The call for land invasions in Hout Bay by the Congress of South African Trade Union's (Cosatu) Western Cape secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, is irresponsible, illegal and a red flag to investors, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Monday (15 January 2007).

Pambazuka News is participating in the World Social Forum () in Nairobi, Kenya from 20-25 January 2007. With its origins in a meeting of community organisations in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, the WSF has grown to become an annual gathering of activists, social movements and progressive groups from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. Focusing on the global South, the quest to place social and environmental justice, international solidarity, peace and gender equality on the political and media agenda is at the heart of the initiative. This is the first such meeting to be held on the African continent, and tens of thousands are expected to attend.

Pambazuka News is proud to be collaborating with PANOS West Africa (http://www.panos-ao.org/) on media initiatives throughout the forum. These will include: articles, daily news bulletins, participatory video, online broadcasts, and electronic distribution of news and information. For the latest news, views, podcasts and blogs, please visit our dedicated WSF site at http://www.pambazuka.org/blogs/wsf2007/

Additionally, Fahamu will be hosting a delegation of African women's grassroots organisations, in collaboration with the New Field Foundation, and launching two new publications: Grace, tenacity and eloquence: the struggle for women’s rights in Africa (http://www.fahamu.org/pzbook.php), published by Fahamu & Solidarity for African Women's Rights, and African Perspectives on China in Africa edited by Firoze Manji & Stephen Marks and published by Fahamu. (http://www.fahamu.org/pzbook.php)

On 23rd January 2007, Commonwealth women will come together to discuss and debate this critical question at the World Social Forum in Nairobi.

What would the world be like if it was viewed through the eyes of African women? The Gender & Trade Network in Africa (GENTA) will pose this question to more than 65,000 social movements, people dwelling in slums, and world parliamentarians at the World Social Forum to be held in Nairobi Kenya January 20 – 25, 2007 in Kasarani.

A number of civil society organizations keen on engaging the AU around key policy discourses are set to meet in Nairobi for a strategy meeting on January 21, 2007.

The World Social Forum is widely celebrated as an ‘open space’ that has no clearly defined political programme of its own – other than its Charter of Principles - but rather provides a relatively free and undirected space for all those interested in exchanging ideas and experience about the state of the world, or in developing their own programmes, to do so.

Refugees face many challenges living in camps, but these difficulties vary amongst different groups. Young Liberian refugees in the Buduburam camp in Ghana deal with their problems in specific ways. Studying the social resilience of these groups may help generate strategies for their improvement.

Abdur Mohammed is part of a massive flood of humanity converging on Bossaso from Ethiopia, southern Somalia and Sudan. The authorities in the town estimate there are over 5,000 people sleeping rough or squatting. The magnet for these people is the chance that Bossaso offers to escape from the misery of their lives in the Horn of Africa.

The press is in crisis; the worst crisis in its history. For the past three years newspapers and news magazines in France, including Le Monde diplomatique, and almost everywhere in the world have been steadily losing readers. Their delicate economic balance is upset, their survival threatened and, with it, the democratic right to express a range of opinions.

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?

I appreciate Jagjit Plahe’s article ‘Sacrificing the Right to Food on the Altar of Free Trade, (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/39046) published by Pambazuka News. However, the otherwise excellent analysis is somewhat muddled because, as stated in Note 1, “The terms food security and the right to food are used interchangeably in this paper.” Perhaps Ms. Plahe could consult my book, Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food, published in 2005, and in particular its chapter on trade. I have also explored the relationships between the right to food and food security.

The importance of the distinction can be illustrated by reference to the first paragraph, where Plahe speaks of “developing countries having to negotiate the right to food within the World Trade Organisation.” Actually, the right to food is well established in international law, and explained authoritatively in General Comment 12 by the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. There is still room for interpretation, of course, but the right really is not up for negotiations at the WTO.

Plahe says that the developing countries’ options to address food security are seriously limited by their obligations under the Agreement on Agriculture. However, as I see it, many national governments are quite willing to sacrifice their people’s food security for what they see as other sorts of gains they might obtain by opening their trade doors. There is nothing in the Agreement that forces them to do that in a way that sacrifices their own people’s food security. Indeed, there is nothing that requires these countries to be members of the WTO. They can opt out. They have chosen to “buy in” to the stories that richer countries tell them about the benefits of trade, not fully appreciating the ways in which trade systematically benefits the rich more than the poor, steadily widening the gap between them. I wouldn’t blame this on the WTO or the Agreement on Agriculture. The poor countries need to make their own analyses, and stand up for what will work for them.

Plahe’s conclusion says, “How, when and if states can regulate trade to uphold the right to food will be determined by international trade rules, and not by international human rights standards.” That may somehow be true in terms of the economic and political pressures that are applied, but there is nothing in international law that makes it so. Indeed, the dominant view is that human rights standards prevail over international trade rules. The poor countries should insist that human rights always prevail over trade rules.

The critical phrase in Firoze Manji's essay ‘African Perspectives on China in Africa’ (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38873)
as far as I am concerned is 'uncritical acceptance or mere rejectionism'.

As an African at home, I am aware of prejudices against Chinese products. I am also aware of some substandard practices which dominate production of these products. Their sales outlets are everywhere in Nigeria. Imitation goods are common. As a result, we have to be circumspect. The inspectorate arms of government bureaucracies must be strengthened in order to perform their oversight functions.

The Chinese manufacturers themselves should realise the enormity of the tasks ahead. Africa needs genuine business partnerships as there is a huge market for goods to be sold. But the whole purpose would be defeated if their goods turn out to be inferior. Business ethics all over the world need to be governed by trust and commitment to excellence.

African Heads of State ought to welcome the investment opportunities provided by the Chinese, but they have an obligation to ensure that the people get the best deals. The rail network the Chinese want to build linking Lagos with Kano through Abuja is a welcome development in this direction.

If the African continent has been disappointed by the West, the Chinese should remember history and know that rejectionism would follow once the wrong signals or actions are given. Thanks for a stimulating essay.

IRIN’s principal role is to provide news and analysis about sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia for the humanitarian community. We are looking for an internship candidate to work for a period of three to six months as assistant Photo Editor in the newly established photo department (IRINPhoto).

Less than a week after a previous head of Guinea-Bissau’s navy was assassinated, a former prime minister has taken refuge at the United Nations compound in the capital, Bissau, after the government issued a warrant for his arrest.

As predicted, the planned meeting between Action Congress and All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) slated for Tuesday (9 January 2007), in Abuja, failed to take place. The parley was to strengthen the alliance between the two in the calculations for April general elections.

After the elections and the dawning of a new political era in the DRC, MONUC will commence a new redeployment of troops in western DRC. Lt. Col. Didier Rancher, the MONUC military spokesperson, explains this redeployment.

Police on Wednesday (10 January 2007) recovered the body of a 13-year-old girl who was apparently raped and then thrown over a cliff in Durban's Molweni area. The police search-and-rescue unit had to retrieve Londi Mdunge's body, which had fallen nearly 60m down a cliff overlooking the Inanda Dam.

The head of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki Moon, picked Tanzania's Foreign Minister as the first woman UN Deputy Secretary General on Friday. Asha-Rose Migiro takes over the post previously occupied by Britain's Sir Mark Malloch Brown.

Activists are calling on Kenyan men to become more involved in campaigns to end the widespread physical and sexual abuse of women and girls, a problem that is putting millions of women at greater risk of contracting HIV.

Uganda has begun implementing a free universal secondary education (USE) programme in 700 public and 280 private schools in the first phase of a scheme aimed at making education accessible to all, officials said on Monday (8 January 2007).

She appears to be in her mid 30s, although she is just 16. Perhaps Amina (not her real name) could now be in secondary school had she not become pregnant at the age of nine.

A prospective cohort study has found that HIV-positive Kenyan mothers who breastfed their babies had faster declines in CD4 cell count and body mass index than those who formula-fed. However, breastfeeding had no effect on viral load or overall mortality among the mothers after two years.

HIV-negative patients with cirrhosis have low CD4 cell counts, but normal CD4 cell percentages, American researchers report in a study published in the February 1st edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

When, sometime ago, Mahmood Mamdani, former Professor of political science at Makerere University, gave us a disturbing diagnosis of what has gone wrong with that institution of higher learning, it earned him considerable wrath from the dons.

More than 100,000 delegates are expected to attend the World Social Forum conference to be held in Nairobi in a fortnight. Organisers said yesterday (9January 2007) the preparations for the conference were almost complete.

Brian Chikwava comments on the literature of Zimbabwe. "Thankfully, in spite of or because of the difficulties that Zimbabwe is going through, the turn of the century has seen a quiet adjustment in the publishing of fiction, giving new voices a better platform to be heard," writes Chikwava.

One can argue that great literary works are rarely about good sentences or syntax. Given a good literary mind, these are insignificances that will normally sort themselves out. More often than not, it is the pulse of the mind behind a piece of work that either turns it into a shoddy bundle of words, or a creation that will find resonance across cultures and connect people’s experiences in ways unenvisaged before. Such minds have been seen in geographically disparate corners of the world: Nawal el Saadawi in Egypt; Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay; Abdullah Hussein in Pakistan; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in Kenya; Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Union; Steve Biko in South Africa; the list is endless.

Whilst this is a literary pantheon that many a Zimbabwean writer can only dream about belonging to, one hopes that perhaps an urgent pulse is entering the work of Zimbabwean writers, both established and the upcoming writers.

Thankfully, in spite of or because of the difficulties that Zimbabwe is going through, the turn of the century has seen a quiet adjustment in the publishing of fiction, giving new voices a better platform to be heard.

In this regard there has been amaBooks’ Short Writings From Bulawayo, Volumes I to III, Weaver Press’ short story anthologies Writing Still and Writing Now, of which a natural progression ought to be Writing Nervous, for it is a nervous pulse that beats beneath the face of any Zimbabwean, be it a writer or a crack lipped mother in the rural areas who knows first hand the kind of tricky relationship a child can have with its empty stomach, or a nurse in diaspora who dreads the text message from her family asking her to wire more money back to their family who find themselves increasingly unable to look after themselves in an economy ravaged by inflation, the unemployed citizen who braves the aquatic predators of the Limpopo to become an illegal immigrant in South Africa, or the firebrand intellectual who dabbled in utilitarianism of a Stalinist variety – advocating the tearing down of the social fabric and national institutions in the name of the final revolution, the third chimurenga – and now finds him/herself sitting at his/her desk; pondering the question of again cutting whatever is left of our national nose to show what we are capable of when push comes to shove. All are in a nervous condition; all are hostages. That includes the president himself, who held hostage by his own will, is nervous about the future. Nervous because although he may have seen the moral shallowness of imperialism, colonialism, global capitalism and mutations of such, far from raising himself above such moral conventions, he continues to live in a moral depravity that he makes up for by exercising brutal power over ordinary citizens. His would be a fascinating contribution to Writing Nervous.

That Zimbabwean writers of wildly differing opinions, whether inside or outside the country, find themselves moved to commit pen to paper in larger numbers, is a healthy development for Zimbabwean literature. And it is perhaps fitting and natural that such developments should be accompanied by the appearance of the above mentioned short story anthologies that have given new writers platforms to be heard. Gone are the euphoric and rather innocent days when the unknown short story writer had to look to the magazines Parade and Moto or the Sunday Newspaper supplements to cut their teeth.

Those were the days when Auntie Rhoda, Parade Magazine’s famed agony aunt, had the answers to all the citizens’ questions, from the challenges of living with alcoholic husbands to handling bad tempered mothers in law who were going through ‘…a mental pause’ (sic). Today the social pulse is a different one, the questions are bigger and perhaps true of Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe’s view of many a post colonial African country: ‘…a reality that is made up of superstitions, narratives and fictions that claim to be true in the very act through which they produce the false, while at the same time giving rise to both terror, hilarity and astonishment.’ No doubt there are still issues that Auntie Rhoda would still be able to take in her stride, but even she would probably quiver at the thought of an impending whack on the head were she to give answers that are sympathetic to one political ‘truth’ at the expense of another. Because of this, it is appropriate that some of the tricky questions be dealt with in these recent short story anthology series; the conversation can no longer be with Auntie Rhoda, but amongst the writers themselves.

Perhaps due to these and other developments, new writers have come into visibility, myself included. These include Stanley Mupfudza, Gugu Ndlovu, Andrew Aresho, Edward Chinhanhu, Chris Mlalazi and Lawrence Hoba among many.

Some have come into the public eye through the British Council’s Crossing Borders programme, amongst them, Chaltone Tshabangu, Adrian Ashley and Blessing Musariri, while from the diaspora poet Togara Muzanenhamo, Stanley Makuwe and Petina Gappah (who was recently shortlisted for the 2007 HSBC-SA PEN Literary Award along with Chris Mlalazi) are emerging. And to add an urbane and gritty realism to this cacophony of voices is a gang of spoken word practitioners like The Teacher, Manikongo, Lucius, Comrade Fatso and Mbizo who, through their performances at The Book Café poetry slams have over the years been creating another row in the choir, right behind such seasoned performance poets like Chirikure Chirikure and Ignatius Mabasa.

The names mentioned here are only a handful picked from many equally good writers. In the years to come, some will be able to tap into the national psyche and produce inspired and great works, while many more of us, will be lost in the fog of our condition. Today, with the aid of digital chatter, our perceptions of our epoch are set to multiply dizzyingly, and from this heap of words, facts, fictions, sophistries and startling lies, one hopes that something will emerge, something that will at least measure up to the past works of names such as Charles Mungoshi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Chenjerai Hove or Shimmer Chinodya. No doubt, the hurdles ahead are many, and the intellectual demands on the writer or poet of today are greater. Whereas yesteryear it was enough to talk of Zimbabweans’ suffering in the colonial era and during the war, today it is the fictions of liberation that must be put under scrutiny; it is time to ask harder questions, and perhaps soberly consider, creatively enquire and consider in our own different ways, such assertions as those of Czech born playwright Tom Stoppard who in reference to communism in Eastern Europe suggested that ‘…revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.’ To question continuously, put one’s finger on a nation’s pulse and at the same time hold the mirror to its collective face without flinching, one imagines, is the staff of works whose worth is not only judged by syntax or the number of adverbs.

This issue features work by some of the writers/poet mentioned here, who in their own ways, are questioning and revealing today’s Zimbabwe. In Chris Mlalazi’s story, choices evaporate, Chaltone Tshabangu revisits the hilarities of the traditional matrimonial arrangement, Nyevero Muza relives the siege, while in Stanley Makuwe’s story, the undead mothers, fathers and children of the revolution, threaten insurrection. In his poem, Mass Murdering Silence, Victor Mavedzenge (a.k.a. Lucius) is carried by tender memories. There is also some inspired poetry from the Book Café’s poetry slams on the accompanying podcasts.

• Brian Chikwava, is a Zimbabwean writer who lives in London. In 2004 he was the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and is currently is working on a novel alongside a short story collection.

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

Stanley Makuwe looks at what it means not to have access to basic services from a point of view of dead people. Through a dialogue among corpses in a mortuary, Makuwe criticizes a government system that disregards the poor, while simultaneously, exposes a rotten system that rewards unscrupulous politicians whose only concern is to fly around the world and shop at the most expensive boutiques.

“What brings you here?” an old voice asks from the top shelf. A maggot crawls on the old body’s face.

“We are all dead. That’s what brings all of us here,” bellows a young voice.

“Is that how you speak to your elders? Young men of today have no respect. That’s why you die young. Long ago no-one of your age would be seen in places like this. We were healthy and strong like oxen pulling a yoke. Look now, how many of your age do you see around here? You die before you grow pubic hair, while you still have breast milk on your noses.”

Another voice groans and says, “Thank you for starting the conversation. Anyway what brings you here old man?”

The old body clears its throat before saying, “I have no family. I divorced my wife and she went away with my son. My parents said, ‘you are now a grown up bullock, you have to graze for yourself,’ then I left their home to look for a job here in the city. You have to know someone to get a job in this country.

For me I knew no-one. I was left homeless and jobless. I slept under bridges for many years. The cold weather kicked me to death. Someone found me dead and informed the police who bundled my decomposing corpse into a metal coffin and brought it in here.

“Government people appeared on the front pages of newspapers, on radios and television talking about the things they said they were doing for the people – donations of food and clothes to the needy, building houses for the homeless, providing free medical treatment to the underprivileged. But they had no money to look after a useless old horse.”

The stench in the mortuary almost chocks the dead bodies to a second death.

“You would put them out of budget. Fuel is now too expensive. Better one old man dies than having ten BMWs grounded,” a young body with says.

“No-one has turned up to claim my body,” the old voice continues, “we are becoming overcrowded in here. Do you think the president knows we are here? He is a great man, that president of ours. He wouldn’t let us suffer. Lucky are those who died when milk and honey were still flowing in the rivers of this country. I feel sorry for those who will die in ten years’ time. Sometimes I feel you are lucky, young men. You died at the right time, when there was still space in this mortuary.”

To the body on the floor, “what killed you?”

“Nurses and doctors went on strike for pay rise. The government said they had no money because they wanted to buy bulletproof vests, handcuffs, bulletproof cars, tear gas and batons, and to train more police dogs. Apart from that, the president was abroad attending to very important matters so they had to wait for his return so he could decide how much increment the medical staff would get, if they were going to get any. I heard he wanted to return but his wife said she wanted to do her shopping so he had to wait and help her carry her shopping bags. You see, he is a busy man.”

“They held fruitless talks while we took turns to die. It started in the first cubicle. I was in the fifth cubicle. I thought by the time death got to me the medical team would have returned to work but I was wrong. I held on for a while but in the end gave up. I couldn’t wait any longer. I woke up dead one morning.”

“We are piling up. I don’t know if my family will find me in this place. Who said hell is somewhere up there?”

The doors slide open. Deafening silence fills the whole mortuary. The sound of a poorly oiled cart breaks the silence, followed by heavy foot-steps and a thud, signaling the arrival of another dead body. The doors slam shut and the sound of the broken wheels slowly fades away.

“I can see a child. Why are you here little one?” enquires the old body.

“I fell sick. My mother took me to clinic. Nurse said I was too sick and I had to be transferred to the district hospital. There was no ambulance. Father put me in our scotch-cart.” The door opens again. More bodies are rolled on the pile. Other bodies shout words of welcome before the child continues.

“When we got to the district hospital doctor said I must go to the provincial hospital. There was no fuel for the ambulance. Mother took me there by bus. People were staring at me and mother. The whole bus was whispering about my sickness. At the provincial hospital they said I must go to the central hospital. We took another bus. When we arrived there was a long queue of very sick people waiting for their hospital cards to be stamped. Mother asked for permission to jump the queue. ‘You must have brought your child early. We are all sick here,’ a man shouted at her in a harsh voice.

“Our card was stamped but not before mother paid all the money she had been left with. We waited for doctor. When he came he examined me and said I needed an x-ray for my chest. We had to wait for the next day for the x-ray department to open. When it opened we were told that the x-ray machine was not working. We went back to see doctor. There was yet another long queue. At last we saw doctor. He wrote some medication. We went to the pharmacy and we were told the medication prescribed by doctor had been out of stock for many moons,” the child’s voice pauses as a fly buzzes around her body.

“Mother broke down and cried, ‘what do you want me to do with my baby. Help my baby please. She is dying. Help her please.’ ‘What do you want us to do? It’s 4 o’clock, we are closing now,’ the woman at the pharmacy said to my mother before she shut the pharmacy doors. She had no mercy in her voice. And I am here today.”

A rat runs across the mortuary. Female bodies scream but other bodies pay no attention. Women.

“Your story, child, sounds like mine. I lost cattle, goats and chicken trying to be treated. I went to witch-doctors and spiritual healers. One of the witch-doctors told me my brother’s wife had bewitched me. He took frogs and lizards out of my chest and bathed me in chicken blood. My brother divorced his wife.

One of the spiritual healers said my uncle had bewitched me because he was jealous of my successful life. He gave me cooking oil to add to my bathing water. It didn’t help. Finally, I came to this hospital. The doctors gave me water through the veins. I was semi-conscious when I heard one of them saying to the other, ‘these are AIDS symptoms.’ Days later I was dead.

“I had money. Real money. Not a few dollars in the bank but millions that could buy me anything in the world. I spent it with women of all sizes and colours.”

“I died when I was drunk,” a faint voice whispers. His eyes are wide open, staring at the derelict roof of the mortuary. “I was beaten to death by young men dressed in green. They said I was a supporter of the opposition coming from a party meeting.”

A woman’s voice interrupts, “I was a strong member of the Women’s League. One of those women who wrap around cloaks with the president’s face printed on them.”

The voice starts singing a song of revolution.

Handei Handeiwo
Handei tinoitora
Nyika ndeyeduwo
Handei tinoitora
Ivhu ndereduwo
Handei tinoritora

(Let us go and take the country. It is ours. Let us go and take the land. It is ours.)

It is a hive of activity as mortuary attendants take turns to bring in more bodies, fresh bodies, some with blood dripping down their faces to the cold floor. The mortuary attendants pinch their noses as they walk into the mortuary. The opening of the door brings in some fresh air making the bodies feel refreshed.

“You deserve to be at the heroes’ acre, woman,” an invisible body shouts from the far end of the mortuary.

“No, I do. I was a war veteran. A liberator of my people,” an angry male voice says.

“We both do,” the woman’s voice reasons, “we must be buried at the Heroes’ acre. I don’t think our president knows we are here. The president wouldn’t allow this to happen. Someone hasn’t informed him. Do you think the minister of information informed him?”

“How can you expect him to inform you about a place he has never been before?”

“Before I died I heard from someone that he is a busy man. He has a demanding job that keeps a minister busy.”

“What kind of a job is that?”

“It’s one of the greatest jobs in this part of the world. It’s about talking the truth on radios, televisions and in newspapers. You have to be a professor to hold such a high post.”

“Someone told me the minister of information has another job in the government as a spin doctor. You see, he is a minister and also a doctor. He is too busy to inform the president about dead people rotting somewhere in a mortuary.”

“Spin doctor!” exclaims a surprised voice, “what kind of a doctor is that?”

“You don’t know?” asks another surprised voice, “a spin doctor is the president’s personal doctor. He treats him of the stresses caused by being a president.”

“Doctors of today,” says the old voice, “let people die in hospitals while they work in government as ministers of information. They have no ethics anymore. Look at that girl’s nose. It’s rotting. If things go on like this, we will march on the streets. We can mobilize all other bodies in other mortuaries. We have to speak with one voice. Our ancestors said one finger cannot kill lice. Just imagine dead bodies marching on the streets demanding fair treatment in the mortuaries.”

A huge applause.

“You have spoken, old man,” the young voice says, “your mouth has spoken. You are wise, I must admit. We must not only protest for fair treatment in mortuaries. We must also protest for fair treatment of our living families.

They have been suffering for too long. The leader of this country is taking them nowhere. If it were not for his mismanagement of the country we would still be alive. Those with no wisdom believe he is a great leader but the truth is this country has been brought down to its knees by this man. I want him out of office. How, I don’t care. As long as we kick him out. The living ones have failed to push him out. It’s now our turn, the dead, to do it.”

“I support you, my friend,” says another young voice, “if we start our own opposition party we can easily win elections just like that. People want change. They don’t care who brings the change, as long as the president goes. They are prepared to vote for anyone or anything, even if it means voting for a donkey.”

“You must be joking,” says the female voice, “who would vote for a dead people’s party?”

“Other dead bodies will vote. In this country dead people are more than the living ones. If all the dead bodies vote we can win. Imagine this country being run by dead bodies!”

“You must be dreaming in your everlasting sleep. The country would be dead too.”

“It’s dead already, killed by a living person.”

Huge applause and laughter.

Five more bodies are thrown in. The old body asks loudly, “What brings you here young people?”

“Don’t you know there is a civil war going on out there? Can’t you hear the sound of AKs and landmines?” says a bleeding body, its voice full of fury.

“Are you saying you have just died? What for? For your masters? You die while they are busy holding endless meetings in five-star hotels.”

The old body starts to weep, bringing grief to the whole mortuary. As the bodies wipe their tears from their lifeless cheeks, a thin and malnourished body is brought in. It wastes no time in making its voice heard.

“My, my, my, I wish you knew what’s happening out there. There is a drought with a mouth full of long teeth; it is biting and killing the old and the young. Our leaders said the granaries are now empty. They are surviving by shopping overseas. We, the poor, can’t afford to shop overseas. Only two days ago, before I died I heard that our very own president took his family to a far country for shopping. Him and his wife and two children took a two hundred sitter jet to fly to the far country to shop. They diverted the route of the plane so that they could use it to carry their groceries. Those who saw it returning said it was full of groceries, even on the roof, like a bus going to the village.

“We, the poor, wait everyday for death to knock on our doors. It knocked on mine. I said to it, ‘come in,’ because I had no choice. I had nowhere else to send it because it had claimed the lives of my loved ones. My children died. We buried them last week. I died this morning. Only the strong survive out there. If the civil war misses you, drought makes sure it does not, or it leaves you devastated.”

“I wish I was a government official,” a tearful voice speaks, “I heard they have a nice mortuary. I heard it’s a mansion of a mortuary. A palace. The bodies bath and dress in suits. They get the most expensive chemicals, oxygen, perfumes and three main meals and snacks in between.”

To another decomposing body, “Hey, you have been quiet. Why are you not talking? Are you happy with your dead life?”

“I listen and take information.”

“Are you a newspaper reporter?”

“No, I am a member of the government’s secret agent. The way you are talking compromises the security of the country. I am not warning you again!”

Fear grips the whole mortuary and there is dead silence.

• Stanley Makuwe is a Zimbabwean writers based in Auckland, New Zealand. His short story collection, Under This Tree & Other Stories, was published last year by Polygraphia. He is also last year’s runner up for the BBC World Service Short Story Award.

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

Christopher Mlalazi explores the consequences of dissent under an intolerant society. Through the lives of Bakithi and Bongani, Mlalazi outlines what it means to be a dissenter, the unintended effects this may have on the family of the dissenter and the tragic consequences that dissenters face in an undemocratic society.

They had been moving across the river for some time now, when, suddenly, Bongani threw his hands into the air, and his body disappeared with a splash under the water.

Bakithi’s heart lurched, and he heaved himself towards where Bongani’s head had disappeared. Just as suddenly, Bongani’s head and shoulders erupted out of the water in a shower of spray. He gasped and spluttered water. He was clutching his now dripping wet bundle of clothes to his chest. Bakithi gripped Bongani’s shoulder. In his left hand he also held an identical bundle. ‘What happened?’ he asked, his breathing heavy.

‘I slipped on a stone!’ Bongani cried out, his left hand wiping water back over his head.

‘Be careful,’ Bakithi said, then caution took over as he remembered that sound carried easily over water, especially at night, and his voice dropped lower. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

The moon disappeared behind a large chunk of scudding cloud, shaped like the head of a snarling lion, and complete darkness engulfed them. ‘Which way?’ Bongani’s voice asked from the darkness. A night bird shrieked above them, the sound amplified, as if the darkness had tried to do something terrible to it.

‘What do you mean?’
‘Which direction?’ Bongani’s voice was faint. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Me also.’
‘What are we going to do?’

The stricken moon re-appeared. Bakithi quickly looked around him. He thought he could see the two banks on either side of the moon washed river, darker smudges in the darkness ahead and behind them against the lighter sky.

‘I can see!’ Bongani cried out.
‘So can I,’ Bakithi’s voice was solemn.
‘So let’s get going!’
‘Which way? The banks look all the same to me.’

There was silence, and below it the drone of mosquitoes that relentlessly attacked their ears. ‘You are right,’ Bongani broke the silence. ‘And we have no time to lose - remember the crocodiles?’ He voiced both their unspoken fear. He looked at the surface of the water, trying to see underneath it – but it was as good as looking into a mirror. And the part of his body submerged into the water felt so exposed, as if it was hanging down into nothingness.

Bakithi did not reply. Instead, he reached for Bongani's free hand and gripped it in his. And so the twin brothers stood hand in hand in the moon-washed chest high water, drawing comfort from their physical contact, as they had once done so in the sacred waters of the womb. Bakithi looked up at the moon, as if trying to draw inspiration from it. It disappeared behind another cloud, as if to disassociate itself from their plight, plunging them into darkness yet again. A shooting star defiantly streaked across a gap behind the scudding clouds. Bongani whispered softly, his eyes on it, ‘Protection -!’ and the comet winked out.

‘What?’ Bakithi asked.
‘A shooting star,’ Bongani whispered.

‘I also saw it also,’ Bakithi whispered back. ‘But it disappeared before I could think of a wish.’ The moon appeared again. ‘Listen Bongani,’ there was an urgency in Bakithi’s voice. ‘I think I can feel the current. The river is flowing that way.’ He pointed with a finger. Bongani held his breath, and tried to feel the water with his body. Was it moving? It felt, and looked, still to him.

‘That is downstream,’ Bakithi was saying, still pointing. ‘The east. So, if you face downstream,’ he turned and faced his downstream. ‘The South African border is on the right hand side. Let’s go.’ Without warning, Bongani disappeared into the water again, this time silently. Bakithi instinctively grabbed out. His hand fastened on a wrist. He felt another greater force pulling the other way, the water churned, a scaled tail flashed above it -and his heart went cold. The moon disappeared.

Bongani’s head broke surface, he screamed, and disappeared again. Bakithi still clung to his arm with all his strength, now using both hands – he had cast his bundle of clothing away. Bongani’s screams tore up the night whenever his head appeared above the water. Overhead in the troubled sky, the moon quickly appeared from behind a smudge of cloud, bathing the world, and the grim battle in the river, one of many in the world, in its pale light.

Suddenly, the force pulling Bongani the other way ceased. The hard pulling Bakithi was caught by surprise, and he almost fell backwards. He pulled the hysterically screaming Bongani against his chest, and wrapped his arms around him. ‘Go that way!’ he yelled into Bongani’s ear, pushing him hard in the direction he assumed was the one they had come from, where lay home – he was no longer sure now - the home they were fleeing from, that, the last time they had seen it, had been in flames.

Three days previously, Bakithi had jerked to wakefulness late in the night, to the sound of loud singing outside his hut. A chill had crept down his back, for right away he knew. Sethu had woken up after him, and she had held his hand in a tight grip, the whites of her wide opened eyes showing in the darkness.

‘What is it?’ she had whispered, fear in her voice Their one year old child, Sipho, who slept next to the wall so he could not fall off the single bed, had started screaming shrilly. ‘Come out, sell outs!’ A voice had shouted above the singing. ‘We are dead,’ Sethu had announced.

The singing was now an uproar, and the earth resounded to the stamp of feet. Bakithi had stood up from the bed. He had groped for his trousers on the wall, where he hung them from a nail. He had taken the trousers and, as he was pulling it on, a whiff of smoke had reached his nostrils, and a familiar crackle. Shirtless, he had rushed to the door and flung it open.

His mouth had opened in shock. Across the yard, the roof of his twin brother’s hut was ablaze, orange flames that leapt joyously to the sky, lighting the yard and the singing crowd in gold. Some of them held flaming torches aloft, like initiates of a satanic cult. A fleck of soot had floated past his eye, and he had looked up.

‘Hayi aah!’ He had grunted in further shock. The thatch of the roof of his hut was ablaze too! He had gone back into the hut, the light from outside now casting a faint light into it. Sethu was scrambling into a dress. He had grabbed the screaming child from the bed, took Sethu’s hand and they had rushed outside, where they were immediately surrounded by the singing mob, most of them youths. His mother and two sisters, his twin brother Bongani, also shirtless, with his wife and two infant children, stood in the middle of this circle. Tears streamed down the cheeks of Bakithi’s mother.

An elderly man had stepped forward, carrying a pistol. Bakithi knew his name. He was called Ninja, the leader of the forest camp. The rest of the group also carried an assortment of weapons that ranged from stones, sticks to iron bars. Ninja was dressed in green military trousers tucked into boots, a black t-shirt, and a black beret. ‘You thought we wouldn’t know, dog!’ Ninja had addressed Bakithi. Sparks crackled above the flames that devoured the huts, seeming to reach out at the stars that blinked in disbelief from the sky.

‘Why are you burning my home?’ Bakithi’s mother, maSibanda, had cried out. ‘Because of these dogs,’ Ninja had spat, pointing his gun at Bakithi and Bongani. ‘They will see tonight, stinking sell-outs!’ One of the youths had unraveled a poster in front of Bakithi. On it was written in bold red letters; SAY NO NOW!

‘This is your work!’ Ninja had accused the twins. ‘You were seen. Deny it.’ He had cocked his pistol. The twins had not replied, but just looked sullenly at the poster, Bakithi rocking the crying baby against his naked chest. Bakithi’s mind had flashed to the other posters hidden in the forest. Posters he instinctively knew they would never put up again.

Ninja had smiled, a gap toothed smile. ‘Say no now,’ he had said, then seized a burning torch from one of the youths and walked towards his mother’s hut, which was still untouched by flame, the torch held above his head. ‘No!’ the twins, their two wives and maSibanda, had all cried out with one voice. Laughing, Ninja had thrown the flaming torch at the roof, and the dry thatch had immediately caught fire.

A sobbing maSibanda had watched her two boys led away by the militia, and she wept fresh tears for them. Her husband had been taken exactly the same way by the soldiers a decade and a half ago, and she never saw him again. And that man who had burnt her hut had been leading them, although younger then. She could not forget his face, especially that gap toothed leer. It was seared into her memory with the hot branding iron of rape. And the crime her husband had committed had been ‘harboring dissidents’, although the said dissidents had forced their way into their kraal, forced them to cook food for them, and then, after eating, had left - after threatening them not to say anything to the soldiers when they tracked them there. Her husband had told the soldiers all this - with a gun pressed to her head – when they had come the following day on the spoor of the dissidents, but still, they had taken him away, just like a lot of other villagers had been, after Ninja had pulled her into a hut and forced himself on her.

The twins were force marched by the singing mob away from the village, and deep into the mopani forest, boots on their posteriors urging them on. They passed darkened homesteads, dogs barked at them, stones were thrown at them by the youths, and finally, an hour later, they came to the camp. It was a hastily made pen of thorns bushes, a few weeks - and terror - old, and they were thrown inside it. A fire was burning in its middle under a fig tree, with some other youths sitting around it, passing a mug of what was obviously the local illicit brew around.

Their hands were lashed with ropes to overhanging branches of the fig tree. Then, the youths still singing loudly, and Ninja, now carrying a sjambok, had stood before them. ‘Who gave you the posters?’ he had asked Bongani first.

Bongani had not replied. Ninja had regarded Bongani silently for a moment, and then he had turned to Bakithi. ‘Who gave you the posters, my twin?’ Bakithi had also not replied.

Ninja had held up his free left hand, and a joint had been instantly pressed into it from behind. He had taken a deep hissing pull, his eyes still on the twins, then he had held up his hand and the joint had been taken away. His eyes had still not left the twins, as if sizing them. ‘I asked who gave you the posters?’ he had finally shouted. The twins had just looked sullenly at him without replying. ‘Water,’ Ninja had said, and, as if from nowhere, two youths carrying plastic buckets had stepped before the twins. They had thrown the water at the twins, drenching them, and then stepped back.

Then Ninja had whipped their upper bodies, one after the other, with the sjambok almost to tatters, all the while accusing them of being ‘fucking sellouts.’ Later, the tormentors had withdrawn from the pen, and closed the entrance with a thorn bush, leaving the twins still tied to the tree, almost unconscious with pain. As the night lightened to dawn, the drunken singing and arguing outside the pen had died down. The fire in the pen had also been reduced to a few glowing embers and ashes, but the twins, faced with the ugly reality of unceremoniously visiting the underworld, were still wide awake in their bonds.

Then a bush at the side of the pen had moved, and opened. Bongani had been the first to see it, and he had whispered at Bakithi to look in that direction. Then an old woman had crept in trough the gap. A superstitious terror gripping their hearts, the twins had watched her approach them. She had got nearer, and they had both recognized her. It was their mother’s sister Rebecca, a childless widow who lived alone in a nearby kraal. She was renowned in the village for not taking nonsense from anyone in the village, and conducted herself almost like a man. She carried a gleaming knife in her hand. Without any word to the twins, she had cut them free from the tree, and immediately fled out through the gap again, her skirts flying.

When the twins had cautiously emerged from the gap, she was nowhere in sight, and their captors were also out of sight on the other side. Two hours of hard running later, headed south away from the village, and the sun now risen to a bright morning, Bakithi and Bongani had stood shirtless under the shade of a mopani tree, sweat coursing down their bodies, stinging their whip wounds.

‘What are we going to do now?’ A worried Bongani had asked his twin. His mind was on their kin they had left behind in the burning kraal last night. ‘We have no choice,’ Bakithi had replied. ‘Let’s head for the border and follow the others across.’ ‘What about our families?’ But there was no answer from Bongani. A hard three days walk later, the twins were crossing the river.

Bakithi whirled around and faced the place where he thought the crocodile could be lurking. He was yelling and splashing the water with his hands, at the same time retreating slowly backwards. A whimpering Bongani desperately splashed away in the direction his twin brother had pushed him towards. His right leg felt not there, and a great big fire where he thought it had been.

Two hops away, and the yelling behind him suddenly stopped. He looked back in the moonlight Bakithi had disappeared. ‘Bakithi!’ he screamed hoarsely.

A great force thudded into Bongani’s left leg under the water. Teeth clamped on his knee, shattering bone, and he was violently twisted under. The last thing the young man saw was the silver eye of the moon silently watching him from the troubled sky.

• Chris Mlalazi is a playwright and fiction writer from Bulawayo. His work has been featured in the Crossing Borders project and several publications. His story, Broken Wings has been shortlisted for the HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award 2007.

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

Writing in Zimbabwe seems to be experiencing an upsurge. There are obviously huge problems for publishers – few people have any spare cash to buy anything but the bare essentials for survival, and few bookshops in Zimbabwe stock any books that are not set school texts. Writers too are affected by the struggle for survival – paper and pens are expensive, let alone computers, which are beyond the reach of the majority, and there are few outlets for their work. But writers are writing, and publishers publishing.

Over the last three years, five collections of short writings have been published by two publishers: Short Writings from Bulawayo I, II and III from amaBooks and Writing Still and Writing Now from Weaver Press. This piece focuses on the Short Writings from Bulawayo series.

Many pieces in these anthologies document the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe in stories and poetry. Writers are reflecting what they see happening around them day after day - the human suffering resulting from government policies. This is particularly pronounced in the most recent of these collections, Short Writings from Bulawayo III.

The effects of Operation Murambatsvina or ‘clear out rubbish’, where hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless, are seen through the eyes of those at the receiving end of the destruction in the work of Diana Charsley, in her short story Forgiveness, as their homes are razed to the ground.

It is not only the newer writers who record the present moment. Established writers like John Eppel and Albert Nyathi document, through poetry, record the destruction of communities and vendors losing their livelihoods. John Eppel in Sonnet with One Unstated Line:

‘Hear the cry of hornbills lost in yards
of rubble and rags, to split the ears
of those who stand and watch; and the guards
unguarded, hammering, hammering.’

and Albert Nyathi in Ode to Departed Writers:

‘Operation Murambatsvina came
With a large broom called bulldozer
And the new townships which were blessed
With the cutting of ribbons were all gone
Africa Unity Square had roses
And now it is clean again’

Writers are looking at issues hitherto largely avoided in fiction. In Thabisani Ndlovu’s powerful story The Boy with a Crooked Head, the violence inflicted on the people of Matabeleland during Gukurahundi is seen through the eyes of a child – ‘I wonder why Uncle Vikitha, a useless person, was made to disappear … by soldiers who looked like us but spoke our language in a funny way.’

Christopher Mlalazi’s id i weaves together, in a nightmare township landscape, the realities of Murambatsvina and the present hardships with the effects on a family of the atrocities committed in 1980’s Matabeleland: ‘My brother’s problem is not hereditary, it’s the army and what they did out there that did that to his head.’

Mlalazi again turns to Murambatsvina in his piece The Bulldozers are Coming, published in the 14 December 2006 edition of The Zimbabwean, where he documents the effects of the ‘clean up’ on a woman who miscarries.

The land issue appears in several stories. Catherine Buckle’s Full Circle in Short Writings from Bulawayo II shows the pain of dislocation experienced by both a white farmer thrown off her farm and a black woman subsequently thrown off her small plot on the same farm. Masimba Manyonga’s A Seed of Hope in the first Short Writings from Bulawayo details the hopes and the despair of an impoverished ex-combatant farmer as he journeys from his rural home to the streets of Bulawayo, where his finds evidence of economic breakdown wherever he looks. Fiction that documents what the writer sees happening around them is often more accessible than history and is able to capture the human story.

Even in the midst of the tragedy of Zimbabwe, there is still humour in the collections, in some of the township characters of Christopher Mlalazi and in the protagonist in Godfrey Sibanda’s The Coming. In The Coming, the narrator is unable to attend the Great Leader’s rally because of diarrhoea; his excuse is mocked by one of the youths who has the task of rounding up everyone to attend the rally: ‘The Great Leader is coming and you want me to believe there’s suddenly an epidemic in this town. And the epidemic only affects members of the Opposition Party.’ Mzana Mthimkhulu’s writings can always be relied upon to bring a touch of humour, such as in his depiction of an eager young boy in a school choir competition in The Concert.

However, poverty, despair, hopelessness, AIDS, loss, queues – the suffering of the people - are recurring themes in much of the writing. Juba, in Farai Mpofu’s story Whirlwinds, in Short Writings from Bulawayo II, walks the streets looking for, and failing to find, permanent employment, despite his qualifications. In the end, he decides to ‘rob three or four of those township dwellers, raise enough money to go to Johannesburg, and graduate into the world of crime.’

Ignatius Mabasa’s character in Paying to Die has ‘never had the guts to go and get tested.’ Instead, he seems ‘to have decided to help the disease he believes is there, by living carelessly.’ The mother, in Judy Maposa’s One by One My Leaves Fall, loses all four of her children. ‘One by one my leaves withered and fell. All dead. All gone.’

In Pentecost Mate’s Pay Day the people in queues ‘are mostly quiet because there is nothing left to talk about. They have talked about price rises, about shortages of basic commodities, about the changing laws and rules that govern them, about the taxes they pay…. They have talked about the fuel crisis … about power cuts, water cuts…. And about salaries below the poverty line, about the huge sums of money they owe….’

As would be expected, queues have become a ubiquitous topic. In John Eppel’s My Dustbin, poverty and hunger drive children to rifle through dustbins:

'These children have acquired the patience of queueing;
children of the neighbourhood; suburban;
queueing at my bin for a lucky dip.’

Phillip Chidavaenzi writing in the Sunday Mirror comments, ‘the economic hardships in Zimbabwe today continue to offer a fertile template for literary works. … (These collections of short writings) have given a whole new generation of Zimbabwean writers that could have remained in the wilderness the space to display their wares and in the process make their claim on Zimbabwe’s literary space.’

Many of the writers whose work was first featured in the Short Writings from Bulawayo series have gone on to ‘claim the space’: Christopher Mlalazi has had short stories published in the Edinburgh Review and in the Caine Prize anthology, The Obituary Tango, Deon Marcus’s poetry collection Sonatas has won first prize for poetry and drama at the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association awards and for Best First Book at the National Arts Merit Awads, and several writers have had stories published in Writing Now and in other collections.

There will be more writing from many of the authors featured in the Short Writings from Bulawayo series to look forward to. Bryony Rheam, Christopher Mlalazi and Raisedon Baya have novels either completed or at the finishing stages, Thabisani Ndlovu and Mzana Mthimkhulu, amongst others, have collections of short stories awaiting publication. John Eppel has a new short writings collection, White Man Crawling, due to be published in 2007.

The writing of now is naturally a reflection of our times. A unifying theme in many of the stories and poems is loss – of livelihood, of innocence, of purpose, of freedom, of love, of belonging, of culture, of home, of country, of life. A reflection of our times. ‘Dreams shattered beyond repair.’ (Tawanda Chipato, from Hope, Short Writings from Bulawayo II)

• Jane Morris is an editor with amaBooks, publishers of Short Writings from Bulawayo I, II and III.

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

"As some of us predicted several years ago, Mr. George W. Bush’s policies have now hit the fan. It may be instructive to go back and read what Wayne Brown and I were saying four years, three years and two years ago. You may not have to do that, because what we said then is now being echoed in some sections of the American press."

The government of Guinea has designated a specially protected area for vultures, the first of its kind in Africa. The 'vulture sanctuary' consists of approximately 450,000 ha in the Fouta Djallon Highlands, a region that holds a significant proportion of West Africa's vultures and which is Guinea's main tourist attraction.

Lake Victoria water levels have dropped over the past five years largely due to excessive releases of water through the second dam. The report, compiled by the Water Resources Management Department (WRMD) in the Ministry of Water, reports that since 2004, Lake Victoria is the only big Ugandan lake that has had its water level patterns fluctuate compared to Lakes Albert and Kyoga.

Religious leaders, the Law Society of Kenya and Kabete MP Paul Muite have added fire to demands that President Kibaki consults widely before appointing 19 new commissioners to the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK).

- Somalia as a Military Target

- Conflict in Somalia: Islamic Courts Abandon Mogadishu as UN Warns of Humanitarian Crisis
http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-1/614/614_06_Somalia.shtml

- Somalia: Hold the applause

- Somalia Victimized by U.S., Ethiopia and Their Warlord Allies