This paper from the Drylands Coordination Group in Norway looks at the links between gender and HIV/AIDS and food security. It aims to address the challenges that HIV/AIDS and gender inequality pose to development efforts in relation to food security in Ethiopia, in particular on the coping mechanisms related to food security among men and women suffering from HIV/AIDS.

The course hosted by the Centre for Developmental Practice (CDRA) aims to un-pack pre-conceptions about planning, monitoring and evaluation; to put forward and stimulate the sharing of alternative and appropriate approaches and tools; and to provide guidance in applying these in rigorous, innovative and developmental ways. Through this course participants will explore and develop alternative approaches and methodologies to Logical Frameworks - approaches that enable planning, monitoring and evaluation processes to support rather than obstruct developmental field-practices.

According to research conducted by the African Centre for Biosafety, South Africa's commercial growing of genetically modified (GM) maize, soya and cotton has been grossly exaggerated by the biotechnology industry for propaganda purposes. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), an industry supported organisation, consistently tries to inflate the figures of GM plantings around the world to support the argument that GM crops are here to stay.

An account of the phenomenal rise of transnational social movements which have opposed the financial, economic and political hegemony of large international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The conceptual debates, substantive themes and case studies have been selected to open up the idea of global resistance to interrogation and discussion by students and to provide a one stop source for researchers, journalists, policymakers and activists. African examples include the Ogoni people's struggle in Nigeria.

Volume 16 (2006) of Children, Youth and Environments (CYE) will be a large special international volume on child and young people's participation with collections of papers from seven regions of the world. This call is for the Africa - special issue. Child rights advocates have embraced the idea of children's participation and have called for it to be 'mainstreamed' in development and everyday life. Yet the practice of children's participation is still in early stages. This issue of CYE will explore perspectives from Africa on the gap between rhetoric and practice.

In writing the above article, Mukoma Ngugi comes across as very partisan and exercising selective amnesia. He does not live out the very impartiality he expects from the people writing the Kenyan constitution to exercise. In spite of the misrule and deterioration of the economy, security and quality of life in the last 10 years of former President Moi's rule (and not the entire 24 years of his political life), there are various facts that Kenyans cannot ignore.

1. That President Moi historically will be remembered as the 2nd President of Kenya.

2. That the current FRUITS of peace in the Sudan and Somalia, not to mention the Great Lakes regions, were largely a result of Moi's efforts. The current government or any genuine historian cannot ignore this.

3. That during the course of multi-party elections, Mr Moi never lost a single election. The defeat of KANU in 2002 cannot be counted as a defeat of Moi, but a defeat of Uhuru Kenyatta and KANU. Moi ran his full term, out-foxed the entire opposition and continues to enjoy a lot of popularity in Kenya (yes, people want him to address them etc, but he has asked people to build the nation under Mr Kibaki). Mr Kibaki's acceptance speech at Uhuru park during his inauguration as Kenya's third President cannot have been said to be graceful or state manly both to the office of the presidency and to the man he served under as VP. Moi remains a true statesman. You have to differentiate Moi the man, from Moi the politician.

4. That the same people who clamoured for "no constitution no election" prior to the 2002 are the same people who are forestalling the review process. Most of these people were in KANU and some are still life members of KANU (yes, President Kibaki still has his life membership with KANU!)

5. The Kenyan press online has continued to highlight that the present NARC government has performed worse than the KANU government in just two years of its existence, in ALL of the areas surveyed, EXCEPT for free education. But free education, if you will recall, is nothing new. At independence, Kenyatta promised and implemented free education and so did Moi in 1978/9, but slowly and surely, cost-sharing is creeping in, and worse still under NARC the standards of public primary school education have plummeted! If you live in Kenya (and not in some safe sterile environment where you only hear pre-processed news, or still live on old bitter perceptions) then you will know that the morale of Kenyans is at an all time low, with respect to the NARC government's running of affairs. It is not just the in-fighting, it is the insecurity in the country, the deteriorating sense of worth, the blatant abuse of office not to mention the total distrust of the current government. Who would have thought they would even woo Biwott ? (not to say he is bad, there surely has been no proof in court, but if perception is anything to go by, what is the difference between old KANU and NARC?)

6. You imply that the KANU government got away with misrule yet enjoyed support in foreign aid. Again this is selective use of information. The KANU government earned itself 10 years of no foreign AID at least from the IMF and World Bank, and SOME Kenyans praised the Bretton Woods Institutions for that, while the bulk of the people bore the burden!! We survived ten years! We need to re-think the "foreign aid" and "foreign investor" nonsense. Read the recent comments by Dr Mukhisa Kitui (Kenya's Trade Minister, and champion against WTO "imperialism").

7. The judiciary is still largely corrupt and sympathetic to the powers of the day. There are no systems and of course no one wants such things. There is no genuine desire to bring surgical and radical change!! The thinking of Kenyans and politicians is still the same as it was in 1972.

8. I put it that there was no "debate" on health: the president simply did not SIGN the bill that was PASSED BY PARLIAMENT. There was pressure to re-discuss the bill in parliament, and of course you know that the members of the house were treated to a "holiday" in Mombasa before they could warm up to this. While President Kibaki rightly exercised his powers in not signing the health bill, you should recollect the facts more accurately. It is your responsibility to paint the country in balanced light, and not be bogged down by your own idiosyncrasies.

Finally, the problems Kanya is facing are POLITICAL. Initially people were driven by a preoccupation to "REMOVING MOI". The constitutional changes suggested before the 2002 elections were all geared towards "containing" Moi, reducing his powers etc etc, even when it was clear to all, that he was NOT going to run for elections. The problems of Kenyan politics is the selective amnesia on the ills of the Kenyatta government. The rot in Kenya begun at Independence. We must re-examine our journey from back there.

In January 2003, Kenyans were a united nation, under NARC, having removed KANU from government. Change was needed then and the politicians provided a united front that had been elusive all along. Kenyans did not elect a Kikuyu, or Luo, or Luhya or....(fill in whatever tribe). They wanted change and progress. A very optimistic people bequeathed the NARC government a lot of good will and grace. They were patient when the NARC government begun reneging on its election promises, saying that they needed time to understand the "rot" that had accumulated. Rightfully, there was a lot of rot after 24 years of one party. Well and good. But soon, people begun to realize that the country was going back to the situation that it was in the late sixties and early seventies. The issue of tribes begun to surface again!! Right now there is a lot of bitterness and distrust towards the "Mt Kenya community". The PEOPLE of Kenya have themselves to blame. They complain a lot and don’t do anything about the situation. Kenyans, and NOT politicians will save their own country.

Thank you.

MUKOMA NGUGI responds:

It seems to me that Jinha's response is largely caught up in a nowhere place. Used to the certainty of the Moi dictatorship, Jinha is unable to deal with the uncertainty of the movement towards democracy. So in a lot of ways, Jinha wants to vindicate Moi since even though his rule has been thoroughly discredited, it was certain and predictable. We know that a lot of people during Kenyatta's dictatorship would sigh for the days of colonialism. But did they mean it? Or should such statements have been read as an indictment of the Kenyatta government?

But it is this uncertainty, an uncertainty at once positive and yet negative to the extent that NARC is still caught up in the legacies of the Moi’s misrule that I was seeking to address in my article. In short, if our project is liberation, then we simply must find the space to make nuanced arguments in uncertain times and time of change – otherwise, we end up with a dictatorship of views and broad generalizations that deny the truth of both the past and the present and are hence of no use when it comes to constructing a future.

I really do not want to take up much time attending to Jinha’s defense of Moi. But nevertheless, Pambazuka Editor, let me address the concerns raised point by point. I do this with the hope that I will not disappoint or even insult those who have spent their entire lives opposed to both the Kenyatta and Moi governments; who understand the full magnitude of what it is to live under a dictatorship and why we must seize the moment and once and for all put Kenya on a road towards irreversible change (to use terms from the anti-apartheid struggle).

For Ngugi's full response, please click on the link below.

People in rich nations need to give up their "caricature of sub-Saharan Africa" and to recognise and support real progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, Eveline Herfkens, executive coordinator of the Millennium Campaign told a meeting here last week. The Millennium Campaign is being pushed by the United Nations to advance moves towards the goals agreed by world leaders at the United Nations in September 2000.

A civic rights group from Angola's oil-rich Cabinda province said on Tuesday that oil had been a "curse" for the region and called on American giant ChevronTexaco and others to recognise the dire humanitarian conditions of the people who live there. "Oil is a veritable curse for the population of Cabinda - a source of problems and not solutions," said Raul Danda, who heads the Mpalabanda rights group, the most influential in the northern enclave.

President-General of Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), Mrs Peace Obiajulu, has said the anti-strike clause in the new labour act would not prevent workers from going on strike when they wanted to do so. Obiajulu, speaking in Lagos during a rally organised by the congress to mark the May Day celebrations, said she was ready to go to jail for going on strike for the sake of Nigerian workers. "Strike or no strike, that clause makes no difference to the Nigerian worker. If I have reason to go on strike, I will do so. I'm ready to be locked up, they will help immortalise my name," she said.

Despite the opposition of the United States, 49 of 53 countries recently voted in favor of a resolution which requests the UN Secretary-General to appoint a Special Representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, with an initial two-year mandate. Visit the website of Choike, a global portal on civil society, for more information.

With the number of former combatants taking part in disarmament programmes almost doubling in the past few weeks, nearly 12,000 ex-fighters have disarmed and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) first national brigade incorporating former militiamen has been deployed, an official from the United Nations peacekeeping department said. The more than 11,500 combatants who entered the disarmament and re-integration programme included 3,600 children, François Dureau, chief of the Situation Centre in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations said.

Oil giant ChevronTexaco is to rethink its community aid strategies after acknowledging that some of the policies implemented by its Nigerian subsidiary in the oil-rich Niger Delta have contributed in fuelling violence in the region. ChevronTexaco said in a statement on Tuesday that its system of investment in community development in the region that produces most of Nigeria’s oil, has been “inadequate, expensive and divisive,” and would be revamped.

The day before the anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in history, (the 26th April was the 19th commemoration of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown) Earthlife Africa Tshwane Metro uncovered high nuclear radiation levels in the vicinity of Pelindaba. A mere twenty meters away from a newly established low-cost housing scheme a site has been discovered where it appears radio active materials have been buried. The discovery and subsequent media frenzy has resulted in heated debate about nuclear energy.

A recent Reuters article examines the many abortions performed each year in Kenya, where the procedure is illegal except when necessary to protect the health or life of a pregnant woman. Under Kenyan law, a woman found guilty of having an abortion in the country faces seven years in prison and anyone performing an abortion procedure on a woman could be sentenced to up to 14 years in prison. Approximately 2,000 women in Kenya die each year because of complications from illegal abortions, and 20 to 30 times that number experience permanent damage to their uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, intestines or bladder because of illegal abortions.

SAFDEM recruits individuals for the database from the SADC region (citizens and legal residents), then matches their qualifications and skills to job descriptions received from the international organizations working in the field. In addition, SAFDEM identifies training opportunities for its candidates to enhance their skills and expertise. While the range of expertise of candidates already on the database is broad, we are currently searching for additional experts in the following areas; nutrition, food and non-food distribution, water/sanitation, media/Information management, humanitarian affairs, human rights monitoring, refugee/child protection, legal drafting, constitutional development, transitional justice, community development, administrators, human resource and financial managers, logistics (includes customs clearance and transport of goods), and security.

Outgoing British high commissioner Edward Clay says he has no regrets of his spats with the Government over corruption. He spoke as Swedish ambassador Bo Goransson, speaking separately, asked leaders to make their wealth public with or without a law requiring them to do so. Although he has been criticised for taking on the Government in the last months of his tour of duty, Sir Edward insisted that his move to expose corruption had rallied the country against the vice and led to good governance.

With 24 hours to go before the UN Security Council meets to discuss peacekeeping needs in Cote d'Ivoire, a human rights group said that more troops needed to be urgently sent into the divided country, which is shuffling along the path to peace. In a report published on Tuesday, Human Rights Watch called for an immediate reinforcement of the UN mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI), warning that if the fragile peace process breaks down, "attacks against civilians could set off a sudden spiral of human rights abuses that would be difficult to control".

The children at Lubilini primary school in eastern Swaziland have never had a real playground. Now they get to spin a merry-go-round in the school's dirt courtyard, not only for exercise and entertainment, but to pump water out of the ground. The water is used to prepare their meals, for sanitation facilities and to irrigate the school vegetable garden.

Although the recent appointment of a female vice-president is seen as a positive step, gender lobbyists in Zimbabwe continue to agitate for more women in public office. Since the legislative elections in March 2005, women now represent just 16 percent in parliament, up from 10.6 percent. However, the figure falls far short of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) declaration in 1997, which agreed to a 30 percent target for female representation in national political bodies by 2005. Gender rights groups said the ruling ZANU-PF party had reneged on a campaign promise to have a third of its seats in parliament filled by women.

Thousands of Somali refugees have been left homeless after heavy rains destroyed shelters in Dadaab camp, north-eastern Kenya. Food and relief items have been distributed amid fears of water-borne diseases and fuel shortage. The torrential rains that hit last Thursday caused the majority of shelters in Ifo camp – one of three camps in the sprawling Dadaab complex – to collapse or wash away.

While press curbs and censorship still occur across West Africa, UNESCO this year has chosen to celebrate World Press Freedom day on Wednesday in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. "We wanted to compliment Senegal for its achievements in respecting press freedom and democracy," Morgens Schmidt, an official of the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, told IRIN.

Two companies have been selected by the African ISP association, AfrISPA, in response to its request for service for data transport between the different ISP members of local Internet Exchange Points. AfrISPA wants to establish true inter-country connectivity within the African continent, to remove the current dependence upon overseas carriers and to promote the establishment and growth of African regional data carriers. The establishment of a network of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) within Africa would also result in reduced costs, improved speeds and the improvement of the Internet backbone within Africa as a whole.

Thank you very much for this continuous good and educative news. For me, this is very relevant as a lecturer because I get nearly all issues in the scio-economic and political arena for our continent of Africa. May God bless you a thousand fold as we continue to be educated by your newsletter. I will try to write back contributing to this great work. Thank you.

Third Millennium Foundation (TMF) is committed to supporting a vibrant international network of people and organizations that champion exemplary tolerance education and human rights work, especially for young people and their families. To this end, we have launched the International Center for Tolerance Education (ICTE) at 25 Washington Street in DUMBO Brooklyn. ICTE facilitates conferences, houses a scholars' retreat program and incubates young leaders. (Please see our attached programs description.) We are scheduling our foreign guests for 2005 and 2006 and want to identify a range of exciting international scholars, practitioners and public advocates that can truly benefit from this program.

As spaces of production, diffusion and legitimation of knowledge, universities around the world have for more than a decade, logically found themselves at the heart of the debate on the knowledge society, and of the wave of reforms it stirred up. The Cahiers de la Recherche sur l'Éducation et les Savoirs wishes to throw a comparative and critical light on the on-going transformations of universities and higher education fields of countries in both the North and the South. The proposed thematic issue will, in particular, seek to understand the impact of the above trends on the structure of national HE systems.

More than 100 community radio representatives from 27 African countries resolved to create an African community radio fund at the just-ended 3rd Pan African Conference on Community Radio held in Nairobi, Kenya. The Community Radio Fund will support the sector through equipment provision and training.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) will again this year be releasing its annual publication, "So This Is Democracy?: State of media freedom in Southern Africa" in commemoration of World Press Freedom Day on May 3. This is the eleventh consecutive year in which MISA has issued this publication which records incidents of media freedom violations monitored by MISA in the previous year. The current edition therefore details media freedom violations in 2004. MISA issued 169 alerts in 2004 about media freedom and freedom of expression violations in 11 countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. This is a decrease of 10% over the 188 alerts recorded the previous year in 2003, and a 100% increase over the 84 alerts issued in 1994, when MISA first began monitoring media freedom and freedom violations in the sub-continent.

Exiled Liberian president, Charles Taylor, will remain a threat to President Lansana Conte of Guinea and the entire West Africa region until he is brought before the UN-backed Special Court for war crimes in Sierra Leone, said the Court's chief prosecutor David Crane. "In early January, Charles Taylor ordered the assassination of Guinean President Lansana Conte as revenge for Conte's support of the LURD rebel faction in Liberia ...and... the effort [to kill Conte] would soon be repeated," said Crane in a statement issued on Monday.

Uganda has turned down a request by the Rwandan government to deny asylum to thousands of Rwanda nationals who have been fleeing their country to Uganda and Burundi over the past six weeks. The Burundi government has also said it would not repatriate them, although it will not grant them refugee status.

Young men, old women and children among the thousands who fled violence in Togo said they were too scared to go home after security forces shot at unarmed civilians in post-election chaos. More than 11,500 people have fled the tiny West African country since trouble erupted last Tuesday, minutes after the late authoritarian ruler's son was declared winner of a poll his opponents say was fixed.

A group of 20 Burundian political parties said last Thursday they would not accept the revised electoral calendar issued recently by the Independent Electoral Commission. "The change of the electoral calendar by the commission is unconstitutional," Terence Nsanze, the leader of the Alliance Burundo Africain pour le Salut, said on behalf of the parties on at a news conference in Bujumbura, the capital.

Almost three years after the International Criminal Court opened over United States opposition, the United Nations Security Council asked it to investigate atrocities in Sudan and, in the process, placed the court squarely in the international spotlight. By any measure, the request was an important vote of confidence in the new tribunal. But at the court's glass-and-steel headquarters in The Hague, the reaction has been less than euphoric. Still wrestling with the mechanics of how to carry out its mandate to deal with large-scale human rights abuses, the new institution faces high expectations but lacks practical experience, reports the New York Times.

New drug-resistant strains of malaria could thwart global efforts to halve malaria deaths by 2010 unless major players in the fight against the disease speed up the rollout of vital new drugs, health experts say. Ninety percent of all malaria deaths are in Africa, where experts say the emergence of drug-resistant strains help maintain a staggering death rate, particularly among children. An African child dies from malaria every 30 seconds.

The GenARDIS small grants fund was initiated in 2002 by CTA, IICD and IDRC, to support work on gender-related issues in ICTs for ACP agricultural and rural development. The programme was developed in recognition of the constraints and challenges encountered by rural women in ACP countries with respect to ICTs. The challenges include cultural factors that hinder women's access to ICTs, limited time availability to participate in training and use of ICTs, minimal access to technology such as radios, mobile telephones or computers, and inadequate availability of information in local languages that is relevant to local contexts.

The International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) has launched a new publication aimed at equipping human rights activists around the world with essential tools to campaign more effectively for freedom of expression and press freedom.

The High Authority for Broadcasting and Communication (HAAC), the regulatory body of the media, on Thursday, April 21, slapped a one-month suspension on a private radio station Kanal FM for broadcasting what it described as a "defamatory, tendentious and insulting editorial". According to a Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) Togo source a HAAC directive issued on Friday, April 15, barred all private radio and television stations from covering the campaign for the elections due to be held on April 24, 2005.

George Ayittey's Indigenous African Institutions presents a detailed and convincing picture of pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa - its cultures, traditions, and indigenous institutions, including participatory democracy. Contrasting traditional African society colonial and post-colonial rule, Ayittey concludes that while colonialism was pernicious and brutal, it did not totally destroy native African institutions and in some ways even contributed to their survival and regeneration.

The latest edition of World Rivers Review, published by the International Rivers Network, examines the US$1.8 billion Merowe Dam in Sudan, the largest dam project currently being built in Africa. The 67-meter-high dam will create a 174-kilometer-long reservoir that will displace about 50,000 people. The main purpose of the project is to generate electricity for Sudan's cities and the petroleum industry. It is being built by Chinese companies. European companies Lahmeyer (Germany) and Alstom (France) are also involved. World Rivers Review examines the fate of those displaced.

As a response to failure of achieving the MDG for gender parity in education in 2005, this paper from the Global Campaign for Education proposes a new action plan to get every girl in school and learning. The paper argues that the 2005 girls' education target was neither unrealistic nor unaffordable, but rather it has not been met because both the international community and national governments have given insufficient political attention and inadequate money to meet it.

Domestic HIV/AIDS-related laws and policies in Southern African countries are not adequately addressing the rights of women and girls, according to HIV/AIDS advocates who attended an Oxfam America event last Thursday in Johannesburg, South Africa, Inter Press Service reports. Studies in Southern Africa have shown that regional and international human rights agreements have not been "adequately applied or incorporated" into domestic HIV/AIDS-related laws, especially those regarding the protection of young women, Jacqueline Bataringaya, an HIV/AIDS consultant for Oxfam in Southern Africa, said.

An official report has found that the Zambian government was not "giving sufficient priority" to orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and has called for universal access to antiretroviral (ARV) drugs.

Four senior Nigerian MPs and Senators are embarking on an international mini-tour in May, 2005 to urge western campaigners, politicians and officials to support debt cancellation for Nigeria. They will explain why rising frustration with the finance ministers of major creditor nations has led the National Assembly to call on President Obasanjo to halt debt repayments. The four representatives are Senator Udo Udoma – Chief Whip of the Senate; Senator Patrick Osakwe – Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Debt; the Hon. Farouk Lawan – chair of the House Committee on Finance; and the Hon. Sadiq Sanussi – chair of the House Committee on Aid, Loans and Debt Management.  They will be accompanied by Dr. Mansur Muhtar – Director General of Nigeria's Debt Management Office. The Senators and House Representatives will be visiting Washington, London, Berlin and Rome.  If you live in any of these cities and would like to attend their upcoming meetings, please write to [email protected] for details.

The IMF and World Bank held their 2005 semi-annual meetings last weekend (April 16-17). It was a good weekend, from the standpoint of the activities organized by civil society. The official meetings, on the other hand, seem not to have gone well for our side. The G7 Finance Ministers issued a communiqué indicating that little progress was made on negotiations for 100% debt cancellation. The major bone of contention was between the US and UK plans for IMF debt relief: the Brits wanted to sell a substantial portion of the IMF's gold stocks to finance the relief, while the U.S. was against gold sales and wanted to finance it through the resources in the IMF's structural adjustment facility (the "Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility").

The war against malaria in Africa can only be won if governments, communities and development partners work together against the parasitic disease that kills more than 800,000 Africans per year, the regional director for Africa of the United Nations health agency said. "Let us re-dedicate ourselves collectively to a more coordinated fight against this public health challenge facing our continent," Dr. Luis Gomes Sambo of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, marking the fifth annual Africa Malaria Day.

The World Trade Organisation was imperialistic and meant to enrich developed nations, a minister said in Parliament. The trade body would do nothing to reduce poverty in the country, Trade and Industry minister Mukhisa Kituyi said, putting WTO in the same league as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "The WTO is not a development vehicle to deal with poverty. It is a tool of imperialism, which has overtaken IMF," he said.

Tony Blair (B.Liar to his enemies) is set for a third term after moving his New Labour Party so far to the right that it is almost indistinguishable from the opposition Conservative Party, writes Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. His three-term reign, to the puzzlement of African leaders under international pressure to show commitment to good governance by stepping down after two terms, is bad news for ethnic minorities.

Next Thursday, May 5, is general election day in Britain. Barring a very dramatic shift through a last minute change of mind by millions of voters, the governing Labour Party will be returned for another term in office.

The election has been dogged by a number of clouds of uncertainties that may not have anything to do with a fundamental difference between the Labour Party and the main opposition Conservative Party. In fact the biggest problem for the Conservatives is that under Tony Blair (those who cannot stand him call him TORY B-LIAR!) his New Labour has outdone the Tories in their reactionary politics and policies, whether on immigration, law and order or the economy.

The second opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, is more distinguishable from the other two by a wide barge on key policy alternatives, but unfortunately these nice people (as they are generally believed to be) are undermined by the undemocratic ‘first past the post system’ that advantages the two main parties. Both Labour and the Tories are beneficiaries of a disproportionate distribution of seats in parliament as a result of having their core voters concentrated in key regions, thereby gaining a majority of seats even without a substantial majority of the popular vote. Unless proportional representation is introduced across the board (not just restricted to European Elections as at the moment) it would be difficult for any third party to make a breakthrough in Britain.

So the voters are forced to decide between one set of Tories and another one. Personality and presentation assume more influence in such a situation. British politics is significantly being Americanised and emptied of substantial ideological differences and political cleavages that may make it pointless choosing between either of the two dominant parties.

The outcome of the election is not a foregone conclusion in many of the marginal constituencies and among different kinds of disgruntled groups. First among these are natural labour voters who are disappointed in Tony Blair's arrogant leadership and toadyism to Bush - especially over Iraq and other foreign policy summersaults. The media and Labour politicians often disingenuously talk of those angry about Iraq as if they are all 'disaffected Muslims'. Muslim British are not the only section of the society that feel betrayed by a Prime Minister elected to serve Britain who chose to be foreign secretary of the USA! The issue has not and will not die away until Blair is no longer Prime Minister.

Second, ethnic and racial minorities feel that Labour has abandoned them as a key constituency in favour of pandering to increasing xenophobia and racism in the wider society. They can point to a raft of immigration and asylum seeking laws further compounded by panic draconian legislation on terrorism that directly or indirectly victimise Black and other ethnic minorities. Instead of leading by principle Labour has allowed the conservatives and their cheer leaders in the largely rightwing media of Britain to lead on these issues. In fact they are in some kind of grotesque competition on these and many other issues for the dubious title of 'The Nastiest' party of Britain. The Conservative leader, Michael Howard, used to have a virtual monopoly on this but successive New Labour Home Secretaries from Jack Straw through David Blunket to the current burly beast, Mike Reid, have done their nastiest best to close the gap.

So bad has Labour shifted to the right on these issues that a former ‘Leading Nasty’, one of Margaret Thatcher's Bull terriers, Norman Thebit, was briefly cast as a Liberal Democrat during the debate on the Terrorism Bill in the House of Lords. Even he could not help drawing attention to the unusual role Labour forced him into. For a man who spent all his political career bashing miners, challenging ethnic minorities to pass the cricket test or jump on their bikes or haranguing the public to accept police state diktats it was a big irony that even this uncompromising law and order grandee felt Labour had gone too far in its crusade against 'terrorists'.

The ideological convergence of the leading parties and the frustration by Labour voters about Tony Blair has generated fears that the turn out could be low. The educated guess is that a lower turn out may punish Labour but be good news for the conservatives.

I am just glad that I will not be in Britain and have not applied for the controversial postal ballot. Where I would have voted is one of those constituencies where even a dog wearing Labour's colors will be elected. In any case many Black voters tend to vote labour when they vote. However, under Tony Blair not a few are reconsidering this historical loyalty. Already in many London constituencies Black, Asian and African voters are switching locally. Like other voters tactical voting may be the means through which anger at Blair and particular war mongering MPs (including the mixed race MP for one of the London constituencies, Oona King) will be punished. There may not be many spectacular upsets but there may be a few symbolic 'enough is enough' messages to Bush's friend by this weekend.

If the Labour lead turns out to be much lower than predicted his tenure at No. 10 may be brought to a quicker end soon. But whatever the size of the majority, Blair is on his last term - despite the fact that there is no term limit in Britain. Among the Ekisanja supporters of President Museveni in Uganda for example (and also other Presidents in Africa toying with extending their rule) there must some confusion as to why a PM who has no limit on his terms is pledging not to run again while they are busy trying to get a president whose terms are constitutionally limited to stand again.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to

In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the ‘solidarity of sorrow’ between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid—and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

I am honored and humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address on this historic occasion. But I also feel outraged and almost morally defeated—as you all must surely be--- that the central message of this 90th anniversary remains the relentless effort to persuade our own government in Ottawa, the Government of the United States, and—I single it out for reasons that I'll try to make clear---the government of Israel, to perform a simple act of justice. We must continue to insist that each of them officially recognizes that in 1915, a classic genocide, wholly consistent with the definition set down 35 years later in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was deliberately inflicted upon the Armenian people living in Turkey by the Turkish government and army and their proxies.

It happens to be among the several terrible ironies of this humiliating situation that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide and almost single-handedly pressured the United Nations into adopting the Convention in 1948, cited the annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide.

I have asked myself why I was selected for this role today. I assume my good friend Aris Babikian, well-known to you all as a community representative, played a key role in this decision. I'm very sorry family matters have prevented Aris from being here today. For those who may not know, I want to tell you that in my view, Aris Babikian is the best single ambassador that the Canadian Armenian community has. NOT because he never stops lobbying anyone with the slightest power and influence about the injustice of non-recognition, although that is true. But because he is THIS community's link to OTHER communities who have shared comparable tragedies. In fact, I regret to say frankly, in my experience Aris is one of only few Armenian Canadians who have shown a genuine interest and who has reached out to such other communities.

And that's why I believe I'm here. Because like Aris, I believe in the solidarity of sorrow and the solidarity of victims.

My own special focus is Rwanda. For various reasons, I came to write a long report, a history, in effect, of the Rwanda genocide. Called "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," it documents the organized slaughter in 1994 of perhaps 800,000, perhaps a million - no one yet knows for sure - Rwandan Tutsi and thousands of pro-democracy Rwanda Hutu, and the complicity in or indifference to this genocide by members of the international community. When the report was published, I found myself unable simply to walk away and begin new and unrelated pursuits. I feared that the memory of the genocide, only 6 years after the tragedy, had already almost vanished, assuming any but a bare minority ever knew the truth about it in the first place beyond a few horrific TV images.

Working from my home, I founded an international voluntary movement called Remembering Rwanda, dedicated to commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the genocide. (The 11th anniversary, on April 7, passed with barely a murmur; I doubt many outside Rwanda knew of it at all.) From the start, I particularly sought out the support and cooperation of Jewish and Armenian organizations.

I had two reasons. I instinctively believed that the solidarity of victims would be obvious to these two communities above all, so that the simple fact of shared victimhood would lead their survivors and descendants to rush to support each other. And I believed (as someone who has always been involved in political action for social change) that for good practical reasons of increased influence, the more of us that we could unite in a common cause, the better for us all.

Despite my long years in the political trenches, I seem to have been stunningly naïve. Of course we found some support. A number of prominent Jews in North America, Europe and Israel lent us their names. A few prominent Armenians did the same. Aris managed to get the agreement of several international Armenian organizations to use their names as well, but I believe that I only ever spoke to a couple of their members in total. During last year's three-day commemoration in Toronto for the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, Aris alone showed up on behalf of the Armenian community. I can tell you how gratified the Rwandans were by his presence. In the dozens of other cities throughout North America and western Europe where commemorations took place, sometimes a few known Armenians were involved, sometimes none at all. Why should this be? I asked a number of people. The bottom line always seemed to be a preoccupation with the Armenian genocide to the exclusion of any other.

This is of course understandable. We naturally all feel most strongly the loss of our own family and kin. But beyond that, the Armenian people, like the Rwandans in certain ways, still must cope with the special burden of official denial. They are assaulted by the harsh reality that the Turkish government to this day refuses to acknowledge the crime that was committed and lobbies incessantly against recognition of the genocide by other governments. I know that this insult continues to drive the Armenian community.

Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I found the general disinterest of Armenians in the Rwandan genocide to be not only morally disappointing but from your own point of view, politically short-sighted.

As for the Jewish communities of the western world and the government of Israel, with notable honorable exceptions they failed to respond in a positive manner. I believe that most of the western Jewish and Israeli establishments were more or less indifferent to the Rwandan genocide.

In regard to the Armenian genocide, I must report that these same elements were in the vanguard of denial.

I fully understand that these are very sensitive and delicate matters, and it's much easier not to raise them at all. But that would be running away from uncomfortable truths carrying important lessons. I want instead to try to talk about them as carefully as possible. I'm sure the fact that I'm Jewish- wholly non-religious, even anti-religious, but yet Jewish to my core - complicates the issue considerably. These are thoughts I have tried to work out for several years. Today seems to be an appropriate forum for articulating them.

On the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, are inscribed one of Hitler's more intriguing statements. In 1939, just before he launched his aggression against Poland, triggering the Second World War, Hitler explained that he was dispatching special death squads to Poland that would deliberately slaughter large numbers of Polish men, women and children. But he wasn't remotely concerned about the reaction. "Who, after all," he asked, "speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" In other words, he was saying, with sufficient shamelessness, you could literally get away with murder, even murder of the ultimate kind. For the past eight decades, a series of Turkish governments and their supporters have largely confirmed Hitler's cynical insight, as they have denied the very existence of the genocide and attempted to undermine all attempts to have it recognized.

As it happens, in recent years their bullying and intimidation tactics have increasingly failed, as a growing number of countries have officially recognized the genocide. But to our shame, Canada has not, the United States has not, and Israel has not.

One year ago, the House of Commons in Ottawa voted to recognize the genocide by a large margin, 153 votes to 68. But the entire cabinet voted against the resolution, citing the need to maintain good relations with Turkey. So the bizarre situation in our own country is that the Canadian House of Commons recognizes the genocide of the Armenians, but the government of Canada officially does not.

In the United States, although George Bush promised recognition in his first presidential campaign, he soon enough reneged in the face of joint pressure from both Turkish officials and significant Jewish-American organizations, such as the highly influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. This is not often widely discussed publicly. But it's perfectly familiar in American political circles since Congress too has been convinced by this same tenacious lobby to reject resolutions calling for recognition. This lobbying effort was hardly unknown, having been documented last year by the Israeli daily Haaretz among other sources.

I should also stress that on the other hand, and as one would have hoped and expected, prominent among those publicly calling for American government recognition of the genocide were a significant number of Jewish Americans. They included Holocaust scholars, rabbis and community leaders, all of whom had concluded from the evidence that there was absolutely no question that a classic genocide had been inflicted on Turkey's Armenians.

The cooperation between Turkish officials and these Jewish American organizations naturally reflects Israel's own position on the question. That position is an adamant refusal to acknowledge the 1915 genocide, regardless of the evidence. In fact so strongly has this policy been maintained by a series of Israeli governments that it is, unfortunately, fair to say that rather than indifference, rather than the passivity of the bystander, Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have taken active measures to undermine attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian genocide. One of these, I'm afraid, has been to deny that a genocide ever occurred. Here we have the most appalling irony of them all: that those who consider that denial of the Holocaust is tantamount almost to a 2nd Holocaust, have now become deniers of the genocide of the Armenians.

The motives of this almost Orwellian stance are, however, clear enough. There are two.

The first, and the better-known, is based on Israel's determination to maintain a strategic alliance between itself and Turkey in the Middle East. Israel's vital interests are deemed to be at stake here, not to say it's very survival. This is an understandable and easily defended position. But it's a position that places realpolitik and national strategic interests ahead of ethics, ahead of the solidarity of genocide victims, and ahead of Israel's self-declared claim to be a different kind of nation, indeed a "light unto the nations". This is a position that says that even the common fate of genocide cannot take priority over Israel's perceived self-interest.

But this leads to the 2nd reason for Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide, one that I find far more difficult to understand or to share. It is precisely the refusal to accept that the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust and any other human catastrophe, can be equated in any way.

As the Jerusalem Post editorialized a decade ago: "There is nothing in history like the Holocaust. It was not even JUST a genocide." The Holocaust must be seen as transcendent, as being in a separate category, from all other presumably "ordinary" genocides like the Armenians'.

I want to say again that these are remarkably sensitive issues, frankly uncomfortable and difficult to discuss. They are felt passionately and unforgivingly by many. For many Jews, both in Israel and the western world, recognizing other genocides somehow diminishes the singularity, the uniqueness, of what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, and on this uniqueness they are uncompromising. Nothing, they declare, can compare to the Holocaust. It is incomparable. It is unprecedented. It is unique. It is even, in the actual words of two scholars determined to end any possibility of further debate, "uniquely unique".

The significance of this debate has been described by one Israeli scholar this way: "From Auschwitz came two people: a minority that insists it will never happen again, and a majority that insists it will never happen to US again."

This is a helpful way to frame the debate. It points out that the lesson of the Holocaust, or at least the implication, can be seen as either particularistic or universalistic, as either a unique episode in human history applicable only to the Jewish people or a grotesque reflection of the potential capacity of human nature for depravity. Of course every event in history is unique and unprecedented in certain ways, and beyond question some aspects of the Holocaust are literally unique, that is to say, nothing else like them had ever happened before or indeed since. But the same, alas, can be said of aspects of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

I believe that what the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides have in common transcend their differences.

For what all three have in common is that in each case, a cabal of conspirators set out explicitly and deliberately to exterminate all the members of the target group for the simple reason of WHO they were, not what they did. What all have in common is a demonstration that whether Turks in the circumstances prevailing in 1915, or Germans in the context of Nazi Germany and World War 2, or Rwandan Hutu in the ambience of the 100 days after April 7, 1994 - in each of these circumstances, ordinary Turks and ordinary Germans and ordinary Rwandans perpetrated crimes that no one would have thought them - or any other human being - capable of. I believe that in advance, few of them would have believed themselves capable of such a descent into barbarism.

For that reason, I consider that I too am capable - under unfathomable but feasible circumstances - of perpetrating similar crimes. For that reason, I see in the Holocaust a universal and not a particular lesson.

I see that any people anywhere may suddenly become the victims of unspeakable atrocities.

I see the solidarity of sorrow, not the competition of victims.

I see that all racism, all bigotry, all hatred, all anti-democratic behaviour must be opposed without compromise.

I see the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized wherever in the world they may be.

Let me conclude with a quote from an article written in 1918 by a man named Shmuel Tolkowsky. Tolkowsky mattered. He was secretary to Chaim Weizmann, then the leader of the world Zionist movement and later the 1st president of the State of Israel. The article, written only three years after the genocide of the Armenians, was called "The Armenian Question from the Zionist Point of View". It is reproduced in a recent book given to me by Aris Babikian called The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, written by an Israeli, Yair Auron.

"We Zionists look upon the fate of the Armenian people with a deep and sincere sympathy," Tolkowsky wrote. "We do so as men [he meant humans], as Jews, and as Zionists. As men our motto is…'I am a human being. Whatever affects another human being affects me.' As Jews, our exile from our ancestral home and our centuries of suffering in all parts of the globe have made us, I would fain to say, specialists in martyrdom; our humanitarian feelings have been refined to an incomparable degree, so much so that the sufferings of other people - even alien to us in blood and remote from us in distance - cannot but strike the deeper chords of our soul and weave between us and our fellow sufferers that deep bond of sympathy which one might call the solidarity of sorrow. And among all those who suffer around us, is there a people whose record of martyrdom is more akin to ours than that of the Armenians?"

Today I would add: "Or that of the Rwandans?"

So I hope that Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and all women and men who believe in justice and a better, more equitable world, will work together for genocide prevention, will work together to end the terrible calamity in Darfur, and will work together to ensure that when we meet again 10 years from now, we will commemorate together the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, mildly comforted that, at long last, the entire world will finally have come to acknowledge the terrible, indisputable reality of your history.

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April 27 was Freedom Day in South Africa, a national public holiday to remember the first democratic elections held in the country eleven years ago. Celebrations took place country wide under the theme ‘Building a South Africa that Truly Belongs to All’. Ronald Elly Wanda visited South Africa last year. Here he reflects on his experiences and concludes that the country has a long way to go before it belongs to all of its people.

Earlier last year I was ill-fated for I missed an opportunity to meet up with some of Africa’s contemporary divas at Hammersmith’s world famous Shepherds Bush Empire (formerly Apollo theatre) in West London. Amongst the divas assiduously imported from rhythmic South Africa were two of my favourites; culturally electrifying Yvonne Chaka Chaka and politically inspirational and poetically soothing Miriam Makeba, the woman whom perhaps every right-thinking African school boy at some point tunefully fell for. Noticeably absent was Brenda Fassie owing to her poor health, she died three months after the event. She will be sadly missed by all who enjoyed her ecstatic and care-free style of music. The festivities were hosted by Republic of South Africa’s London consulate to honour the country’s 10th anniversary under Black rule and as a democratic state.

January of 2004 saw my first visit to South Africa or Azania, a place chock-full of political history and also social ills resultant from the devilish apartheid system. I had other prior rendezvous in Durban and later in Johannesburg, but as a political spectator I couldn’t resist the temptations of comparative politicking to try and weigh whether what the English professors have painted in their thrilling lectures and engaging books was actually anything closer to reality. I am not implying that what the armchair professors have reported are entirely wrong, but that it is sometimes qualitatively functional to hear the story from those who actually went through it. After all, Simeon Strunsky the essayist perhaps had me in mind when he remarked that “people who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library reading Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subways”.

My journey from London Heathrow to Johannesburg had been a fat circus right from the start. Day one, I missed my flight, due to Expedia’s (the internet travel agents) late communication to Virgin Atlantic who subsequently mishandled my E-ticket, not to mention the usual airport pressures.

Having spent a soporific night under the inept hands of Virgin Atlantic, I arrived at Johannesburg as scheduled. I was swiftly welcomed by the wonderful southern comfort (the weather not the drink!) that made me forget all about the horrible wintry English weather that I had left behind for the pitiable London inhabitants. Johannesburg airport’s layout, capacity and organisation are impressive and capable of giving one a counterfeit impression of having arrived in Amsterdam, Berlin or Venice and not geographically south of mother Africa.

Johannesburg, commonly referred to as the ‘city of gold’ is Azania’s biggest commercial centre; it is largely white and quite well to do. My stay at Sandton district was necessitated after a lengthy exploration that left me exhausted and disappointed in failing to find a place to stay in Johannesburg amongst “abantu” (people).

The neighbourhood of Sandton city (formerly Down-town) where I briefly resided boasts about everything that Soweto does not. Large and spacious houses, public parks which are not accessible to the general public, shopping malls, corporate headquarters, hotels and a large tax base to support ample amenities and services. Sandton city’s residents are predominantly white but one can find a few and occasional blacks who are considered better - off aka “Rand-lords”.

I didn’t have to walk very far from my transient residence to notice the huge electrified wall fencings that were supervised by Sandton’s very own police force. They reminded me of London’s city police, who keep watch over London’s fiscal constituency and are known for their brutality against ethnic minority communities. For a minute or so onward, I permitted my mind to wonder what it would have been like for me as a young black person or for that matter a black South African or just a black African caught by these largely white “heavy weaponry carrying” police force. Word has it that during the Apartheid regime the white dominated police force here when dealing with black people, were known to have employed a policy of “shoot first then ask questions later”. How times have changed, I thought to myself.

As elsewhere in Africa, the changes in South Africa came after a long and bruising fight by the people. Through liberation struggles, the working class, black women and the student movements amongst other groups of people fought a bitter war to liberate black people from the slaving system of apartheid. The outcome in South Africa was that Nelson Mandela in 1990 was released having spent 27 long years in prison, South Africa had its first ever democratic election that saw black people voting for the first time in 1994. Expectedly and unsurprisingly, Mandela and the ANC (African National Congress) won the elections overwhelmingly and Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president. Having served his full term he was succeeded by the country’s vice president Thabo Mbeki in 1999, whose mandate got renewed in the middle of last year by the South African electorate.

Eleven years on, it is often common to come across books and discussion papers written by European and American armchair professors of African politics on how well South Africa is doing. I mean you walk into a library or a political or social forum and all you will see is; “The End of Apartheid”, “The fall of Apartheid”, “The politics of Apartheid”, “Mandela”, “Waiting: the White South Africans”, “The concise History of South Africa.”

I might upset some readers, but I am of the view that there were many concessions made in the run up to the political transition of 1994. Mandela and other leaders who led the liberation struggle abandoned the “real” fight for the people, that of social justice and equality of opportunity. For instance, the laws in South Africa today are formally ‘colour-blind’ and in some cases even promote affirmative action in favour of black people; however from what I saw in Soweto, and in Durban, the country remains an inequitable society. United Nations research has also categorised it as still amongst one of the most unequal in the world. Indeed, not so long ago a government minister was quoted as saying: “South Africa is sitting on a social time bomb”, clearly reflecting the concerns of the majority of poor black South Africans.

It is clear that the ANC has abandoned its core roots and energy - the poor people. The ANC party was born socialist but later adopted capitalism and endorsed the neo-liberal agenda, whose fruit we know is exploitation of the people. The ANC’s economic policy emphasis on market liberalization and tight government control on spending has meant that the working class and poor who are mostly black South Africans have to bear the cost of its conservative economic policy.

I recall one prominent South African panellist during a seminar in London that I chaired, noting that: “Post Apartheid policy makers drew all the wrong lessons from ‘international experience’, and hence have prepared to amplify rather than correct apartheid capitalism’s main economic distortions”.

The compromises made by the ANC government since 1994 has not delivered higher living standards and its systematic ideological conversion has pronounced many people who are already poor into further poverty. My former tutor Professor Heather Deegan in her book “The Politics of the New South Africa” agreeably notes that: “When it comes to education, the legacy of apartheid is still evident in many places. Many children continue to study under the tree, in dilapidated buildings and without appropriately trained teachers. Some schools are hollow shells without even the most basic equipment and few textbooks.”

For if we are to truly judge whether present day South Africa is democratic or not we need to look at the primary essence of democracy. The essential aspirations of democratic ideals are that decision ought to be taken by the people. Secondly, this means that the mass of the people should have some say in what they are going to be, and not just told what they are. Thirdly, this decision should be genuinely the peoples; it should not be manipulated by propaganda, misinformation and irrational fears. And fourthly it should to some extent reflect the peoples considered opinions and aspirations. In my view none of the above tenets are apparent in present day South Africa. This is because the only way we are going to fully realise democracy in Africa is when collectivism prevails, in other words a government by the people for the people.

In this light, it is easy to comprehend the argument of two amongst many of Mbeki’s critics, Professors Dani Nabudere and Patrick Bond – who have articulated that the persuasive powers of the World Bank and IMF - are partly to blame for the fact that a decades old liberation movement disappointed its constituents entirely reasonable aspirations within months of coming to state power.

The exchanges I received whilst in Soweto were enough to make me defend the view that the poor men and women in the townships have got no reason to be cheerful - in spite of ten years of Mandela and Mbeki neo-liberal regimes. For the poor are still poor and the Rand-lords as in Sandton are still getting richer. The liberation struggle ought to continue, free enterprise ought to be dejected whilst collectivism encouraged in order for Africa to fully realise egalitarianism. After all in terms of natural resources Africa is the richest continent in the world. Why are its inhabitants incessantly in poverty?

* Ronald Elly Wanda is a Political Scientist based in London, UK.
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* Please send comments to [email protected]

Rape, incest and other forms of violence against women reign in Kambiti, a small shopping centre in the Central Province of Kenya. The background information the Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK) had before starting a project to create awareness on violence against women little prepared us for the lessons we have learnt in the last seven months. The AMWIK project sought to utilise information and communication technology to disseminate information on gender based violence to the Kambiti community and adjacent areas.