At least three people have been killed after bombs exploded in two hotels in a town in southern Ethiopia. The blasts also injured five other people in Negele Borena, a small town 595km south of the capital, in the Oromo region, police and government officials said on Wednesday.

Applications invited from parliamentary staff (researchers, librarians, clerks) who regularly handle science related issues. Members of African parliaments are increasingly required to address the science, technology and innovation aspects of important policy issues, such as climate change, infectious diseases, ICT infrastructure, agriculture and food security, etc.

Public-private partnership organisations (PPPOs) — which focus on African neglected diseases — have failed to change the imperialist research paradigm or involve African researchers on an equal basis, say T. J. Tucker and M. W. Makgoba in Science.

Several hundred Malians fleeing fighting between the army and Touareg rebels in northern Mali have crossed the border into Burkina Faso since April, according to the Burkina Faso national commission for refugees (CONAREF). Over 300 refugees, most of them women and children, have been registered in Ouagadougou where they are sheltering in locker rooms in the football stadium, while a further 600 are setting up makeshift shelters in Djibo, 53 km from the Mali border and 205 km north of the capital.

The recent suicide of a secondary school student in Kenya's North Eastern Province after he was diagnosed as HIV positive has highlighted the shortage of qualified counsellors in the region, and the urgent need to address the misinformation and stigma attached to the virus.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has stressed need to increase international investment in Africa with the primary aim of ensuring peace and security in the impoverished continent. He also promised to increase Japan's cooperation with Africa. Fukuda said this when officially opening a three-day high level Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Yokohama where African and Japanese leaders are conferring on how to reach internationally agreed anti-poverty target goals - the so-called Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - by 2015.

Kenya President Mwai Kibaki said on Wednesday that his country has learned its lesson from post-election violence and promised to focus on improving the economy. Kenya, long considered one of Africa's most stable countries, suffered weeks of political violence that claimed at least 1 500 lives after the disputed December general elections.

The ANC Youth League, AZAYO, IFPYB, DA Youth, other Faith-Based Youth Organisations, Personalities and the Business Sector today launched a Youth Front Against Xenophobia through a campaign dubbed "South Africa We are listening, Africa we are sorry".

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48440china.jpgChina’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments, writes Stephen Marks. It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.

China’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments - both by contrast with the Burmese military junta’s handling of the recent floods, and also with Beijing’s reaction to previous natural disasters.

The Shanghai-based blog reviews and discusses the generally favourable global and Western reaction.

It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.

May 1 saw the entry into force of the Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation), issued by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. According to Ma Jun, Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese environmental NGO, ‘the measures require environment agencies to disclose 17 different kinds of environmental information, including regional environmental quality, amounts of discharge and the records of polluters in various regions’.

The categories of information which the new measures require to be made available to the public include:

- A list of enterprises violating discharge standards or exceeding discharge quota limits;

- Letters, visits and complaints filed about pollution caused by enterprises; and the result of their disposal;

-Administrative punishments, reviews, lawsuits and enforcement;

- A list of enterprises causing major and extremely large pollution accidents and incidents;

- Enterprises that refuse to comply with the effective administrative punishment decisions.

Enterprises listed for environmental violations must publish detailed discharge data within 30 days, on pain of a fine, and members of the public have a legal right to require environmental agencies to publish the list of polluting firms.

In addition, enterprises are encouraged to publish a much wider range of information regarding their environmental impact, and firms agreeing to do so will be rewarded with priority in the allocation of contracts for government-funded environmental projects.

All of which dovetails significantly with the conclusions reached last month in Nairobi at a strategy meeting of some 20 civil society activists and researchers from across Africa organised by Fahamu to discuss China’s growing African involvement.

A central theme to emerge from the meeting was the lack of direct links between Chinese and African civil society; While most African civil society groups are not explicitly concerned with China (and vice-versa) they are very much concerned with issues with a strong China dimension, and high on that list are issues connected with the environment.

Could African civil society groups pressure Chinese companies in Africa to raise their game, in ways which Chinese activists could use as leverage back home? This possibility might well be reversed if the new Chinese regulations prove to have teeth - African campaigners could press Chinese firms to be as open in Africa as they may yet be required to be in China.

The Chinese Government has a declared policy that where local laws are lacking or deficient, Chinese companies should abide by the relevant Chinese legislation. So participants at the Nairobi meeting agreed that better knowledge of China's own domestic laws, both on environmental regulation and on issues of employee rights and broader social responsibility, would help.

If the new regulations on disclosure prove to have teeth they could prove a useful basis for closer co-operation between environmental activists in China and in Africa. But how effective are the new rules likely to prove in practice?

As Ma Jun points out ‘It is well-known that there is weak enforcement of laws and regulations in China. As a law that reflects new thinking, the implementation of the measures is expected to be even more challenging’.

On the plus side, the regulations are launched by the energetic and radical Environment Minister Pan Yue whose State Environmental Protection Administration [SEPA] has since the last Party Congress, been officially retitled and promoted to the status of Ministry of Environmental Protection [MEP].

Pan Yue is on record as connecting China’s environmental crisis with the uncritical adoption of Western capitalist models of industrialisation, and the consequent widening of .

So it is not surprising that his Ministry was among the first to issue .

Which brings us back to the issue of government and media reaction to the earthquake crisis. Some of the positive Western comment has explicitly linked the greater openness about the scale of the disaster and even of inadequacies in the response, to the new directives on openness - Financial Times reported last week that:

‘In spite of wall-to-wall coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province, the ruling Communist Party has been working hard to shape the news.

'A meeting of the party’s most powerful propaganda officials on Tuesday stressed the importance of “correct guidance of public opinion” and ordered a strengthening of political consciousness among journalists.

'All frontline coverage of the disaster should “uphold unity and encourage stability” while “giving precedence to positive propaganda”, ordered Li Changchun, a member of the party’s supreme Politburo standing committee, the People’s Daily reported.’

Just what these central edicts will mean in practice is still not clear. In the same issue of the Financial Times Mure Dickie analysed the implications in a piece headed China Media Project [CMP] at Hong Kong University reports that:

‘CMP has confirmed with sources inside China’s media that the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department (...) has issued “numerous” directives on coverage of the Sichuan earthquake, including a directive against “critical reporting” on the disaster. The general atmosphere for coverage, however, seems to remain relatively open. While media have been instructed to follow the lead of central party media – Xinhua News Agency, CCTV and company – regional commercial media can and are, for the moment, pursuing the story with intensity.’

CMP illustrates the point with a comparison of the coverage in the official Xinhuanet, site of the official Xinhua news agency, and Caijing, the leading independent business and current affairs magazine.

So where does that leave us? Central government agencies that issue commendable regulations, which will not be implemented by sluggish and self-interested officials unless, perhaps, they are forced to by energetic popular pressure. And politicians who encourage press openness - as long as it is ‘positive’ and avoids ‘irresponsible sensationalism’.

Sound familiar? Clearly Chinese and African civil society activists will have a lot of common experiences to share in future.

*Stephen Marks is research associate with Fahamu.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48442map.jpgChina has great strategic interests in Africa, and Africa will benefit from a continued strengthening of its cooperation with China, says Peter Bosshard. Such South-South cooperation will promote growth and much-needed investment. However, economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental destruction. China has a self-interest in strengthening the rules on the social and environmental impacts of its overseas projects. African governments can learn from China’s experience by being selective in the types of investments which they invite, and by making sure that investments do not undermine the long-term environmental foundations of growth and prosperity.

China and Africa have rapidly expanded their political and economic relations since the turn of the century. China – ‘the world’s factory’ – is trying to secure access to resources in Africa which it lacks at home. Africa also offers a welcome market for Chinese companies facing stiff competition at home. The Chinese state supports this investment in African resources and creation of jobs to stave off the country’s permanent unemployment crisis.

Africa has for a long time been a primary source of natural resources for the European and American markets. China’s strategy is to access resources which have so far not been exploited because they were considered by Western companies to be too small, remote or politically risky. This strategy requires massive investment in mines, oil exploration and auxiliary infrastructure such as pipelines, roads, railways, power plants and transmission lines.

China’s economic expansion in Africa is carried forward by thousands of individual entrepreneurs, a small number of large, state-owned enterprises, and a host of companies owned by provincial and municipal authorities. While small private enterprises dominate investment in commerce and manufacturing, state-owned enterprises typically invest in extractive and infrastructure projects. In integrated investment packages, government institutions and state-owned companies work closely together. The Chinese government’s active involvement in resource extraction is not fundamentally different from the financial, political and military support granted to oil and mining operations by the US, French or South African governments.

The Chinese government does not directly interfere in the investment decisions of the enterprises it owns, but offers support and incentives in the form of finance and diplomatic support. China Exim Bank is a key source of finance for the Africa projects of state-owned enterprises. The Chinese export credit agency was created in 1994 to promote Chinese exports. With new loan approvals of $36 billion, China Exim Bank outgrew the World Bank and all other export credit agencies in 2007. In May 2007, China Exim Bank pledged to commit approximately $20 billion for loans to Africa over the next three years [1]. In comparison, the World Bank approved projects for $4.8 billion for Africa in 2006.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF CHINA’S EXPANSION IN AFRICA

Rapidly growing economic ties with China have contributed to Africa’s strong economic growth in recent years [2]. As a developing country, China can offer experiences and goods that are better suited to the needs of African societies than the advice and products from industrialised countries. For example, China is a world leader in renewable energy technologies, which are essential for rural electrification in Africa. Chinese investment and consumer goods are usually more affordable than Western products. Finally, Chinese loans and aid flows allow African governments to eschew the often dogmatic economic policy conditions of international financial institutions. However, the primary focus of China’s Africa strategy is not on exporting appropriate technologies but on accessing raw materials. It mirrors what has been the dominant approach of Western governments and corporations to Africa’s development for many decades.

Civil society and academic observers have expressed concerns about the impacts of China’s economic expansion on Africa’s governance, human rights, environment, local employment and labour conditions, product quality, and the sustainability of the continent’s debt burden. This paper focuses on the environmental impacts [3]. Concerns over China’s environmental footprint in Africa have arisen for at least four reasons:

- China’s investments in Africa are concentrated in sectors which are environmentally sensitive (such as oil and gas exploration, mining, hydropower, and timber), and in infrastructure projects which help to facilitate environmentally sensitive investments (such as roads, railway and transmission lines).

- While investments in the mining, oil, gas, hydropower and timber sectors generally carry high environmental risks, China’s strategy of making previously inaccessible resources accessible compounds these risks. Chinese investors are developing projects in remote, ecologically fragile regions, in areas that have so far been protected as national parks, and in countries with weak governance structures.

- China’s domestic policies have prioritised economic growth over the protection of the environment, with harrowing results. The Chinese government has set in place laws, regulations and institutions to protect the environment, but with limited success [4]. China risks exporting its domestic environmental track record to other parts of the world through its foreign investment strategy.

- International financial institutions have since the 1990s adopted environmental guidelines and standards to address the environmental impacts of their projects. Major Chinese investors, financiers and equipment suppliers have so far not adopted such standards, or have developed policies which are not necessarily in line with international standards.

Some high-profile examples illustrate the risks created by Chinese investments for Africa’s environment. In Sudan, China Exim Bank is financing the large Merowe Dam Project on the Nile. The dam’s reservoir will displace more than 55,000 people from the fertile Nile Valley to arid desert locations. In violation of Sudan’s environmental law, the project’s superficial environmental impact assessment has never been approved by the Ministry of Environment.

In Gabon, Sinopec explored for oil in Loango National Park until the country’s national park service ordered exploration to stop in September 2006 [5]. Conservation groups had pointed out that oil exploration threatened rare plants and animals, and the environmental impact study had not been approved by the environment ministry. China’s Kongou Dam, which has been proposed to power the Belinga iron ore project in Gabon, could negatively impact the forests of the Ivindo National Park. Sinohydro’s Bui Dam, a project being financed by China Exim Bank, will flood about a quarter of Bui National Park in Ghana. The Lower Kafue Gorge Dam, a Sinhoydro project being financed by China Exim Bank in Zambia, will put additional pressure on the ecologically important Kafue Flats and its national parks.

AFRICAN AND WESTERN REACTIONS TO CHINA’S ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT

African governments of all political stripes have strongly welcomed China’s growing presence on the continent. They have expressed appreciation not only for the economic boost triggered by Chinese investment, but also for the pragmatic and speedy way in which China has delivered aid projects, often irrespective of concerns over corruption and environmental impacts. Sahr Johnny, Sierra Leone’s ambassador to China, summarised a meeting with Chinese investors in 2005 as follows:

‘The Chinese are doing more than the G8 to make poverty history. If a G8 country had wanted to rebuild the stadium, we’d still be holding meetings! The Chinese just come and do it. They don’t hold meetings about environmental impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I’m not saying it’s right, just that Chinese investment is succeeding because they don’t set high benchmarks' [6].

African governments have expressed concerns when cheap Chinese investors wiped out local textile (and other) industries, preferred Chinese over African workers, or did not comply with local labour laws. Very few concerns have been recorded regarding the environmental impacts of Chinese investments. In January 2008, Sierra Leone banned timber exports because, as the country’s environment minister said in an interview with the BBC, Chinese and other logging companies were plundering forests with no respect for the law [7]. And a task force of the African Union urged all actors in September 2006 to ‘[e]nsure that China pays more attention to the protection of the environment in its investment practices’ [8].

Since the 1980s, multilateral development banks have adopted safeguard policies that address the social and environmental impacts of their projects. Western financiers are concerned that Chinese banks will take up projects that they rejected because of unacceptable environmental risks. There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that borrowing governments use the availability of Chinese funding to pressure other financiers to weaken their environmental standards, or to flout them in specific projects.

In October 2006, then World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz warned:

‘Almost 80 per cent of the world’s commercial banks respect [the Equator Principles] when they finance projects. The large Chinese banks do not apply them. True, they are relatively new to this type of activity in Africa. But they should not make the same mistakes which France and the United States have made in Mobutu’s Zaire… Let’s be honest, this would be terrible, a true scandal [9]."

Around the same time, Philippe Maystadt, the President of the European Investment Bank, criticised Chinese financiers even more bluntly. ‘The competition of the Chinese banks is clear’, Maystadt said according to the Financial Times. ‘They don’t bother about social or human rights conditions.’ The EIB President claimed that Chinese banks had snatched projects from under his bank’s nose in Africa and Asia, after offering to undercut EIB conditions on labour standards and the environment [10].

Maystadt and others recommend that international financial institutions should lower their own standards in response to Chinese competition. The EIB President argued that international financial institutions needed to avoid ‘excessive’ conditions, and had to ‘think about the degree of conditionality we want to impose' [11]. The Chinese financiers’ lack of stringent environmental standards may not only cause serious environmental impacts in specific projects, but also trigger a broader race to the bottom regarding the environmental standards of financial institutions.

EVOLVING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

China’s traditional response to concerns about the environmental impacts of overseas projects is that China does not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries. China’s African Policy of January 2006 stresses that China ‘respects African countries’ independent choice of the road of development’, and will ‘increase assistance to African nations with no political strings attached’ [12]. In response to Paul Wolfowitz’s accusation that China was undermining environmental standards, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson maintained in October 2006:

‘China has adopted the principle of non-interference of other nations’ internal affairs in its foreign relations. China does not accept any country imposing its values, social systems and ideology upon China. Neither will China allow itself to do so to others' [13].

The reality of China’s foreign policy is more complex than public announcements indicate, and has evolved over time. After a string of riots in African countries, the Chinese government seems to be increasingly aware that human rights abuses and environmental destruction in Chinese projects can trigger an unacceptable backlash. President Hu Jintao for example repeatedly urged Chinese businesses to respect local laws during his visit to Africa in February 2007.

Government concerns over the impacts of overseas investments have triggered a series of guidelines regarding workers’ rights, product safety, community relations, and environmental impacts in such projects. In August 2006, the Ministry of Commerce issued recommendations for improving the safety of workers in Chinese overseas investments. It urged Chinese companies to hire local workers, respect local customs and adhere to international safety standards in their projects. The recommendations argue that doing so will serve China’s national interest [14].

In October 2006, the State Council, China’s highest government body, issued nine principles regulating foreign investments of Chinese companies. Among other things, the Council called on Chinese investors to ‘fulfill the necessary social responsibility to protect the legitimate rights and interests of local employees, pay attention to environmental resource protection, care and support of the local community and people’s livelihood cause’, and to ‘preserve our good image and a good corporate reputation’ [15].

China Exim Bank was an early example of China’s effort to adopt environmental guidelines. The bank adopted an environmental policy in November 2004, and made it publicly available in April 2007. The policy states that ‘projects that are harmful to the environment or do not gain endorsement or approval from environmental administration will not be funded’. It stipulates that ‘once any unacceptable negative environmental impacts result during the project implementation, China Exim Bank will require the implementation unit to take immediate remedial or preventive measures. Otherwise, they will discontinue financial support' [16].

In August 2007, China Exim Bank issued more specific guidelines on social and environmental impact assessment. The guidelines require projects to comply with host country policies – but not international standards – regarding environmental assessment, resettlement and consultation. They stipulate an active role for China Exim Bank in monitoring environmental impacts throughout the project cycle, and reserve the right to cancel a loan if environmental impacts are not adequately addressed [17]. Observers agree that China Exim Bank is interested in international good practice in environmental assessment, but does not accept any political obligation to endorse standards drawn up by other bodies.

FROM GUIDANCE TO IMPLEMENTATION

Guidelines indicate the political intentions of the Chinese government, yet compliance is not mandatory. The central government still owns more than 150 large companies but has little control over their day-to-day operations. It has even less influence over the numerous provincial, municipal and private Chinese enterprises which are currently exploring Africa [18]. As a result, there are countless examples of Chinese investments in Africa which contradict the government appeals for a harmonious society and the tenets of corporate social responsibility.

In recent years, Chinese government agencies have created strong incentives for companies to comply with the country’s environmental laws and guidelines. In August 2007, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, now Ministry of Environmental Protection or MEP), the People’s Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission jointly prepared a green credit policy. Under this policy, ‘banks will be stricter about lending to companies that do not pass environmental assessments or fail to implement environment-protection regulations’ [19]. In November 2007, 12 Chinese companies for the first time were withheld loans under the green credit policy.

In October 2007, SEPA and Ministry of Commerce announced that they would ban companies which were found seriously violating environmental rules from exporting for up to three years [20]. And in January 2008, SEPA signed a deal with the International Finance Corporation to introduce the Equator Principles – the environmental standards of international private banks – in China [21].

None of the measures adopted by SEPA and other agencies explicitly refer to the environmental track record of Chinese overseas investors. They may even encourage domestic producers to relocate their most polluting operations abroad. Yet if the political will exists, all these measures can be used to strengthen the global environmental performance of Chinese companies.

EXPORTING CHINA’S DOMESTIC EXPERIENCE

Like every government, China tends to export its own development model through its aid and foreign economic policy. Chinese authorities have for example invited several African delegations to visit the Three Gorges Dam as a model for the continent’s energy sector development.

In recent years, the horrendous cost of the Chinese development model to the environment, public health and ultimately the economy has become evident. In 2007 the World Bank documented the alarming price which China pays for its air and water pollution. The Three Gorges Project in particular can no longer serve as an argument for putting growth before the environment. In September 2007, Chinese experts warned that the hydropower dam could ‘lead to [an environmental] catastrophe’ and that ‘the problems are all more serious than we expected’ [22].

Over the years, the Chinese government has taken strong measures to address the alarming environmental destruction. It banned logging in old-growth forests in 1998, strengthened the water law in 2002, adopted a strict law on environmental impact assessment in 2003, and ensured public participation in such impact assessments in 2006. The green credit policy and other measures adopted by SEPA provide the teeth which will enforce stricter compliance of domestic polluters with environmental regulations.

The guidelines adopted by the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce, China Exim Bank and other agencies indicate that China intends to address the environmental footprint of Chinese companies overseas. Yet as happened in Western countries, stricter environmental regulations at home may also motivate Chinese companies to move their polluting operations abroad. This creates risks for regions with weak environmental regulations and enforcement capacities such as Africa.

In September 2007, South Africa’s Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka announced that her government was talking with China about moving polluting Chinese companies to South Africa. ‘China needs to send some of its polluting industries elsewhere because it is choking on them’, Mlambo-Ngcuka said. ‘We have the capacity to manage emissions and want to regulate that agreement' [23]. The announcement is reminiscent of a memorandum in 1991 in which the World Bank’s chief economist Lawrence Summers argued that ‘under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted’, and that the World Bank should be ‘encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the [Less Developed Countries]' [24].

CONCLUSION

China has great strategic interests in Africa, and Africa will benefit from a continued strengthening of its cooperation with China. Such South-South cooperation will promote growth and much-needed investment. However, as China’s domestic experience demonstrates, economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental destruction. As a long-term partner in Africa’s development, China has a self-interest in strengthening the rules on the social and environmental impacts of its overseas projects. China has begun the process of establishing guidelines for overseas investments. Given the speed of its global expansion, these guidelines will need to become more comprehensive, and deepened through binding regulations.

African governments can learn from China’s experience by being selective in the types of investments which they invite, and by making sure that investments do not undermine the long-term environmental foundations of growth and prosperity. Africa’s civil society is taking an active interest in China’s role in the continent, and will continue to monitor the sustainability of Chinese investments.

Western governments will become more credible in expressing concerns regarding the environment and good governance if they uphold and strengthen the standards ruling their own overseas investments. They will need to accept their primary responsibility for addressing global environmental impacts. They should do more to promote standards and technologies which can help reduce emissions at home, in China and in other countries which are currently catching up with Western consumer societies.

*Peter Bosshard is the Policy Director of International Rivers in Berkeley, USA. He coordinates a programme to strengthen the environmental standards of Chinese overseas investments. A longer version of this text is available, in English and Chinese, at

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

*For further notes please follow this link:

In the essay, , the authors write "...Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent." Can any further information be given on this crucial matter?

Usiku wa dhuluma (The night of oppression)
Usiku wenye giza (The night of darkness)
Usiku mrefu mno (The long long night)
Usiku bila mwisho (The night without end)
Usiku huo (Even such a night)
Mwishowe utaisha (Will finally end)
Jogoo litawika (The cock will crow)
Jua litatoka (The sun will rise)
Mshale wa nuru (The arrow of light)
Utachoma utusitusi (Will pierce the darkness)
Kutakucha (The dawn will break)
Mapambazuko ya siku mpya (The dawn of a new day)
Matumaini ya maisha mpya (The hope of a new life)
Mapinduzi kuleta jamii mpya (The revolution to herald a new society)
Yataondoa usiku wa dhuluma (To drive away the night of oppression)

Courtesy of Vita Books
With thanks to Shiraz Durrani for permission to reproduce the poem by an anonymous author from a collection of poems from Kenya in early 1980s.

The government of Zimbabwe has a democratic commitment to ensure the freedom of movement and association of domestic and international election observers during the upcoming second round of the country's presidential election. It is also obligated to ensure the overall transparency and integrity of the entire electoral process through commitments outlined in the Southern Africa Development Community Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections (2004) and the African Union Declaration on the Principles Governing Democratic Elections in Africa (2002).

Commentator Armelle Choplin did a real service in pointing out that while Mauritania was the locale of several acts of terrorism, there is no evidence that Mauritanians, including home grown Islamists, support terrorism. That is an important distinction in light of claims by others that Mauritania has become a country of terrorism. Similarly she did well to wonder if the combination of festering social unrest and well funded promotion of Islamic fundamentalist teachings by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf donors may yet produce genuine Islamist domestic terrorism.

There is a serious shortcoming, however, in the her summary of the country's socio-religious evolution since independence. Attributing the early decision to become an Islamic Republic as a move to unite the country's social communities under the banner of Islam was true in its use as a public justification but largely false as to its actual purpose.

First, the major political factions of the dominant white Moors were animated by purely local clan competitions and the then widespread, emphatically secular Arabization movements. Syrian-Iraqi Baathism (which made a point of including Arab Christians) and Egyptian Nassirism (enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood) were the most attractive to the ruling white Moors. Second, being an Islamic Republic was useful in fending off actual "intégristes" (religious fundamentalists) by gaining tight control over the mosques. Third, Mauritanians were already Muslims, so Islam as such required no promotion. Yet unlike Arabized black Moors (Haratins), black Mauritanians remain oriented by language and culture to sub-Saharan Africa and in religious practice to the unique Muslim brotherhoods of Senegal and Mali. So black Mauritanians understood the dominant white Moors were launching an Arabization, not Isalmization, campaign to marginalize their own status and end the use of French in public education, the bureaucracy and military. This struggle became a key feature of Mauritanian political life as the Arabization campaign moved ahead and periodic acts of civil war and suppression occurred, with black Mauritanians steadily losing ground until this came to major crisis with the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of black Mauritanians in 1989. Any lingering pretense of unity under the banner of Islam was discarded in favor of a naked political power play and land grab. So yes, religious practice in Mauritania has always been tolerant of diversity within Islam but not so its use as a political facade to mask other purposes by the dominant white Moor elite.

As Africa marked the golden jubilee of African Liberation Day on May 25th, the African Union (AU) commission marked the occasion under the theme of "Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation", which will also be the theme of the AU summit to be held in Egypt this June. Concurrently, the committee of twelve African heads of states met in Tanzania to discuss the implementation of a Union government. While only five of the twelve heads of states expected to attend the meeting took part, those absent being represented by senior officials, the mini-summit approved several accelerators including the free movement of people, the establishment of financial institutions, regional infrastructure and African multi-national firms. Following the committee of twelve meeting, President Kikwete of Tanzania, current Chair of the AU, expressed shock at the xenophobic violence in South Africa but underlined that these were not government policy but “acts of vandalism”. This violence, among other events in Africa this year, are occasion for pause during this year’s Africa Day celebrations, according to Faten Aggad, who states that: “Africa Day should not only be a day to celebrate our diversity in the form of diplomatic functions and academic workshops. It should also be a day when we assess our future as a continent. For starters we should reflect on ways to create development-oriented governance systems”. He further assesses the challenges and opportunities of the African Peer Review Mechanism as a starting point for responsive and accountable African governance systems. In this regard, the AU commission will hold an East African meeting on the African Charter on Democracy, Election and Governance in Rwanda from May 29-31 aimed at promoting and encouraging ratification of the Charter. “The popularisation of the Charter and the strategies to mobilise as many signatures as possible during the ratification process are some of the main objectives of organising regional meetings”.

As the African Union prepares for the summit in June, which will take place in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, Francis Ameyibor provides analysis of the expectations and challenges for this meeting. Noting that the summit will be an important indicator of the performance of the new leadership of the commission, he further elaborates that the summit will “confront the adoption and implementation of a more responsive and rights based social policy framework for Africa. Among them are the non-implementation of existing social continental policy standards contained in various AU Decisions and Declarations and the MDGs, poor national and inter-ministerial linkages and inadequate resources.” Further, on “the formation of the Union Government of Africa, it is expected that the Summit would come out with a definite position, and stop the foot-dragging tactics”.

In regard to aid and development, a recent report has revealed that “on current trends the European Union (EU) will have given 75 billion less in aid by 2010 than it promised” and that European governments inflate aid statistics with debt relief and refugee costs. Assessing regional integration in terms of trade and development, Dot Keet notes that “neo-liberalism really narrowed the conceptualisation of regional integration. The World Bank and the IMF were promoting the paradigm called ‘open regionalism’, for and towards ‘global integration’, and this was backed by the EU.” She further asks how Africa can forge external agreements, such as the Economic Partnership Agreements with the EU, when regional protocols on these issues are not in place or have been reinterpreted from their original intention. Also affecting African integration, the European Commission has unveiled plans for a Mediterranean Union, bringing together 44 countries, including Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. This Union is to have a co-presidency from the EU and a Mediterranean country lasting two years.

Lastly, the new commissioner for science and technology, Jean-Pierre Onvéhoun Ezin, plans to include education in the proposed African Science and Innovation Fund, in a move meant to avoid duplication of efforts, but which some fear will diminish resources for science.

Amongst other things, Paul T Zeleza argues that in spite of the xenophobic violence being black on black, there is a "bequest of deeply racialized and internalized superiority and inferiority complexes at work."

The Pan-African world has been watching with mounting horror the xenophobic violence that has gripped several South African townships over the past two weeks which has resulted in the wanton destruction of many lives and property. Fifty-six people have been murdered, thousands seek sanctuary in police stations, churches, community halls and 'safe havens' or camps, and many more are fleeing back to their countries of origin as several governments desperately try to repatriate their nationals.

Our horror reflects our immense investment in the success of the rainbow nation born out of our collective abhorrence of apartheid South Africa as the supreme embodiment of the barbaric crimes committed against peoples of African descent over the last half millennium: slavery, colonialism, and racism. It also reflects deep disappointment that migrants from the neighboring countries and the rest of the continent are being treated with such vicious contempt notwithstanding their countries' unwavering support and sacrifices for the liberation of South Africa from the historic nightmares of apartheid.

To date, 35,000 people are internally displaced and more than 26,000 have fled to Mozambique alone, and 25,000 Zimbabweans are fleeing through Zambia. The scale of the violence has shocked South African civil society and humanitarian organizations, pummelled the rand and business confidence, and dented South Africa's image across the continent, shaking the South African state and its embattled lame-duck president out of their stupor of political indifference, policy incoherence, and operational incompetence on migration and the poor.

The current cycle of xenophobic violence--there have been several others--is a depressing testimony to the failures of post-apartheid South Africa to resolve the interconnected challenges inherited from the political and racial economies of apartheid: domestically the deracialization and reduction of social inequalities and externally the reinsertion of South Africa into independent Africa from its apartheid laager of isolation. While South Africa has made remarkable progress since 1994, not least in terms of economic growth, national integration, democratization at home, and reincorporation into African and world affairs abroad, social inequalities persist and are in fact deepening, and the dangerous and occasionally deadly myth of South African exceptionalism endures.

The South African poor are still awaiting the fruits of uhuru as the black middle classes expand and the white rich maintain their monopolies of wealth and privilege even if they are now joined by politically well-connected 'native' beneficiaries of black economic empowerment. In the meantime, South Africa historically constructed as a sub-imperial metropole ever since the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth century continues to attract labor migrants from the subregion and further afield. The postapartheid migrants are no longer chanelled predominantly to the declining mining industry, but find themselves increasingly competing for economic survival with South Africa's poor in the townships.

The demise of apartheid ended internal 'influx' controls into the previously designated 'white' cities and opened South Africa to new waves of African immigrants. Circumscribed by its conformities to neo-liberal economic policies on the one hand and its commitments to a Pan-African agenda on the other, the ANC government has thus far failed to stem domestic racial and social inequalities and develop a sound and sustainable immigration policy. This is the combustible brew that has blown up: the struggle for resources among the disaffected South African poor and the disenfranchised immigrants, whose very social and spatial intimacies engender the violent narcissisms of minor difference.

Whatever their debilitations and marginalizations from the postapartheid dispensation, the township poor have citizenship on their side, which they periodically wield violently to dispossess the immigrants, for petty primitive accumulation (342 foreign-owned businesses have been looted or destroyed), for national attention, to make claims for redress from the neo-liberal state. As is typical in such struggles, the former blame the latter of taking their jobs, opportunities, and women (the gendered inflexion of xenophobic bigotry), and the escalation of crime--never mind that levels of crime in South Africa are much higher than in the countries where most of the immigrants come from, itself another tragic legacy of apartheid.

But there is more to this depressing carnage of xenophobic violence than material conditions. Nor is South Africa unique in its eruptions of xenophobia in the Pan-African world, let alone the world at large. Remember the state-sponsored expulsions of 155,000-213,000 West Africans including 50,000 Nigerians from Ghana in 1969, 1.3 million Ghanaians from Nigeria between 1983-1985, the killings and mass expulsions in Libya in the 1980s and 1990s, the tit-for-tat expulsions of nearly 150,000 people between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the late 1990s as the two countries slid into a senseless war, and of tens of thousands from Cote d'Ivoire during its boom years. The list of xenophobic violence across Africa is a long and depressing one indeed.

One could of course blame the incongruity of Africa's porous national boundaries and the legacies of colonialism, the universal propensity of governments and the media to blame foreigners for domestic economic and social crises, and the rise of chauvinistic and explosive nationalisms in response to the stresses of neo-liberal globalization. In the case of Africa's former settler societies from Algeria to South Africa, via Kenya and Zimbabwe, there is an added dimension: the cruel bequest of deeply racialized and internalized superiority and inferiority complexes. The current xenophobic violence in South Africa is being meted out to what some in the country call "those Africans," or more popularly, the makwerekwere. None of the fifty people who have been killed is white. The anger is intra-racial, directed at other black Africans.

Pius Adesanmi discussed the social pathologization and discursive ridicule of the in an earlier blog on The Zeleza Post. African commentators and visitors to South Africa are often confounded by the pervasive sense of South African difference, of exceptionalism, the lingering racist apartheid myth that South Africa is an outpost of civilization, of modernity, on the 'dark continent'. Ignorance about other African countries is of course not peculiar to South Africa, nor is the sense of misguided national superiority. I have encountered it in many other countries in which I have lived in the Pan-African world from Zimbabwe to Jamaica to Kenya, not to mention Britain, Canada, and the United States. It is the deadly mantra of xenophobic nationalism: 'We are better than you, You are less than us'.

In all these cases, across the Pan-African world, the measures of the 'better than, less than' national discourses mutate and are articulated in peculiar local idioms, but they revolve around two axes: the relative levels of material development and the magnitude of the white presence. Thus, westerness and whiteness remain imprimaturs in the scale of human worthiness in the Pan-African world, the reason why diasporan Africans feel superior to continental Africans, why within the diaspora the light-skinned have historically enjoyed better opportunities than their darker skinned compatriots, why shades of blackness have become a shameful basis for distinguishing African immigrants among black South Africans, why the latter's xenophobic rage is not directed at white immigrants but at 'those Africans', the despised makwerekwere.

This is the racialized devaluation of black lives that we are witnessing in South Africa today in the xenophobic violence against African immigrants perpetrated by fellow Africans whose own lives were devalued during the long horrific days of racial segregation and apartheid. Racialized superiority and inferiority complexes have stalked the Pan-African world for decades, stoking the mistrust that sometimes degenerates into interpersonal and intracial animosity and even violence. This violence is the flipside of the collective Pan-Africanist struggles and ideals for the unity of African peoples and their collective liberation and empowerment. South Africans and all of us could benefit from a more systematic and sustained education about our shared pasts, present, and futures in a world that has devalued and continues to devalue our lives and humanity.

*Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post. This article was first published at http://zeleza.com

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

Jegede Ademola Oluborode looks at the Protocol on the Rights of Women in relation to medical or scientific experiments and argues that ethical and scientific standards are lowered when it comes to African women and informed consent may not be enough to protect vulnerable African women.

This article is a reflection on the provision of article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa( Protocol on the Rights of Women) which seeks to prohibit all medical and scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. The article argues that the prohibition of all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent, without more, falls short of other ethical requirements for safety in scientific and medical experimentation. This in itself is an expression of the regrettable gap which over the years has existed in major international human rights instruments, to which most African States are signatory. To this end therefore, the article suggests that along with the requirement of consent, there is a need to legally prescribe appropriate human rights standard on the performance of medical and scientific experiments. The article concludes that a re-draft of article 4 (2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women is imperative to ensure maximum legal protection for women, who by virtue of their role in the society are most vulnerable to medical and scientific exploitation.

INJUSTICES IN MEDICAL OR SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS AND WOMEN [1]

Examples of where women have been victims to medical and scientific exploitation under the pretext of research are not new. Grave atrocities were committed in the process of medical experiments carried out during the Second World War on non-consenting women and children prisoners of Nazi concentration camps [2]. During the same period in history, African women from the German South West Africa, now Namibia, were part of sterilization programmes instituted by Germany without their consent [3]. In more recent times, evidence from Nigeria implicated Pfizer International Incorporated (PII) of fraud and criminal breach of trust of its controversial drug test, popularly known as Trovan Clinical Trials, which it carried out on Nigerian citizens in Kano in 1996, which had fatal results [4].

The burden of disease, generally, including malaria, sickle cell anaemia, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, weighs heavily on Africa, where these illnesses are most prevalent. In more ways than one, the impact of these diseases has been disproportionately borne by women. While medical and scientific trials and research involving women, holds great prospects for the solution of these problems, researches and pharmaceutical companies who engage in trials can not always be trusted to function with due consideration for ethical requirements, when such requirements are not well specified and projected in the African human rights system.

It is noteworthy that due to low level of literacy in Africa, very few women who are research participants are sufficiently educated to really understand the details of studies and trials in which they are engaged [5]. The poverty and powerlessness of women often lead to their participation in clinical and scientific researches merely for inexpensive inducements, and largely due to less understanding of study risks, or for the pregnant women, under the mistaken belief that such studies will result in care for their unborn children. There are for instance, controversies which have surrounded microbicide trials carried out on women in South Africa which revealed that women in the study developed higher risk of HIV infection [6]. In 2007, the US-based reproductive health research organisation, CONRAD, also announced the premature end of trials of a cellulose sulphate-based microbicide in Nigeria, Benin and Uganda after the data safety and monitoring committee found a higher number of infections in the active group compared to the placebo group [7].

The New England Journal of Medicine carried a comment on 15 on-going clinical trials testing cheaper drug regimens to prevent maternal-foetal transmission of HIV in Africa. Some 16,000 pregnant, HIV-positive women were enrolled in the placebo-controlled trials. The problem with these trials was that it began after Zidovudine (AZT) had been found to prevent such transmission by 50% or more, and is recommended to all HIV-positive pregnant women in western countries. In other words, it was reported that, thousands of women in the trials were getting sugar pills to test the efficacy of the new regimens whereas if they had been enrolled in trials in Europe, they would have received a standard course of AZT [8]. This further underscores the point that the truth in Africa, is that very few women do enjoy the benefits of the research in which they participate.

The survival of women therefore raises the question as to whether international human rights have done enough to protect women in terms of medical and scientific experimentation and if not, whether there is the need for the African human right system to review existing legal framework with the view of addressing such gap.

INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS ON MEDICAL/ SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

When international human rights instruments have discussed access to health services, it has been silent on medical and scientific experimentation. This was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which only guarantees in its Article 25(1) the right of everyone to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care. Similarly, subsequent notable instrument such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in Article 12(2)(d) only urges the States to take steps to achieve full realization of the right to health by creating conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness [9]. Article 5 (d)(iv) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is no different when it provides for the right to public health, medical care, social security and social services [10].

Although, the need to take urgent steps to address the inequality as it affects women on a number of issues led to the adoption of the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), [11] the Convention fails to sufficiently address the issues of human rights around medical and scientific experiments in its copious provisions in Article 11(f), 12(1) and 14(2) (b) regarding improvement of access of women to health care services. This is also lacking in the 1999 General Comment of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which interpreted the right to health under Article 12 of CEDAW as the right of women to be fully informed, by properly trained personnel, of their options in agreeing to treatment or research, including likely benefits and potential adverse effects of proposed procedures and available alternatives [12].

Article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women provides that States parties shall take appropriate and effective measures to prohibit all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. This appears progressive for Africa, considering that, with the exception to South African Constitution which has similar provision; hardly does any other African constitution have a similar provision with such safeguard [13].The Protocol is however merely re-stating article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which provides that ‘no one shall be subject without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation [14]. The inherent weakness in the foregoing efforts is that the requirement of consent, without more excludes certain elements of ethics which are fundamental in medical and scientific experiments and in so doing, deprives them of being legally determinable.

ELEMENTS AS IMPORTANT AS ‘INFORMED CONSENT’ IN MEDICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

The medical misdeeds at the Second World War led to the Nuremberg code in 1947, a set of principles devised to protect human subjects from unethical experimentation [15]. The Nuremberg code was a part of the judgment delivered in the so-called Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg following World War II. The principles of the code were based upon the criteria for ethical research that were elucidated by the two expert medical witnesses at the trial if human experimentation was to be justified. These are: informed consent; Results must be for the good of society; and the experiment must be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons [16].

While further reinforcing the principles at Nuremberg, the Declarations of Helsinki (1964 and 1975, with further revisions in 1983, 1989, 1996 and 2000) emphasised that in research involving human beings, the potential benefits must outweigh hazards. The Belmont Report of 1979 projected three ethical principles as relating to research on human subjects namely; respect for persons; beneficence and Justice. The principle of respect to persons connotes that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents. The principle of benevolence indicates that harm must not be occasioned; maximum benefits must be ensured while Justice signifies that there should be fair distribution of burdens and benefits of research [17].

RECENT EFFORTS AT CODIFYING RESEARCH ETHICS

The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (the Declaration) which regulates cell research appears to have provided for other requirements apart from informed consent. Article 5 of the Declaration recommends that attention be given to best interest the persons involved in the research, compliance with national and international research standards or guidelines, health benefit, minimal risk and minimal burden, compatibility with the protection of the individual's human rights [18]. Apart from failing to define what the national and international research standards and guidelines are, the Declaration, suffers the same setback with other declarations, which is that generally, they are not binding in international law.

In 1997, Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine was adopted by the Council of Europe (The Convention). The Convention provided extensively for ethics regarding medicine and scientific experiments. Article 16 of the Convention extensively provides for protection of a person undergoing experimentation and accommodates the ethics on Justice, Benevolence and freedom of harm which the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration Belmont Report have projected. Article 23 of the Convention allows parties to pursue judicial protection to prevent or to put a stop to an unlawful infringement of the rights and principles in the Convention at short notice [19].

Africa may not however benefit from the Convention considering that the only parties to the Convention were members of the Council of Europe. Without regional legal human rights coverage of the subject, it is unlikely that the Convention as it is presently will be of any use on African concerns on the matter of experimentation and exploitation. The need for such coverage is imperative in a globalised world where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and stands the greatest risk to be impacted by medical exploitation. That is more so considering that it is unlikely that free choice and benefits can be enjoyed by women in relation to medical and scientific experiments where standards are absent.

THE WAY FORWARD

From Universal Declaration of Human Rights through CEDAW to the Protocol on Women Rights, international human rights instruments to which most African nations are signatory are inadequate as a standard of regulating scientific and medical experiments. Most importantly, article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights lacks the essential components on ethics required for scientific and medical experimentation. The Protocol on Women Rights, just as the Convention on Human Rights & Biomedicine should accommodate requirements which the Nuremberg Codes, Helsinki Declaration and Belmont Report have projected in terms of respect for persons; beneficence and fairness. Achieving this will be a leap forwards as it will take the principles beyond the realms of mere ethics to the realms of active rights. It is therefore suggested that article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights in addition with the principle of informed consent should include the principles of beneficence and fairness. This is imperative in this age of globalisation where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and its women the most vulnerable.

*Jegede Ademola Oluborode is a legal practitioner and a human rights activist in Nigeria.

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

For further notes, please follow this link:

First of all your premise in that the poverty and economic stagnation in African countries is cause by corrupt and incompetent government is a narrow interpretation of the difficulties which beset the African continent. You virtually exclude the impact of neo-colonialism.

And your claims that the land distribution could have been accomplished by legislation in naive. They tried that in South Africa before Mandela left office and big landowner threatened to resist and ignore any such mandate, forcing the government to back down.

Mugabe has declared war on the people of the world, writes Grace Kwinjeh. To me it sounds a little bit exaggerated as do other statements in .

However, she is right when she writes that the Mugabe government until 1998 was considered amongst the highest-performing of World Bank and International Monetary Fund clients. And the Zimbabwean government did pay back $205 million in hard currency in 2006 to the IMF and more recently $700,000 or so to the African Development Bank. If Mugabe also flirted with the US military for many years, I don’t know. But in that case, this courtship now has been harshly turned down by the attended.

Kwinjeh paints a somber picture of the developments in Zimbabwe but forget to tell us what really happened when this development sat in.

In 1998 Zimbabwe broke with the IMF and Western-sponsored developmental paths, paths apparently spurned by Kwinjeh, and tried to enter a more homemade one. No doubt, it is has been an arduous pathway with a lot of potholes and blemishes but to blame all the present malice in Zimbabwe on the government may be an elopement. T

The introduction of Kwinjeh’s article promises an analysis of Zimbabwe through regional, African and global capitalism. But she fails grossly to tell us about how the forces of global capitalism are working against Zimbabwe today. The West has been heavily investing in regime change in Zimbabwe lately, through sanctions and its docile media, sometimes referred to as the “free press” or “independent media”. In what way FOX, CNN and BBC are independent is beyond me, but those media paint the same one-sided and ominous picture of Zimbabwe as do Kwinjeh.

In my opinion it is Kwinjeh who is “talking ultraleft” while at the same time “walking right” more than the government of Zimbabwe.

I think the article, , might have been somewhat mis-translated - "awash with extremists" is not what I understood from the French original, but rather something along the lines of how the West had suddenly become suspicious after the attacks; nor "suspicious of the West" but rather "which worries the West". I'd suggest readers turn to the original French if possible

The new African Union (AU) commissioner for science and technology has put education firmly at the top of his agenda. Jean-Pierre Onvéhoun Ezin, a mathematics researcher at Benin's National University, took office last month (29 April).

In a move which could potentially plunge Guinea into political and social turmoil, President Lansana Conté sacked his internationally-backed prime minister Lansana Kouyaté on 20 May, replacing him with long-time ally Ahmed Tidjane Souaré. The change over was ordered by presidential decree and announced on the state-run television’s evening news.

Two soldiers were killed and two others injured on 20 May when their army patrol in the Casamance region was attacked by armed men allegedly from the rebel Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques De Casamance (MFDC), an spokesman for the army told IRIN.

With governance in limbo and post-election violence spreading beyond control in Zimbabwe, rights groups and think-tanks have warned of a military coup, martial law or even civil war. Hope that a run-off after disputed presidential elections will bring reconciliation is fading, and calls for urgent pan-African intervention are increasing.

Why are condoms so unpopular? This question has baffled and discouraged health experts for a decade, but in Swaziland the mystery of why men and women refuse to use condoms is slowly being unravelled by a project that is getting Swazi men to open up about their condom use, or lack thereof.

Tuareg rebels attacked an army camp in north-eastern Mali where 17 rebels and 15 soldiers were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes to date in a revolt by the desert insurgents, the government said on Thursday. A Defence Ministry statement said an "armed band" assaulted the camp at Abebara, 150km from Kidal during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in Mali's remote north-east, where Tuareg fighters have carried out a series of raids and ambushes.

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – a co-ordinating national body of social movements, civil society and activist organizations – is organizing with its affiliated organizations and immigrant communities to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia.

In the years since its formation in 2002, the SMI has linked organizations of the poor in struggle for basic services, international solidarity and against police repression. At its last national meeting in December in Cape Town, the SMI identified xenophobia as a pervasive problem in communities and undertook to campaign against hatred of foreigners. Now that the crisis of hate crime is no longer foreboding and is terrifyingly HERE, there is no time to stall and wish we were better prepared. We are without hesitation committed to the struggles for social justice, internationalism and solidarity with all repressed people.

While the police have been deployed to try keep a lid on the pressure that has boiled over, this is no solution to the safety and security of all. As a xenophobic force in Johannesburg pre-existing the outbreak of violence, the police cannot be trusted to be more than the brute barrier between perpetrators and their targeted victims. The South African Police Services and Johannesburg Metro Police harass immigrants to solicit bribes as a matter of practice. Calling on the police to 'do their work' as president Thabo Mbeki and his government have done does not, therefore, address the issues of safety and security amongst immigrant communities. The refugee communities do not trust the police as impartial arbiters of the conflict. The police conducted a brutal raid on the Central Methodist Church on the 31st of January 2008 under the pretext of crime prevention. Criminalisation of immigrants is a smokescreen for deportation and bribery that the police has not cleared.

Long-lasting safety and security for all does not include deportation of foreign nationals, whether voluntary or not. Xenophobia's origins lie within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of south Africans live. Immigrants have been targeted for their ethnic difference and for their very similarity with their persecutors. Seen as competitors for scarce jobs and housing, south Africans have misdirected their anger at conditions of poverty that are unchanging. Their fellow brothers and sisters who are enduring the same cannot be responsible for what the economic and political system has created.

While we struggle for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has created this reality, rearguard struggles for safety and security of immigrants in the country must continue. The SMI gives thanks for those humanitarian organizations, emergency services and churches that are trying to stem the tide of bloodletting and forced removals. We will organize against the creation of refugee camps and work towards the reintegration of immigrants in our communities. In working to recover our common humanity and restore calm, delegations from the SMI are meeting with community-based organizations in Alex and the inner city, and as the programme of action to roll-back the hate unfolds, the SMI will be going further afield to speak to affected communities.

The SMI is mobilizing social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs and concerned residents from poor areas around the province for a march this Saturday, the 24th of May. The march will gather at Marks Park (Empire and Hospital Road) from 9a.m., proceed through Hillbrow and stop at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the Library Gardens. The message marchers will be conveying is that our struggle is common and knows no borders.

— No one is illegal —

*The Social Movements Indaba includes amongst other organizations: the Anti Privatisation Forum, Jubilee South Africa, Imbawula Trust, Sounds of Edutainment, Umzabalazo we Jubilee, Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, Inner City Resource Centre, Kliptown Concerned Residents, Khanya College, Earthlife Africa (Johannesburg), Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Golden Triangle Crisis Committee, Samancor Retrenched Workers Crisis Committee, African Renaissance Civic Movement, Group of Refugees Without Voice.

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

In the midst of the drama of the past few days, which has seen South Africans rampaging against foreigners to vent their frustrations at the slow pace of delivery of land, housing and jobs, one story stands out as the antithesis to the story of non-development.

The government of Côte d’Ivoire should take immediate steps to end impunity for members of a pro-government student group responsible for numerous acts of violent, criminal behavior, Human Rights Watch has said in a report. Since 2002, when a failed coup attempt plunged the country into a political and military crisis, the Student Federation of Côte d’Ivoire (Fédération Estudiantine et Scolaire de Côte d’Ivoire, FESCI), alternatively described as a “pro-government militia” and a “mafia,” has been responsible for politically and criminally motivated violence.

International action is needed to end the Lord’s Resistance Army’s reported new spree of abductions and sexual violence and to help execute arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for the group’s leaders, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch has learned that since February 2008 the insurgent Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) group has carried out at least 100 abductions, and perhaps many more, in the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Southern Sudan.

Supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party in Zimbabwe tortured more than 70 people, including six men to death, in a “re-education” meeting on May 5, 2008 in Mashonaland Central, Human Rights Watch said today. The government’s campaign of organized terror and violence against the political opposition is continuing despite agreement to hold a presidential runoff election.

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Jacques Depelchin reflects on the ties that bind Haiti to South Africa and asks: "In a country where the lethal combination of racism and competition has left a legacy of gross injustice, is it too late to suggest that those who were trampled upon should be listened to with the greatest care possible?"

This is a brief report from a visit to Durban, specifically to see for oneself places like Kennedy Road, Motala Heights, to meet with people like S'bu Zikode and Shamita Naidoo whose words continue to impact us in a way which is still generating new thinking. We were on our way to meet people who can be described as the staunchest defenders of the poor, and, by extension, of humanity.

Driving with Pauline from Maputo to Durban reminded her of her native lands in the Caribbean: sugar plantations after sugar plantations. However, for her, that was the 50s. Now, this was 2008, in the Province of Kwazulu-Natal, where Jacob Zuma, the newly elected President of the ANC, comes from. For those who do not know, it is worth remembering, in the name of always connecting the dots, that President Jean Bertrand Aristide presented a thesis in linguistics at the University of South Africa (Unisa) comparing Isizulu and Creol. I am still reading the thesis which can be found on line and downloaded. It was presented in November 2006. I hope and pray that President JBA does get invited/encouraged to visit the place from where so many Haitians originally have came: DRC. We could then look forward to another comparative thesis on Kikongo and Creol and another step in the process of reconnecting those who should never ever been separated from each other

Thanks to Richard Pithouse we were able to meet a few among those who constitute the heart of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), including Shamita Naidoo at Motala Heights and S'bu Zikode at Kennedy Road. Besides wanting to see the faces behind the names we had heard about, we wanted to understand how people like S'bu Zikode and his companions had attracted such wrath from Durban City officialdom in general, and from the Superintendent of Police Nayager, in particular. We wanted to understand how in the country where Apartheid was defeated, some of its practices are still alive and well.

Here were people who, living among the poorest of the poor, standing up and insisting on being treated with respect and dignity, as called for by the South African Constitution, but who, strangely, were being charged, beaten up and arrested by the police as though they were criminals. How could a police force, under the political leadership of the ANC, behave in a way that is reminiscent of the apartheid police?

This question could be formulated differently, and maybe, more generically, in a region and in a world where such drastic turns are no longer the exception: How do good people or, more precisely, people who could have become heroes/heroines of Goodness/Love took a wrong turn somewhere. Some may not like the jump, but visiting places like AbM could help understand how a Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, became what he is today, i.e. turning against his own people. Is it that easy to loose one's moral compass?

In a world where governments are stating their objectives of wiping all forms and degrees of poverty from extreme to mild, from endemic to periodic, one might be forgiven to think that the poor themselves would be the most important allies in such a project. Unfortunately, not so when one listens to AbM. Instead what one hears and what one sees leads one to a frightening conclusion. That is: how something akin to ethnic cleansing emerges, against defenceless people. The average person might balk at such an assertion. After all, cleansing has been more easily associated with genocidal behaviour against another ethnic group. Some might find it offensive and out of line to suggest that an ANC government could be accused of ethnic cleansing against the poorest of its citizens. Is it not better to think of a most outrageous hypothesis so that those who are currently responsible for its probable outcome might pause, pull back and change course?

What would it take to stop the violence against the poorest of the poor (pop)?

One of the possible explanations for the extreme hatred shown by Superintendent of Police Nayager, can easily be understood once one understands the context of the soon to be held in South Africa Soccer World Cup: in 2010. FIFA may not have stipulated that all efforts must be exerted to keep all and any signs of extreme poverty out of sight but the message comes through and RSA is doing everything to hide the offending communities away. It is not difficult to understand the reasoning behind this: people who come to be entertained by the Soccer extravaganza must not be allowed to be disturbed by the sight of shacks. Such a sight could lead some of the visiting entertainees, not to speak of the performers themselves, to ask themselves about the appropriateness of spending such huge amounts of money when significant segments of the local citizenry does not have access to adequate housing and amenities, such as water and electricity.

2010 being just around the corner, South African officialdom, at least some of them, are implementing the most radical option in keeping poverty/poor out of sight: removing the poor from the landscapes which could be in the visitors' line of vision. In the process, these poverty/ethnic cleansers have affirmed, in various and modulated ways, that the poor are not worth listening to, that their voices do not count.

In a country where the lethal combination of racism and competition has left a legacy of gross injustice, is it too late to suggest that those who were trampled upon should be listened to with the greatest care possible? Is it too late to suggest that while the TRC was a step in the right direction, it was bound to fall too short of the task at hand? Is it too late to suggest that those who understand their profession as that of repressing, oppressing and beating up, should be retrained to listen, attentively, and, wherever possible, with compassion to the poor? Surely it is not too late to suggest that as long as the poor are not free from the consequences of apartheid, no one is free. In parenthesis, that is why on Freedom Day, they, at Kennedy Road, marched to remind the South African Nation that, for them, this was Unfreedom Day.

It will be a while before I digest all of the words from S'bu Zikode and his companions, but there is a phrase I shall never forget: "We do not want money". This is the crux of the matter. In a world driven by the profit motive, competition, greed, selfishness, S'bu reminded those who would listen that they are not interested in what the self appointed discoverers of poverty would like to eliminate via charitable gestures. They want to be treated with respect, justice and dignity. In those cases where the law is broken, e.g. trying to get food, water and/or electricity, they are saying to the government "look at our situation. It is an unacceptable one to any self-respecting human being". Is such a demand so outrageous that it has to be met with the unleashing of extreme violence? Is such a demand so unreasonable that it cannot even be listened to?

When so much still remained to be said we asked S'bu Zikode "what is the way out?" "Healing", he said. Needless to say, given Ota Benga's motto –for peace healing and dignity—a very long exchange followed. In a post Apartheid South Africa, in a South Africa where the TRC had raised such expectations and led to such disappointments, is it too late to listen to those who articulate the spirit of reconciliation with the conviction of a Mandela or a Tutu? People like Nayager, Sutcliffe, Govender and many others who share their understanding – misunderstanding, really—of the poor, surely are in deep need of healing because in their minds the poor are not worth anything.

Is it too late, in the name of humanity, to slow down the race to join in globalization, the race to be part of the first world, with the collateral damage of maiming, torturing, killing those who are not strong enough to keep pace? It is our hope that the voices of S'bu, Shamita, and their growing supporters, such as Bishop Rubin Philipp, will re-energize, re-awaken the flagging spirits of those who had a different vision of Post Apartheid South Africa, one which was more in line with the prescriptions being enunciated with such clarity from the favelas of South Africa and many other parts of the world. Those voices are refusing to accept the transition which has taken South Africans, poor and rich, from the end of apartheid in South Africa to Global apartheid.

Seeing the citizens of Kennedy Road, of Motala Heights reminded us of their brothers and sisters in Haiti, in Brasil, India, and cities all over the world whose only prescription is to be listened to with respect, and justice as human beings. As they keep repeating over and over: they do not want charity, they want solidarity. They do not want to be treated as a humanitarian issue, they want to be treated as human beings. To them we say thank you for being strong, thank you for reminding us of our common humanity, thank you for your courage and serenity.

* Jacques Depelchin works with the Ota Benga Alliance for Peace Healing and Dignity. He is currently visiting Professor at the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

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

Girls within armed groups have generally been neglected by scholars, governments and policymakers. This Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) paper traces the experiences of girls in armed conflict in Angola, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Uganda. It finds that girls in fighting forces are rendered invisible and marginalised during and after conflict, although they are fundamentally important to armed groups. They experience victimisation, perpetration and insecurity, but are also active agents and resisters.

Despite a marked improvement in the security situation in Burundi in recent years, some 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in settlements throughout the country, in addition to an unknown number living with host families. Many IDPs seem to have to a large extent integrated into the communities of neighbouring towns and villages, but there is little information on their situation, their needs or their aspirations.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Sudanese authorities to lift the ban on Arabic-language newspaper Alwan, which has been accused of publishing “sensitive military information harmful to the country’s security” linked to a recent attack on the capital city Khartoum by Darfur rebels.

According to press reports in Spain, the government and army of Morocco are making preparations for a military attack on the territories controlled by Western Sahara's Polisario Front since a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991. The alleged "preparations" are to be a reaction to the increased civilian activities by Polisario in its "liberated territories".

In this vivid and personal account, a trade unionist walks through the unfolding xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

19 May 2008:

Friends, this is simply an account of what I saw and experienced in a twenty four period. It might be incomplete. It is not an analytical piece as such, but I hope a small step towards trying to understand what had taken place in this city, in this country that I have come to love.

Last night as we drove from the centre of Joburg to the eastern suburb of Kensington, we wondered why the police helicopter was circling over Jeppes Town, the historic centre of this city built on gold. The area is now mostly an industrial relic and has seen far better times, part wasteland, part small enterprises and a big part, home of one of the largest mens hostels in the City.

We had been discussing earlier the violence in Alex, the eruptions in other parts, and what we felt was the cause, and the inadequate response of the State. We had participated earlier in the day in a demonstration called by our Union Federation to protest against rising food prices, and against xenophobia, an issue that had been tagged on after foreigners had been brutally attacked in Alexandria township and other places. We had taken our son and his friend, and their enthusiasm had helped to minimise the disappointingly low numbers who had turned up.

We slept that night within earshot of police sirens and the whirring of helicopters and wondered what we would wake to.

At 9.00am Lesego rang the bell. A small boy for his sixteen years, wirey but capable of dribbling a football as if his feet had magnetic powers. I let him in, and he looked terrified. He had traveled from Soweto, as he did every fortnight, to come and do odd jobs to earn an allowance that he depends on to survive. We would normally have a talk about his schooling, the continuing absence of contact with his mother, and his living conditions. We hoped this might help him be capable of getting through the next hurdles he inevitably faced.

But this morning, it was fear that was etched on his face. Scrunched up in his pocket was the small round hat favoured by members of the Moslem community. Getting off the taxi at Jeppe Station, he noticed a crowd of men beating two people on the ground with knobkerries. One of those doing the beating looked up, saw him and shouted, ‘Hey you, alien, come here’. He didn’t wait to answer. Snatching the hat from his head, he sprinted like a springbok, and ran the kilometre to our house in sheer terror.

A quiet and reserved young man, we somehow managed to calm him down with sweet tea and reassurances. He was thinking hard before he finally spoke.

‘These people have not been educated’ he said. ‘They think it is the foreigners who are to blame. I fear them, but I also feel sorry for them. They think that killing poor people like themselves is going to make it better for them’.

Later I dropped him in town to connect with his taxi to Soweto, and the shack where he lived alone without electricity to read his homework and prepare for his exams the next day. Without the means to cook himself even a simple supper.

As I circled town to return home I came across hundreds and hundreds of bedraggled people, milling around an infamous taxi rank area. I pulled up next to a police woman on duty. I asked her what was going on. ‘It’s the Zimbabweans’ she said matter of factly, ‘They have come out of the Methodist Centre because there is trouble there’ And when I asked her what sort of trouble she simply said ‘Something to do with Bishop Verryn’.

Some months earlier, the Methodist centre managed by the Bishop as a makeshift refuge for hundreds of destitute Zimbabweans, had been raided by the police in a military style operation that belonged to another era. Purportedly looking for ‘illegals’ the police had unceremoniously thrown the destitute and their few possessions into the street, had publicly assaulted perfectly innocent people, and then arrested many of them on completely spurious grounds. Bishop Paul and others were later to respond by having the entire action severely criticized by a court of law, and declared completely illegal. But the damage had been done.

The leadership of the police had given a very public indication that they regarded ‘aliens’ as unworthy of fair treatment under the law. Refugees, wherever they were from, were to be treated as if they were less than human, and therefore human rights guarantees under the famed South African Constitution, were not to apply.

Worse, they sent a clear message to the persecuted Zimbabwean community. Do not look to the police for protection. These thoughts returned many times over the next few hours.

By now, radio news reports had started to tell what had happened the previous night, but not before my partner had phoned them and reminded them of their duty to report what was happening on our doorsteps. When approached, the public broadcaster listened carefully and promised to increase reportage, and did by the time of the next hourly bulletin. The commercial station was less receptive, and continued to air a truncated and inaccurate report for three more hours.

As I drove up Main Street in Jeppes Town, events of the previous night were clear to see. Buildings, once occupied by tens of families were still smouldering, a fire engine stood nearby, several police cars with lights flashing had blocked roads leading to the Jeppe Hostel.

Jeppe Hostel, as it is known locally, had been at the centre of other storms in the past. In the tumultuous eighties and nineties it had been the centre for Inkatha Freedom Party activity in the area. ANC and COSATU activists who ventured there took their life in their hands. So called ‘black on black’ violence that resulted in dozens of deaths were centred on the train station in Jeppes Town.

The hostel itself is now chronically overcrowded, squalid and seriously unfit for habitation, it houses thousands of poor working class men and some of their partners. It is surrounded by an urban squatter camp, made up of once busy outlets, workshops and factories that are now lived in by those who cannot or who are unable to live in the hostel. Adjoining factory floor space is divided by makeshift curtains to mark the living spaces of the working and unemployed poor. Sanitation, electricity, clean water, privacy, safety are all luxuries in this community.

As I continued up the road I noticed that despite the police presence, large groups of men carrying ‘cultural weapons’ (various clubs, machetes, bottles) were standing on the corners, watching, waiting. Many others, mostly family groups, were standing in their doorways looking anxiously out.

Further up the road still, I slowed to pass the building where Lesego had witnessed the beatings and from where his pursuers had emerged. A miserable building of perhaps ten electricity deprived flats. A large group of men, some middle aged, others in their early twenties were standing and watching passers by, their weapons visible for all to see. The police it seemed were keeping a safe distance.

Back at home, we listen to the news reports, and start to receive anxious calls from friends. One comrade, Paul, who worked for the trade unions in Zimbabwe for many years is here to receive treatment and staying with his brother in Cleveland, a working class suburb close by. He and his brother’s family have sought refuge in the local Catholic church. He described how he witnessed mobs of drunken men from the large Denver Hostel moving from house to house asking the occupants questions in Zulu. If the reply was made in Zulu, then the visitors asked for money and moved to the next house. If not, the house was looted, the occupants assaulted, and thrown out onto the street to make a hasty escape as best they could. In between these raids, dozens of people are ‘arrested’ by the same mobs walking in the street, and are interrogated, systematically robbed and assaulted. Calls to the police for protection produced nothing.

‘Are you safe in the church’ I enquire. ‘Well we have nothing’ he replies, ‘and we have heard that our place was raided for a second time an hour ago, and so we don’t expect to find anything left, if and when we return. Right now we are at the mercy of the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. They are bringing food and blankets’.

I think to myself, the Red Cross are saving people in suburban Johannesburg.

Later in the morning I pulled into a garage to buy newspapers and see almost fifty men in groups talking on phones and to each other in a very excited manner. I started a conversation and discover that these are all displaced Nigerians who live in the Malvern suburb of Johannesburg. They mostly left their homes last night. Some slept at friends, and others in their cars. One had his car burned out when trying to escape, and managed to run into the back of a supermarket and hide. They describe how the night before, hundreds of hostel dwellers chanting ‘Zula Nation’ surged into their neighbourhoods and started breaking into houses and cars, and assaulting those walking the streets.

One older man told me of a South African neighbour who climbed over the garden fence and provided an escape route through a broken fence into a park. For most of the men, their anxieties centre on the plight of their families who they had left behind. Many had South African partners and their children stayed behind in the hope that they would be able to ‘pass the Zulu test’, make a cash ‘contribution’ and be left in peace.

One middle aged man who works in the local hospital as a radiographer’s assistant told me that his wife speaks Zulu and his children too. He left them behind last night as the neighbourhood shop was being ransacked and destroyed. In a distressed state he said, ‘I couldn’t take them with me. If we had been caught they would have been treated like foreigners, and who knows what would have happened. This is truly horrible. This would never happen to you people in Nigeria’ he said.

This is certainly an instance of cell phone technology being a life line. I noticed that a pump attendant has run an extension cord around the back of the garage to the place where the Nigerians were huddled, and they are busy recharging their phones.

I ask a small group if they have plans to somehow try and organize to protect one another and their communities, to ensure that they do not become victims. A young man of around thirty takes his time to reply. ‘Can you imagine the reaction of the police, the media and the government if we organised a self defense or community safety organization? We would become the target, not those who are attacking us. The police hate us already, the newspapers call us drug barons and pimps, and who do you think ordinary South Africans are going to believe?’

Everyone was silent. A phone rang. The same young man answered, listened carefully and then said, ‘The Nigerian High Commissioner has told us all to stay calm’.

As I return home I pass another group outside a local church. They have the look of North or East Africans, and I pull up and ask if they are OK. ‘The priest is coming to meet us here’ says one. I ask where they have come from, and they point towards Bez Valley, another working class suburb near by. They are Somali’s and I ask if they have experienced any trouble. No, they say, but rumours are making them afraid. Last night there was gun fire close by, and they know they will be targets if the situation worsens. We look like foreigners says one.

Later in the afternoon I receive more calls from Paul and his Zimbabwean family from inside the church haven in Cleveland. They have had news that a neighbour tried to resist a forced entry, and has been murdered. Stabbed repeatedly and left in the front garden of his house.

At four thirty, I travel with a friend to Malvern to help evacuate a Rwandan family who settled in South Africa after the genocide in that country. Small groups of young men are walking up and down the surrounding streets. Police sirens and shouting can be heard nearby. The family gather up a few belongings and are resettled in a local hotel courtesy of the NGO who employ the mother. We take the children, and the parents follow closely behind in their own car. It’s a solemn drive for the three children and our attempts at humour are politely tolerated.

I have a conversation with another Rwandan and he tells me that some people might think that evacuation is an over reaction, but he says, ‘We have learnt to smell danger of this type. The marauding gangs, the inability of the police to keep control, the under-reporting on the radio, the pent up frustrations, the absence of neighbours ready to help or warn. All of these things we have seen before, and now we can smell them’.

At five thirty I make my way back towards Jeppes Town to collect my son from his friend’s house where he had spent the night. He had heard shooting earlier, and the police sirens and had seen the helicopter circling. They had stayed within the grounds of the closed estate, and played football. On the way home, I fielded dozens of questions from him about what had been happening, and as if on cue he said ‘If you are poor, how can you blame others who are also as poor as you, it doesn’t make sense Dad?’

Later that night, we drove down Jules Street and saw municipal workers starting to clear up the mess left behind from shop burnouts and looting. A row of ten shops was completely destroyed, and small groups of men carrying clubs were still to be seen in full view of the police. We came away from the scene feeling that this was not over. There was more and possibly worse to come.

On the news late last night, the police said they had restored law and order in most parts, and that arrests of suspects had been made, and serious charges would be made against them.

This morning, my Zimbabwean friend called to say that two more people had been killed a short way from the church where he was hiding, and that gunshots and screams had kept everyone awake all night.

The newspapers carry a front page photograph of a man who was set alight by a mob. It reminds me of the Buddhist monks who campaigned against the war in Vietnam. Is this a war?

Meanwhile the politicians and media commentators proffer explanations and condemnations, and it suddenly dawns on me that the only people I have not spoken to or have heard from are the perpetrators. And I wonder, what on earth do they think they are hoping to achieve?

22 May 2008:

Three days later, and it seems everyone is aware of the gravity of the crisis. The President of the country has sanctioned the use of the army though they are not yet deployed to keep the peace.

Two days I ago I went to visit my comrade Paul from Zimbabwe, who had been sleeping in Germiston Town Hall for the past two nights. He is a born organiser and has been serving on the committee that manages the food, sanitation, facilities for children, and security.

He takes me on a tour of the Town Hall, a place we have used in the past for May Day rallies. It’s a little run down but still maintains some of its former glory. Now it is one massive bedroom. More than three thousand people are staying here, and most are very afraid. I speak to many others, and hear very similar stories of extreme bullying, violence, theft, and a sense that they have been abandoned to their fate. My friend has been sleeping on a chair because floor space is limited, and its getting cold. Not everyone has a charity blanket, and there is not enough food to feed all. In the absence of proper communications, rumours ripple like Mexican waves across the multitude that are assembled outside, and generate fear.

One large room has been reserved for women, and many are carrying small children and receiving baby food and nappies. It’s clear that many are in a traumatized state, and barely smile when greeted. One can only shudder when thinking about what they have gone through.

I have a brief conversation with a couple of municipal workers inside the building who are members of my union, and am struck by their sympathy towards the refugees despite the increased workload, and near impossible conditions. The toilets have limited capacity, and the kitchen has never had to be put to use to feed such numbers, but union members are working hard, being decent and helpful. One of the shop stewards tells me ‘Everyone here is so grateful for the little that we can do, but I cant stop feeling ashamed that this is happening in my locality. No one deserves to be treated like this’

Paul collects his few possessions and we leave for home where he will stay for the foreseeable, but not before he says a tearful farewell to his committee members, and is reassured that his relatives and others are in relatively safe hands.

This morning the news reports of attacks on communities seem to be more sporadic, although they do appear to be spreading into other Provinces.

Another demonstration has been called for Saturday, by a conglomeration of left groups and community campaigns. I am hoping that there can be a united response, that is inclusive, and non sectarian. I hope the unions will support it despite difficulties that exist between the left groups and the trade union movement.

There is a great deal of speculation about the ‘troubles’ being started by a ‘third force’, some form of underground organization bent on subverting the peace and creating disharmony. It’s mostly speculative. It is clear however that many of the attacks have been coordinated, and especially at a local level. Similar sized groups have been moving from house to house on assigned streets for example, and of course, chanting and demanding the same things. But there are also attacks that appear more opportunistic, and often following a rally or large gathering.

Much of the commentary and analysis from both left and right seems to me to be very simplistic, as if the analysts are not talking to people on the ground, are not asking questions like for example, why in the gatherings of the xenophobic there are so few women? What does this tell you about the men of this country? Why for example, there has been virtually no action against white people? What does this tell you about what is happening in communities that experience grinding poverty? So many questions. So much to be done.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/372/48212burn.jpgThe mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding, write Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji looking at the background to the explosion of xenophobia in South Africa. The situation is the culmination of policies that have made the rich richer, and the poor poorer. But "the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia."

The mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding. There is no point in running away from this. The edifices we have of Truth and Reconciliation, post-apartheid healing, rainbow nations and multi-party post-dictatorship democracies are coming down all around us.

What is more, the edifices are crushing down into a sea of ruin. Kenya, Zimbabwe, Somalia, and now South Africa are burning alongside bigger fires in Darfur and the Congo. And where a fragile peace now reigns in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, the poverty is so extreme that unless tackled decisively, the slide back into civil war will continue to loom threateningly in the background.

But South Africa especially represents a collective tragedy because, and perhaps naively, it has represented our collective hope for Africa. This land where, as of today, at least 42 Africans from other countries have been killed and thousands are fleeing, businesses destroyed and homes burnt, where the army is being deployed in the poor townships just like the days of apartheid, this is the land that produced Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Ruth First and others.

This is the land that produced a militant and revolutionary Mandela, a Mandela so sure of the righteousness of his struggle that at his treason trial, he described the ideal of a South Africa where “all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”, and as one that he was prepared to die for. That was in 1964. In 1990, when he was released from prison, and with apartheid broken, the promise of his struggle became a possibility. And the new South Africa became our collective hope. We clung to that hope all the more because in the same year as South Africa held its first democratic election – 1994 - was also the year in which we witnessed the genocidal slaughter of nearly a million people in the space of a few months in Rwanda. Hope and tragedy – these are elements that hover concurrently in our collective consciousness across the continent. In the rest of Africa, we have lived with those contending emotions, but somehow South Africans believed themselves immune.

But history is not without irony for in that same statement that he submitted at the beginning of his prison trial, Mandela said:

“The whites enjoy what may well be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery. Forty per cent of the Africans live in hopelessly overcrowded and, in some cases, drought-stricken Reserves, where soil erosion and the overworking of the soil makes it impossible for them to live properly off the land.

"Thirty per cent," he continued, "are laborers, labor tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages. The other 30 per cent live in towns where they have developed economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards. Yet most Africans, even in this group, are impoverished by low incomes and high cost of living.”

That was the Mandela of 1964, but he might as well have been speaking about the South Africa he helped create. For the Mandela of the 1990’s was followed by Mbeki who answered the challenge of this vast economic and social inequality by throwing at it the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy followed by the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) plan. These social and economic policies have enriched a minority, and impoverished the many. The poor have remained poor, but part of the class that Mandela in 1964 identified as developing “economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards” have been the only ones who benefited, and grown rich, from BEE.

That the ANC struggle would not have succeeded without sacrifices from fellow Africans is well known. As is the fact that the South African economy from the days of apartheid has been kept afloat by migrant labor. So how did we reach this point where xenophobia has turned violent? As in any situation – keep an eye on who benefits.

A government with policies that reward the haves - those who during apartheid already had something - and punishes those who had nothing to start with, has a good reason to find xenophobia useful. What racism did for apartheid, xenophobia serves for the new ruling class – its unjust policies, its failures, its betrayal of poor South Africans, are all blamed on the amakwekwere.

What should we expect? We now know that the even in exile, some ANC members were more equal than others. The elite of the ANC today was the elite in exile. Blind to the poor of Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola when in exile, how can we expect them to see them today from the high offices of government? And if blind to the cries and struggles of poor South Africans, surely the poor immigrant is invisible.

The Mbeki government has for the short term deployed the army to assist the police. The government will do what all other governments do – criminalize: it will criminalize the youth in the slums in the same way that the Kenyan, Zimbabwean and Nigerian governments have, in the same way the American government has criminalized African American youth in the ghettoes. The structural inequalities will remain, individual youths will be thrown in jail as criminals.

But let us remember this: the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia, opposed to the policies that attack the poor and reward the rich. There are many who understand, as did Steve Biko, that because of the vicious inequalities in South Africa, justice cannot come without redistribution of land and wealth.

Anticipating the violence,, PASSOP (People Against Suffering Suppression Oppression and Poverty) together with COSATU and other organizations marched against xenophobia on the 17th of May. Announcing the , PASSOP said that it is “appalled by the reports of recent xenophobic attacks in Alexandria and Diepsloot. We are appealing to all political parties and social movements within South Africa to address and clarify their stances towards the important issue of xenophobia. Foreigners in townships across South Africa live in fear, much like the Jews during the Nazi Regime. Their homes are vandalized, their stores looted and even their lives are taken. This inhumanity cannot be allowed to continue.”

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – “a coordinating national body of social movements, civil society and activist organizations – is organizing with its affiliated organizations and immigrant communities to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia” on 24th May. Recognizing the “origins lie within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of south Africans live” and that the struggle is “for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has created this reality” SMI maintains that a “rearguard struggles for safety and security of immigrants in the country must continue.”

Abahlali baseMjondolo, (Shack Dwellers) Movement says it is time for us to ask seriously the question “why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation.” Abahlali baseMjondolo which began in Durban, South Africa is the largest organisation of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa that includes tens of thousands of people from more than 30 settlements. It is this organization that says “A human being cannot be illegal!”

In this issue of Pambazuka News, we carry some of the courageous reports that have arisen for those who ally themselves with the oppressed. Below is a partial list of articles on xenophobia carried Pambazuka News in the recent past. They illustrate that xenophobia is not new to South Africa. But it had to blow eventually.

* Owen Sichone (2008-02-07)

* Koni Benson (2007-08-30)

* 2006-09-14

* Further articles on racism and xenophobia

*Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji are co-editors of Pambazuka News.

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

A heavily pregnant woman who was three months away from giving birth was bludgeoned to death in a ‘horrific, brutal and frenzied attack’ that left her almost unrecognisable. Rosemary Maramba’s body was found in Nhakiwa village in Mutawatawa in Mashonaland central. Maramba is one of three people linked to the MDC, who were murdered in the area over the weekend.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has noted with concern the rising tide of violence leading to loss of human life, destruction of property and livelihoods, against foreign nationals in the Republic of South Africa.

Northern Uganda leaders returned empty handed last week from South Sudan after waiting in vain for days to meet Joseph Kony, right, the elusive commander of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA. Kony’s no-show was the second time in two months that he has snubbed peace negotiators and appears to have killed what hope remained that a peace deal, 22 months in the making, will be signed.

In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution 61/149, decided to convene in 2009 a review conference on the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. To this end, it requested the Human Rights Council to prepare this event, making use of the three existing and ongoing follow-up mechanisms, to formulate a concrete plan and to provide yearly updates and reports on this issue starting in 2007.

A regional conference on refugee protection and migration in the Gulf of Aden wrapped up in the Yemen capital on Tuesday with delegates stressing the need for more assistance to support refugees in host countries."For 16 years, I feel that the world forgot about us, so I appeal to all of you – and especially to our Arab brothers – to help us, support us and visit us in Yemen," said an emotional Somali refugee woman, who has been living in Yemen for the past decade. "Yemen, a poor country, has borne the main burden of hosting us, so please help us."

The 25 May is commemorated annually as Africa Day, recalling the founding of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union, in 1963. Flowing from the communiqué issued by the African Civil Society Meeting held in Dar es Salaam in April 2008, we ask concerned organizations regionally and internationally to commemorate Africa Day, Sunday 25 May 2008, as one on which to show solidarity for the people of Zimbabwe – a “Stand Up (For) Zimbabwe” Day.

Although the concept originates with a group of southern Africa-based NGO’s, concerned for issues of democracy and human rights, in Zimbabwe, it is intended that people all over the world build on this concept and that the “Stand Up For Zimbabwe” campaign have varied and multiple dimensions.

On this day there would be protests and assemblies outside offices of the Zimbabwean government, like embassies; outside offices of SADC, the AU and the UN calling for stronger action; outside offices of those individual governments which have roles to play in resolving the crisis (specifically southern African governments). All such protests and assemblies are to stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.

The campaign will also be carried out through other activities: through asking congregations assembled at places of worship to rise and stand in solidarity with those beaten, tortured and killed in the post-election violence in Zimbabwe;

HOW TO ORGANISE YOUR “STAND UP (FOR) ZIMBABWE” ACTIVITIES FOR 25 MAY 2008

The day in a nutshell:
We are asking organizations and people from around the world to “Stand up (for) Zimbabwe”, by planning and participating in a series of activities around the African continent and the world that seek to show solidarity with those Zimbabweans impacted by the unashamed attempt to subvert the people’s will who voted for a party of their choice and the escalating post-election violence. We ask that you plan these events to lead up to or coincide with the 25 May 2008, a day traditionally commemorated as Africa Day, being the day on which the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) was founded.

THE THEME

The theme of the International Day of Action is “Stand up (for) Zimbabwe” to highlight that the people of the region and the world are standing up and with the people of Zimbabwe in their desire for a democratic, peaceful transition of government and an end to the violence that is so much part of their lives.

On 25 May

1. We call on people to join TAC and other organisations from South Africa and from around the world to literally stand up at 12:00pm local time.

2. In South Africa TAC will be marching upon the Presidency on Sunday 25th May.

3. Mobilise, organise and popularize this mass event to STAND UP FOR ZIMBABWE

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In this essay, Horace Campbell looks at the importance of Africa Liberation Day, its changing relevances as Africans are betrayed by the architects of first independence and how, through struggle, we can reclaim and fulfill its promise.

INTRODUCTION

On May 25, 2008, peace loving peoples all over the world will celebrate African Liberation Day. This will be the fiftieth anniversary of the setting aside of a day to commemorate those who sacrificed for the liberation of the African peoples at home and abroad. In 1963, the Organization of African Unity was established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Then, the main emphasis was on the liberation of territories from colonial rule. At the end of apartheid in 1994 new ideas of liberation were placed on the agenda for Africa. Questions of health, food security, environmental justice, decent education, the rights of women, the politics of inclusion and cultural freedoms were placed as the core of the liberation of Africa. African women at the grassroots are campaigning for a new form of popular power where African peoples will have the voice to intervene in the political process where they live and where they work. These men and women at the grassroots seek to give meaning to political participation and realize the dream of C.L.R. James who envisioned that ‘every cook can govern.’ This form of politics elevates the political participation of the people beyond periodic voting. African youths at home and abroad are looking forward to new institutions and new sites where the ideas of peace, love and human dignity will prevail.

THE ORIGINS OF AFRICA DAY AND AFRICAN LIBERATION YESTERDAY

At the All African Peoples Conference, held in Ghana, in 1958 it was agreed that one-day would be set aside as a national day of remembrance for African freedom fighters. Ghana had achieved its independence in 1957 and one year later Kwame Nkrumah called a conference of African workers, freedom fighters and champions for justice. Nkrumah who had been inspired by Garveyism and the self mobilization and self organization of the people took up the idea of African Liberation day and successfully promoted the idea to the leaders who formed the Organization of African Unity. The first celebration of Africa Day had begun in Harlem, USA by the followers of Marcus Garvey who had called for African Unity from as far back as 1919.

When Ghana achieved its independence in 1957 Nkrumah maintained that the independence of Ghana would be “incomplete without the independence of all of Africa.” Together with the principal freedom fighters within Ghana, Nkrumah established a Pan-African Secretariat within the Ghanaian government and appointed George Padmore to run the secretariat. The task of the secretariat was to act as the coordinating point for the establishment of links with freedom fighters on the African continent and for the secretariat to be a center for information to support those fighting for freedom.

At that historical moment freedom was conceived of as freedom of the peoples and freedom of the states from colonial rule. To carry forward this task the Ghanaian government deployed the resources to support freedom fighters, trade unionists and political activists for independence. This was the spirit that inspired the calling of the All-African Peoples’ Conferences in 1958. It was at this meeting where Patrice Lumumba was introduced to the wider Pan African struggles. In tandem with this people-centered activity, Nkrumah also convened the conferences of Independent African States to establish a diplomatic framework for the political union of Africa.

Because most of the present governments in Africa are opposed to the liberation of the peoples and the Union of the peoples of Africa the detractors of African Union present the struggle for the United States of Africa as a Gadaffi Initiative. Instead of Africa Day becoming a day to honor and celebrate those who struggled for independence, the day has been taken away from the people and the officials use this as another opportunity to organize embassy parties and dinners to seek assistance from the imperialists who are today called ’donors.’ Nowhere is the idea of Pan Africanism more devalued than where Pan Africanists seek to use the name of Pan Africanism to establish NGO’s to seek assistance from the very same forces that undermine African independence. Yoweri Museveni has used the current Secretariat of the Pan African Movement in Kampala as political football.

AFRICA DAY AND THE OAU IN PRACTICE

Fifty years after the start of the celebration of Africa Day in 1958 there are still colonial territories in Africa. The most well known is the case of the Western Sahara. The military invasion and occupation of Iraq by the USA demonstrated clearly the reality that the days of colonial occupation are not yet over. In North Africa and in Palestine the legacies and problems of military occupation reinforce and support the dictatorial rule of the Egyptian ruling elite.

At the time of Kwame Nkrumah, Nasser and the peoples of Egypt represented one base of support for freedom fighters. Today, the leaders of Egypt seek to establish a dynasty and hinder the full support for those fighting against occupation whether in Palestine or in Iraq. Peace activists in North Africa like peace activists in the other parts of Africa oppose occupation and genocidal violence. It is this reversal for the peoples that ensure that the politics of retrogression thrives. With the absence of committed leadership, militarists seize the discourse of liberation to establish movements for emancipation and liberation to foment genocidal politics. Genocidal politics thrives when the politics of exploitation, exclusivism, racism, militarism, religious dogmatism, extremism, and patriarchy intersect in a nested loop to oppress the people. Sudan is one society where the recursive processes of genocidal thinking, genocidal institution, genocidal politics and genoicidal economic relations are reproduced to perpetuate war and the wanton destruction of human lives.

There is a new peace movement across the globe and the celebration of Africa Day is one component of the struggles against genocide and genocidal thinking. This peace movement in Africa must link up with the global movement for peace so that liberation in Africa will be associated with emancipation, peace, social justice and the well being of the people.

THE OAU LIBERATION COMMITTEE

It was very significant that it was in those states that supported African liberation with moral, material and political support that this day was observed at the national level as a public holiday. After imperialism killed Patrice Lumumba and orchestrated a military coup d ‘etat against Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and the Tanzanian people stood out in the ways in which the idea of African Liberation was respected and the society made tremendous sacrifices for the liberation of Africa. Julius Nyerere established a tradition of self-sacrifice that was followed by those committed to ending all forms of exploitation. The Tanzanian society could not have supported liberation and hosted the OAU Liberation Committee to spearhead liberation without the mobilization and politicization of the ordinary people.

One can compare the sacrifices of the Tanzanian peoples with the present Xenophobia in states such as South Africa and Angola where former freedom fighters have used the history of the liberation struggles to hold on to political power, to enrich themselves and diminish the meaning of independence and liberation The attacks on African migrants in South Africa and the violence unleashed against poor workers in 2008 represented one example of how the former leaders of the African liberation process have become obstacles to the further emancipation of Africa. Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF leadership in Zimbabwe represents the extreme example of freedom fighters who started out on the side of the people but used state power to enrich a small clique while shouting about imperialism. Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea represent leaders who once used the language of liberation while setting up militaristic states to oppress the people of Africa.

WILL THE PEOPLE PREVAIL?

The momentum and energy of the poor ensured that the OAU through the liberation committee supported the process of decolonization in Africa despite the fact that the generals constituted the majority at the summit. The formation of the OAU in 1963 had been a compromise among member states that could not agree on how to respond to the clear external manipulation of the Congo after those representing the interests of Western mining capital murdered Patrice Lumumba in 1961.It was in this Congo where the traditions of militarism, corruption and genocide had taken deep roots.

Those who yesterday opposed African liberation and supported dictators such as Siad Barre (Somalia), Arap Moi (Kenya) Félix Houphouët-Boigny y (Ivory Coast) and Hastings Banda (Malawi) now write books on failed states in Africa. This language of corruption and notions of Africa representing a breeding ground for ‘terrorism’ is one component of psychological war against Africa. The objective of the propaganda is for the young to forget the imperial crimes in Africa. In this way the dream of the young is to escape Africa to Europe.

The imperialists who orchestrated and planned the assassination of Patrice Lumumba have reframed their role in the destabilization of Africa and now write books celebrating their role in the destruction of African sovereignty. Larry Devlin who was the Chief of Station of the Central Intelligence Agency in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) has written a book (Chief of Station) to cover up the crimes of US imperialism in Africa. Mobutu represented the biggest obstacle to African liberation and unity and for thirty five years Mobutism supported genocidal politics and genocidal leaders in Central Africa from Rwanda to Burundi and Uganda under Idi Amin. The clause of non-interference in the internal affairs of states was the expedient to protect the confraternity of dictators. Despite these setbacks, the people prevailed and are now placing the question of the union of the peoples of Africa as the urgent task of contemporary liberation.

The formation of the African Union in 2001 was a conscious effort to transcend the traditions of violence and militarism. Defeat through victory Just as how at the end of slavery in the British territories 1834 the slave masters were compensated, so in the period at the end of apartheid the West intensified the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, liberalization and de regulation so that the architects of apartheid and their black allies could enrich themselves.

Firstly, through IMF and the World Bank the basic rights to education, housing, health care and decent wages have been eroded. This has meant that the African poor have borne the brunt of the world capitalist depression. When Alan Greenspan, (former head of the Federal Reserve in the USA) noted that this capitalist depression has been the worst since 1920, he neglected to note that the poor and the exploited in Africa bore the brunt of this capitalist depression. Food riots in Senegal, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Egypt, Somalia and the Cameroons are the outward signs of the stirrings of a new liberation movement where the peoples of Africa are demanding food, clothing, shelter and access to proper health care.

Secondly, African liberation now requires that the people control their governments and that issues of financial planning and budgeting are discussed in the villages, townships and cities of Africa. In Africa, the politics of retrogression has become the norm, and the leadership has taken – to cultural proportions - the tendency to turn their backs on the people as soon as they take office. Hence, though the African Union has stipulated that no leader can come to power through military coup leaders now resort to electoral theft as evidenced recently in Kenya and Zimbabwe. There is now an urgent need to create new democratic institutions to strengthen popular participation and representation. Parliamentary democracy on its own is not enough; it must be supplemented with and strengthened by other popular institutions and associations like the local governments, cooperative movements, independent workers, women, student and youth organizations, assemblies or organizations for the environmental concerns and for minority rights, and so forth A new leadership must ensure that this is the dominant political culture, with enough flexibility to allow for changes when changes are needed to strengthen and further consolidate that culture.

This new political culture will eventually shift power from the current corrupt and unrepresentative political groupings, to local communities whose chosen representatives will be accountable to the interests of these local communities first not those of a small center that monopolizes power in the national political groupings.

Thirdly, in the midst of the millions dying from the AIDS pandemic the African governments are being coerced to cut delivery of health care. The provision of health for the masses of the people represents one of the fundamental goals of liberation in this era. All across the continent the requirements for a healthy life are pressing when the poor are seeking environments with clean air, clean water, and neighbourhoods cleared of mosquito holding areas and homes that are not dilapidated.

LIBERATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REPAIR

Environmental repair and environmental justice form the fourth link in the chain of liberation in this new century. All across the continent the present leaders glorify the extraction of petroleum resources without regard for the health and safety of the peoples. From the North of Africa down to the Namibian coast petroleum companies are looting African oil while destroying the environment. Nigeria represents an extreme example of where environmental racism abounds and where a small clique is enriched while the majority of the peoples are exploited.

As much as 76 per cent of all the natural gas from Petroleum production in Nigeria is flared compared to 0.6 per cent in USA, 4.3 per cent in the UK, 21.0 per cent in Libya. The flaring is one of the most severe of the numerous hazards to which the peoples of the Delta and the Rivers States are exposed. At temperatures of 1,300 to 1,400 degrees centigrade, the multitude of flares in the Delta heat up everything, causing noise pollution, and producing CO2, VOC, CO, NOx and particulates around the clock. The emission of CO2 from gas flaring in Nigeria releases 35 million tons of CO2 a year and 12 million tons of methane, which means that Nigerian oil fields contribute more in global warming than the rest of the world together. (Claude Ake, 1996)

It is in Africa where the petroleum companies are engaged in crimes against Africans and crimes against nature. Many of the gas flares are situated very close to villages, sometimes within a hundred metres of homes of ordinary citizens. Petroleum companies have been flaring at some sites for 24 hours a day for more than 30 years. Despite this record, the standard view of environmental management, is that the basic rights of private property and of profit maximization, come before the health and welfare of the peoples of Nigeria in general, and in particular, the peoples who live in the Niger Delta.

Concerns for environmental justice are kept subservient to concerns for economic efficiency and capital accumulation. Successive governments in Nigeria have been willing accomplices to this degradation, the oil companies are protected while the health and welfare of Nigerian society suffers irreparable. The cuts in the social wage of the population make it impossible for local communities to support health clinics and there is an absence of drugs in most rural hospitals. The oil revenue is recycled to prop up the political class. Since 1958, Royal Dutch Shell has extracted billions from the lands of the Niger Delta. It is in this situation where a movement has developed called Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.

Should African freedom fighters be supporting the armed struggles in the Niger Delta when we are presented with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta? Acts of militarism even in the face of the keenest oppression can only be supported in the present era when all other forms of popular political mobilization have been exhausted. This is the concrete lesson from the wars in Sierra Leone and “the revolutionary forces of Foday Sanko.” We have also learnt the limits of armed revolutionary struggles from the wars of liberation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the military campaign of Kabila, the intervention by Wamba dia Wamba, the senseless wars between Angola, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Namibia along with prolonged fighting in Eastern Congo there are clear lessons for liberation.

These acts of militarism and war force revolutionaries to grasp the meanings of liberation and liberation movements today.

The legacies of the defeat in the Congo The Congo stands at the heart of Africa and peace in the Congo will have a tremendous impact on social reconstruction and transformation in Africa. Regional cooperation between truly democratic states will change the African Union and there will be a quantum change in the politics of Africa when the ideas and principles of African wildfire spread to all parts of the continent. In order to forestall the full operation of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union, the United States has established the US Africa command to remilitarize Africa at the moment when the driving force behind African liberation is the peace and social justice movements. It is this peace and justice movement that inspired the continent wide opposition to the Africa command so much so that the US government has to resort to covert agreements to shore up the allies who are secretly colluding with western militarism.

Potentially were countries such as Angola, the DR Congo and the Sudan democratic states, they could collectively put together a major program of self-development, funded entirely by them for the whole Eastern and Southern Africa region. The West understands this and it is for this reason that the European Union and the USA are not supporters of peace and demilitarisation in Africa. In the face of the crisis of US capitalism the Chinese have emerged as a major force in the political economy of Africa. This new engagement has been significantly different from the period when the political leaders of China had supported the decolonization of Africa and provided support for Tanzania to build the Tazara railroad.

From liberation to emancipation As we come to the end of the first decade of a new century this moment provides one other opportunity to reflect on the tasks of liberation in the last fifty years and to assess how far the tasks and goals of liberation were realized. The crisis of the nature of human existence is manifest in all spheres of social relations; in the relations between humans (men and women), in the relationship between humans and the environment and in the forms of economic organization. It is now clearer that African liberation is not possible within the capitalist mode of production. When Walter Rodney wrote the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he had stated unequivocally that capitalism stands in the path of further human transformation. Now this is even clearer with the nested loop of environmental crimes, food crisis, economic terrorism, pandemics and the absence of representative democratic forms.

African women are leading the call for a new definition of liberation beyond one where African males occupy the positions of power of European and send their children to schools to be educated in European languages and in the ideas of patriarchy, domination over nature and private property. Since the period of the anti-apartheid struggles there has been a deepening of the understanding of liberation to encompass issues that are common on both sides of the Atlantic such as regional economic integration, democratisation, the end to genocide, reparations, the emancipation of women, the end to sexism and heterosexism, the humanization of the male and the humanization of the planet. The African Liberation Struggle of Tomorrow How can Africans be validated as human beings and lay the foundations for a new sense of personhood? This question has been sharpened by the major turning point in human transformations with the revolutionary technological changes that carried potential for healing as well as the potential for destruction. Books on Apartheid medicine have pointed to the ways in which Africans are being used as guinea pigs. The questions of the worth of the value of African life, of human life will be contested in the 21st century.

Millions are dying from preventable diseases and the health infrastructure has deteriorated while health workers leave Africa in droves. Where Information technology and robotics are changing the nature of work, education and leisure and the traditional understanding economics, the advances in gene splitting technologies are changing the very ways in which plants and animals are produced. The information revolution is bringing telecommunications technology to most communities across the continent and the peoples are now able to keep in constant contact with their village communities. African youths are using this technology to bring knowledge and information to others in order to break the control over information. Imperialism seeks to tap into the cognitive skills of the peoples while the governments look to Europe for models of education.

Africa is the home of the richest biodiversity on the planet. While some leaders are struggling for land, the biotech and pharmaceutical companies are patenting African medicinal plants. The threat of the major biotech companies to patent life forms along with the new rules of the World Trade Organization relating to intellectual property rights contain the seeds of undermining all of the gains that were made in the context of the struggle for self determination. By presenting life as an “invention” the biotechnical companies and the food corporations seek to eliminate the African farmer altogether. It is against this background that Africa is providing the lead in the World Trade Organization against the patenting of life forms. In the book, the Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, Samir Amin has warned of the dangers to the pauperization of the majority of farmers in Africa if African government follow the model of agriculture of Europe and the United States.

AFRICAN LIBERATION AND THE CENTRALITY OF GRASSROOTS WOMEN

Whether it is in the area of food production, health care, care for the sick or the education of the youth there is a disproportionate burden that is carried by women of the grassroots. One of the most important new development in the debates on revolution and transformation in the 21st century lies in the centrality of the place of the black women of the producing classes in the struggle for social transformation. This discussion which is going on in Africa and in the Americas emanates from a long tradition of struggle by black women and the determination that the black woman would never be again be marginalized in the African revolution.

The ensuing debates on women’s rights, racism, class alliances, environmental racism, gender and social reproduction hold the seeds of the most profound understanding of the limits of the concentration on productive forces that was the hallmark of radical politics for the generation after 1917. The question of how the understanding of the oppression of women is linked to the household as a site of politics brings home the point that one cannot be politically progressive and support any form of domination or intolerance. The women's movement successfully challenged the labor theory of value and influenced our understanding of the centrality of household production in the capitalist labor process. These revolutionary women have deepened our understanding of the importance of care and that the discipline of economics will remain one branch of capitalist ideas unless it takes into consideration care and reproductive capabilities of women.

Female labor power was never calculated in the economic models of nineteenth century revolutionaries. Black women such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman yesterday and women such as Angela Davis and Nawal El Saadawi today placed the question of the liberation of women on the political agenda. Throughout the twentieth century the women’s movement internationally made great strides in placing the gender, care and housework as fundamental questions of revolution. However, in the main, this mainstream movement was dominated by conceptions of progress and reason that emanated from Western Europe.

It was the radical black feminists who have reflected on how the growth of emancipatory ideas has contributed towards the project of our collective emancipation. By framing and ending the separation of the woman question from the other sites of struggles and making gender transformation the central question of the struggle, the progressive women inside the left movement and in the radical formations have taken the political lead in the fight for justice. Hence in Africa today, the combined energies of the women from all parts of the Sudan are seeking to place the issues of rape, sexual terrorism, violation and gender oppression at the center of the debate on the future of the Sudan. Fundamentalism of all forms represents one component of the counter revolutionary period in which we live.

UBUNTU

There is need for a new orientation on liberation to conceptualize the values of ubuntu as the basis for liberation. The concept incorporates values of sharing, cooperation and spiritual health. Ubuntu, emancipatory politics and reparations are the key concepts for liberation tomorrow. The attainment of ubuntu is bound up with the political union of Africa. The concrete understanding of the cultural unity of Africa and the contributions of the African peoples towards human transformation are being refined every day through day to day struggles. Cheik Anta Diop who has studied the linguistic basis of African Unity emphasized the importance of African languages in the push for continental unity. African Liberation will be meaningless if it is not rooted in African languages and in the genius of the African woman. The aspirations of Diop, which were outlined in his book on the Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State, form the core of the African Union of tomorrow. Diop was clear that his idea on industrialization and regeneration of Africa was not based simply on the development of the productive forces without reference to the working people of Africa. Diop wrote clearly of the requirement of effective representation of women at all levels of governance.

The future of African liberation will be informed by a new mode of politics where ordinary African men, women and children will be able to revel in the idea of Africa for the Africans at home and abroad and tear down the borders of oppression and control which were created in 1885. The future of Pan Africanism and the AU must reinforce the traditional respect for the elders and should raise up a new tradition, respect for young people. This new tradition calls for Africa to lead the world in the use of all means to support the emancipation of African women and girls and to end all forms of oppression.

This is the essence of reparations, peace and justice!

*Horace Campbell is the author of the well known book, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. His latest book, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation is published by David Philip of Cape Town, South Africa.

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

Emma Njoki Wamai reflects on the 2007 I6 Days of Activism Campaign and notes the positive impact on Sauti Ya Wanawake (The Voice of Women) such as strengthening the organization's relationship with the provincial administration. This has led to police and the chiefs’ working together with SYW on cases of sexual and gender based violence.

The Sauti Ya Wanawake[1] grassroots women’s movement members recount their experiences with sexual and gender based violence with an uncomfortable familiarity. In the dusty and desolate sisal plantations, national parks and the savanna grasslands in Taveta, Taita and Kinango districts in the Kenyan Coast, everyday women and children are sexually abused at an alarming rate.

In Taita, Taveta, Kwale and Kinango Districts in Kenya, sexual and gender based violence has been rampant for a long time due to retrogressive cultural practices and poverty which deprives the most vulnerable people, mostly women and children their human rights. In 2007 alone, 62 girls and women and 2 boys were defiled and raped (Children’s Department, Taita Taveta District). According to the Children’s Officer and the Sauti ya Wanawake movement[2] in the region, reported rape and defilement of children is excercabeted in the district by the complacent culture of wazee wa vigogoni[3] laxity of provincial administration, entry of illicit drugs and brews from neighbouring Tanzania. Of these 62, only 20 cases were taken to court. It is notable that these were reported cases and many other cases especially where women were violated, were not reported to the police since the perpetrators are normally relatives and fear of castigation by the community.

Coincidentally, the theme of the 2007 16 days of activism campaign, ‘Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence against Women’ could not have been more appropriate to the sisters and mothers of Taita Taveta who have watched helplessly as their children’s childhood is hurriedly ended by lurking man made beasts.

Inspired by the need to end violence against women in their communities, they sought partnership with like minded organizations such as the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) ,a non governmental organization whose vision is promoting and protecting human rights and the Canadian International Development Agency Gender Equity Support Project (CIDA-GESP) to mainstream strategic and practical gender issues in the existing pre election promises by aspiring candidates and to raise awareness on legal forms of redress such as the New Sexual Offences Act through dialogue forums and community radio stations. They also trained local village elders, local provincial administration, religious leaders, youth and women on the effects of violence against women and erected 4 information billboards in remote villages offering community members safe spaces to deposit information on violence against women and children.

Mama Dorcas Jibran, the coordinator of the Sauti Ya Wanawake says that the impact of the 16days of Activism 2007 is profound on the safety of women and children in the three districts barely 3 months later. Mama Dorcas shared these achievements of the 2007, 16 days of Activism campaign which include;

- Sustainable Partnerships. This project has strengthened Sauti ya Wanawake’s relationship with the provincial administration and as a result, Sauti ya Wanawake, police and the chiefs’ work together on cases of sexual and gender based violence. The Divisional Officer’s office (DO) has been facilitating Sauti ya Wanawake to visit remote places incase of an alarm and they have also been making follow-ups together. Mama Dorcas is currently working with the chiefs and the Councilors to establish modalities of setting up information boxes in every location.

- The grassroot women’s movement now has the capacity to articulate issues and the village representatives are called upon to advice on gender issues in churches and local development committees. For example, Mama Dorcas and Mama Emma Mailus are normally called upon by their local police posts to advice and train the police when a sex offender is arrested.

- Lastly, Sauti Ya Wanawake and the residents of Taita, Taveta and Kinango have benefited from the information billboards which are positioned in every constituency. Mama Docras Jibran has already received five cases on violence against women and children and succession issues from women and she has referred the individuals for further support to Police and the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Mombassa Office.

There is need for the Africa Union Members states to fully domesticate the numerous instruments and regional charters that recognize the hardships women like Mama Dorcas face.

The Convention on Elimination against All forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) is one such instrument. The African Women’s Protocol of the African peoples Human Rights Charter is another that criminalizes any violence committed against women.

The time is now!

*Emma Njoki Wamai is a Programme Associate in the Kenya Human Rights Commission

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

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