CONTENTS: 1. Features 2. Announcements
Features
A lecture delivered at the University of California Los Angeles and Freedom Park, 7 July 2017
Forty years after Steve Biko’s murder in detention, the world we live in has not changed fundamentally for Black people. Regardless of where you reside in the world, how educated you are, religious, progressive or nice you may think you are, if you are Black you are guaranteed the scorn, humiliation, violence and death that Biko and others had to confront.
A South African court has found a police officer guilty of shooting dead 17-year-old protester, Nqobile Nzuza. The judgement sends a strong message to all police officers who act on the instructions of politicians to brutalize unarmed citizens demanding their rights.
In response to a protest outside a white editor’s home, the South African Editors Forum (SANEF) sought court orders to stop Black First Land First activists from harassing, intimidating and threatening journalists and editors over their reporting. But SANEF did not show similar concern when Black journalists came under attack. Why the double standards?
The G20’s Compact with Africa is meant to force open African doors to European and generally western investments. African governments have been told in no uncertain terms that for them to receive foreign direct investments, they must improve conditions for such investments. Using its financial muscle the west (through Berlin) is waging war against Africa.
In Zambia, as with elsewhere in Africa, Canada’s mining industry, foreign policy and neoliberalism overlap tightly. It is a subject Canadians ought to pay attention to if they want their country to be a force for good in the world.
No new plantation has succeeded since independence, either state-owned or private. But it has not stopped Frelimo leaders since Samora Machel from dreaming of giant mechanised farms funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from abroad.
The world changed this past week in ways that it may take decades to fully appreciate. With the opening of its first overseas military base in Djibouti, China sent an unmistakable message that its role in the world is changing. The implications for the Middle East and Africa are immediate, but the larger message is that China is no longer pretending to be an inward-looking, exclusively Asian power.
Reparatory Justice must be the clarion call of the African Peoples at home and abroad. This was the Declaration of the 2nd Kwame Nkrumah Intellectual and Cultural Festival which was held in Accra from 25 June to 1 July, 2017. The Festival was hosted by the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana under the auspices of the third Kwame Nkrumah Chair, Professor Horace Campbell.
The moral case for Black reparations has effectively been made, but the legal argument has met much frustration in the courts. The authors believe that the period after 1808, when U.S. participation in the international slave trade was outlawed, is key to clearing the legal hurdles to reparations.
Human beings, including Europeans, have migrated throughout history and continue doing so. Migration is, therefore, not a problem; it is part of humanity. What is a problem is failing to understand why people migrate and using recent refugee flows from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya to politicise and militarise the whole issue.
Gambians must not forget the atrocities committed by President Jammeh’s regime and demand that the perpetrators of crimes be brought to justice. The government of President Barrow should relentlessly pursue and reclaim all the ill-gotten wealth accumulated by Jammeh’s family and its cronies. Any call for unity, reconciliation and forgiveness will be meaningless without truth and justice.
Breaking up Nigeria into several nations to solve its current problems, as some people suggest, will not work. The resulting chaos will be unimaginable, throwing much of West Africa into crisis. The better option is for all Nigerians to commit to work to build one Nigeria that works for all.
Several civil society organizations have voiced their support for protests in Morocco and other North African countries facing growing state repression, resource theft and imperialist expansion. They call for respect for people’s rights and just development.
Announcements
Call for papers for a special issue of Pambazuka News
As African and European leaders plan to meet in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, late November 2017 to assess the status of the Africa-Europe partnership, Pambazuka News is calling for a broad range of papers analysing, from various perspectives, relations between Africa and Europe and how they might evolve in the coming decades.
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Henry Makori and Tidiane Kasse - Editors, Pambazuka News
Yves Niyiragira - Executive Director, Fahamu
Websites: Fahamu.org, Pambazuka.org
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