Jacques Depelchin

I have just read the account by Sokari about Randall Robinson's book: Unbroken Agony and I cannot help but wonder how does one collectively keep walking away from one of the most exemplary rupture with dehumanization. The Africans who had been enslaved simply said: NO MORE. Yet, 200 years later, it seems easier to find excuses about why one keeps treating the people of Haiti as if they were not worth anything. Peter Hallward wrote an essay about how the media decide who counts and who does...read more

Mukoma wa Ngugi's article (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/42869) article is still resonating inside me, but I did not know what to say at the time. But on this anniversary of Hiroshima (August 6th 1945), it hit me again.

Significant anniversaries come upon us now and again like flood waters and we are caught speechless, and then, the very thing you point out happens: "Oh well, next time we shall speak up", ...read more

I shall start with Annwen's contribution (which, by the way could also go to Tutu's successor's comments on the G8).

Thank you for all of these contributions they have encouraged and inspired me to write a few things which, I hope, can to this sort of live parliament of the people. It could also be a Shir or a Mbongi or a baraza or a plaver. In a sense, as we keep trying to say affirm who we are, one of our difficulties is that, now and then we keep (often unconsciously) borrowing from...read more

Dear comrades, Thank you very much to all of you from Firoze, whom I have met on a few occasions to all I have not met, but without whom the 300 mark might not have been reached, or might have been reached with greater pains and greater costs.

What could I say that you already do not know?

Pushing the enveloppe all the time, moving away from the pyramidal figure of the global society toward the sphere as suggested in Ayi Kwei Armah's KMT novel.

From now till 2011 there wi...read more

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/296/haiti.jpgJacques Depelchin challenges global citizens to make links between poverty across the world both historically and in the present day: From Cite Soleil in Haiti; to Abalhali in Durban, South Africa; Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya; Maroko in Lagos, Nigeria; and Ndjili in Kinshasa, DRC.

In the age of globalisation why do ...read more

I just read the call for solidarity with Haiti on February 7, and I felt good that our brothers and sisters in Haiti are being heard. 2007 is the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s Independence. Between now and 2011 there will be a number of 50th anniversaries in Africa including the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

One of the things which seem to be coming to me all the time, while visiting here in Maputo, is the kind of house arrest that Aristide has been submitted to in South Africa. Shou...read more

I want to thank Joel Bisina for the article, ‘Environmental Degradation in the Niger Delta’ which helped deepen our knowledge and understanding of all the processes going on in the Niger Delta. As we learned from Ike Okonta in previous articles http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38119 published on Pambazuka News, we are witness to a socio-economic and political tsunami whose proportions are difficult to describe, let alone measure.

As a way forward, I would...read more

Thank you again for trying to show how apparently disconnected histories are indeed connected and converging toward a world more and more emancipated from the shackles of a genocidal system (see I was surprised that you referred to the Irish. Not that the example is out of place, but because the African continent continues to be the most fertile ground for comparing what the Palestinians are enduring. By African, I do mean also those who were taken away. By African I include Haiti, yesterday...read more

A fantastic piece indeed. Slavery was never abolished, it was modernized, with everyone helping along the way. The piece could be the basis for anyone interested in making a film or writing a play. In this day and age, it seems, only art (theatre in this case) could render not just the actual facts as described by Tajudeen, but also the thinking, the emotions going on in the heads of those who traveled on that famous plane (it would be good to actually have the flight number, departure and de...read more

I cannot say that I followed every interview Soyinka gave in his visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, but in all of them, including the one excerpted in the latest issue of Pambazuka News, there was something striking: not a word about African literature. It was almost as if the ones doing the interview had decided that the subject did not even exist or that (just as bad) it was not worthy of discussion. One is reminded of Oxford Historian, Trevor-Roper's words in relation to African History:...read more

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