http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/prah.jpgKwesi Kwaa Prah critiques Mahmood Mamdani's writings on Darfur. He posits: 'Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.'

In the aftermath of the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the singularly heinous crimes of Herr Hitler and his followers were subjected to global and detailed scrutiny.

The genocidal campaign against European Jewry, which he and his hordes flagitiously described as the 'final solution', was brought to the wider notice of humanity as the atrocities in and out of the Nazi death camps (the 'Vernichtungslager' and 'Todeslagers'), under Hitler’s equally mephistophelean disciple Heinrich Himmler, came to light.

It was at this time that the inane excuse by many Germans: 'wir haben nicht gewusst' ('we did not know') caught the world’s attention. Many Germans were claiming that while the devilry was going on, they saw nothing, spoke nothing and heard nothing.

In our pronouncements about the devilry that is going on in Darfur, we need to be careful not to put ourselves in a position where we offer similarly lame explanations. Even more crucial is the need to avoid providing by word and deed comfort and succour to the perpetrators of evil in Darfur.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/305/41564_darfur.jpgWe have seen the genocidal barbarism that Rwanda descended into in 1994, when between 500,000 and 800,000 people were butchered in three months.

This genocide was mostly carried out by two extremist Hutu militia groups, the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi, during a period of about three months from 6 April through mid-July 1994.

Since the 1960s, the brutal carnage of the Angolan war, the Liberian war, the Sierra Leonean killing fields, the Casamance imbroglio, wars in Guinea, Mozambique, Uganda, Guinea Bissao, the incessant slaughter in both the Congos, the Sudanese wars, the Chadian civil wars, the Tuareg wars, the Central African Republic, the Nigerian civil war, the collapse of the Somali state as we knew it, the Eritrean and Ethiopian wars and other internecine conflicts have left Africans benumbed and traumatised, with little and sporadic respite from intermittent but continued blood-letting. With weak democratic institutionalisation, tin-pot dictatorships and warlordism, the immediate future of Africa and Africans look bleak.

We appreciate the fact that in all wars, all the contending parties claim God to be on their side. None invoke the devil’s name in their support. In South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process revealed some atrocities committed by the insurgents.

But, it would be grossly disingenuous to suggest that in either scope or intent, those that were fighting the racist government committed crimes anywhere near equal to the fiendish villainy of the apartheid regime.

As Herr Hitler’s war drew to an ignominious close, the greatest fear of German citizens in the face of Soviet military advances was treatment at the hands of Soviet forces who had suffered about 20,000,000 dead (military and civilian). Through these colossal sacrifices, they had broken the back of the Nazi war machine. In Darfur, we know that the insurgents have also been responsible for atrocities. But the moral standing of the perpetrators and the resistance are worlds apart; and the scale of the atrocities incomparable.

We can debate ad infinitum whether or not the tragedy of Darfur has reached genocidal proportions; or whether it is a counter-insurgency and an insurgency; or whether it is a civil war or not a civil war; or whether it is as brutal as the Iraqi case; or whether the numbers of people that have been killed in Darfur are anywhere near the numbers that have been killed in Iraq. The bottom line is that these two scenarios represent enormous tragedies in our times, and deserve the attention and anger of humanity against who are responsible for them.

The Bush administration started the tragic misadventure in Iraq with lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which were never there. But the grounds for this misadventure had long been in preparation. In February 1998, Bill Clinton argued: 'What if Saddam fails to comply [with UN sanctions], or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more time to develop this (WMD) programme? He will conclude that the international community has lost its will...[that] he can go right on, and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use this arsenal.'

On 31 October 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated: 'it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power'. And, in that same year, 1998, the US Congress authorised President Clinton to '...use US armed forces pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 678 to achieve implementation of UNSCRs 660—667.'

In December 1998, Clinton’s national security council advisor Sandy Berger’s view was that: 'for the last eight years, American policy towards Iraq has been based on the tangible threat that Saddam poses to our security. That threat is clear'. What has so far been little appreciated is the fact that control of oil resources formed an important, but little discussed, reason for the Bush intervention to topple former US protégé Saddam Hussein.

The American public knows better now, and will know more in the future about the Bush administration’s unspoken and hidden war aims. Iraq is everyday on world television. The bombings and gore are unfailingly harrowing.

Darfur has for long been a little known place in Africa. Now, for the past four years, it has been thrust into the forefront of our imagination. People have slowly come to learn about the contradictions and conflicts of the Afro-Arab borderlands. The contestation and conflict between pastoralists and sedentary cultivators runs roughly parallel to Arab and African in Darfur, between an Islamist tradition from the north-east and a tradition from West Africa; between African language-speakers and those who prefer or rely on Arabic and Arabic customs.

Islam found a footing there in the 16th century, and took on the more mystical Sufi forms common to other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The most impoverished are the African groups. These latter also form the social bases of the insurgency. What needs to be categorically stated is that competition over resources does not necessarily lead to war and/or genocide. It is the way such competition and other allied problems are resolved which is ultimately determinant and decisive. If democratic and culturally tolerant policies are advanced, it is possible to avoid conflict.

Mamdani’s Darfur

Over the past three to four years, Mamdani has written two articles which confuse issues and intentionally or unintentionally throw dust in our eyes with regards to what is happening in Darfur, and whether or not we can describe it as genocide. The first article I saw appeared in the collection of the 2004 Editorials from Pambazuka News.[1] The second article has recently been put out in the March 2007 issue of the London Review of Books.[2]

My attention was drawn to the second article by a young colleague who asked in an email: 'I don’t know why Mamdani has been...a denialist of the racist genocide in Darfur. Please direct me to any readings which may enlighten me on this matter.' Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.

Mamdani’s implicit audience in both papers is the American public. He directs a great deal of his attention to outlining how the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, 'often identified as a lone crusader' on Darfur, has succeeded in spreading a false alarm about genocide. He effectively establishes an eloquent and bruising debate between himself and Kristof about 'naming'. But in all this, he makes controversial assertions, some of which are examined here.

In the first paper, by the same title, Mamdani asks: 'How Can We Name the Darfur Crisis?' In the second paper, the title becomes: 'The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.' The two papers cover almost the same ground, but in the recent paper, Mamdani attempts, ineffectually, to beef up his evidence. He also discusses Iraq more fully. However, with the introduction of the Iraq tragedy into the discussion, he tries to shift and dilute the argument and focus of his whole discourse from what he wants to say about Darfur: that genocide is not taking place; taking to pyhrric semantics about genocide. It is a position, an argument, stated in the passive mood.

The question could be asked more actively: 'what is happening in Darfur?' This is more direct and avoids much of his obfuscation and intellectual ducking and diving. Mamdani assembles a wealth of facts; but he does not see his way successfully out with a synthesis. In my estimation, this is partly the result of his methodological drift towards postmodernism. One cannot quarrel with many of Mamdani’s facts and some of the historically attestable substance of his argument. It is in his judgment and the way he draws inferences between these facts that his selection of saliency fails him.

It is an ironic lesson that Gen. Bashir and his dictatorship will find comfort reading Mamdani. They have committed no genocide; although about a third of the population of groups such as the Fur, Messalit, Zaghawa, Birgid, Daju, Berti, Tama, Tunjur and others have been forcibly been dislocated from their homes and villages and forced to flee across the border to the miserable safety of cross-border refugee camps in Chad through a deliberate combination of torture, rape, gunfire and aerial bombardment, by aircraft and helicopter gunships.

The murderous Janjaweed are now also operating in Chad. There are 200,000 refugees in the cross-border Chadian refugee camps. Estimates are that between 220,000 and 300,000 people have lost their lives since early 2003 through this campaign of state-sponsored terror. 2,000,000 of a former Darfur population of about 6,000,000 are now in surrealistically overcrowded refugee camps. The Sudanese government is using ethnic cleansing and forced displacement as a counter-insurgency strategy. It is useful to recall that, 'ethnic cleansing' as a descriptive phrase was a euphemism used by Slobodan Milosevic to describe the mass killings in the former Yugoslavia.

The phenomenon is hardly new. Goody reminds us that this is how the Anglo-Saxons emptied most of England of Celts, pushing them to the western extremities of the island. That was also how the Latins moved north into once German lands. From the sixteenth century onwards, European expansion involved the constant transfer, confinement or destruction of so-called 'primitive' peoples throughout the Americas, in Australia, South Africa and the Antilles. Again and again, indigenous populations were reduced to 'ethnic minorities'. Since the second world war, three devastating operations of ethnic cleansing have historically been registered in the Mediterranean, Middle East and the Indian subcontinent: the partition of India, the creation of Israel in the late 1940s and the division of Cyprus in 1974.[3]

Both the sustained brutal carnage of Iraq and the slaughter in Darfur are horrific realities of our times. There is strong similarity with respect to the main protagonists in the cycle of violence. Much of what Mamdani says about the similarities is acceptable.

In Iraq, since the American invasion and the end of the conventional war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an insurgency against the coalition of invasion forces and the current Iraqi US-backed government has emerged and is growing by the day. The main butchers in Iraq now are the vigilantes, sectarian militia and paramilitaries pitching Shia against Sunni, and vice versa.

In Darfur, the vigilantes, sectarian militia, and paramilitaries are Arabised or Arab groups. The Sudanese government is supporting these groups with weapons and aerial bombardment to effect scorched earth policies of ethnic cleansing. In a recent article in the Al Ahram Weekly, Gamal Nkrumah quoting Sudanese First Vice-President Salva Kiir, a Southern Sudanese, writes that: 'Khartoum’s proxy militia, the ethnic Arab Janjaweed are wreaking havoc on the hapless indigenous non-Arab population of Darfur. Furthermore, the Sudanese President’s failure to hold his cronies accountable for trashing his country’s international reputation by defying the international community’s wish to deploy UN troops has exacerbated the situation.'[4]

Understanding Darfur

In order to understand what is going on in Darfur and much of the Afro-Arab borderlands we need to take a broad historical view of the situation.

It must be remembered that Arabs first entered the African continent almost 1,400 years ago. The first Arabs to enter Africa were early followers of the Prophet Mohammed who sought refuge in Christian Ethiopia in what is often called 'the first hejra' in 615 A.D.

A quarter of a century later, the Arabs, under the military command of Amr ibn al-As, by fire and sword, pushed their way into Egypt during the great movement of expansion of the lands of the Caliphate. This was during the caliphate of Umar b. al-Khattab. By the end of the 7th century, the territory of the Caliphate in Africa had expanded westwards to the Atlantic, covering what are now the countries of the Mahgreb: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

By fair or foul means, today, Arabs and Arabised Africans occupy about a third of the African continent, and the processes of the Arabization of Africans continue. Darfur and much of the Sudan are squarely located in the frontline and vortex of this process. It is an expansionist process, which Africans must address. Is this acceptable? My view is that it must be halted. Africans are happy to be as they are. Arabisation is unacceptable.

Mamdani asks: 'Is Darfur genocide that has happened and must be punished? Or, is it genocide that could happen and must be prevented?' He argues the latter. The basic weakness in this thinking is that an ahistorical and undialectical assumption has been made in the understanding of genocide.

The point is that, genocide is not only an event; indeed it is rarely simply so. It is, more significantly, a process. by that, I mean we are not going to wake up one day and find that overnight, we have moved from a pre-genocidal to a genocidal reality. Genocide is almost always a consequence of an approach to warfare. Once the foundations and direction of a genocidal route have been put in place, baring seriously mitigating circumstances or major reverses on the war-front, genocide is fairly consequential. The question we must ask therefore: is there a genocidal process underway in Darfur? What are the politics and ideology of the insurgency and counter-insurgency with respect to the phenomenology of genocide? When we understand the ideology of the counter-insurgency we can ascertain if the intention and process is genocidal or not.

In an article, which appeared in the Washington Post on 30 June 2004, Emily Wax writing from El Geneina tells the story of three young women who walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur:

'They had gone out to collect straw. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid", meaning "black" and "slave". Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said. They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, "Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby", said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. They said, "you get out of this area and leave the child when it’s made".'

It is important to note that this was not an isolated incident. The mind and thinking behind such cruel and barbaric acts are telling. Years ago, Joseph Oduho, one of the founders of the Sudan African National Union in the south, drew my attention to the fact that the military principle of 'ibid yektul abid' ('killing a slave with a slave'), has a history in the Sudan and was frequently heard during the First Civil War, 1956–1972.

Emily Wax’s testimony continues with the revelation that interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Arab Janjaweed militias were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. 'The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing', said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations.

She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. 'It's systematic,' the aid worker said. 'Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realise the extent of how widespread this is yet.' Another high-ranking international aid worker said: 'These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It’s hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it’s true. It’s systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way.'

In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, about 200 miles east of El Geneina, 'Aisha Arzak Mohammad Adam, 22, described a rape by militiamen. They said: 'Dog, you have sex with me.' Adam, who was receiving medical treatment at the Abu Shouk camp, said through a female interpreter that she was raped ten days ago and has been suffering from stomach cramps and bleeding. They said, 'the government gave me permission to rape you. This is not your land anymore, abid, go'.[5]

In another report, we are informed: 'When describing attacks, refugees often referred to Government of Sudan (GOS) soldiers and Janjaweed militias as a unified group; as one refugee stated, "the soldiers and Janjaweed, always they are together". The primary victims have been non-Arab residents of Darfur. Numerous credible reports corroborate the use of racial and ethnic epithets by both the Janjaweed and GOS military personnel; "Kill the slaves; Kill the slaves!" and "We have orders to kill all the blacks" are common. One refugee reported a militia member stating, "We kill all blacks and even kill our cattle when they have black calves". Numerous refugee accounts point to mass abductions, including persons driven away in GOS vehicles, but respondents usually do not know the abductees’ fate. A few respondents indicated personal knowledge of mass executions and gravesites.'[6]

Several observers and concerned parties have indicated that the tenets of the counter-insurgency include the view that the Islam of the insurgents is inferior or ideologically deficient at the mass base of society. Islam in Darfur, for the majority, is more of West African inspiration than of immediately easterly derivation. Daoud Ibrahim Salih, a refugee from Darfur and a founding board member and president of the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, a group that developed from exiled Darfurian refugees in Cairo expresses himself thus: 'We, the Darfurians, did not commit any crimes, just that we are African...we are very ordinary people, as you can see from the pictures. Today, genocide is happening, right now while we are speaking, for my people in Darfur...we did not take Islam in the full package, which means assimilation and Arabisation...second, they want to take the land, because Darfur is a huge area...that’s why all of the Arabic countries are supporting Sudan’s government.'[7]

Apophthegmatically, Daoud Ibrahim Salih summarises the position thus: 'To stop genocide means to stop Arabization, to stop genocide means to stop assimilations, to stop genocide in Darfur means to stop the dividing of Africa.'[8] The then United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in characteristic understatement, in guarded and diplomatic style, has described the Darfur situation as 'bordering on genocide'.

Mamdani successfully calls into question Kristof’s extravagant and fabulous numbers. He also summons to witness Obasanjo and Ntsebeza. Obasanjo’s utterances feature in both the 2004 and 2007 articles. Obasanjo in 2004, at a time he was chair of the African Union (AU) and involved in delicate negotiations between the Khartoum regime and the Fur insurgents said that:

'Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That's what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.'

What Mamdani fails to add is that, in an address at the headquarters of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on 10 October 2006, Obasanjo, then president of the largest contributing country to the AU's protection force in Darfur - set out the need for the AU to hand over to the UN there, while retaining its African composition: 'It is not in the interest of Sudan, nor in the interest of Africa, nor indeed in the interest of the world, for us all to stand by, fold our hands and see genocide in Darfur.'

Soon after the Darfur crisis exploded on the world scene, Ntsebeza, the well-known South African jurist, in work commissioned by the UN Security Council, had not at that stage found explicit grounds for declaring genocidal acts or intent in Darfur.

In his, 'Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide', Gerard Prunier informs us that the real logic of the war is related to a word which Nazism, the demise of colonialism and the development of scientific anthropology have marginalised into intellectual exile and political opprobrium: 'race'.

'In the 1980s Colonel Gaddafi and Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi gave an answer: Darfur was poor and backward because it was insufficiently Arabized. It had missed out in the great adhesion to the Muslim umma because its Islam was primitive and insufficiently Arabic. The situation was pregnant with the potential for enormous destruction because it fitted only too well within the broader context of racial prejudice in the Sudan.'[9]

Prunier points out that, during the 1980s, Gaddafi as self-appointed leader and modern prophet of the Arab world distributed vast quantities of arms in Darfur. His plan was to get rid of Africans and replace them with Arabs. It is the same Gaddafi who said at a press conference in Amman at an Arab League summit meeting in October 2000 that 'two-thirds of Arabs live in Africa and the remaining third must join the other two in Africa'. Mamdani is worried that an important contention of the international campaign against the Sudanese government and its proxy militias is that 'the ongoing genocide is racial: "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans"'. But his objections cannot stand up against such evidence as produced here.

Arabisation and the assimilation of Africans

Arabisation has been the historical instrument for the expansion of the Arab culture and the Arab political world on the African continent. From the earliest times, the acculturation of conquered peoples, trading partners and the spread of Islam, became the motor for Arab expansion in Africa. In many parts of the world, Islam has not led to Arabisation. This is the case with Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the countries of Central Asia, Turkey, and parts of China, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and some other areas of the world. Local cultural traditions have prevailed in spite of the penetrative influences of Islam.

For many Messalit, Fur, Birgit and Zaghawa, the Islamic religion sits astride an older African religious system. There have therefore often been combinations of indigenous pre-Islamic traits, and, at other times, Africanised and nativised Islam.

The popularity of these is what the Janjaweed see as a stumbling block to greater Arabisation. Like the Yezidi Kurds, the Fur practise, in effect, a religion, which is an eclectic mix of indigenous African pre-Islamic traditions and usages, and Islamic ones. But the injunction that 'Arabic is the language of the God' has historically seduced many to bend to the sweep of Arabisation and Arabism.

Today the Nubians are about 3,000,000 in Egypt, a country of 70 million people. In the Sudan, the Nubians are very many more. Large sections of the Nubians, in both Egypt and the Sudan, have over centuries been Arabised. But in recent years a strong Africanist recollective tradition is affirming itself societally in Egypt in tandem with similar processes in the Sudan as a whole. Among the Beja around Kasalla, the Blue Nile region, the South Sudan, Nuba and Darfur. The noose is closing around what the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLA) in its early years described as 'the Khartoum clique'.

From the onset of the postcolonial era in the Sudan, Arabisation has been an avowed political offering of the political elite. Both the military and civilian regimes in Sudan over the past half-century have upheld the policy of Arabisation. It is inherently a racist policy. Mamdani bemoans those he describes as 'demonizing Arabs'. It would have been useful to be explicit and explain this. If he is suggesting that those who are fighting Arabisation and the international campaign against genocide in Darfur are Arab demonisers, then he has clearly nailed his flag to his mast: The ideology of the war on the side of the counter-insurgency is Arabist.

There are many Africans on the continent and in the diaspora who reject Arabisation; who have no sympathy with the idea of changing Africans into Arabs; who are happy to be Africans and nothing else. They have that right. Other minorities in the Arab world continue to speak in increasing volume about the non-Arab character and otherness of their communities. They include Syriac, Moronites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Kurds, Turkomen and Berber communities.

Many African intellectuals also took note of Osama bin Laden’s threats about Darfur. In 2006, He called for Islamist militants to prepare for a 'long war against the Crusader plunderers in western Sudan'. What such thinking cannot truly face up to is that both sides in the Darfur war are made up of Muslims, Arab Muslims and African Muslims. But, the African Muslims are regarded by their Arab fellow-inhabitants as heretics.

Most of us cannot support big-power intervention in the area, in whatever shape or form. But the AU in combination with the UN is, if well coordinated, acceptable. Many Africans are still waiting to hear, loud and clearly, Arab criticism of Sudanese government policy in Darfur. It is remarkable that the silence of members of the League of Arab States is so resounding.

The idea of assimilation and Arabisation of Africans comes to us in many guises. Ali Mazrui’s rendition of in September 2004 in an interview with an Arab media house, reads: 'I do believe that the African People and the Arab People are, at the moment, two people in the process of becoming one. So the process has been underway for centuries and they will, one day, be virtually indistinguishable, but at the moment it is a continuum, rather than a dichotomy.'[10]

An ethnic group is a group with a sense of common identity based on history, cultural affinities and solidarities of identification. Members of an ethnic group tend to identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. This boundary may take any of a number of forms - racial, cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, political - or differing combinations of these factors. Ethnic boundaries are frequently more or less permeable. Of all the factors which define an ethnic group, the racial factor is the least significant. Race is in anthropological usage, an ascribed/biological category; all the other factors are achieved categories. These latter are cultural. It is the cultural factor - understood to include language, traits and customary usages - which is the most important. It is nurture not nature which defines ethnicity. Ethnicity therefore largely overlaps with the notion of a cultural group.

Mamdani is mistaken when he writes: 'The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Messalit and Zaghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim).'

This is factually simply not correct. Arab ethnicities here include, the Baggara or Shuwa Arabs, Taisha, Rezeigat, Habbaniya, Beni Halba and others. In multilingual Africa, most people speak several languages. The fact that I speak English does not make me an Englishman. Arabic in the Sudan is a hegemonic language. In places like Darfur most people would know Arabic, but that does not make them Arabs. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias armed and supported by the Sudanese government. Yes, they embrace the same religion, but the Arabs of the Sudan regard the Islam of Africans as inferior.

Mamdani writes that: 'the dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny “Arabized” elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalized populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.'

He is correct in identifying the root cause of the conflict as the monopoly of power by what Garang often described as the 'Khartoum clique'. But why is Mamdani saying that this clique has monopolised and marginalised the populations of the south, east and west; then going on to say that the insurgents, the overwhelming majority in the east, south and west, should share power with what - in his own words - are 'a tiny Arabized elite from the riverine north of Khartoum'? In democracies, power rests with the majority. The English say, 'you cannot have your cake and eat it'.

He then goes on: 'The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organized negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.'

To reinforce the peace process is the democratic rights of the majorities which need to be acknowledged and respected. The simple reason why African Union organised arrangements have time and again fallen apart is, as Abel Alier years ago wrote about the post-colonial ruling class in Sudan, because they have made an easy habit of dishonouring agreements.[11] They fear the implications of democracy in the Sudan.

In Mamdani’s view, apparently one of the most irksome facts about the Darfur international campaign is that 'the conflict in Darfur is highly politicized, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign's constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans". But both "Arab" and "African" have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of "Arab". Locally, "Arab" was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become "Arab" over time. This process, known as Arabization, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharization in Ethiopia and Swahilization on the East African coast. The third meaning of "Arab" was "privileged and exclusive"; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabization with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent'.

Is the definition of an Arab a question of taking your pick from among these different meanings Mamdani offers? The 'pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad' is literally and metaphorically a joke in much of the Arab world. Arabs know too well that the historic civilisation that is Arab, came from the Arabian peninsula. It is a culture and civilisation of which they are proud. Arabisation does not result from merely speaking Arabic as a primary language. It involves the acceptance and adoption of Arab culture as a package. Yes, the Arab identity in the Sudan has been characterised by privilege and exclusivity. That is why the marginalised majority of the Sudanese are putting up resistance to its domination.

In the history of the relations between Arabs and Africans, from time immemorial, Arabs have been masters, and Africans slaves. Indeed, 'black' in much of the Arab world is equated with slave. Until today in Egypt, the so-called bawab (doorman, gate-keeper) is invariably a dark-skinned Nubian from Egypt or the Sudan. We are reminded that 'the bawab class is the lowest of the low.'[12]

Amharization in Ethiopia and Swahilization on the East African coast has not gone on unchecked and unquestioned. In our lifetimes, we know that in Ethiopia, Amhara cultural dominance has been one of the factors underlying some of the conflict we have seen in the area. Swahilization remains largely a linguistic affair. It includes in its mould Christians, Moslems, African religionists and a whole variety of African language-speakers. Swahilis in East Africa do not control the state anywhere. They are Africans. Arabization is a different kettle of fish. Effectively and eventually, it totally effaces the cultural characteristics of Africans. This is why Africans in the region, who historically were Christians before they became Muslims, today regard themselves as Arabs and are prepared to embark on genocidal wars in the service of Arabism and Arabisation.

In search of Africans

When he comes to the issue of who is an African, Mamdani shifts into postmodernist over-drive and writes that:

'"African", in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an "African" was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – "African" as Bantu and "African" as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign's characterisation of the violence as "Arab" against "African" obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of "Arab" and "African": a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticization, naturalization and, ultimately, demonization of the notion "Arab", as against "African", has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.'

Mamdani must not underestimate the power and relevance of language as an identification reference point. Language is a central feature of most cultures. Arguably, it is the most crucial feature. At the same time, it is one of the principal distinguishing features of homo sapiens as a culture creating animal. It is through language that we relate societally, through language that we transact our social lives.

I personally knew John Garang, for many years. Indeed, I spoke to him on the phone, long-distance, about a month before his very strange death. Nowhere does he define an African in the political terms Mamdani writes about. Garang was always a proud Dinka from Bor. Mamdani’s so-called inclusive definition of an African as 'anyone determined to make a future within Africa' is most perplexing.

When I read this definition to an intern in the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), Cape Town, Nana Kofi Appiah, his immediate and hilarious response was that this is an invitation to the pillagers of Africa. Does this sort of idea apply to other people in other parts of the world? Does a similar formulation apply to Chinese, Indians, Arabs or Europeans? If I arrived in China or India with a wish to make a future in these places, do I, on the basis of my wishes, become Chinese or Indian?

Cecil Rhodes, Verwoerd, Ian Smith were all people who were 'determined to make a future within Africa'. Were they Africans? I dare say they never even wished to be so regarded. Mamdani’s understanding of the so-called inclusive definition of an African makes Africaness very cheap. I say, 'if everybody is an African, then nobody is an African'.

We all know that, by appearance and looks, you cannot tell a Sunni from a Shia, a Northern Irish Protestant from a Catholic, a Palestinian from an Israeli, a Pakistani from an Indian. There are numerous other such examples. Black, in Darfur, does not really help us to identify an Arab from an African. The difference is more subtle and decisive. Africans are attached to more eclectic varieties of Islam than Arabs. They are more likely to be cultivators than pastoralists. They identify themselves as Africans and speak more African languages. They form the overwhelming majority of the population. For an American audience, black as understood in African-American parlance does not help us understand the nationality dynamics of Darfur. Africans are first and foremost a historical and cultural group. They identify themselves as such. Most are black, but there are blacks who are not African. From South India through Sri Lanka to Melanesia many such groups are to be found.

Years ago, I argued elsewhere that 'the racial definition of an African is flawed. It is unscientific and hence untenable. No serious mind today would use the race concept in any way except as an instrument for poetic imagery. What I am saying is that no group of people has been "pure" from time immemorial. Notions of purity belong to the language of fascists and the rubbish-bin of science. But before my observations are misunderstood let me take the argument into another direction. Most Africans are black, but not all Africans are black, and not all blacks have African cultural and historical roots.'[13]

Additionally, one must not forget that Arabism in Africa came largely through conquest and cultural domination. Therefore, even today, Arabisation and Arabism for Africans represent instruments of thralldom in a tradition, which precedes Western colonialism by a millennium.

1 Mahmood Mamdani. How Can We Name the Darfur Crisis? Preliminary Thoughts on Darfur. In, African Voices on Development and Social Justice. Editorials from Pambazuka News, 2004. Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2005, pp. 256–262.
See also, K.K. Prah. Darfur Beyond the Crossroads: Struggles of African Nationalism in, African Voices on Development and Social Justice, ibid, pp. 249-256.
2 See, the London Review of Books. Vol.29. No.5. March 2007.
3 Jack Goody. How ethnic is ethnic cleansing? New Left Review. 7 January– February 2001.
4 See, Gamal Nkrumah. Masters at holding on. Al-Ahram Weekly. 5-11 April. p.9.
5 Emily Wax. 'We Want to Make a Light Baby'; Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing. Washington Post Foreign Service. Wednesday 30 June 30 2004.
6 See, Documenting Atrocities in Darfur. US State Publication 11182. Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, September 2004.
7 See, .
8 Ibid.
9 Quoted here from, Harakati Shaka Lumumba. Darfur: A Wake-up Call for Africa. (Mimeo), Nairobi, Kenya. 12 November 2006. Appearing in Tinabantu, Vol.3, No.1, 2007.
10 Harakati Shaka Lumumba. Ibid.
11 Abel Alier. Southern Sudan. Too Many Agreements Dishonoured. Exeter: Ithaca Press, 1990.
12 See, Amina Abdul Salam. A doorman’s lot is not a happy one. The Egyptian Gazette, 29 March 2007, p.6.
13 Kwesi Kwaa Prah. Beyond the Color Line: Pan-Africanist Disputations. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998, p.36.

* Kwesi Kwaa Prah is director of The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) http://www.casas.org.za/, Cape Town.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/305/41566_Fanon.jpgMandisi Majavu draws on Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to encourage an exploration of the interconnections between psychology and society in Africa.

Derek Hook (2004) argues that Frantz Fanon’s greatest source of originality as a postcolonial theorist lay in the fact that he combined psychology and politics in his analysis of colonial problems, national liberation and social revolution.

For Fanon, psychopathology in the colonial society, or any other oppressive society for that matter, can be characterised as a ‘pathology of liberty’. This means that for a psychological intervention to be sincere and relevant, the psychological services offered would have to play their part in restoring freedom in some meaningful capacity to the sufferer (Hooks 2004).

According to Bulhan (1985), for Fanon, oppression in the practice and institutionalisation of violence by the colonial state is not only motivated and perpetuated by economic motives, but also by psychological and cultural interests. The revolutionary response of the oppressed to such violence generates a new language, people and humanity. Such a response has the potential to produce a liberated society (Bulhan 1985).

Concerning violence
Fanon argues that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon: 'The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it.' Accordingly, decolonisation is a programme of 'complete disorder' which aims to change the social order of the colonial world. It is a meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature: '[their] first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon'. Colonial society by its very nature is violent.

It does not, however, necessarily follow that decolonisation as a revolutionary programme is violent in nature. It might be true that most countries that have been colonised have achieved freedom through a violent struggle. However, that says more about the arrogance of colonial power than it says about the decolonisation programme itself.

This misconception of decolonisation as violent in nature characterises the false assumptions that underlie Fanon’s thinking about where the decolonisation process ought to begin. Fanon’s understanding of the colonial world is profound. However, some of his assumptions regarding decolonisation hinder how we might relate sensibly to the possibilities of moving forward, beyond pathology, to the liberated, decolonised society.

We could conceive of decolonisation as a fundamental, societal radical change in both the economy, and in social relations such as race and class relations; and that through such a programme, colonised people find their freedom; and not, as Fanon claims, through violence.

Fanon argues that violence for the colonised is therapeutic, a 'cleansing force'. But as Albert (2004) points out, 'violence has horrible effects on its perpetrators, more often than not causing them to devalue human life'. Colonial societies serve as evidence to support this view. There is no evidence to make us believe that violence perpetrated by the other side will not have the same effects.

Fanon argues that violence frees 'the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction...[and] restores his self-respect'. He does not provide evidence to support this perspective, nor does he explain his assumption regarding the ‘native inferiority complex’. He seems to assume that simply because blacks in the colony are subjected to all sorts of racist humiliation, this automatically results in an inferiority complex and self-hatred in blacks (Owusu-Bempah & Howitt 2000).

In his book Shades of Black, William Cross (1991) argues that there are at least four factors that explain why the mental health of blacks, including any propensity toward self-hatred, are not and have never been easily predicted by measures of racial identity:

- the limited generalisability of results of results of racial-preference studies conducted with three and four year old children
- the effects of black biculturalism, acculturation, and assimilation on black monoracial preference trends in racial identity experiments
- the problem of interpreting the meaning and salience of racial preference and racial identity for black adults operating with a multiple reference group orientation
- the historical failure of students and scholars of racial identity to differentiate between concepts and measures of ascriptive RGO [Reference Group Orientation] and concepts and measures of self-defined RGO.

Some of Fanon’s assumptions vis-à-vis the representation of decolonisation - the motivation that inspires natives to violently rebel against a colonial regime and the supposedly rampant inferiority complex - are unfounded. If we are concerned with building a sound postcolonial theory, then that theory ought at least to be based on sound assumptions. A postcolonial theory is needed that explains social events and psychological and political trends and phenomena sufficiently for us to situate ourselves, explain to others and understand the way things are.

The pitfalls of national consciousness
Fanon discusses how the new government of the liberated postcolonial state can betray the revolution. He argues that the middle class of the new postcolonial state is underdeveloped because it is reduced in numbers, has no capital, and is opposed to the revolutionary path. Eventually it falls into deplorable stagnation. For this middle class, nationalisation of the economy simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period. The middle class 'will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoise’s business agent'.

Fanon refers to this middle class as the 'bourgeois dictatorship'. He argues that they are not real bourgeoisie in the true sense of the word, but rather a 'sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it'. Accordingly, after independence this middle class does not hesitate to invest the money it makes out of its native soil in foreign banks.

According to Fanon, the reason it is corrupt is because it has a permanent wish to identify with former colonisers. Consequently, it adopts with enthusiasm their characteristic ways of thinking. It is incapable of generating great ideas to manage and develop the economy, for it remembers what it has read in European textbooks.

The logic that underlies Fanon’s analysis is that the postcolonial government and its new middle class betray the revolution because, among other things, they want to be white, or to occupy the position formerly occupied by the coloniser. For example, he writes that before independence the 'look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possessions – all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible'.

History teaches us, as for example Howard Zinn argues in his People’s History of the United States, that when people are oppressed, they always rebel sooner or later. Furthermore, they do not rebel because of lust or envy, but because they believe in justice, equity and freedom.

In most cases, the revolution is betrayed due to a combination of a lack of vision for the new institutions for a democratic society, and a mixture of internal and external forces such as self-interest and the global economy.

Postcolonial politics from this standpoint is revealing and enables us not only to explain but to predict political and social phenomena. A theory based on flawed assumptions, that compels us to focus on lust, envy and desires to be white, forces us to chase psychologically reductionist dead-ends.

On national culture
Fanon’s basic premise is that native intellectuals respond to colonialism and the cultural hegemony that goes with it by rejecting Western culture and embracing a pre-colonial history and way of life. To escape from the hegemony of the Western culture, Fanon argues that the native intellectual feels the need to turn backwards towards his unknown roots, and as a result, sets a high value on the African customs and traditions: 'The sari becomes sacred, and shoes that come from Paris or Italy are left off in favour of pampooties, while suddenly the language of the ruling power is felt to burn your lips.'

The appreciation of certain Western ideas and the fact that certain postcolonial writers are influenced by Western writers and write in European languages should not be presented as a failure to create an authentic postcolonial cultural work, as Fanon presents it.

To write in an African language, or to quote only African writers, does not necessarily translate into originality. A radical postcolonial vision on culture ought not to be opposed to diverse cultures, including Western cultures, or a reduction diverse cultures to a least common denominator. The point is to enjoy their benefits while transcending prior debits.

As Albert (2006) points out the only real cultural salvation lies in eliminating racist institutions, dispelling colonialist ideologies and changing the colonial environment within which historical communities relate, so that they might maintain and celebrate difference without violating solidarity. A radical post-colonial theory would encourage individuals to choose 'cultural communities they prefer rather than have elders or others of any description define their choice for them' (Albert 2006: 47).

Conclusion
What is needed is a liberated society that is not characterised by cultural hierarchies and the one-way community assault common throughout the colonial history. Liberation postcolonial theory ought to provide us with concepts to describe and explain what it would take to build such a society and what such a society would constitute.

This essay is based on the premise that to have a growth-oriented attitude about one’s ideas, rather than a stability-oriented attitude, is healthy and the antithesis of sectarianism: 'Sectarianism is defensive and preservationist and often obscurantist and unconcerned with truth. We need instead to be self-critical and growth-oriented, and to strive for clarity and seek truth as best we can' (Albert 2004: 190).

References:

Albert, M., 2004, Realising hope: Life beyond capitalism, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Albert, M., 2004,. Thought dreams: Radical theory for the 21st century, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Bulhan, H.A., 1985, Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression, New York: Plenum Press.

Cross, W.E., 1991, Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American identity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fanon, F., 1990, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Books.

Hook, D., 2004, 'Steve Biko, psychopolitics and critical psychology', in Hook, D., ed., Critical psychology, Cape Town: UCT Press, pp. 84-114.

Owusu-Bempah, K. & Howitt, D., 2000, Psychology beyond western perspectives, UK: British Psychological Society Books.

* Mandisi Majavu, a Stephen Bantu Biko fellow, is currently working on his masters in psychology at the University of Cape Town. [email][email protected]

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

Gender in the Pan-African community

NO! - a film on rape in the Black American community

Marian Douglas

'... we so called men, we so called brothers wonder why it's so hard to love our women when we're about loving them the way america loves us.' – the late Black American poet Essex Hemphill

On a warm spring evening in Washington, we drive past a building with a sign describing the address as a cultural center for expats from a certain African country. A crowd gathered outside the building is
all-male. It makes me wonder once again about the nature of gender relations in Black communities other than my own.

As I consider my life and those of my Afro-descendant sisters throughout the Americas, often I meditate on our fates had we been born, the same colours we are today, little more than a century ago.

For the past seven years or so, the month of December reminds me not only of Kwanzaa and Christmas but also of rape. In 1854 a very young Black American woman named Celia is tried and found guilty in a US court of 'law'. She is convicted and sentenced to execution for killing Robert Newsom, her rapist and the man who has imprisoned her in an institution' called – chattel – slavery. Celia is hanged on
Thursday 21 December 1854, just days before Christmas, for defending herself from repeated sexual assault.

Such is the course of American 'justice'. The fact that Celia had been raped regularly and repeatedly was treated as so 'inconsequential' that, according to Dr Melton McLaurin, Celia's biographer, the rapes
were not even mentioned during her trial for murder.

Most of what we now know of Celia's brief and unprotected life is carefully detailed in McLaurin's book, Celia: A Slave, compiled from the historical record - mostly musty and neglected Missouri legal
documents.

Her story and millions more like it form an integral but largely silenced part of what we Black Americans refer to as our 'race memory'. This memory lives within me, and even more so since my own family was enslaved in central Missouri where these events of Celia's life and death occurred.

In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs also spills the ugly truth of being enslaved as a girl, a female, as someone's daughter and as a woman and mother. Jacobs speaks
clearly of how the unspeakable - rapes, exploitation, concubinage, violence, killing and suicide - occurred not just daily but 'yea, hourly' as Jacobs writes, to Black women and girls.

This is the context in which I viewed Aishah Simmons' film about rape within the Black community. What we now need is for our families, communities and organizations to screen and begin discussing this ground-breaking film.

For more than seven years I've researched the lives of Black women and our female ancestors in the Americas, girls and women like Celia and Harriet Jacobs. This is why I want to write about Aishah Simmons' labor of love, this documentary, NO! But Aishah's film is much more than just a movie about rape. It's also a major contribution to help us re-learn our history, an inducement to what I call 're-membering' - re-assembling, pulling together once again - the Black communities of the US and throughout the Americas, and reaching back across the Atlantic to Africa's communities, as well as the Black communities of Europe and beyond.

Because some form of sexual assault takes place regularly in virtually every society in the world, NO! is a film for all people and deserves to be shared. It also illustrates articulately how, in the Americas,
Black women's and girls' historically recent experiences of systematic, collective and societally condoned rape and sexual enslavement trace back to the roots of Europe's various colonial empires throughout our region.

In 19th century America Celia was a young nineteen year old Black woman and a 'baby mother' of two, though actually viewed as no more than a 'slave'.

Sexual exploitation and gender-based violence have been the rule rather than an 'exception' in Black women's and girls' lives in the Americas ever since the slave raids across Africa and deadly trans-Atlantic mass forced migrations of our people.

The 'crime' of our 19 year old ancestor Celia, condemned to death by America's 'justice' system, was having been selected and enslaved by the ill-fated slaveholder, "the master", Robert Newsom. Newsom
actually purchased Celia to supply him with sex. With the blessing and sanction of US law and custom, as a white man, his primary responsibility was to never acknowledge Celia nor his sexual relations
with her, nor his children born to Celia.

NO! is the first documentary where, finally, I see and hear certain connections made between our history and our contemporary, lived experiences of gender and race.

Law professor Adrienne Davis talks of how she now realizes and refers to Black Americans' chattel enslavement as the "sexual economy" it truly was. An enormous, universe-shifting, global economy not only of 'can't-see-in-the-mornin'-til-can't-see-at-night' daily servitude and backbreaking labour, but inextricably also an economy of sex and condoned and condemned sex relationships.

'Black women's reproductive and sexual relationships were an integral part of the political economy', Davis states in the film. She asserts that American slavery '... construed childbearing by enslaved women, and their sexuality, as market and economic relationships that actually created white wealth.'

Farah Jasmine Griffin of Columbia University speaks of the routine sexual assault of our sisters, largely though not only, in the American South as having been a key yet mostly unspoken reason for the massive migration of our families and kin to the US North and West, the 'great migration' of 20th USA.

Simmons is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city that was my home in my earlier life, that's been home to other members of my family. Simmons tells me what influenced her to create NO! was 'the value of African women's lives'.

'The doc speaks for itself. It also looks at Black women's history.'

I ask about public reaction so far. 'It's a complicated answer. There's been so much resistance to my making the documentary, but NO! has a life of her own now.

'Audiences are now changing. There has been some resistance on the part of black men, as far as them being perpetrators as well as victims of racism.

'The Black community tends to rally behind Black men accused of perpetrating sexual assault. Mike Tyson was a big turning point for me. Lots of women castigated Desiree Washington.' She adds that 'when black men are brutalized by white supremacy, people rally around them...'

In this film nothing is romanticised in its reflections on boxer Mike Tyson's conviction for the rape of a woman named Desiree Washington. There's also footage of certain Black male religious leaders coming to Tyson's defense and even appearing to praise him. Black women still often find it difficult or still even prohibited for them to physically enter the pulpit or preacher's space in many Black churches. So it's pretty difficult to watch footage of Tyson as a convicted rapist being physically embraced by 'the brothers' right near that space at once sacred, masculinised, and often still exclusionary of women.

As if Tyson's welcome in the bosom of some Black religious leaders weren't enough, perhaps even more shocking is seeing and hearing Black Muslim leader (and former 'calypsonian') Louis Farrakhan caught on film as he berates, ridicules and derisively mimicks Black women in a speech to an audience. At Howard University, the audience emits a loud and collective gasp.

I was lucky enough to attend NO!'s November 2006 premiere at Howard in DC. It was a mostly Black audience of students and more mature folk, men as well as women. Following the film a lengthy Q&A session featured Simmons and Lori Robinson, another survivor of sexual assault, who's written I Will Survive: The African-American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse (Seal Press, 2003). Robinson recounted how two strangers took her inside her home and attacked her.

The Howard screening was sponsored by the DC Rape Crisis Center, which wisely offered on-the-spot counseling during the premiere. To support the effort I buy a dvd of the film along with Robinson's book.

NO! is divided into eight parts: 'Introduction & Devastation of Date Rape', 'Weapon of History: Slavery, Freedom, Sexploitation', 'Survivors Silenced (Who is a Race Traitor?)', 'Civil Rights & Wrongs', 'Raping
the Next Generation (Impact on Girls)', 'Holding Men Accountable: Campus, Clergy & Community', 'Unequal Justice Under Law', and 'Healing, Faith, & Hope'.

It begins with survivors retelling their own personal and varied experiences of rape and attempted rape. One adult survivor recalls being 12 years old shortly before she was assaulted by an older boy.

In the wake of ex-radio personality Don Imus's 'gutter remarks' about Rutgers University's highly successful women's basketball team, NO!'s critique of hip hop and 'gangsta rap' takes on greater meaning. Video features men surrounding themselves with scantily dressed young women.
The film depicts gangsta hip hop for what it is: a disturbing expression of something very skewed and distorted in the perception of the female, feminine part of ourselves and our own community.

Viewing these clips makes me feel self-conscious and deeply uncomfortable. I remember earlier cultural and political gender battles waged not so long ago by the late political leader, C. Delores
Tucker, who was one of Black America's leading public policy advocates. Dr Tucker raised the issue of the treatment and depiction of Black women in the music industry, not only in the United States Congress but also in local Washington and across the US and beyond. As head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, "C. Delores", as many called her, dared to speak up and speak out.

Her articulate and valid critcism of the vulgarisation and objectification of Black womanhood in so many music videos brought her ridicule by many in the music business and so-called "street" culture.

In the film Aaronette White eloquently describes her assault by someone she describes as the then-most senior Black administrator at the university she attended in the 1980s. White also remembers that at the time, another Black man advised her not to file a complaint because, according to him, no one would believe her over her college administrator attacker.

NO! also pulls together soul-stirring contributions from the older generation of sister-activists, including Spelman College's Beverly Guy Sheftall, and Johnetta Cole, former president of Spelman and
recently retired as president of another institution dedicated to Black women's higher education, Bennett College in North Carolina.

I rejoiced to hear the voices and thinking of veteran sister-leaders, like lesbian feminist writer and activist Barbara Smith, the founder of Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, and former Black Panther chairperson Elaine Brown. Barbara takes us through the early coalitions of lesbian and heterosexual Black women, fighting violence against women, especially within Black and other communities of colour. Internatiionally, did women's rallying cry in the US: 'We cannot live without our lives' reverberate elsewhere among our people?

All of us are called upon to remind each other of the truth of these words, and to teach our younger generations of boys and girls, women and men, who are coming up behind us.

Simmons' film is only made stronger by the contributions of several men. After all, ultimately it is men's responsibility simply to stop inflicting most sexual and other forms of violence.

Enter Essex Hemphill. In a video recorded before his death, the late gay Black American poet recites 'Conditions XXI', a poem he originally entitled 'To Some Supposed Brothers':

'You judge a woman by the length of her skirt, by the way she walks, talks, looks, and acts; by the color of her skin you judge and will call her "bitch!" "Black bitch!" if she doesn't answer your: "Hey baby, whatcha gonna say to a man..."'

Also within the film is a dialogue between Sulaiman Nuruddin and Caribbean-born Ulester Douglas, both working with Atlanta, Georgia-based group Men Stopping Violence.

Admits Nuruddin, 'How difficult it is to challenge my brother, wanting to protect my brother from the white male patriarchy... how I will collude or not talk or be silent about that which needs to be talked
about.'

Caribbean native Ulester Douglas breaks it down further. 'We will protect the race at any cost, even if we're killing our sisters.'

Samiya Bashir's incredible poem, "Treason" stuns the listener, just as another young Black poetess describes going to poetry slams and how after finding her "attractive", brother poets first want to protect her, up to the moment they hear her read a poem about her love for another woman.
After this fateful poem she feels the brothers' intentions and attitudes shift.
'Manhood offended', if given the chance, she says, a few of the same men, moments earlier her friends and admirers, actually would sexually assault her, ostensibly in order to 'teach her a lesson'.

Gwendolyn Simmons, who's also Aishah's mother, paints a self-portrait of being a Spelman student in 1962 and getting involved in SNCC - the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ironically the elder Simmons' own early devotion to 'the Black liberation struggle' ventually brings her into proximity with almost being raped. She describes the would-be rapist, the type of man whom in the 1970s we called 'a movement brother'. Gwen Simmons says he was a well-known SNCC leader and 'a local Mississipian' but does not name him.

Both the poetry-slamming sister and Gwendolyn Simmons' cautionary tale remind me how often rape is very 'local'. It is most often perpetrated by males we've seen and/or know, which contributes to an even greater destrucion of trust, and the equally powerful need to heal and restore our trust in ourselves and others.

The filmmaker describes NO! as her own child; now living its own life. Simmons is very aware of obstacles and perserverance. She completed the film in 2005, eleven years after starting it in 1994.
She tells me the doc grew out of "knowing black women affected by sexual assault and the silence in our community - acute silence in our community - around this issue.'

Aishah's company, AFRO-LEZ Productions, reflects the fact that she's also an 'out' lesbian. Her film moves to break down some of the Black community's silence about loving and accepting our own Black gay and lesbian people. Lesbians and gay men are seen and heard in this film.

From Barbara Smith to the haunting, poignant poetry read by the late Essex Hemphill, to the hilarious, insightful and deeply touching Loretta Ross and others, Aishah's work honors and includes the presence and contributions of 'all her peeps' - all of our people - to our common struggle and to this film.

More than ever, these days Aishah is still busy 'running'. Travelling and too busy for a real interview for the moment, she emails me to say that NO!'s subtitled versions should be available by fall 2007, thanks to a grant from Ford Foundation. Work also is underway on the accompanying educational guide which will be available as a download on the NO! website.

This is a film about all of us as humans. It's not only about pain, but also healing, recovery and self-discovery. While some may try to frame this film as 'controversial' or 'subversive', globally Black communities will benefit by doing whatever it takes and by any means necessary to bring this documentary to the wider audience it deserves - our families, schools, religious bodies, clubs, reunions and other organisations.

Essex Hemphill died of AIDS on 4 November 1995. This line from the film is the last line in his earlier-quoted poem. Reading it on a page isn't the same as watching and hearing him fairly spit it.

'... we so called men, we so called brothers wonder why it's so hard to love our women when we're about loving them the way america loves us.'

Marian Douglas is the author of Marian's Blog -

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Wasai J. Nanjakululu is a Kenyan based in Nairobi, working on HIV/Aids policy at the Agency for Cooperation in Research and Development (ACORD). In March, Saloman Kebede interviewed him on the forthcoming debate on continental government during the next African Union summit, June–July 2007.

This interview is one of several interviews with African citizens and CSO leaders on the AU proposal for continental government. Ivy Maina, consulting with the pan-Africa programme at Oxfam, edited the interview.

Saloman Kebede: What form of continental government does Africa need?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: We recognise that we were given artificial states through colonialism. Breaking these states overnight is a daunting task. We should instead build these states to become federal states of Africa in order to end up with a federal government of Africa. This kind of government should then identify historical links that countries share and create regional states like the East African Federation. This may help in dealing with internal conflicts.

Saloman Kebede: Why is continental union important to African citizens, especially the poor and the marginalised?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: If the continental union’s importance is based purely on political recognition, then what good shall come out of it? It must guarantee freedom of movement and free markets that work for Africa. This will also provide an enabling environment to mount a continent-wide HIV/Aids response. By making Africa one huge market we could jointly procure anti-retrovirals and establish pharmaceutical factories on the continent. This would ease the prices of these essential life saving drugs.

Saloman Kebede: What strategic areas of focus do you propose for the integration to be successful?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: One, we need to break open state borders. Two, let the citizens be well informed and involved in policy making at country level, in order to allow people to engage democratically in governance, wealth creation and distribution. Then, when we propose the issue of African unity then the masses will not see the leaders as having hidden motives. Three, we have to come up with a good economic policy for African unity. Finally, let us be on the look-out for reactionary processes at country level and be prepared to deal with them.

Saloman Kebede: What obstacles must the AU overcome for the continental union to be successful?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: I believe that you only see obstacles when you take your eyes off the goals. We also need to come to a place where we can allow others to lead but not allow the stronger countries to dictate to other states. The AU must embrace a culture of empowering its people and preserve the historical links that unite us.

Saloman Kebede: What one policy would your organisation propose to be adopted in continental integration?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: All governments seem to recognise the role of the civil society in development. I would like all pan-African organisations to be registered within the AU and given a legal mandate to operate in all African countries. We need to avoid instances as those in Eritrea where ACORD was kicked out, or where some CSOs are being proscribed from Zimbabwe. Then we shall be able to engage across the continent and create overwhelming support and ownership for continental union government from the masses.

Saloman Kebede: What milestones would you like to see achieved within the first phase - the first two years?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: I work with a pan-African organisation that works to build and strengthen African social movement. We are present in 18 countries in Africa. By opening up borders, we will cut costs on visa and interconnection of flights. Open the borders, let people, goods and services move. I am sure that can be done at a click of a finger from our heads of states.

Saloman Kebede: What meaningful decisions should the head of states make so that this process is people driven, rights based and publicly accountable to African citizens?

Wasai J. Nanjakululu: They should open up the debate in the media to popularise the proposal and involve the civil society and national parliaments.

The views expressed here are the perspectives of the interviewee. Jacob Wasai Nanjakululu can be reached at email: [email][email protected]

FEATURES: Kwesi Kwaa Prah on Mamdani's interpretation of the conflict in Darfur
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Mandisi Majavu on psychology, postcolonial theory and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
- The political situation and the return of Bakili Muluzi in Malawi
- Doreen Lwanga on violence and paranoia in South Africa
LETTERS:
- Responses to last week's article on solidarity with Zimbabwe
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Will the next G8 summit honour old promises?
BLOGGING AFRICA:
- Review of the North African blogosphere
BOOKS AND ARTS:
- Marian Douglas reviews the documentary film NO on rape in the black American community
AFRICAN UNION MONITOR:
- Opening Africa’s borders and challenging HIV/Aids
- CSO pre-summit activities

WOMEN AND GENDER: State of the World’s Mothers report
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Congolese flee fresh clashes
HUMAN RIGHTS: Study on Ugandan torture survivors
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: The scramble for Africa’s oil
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Risk of health crisis in South Sudan
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Another blow for Senegal’s opposition
AFRICA AND CHINA: Chinese activists look to Africa
CORRUPTION: New TI report on judicial corruption
DEVELOPMENT: African countries fight EU for survival
HEALTH AND HIV/Aids: Medicines without doctors
EDUCATION: West asked to help Zimbabwe’s children
LGBTI: Mauritian blood donor system brands homosexuals
ENVIRONMENT: Call for strong leadership to tackle climate change
LAND & LAND RIGHTS: Botswana’s bushmen seek UK support
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Nigerian journalists attacked
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: All set for eLearning Africa
PLUS: e-newsletters and mailings lists; fundraising and useful resources; courses,
seminars and workshops, jobs and books and publications

*Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit

Around 300 mainly female workers at the Mansoura Spanish Garment Factory in the Nile delta have occupied the plant since April 21. The workers are staging a sit-in on the firm’s shop floor after a dispute with management over missed pay and the contested sale of the company.

On April 25, 2007, IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, and the Financial Times launched the second annual IFC/FT Essay Competition. This year's theme is: “Private Sector Development: Creating Markets, Transforming Lives.” Entries are being accepted from Wednesday, April 25, 2007 to Sunday, September 30, 2007.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) invites applications from suitably qualified African scholars for the post of Deputy Executive Secretary in its pan-African Secretariat located inDakar, Senegal. All applications must be received by 31 October, 2007. Any application received after this date will not be considered.

"Information for Change: Generating, Publishing, and Applying Knowledge for Development," a workshop that will take place at the Cape Town Book Fair on Monday, 18 June, will address the following questions. What is the role of information in achieving development aims? How is knowledge generated, isseminated, and used? Where do you go to find information? What is the role of the researcher, the publisher, the librarian, and the NGO? How can publishing help make change happen? Admission is free.

Medecins Sans Frontieres’ (MSF) flagship antiretroviral programme in Khayelitsha is taking strain and has been forced to put patients on waiting lists as nurses and doctors struggle to cope with the growing demand. In a report titled “Help Wanted”, the humanitarian organization warns that efforts to further increase access to HIV treatment and maintain and improve quality of care are coming up against a wall due to the severe shortage of health workers.

Looking for a Livelihoods Coordinator to provide technical and management support to the livelihood security programmes in the four programme counties, Grand Bassa, Lofa, Bong and Montserrado. Career sector: Management, Coordination, Leadership; Type of work : Accomodation Provided, Contract, Full Time. Closing Date: 15.06.2007

I was travelling in Germany all of last week, 13-20 May 2007, like a politician on a whistle stop campaign. My journey had begun in Nairobi. I went via Amstadam to Hamburg. From Hamburg, I travelled by road to Rostock then off by train to the beautiful Gothe town of Weimar, from where we again got on the train to Bonn via Frankfurt.

This is not election year in Germany. Even if it were, I could not be campaigning for a seat in the Bundestag, or the European parliament, since I am neither a German nor a European citizen.

But it was a campaign of a sort. I was participating in various pre-G8 summit activities and events organised by the UN Millennium Campaign in Germany, in partnership with other civil society and NGO groups, including the Catholic church, and even elements of the private sector who support the global campaign against poverty.

Many of my colleagues had doubts and wondered if it was a good use of my time and energy. One cynical colleague even suggested that I was perhaps just going just for the trip. Another who knew that this could not be the case, and that I definitely could not be going there for the weather, consoled the others with a more philosophical doubt: 'Tajudeen is a servant of lost causes who believes that he can make stones hear!'

Their cynicism is not without foundation. It is not that they do not know the significance of the most important club of the richest countries in the world. They are very much aware that G8 countries dominate global trade, commerce, finance, global institutions, corporations and disproportionately use, misuse and abuse global resources; and that against this stark reality, the rest of us look like poor tenants living on the fringes of the real estate of the G8 countries.

Rather their scepticism is based on painful lessons from previous G8 summits. Their expectation now is 'not to expect anything at all'. That way, they protect themselves against disappointment. It is not that they do not believe that there are many things this club of the world’s most powerful countries could do about the world’s problems, from poverty to pollution; but that they no longer hold their breath that they will.

I call these non-expectations the post-Gleneagles downward spiral. The G8 summit in that Scottish town in 2005 raised so much hope that the richer countries of the world were able, ready and willing to stop treating the overwhelming majority of the poorer peoples of the world as illegal tenants; rather as fellow human beings in a shared estate that respects our common humanity with dignity.

At Gleneagles, old commitments such as those contained in the Millennium Declaration, as translated into the MDGs, were renewed, while additional promises were made to fast track the end of the extreme poverty and hunger, reform global financial and trading regimes to facilitate fairer trade, write of the odious debts of poor countries, improve both the quantity and the quality and effectiveness of aid.

2005 was even declared ‘the year of Africa’ - thanks to the discredited, soon to be ex-prime minister, Tony Blair - amidst optimism that the world would stop doing wrong to Africa and start playing fair; while African leaders would also stop doing wrong by their peoples by improving governance and increasing accountability to their own citizens.

Initially there was a buzz of activities to potentially shut up the critics and cynics. Debt relief was provided for 14 African countries that were already in the HIPC initiative. Non-HIPC African countries - Nigeria for example - had some of their debt cancelled while they paid off the rest. (Nigeria paid back more to Britain in 2005/2006 than the global total of British aid – therefore raising the question: who is aiding whom?)

But the majority of the African countries, unable to pay their debts, are still waiting on bended knees at the G8 doors. The volume of aid also increased in quantity. But the old habits of tied aid, rewarding current favoured leaders, and withholding from those out of favour, lack of coordination, non-delivery and not meeting promises are still the practice.

With hindsight, even the aid increase was soon revealed to be paper money because it was mostly debt relief. And Nigeria and Iraq swallowed a larger proportion of it.

However 2005 represented a high point in both public awareness in the G8 countries and globally about these issues, forcing political leaders to take note and recommit themselves to doing something.

Today, that something is lagging behind all expectations. Aid levels are now falling because G8 leaders are backsliding and retreating from their commitments.

And yet in the troika of trade, debt and aid, aid is the weakest link, though the most visible politically.

Aid can be doubled, tripled or quadrupled. But without further significant movement on trade and universal debt relief, the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America will continue to be trapped in the vicious cycle of structural poverty, induced and reproduced by the unequal terms of global trading regimes, imposed by the richer countries through the IMF, World Bank, EU and WTO.

Poor countries can trade their way fairly from poverty to prosperity. Aid is like emergency treatment at the scene of accident. It is well appreciated, and often timely. But it does not mean that the wounded should not go for proper medical examination. For long term development, it is not aid that these African need, but a fairer trading system and opportunity to choose their own development model.

Most African countries produce what they do not consume and largely consume what they do not produce. But the price of both what they produce and consume are determined from outside, namely the EU, G8 and now increasingly China.

Therefore Africa cannot be aided out of poverty without a fundamental reform of the unequal trade that is rigged against our producers, workers, professionals and domestic companies. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprising, this is the one area where the G8 countries, the EU and the US have continued to conspire against the poorest peoples of the world in the stagnated so called development round – the Doha negotiations in the WTO.

If the G8 wants to renew the faith of its own citizens in their leadership of the world, and convince poor countries that they actually mean what they say, the answer is very simple: honour your own commitments.

Africa does not need new promises, but the fulfilment of old ones. Both the ones we made to ourselves through the African Union, Nepad and the MDGs, and those promised by the G8.

Everywhere I spoke, I told my German friends and other activists who care about international development, many of whom are as frustrated with their leaders’ broken promises that we are doubly disappointed with ours and the G8.

The next G8 summit in the East German town of Heiligendamm should not be business as usual, but business in the most unusual way. And that means two things: No more new promises, but the honouring of all the old ones. That would be a truly welcome surprise.

About thirty civil society organisations from across Africa met in Accra at the SSNIT Guest House on May 18, to discuss plans for civil society participation in the up-coming African Union (AU) Summit to be held in Ghana. The African Union Summit as usual will be preceded by a series of activities, including civil society events.

Malaria diagnostics are grossly underused and there is widespread over-treatment for malaria in patients with negative test results in Zambia, according to the findings of a cross-sectional survey published in the May 23-30th edition of the Journal of American Medical Association. The study calls for the provision of new tools to reduce the overuse of expensive antimalarial treatments and recommends a major change in the treatment of fever in patients without malaria.

Magharebia reports that Algeria has created a multinational company called the Oil Spill Response Company, with the mission of combating marine pollution caused by hydrocarbons. The Algerian-registered company plans to cover more than 20,000 km of coastline ranging from the Suez Canal in Egypt to Cabinda Bay, Angola.

The Web Manager is the chief project manager of OSI's websites and new media initiatives. (S)he coordinates production (programming, design, editorial), develops and implements business practices and marketing strategies, standardizes and maintains content management and publishing processes, and manages a geographically distributed team of programmers, designers, editors, and writers. (S)he is also the main liaison between internal and external constituencies. The web manager reports to OSI's Director of Public Affairs. Deadline: May 31, 2007

Feminist.com is currently looking for interns and volunteers in the areas of grant writing, fundraising, web programming and design, content development, typing (to transcribe interviews, articles and book excerpts), link scouters, researchers and many other opportunities.

Bushman leader Roy Sesana will meet with British MPs at Westminster this Wednesday 23 May to seek support for his people’s ten-year struggle to return to their land in the Kalahari desert, Botswana. Despite the Bushmen’s dramatic court victory in December, the Botswana government is trying to prevent them returning to their land.

Anti-poverty campaigners have likened trade negotiations between the European Union (EU) and several regions in Africa to a boxing match between a schoolboy novice and a heavyweight champion. Such disparity appears particularly evident in the case of the EU's talks with governments from Eastern and Southern Africa, with whom Brussels wishes to sign an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) by the end of this year.

Human Rights Watch mourns the death of Moroccan human rights activist Driss Benzekri, who died on Sunday after a long illness at the age of 57. Arrested for his left-wing student activities in 1974, Benzekri served the next 17 years as a political prisoner. Freed in 1991 by the late King Hassan II, Benzekri immersed himself in the human rights work that consumed him until the end of his days.

To help us sustain and build on our current position we now seek an Organisation Consultant with a demonstrable interest in sustainability and corporate responsibility. We are particularly interested to hear from those experienced in new business development and in managing complex projects across their life cycle. Deadline: 6 June, 2007

The Youth Program Manager’s primary role is to reinforce the quality of the youth program across the Country Program in line with the IRC Program Framework, the Programming Principles and the Country Strategic Plan, and to strengthen the capacity of IRC Burundi youth staff. The Manager ensures the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the UAM program. He/she is in charge of writing donor reports and of budget management of ongoing grants.

The University of Cape Town is seeking a Vice-Chancellor to succeed Professor Njabulo Ndebele, who completes his second term of office in mid-2008, and invites applications and nominations for the post. The Vice-Chancellor is the University’s Chief Executive Officer, responsible to Council and Senate, and should be a leader who is able to provide direction and inspire others. Closing date: 1, June 2007

Community Learning Resource Centres (CLRC) are facilitied, initiated and managed by their communities. They aim to increase access to learning opportunities and facilitate activities which increase self-reliance. A CLRC is expected to catalyze community mobilization for the purpose of learning and earning. In 2004 UCRC partnered with Rambula Community Library and the Department of Adult Education to facilitate the creation of 16 CLRCs across Siaya district.

A report appearing in Business Week states that now that the computer industry has its first accounting of how many patents Microsoft says are violated by open-source software, the question for many tech vendors is how aggressively the software giant will begin enforcement. And judging from the reaction in the blogosphere, the new disclosures inspire fear.

The history of cartooning in Kenya, as it is elsewhere in Africa, is indeed a work in progress. Little has been written on Kenyan journalism, and even less on cartooning. A generation ago, Kenya hardly had any cartooning significance. But in the last two decades, cartoonists have taken the media by storm. Today, all the major newspapers in Kenya feature political and comic strips. This publication sets out this history and also explores the impact cartooning has had on the political development of the country. The booklet is compiled by Patrick Gathara of the Association of East African Cartoonists (KATUNI) and funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Orders to Patrick Gathara ([email protected])

This report was produced by five independent human rights organizations in response to the government of Zimbabwe’s state party report to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (African Commission). It presents a very different picture of the state of human rights in Zimbabwe to that contained in the government’s report.

Recent internal comments from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ("the Global Fund") suggest an intention to focus more on the three diseases, and to leave the strengthening of health systems and support for the health workforce to others. This could create a "Medicines without Doctors" situation in which the medicines to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are available, but not the doctors or the nurses to prescribe those medicines adequately.

Much remains to be done in Mauritius to ensure equal rights for all citizens. The questionnaire one has to fill before giving one’s blood is an example of discrimination against gays. Danielle is gay. She did not hesitate to tell it to the person present in the blood donors’ caravan in Port-Louis when she went for blood donation. But she was astonished when she was told that she could not give her blood because she was homosexual.

Congo opposition lawmakers and human rights campaigners on Thursday dismissed as a whitewash a parliament report on a government crackdown against opposition protesters in which more than 100 people were killed. They said the report on the violence in western Bas-Congo province on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 was a setback for efforts to promote good governance in Democratic Republic of Congo, which last year held its first free elections in over four decades.

Intel, the software giant has launched the World Ahead Programme, which aims at expanding accessibility, connectivity, education and content for the world's developing communities. The programme aims at developing low-cost full-featured PCs for first-time computer users, extending Worlwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) technology and deployment, training 10 million more teachers on the effective use of technology in education and donating 100,000 PCs to classrooms in developing communities to promote the effective use of technology for improved learning.

Kenya will next week host the second International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development, Education and Training from 28th to 30th May, 2007 at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi. Dubbed eLearning Africa, the conference will be held under the theme "Building Infrastructures and Capacities to Reach out to the Whole of Africa".

Al Jazeera reports that former members of a pro-government militia in the west of the Ivory Coast have burnt piles of weaponry in a symbolic gesture to mark the completion of their disarmament. Attending the ceremonies on Saturday, the president of the Ivory Coast hailed the disarmament as an important step towards re-unifying the war-torn west African country.

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s appointment of activist Elizabeth Mataka as the HIV/AIDS Special Envoy for Africa is an important step for gender equality in Africa, and for addressing the impact of HIV/AIDS on women. On the same day, 21 May, the General Assembly reviewed progress towards universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, and discussed the impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls.

Corruption is undermining judicial systems around the world, denying citizens access to justice and the basic human right to a fair and impartial trial, sometimes even to a trial at all, according to the Global Corruption Report 2007: Corruption in Judicial Systems issued today by Transparency International, the global coalition against corruption.

At least 10 journalists working for Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State (BCOS) in Nigeria have been attacked. Enraged by the public broadcaster’s relay that state elections would go ahead today, 100 armed supporters of a local politician, Christopher Alao Akala, allegedly stormed BCOS’s headquarters in Ibadan and started attacking journalists with machetes as well as smashing equipment. The attack had trapped many employees while others took to their heels.

More than a third of Swaziland's population is in need of food aid, after its worst ever harvest, said a UN food agencies' report.A prolonged dry spell has left around 400,000 vulnerable people in need of approximately 40,000 metric tonnes (mt) of food assistance until the next harvest in April 2008, according to a report by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), which was based on a joint assessment mission.

At least 40 children are among thousands of newly displaced civilians in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) fleeing ongoing clashes between Congolese armed forces and Rwandan rebels, officials said. "These newly displaced people come from the Ufamando group and the Gungu area," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC) said on 23 May.

The increased movement of people within Southern Sudan, including the return of hundreds of thousands of former refugees and internally displaced persons, could create a public health crisis across the impoverished region, a humanitarian official has warned.