Between 2001 and 2006 thousands of families were forcibly evicted from various neighbourhoods in the Angolan capital of Luanda. These forced evictions(2) were typically carried out without prior notification or consultation, without due process and with recourse to excessive use of force.

Madi Okollo Refugee Settlement was created in 2003 and at the time of research had an official population of 7,989 people, 63 percent of whom are below the age of 18. The majority of the refugees in the settlement are Sudanese Acholis, with smaller populations of other Sudanese groups including Latuku, Didinga, Baka, Dinka, and Lafon as well as a handful of Congolese.

Let’s reflect for a moment on hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who is in the diamond business now with a jewellery store, Simmons Jewellery Company, and has founded the Diamond Empowerment Fund.

Imagine my surprise and the television-viewing irony, when after grabbing my keys and jacket on my way to see Blood Diamond, there he was at a press conference on ABC News, holding hands with his bejewelled, estranged wife, Kymora Lee, and discussing his recent fact-finding trip to diamond mines in Botswana and South Africa.

I headed to the Cineplex with a funny taste in my mouth and a troubling question: Of all the industries on the African continent ripe for investment to “help Africans,” quoting Mr. Simmons, why diamonds?

But I’ll get back to Russell Simmons in a moment.

Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick, is a mesmerizing personal account set in and around Sierra Leone in 1999 at the height of its civil war, a conflict that took the lives of tens of thousands and saw the displacement of more than two million people (well over one-third of the population), many of whom became refugees in neighbouring countries.

It’s the story of Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a humble fisherman, eking out a living with his young family, who has enough vision and foresight to risk almost everything to rescue his family and save his son, a white former soldier of fortune/mercenary, Danny Archer, now an amoral diamond smuggler, portrayed masterfully by Leonardo DiCaprio; and the American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), who, conflicted and in love, unveils the human misery occurring at the hands of civil strife and African mineral exploitation.

Danny and Solomon’s paths cross early on while both are in prison. Danny is arrested while trying to smuggle diamonds into Liberia, posing as a National Geographic journalist and Solomon, forcibly removed from his razed village and now an illegal diamond labourer, is also imprisoned. Danny hears an RUF soldier, Captain Poison, yelling at Solomon, asking him: Where is the stone?

Therein lies the cinematic flaw, and yes, you’ve witnessed this before.

Solomon is introduced as an idyllic family man whose life is forever changed once the RUF destroy his village, shooting fleeing women and children and burning everything in sight. He narrowly escapes losing a limb by being identified as an ideal candidate for the back-breaking diamond “mining” labor - which literally means standing in riverbeds, sifting sediment for minerals. And the less desirables, one-by-one, have limbs chopped off when they’re not useful as child soldiers or mine workers.

We are introduced to the noble African, not unlike the black American protagonist, decent and upstanding, with little sex appeal, and loads of dignity and righteous anger to spare. Thus unfolds the classic Africa saga - an almost unimaginable story of courage and horror becomes a lush, breathtaking African backdrop of white redemption, black, power-hungry, violent, psychopathic rebels, and the good-as-gold, innocent African caught up in the madness.

Solomon spends his days sifting in the muddy river bed and one day finds a huge pink diamond while his captured son, Dia, begins the miseducation and training as a child soldier. The children are beaten, given drugs, and told that their families are dead. The brainwashing scenes are devastating. Dia is favored by the same mercurial, violent Captain Poison, and we watch as little by little, Dia’s childhood and humanity dissipate through indoctrinations, like being blindfolded and given an AK-47 to simply fire freely with an innocent person on the other side of the barrel.

This juxtaposition of father and son, both victims of a nation at war which is itself fuelled by the global greed for its natural resources, and the trajectory of finding a precious stone makes for a compelling tale of deliverance and survival. Solomon’s journey is that much more incredible given that it is based on actual events.

Unfortunately, that’s not good enough for Hollywood. What stands in its place is equally as compelling: Danny Archer.

What makes Danny tick is revealed as he stands at a beach bar in Sierra Leone, flirting with journalist Maddy Bowen, who immediately sees his connection to the blood diamond story she’s trying to uncover. When he tells her that he’s from Rhodesia and she jokingly reminds him that we now call the country Zimbabwe, she’s met with a cold glance. Danny is that complex white African who loves Africa equally to any black African. His emigrating ancestors tilled the soil, fought the wars, and lived and died in Africa. But his relationship is complicated by his presence as a “white African,” the sheer history of white people on the continent, and all the obligatory privileges that brings.

Orphaned very young, he becomes a soldier in South Africa and talks about fighting alongside black soldiers in Angola. This history that he believes gives him the right and pride to defend Africa is the same one that leaves him unsettled and willing to do the unthinkable to leave the continent. He is a complicated man with a killer smile. He is cunning and sleazy and violent on one hand and befriends Solomon, promising to help him track down his family if he leads him to the hidden diamond. On the other hand, he reminds Solomon that his white status opens doors and gets him close to places that Solomon otherwise would never have access to. Danny will never be on the winning team and will always be a phantom of sorts. He is despised as a pariah by the locals and viewed as a kind of plumber, doing the dirty work for the precious gem multinationals, international diamond traders, and the corrupt governments and business people that push the stones past borders and legal restrictions.

Danny knows he’s a throw-away, easily snuffed out if he makes too much noise or if the authorities start asking questions that lead past his bottom-feeder role in the chain. His weariness and dispassion is summed up when he, half-jokingly, asks Maddy if she’s in Africa “to make a difference” and later turns to the bartender and tells him, “But TIA…this is Africa.”

But after meeting Solomon, he’s all about finding the stone - he has a ticket out of Africa.

The film’s inability to be solely Danny or Solomon’s story flattens the overall character complexity. Maddy Bowen is getting to the bottom of a gripping story and spends a lot of time chastising Danny while at the same time falling in love with him. Her role is a critical one for Solomon, but in the movie she’s reduced to an idealistic helper, bothered by a lot but helping Danny manipulate everyone in his path to get to the stone. The implausibility of their relationship and Solomon simply following along against the visual horror all around diminishes the fact that this is based on a factual account—his account.

The lack of one strong narrative is replaced with horror-show violence, explosions, cat and mouse chases, scenes of brute force, and the disturbing post-pillage hedonism of the RUF soldiers. There are some gestures of “goodwill,” perhaps inserted to prove to audiences that some people outside of Africa at that time were consumed with more than the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. The convened Conference On Diamonds discusses the phenomena of thousands of innocent lives lost each time a natural resource is discovered in Africa, i.e. ivory, gold, rubber, diamonds (ain’t that the truth). In a show of doing-the-right-thing, while the head of the Van Der Kamp cartel (translated: DeBeers) is at the table in support of stopping the violence, Solomon, Maddy, and Danny, on the run from rebels, land upon a hidden oasis in the middle of nowhere where a soft-spoken African is rehabilitating former child soldiers.

For newcomers to the conflict diamond issue, the film does a good job of spelling out the basic formula: conflict diamonds are smuggled illegally to Liberia (Liberian President Charles Taylor played a key role here) under the blind eye of corrupt officials, where a middle man is bribed to smuggle them to Antwerp, Belgium. They are then transported legally to be cut and polished in India whilst the London Stock Exchange allows the DeBeers cartel engine to hum along by keeping the majority of diamonds off the market so they remain rare and always high in demand, politely called an “artificial scarcity.” We learn that the majority of diamonds are actually stored in vaults in London!

The “conflict” is the illegal mining by forced labour for minerals, set in place by rebel soldiers in conflict zones, in this case the RUF. As the primary military focus, diamond mining became a major fund-raising exercise. Diamond profits buy weapons and guarantee future corruption, all fuelled by greed and the demand for precious stones.

Danny and Solomon find the diamond, but only after a reunion with Dia that almost costs their lives. And for the naysayers who believe that the process is no longer flawed now that the Kimberley Process exists, be reminded of South African Colonel Coetzee’s army in the movie and the ease with which he does an air strike to divert attention to get to Danny and the diamond. They have a deal to split the profit 50/50.

Like in Crash and most recently Babel (an excellent movie), Blood Diamond shows how Americans are unknowingly soaking up some very complicated issues through the way our lives intersect and how one deed, large or small, can take on a life of its own. The challenge for the director is to ensure that the story stays personal and while Blood Diamond had that opportunity, it just couldn’t decide whether to stay true to Solomon’s journey or to box office proceeds. I really like Djimon Hounsou and I’m certain he’s sick of being so damn proud all the time. Sidney Poitier suffered that fate decades ago. But in the end, it’s still Solomon’s story, however diminished his portrayal on screen. Danny faces his demons and makes the ultimate sacrifice, and Maddy gets her story that unveils the horror to the world.

But back to Russell Simmons. He’s spent a lot of time recently criticizing Blood Diamond, reading letters from Nelson Mandela and asking us to look at all sides of the issue, concerned that the film will scare people away from purchasing legitimate diamonds. Meanwhile, Zwick has accused Simmons of being a puppet for the diamond industry. A local radio DJ joked that Russell wants in on the bling-bling monopoly of Jacob the Jeweller, the jeweller to many, many hip-hop/rap artists who was arrested in June by the FBI for money laundering. Makes you wonder what kind of diamonds he’s dealt with…

(A direct quote): “Simmons has responded to Zwick’s comments and maintains that the film will scare people away from purchasing legitimate diamonds. The mining process of the precious stones have become profitable industries in some African countries.

“This is the arrogance of Warner Brothers pictures," Simmons told AllHipHop.com. "They were selfish self-centered, greedy and hurtful to the indigenous people of Africa. This messaging should have been changed after Nelson Mandela and other African Presidents asked Warner Brothers to change it. Period. I am going to continue to focus on the positive that can come out of this dialogue and work to help empower black Africa.”

Wow. I guess I might be moved if he didn’t own that jewellery store.

Three Questions for Mr. Simmons:

1) There are still over 200,000 child soldiers in Africa. That’s a mighty problem to overcome with the tools that are fuelling their recruitment. What’s the plan to save them?

2) And what to do about DeBeers? Is there a possibility Russell, a mere distributor with loads of celebrity in the operandus of a century-old cartel, might convince the corporate heads to flood the market with all those diamonds that are locked away? Maybe more Africans could afford to buy their natural resource or better yet, each get a free diamond.

3 )There’s a jewellery store on every corner in the U.S., so what’s so special about the Simmons Jewellery Company? Does he have franchise plans? Is there a possibility for a chain in Africa?

But God save Africa from good intentions. Can the continent handle any more (especially those with a profit motive buried somewhere deep)?

I realized after the movie that the bad taste in my mouth was the fact that an even wealthier black American, Oprah Winfrey, is taking a very different approach to “helping Africans” and, might I add, a longer-term investment—education—that has a much better payoff.

Alas, I’m reminded of Michael Jordan at the dawn of the Air Jordan Empire (FYI, the 2006 Air Jordan XXI costs $175.00!), touring sweatshops in Asia with the Nike Corporation and giving them a clean bill of health. Among activists, he’s now known as the world's most successful salesman of sweatshop-made shoes.

• Del Hornbuckle is a writer, jazz/electronica-head and librarian lives in Washington, DC. She will be attending FESPACO and writing a diary of the event.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Further Reading:

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Forty years after Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and almost 60 years after the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, the Palestinian people are at a critical juncture. Global solidarity and support will be decisive in enabling the Palestinian people's struggle for freedom, justice and durable peace to prevail.

As the 7th edition of the World Social Forum converges in Nairobi under the slogan ‘Another World is Possible’, Alliance Française presents an exhibition by three of Kenya’s leading contemporary painters and sculptors, aptly titled ‘My World, Your World’, inviting visitors and residents alike to share and exchange differing perceptions of our world and appreciate the heterogeneity of contemporary Kenyan art.

Racist and fascist speech is alive and well, transmitted over the airwaves and cables of major U.S. media. Hosts who call for the burning alive, torture and lynching of minorities and leftists are paid big bucks to spread hate, while bloggers who ‘out’ the culprits can be shut down.

Scholars early in their careers are encouraged to submit papers on any aspect of communal societies past or present for consideration for the Communal Studies Association Starting Scholar Award. The Donald Durnbaugh Starting Scholar Award is designed to encourage and recognize new authors in the field of communal studies.

We are pleased to announce that the 24th International Literature and Psychology Conference will be held July 4-9, 2007 at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Our host will be Aleksandar Dimitrijevic.

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko discusses the real impact of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) on women and the failures of liberalization policies to examine and address the specific needs of women.

Trade liberalisation produces different results for men and women. The differential outcomes are associated with the most essential aspects of livelihoods and well-being, including food security, employment, income and access to affordable health services. Differentiated outcomes across countries and regions are based on the category of economic area and specific sector, measures, timing and sequencing of trade policies. They traverse various sectors and sub sectors of trade liberalisation: agriculture, services, clothing and textiles, and intellectual property.

Policy-makers and any groupings concerned with gender equality, poverty eradication and development-orientated economic growth must be cognisant of the massive constraints and challenges presented by the liberalisation of these sectors. In short any cultural, policy and structural constructs that ignore or exacerbate the oppression of women must be redrafted or replaced.

The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) have not examined the cost of liberalisation on women in terms of physical resources, human resources and social capital needed to transfer resources, skills as control to effectively manage liberalisation. The liberalisation programme of EPAs need to be examined in a broader, gendered context that is mindful of the non neutrality of the market economy.

Geo-politics of EPAs

It is crucial to be mindful of the geo political agenda propelling the Economic Partnership Agreements. The agreement is being punted at a time when European markets are shrinking, production costs are making it difficult for companies to make a significant profit from Northern consumers and three successive WTO ministerial meetings have gone badly for corporate interests.

The African, Caribbean and the Pacific offer the opportunity for the European Union to find an unfettered market. Many observers thus argue that the intentions are related more to pro-North market driven interests than pro-South development ones.

This assertion is evidenced by the intensity of protectionism the EU is permitted while habitually dumping surplus produce on overseas markets. Though 90% of ACP countries’ tariffs must be removed to access EU markets, there is no mention of dismantling the Common Agricultural Policy or of stemming the anti competitive practices arising from dumping. The consensus among many progressives, NGOs and policy analysts in both the South and North is that there is great cause for concern.

EPA and women

In all this, women emerge as the double losers. THE EPAs focus on primary production and force countries to de-industrialise. As such:

• Women are locked into the lowest paid work with the least statutory protection and benefits. Even though employment may increase, the quality of that employment is poor;

• Labour rights are thus violated while factories are given tax holidays at the expense of providing real livelihoods and permanent employment to women workers;

• Women are subject to competing with poorly paid contract workers abroad as the move to ‘outsourcing’ continues as seen in the notorious Export Processing Zones [EPZs] operating in the South;

• The ability to organise and gather as unions or worker groups is minimised through threats, bullying and in extreme cases murder of vocal workers;

• Women’s reproductive rights are violated whether through forced abortions, dismissal when pregnancy is disclosed, or miscarriages through strenuous work and exposure to toxic chemicals;

• Earning an income externally to the household can lead to greater empowerment for women, both in the home and in the wider community. However, trade liberalisation can also lead to unemployment and the restructuring of labour markets – a situation that tends to affect poor and marginalised groups of women more than men. In fact, occupational and wage segregation is widening and bad working conditions are rife in many export industries. The need for flexible workers to respond to market fluctuations has led to a rise in the numbers of informal sector workers, of which a high percentage are women.

• Access to education, health care and other basic services is often truncated through trade liberalisation. As such there is often less to spend at household level so the role of social reproduction in terms of providing care, gathering fuel and food etc is brought upon the women and girls. Where choices are made about whether to send the boy or girl child to school, most communities and families favour the boy. The ‘care economy’ meanwhile remains unregulated and unsupported;

• The displacement of indigenous women farmers and artisans in favour of European tourism interests transforming the South into a huge exotic safari and often linked with increasing sex trade;

• The diminishing of women’s role as custodians of traditional knowledge and bio-diversity has been well documented and bears restating in the wake of the GMO assault and the threat to food sovereignty;

• Cheaper goods come onto national markets from overseas, affecting existing indigenous producers but also providing cheaper options for consumers, many of whom are women who manage diminishing household budgets.

Value Added Tax and Women

Value Added Tax [VAT] can be extremely unfavourable for women, not only as consumers but also relative to their reproductive role, since it is normally levied on goods for the household and labour-saving devices such as domestic appliances. This is in addition to the taxes paid on food at the point of purchase.

The theory of fiscal austerity has fundamental repercussions for expenditure on services such as health and education, which are critical particularly for women in their socially assigned task as ‘carers’. Fiscal austerity may also constrict governments’ capacity to establish social protection measures and safety nets to counteract the harmful consequences of liberalisation.

Production structures and employment

In real terms, the effects and shocks of trade are experienced by individual women, by individual men, by households, by families and by communities whenever fluctuations in price (related to availability of goods) and changes in output (the goods and services people work to produce, how they produce them and under what conditions) occur. A typical claim made by advocates of EPA policies, including some gender advocates, is that increased trade and investment liberalisation can improve economic growth, which in turn can increase women’s participation in the labour market. However, we need to examine the nature and terms of this participation.

Case Study on Production Structures - Leather sector South Africa

Rapid liberalisation of tariffs in the South African footwear and leather sub-sectors (from 41.2 per cent in 1995 to 28.9 per cent in 1999) has resulted in retrenchments and drastic changes in production processes in local factories.

Additionally, there is a correlation between company restructuring in the footwear industry and the expansion of the informal sector. Not only is this the only apparent option for the increasing number of retrenched workers, but also for factories through subcontracting to the informal sector in order to cut labour costs. South Africa’s informal sector has increased from 1,136,000 workers in 1997 to 1,907,000 in 1999. There are approximately 193,000 African women compared to 28,000 white women working in the informal sector. What this illustrates is that it is the social groups with the least power and resources who are over represented in the ‘informal’ sector (Statistics South Africa 1999 cited in ILRIG 2001: 82-83).

Investment measures

There are typically four ways in which a government can protect the national investment measures environment:

1. By prescribing and enforcing minimum local content requirements (in terms of value, volume or proportion);
2. By setting trade balancing requirements (limits on purchase or use of an imported product up to the maximum value or volume related to local production);
3. By placing restrictions on repatriation of dividends;
4. Be placing ceilings on the equity holding of foreign investors.

Several African, Caribbean, South American and Asian countries have adjusted their mercantile and investment laws to comply with bilateral investment agreements aimed at encouraging foreign direct investment (FDI). Usually the result has been to remove regulations which govern minimum local content, trade balancing, access to foreign exchange and repatriation of dividends.

Several South American and Asian countries implemented import substitution policies in the 1960s and 1970s to encourage local production of consumer goods and to maintain a balance of payments through barriers on certain imports. Under WTO agreements these would now be illegal. The gender dimensions of this are that women tend to work more in industries in which capital flight is common and that are more susceptible to foreign competition. These industries are profoundly distressed by economic downturns, which have repercussions on the job protection of the largely female workforce.

Case Study on the Investment Environment – Tomato Sector, Senegal

Some years ago, the Senegalese government reduced tariffs on food imports to comply with a trade liberalisation package. This coincided with the launch of tomato paste business by a group of Senegalese women. They had taken out micro-credit loans. Having shifted from producing subsistence crops to solely growing tomatoes tariffs dropped and cheap foreign tomatoes flooded the Senegalese market. In what seems the typical story of the South when confronted with Northern imports, co-operatives were unable to compete. The result was that they could not honour the payment of micro credit loans. This illustrates the hostility of the market towards women and less resourced business people. It also shows the importance of Southern government regulation and protectionism of women and their families. It is critical to prevent families from entering economic situations that are more invidious than before as a result of placing them in competitive environments without adequate support.

Small and medium enterprises and women entrepreneurs

Enterprise development and market access are commonly promoted as policies that enable developing countries to engage in international trade. Overall, liberalisation under the WTO rules has not significantly increased women’s access to credit, nor has it enhanced opportunities to generate domestic savings for entrepreneurial activities. Structural gender inequalities linked to property rights and ownership women have fewer assets that can serve as collateral.

Instead of introducing a framework to enable women’s access to credit and venture capital, profit-motivated liberalisation policies have propagated the discrimination against marginalised and dispossessed women by mainstream financial markets by aiming at urban areas and more lucrative economic sectors. This excludes poor women who are concentrated in the informal sector and operate mostly in small and medium enterprises. The Most Favoured Nation principal merely enforces this.

Women largely go to unregulated sources of venture capital. These are composed of specialised moneylenders, pawnbrokers, savings and credit associations, and characterised by the lack of regulation and high interest rates.

Currency devaluation

Currency devaluations have particularly insidious effects on people living on the economic margins especially women. Typically, women and girls absorb the direct consequence of price increases attributable to classic societal expectations that prescribe women as custodians of domestic well-being. This encompasses:

• Extra workloads in waged and unwaged work to outpace appreciating prices;
• Survival mechanisms to source affordable alternatives (replacing home produced food for shop bought);
• Transferring consumption rations to family members who earn the most.

The African Women Leaders in Agriculture and Environment (AWLAE) have published a case study of the devaluation of the CFA franc in Mali. The findings assert that since the devaluation, “women are participating in greater numbers in agricultural production as the number of households threatened by food insecurity increases.” Women invest more labour into crop cultivation as an incoming generating venture. This resulted in decreased child care at domestic level. In addition AWLAE’s research also exposed the irony that women’s status improved due to their ‘indispensable’ financial contributions to the household. In contrast men tended to abandon their social, community and household responsibilities as financial pressures mounted as an inverse coping strategy.

Capital controls on direct investment

Capital controls (owning physical property) or portfolio investment (investing in the stock and bond market) are pivotal in preventing speculative investment and encourage enhanced financial stability. Speculative investment often results in major economic disturbance, and swift, substantial changes in money moving into or out of a country for rapid profit. Investment controls restrict external money flows enabling countries to pursue social investment priorities such as employment creation and technology transfer. Free market proponents argue that liberal capital movement is more efficient while restrictions discourage investment. The primary concern of the free market investment environment is that investors may opt to go to countries with fewer controls.

Case study on capital controls - Asia Crisis

A major catalyst of the Asian financial crisis was the swift capital flight from Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea, following a drastic increase in speculation. (FDI doubled in South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines between 1994-1996.) Most of these had inadequate [if any] capital controls having liberalised financial markets without sufficient regulations. This inadequately protected environment enabled investors and well-off individuals to effortlessly remove money from banks, the stock market and certain businesses to more lucrative off shore markets. Inexorably financial volatility resulting from capital flight plummeted foreign exchange rates, triggered scores of bankruptcies and momentarily shattered Asian economies.

This period was characterised by escalating joblessness and prices for essential commodities. The numbers of people in extreme poverty soared in tandem with the increasingly desperate economic conditions. For example from 1997-1998, unemployment in Indonesia tripled, according to the International Labour Organisation. One immediate coping mechanism was to despatch women and girls to augment household incomes. Indonesian government figures state that there was an increase of 2.4million self-employed people and 1.3 million in unpaid workers (including family businesses like farms). It is not clear how many of new workers were female. What is well documented is that females are disproportionately over-represented in the informal sector and among unpaid family workers. Statistical data is not yet able to quantify the spectacular rise in migrant labour and prostitution among Indonesian women.

Conclusion

The EPAs will undeniably affect individuals, families and communities through their impact on prices, employment, capital flows, investment conditions and production structures. Most critics of the EPAs agree that these structural changes will have differentiated consequences on women and men, the wealthiest and the least wealthy due to their incongruent locations in the economic system. These diverse positions arise partly from various national contexts and are strengthened by nuanced social and cultural factors such as gender, ethnicity, class or race. Furthermore, the New Issues so far resisted at WTO level could make a pernicious come back through the EPAs.

In all this the power and social relations between the South and the North, between women and men, between girls and boys, between differently abled citizens, between the economically dispossessed and the wealthy, between people with different educational attainments and a plethora of other societal textures will be exacerbated. The experiences of Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes and the current struggles against the World Trade Organisation provide ample evidence of this.

The Economic Partnership Agreements have implications for job security, livelihoods, well-being and human rights. The dangers of liberalisation for women are well crystallised by the construct of social inclusion. This inherently respects and acknowledges a sense of human community in which all community interests must be considered in order for the whole to progress.

These bring human rights to life and remind us that any policy, practise or law that further removes the displaced, further excludes the marginalised and further impoverishes the most vulnerable- most of whom are women- must be redrafted, rethought and realigned to promote gender equity and authentic social transformation.

• Liepollo Lebohang Pheko Is a member of the Secretariat for the Gender & Trade Network in Africa based in Johannesburg. This paper was presented at the European Commission, Brussels, and is republished here with the kind permission of the author.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

A court in Casablanca has handed down three-year suspended jail terms to two journalists for defaming Islam and breaching public morality in jokes published in a Moroccan magazine.

Clan elders and residents of southern Somalia have said that about 100 civilians were killed in US and Ethiopian air attacks this week. A senior US official said the US had only carried out one raid in Somalia and no civilians had died.

Somalia's government has lifted its ban on four media outlets it had closed, accusing them of biased coverage during the recent war, media owners have said. The interim government, newly equipped with emergency powers, ordered HornAfrik Media, Shabelle Media Network, the Koranic radio station IQK and Al Jazeera, to cease operations in Somalia on Monday (15 January 2007).

A Nigerian newspaper publisher faces up to 15 years in prison after being charged on Tuesday (16 January 2007) with belonging to the virtually unheard of terrorist group known as the "Nigerian Taliban".

Ethiopia’s current unilateral intervention into Somalia is a timely poignant reminder of the need to create a functional Eastern African political federation that would serve as an obstacle to the continuation of our now perennial conflicts in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa regions.

This invasion was triggered off by parochial national Ethiopian, Somali and Eritrean rivalries. Rivalries that would have been effectively checked by a broader regional political union, which unfortunately, in its absence, are bound to spillover this entire region with disastrous consequences.

Somalia’s condition of statelessness resulting from the misrule of the Said Barre junta has created an arena that fosters regional instability. Unfortunately Ethiopia, under the Meles Zanawi regime, has a vested interest in having either a weak puppet regime in Mogadishu or a stateless Somalia, to the extent that with the blessing of Washington, they supported the emergence of criminal Somali warlords, who held the Somali people at ransom and wreaked havoc on them.

However, the chickens did come home to roost for the Zenawi regime, with the emergence of the Somali Islamic Court Movement. Similar to the Taliban in Afganistan, and indeed drawing experiences from them, they defeated the warlords and established order and sanity in the areas they took over control of. The Islamic Courts created stability that benefited economic activity, one informed by a predictable political regime based on the Islamic Sharia code. This in turn led to their gaining widespread popular support.

And that’s the dilemma that Ethiopia is going to be faced with. For the hand-picked puppet regime that they are currently installing in Mogadishu, headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, lacks the required political support in Somalia. Indeed it would not even last a day, albeit all the support it has from the African Union and Washington, should Addis withdraw its troops.

Though disunited, the Somalis are a highly nationalistic lot when it comes to protecting their identity and country from foreign intrusion. And unless some creative political arrangement is devised, one which accommodates the Islamic Courts and other legitimate Somali political actors, the Zenawi administration is most likely going to be faced with its Waterloo - a protracted Somali guerrilla insurgency that it can ill afford. It will inevitably lose over time, especially since Meles Zenawi embarked on the Somali invasion to divert domestic attention from internal questions of his regime’s legitimacy, and given the high level of opposition the regime faces from large sways of the Amhara and Oromo elite.

The said Somali guerrilla resistance is likely to adopt a jihadist radical Islamic orientation which will unfortunately be internationalist in nature and affect the broader Eastern African region. Already the Al-Qaida leadership was reported to be inciting an insurgency along narrow religious sectarian and nationalist lines.

Uganda’s intervention into Somalia should only be based on a multilateral approach seeking a political stalemate that would create a Somali government of national unity. The current African Union and Ethiopian-backed Abdullai Yusuf administration is too discredited amongst the Somali, and should not be allowed to govern on its own. Time is of the essence and creative diplomacy is called for. Short of this, Ethiopia’s current deceptive victory is mostly likely to cause further instability in Somalia that would directly spill over into Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia itself. It may also trigger off another hot war between Asmara and Addis Ababa.

The medium to long-term solution to these destructive wars lies in the creation of a broad and viable Eastern African political federation. Indeed as events illustrate, this is a necessity, and not luxury, in our region.

The article ‘Somalia: The Next Afghanistan + Iraq?’ (www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/39142) by Issa Shivji is well written. It's not been as publicized in the US; what is going on in Somalia? Beyond Africa, there should also be some activity from other people of color around the world. Whether African by birth or by lineage, it is important to protect one another and unite. For the sake of what is Africa and those lives that are there, it is important to scrutinize and protest the US killing of Africans. There has been enough of that throughout history. So what do we do on this side of things?

Kameelah Rasheed argues that we should not abandon the WSF or global civil society to the bourgeoisie and liberals who we assume are harmoniously preoccupied with talking and reform agendas. Instead, “we should work toward radical re-appropriations of this problematic space.”

For the past 3 months, I have been trying to decide whether to attend the World Social Forum in Nairobi. The World Social Forum first met in 2001 in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a challenge to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and 'claimed to organize an alternative to capitalist neo-liberal globalisation.' Lofty mission, right? I have been lukewarm about the forum for a few months because such transformative discourse is not always met by such transformative politics or action. Furthermore, I like to investigate a bit before I invest the 600 USD for a plane ticket plus 300 USD in associated costs. As I scoured for analysis of the World Social Forum, I came across critiques accusing the WSF of being a glorified discussion group for the emerging class of career activists and NGOs, to an incubator for the domestication of possibly explosive actors.

One paper that I found particularly interesting was Rodha D'Souza's "The WSF Revisited: Back to the Basics." D'Souza analyzes the WSF as advocating discourses that run counter to the tagline "another world is possible." D'Souza interrogates the notion of "civil society" that the WSF harps on (the World Social Forum as "an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulations of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society.")

She examines civil society within a historical context not as a democratic space for the development of counter-hegemonic activity and discourses, but as an incubator for the domestication of the possibly explosive elements of society. In examining the WSF's support of Third World debt cancellation and leading intellectuals’ examination of the Tobin Tax, she finds that the WSF does not interrogate capitalism or state power. Rather it advocates for a "more sustainable exploitation of society." In a search for compassionate capitalism and benevolent states, D'Souza finds that the WSF does not work toward "another world" but toward a reformed vision of the world that does not disrupt the fundamental structures that feed global exploitation.

Patrick Bond's "Gramsci, Polanyi and Impressions from Africa on the Social Forum Phenomenon," further frames the critiques of the WSF. Bond finds that the dichotomous reading of civil society, and by extension the WSF, are rooted in the conflicting arguments of Hungarian social scientist Karl Polanyi's construction of civil society as the "new social movement challenge to neoliberalism", and Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci's construction of civil society as a "stabilizing, conservative force." If the WSF is a seemingly "stabilizing, conservative force," is the preoccupation with discussion just a politics of diversion to distract us from the need for discourse to be anchored to transformative action?

Before I allowed the pessimism towards the WSF to overwhelm me, I received an email that suggested that our attitude toward the WSF should be that of Gramsci's "Pessimism of the Intellect; Optimism of the Will." Irrespective of the critiques, he reminded me that we should not abandon the WSF or global civil society to the bourgeoisie and liberals who we assume are harmoniously preoccupied with talking and reform agendas. Instead, he argues that we should work toward radical re-appropriations of this problematic space. This process of building is a matter of great urgency. If we become too preoccupied with critiques of the WSF, we will find ourselves both frustrated and without the visions of the new spaces and worlds we want to build.

A lack of funds kept me away from the World Social Forum this year. However, for the lucky many that have the opportunity to participate in this event please keep in mind the words of Patrice Lumumba. Forty-five years ago, before Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, he left a very important message in "Congo, My Country." He wrote: "It is easy enough to shout slogans, to sign manifestos, but it is quite a different matter to build, command, spend days and nights seeking the solutions of problems." While written nearly 45 years ago, this call to action is still important today as many pack our bags en route to Nairobi.

• Kameelah Rasheed is a community activist and Fulbright Scholar at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The United Nations security council is planning to cut its peacekeeping force which monitors the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The UN wants the military force based on the disputed border cut from 2,300 to 1,700, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's UN envoy, said on Tuesday (16 January 2007).

Fighting between unidentified groups in Central African Republic’s crisis-ridden north has left one million people in need of humanitarian assistance, the majority of which have been directly exposed to conflict, said the country’s Humanitarian Coordinator, Toby Lanzer, on Tuesday (16 January 2007).

Leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have said they want to leave southern Sudan - where they have assembled for peacetalks - and return to Uganda. Monday's (15 January 2007) statement comes after the LRA's ended peace talks with Uganda on Friday (12 January 2007).

An increasingly grim security situation in northern Central African Republic threatened the progress made since elections in 2005, Toby Lanzer, United Nations Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator in that country, said at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon (16 January 2007).

The Rift Valley Fever, a virus that has killed nearly 80 people in Kenya, has spread to the Somali border town of Doble, where thousands of refugees fleeing conflict are assembled, officials said on Friday (12 January 2007).

After the traumas of war and forced exile, HIV is an additional hardship for many refugees living in the small huts of clay and straw in a camp at Molangue, Central African Republic (CAR), near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Rising levels of rape and sexual exploitation of women and teenage girls in Liberia have sparked concern by both the government and women's rights groups.

Africa's premier air carrier, South African Airways (SAA), is fighting to regain its credibility by penalising its officials indicted in a sex scandal. With claims of a sex scandal among the carrier's top management, SAA is degenerating into a haven for sex pests such as rape and harassment, critics say.

A shortage of paediatric testing kits and specialised medical staff in Zambia is causing delays in rolling out antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for children infected with HIV/AIDS. Despite the National AIDS Council (NAC) having enough ARV medication to treat about 19,000 children, only about 5,000 are able to access the drugs.

As a tense and at times violent nationwide strike continued in Guinea this week, Human Rights Watch called on Guinean security forces to exercise restraint in responding to demonstrators and to ensure that their fundamental right to life, and freedoms of expression and assembly are respected.

Zim Online reports that a special parliamentary committee on Tuesday (16 January 2007) said it plans to begin probing members of President Robert Mugabe’s Cabinet suspected of involvement in “shady diamond and gold deals”. The police confirmed they were investigating several top officials they suspect of illegally dealing in precious minerals.

M’du Hlongwa explores the role of NGOs in the struggle for social justice. “Even some NGOs call us criminal when we speak for ourselves. We are supposed to suffer silently so that some rich people can get rich from our work, and others can get rich having conferences about having more conferences about our suffering. But the police never come to these conferences. These conferences are just empty talking.”

South Africa does not think of the poor. The poorest of the country are the majority but we are kept voiceless. The poorest I am talking about are the shack dwellers, the street traders, the street kids, the flat dwellers who can’t afford the rent and the ‘unemployeds’ from Cape Town to Musina in the Limpopo Province and from Richard’s Bay on the Indian Ocean to Alexander Bay on the Atlantic Ocean.

We always say that the fact that we are poor in life does not make us short-minded. We know that our country is rich. There are all the minerals like gold and aluminium, the water and the forestry, the trade and the industry, the agriculture, the art and the culture and the science and the technology.

The Freedom Charter said that the wealth of South Africa should benefit the people of South Africa but it is not like that. The land of our ancestors was taken for the farms and the forests. Our grandparents and parents worked on those farms and in the mines and factories and houses. Now we are either trying to make a living selling to other poor people or we are the servants who come quietly into the nice places with our heads always down, to keep them nice, and to keep them working for the rich. Most of our time goes into just trying to survive. To get some little money, to get water, to see a doctor, to rebuild our homes after they have burnt down, to get our children into school or to try and stop evictions. We shouldn’t be suffering like this.

Our shacks are flooded during heavy rains. Sometimes they are even washed away because the City won’t let us build proper structures or build proper houses for us in the city where we need to be to work and study. And our shacks get burnt down in fires because the City thinks that we don’t deserve to have electricity. We are always losing our belongings in these fires and sometimes loved ones, especially children and old people, are lost. The constitution says that everyone must have adequate shelter. We don’t have adequate shelter and the situation is not getting better. Now the city is trying to evict us and is leaving people homeless on the side of the road. How many lives will be destroyed before our voices are heard? How many children will drown in rivers on the way to school because ‘there is no budget’ to build bridges while casinos, and airports and theme parks have huge budgets? Who will do something about the fact that the police who are supposed to protect the people are always abusing us? Is it right that they come into our houses and ill-treat us, insulting us, stealing from us and hitting us? Who will do something about the fact that even when our youth finish grade 12, they just sit at home because there is no work and because our parents can’t afford to send us to university? Who will turn our economy from something that lets the rich get richer off the suffering of the poor into something that lets all the people make a better life?

The politicians have shown that they are not the answer to our suffering. The poor are just made the ladders of the politicians. The politician is an animal that hibernates. They always come out in the election season to make empty promises and then they disappear. But we know that lies are for the time being but truth is for life. These guys get into power by lying to us and then they make money. They don’t work for the people who put them up there. In fact our suffering ends up working for them. Their power comes because they say that they will speak for us. That is why in Abahlali [Shack Dwellers Movement] we started to say ‘Speak to us and not for us’ and why we vote in our own elections for people who will live and work with us in our communities and without any hopes for making our suffering into a nice job.

We know that our country is rich. We know that it is the suffering of the poor that makes it rich. We know how we suffer and we know why we suffer. But in Abahlali we have found that even though we are a democratic organisation that gets its power from the trust of our members and have never hurt one person, the government and even some NGOs call us criminal when we speak for ourselves. We are supposed to suffer silently so that some rich people can get rich from our work, and others can get rich having conferences about having more conferences about our suffering. But the police never come to these conferences. These conferences are just empty talking. When we have big meetings where we live, the police are even in the sky in their helicopters. These conferences demand our support but they never support our struggles. We are always on our own when the fires come, or when the police come, or when the City comes to evict us.

I want to say clearly that I am a Professor of my suffering. We are all Professors of our suffering. But in this South Africa, the poor must always be invisible. We must be invisible where we live and where we work. We must even be invisible when people are getting paid to talk about us in government or in NGOs! Everything is done in our name. We are even told that the 2010 World Cup is for us when we can’t afford tickets and will be lucky to watch it on television. The money for stadiums should go for houses and water and electricity and schools and clinics. Even now shacks are being destroyed and street traders are being sorely abused by the METRO and SAPS police to make us invisible when the visitors come. This World Cup is destroying our lives. I call 2010 ‘The year of the curse’. South Africa is sinking. It will only be rescued if the poor take their place in the country.

But before 2010 is 2009. This is the year of the National Elections in our beloved country. When the elections come I want to see who will be queuing in that hot or rainy day to vote. I see voting as the same as throwing your last money in a flooded river. I believe that many people who voted before want to go and ask to get their X’s back. Abahlali sensed this early and in the 2006 local government elections we said “No Land, No House, No Vote”. We said that whenever we have voted for people who say that they will speak for us, they hibernate afterwards. We said that we would struggle for land and housing against all councillors. We said that we would make ourselves the strong poor by building our settlement committees and our movement.

We got beaten for that by the police. Some of the NGO people said that we were too stupid to understand what elections were for and that we needed ‘voter education’. They need an education in the politics of the poor. They should come and live in a settlement for even just one week before they say that we are too stupid to understand our own politics. Our boycott brought the percentage of voters in the areas where we are strong right down. In these areas the councillors can’t claim to represent the poor and we have made our own organisations, which do represent the poor because they are made for the poor by the poor, much stronger than the councillors. Abahlali is much stronger than Baig and Bachu and Dimba.

I am sure the number of non-voters who choose to work very hard every day struggling in their communities instead of giving trust to politicians will be multiplied in 2009. I will personally be pushing for Abahlali and our sister organisations to take the ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’ campaign into the 2009 National Elections. Oh! South Africa the rich, sinking country! There is no more need to vote for politicians in this country. I always say to people that they should vote if they ever see even one politician doing something good for the poor.

But from the local government to the provincial and national parliaments I only see politicians on gravy trains and holidays and in conferences with the rich. They are the new bosses, not the servants of the poor. They deceive us and make fools of us. They ask us for our vote and then disappear with our votes to their big houses and conferences where they plan with the rich how to make the rich richer. Their entrance fee for these houses and conferences is us. They sell us to the rich. Can anyone show one politician who has stood up to say build houses not stadiums? Can anyone show one politician who has said that Moreland’s land should be for the poor who are still waiting to be a real part of South Africa and not for more shops and golf courses? Can anyone show one politician who has said that it is wrong for the police to beat us and arrest us when we want to march? Can anyone show one politician who has stood with us when the police shoot at us?

Let us keep our votes. Let us speak for ourselves where we live and work. Let us keep our power for ourselves. The poor are many. We have shown that together we can be very strong. Abahlali has now won many victories. Other organisations are working hard too. Let us continue to work to make ourselves the strong poor. Let us vote for ourselves every day.

• M’du Hlongwa lives in the Lacey Road settlement in Sydenham, Durban. He is unemployed and his mother works as a cleaner in a state hospital. He was the secretary in the first and second Abahlali baseMjondolo secretariat but did not stand for election for a position in the 2007 secretariat in order to be able to complete his book on the politics of the poor and to try and gain access to a university to study to be a teacher. However he continues to be an enthusiastic ordinary member of Abahlali baseMjondolo and to do volunteer work each week day morning work for people living in HIV/AIDS. He is 26. For information on Abahlali baseMjondolo visit

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

All-expense-paid trips are being offered to help ensure that technologists in developing countries have a say in shaping the Internet's architecture for years to come. Given that the Americans and Europeans got to the Internet first, engineers elsewhere have complained they haven't had enough say in some of the Internet's fundamental decisions.

President Olusegun Obasanjo has attributed Africa's environmental problems to activities of other nations, saying, "Many African nations did not contribute to environmental degradation through emissions but suffered debilitating implications due to the activities of other nations."

That sub-Saharan Africa has experienced high growth rates over the past few years is not in dispute, the question is; for how long will it last? For most countries, it won't, according to the World Economic Forum.

When Marie Diongoye Konaté first encountered ITC at an exporters’ association meeting in Bamako, Mali, in March 2005, she was very much struck by the “Buying from Africa for Africa” initiative it was promoting. It was an idea to which Ms Konaté wholeheartedly subscribed.

Africa Online is the subject of a takeover attempt that involves rival Internet service provider Wananchi Online. On Monday (15 January 2007), the bidding group released a statement detailing plans to buy the African Lakes Corporation (ALC), Africa Online's London-based parent company.

The classroom has become a front line in the fight against AIDS in southern Sudan, where many teenagers are attending school for the first time now that the 21-year civil war has ended.

The first day of school could be grim for a bunch of Grade 1 pupils whose classrooms were ransacked and wrecked days before the start of term. Teachers and governing body members at Greenlands Primary School in Bishop Lavis looked hopelessly yesterday (15 January 2007) at what they estimate to be R60 000 in damage.

Relief International, an international relief and development agency with cross-sectoral programs bridging relief and development is in search of a Program Manager (PM) for a USAID funded Child Survival (MCH) Program in Tessaoua District, Niger.

Students Partnership Worldwide (SPW), a youth-led international development agency, is in the process of dramatically increasing its operations and impact. Currently SPW has offices in Australia, India, Nepal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, UK, USA, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Burundi's Supreme Court has sentenced two people to jail terms ranging from 15 to 20 years and acquitted four others, including former President Domitien Ndayizeye, over charges of plotting a coup.

Somalia's Parliament voted on Wednesday (17 January 2007) to oust powerful speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who fell out with the president and prime minister late last year after he made peace overtures to Islamists.