross violations of his or her privacy and personal rights, demands and practices which a few years ago would have attracted wide condemnation from different quarters. The War on Terror, as well as the desire of western nations to keep migrants (and visitors) from the global south out of northern borders has meant that the civil liberties of populations, especially from the global South wishing to visit the North, are disregarded and even abused.

is a well written article. I remember way back when I was young, we used to be asked in class, "what would you like to be when you grow up?" Most everyone would say they wanted to be teachers or lawyers; Many a times my answer would elicit sharp glances from the teachers: A writer, I would say. "You need to get more practical Judy. What would you have of interest to tell to the world? If I were you, I would aspire to be a nurse, now thats a noble profession."

Anyway, I shouldn't put my having not penned anything substantial to-date to negativity by teachers etc; frankly it might be more to laziness, but all in all, it is hard to produce an African writer with all those negative vibes.

New hope for the jobless in Philippi, Cape Town. has come with the launch of a computer hub which will allow people to register for work, create CVs and get information about job opportunities and skills development. The Umsebenzi Job Opportunities Information hub, which was launched on Tuesday by Western Cape Transport and Public Works MEC Marius Fransman, is situated at Philippi's Tsoga Centre.