The story of Haiti represents that of the Africa of today: trying to stand up, to reconstruct, to rebuild, she stumbles, hesitates, and sometimes retreats in the face of threats from the watchdogs seeking to liquidate humanity and replace it with a substitute known as humanitarianism.

As in other parts of the world, there are signs of revolt of ordinary people against many decades of oppression and dispossession. The dictators leave, but the system which bore them remains.

‘The tragedy that is unfolding in front of our eyes is not just about the excesses of one industry… It is about the continued and deliberate silencing/sidelining of the majority of humanity by a tiny dictatorial fraction that, for centuries and generations has always gotten away, literally with murder,’ writes Jacques Depelchin.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/500/10_500.gifJacques Depelchin outlines the centuries-old exercise of power that has kept Haitians in a state of oppression. What is needed, he argues, is for common sense and humanity to emerge.

Professor Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work in the political reconstruction of Congolese society, characterised by ‘remarkable self-sacrifice and humility’, is worthy of support, writes Jacques Depelchin. Let’s show solidarity for ‘one of the most committed intellectuals for another Africa, for another humanity and for another world’, Depelchin urges, to ensure that Wamba-dia-Wamba is not faced with ‘destitution and isolation’ as a result of his singular path.

‘Our deepest sympathies to the entire Haitian population’, writes Jacques Depelchin, ’and in particular to those who, prior to the earthquake were already suffering too much, simply because they were continuing a struggle started more than two centuries ago.’

Commenting on the G20 (The Group of Twenty), Jacques Depelchin asks why, when Africans have suffered so much under the ’most predatory system ever invented by humans’, African leaders are helping to prop up that system, rather than encouraging new ways of doing things.