An Interactive Study Map of African States

 Laura J. Mitchell

Africa is a country | December 19th, 2013

“Africa is a country,” some say with irony. Or derision. Or perhaps in sheer frustration, as those of us resident in some other part of the world try to share our interest in the vast, variegated topographies, cultures, and political constellations all called “Africa.” A critique of continents, the etymology of Ifriqiya, and a European fascination with Bilad al-Sudan are well-rehearsed elsewhere. Here in the U.S., we all operate politically and intellectually in a world-view shaped by the U.S. State Department and an area studies model of regions that presents Sub-Saharan Africa as separate from the Maghreb and Mediterranean Africa.
As Africanists, our stock-in-trade includes pushing back. As teachers, scholars, and commentators we poke and prod at constructed geographies, charting unities across previously demarcated sub-regions and identifying particularities in eco-zones or communities that are conventionally grouped with larger nations. In a post-modern landscape, geography is admittedly malleable. But that does not make it optional. I may be hopelessly old-school to say so: but to make sense of a place, you still have to find it on a map.

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Looking for Africa

An African Studies graduate student investigates the program's decline and Yale's new focus on Africa

By Scott Ross

Yale Daily News - Sunday, December 1, 2013

My welcome to Yale was quieter than I expected. On orientation day in August 2012, I took my seat among the seven other first-year African Studies Master’s students in a small classroom on the first floor of Luce Hall. We could hear chatter and laughter coming from other department meetings upstairs, but the atmosphere in our room was subdued. We introduced ourselves and waited for the meeting to begin. The eight of us came from all over — the West Coast, the East Coast, China, Ethiopia — but we had all come to Yale for the same reason: to learn about Africa.
I had just graduated from Arizona State University, where I’d fallen in love with Africa after getting involved with campus advocacy efforts to raise awareness about the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in Uganda and Congo. I’d fundraised to rebuild schools in the region, met with elected officials to discuss U.S. involvement, and devoted hours and hours to learning about the conflict.

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If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero

Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to     

By Slavoj Žižek            

theguardian.com, Monday 9 December 2013

In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Second, people remember the old African National Congress that promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

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Africa and the Chinese Way

The New York Times - December 15, 2013

The Kamba people of Kenya claim they were warned about the evils of colonialism long before the first colonialist arrived. The legend goes that the prophet Syokimau, back in the early 19th century, told her people of “a long narrow snake spitting fire” that would make its way up from the East African Coast, bringing with it “red people” who would take away their land. She was right; it was the railroads more than anything else that enabled European colonialists to exploit Kenya’s people and extract its wealth during the first half of the 20th century.

The 1,000-kilometer track stretching from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Uganda was Britain’s most ambitious project in Sub-Saharan Africa. The railroad, begun in 1895, was famously disrupted by the so-called man eaters of the Tsavo, two lions that stalked and attacked construction workers. More than 130 people are said to have been killed — the exact number is uncertain — before the animals were finally hunted down. Within the next five years the railroad was completed and the way opened to British domination of the region. 

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Mandela has been sanitised by hypocrites and apologists

The ANC liberation hero has been reinvented as a Kumbaya figure in order to whitewash those who stood behind apartheid

The Guardian, Wednesday 11 December 2013

We have now had a week of unrelenting beatification of Nelson Mandela by exactly the kind of people who stood behind his jailers under apartheid. Mandela was without question a towering historical figure and an outstanding hero of South Africa's liberation struggle. So it would be tempting to imagine they had been won over by the scale of his achievement, courage and endurance.
For some, that may be true. For many others, in the western world in particular, it reeks of the rankest hypocrisy. It is after all Mandela's global moral authority, and the manifest depravity of the system he and the African National Congress brought to an end, that now makes the hostility of an earlier time impossible to defend.

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Madiba Tribute

Woolies and Soweto Gospel Choir: Madiba Tribute

A New Book: Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral

Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral.
Edited by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr.
Dakar, CODESRIA and DARAJA Press, 2013

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: 
Senai Abraha • Makungu M. Akinyela • Kali Akuno • Samir Amin • David Austin • Ajamu Baraka • Jesse Benjamin • Angela Davis • Demba Moussa Dembélé • Jacques Depelchin • Mustafah Dhada • Jean-Pierre Diouf • Miguel de Barros •Aziz Fall • Grant Farred • Bill Fletcher Jr • Mireille Fanon-Mendès France • Hashim Gibril • Nigel C. Gibson • Patricia Godinho Gomes • Lewis Gordon • Adrian Harewood • Augusta Henriques • Wangui Kimari • Redy Wilson Lima • Ameth Lo • Richard A. Lobban, Jr • Filomeno Lopes • Brandon Lundy • Firoze Manji • Perry Mars • Bill Minter • Explo Nani-Kofi • Barney Pityana • Maria Poblet • Reiland Rabaka • Asha Rodney • Patricia Rodney • Carlos Schwarz • Helmi Sharawy • Olúfémi Táíwò • Walter Turner • Stephanie Urdang • Chris Webb • Nigel Westmaas • Amrit Wilson

2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Cabral’s influence stretched well beyond the shores of West Africa. He had a profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the black liberation movement in the US. In this unique collection of essays contemporary thinkers from across Africa and
internationally commemorate the anniversary of Cabral’s assassination. They reflect on the legacy of this extraordinary individual and his relevance to contemporary struggles for selfdetermination and emancipation. His well-known phrase “Claim no easy victories” resonates today no less than it did during his lifetime. The volume comprises sections on Cabral’s legacy; reflections on the relevance of his ideas; Cabral and the emancipation of women; Cabral and the pan-Africanists; culture and education; and Cabral’s contribution to African American struggles. A selected bibliography provides an overview of Cabral’s writings and of writings about Cabral.
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and DARAJA Press
ISBN-13: 978-2869785557 ISBN-10: 2869785550
BISAC: Political Science / World / African
518 pages List Price $25.

How Many Times Did Cable News Mention Steve Biko This Week?

By Tommy Christopher

mediaite.com | December 7th, 2013

The death of global civil rights icon Nelson Mandela this week has sparked hours of coverage, including some welcome (and unwelcome) revisitation of Apartheid’s history and impact. While the lion’s share of the coverage has rightly focused on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, the retelling of Apartheid’s history has also included many important touchstones and leaders in the struggle against South Africa’s white supremacist government, save one conspicuous omission: Steve Biko.

Even as cable news networks, to varying degrees, recounted important milestones like the Sharpesville Massacre, Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, the Reagan-ea politics around sanctions against South Africa, and to a much lesser extent, the Soweto Uprising, even as white apartheid figures like P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk were written into cable news’ remembrances of Mandela’s lifelong struggle, the name of Stephen Bantu Biko was not uttered. According to the TV Eyes television transcript database and the Internet Archive TV database, Biko was not mentioned once by any of the cable news networks this week.


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Madiba (Tata) and Western Imperialism

West praises Mandela for own interests
Interview with Abayomi Azikiwe
Press TV - December 6, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/12/06/338562/west-praises-mandela-for-own-interest/

Mandela's African legacy
By William Gumede in Johannesburg and Patrick Smith
Theafricareport.com - 06 December 2013
http://www.theafricareport.com/News-Analysis/mandelas-african-legacy.html

C.I.A. TIE REPORTED IN MANDELA ARREST
By DAVID JOHNSTON
Special to The New York Times - June 10, 1990
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/10/world/cia-tie-reported-in-mandela-arrest.html

The Conservative Movement’s Long-Time Hate Affair With Nelson Mandela
By BILL BERKOWITZ
TRUTHOUT - December 6, 2013
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18354-conservative-hate-nelson-mandela

The real Mandela: Don’t let his legacy be abused
By John Wight
Russia Today - December 6, 2013
http://rt.com/op-edge/mandela-legacy-abused-cameron-obama-846/ 

Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About
By Aviva Shen and Judd Legum
Think Progress - December 6, 2013 
http://thinkprogress.org/home/2013/12/06/3030781/nelson-mandela-believed-people-wont-talk/

Lest We Forget, on Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Mandela Was a Radical
By  Mehdi Hasan
The Huffington Post - 06/12/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/nelson-mandela-iraq-israel_b_4396638.html 

Nelson Mandela – an African nationalist
Socialist Resistance - December 5, 2013
http://socialistresistance.org/5331/nelson-mandela-an-african-nationalist

Nelson Mandela: Icon of Africa’s Liberation Struggle, Creation of the Real Movers and Shakers of the Global Scene
By Mike Molyneaux
Global Research - December 06, 2013
http://www.globalresearch.ca/nelson-mandela-icon-of-africas-liberation-struggle-creation-of-the-real-movers-and-shakers-of-the-global-scene/5360531

It was the CIA that helped jail Nelson Mandela
Crocodile Tears to Mask US Imperialism’s Role as the Enemy of African Liberation 
By Brian Becker
Liberation - July 18, 2013
http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/cia-helped-jail-nelson-mandela.html

Mandela on U.S. imperialism in Africa in 1950s
By Nelson Mandela
The Militant - Vol. 74/No. 45      November 29, 2010
http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7445/744549.html

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013) Official Trailer

Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then

By Peter Beinart

The Daily Beast - December 5th 2013

If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now.

We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places—Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”


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America’s Shameful Treatment of Mandela Still Lingers

Friendly Fire - Daily News Opinion Blog

June 30, 2013 by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

During his trip to South Africa, President Obama graciously and reverentially praised Nelson Mandela as a leader who inspired people around the world and that included himself. This was more than just praise for one of the planet’s most respected leaders, the man Obama called by his traditional tribal (and affectionate) name Madiba. He also accurately noted that Mandela was a driving force in the freedom struggle against apartheid and the post-apartheid struggle for democratic, non-racial rule in South Africa. Obama’s heartfelt remarks about Mandela have been part of the consistent U.S. government’s narrative about Mandela since the official dumping of apartheid in 1990 and black majority rule in 1993.
But the embrace of Mandela and the reality of black majority rule in South Africa have come at a steep price. The price was the U.S. government’s decades old assault on Mandela’s character and leadership. The malign treatment by the U.S. of Mandela didn’t end with his release from prison in 1990, the official unbanning of his African National Congress, or even his becoming the first democratically elected President of South Africa in 1993. It didn’t end when he took the rare, tactful and universally praised step of stepping down from the presidency in 1999 after one term. It didn’t even end as then Democratic presidential candidate Obama in 2008 inched close to his election as America’s first African-American president.
The U.S. government still continued to brand Mandela a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organization. This ridiculous tag on Mandela as a terrorist chilled U.S. relations with Mandela and the South African government even after the power takeover. The chill began with the Reagan administration’s well-documented fierce resistance to the demand that corporations and non-profits divest their financial investments in South Africa, and the administration’s refusal to support UN and international trade sanctions and an arms embargo against South Africa. The Reagan administration’s line was that the ANC was Cuban backed and posed a communist threat to South Africa and by extension U.S. investments. Mandela by then was well into his second decade in prison on Robbins Island, posed no threat to the South African government, and had no direct say in the political or military operations of the ANC. Yet he was still regarded by the Reagan administration as a dangerous subversive. Mandela’s release from prison, the recognition by the apartheid government of the ANC, and his subsequent presidential election changed little, except the terminology of how Mandela was tagged. This dovetailed with the U.S.’s shift to the global fight against terrorism. Mandela instead of being a communist and a subversive simply had the terrorist label slapped on him. Though Regan had dumped him and the organization on the terrorist watch list in the 1980s and it stood unchallenged during those years. It took a concerted effort by civil rights activists and many congressional Democrats to end the political targeting of Mandela. But it was not a slam dunk. As late as 2007, ANC officials, and that included Mandela, who sought to travel to the U.S. still had to get a State Department waiver or special certification in order to enter the country. Mandela had to get that even for his White House visit with George W. Bush in 2005.
The issue finally came to a head that year when Barbara Masekela, the former South African ambassador to the United States, was denied a visa to visit a dying cousin in the United States. A chagrined Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it “embarrassing.” In April, 2008, she urged Congress to remove Mandela and the organization from the terrorist watch list
With a big prod from the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress finally voted to remove the now 90 year old (and Nobel Prize winner in 1993) Mandela and ANC from the U.S. government’s official terrorist watch list. But even the language of the bill that removed him from the list was hardly a full throated, ringing praise of the ANC and Mandela, or a disavowal of the disgraceful history of his treatment. It did not acknowledge the towering role and stature of Mandela in the fight for justice. It simply said that it would add the ANC to a list of groups that should not be considered terrorist organizations. The closest Congress came to repudiating the official maltreatment of Mandela was then Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s retort that it was “a great shame” that his name was on the watch list. Rice, for her part, followed this and called Mandela “a great leader.”
Bush promptly signed the bill in July, 2008 after Senate passage. This seemingly closed the book on not a 20 year but the forty year branding of Mandela as a political pariah by the US government. This vicious legacy left a deep scar of suspicion and doubt, and distance from South Africa’s government leaders, and colored relations between the governments that hasn’t ended even today as the U.S. and the world publicly celebrate Madiba’s colossal place in history.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new ebook is America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon Martin (Amazon). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

South Africa's Future Foreign Policy By Nelson Mandela

Foreign Affairs November/December 1993 Issue
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/49408/nelson-mandela/south-africas-future-foreign-policy

NEW PILLARS FOR A NEW WORLD

As the 1980s drew to a close I could not see much of the world from my prison cell, but I knew it was changing. There was little doubt in my mind that this would have a profound impact on my country, on the southern African region and the continent of which I am proud to be a citizen. Although this process of global change is far from complete, it is clear that all nations will have boldly to recast their nets if they are to reap any benefit from international affairs in the post-Cold War era.

The African National Congress (ANC) believes that the charting of a new foreign policy for South Africa is a key element in the creation of a peaceful and prosperous country. Apartheid corroded the very essence of life in South Africa. This is why the country's emerging political leaders are challenged to build a nation in which all people-irrespective of race, color, creed, religion or sex-can assert fully their human worth; after apartheid, our people deserve nothing less than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This vision cannot be realized until South Africa can again participate fully in world affairs. For four decades South Africa's international relations were dogged by the apartheid issue. By the end of the 1980s, South Africa was one of the most isolated states on earth. Recovering from this will be no easy task. Conscious of this difficulty, the ANC is involved in developing those policies which will be necessary to take South Africa into the new world order as a responsible global citizen. Additionally, it is concerned with the need to forge a truly professional diplomatic service which will serve all of South Africa's peoples and represent their rich diversity. Fortunately, foreign governments have recognized the importance of this and are generously providing training for young South Africans who wish to make careers in foreign affairs.

Within the context of the current multiparty negotiations, preliminary discussions are also under way between political parties with an interest in foreign affairs in an effort to bridge the divides between them on important policy questions. The pillars upon which our foreign policy will rest are the following beliefs:

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Catch a Fire - Tim Robbins Movie (2006) HD

The Life and Death of Steven Biko

Remember Sobukwe! - South Africa

Nelson Mandela, Former Leader of the ANC and President of South Africa, Has Died at 95

Nelson Mandela dies

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the father of the nation, has died on December 5 2013 at the age of 95.

05 Dec 2013 23:27 Staff Reporter
South African Mail & Guardian
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the father of the nation, died on December 5 2013 at the age of 95.

President Jacob Zuma made the announcement from the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Thursday night. He said Mandela passed away at 20:50 in his Houghton home surrounded by his wife, Graça Machel and members of his family.

Zuma said Mandela would have a state funeral and that the flags would fly half-mast from December 6 until after the funeral.

Long illness

Mandela was hospitalised on June 8 with a recurring lung infection. Initial reports from the Presidency suggested Mandela was stable, although his condition was serious. But on June 23, the Presidency announced that Mandela's condition had deteriorated and he was critical.

Court affidavits soon confirmed that the former statesman was on an assisted-breathing, life support machine. More reports emerged about Nelson Mandela in the days that followed, that he was in a "permanent vegetative state", although the presidency denied these, maintaining that he was "critical yet stable".

On his 95th birthday, July 18, President Jacob Zuma announced an improvement in Mandela's health. Mandela was discharged from hospital in September and transported to his home in Houghton. In November, his family said he remained "quite ill", but his pneumonia had cleared up. President Jacob Zuma visited Mandela on November 18 and said Mandela was still in a critical condition, but that he continued to respond to treatment.

On December 3 his daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, said the former president was "strong" and "courageous", although he was "on his death bed". Mandela's grandson, Ndaba Mandela, said his grandfather was "not doing well", although, "he is still with us".

His declining health has been the subject of much speculation over the past few years. He was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001 but made a full recovery. In 2011, he was admitted to hospital following a severe respiratory infection and a year later underwent a scheduled surgery for a longstanding abdominal complaint.

Mandela was plagued by recurring lung ailments in recent years. He spent 18 days in hospital at the end of 2012 and, despite receiving home-based high care thereafter, was back in hospital in March and April 2013.

There were renewed fears for his health when he returned to hospital in June. Despite assurances from the presidency that he was in a "serious but stable" condition, South Africans began preparing themselves for the worst as Mandela's family members flocked to Johannesburg, struggle stalwarts paid visits to the icon, and the world's media gathered in Qunu, Houghton and at the Pretoria hospital where he was treated.

The much-loved Mandela, known affectionately as Tata Madiba, became increasingly frail and retired from public life in 2004 at the age of 85.

Mandela's last public appearance was a brief one, at the end of the 2010 soccer World Cup. Since then, he has split his time between his home in Houghton, Johannesburg, and his ancestral home in Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

Mandela became the symbol of the struggle against apartheid after he was convicted in the Rivonia Trial of charges of sabotage and was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

At the end of his trial, Mandela gave a now iconic speech in which he said: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Mandela, a key figure in the African National Congress, who helped found the party's youth league and armed wing,Umkhonto We Sizwe, was imprisoned for 27 years before he was finally released in 1990 at the age of 71.

Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, together with former president FW De Klerk, for the 'peaceful termination of the apartheid regime and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa". A year later, he was elected president in the country's first democratic election.

He stepped down from the presidency in 1999 after one term in office but continued with a busy public schedule. He brokered negotiations for peace in Rwanda, established the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation for educational scholarship, and launched the 46664 Aids fundraising foundation.

Africa's Happiest Countries

Largest African Populations

Why Central African Republic is slipping close to catastrophe

By Paul Melly, Associate Fellow, Chatham House,

Special to CNN December 2, 2013

Is the Central African Republic the world's next Rwanda? That's the question some are beginning to ask about a crisis that has been going on for most of this year but has only just burst through into the mainstream international mass media.

Warlords ruling the countryside by terror, a government that is almost toothless and the collapse of institutions have forced 0.4 million people to flee their homes and left a million dependent on aid.

And now reports of Muslim and Christian communities engaged in inter-communal violence have sparked concern about a slide into religious conflict. The "G-word" -- genocide -- has even been floated as a real risk by some observers.

In fact the country has not yet sunk that far. There is no sign of ideological motivation or the systematic political organization of mass killings.

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Revealed: the bonfire of papers at the end of Empire

DG was a code word to indicate papers were for British officers of European descent only    

By Ian Cobain       

The Guardian, Thursday 28 November 2013   

The full extent of the destruction of Britain's colonial government records during the retreat from empire was disclosed on Thursday with the declassification of a small part of the Foreign Office's vast secret archive.
Fifty-year-old documents that have finally been transferred to the National Archive show that bonfires were built behind diplomatic missions across the globe as the purge – codenamed Operation Legacy – accompanied the handover of each colony.
The declassified documents include copies of an instruction issued in 1961 by Iain Macleod, colonial secretary, that post-independence governments should not be handed any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's [the] government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might betray intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

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Africa and the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe

Thomas M Blaser

Africa is a country | November 20th, 2013

Within a short period of time, the global, corporate discourse on Africa has swapped a refrain of hopelessness with a near eschatological discovery of a new el dorado — a place of gold from which global capital hopes to regain its lost mojo. Africa is a Country has debunked the discourse of an ‘Africa Rising’ in several postings, and collectively they make it quite clear that a future in Africa worth striving for is beyond the growth of the GDP, the rise of the ill-defined African middle class or the increase in return on investment.
In the following interview, Achille Mbembe reflects upon the category of the future for Africa, the consequences of global capitalism on the continent, and on Africa’s contribution to an emerging world in which Europe has provincialized itself.
Since 2008, when you initiated the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), you were very much concerned with thinking about the future — why and why now? Is there something about our current epoch that requires us to think about the future?
Mbembe: There were two reasons. The first was that the category of the future was very central to the struggle for liberation if only in the sense that those who were involved in it had constantly to project themselves towards a time that would be different from what they were going through, what they were experiencing. So the political, in that sense, was about a constant engagement with the forces of the present that foreclosed the possibility of freedom, but it was also the political, closely associated with the idea of futurity. And what seems to have happened after 1994 [in South Africa since the first democratic elections after apartheid], is the receding of the future as a temporary horizon of the political, and of culture in general, and its substitution by a kind of present that is infinite and a landing. This receding of the future and its replacement by a landing present is also fostered by the kind of economic dogma with which we live; to use a short term, neoliberalism. The time of the market, especially under the current capitalist conditions, is a time that is very fragmented and the time of consumption is really a time of the instant. So we wanted to recapture that category of the future and see to what extent it could be remobilized in the attempt at critiquing the present, and reopening up a space not only for imagination, but also for the politics of possibility.

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"They Enslaved and Colonized Us, and Now They Want to Judge Us"

By Colum Lynch

Foreign Policy - Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The African Union came to the U.N. Security Council last week in search of a showdown. But its representatives left with little to show for their effort, having failed to persuade the United States and other Western powers to suspend the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecution of two African leaders, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto, who stand accused of orchestrating a frenzy of mass murder during the country's post-election violence in 2007 and 2008.
Securing a delay in the trial, however, was hardly the point of the exercise. The African sponsors of the resolution, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and the five members of the African Union's ICC contact group -- Burundi, Mauritania, Namibia, Senegal and Uganda -- knew going in that they lacked the votes to prevail in the Security Council. Opposition from the Britain, France, and the United States all but ensured that the initiative was doomed from the start.
The real aim of the AU's offensive was twofold: to register Africa's dismay over the council's refusal to defer to the region's leaders on a highly sensitive issue and to reinforce Kenya's bargaining position on the eve of negotiations at the Hague over possible amendments to the ICC treaty that would prevent Kenyatta and Ruto from having to sit in the Netherlands for a lengthy trial. The Kenyan government is proposing that its leaders be permitted to sit out their trials entirely, leaving their lawyers to represent them instead. (Here's a confidential copy of the main amendments under consideration.)

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Amandla! | Taking Power Seriously | South Africa's new progressive magazine for social justice

• The storm after the whirlwind: The ANC after Zuma

  The big question for the political future of the ANC and that of South Africa, although it may appear early or some would say premature, is a post-Jacob

• Till death do us part? The future of COSATU

  For the leadership of the ANC and SACP an independent and militant worker controlled and independent trade union federation is too dreadful to contemplate–

• Interview with police Major General Jeremy Vearey

  In this extract from a longer interview conducted by Amandla! Vearey outlines a brief history of policing methodology in Cape Town and a critique based

• Q & A with Jeremy Vearey

  A!: Maybe you'd like to introduce yourself and your capacity. JV: I am Jeremy Vearey. I am also a Major-General in the police service. I am responsible

South Africans Didn't Die for This

By T. O. MOLEFE

The New York Times - November 12, 2013 

Cape Town — There’s a reason photographers like to take pictures of Cape Town, South Africa’s second largest city, from out over the Atlantic Ocean. From this vantage point, cerulean waters give way to a long line of luxurious sea-facing apartments that hug the Atlantic seaboard. Others nestle on the cliffs of Bantry Bay and overlook the sandy beaches of Clifton. To the left, the harbor, city center and manicured parks nestle at the foot of city’s most famous peak, Table Mountain.

At the end of October, this picturesque scene was disrupted by an incursion from the real Cape Town, hidden from view behind the mountain, where the vast majority of the city’s 3.7 million inhabitants live. 

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A Documentary: African Independence

By Tukufu Tz Zuberi

2013

http://africanindependencefilm.wordpress.com/

The Dark Side of Chocolate

The Dark Side of Chocolate

The Dark Side of Chocolate :

Director: Miki Mistrati & U. Roberto Romano | Producer: Helle Faber
2010

Synopsis: Children in Germany eat chocolate every day of the year. They enjoy the delicious taste of cocoa, which originated in Africa. But behind the production of their delicious treats, there is another taste altogether: the taste of child abusers and child slavery. In this program we will bring the chocolate makers to book, and confront them with our visual evidence. We will reveal the conditions under which the apparently innocuous chocolate bar is produced, and thereafter follow the coco beans’ route from the plantation to the chocolate bar in Germany, all with the consumer oblivious to the full story behind what their chocolate bar actually contains. In the process, those responsible will be held accountable. "The Dark Side of Chocolate" is a journalistic documentary which will reveal for the first time on film the hideous truth behind the manufacturing of German and international chocolate, as sold and enjoyed in Germany and the rest of the world.

A Bok Review: Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali

Music is Mali’s most famous cultural asset and has shaped the country’s history for centuries. A new book

By Andy Morgan recounts how it has suffered under Islamist occupation.

Think Africa Press | 1 November 2013

Music is the glue that holds Mali together, the bridge that connects its past with its present, the ink with which its history is written. Without it, Mali as we know it would not exist.
For centuries, the role of the djeli or griot, a kind of storyteller-cum-singer-cum-poet, has been central to Malian society. In a predominantly oral culture, griots long fulfilled the role of historians. They recorded history through their songs and praises, and passed it down from one generation to the next. In pre-colonial times, every family had its own griot who recounted the family’s past, its births and deaths, its relations with other families, and its connection to the legendary Emperor Sundiata Keïta, founder of the Malian Empire in the 13th century.
Griots are also to thank for perpetuation of the very structure of Malian society. Back in 1235, Sundiata defeated the Sosso king, Sumanguru Kanté, in the Battle of Krina, thus securing the rule of the Mandé people over a large part of West Africa. After the victory, an assembly of nobles set out to create a constitution that would organise the newly-established Mali Empire socially, politically and economically.

To read more...

China’s New Competitor: Africa

By Edward Paice and Jonathan Bhalla of the Africa Research Institute

China Africa Project - August 16, 2013

“China: friend or foe?” was the title of a special Q & A session with the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, on Tuesday 30 July. Of course loaded leading questions – cast in binary terms – tend to produce answers that are of little value. “China is neither good nor bad. China is a combination of these things”, says Zhong Jianhua, China’s Special Representative on African Affairs – a far more satisfactory starting point for discussion.
Nowhere is the debate about China’s motives and practices more live than in Africa. China is either the saviour the continent has long awaited, or neocolonialist gargantuan solely intent on sucking up oil and minerals as fast as it can in the murkiest possible fashion. The reality is more complex – and it is evolving far more rapidly than the stilted relations between Africa and the West.
In March 2013, Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, delivered the boldest assessment to date of China-Africa relations by a senior African policymaker. In an open letter to the Financial Times, he argued that Sino-African trade patterns were “a significant contributor to Africa’s deindustrialisation and underdevelopment” and smacked of “the essence of colonialism”.  He called on Africans to “remove their rose-tinted glasses through which we view China”. The dragon-slayers cheered. The immediate response from China was muted and, when it came, more considered.
Zhong Jianhua is the most senior Chinese government official to have voiced his reaction to Sanusi’s accusations in detail and on the record. In an interview with Africa Research Institute, an independent and non-partisan think-tank in London, Zhong was characteristically urbane. “I would argue that Mr Sanusi made a number of important points that have been overlooked”, he says. A highly respected career diplomat, Zhong knows the form. But his take on the broadside from Nigeria, China’s fourth largest trade partner in Africa, is also illuminating.

To read more....

China Africa Project

The China Africa Project is a multimedia resource dedicated to exploring every aspect of China’s growing engagement with Africa. Through a combination of original content and curation of third-party material from across the Internet, the CAP’s objective is purely informational. None of the blog’s authors or producers have any vested interest in any Chinese or African position.

https://soundcloud.com/chinatalkingpoints

East African countries launch single customs territory

The Africa Report - 29 October 2013

Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan and Rwanda have launched a single customs territory to boost business among the partner states, agreeing to eliminate the remaining non-tariff barriers.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Salva Kiir of South Sudan and their host Paul Kagame of Rwanda agreed the move at a summit on Monday, which also resolved to hasten transit cargo from Kenya's port of Mombasa.
Transit cargo would be weighed once at the point of entry into each member state territory, they said in a statement.
The time for cargo to reach Rwanda from the port of Mombasa would fall to eight days from 21 now, and shipments to Uganda from Mombasa would take five days from 15 days.
The summit was convened to review progress on the implementation of decisions reached during a previous meeting that focused on infrastructure in Mombasa on August 28, where Kenya commissioned a new berth expanding its main port.
At an initial summit on June 25, Uganda agreed to a plan to build a pipeline from its oilfields to a new port being developed on Kenya's northern coast, enabling crude exports and boosting its oil industry.

To read more....

Zimbabwe: Reading between the political lines

By Stephen Chan  

The Africa Report - Monday, 28 October 2013

The big questions – leadership succession in the two main parties, economic strategy and foreign policy – remain unanswered despite the peak of international interest in the elections. But many voters wanted little more than to avoid the murderous violence of 2008.

The ease with which Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won the 31 July 2013 elections was like a dawn where all seems calm, but the storm clouds sit on the horizon. Those elections were won because of two key reasons.
The first was because Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) performed appallingly. Outwardly confident, it made the same mistakes it had in previous elections – as if internal reflection, self-criticism and learning from mistakes were impossible.
The second was because ZANU-PF took advantage of all the opportunities available to it to 'condition' the election. Many said ZANU-PF stole it. The problem with the accusations of a stolen election was that evidence collated from local instances of electoral malpractice could not be extrapolated into one national picture.
All the accusations assumed a single 'rig' and none of the civic and observer groups examined the possibility of several strategies to ensure victory.

To read more....

Elephants and tigers

Chinese businessmen in Africa get the attention, but Indians are not far behind

The Economist - Oct 26th 2013 | DAR ES SALAAM

ABHIJIT SANYAL is sitting on a beach-chair watching frothy waves roll in from the Indian Ocean. He arrived in Tanzania a year ago after a career in his native India with Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods giant. ChemiCotex, an industrial company in Dar es Salaam, hired him as chief executive to oversee the expansion of its “tooth-and-nail business”, which dominates the Tanzanian market for dental care and metal goods.
“A lot of the challenges here are familiar to someone like me from India,” he says. “And so are the solutions.” Distribution is hampered by poor infrastructure, as is the electricity supply. Ancient and modern manufacturing processes co-exist uneasily. Most customers are middle- and upper-class; the rest are too poor.
What surprised Mr Sanyal when he arrived was how often people in Tanzania mistook him for a local. “On a new continent you expect residents to recognise you instantly as an outsider—but not here.” East and southern Africa host large populations of people from the subcontinent, mainly India. Most distributors of Samsung goods in Kenya are Indian. Many of their ancestors came as railway-workers and traders in the early 20th century. The rupee was then east Africa’s main currency. Mahatma Gandhi spent two decades in South Africa and Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, backed African nationalist movements in the 1950s. Until 1999 India’s trade with Africa exceeded China’s. “It’s not called the Indian Ocean for nothing,” says Mr Sanyal.

To read more....

Ayn Rand in South Africa

Benjamin Fogel

Africa is a country | October 22nd, 2013

Prince Albert, a backwater town in South Africa’s Karoo region, was the site of a truly world historic event on October 20th, 2013. The event in question was the official launch of the latest addition to our growing register of political parties — namely the South African Libertarian Party. (BTW, at their launch they also made sure they didn’t elect the only black member, who helped found the party.) Claiming inspiration from the prehistoric congressman from Texas, Ron Paul (he is also a Tea Party favorite), and that notorious Roman crank Cato the Younger — the Libertarian party looks set to storm the ballot boxes “Atlas Shrugged” in hand as they get crank South African reddit users to the polls in numbers.

But are they really necessary when there is another new entrant to the political scene talking libertarian master theorist Friedrich Hayek’s language of “economic freedom”? I am of course talking the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema.
Surely their radical program based upon land expropriation without compensation, nationalization and their commie pinko headgear is the very antithesis to libertarianism worship of property rights? One might ask. But is this really the case? I for one believe the only rational position for South African libertarians to take in our current political context is to Juju and co in EFF if they are to stay true to their own ethical and moral imperatives demanded by their ideology.

To read more....

Listening to the voices from Kenya's colonial past

The culling of imperial archives led me to turn to oral history. But for many scholars, the official myths of the British Empire persist    

By Caroline Elkins            

The Guardian, Sunday 20 October 2013

'Africans make up stories." I heard this refrain over and again while researching imperial history in Kenya. I was scarcely surprised when it came from former settlers and colonial officials living out their days in the country's bucolic highlands. But I was concerned to find that this position took on intractable proportions among some historians.
At the time of decolonisation, colonial officials destroyed and removed tons of documents from Kenya. To overcome this, I collected hundreds of oral testimonies and integrated them with fragments of remaining archival evidence to challenge entrenched views of British imperialism.
My methods drew sharp criticism. Revising the myths of British imperial benevolence cut to the heart of national identity, challenging decades-old scholarship and professional reputations.
Some historians fetishise documents, and historians of empire are among the most hide-bound. For decades, these scholars have viewed written evidence as sacrosanct. That documents – like all forms of evidence – must be triangulated, and interrogated for veracity using other forms of evidence, including oral testimonies from colonised populations, mattered little.

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Malema promises political change in S Africa

Former ANC official launches Economic Freedom Fighters party in town where 34 striking miners were killed by police.

Al-Jazeera - October 14, 2013

South Africa's fiery young politician Julius Malema has told a rally of his new party that a "giant" has been born which should be feared and will fight for the poor.

Thousands had gathered near the Marikana mine on Sunday where 34 striking workers were shot dead by police in September 2012, to cheer the 32-year-old leader and his newly-formed Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party.

"A different baby is born today, a giant ... A child that walks immediately. The baby that fights for your living wage," said Malema, who was last year expelled as head of the governing ANC Youth League (ANCYL) for bringing the party into disrepute,

"You must be afraid of that child," he warned, wearing his trademark red beret.

"This is the home for the hopeless."

Malema apologised for once backing President Jacob Zuma, saying he had given the country mediocrity by promoting a singer who was neither a thinker nor a reader.
Malema said there was no difference between the Marikana massacre and Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when apartheid police opened fire on protesters, killing 69 people.
Malema said he picked on Marikana as the venue for the party's launch because the slain miners were economic freedom fighters, the City Press newspaper reported.
Security forces last year opened fire on striking workers at a platinum mine in Marikana, killing 34 miners in a crackdown reminiscent of the apartheid-era police brutality.

The government has since instituted a commission of inquiry to investigate the fatal shootings which were preceded by an attack in which police officers were allegedly killed by miners.

To read more...

A New Movie: The President

http://president.weltfilm.com/ 

The President
Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo

When the Cameroonian president disappears just a few days before the elections after 42 years in power, the country’s media go into overdrive, speculating on what happened. Meanwhile, the president’s kidnappers, who remain unnamed, are taking him on a tour of the country, forcing him to interact with the people that he has so wistfully ignored all this years. The president is forced to answer for what he has done – which is not much. A controversial “mockumentary” that mixes fiction and reality, THE PRESIDENT questions the phenomenon of Africa’s “president-for-life” and the threat that the incertitude over their succession poses to their countries’ stability.

To watch the movie: 

Christina Aguilera feeds war-torn Rwanda

By Natacha Nsabimana

Africa is a country | October 13th, 2013

Christina Aguilera, ambassador for World Food Program (WPF), recently went to “war-torn Rwanda” People Magazine tells us. Well thankfully she made it back home safe. War is not an easy thing. Although, I’m not sure exactly which war she is referring to – last I checked, the civil war and genocide in Rwanda ended twenty years ago. Well, Rwanda has other problems and its government is implicated in violence in neighboring DRC,  but it is not war-torn.  Also, Rwanda is an entire country. Where in Rwanda was Aguilera?

The song the children are singing in the video is of course inaudible but Aguilera’s is crystal clear. Her Light Up The Sky forms the background to the video. We hear her sing “When skies are grey, I’ll light your way, I’ll be your shoulder, You can lean on me” while seeing her feed “starved African children.”

Interestingly, one word from the kids’ song in Kinyarwanda is clear: Tuzarwubaka: We will build it (i.e. the country); clearly indicating that meaningless charity is not what they have in mind but rather that they are actively engaged. This is of course lost to all the non-Kinyarwanda speakers.

“The people of Rwanda touched me in a way I cannot express or put into words. They are in a place that needs our help and I am so proud of the work that we are doing there,” Aguilera insists. “This trip came at a time when I needed to step away and connect with bigger issues in the world,” she continues.

To read more....

African Union summit opens with attack on ICC

By ANDUALEM SISAY in Addis Ababa

African Review | Friday, October 11  2013

Ethiopia’s Foreign Affairs minister Tedros Adhanom has condemned the manner of trial of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto by International Criminal Court (ICC).

Mr Tedros said the demand for the two to attend all the court proceedings at The Hague was a threat against Kenya’s sovereignty.

“ICC’s decision does not only undermine the ability of the Kenyan leaders in the discharge of their constitutional responsibilities, but also poses significant threats against the country's sovereignty,”

said Mr Tedros, in his address to the African ministers gathered in Addis Ababa Friday.

“We should not allow the ICC to continue to treat Africa and Africans in a condescending manner. That is the reason why we are gathered here today and I am confident that our deliberations will help us to come up with appropriate recommendations for the consideration and adoption of our Heads of State and Government,” he said.

The ministers' meeting was expected to draft a resolution for the heads of state and government, who are furious at ICC’s recent action and apparently afraid of the court’s next move.

To read more...

Nobel Literature Prize eludes Africa again

By TREVOR ANALO in Nairobi and Agencies

Africa Review | Thursday, October 10  2013

It was yet another miss for Africa when Canada's Alice Munro was Thursday declared this year's Nobel Literature Prize winner.

Munro was awarded for her short stories that focus on the frailties of the human condition.

She becomes just the 13th woman to win in the history of the coveted award. It was first awarded in 1901.

Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o was touted among the favourites for the prize.

Ngugi is acclaimed for his works like A Grain of Wheat,The Wizard of the Crow and In the House of the Interpreter.

Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka was the first black person to win a Nobel Literature Prize in 1986.

The late Chinua Achebe consistently failed to win the prize, and it seems Ngugi may be joining him on that list.

The Swedish Academy honoured Munro, 82, as a "master of the contemporary short story".

To read more...

African Facebook Users in 2013

African Facebook Users in 2013

No to ‘extension of colonialism’: Gambia quits Commonwealth

Russia Today - October 02, 2013

Gambia announced it is immediately leaving the Commonwealth of Nations, saying it will not be part of an “institution that represents an extension of colonialism.”
"The general public is hereby informed that the government of the Gambia has left the Commonwealth of Nations with immediate effect," the government said in a statement.

The Commonwealth is made up of over 50 countries, most of which are former territories of the British Empire. Gambia is located in western Africa, enveloped on all sides by Senegal.

"[The] government has withdrawn its membership of the British Commonwealth and decided that the Gambia will never be a member of any neo-colonial institution and will never be a party to any institution that represents an extension of colonialism."

Government officials did not respond to press inquires Wednesday, Reuters reported.

However, one anonymous foreign ministry official told AFP the decision was made after the government disagreed with a 2012 proposal by the Commonwealth to create commissions in the Gambian capital of Banjul to address human rights, media rights, and corruption. Following the proposal, Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma met with Gambian President Yahya Jammeh and other top officials.

To read more.....

Top 6 Countries That Grew Filthy Rich From Enslaving Black People

Atlanta Black Star - October 1, 2013

Netherlands
The Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of Dutch merchants, was established in 1621 as a  monopoly over the African slave trade to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.
WIC had offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Middelburg and Groningen, but one-fourth of Africans transported across the Atlantic by the company were moved in slave ships from Amsterdam. Almost all of the money that financed slave plantations in Suriname and the Antilles came from bankers in Amsterdam, just as many of the ships used to transport slaves were built there.
Many of the raw materials that were turned into finished goods in Amsterdam, such as sugar and coffee, were grown in the colonies using slave labor and then refined in factories in the Jordaan neighborhood.
Revenue from the goods produced with slave labor funded much of The Netherlands’ golden age in the 17th century, a period renowned for its artistic, literary, scientific, and philosophical achievements.
Slave labor created vast sources of wealth for the Dutch in the form of precious metals, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, coffee and cotton and other goods, and helped to fund the creation of Amsterdam’s beautiful and famous canals and city center.

To read more.....

Pan-Africanist and Black Revolutionary: George Padmore

By Manning Marable
www.blackstarnews.com

I recently delivered a keynote address in London celebrating the life and contributions of a leading figure of Pan-Africanism and Black liberation, George Padmore, at the invitation of the Borough of London. It was part of a year-long celebration of Afro-Caribbean history and culture in Britain. Such occasions always allows me to reflect on people who have contributed to the upliftment of Black people.

Born in Trinidad in 1901, Padmore would come to personify the hopes and aspirations for Black freedom throughout his native Caribbean and Africa. The English-speaking Caribbean is in ways unique in the Black world for the remarkable tradition of political intellectuals it has produced. In the six generations since the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, there have been a series of Black intellectuals whose activities and social analysis greatly shaped and denied insurgent political movements in their region and elsewhere.

Just a short list of these extraordinary figures includes Henry Sylvester Williams, born in Trinidad in 1869, educated in North America and England, and the coordinator of the first Pan-African Conference held here in London in 1900; Jamaican Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, born in 1887, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, which became one of the most dynamic and influential mass movements in Black history; Jamaican journalist W.A. Domingo, born in 1889, who briefly edited Garvey's newspaper, The Negro World, and who subsequently helped found the pro-independence Jamaican Progressive League in New York City in 1936; and Cyril V. Briggs, born in Nevis in 1887, who created the first international political organization based on revolutionary nationalism and socialism, the African Blood Brotherhood, and who later became the first major Black leader of the U.S. Communist Party.

One of the greatest social theorists of the twentieth century was Trinidadian scholar-activist C.L.R. James, author of the acclaimed history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins. Others in this Black radical Caribbean tradition include: Jamaican activist and writer Amy Jacques Garvey, who contributed to building the movement of Pan-Africanism; Jamaican Communist and feminist leader Claudia Jones, who fought for Black people, women and workers both here and in the United States; and the great historian and Guyanese political revolutionary Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Within this rich intellectual and political tradition stands the son of Trinidad, born with the name Malcolm Nurse, who would later be known as George Padmore.

Among historian and activists through the Black world, the biography of Padmore is well known. As a university activist student in the United States in the 1920s, Padmore joined the Communist Party and quickly rose in its ranks. As head of the Negro Bureau of the Communist Trade Union International, Padmore organized an elaborate network of thousands of anti-colonial militants throughout the Caribbean and Africa during the Great Depression. In 1931, Padmore wrote The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, which championed the cause of Black labor throughout the world.

After breaking bitterly with the Communists over their colonial policies, Padmore returned to London with few resources. Still, from his modest apartment, he charted a course of action which would deeply influence anticolonialist movements in both Africa and the Caribbean.

Padmore established the International African Service Bureau, a network that coordinated voluminous correspondence between African and Caribbean nationalists, trade unionists, editors and intellectuals. Padmore's small journal, the International African Opinion, became an invaluable source of information and analysis for Black radicals. Padmore was the mentor and influential theoretician to an entire generation of Black leadership, including Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and the charismatic Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

It is difficult to overemphasize Padmore's crucial ideological and political role in the emergence of political nationalism and movements of independence in English-speaking Africa. C.L.R. James went so far as to assert: "It is impossible to understand the development of the revolution in the Gold Coast that brought Ghana, unless you realized from the start, the man behind it was Padmore."

Like all public figures active in politics, Padmore was not perfect. Like Garvey, Padmore dreamed of an independent Black Africa, united around the principles of mutual cooperation and Pan-Africanism. However, his Pan-Africanist vision failed to recognize the power of British and French colonialists to coop independence movements, and to create "neocolonialism" with new Black elite taking the place of the white colonial elite.

After Padmore left the Communist Party, he became a bitter critic of Marxism. He argued in his 1955 book Pan Africanism or Communism that Black people must be "mentally free from the dictation of Europeans, regardless of their ideology." But Padmore's hatred of Communism pushed him into the arms of U.S. and British imperialism. Padmore, and his protégé Nkrumah, also failed to appreciate the importance of democracy in the development of new states in Africa. This failure ultimately contributed to the conditions leading to Nkrumah's overthrow by Ghana's military in 1966.

Despite his mistakes, Padmore committed his entire life to the ideal of Black liberation. After his death in 1959, dozens of new Black states in the Caribbean and Africa would enter the world stage. They owed their independence, in part, to the monumental contributions of Padmore. Black Americans must recognize that our monumental contributions of George Padmore. Black Americans must recognize that our struggle in the U.S. against racism is directly connected with the struggles of people of African descent worldwide.

How to Rob Africa

When You Kill Ten Million Africans You Aren’t Called ‘Hitler’

By Liam O'Ceallaigh On 22 December 2010

Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?

Most people haven’t heard of him.

But you should have. When you see his face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when you read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see, he killed over 10 million people in the Congo.

His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.

He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, executions, torture, and his private army.

Most of us aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of the white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Making overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in polite society, but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs.

Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s an easy read at 49 pages long. Mark Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind, and that is never pointed out). We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, Africans have no history.

When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricaturized Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid (which of course now is long, long over). We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing millions of people through bombs, sanctions, disease and starvation. Body counts are important. And we don’t count Afghans, Iraqis, or Congolese.

To read more.....

Mugabe is demanding that an African nation have a seat at the table

African nations push for permanent UNSC seat Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is demanding a UN Security Council seat for an African country.

By Gift Phiri

Al-Jazeera - 26 Sep 2013

Harare, Zimbawe - Calls to include one the 54 African states in the world body’s security council are gaining traction as the 68th session of the UN General Assembly continues at the UN headquarters in New York. President Robert Mugabe has said he would press for Africa to have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
“We don’t understand why you have three countries out of five countries on the Security Council as permanent members with a veto coming from Europe,” Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, Zimbabwe’s Foreign Affairs minister said. “We all know that Europe is no longer such an important part of the world as it was in 1945. And then you look at Africa, 50-plus odd countries and not a single country sits on the Security Council as a permanent member wielding the veto, representing Africa and African interests.”
Set up in 1946 by the winners of the World War II, the UN Security Council comprises of 15 members, five of them - Britian, France, China, the United States and Russia - are permanent, while 10 are non-permanent members that serve for two years on a rotational basis.
The council is the UN’s most powerful body and helps shape international law. It has the power to make binding decisions about war and peace. Critics say it represents an international order that no longer exists - that of France, UK, US, China and Russia as world “gendarmes”.

To read more....