As quoted in January, Zimbabwe's security minister Didymus Mutasa warned that "the net will soon close" on critical journalists who threatened nation’s security. The statement came together with a new offensive against the remaining independent journalists in the country and just after the arrest of employees and directors of Voice of the People (VOP), a radio station that transmitted into Zimbabwe via a shortwave transmitter in Madagascar. The significance of the crackdown lies in the fact that VOP is one of the few alternatives to the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

This Friday in Harare, six trustees of Voice of the People (VOP), a privately-owned radio station, are due to appear in court on criminal charges, according to a Human Rights Watch press release (http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/02/08/zimbab12632.htm). On January 24, the authorities brought charges of broadcasting without a license against six of the station’s trustees. VOP was one of the few alternatives to the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, the only broadcaster with a license to operate legally in the country.

“The Zimbabwean government is using criminal charges to muzzle independent reporting and criticism,” said Paul Simo, Africa advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “This crackdown targets media that criticize government institutions, officials and the ruling party.”

The VOP trustees could face up to two years in jail. The charges came after police raided the Harare home of one of the board members, Arthur Tsunga, and kidnapped two of his household staff. The two were detained without charge for four days in an effort to coerce the executive director of VOP, John Masuku to turn himself into the police. Masuku was charged with broadcasting without a license on December 23.

The board members? David Masunda, Isabella Matambanadzo, Millicent Phiri, Lawrence Chibwe, Nhlahla Ngwenya and Tsunga?are will be represented by Beatrice Mtetwa, a renowned Zimbabwean human rights lawyer.

VOP was not the only target, however. Independent journalist Sydney Saize was arrested for filing a Voice of America report saying that the ruling ZANU-PF party had beaten teachers in the city. Meanwhile, the Media and Information Commission (MIC) threatened in early January to cancel the license of the Financial Gazette, a privately-owned newspaper, and refused to renew the accreditation of fifteen journalists working for the Zimbabwe Independent, another privately-owned newspaper.

Three laws have tightened the screws on Zimbabwe’s media over the last five years. The Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act of 2002 forces media ventures to register with a Media and Information Commission or face prison. It also makes it an offence for journalists to work without accreditation.

The Broadcasting Services Act of 2001 ensures that the government has control of the airwaves by giving the Minister of State for Information and Publicity the power to decide who can broadcast. Lastly, the Public Order and Security Act of 2002 has a number of aspects which potentially limit the right to freedom of expression and covers the publishing of false statements against the state, the organizing of public gatherings and grants extensive powers to the police.

Mona Prince, an Egyptian woman writer, traveled to America full of hope and excitement. But what she found forced her to stand up for her rights and “resist the silences”. Before returning home she had a chance to hear the voices “against the war, against the erosion of what is great in the American system, against homeland security as a pretext for silencing ‘other’ voices.

In a climate where the United States is seen as an aggressor enforcing her way and will on the rest of the world, I found myself excited last summer to be heading to America after being chosen as part of the International Writing Program (IWP) in Iowa City. My excitement stemmed from the fact that I refused to believe that the US, with one of the best constitutions in the world, where individual rights are cherished and defended, has lost its soul. Rather I wanted to believe that its current policy is an aberration that came to pass as a result of fears arisen after 9/11, and not a true reflection of what America is all about.

I could not think of a better bridge to mend the widening gap between the image and true face of the Arab "other". As an Egyptian woman writer and academic, I wanted so much to show the true face of the other, transcending the stereotype that has been propagating in the US lately, wanted in my own small way to unveil that thick veil of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

I was officially invited by the US Embassy in Cairo and funded by the US State Department to participate in the IWP, an invitation I wholeheartedly accepted. I was delighted to be part of a programme that fosters mutual understanding, cross-cultural communication, and tolerance; to share and exchange ideas with, and learn from, the other international writers as well as our American counterparts in an academic institution setting at the University of Iowa where the programme resides.

I arrived in Iowa City and my first two weeks in the program was all I would have hoped for. I felt energised, thinking of many things I want to do -material for my writings that would benefit from my stay in the US within the IWP. One of my major interests and ideas for a writing project was to visit an Indian reservation, get in contact with Native American traditional storytellers and learn about their spiritual practices. What unravelled after those two weeks was so much telling of the extent of the erosion of the American way as a result of the current administration's policy and how deep it has affected even the best of sanctuaries and defendants of individual rights, transforming academics and poets into big brothers driven by homeland security to charter the handling of their programmes.

I informed the programme director of my interest in visiting an Indian reservation and explained to him the reason behind my interest. His initial response was positive. So I took it upon myself to search for potential places I could visit and found one in a neighbouring state. I informed the director where I would be heading - a short visit to Minneapolis to visit an Indian reserve.

The e-mail response that I have received from the director was a total shocker in both language and content. I was threatened with homeland security law, informing me that I could not leave Iowa City and if I did I would be expelled from the programme and the United States. I was made to feel like a prisoner at best, a criminal at worst. At no point before or during my visit was I made aware of any rule in the IWP program restricting the movements of international visitors. Additionally, an immigration officer confirmed that there were no such rules. This incident and what followed thereafter made me think whether this response from the director was an isolated and petty exercise of power or was symptomatic of a bigger picture where homeland security and what it entails is starting to seep into the American system, reaching the gate of institutions that are traditionally viewed as strong voices for the preservation of the individual rights, voices against stereotyping and labelling of the "other". Are the fences of Guantanamo Bay slowly closing on academia, indeed on all of us? I abided by the director's decision and did not go to Minneapolis. Elation and excitement were quickly replaced by feelings of failure and depression. Guantanamo seemed just around the next corner.

After a few e-mail exchanges with the programme director, and a fruitless effort to get advice or help from the US embassy, I decided to break my silence and to speak out against the intimidation and abuse. I wrote several statements against the unprofessional and undiplomatic handling of my situation, while demanding at the same time an official apology, as well as to be provided with the governing laws by which writers should abide while in the programme.

I sent all the official correspondences between the programme director and myself to all parties concerned, as this matter impacted upon all the members of the IWP programme. Not only was I severely criticised for speaking up against this injustice, I was repeatedly intimidated, offended, and threatened by the grave consequences that would be directed at me if I do not put an end to my vocalism, which I took to mean, "Shut up and take the abuse."

The programme director, eventually, decided to terminate my participation in the programme because of the public statements I made, as clearly stated in his official letter. I was removed from all my scheduled public cultural activities and my funding was cut, leaving me with two days to evacuate Iowa City. The termination letter cited a US State Department decision that I have yet to receive.

After my deportation from Iowa City, I joined a group of African Americans who were evacuated from New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane. I felt for them and in some way felt part of them. What those evacuees told me in an interview is a counter- narrative that expressed their concerns about how America was, to their minds, disintegrating from within, which has resonated very well with my own experience in Iowa. A different form of "homeland security" had been imposed on them, and their human and constitutional rights had been violated.

During the current administration they had more than ever been marginalised, made to feel like they belong to a second-class America. They looked at the breach of the levy that flooded the city, their homes, as a symbol of the neglect of the current administration that is preoccupied with the "unjust" war in Iraq. They were forced at gunpoint - fully loaded M16s - to leave their houses while affluent white Americans were extended all necessary assistance and did not have to leave their homes. They told of being searched several times for weapons, as if they were terrorists in their own country. They were shipped in a plane, guarded by armed soldiers, without knowing their destination, to finally land as refugees in Omaha, Nebraska.

Before I flew back to Egypt, I was able to finally arrange a meeting with Native Americans. I met one of the five elders of the Dakota nation who still speaks the Dakota language and performs the spiritual ceremonies of his tribe. Contrary to what I have heard from the IWP administration, I was unreservedly welcomed by the spiritual elder and his family. I was offered a sweat lodge ceremony that is meant to purify the soul, mind and body, which was attended by other non-Native Americans. We were a mixed group of all colours and ethnic backgrounds.

The ceremony began with an ancient Indian saying "we are all relatives." Following the instructions of the spiritual elder, we all prayed in our different languages for the good health and happiness of all people. The ceremony ended again with the same wise man iterating that "we are all relatives." After the ceremony was finished, all of us had a collective dinner at the house of the spiritual interpreter. Before I left the reserve, I asked if I could have an Indian name. They agreed, and a special ceremony was held for me the following day. The name that was given to me from the spiritual world was "Good Eagle Woman."

I flew back home empowered by the immense knowledge and experience I gained in the US. In spite of having the misfortune of leaving the programme earlier than planned, and being subjected to such unjust and unfortunate treatment from the IWP director, I remain enriched by the whole journey, by finding it in myself to stand up for my rights, to refuse to be intimidated into silence. When I was about to leave the US, I witnessed the emergence of voices that started to speak out against the war, against the erosion of what is great in the American system, against homeland security as a pretext for silencing "other" voices. I will always remember the people that came to my defence; the refugees in Nebraska that hosted me when I was deported from Iowa City, and my spiritual enriching encounter. As my journey came to a close, I came out of it flying like an eagle having broken free, resisted being bullied into submission, even under the pretext of "homeland security". I can't think of my journey to the US without thinking about the "Good Eagle Woman" as a symbol for resisting silence.

* This article was first published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM. It is reproduced here with permission of the author. Please send comments to

John Christensen comments on the issue of capital flight and tax avoidance, a massive drain on African’s resources. In the face of a reluctance by international organisations to address the issue, and the weakness of national efforts in the face of global capital, civil society will have a vital role to play in pushing for change.

Last month two global meetings painted two very different portraits of Africa. In the luxury Swiss holiday resort of Davos, shielded by a ring of steel fences and security forces, finance ministers, corporate executives and assorted celebrities gathered at the World Economic Forum. They talked vaguely about the responsibility to bolster aid and reduce the debt of African nations. The Africa portrayed at Davos was an indebted, broken continent whose impoverishment can only be solved by the generosity of donors in the North.

Four thousand kilometers away, civil society groups from Africa and beyond came together in the Malian capital of Bamako for the African leg of the World Social Forum, a vibrant grassroots alternative to the suits and platitudes of Davos. Five days of meetings addressed alternative solutions to poverty and disease across the global South. In these meetings a different Africa emerged: a region not simply in need of external resources, but with immense wealth potential of its own, being drained at an ever increasing rate with the collusion of the world's wealthiest countries and companies.

This was the message of the Tax Justice Network (TJN), an international coalition of researchers and campaigners who spoke at packed meetings in Bamako on capital flight and tax avoidance. The remarkable interest in these ordinarily dry topics shows how tax is emerging as an overlooked but central issue in the fight against poverty. The figures speak for themselves: TJN's own research estimates that a staggering $11.5 trillion has been siphoned 'offshore' by wealthy individuals, held in tax havens where they are shielded from contributing to government revenues. The benefits from taxing this wealth would far outweigh any realistic amount of foreign aid from those countries. If the income from this offshore wealth was taxed at the moderate rate of 30%, the resulting revenue - around $255 billion annually - could finance the United Nations Millennium Project in its entirety. Put simply, making the rich pay their due taxes could immediately fund measures to halve world poverty.

In common with the rest of the developing world, Africa suffers particularly acutely from this wealth drain. Around 30% of sub-Saharan Africa's GDP is moved offshore. As several studies have suggested, this rate of capital flight means that Africa - a continent we are continually told is irrevocably indebted - may actually be a net creditor to the rest of the world. Whilst Africa's wealth flows to Monaco, Switzerland, Jersey and London, those who lose out are the populations of African nations whose dwindling tax revenues cannot support government spending on health, AIDS programmes, education, infrastructure and communication. Meanwhile the banking secrecy maintained by the world's bankers and accountants in tax havens helps business and political elites to plunder resources across the continent, providing a secure cover for them to launder the proceeds of political corruption, fraud, embezzlement and illicit arms trading.

Astonishingly, international organisations including the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund have not pursued international action to stem the hemorrhaging of Africa's wealth. Instead, they have encouraged developing African nations to drop business and trade taxes further, in a desperate bid to encourage investment from multinational corporations accustomed to channeling their wealth through tax havens. The result is that ordinary people shoulder more of the tax burden through sales taxes, while homegrown national businesses cannot compete with giant international corporations which can avoid tax through the international movement of capital and assets.

National initiatives are beginning to work against this African plunder. Nigeria's heroic Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is working to recover some of the wealth lost to tax havens through corruption and the tax evasion of multinational oil companies. And last November, South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, called for wider measures against multinationals' aggressive tax avoidance.

But national initiatives alone are weak in the face of mobile, global capital. International cooperation on tax is urgently necessary - and if international institutions like the UN and the OECD will not take action, global civil society must force them to do so. Bamako saw a bold proposal: to form a continent-wide Tax Justice Network for Africa, to be launched at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. This will be a major step in a new global development struggle, at whose forefront should be African activists and campaigners.

Davos and Bamako are worlds apart. Uniting them, though, is not just philanthropic promises over debt and aid, but a global theft which sees vast African wealth secreted away in bank accounts and offshore trusts in Switzerland and beyond. Stopping that theft, and taxing it for the benefit of African populations, will go a long way towards ending the poverty of Mali and its neighbours.

* John Christensen, is the director of the Tax Justice Network's International Secretariat. He is a development economist and former economic adviser to the UK and Jersey governments.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

South African leader Thabo Mbeki, in his state of the nation address at the opening of parliament in Cape Town last Friday, focused on plans to support government’s accelerated and shared growth initiative (Asgi), aimed at boosting economic growth and job creation. But Mohau Pheko and Lebohang Pheko, from the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, take Mbeki to task for failing to adequately consider the country’s women in his latest plans to fast-track growth.

Dear Mr. President Thabo Mbeki,

You have missed a great opportunity in the State of the Nation Address to articulate the problems confronting the women of South Africa. Why is it after 50 years of contributing to resistance, opinions, wisdoms and economic growth in this country when you mention us in your speeches we are merely lumped together with the disabled who should also take exception to this patronising marginalisation.

Since this is the 50th year that women celebrate their tremendous contribution to this country, it is worth using it to sum up what the last 12 years have been like in terms of economic policy. In adopting a market led macroeconomic strategy, we should tell you that the relationship between women, markets and the state has been increasingly complex. The market in the past 12 years has not acted in the interest of women nor has the state always acted in the interests of women. This has resulted in a rather disconnected policy framework which has failed to accurately evaluate the realities of women’s lives which are controlled through the interaction of economic, political, social and cultural forces based on class, gender and race. The policy framework has also failed to evaluate women’s role in social reproduction and how they maintain life within the family and communities they live in.

It is deplorable that women in the South Africa’s policy framework are still treated as dependents and instruments for family survival or state objectives. South Africa has long neglected gender as a category in the economic analysis of poverty, growth, inequality and the concentration of wealth. The frameworks suggested for poverty eradication by 2014 do not empower the majority of women in their own right. They tend to view women from a skewed perspective of ‘neediness’ rather than recognizing women’s wisdom, intellect, and achievements.

More importantly the assumptions in your Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA) do not spell out how the women of this country stand to benefit from this plan. The latest labour survey still reports that women are the most unemployed in the country. The most recent United Nations Human Development Report for South Africa confirms that women are still the poorest in our country and this trend is downward. In ASGISA, who are you accelerating growth for? How will you ensure that women qualitatively and quantitatively share in this growth? What type of growth are you talking about? The pattern of growth is as important as the rate of growth. Some growth patterns even if they increase per capita income and consumption may in the long run be detrimental to women as we have experienced in the current neo liberal framework. Economic growth without a distribution mechanism is inimical to women. Economic growth that depends on cuts in public expenditure, productivity, on labour deregulation are a danger to women in this country. Growth patterns or resource allocation that do not meaningfully integrate women, or result in growth equity are all costly to the women of this nation.

Many of your policy makers and public servants do not understand that women experience poverty differently from men due to gender inequalities resulting in different access to entitlements, economic leverage and social advancement. Women are subjected to the intergenerational transfer of poverty. Women have fewer economic resources, less access to labour markets. They shoulder greater responsibilities at the household level and many have restrictions on their mobility. These interlocking disadvantages result in women having less time to access your expanded works programme and less power to negotiate opportunities. How will ASGISA respond?

Gender equity is the power relationship that enables men and women to have equal access to the scarce and valued resources of their society. Within asymmetrical, unequal power relations at the household level women are the least powerful. These asymmetries include employment, education, wages, personal autonomy, healthcare, leisure and decision-making. The over weaning posture and support given to the male private sector has not been extended to women in the same way. Business and Economic Commissions set up to advise the President are still dominated by males. Trading enterprises have put severe limitations on market opportunities for many impoverished women and has allocated to them the nooks and crevices. The issue is not just the quantity of market opportunities it is also the quality. Many women work in the informal market under conditions of insecurity, are subjected to police harassment and exploitation and have little bargaining power and freedom to organize. At the same time, the commercialization of common property and cutbacks and privatization of healthcare and education have deprived women in poverty of access to affordable resources to improve their conditions. To what extent does ASGISA address these issues and how will it act as a catalyst in changing these critical dimensions?

The growth process suggested in ASGISA will in fact create new patterns of poverty deprivation for women because the issues that create inequality have been embedded and reproduced in ASGISA. In our country, women are responsible for social reproduction and daily household management. Since ASGISA is dependent on labour flexibility, inadvertently, women are the ones who will pay the cost by having to devise coping and survival strategies when household incomes fall and prices rise.

When food prices increase, when user charges for water, healthcare, electricity, and education are introduced and increased, the access of women to these services is affected, especially in a situation of poverty. There has been the casualisation of women’s work to lower unit labour cost, not just in the informal sector but also in the formal sector in terms of outsourcing or subcontracting arrangements. What is happening is that economic growth will depend on increased efficiency becoming a transfer cost subsidized by women from the paid economy to the unpaid work of women at the household level. That second economy you keep talking about consists of millions of women who subsidise the first economy without any fruits of growth accruing to them. Women especially in the rural and peri-urban areas are concentrated in the agricultural sector and the informal sector where the rate of growth and the potential for growth is relatively low to non-existent. In the industrial sectors women are concentrated in the unskilled or semi-skilled categories and have limited access to opportunities and benefits of economic development and growth. Is ASGISA a sufficient tool for standing up to these challenges?

The role of the State in distributing resources along gender, class and race lines to ensure access is critical if there is to be any meaningful developmental benefit for women. These social constructs and lived realties are essential mediating factors. The State is not a private company but a nation requiring government intervention to enable social cohesion, people participation and conscious distribution of the fruits of growth.

* Mohau Pheko and Lebohang Pheko are with the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, which works on international trade providing macroeconomic, trade, and policy literacy on the Africa continent. It works in 18 countries and is linked to the International Gender & Trade Network based in Brazil. Contact 082 6702505/084 881 9327

* Please send comments to

Can protocols and legislation really be an effective weapon against gender discrimination? Janah Ncube examines the Southern African Development Community and contends that while law may not change a moral belief, it can stop a husband from beating his wife to pulp, penalize unfair employment practices, and punish rape. “Legislation has proved that with the state upholding it, social norms eventually conform to it if it is beneficial to all peoples.”

It is no longer business as usual in the SADC region for development and gender stakeholders. After representatives from SADC Member States in government and civil society, regional NGOs, inter-governmental bodies and SADC Secretariat met in Botswana in December 2005, they concluded that if any integration in the SADC region is to be successful, sustainable and achievable, it has to be gender based regional integration.

The Executive Secretary of the SADC Secretariat Dr. Tomaz Salamao urged SADC governments to facilitate the implementation of the SADC Gender programme to enable the gender equality and equity objective to be attained. The driving force behind this consultative conference was the head of the Gender Unit at the SADC Secretariat Mrs. Magdaline Mathiba-Madibela who had the foresight to lobby and push for an action plan. Thus the 5 year SADC Gender Based Regional Integration Strategic Implementation Framework (2006 – 2010) was developed by the 110 participants.

The SADC Gender and Development conference was held in the backdrop of a region that is currently facing increasing poverty with over 70% of the region’s population living below US$2 per day and 40% below US$1 (SADC 2003), severe drought, extremely high HIV/AIDS prevalence (of the world population living with HIV, 60% come from the SADC region and of this number, 57% are women), serious food insecurity, high unemployment and cross border economic migrants.

While the only country in the SADC region experiencing ‘active conflict’ is the DRC, Angola is still reeling from the immediate effects of conflict including the problem of landmines, which Zimbabwe and Mozambique among others are still dealing with. Poor infrastructural development at national level and within the region in terms of connecting SADC Member States to facilitate trade and other cross-border initiatives is another such limitation.

All these limitations and challenges overbearing SADC precipitate as problems for women at practical day in day out experiences. This is because of the gendered nature of allocation of roles and responsibilities in our societies both at primary level (in the family) and at secondary level (in the public space). When the state cannot provide for its citizens, women become the subsidizers of the state by providing for unrecognized and unrewarded skills and services. The drastic expenditure budget cuts on social expenditure by governments in the late 1980s to 1990s due to structural adjustment programs give such evidence. African countries saw the negative impact of SAPs through the increased burden of care and basic food provision being shifted from the state to women (Maramba, Olagbegi & Webanenou 1995).

Women in the region have been facing increased challenges, marginalization and appalling gender crimes - despite vigorous gender awareness campaigns, women’s empowerment policies, legislation and programs adopted at national level since Beijing and other much earlier processes. What also is unique about the SADC region with regards to dissipating typical gender stereotypes is that women’s emancipatory efforts in this region were evidenced by their active participation together with the men in our liberation struggles (Campbell 2003).

However basic human rights, human dignity and human freedoms for them are still contested and have to be implored for diplomatically from our Heads of States. As seen in slavery, colonialism and apartheid, denial of rights of any persons is a mere facilitation of fictitious justifications for their exploitation. Until January 2006, adult women of Swaziland were being denied the dignity of being legal entities. Up to today, adult women in Botswana who decide to marry cannot open a water utilities account without the substantiation of their husbands. The way women are still portrayed in our media as trivial, sexual, insignificant entities of course perpetuates their secondary status in our societies.

Gendered violence is rampant in the SADC region and the conspiracy of silence around it in our homes, in our communities and indeed within the law has seen it multiply and become even more reckless as it is stealthily inflicted with impunity. Some of this abuse includes sexual crimes against baby girls as young as 3 days old; rape of primary school girls by male teachers and headmasters; gang rapes in daylight and cold and bloody murders sold to the world as ‘passion killings’.

While SADC is generally perceived as a region ‘enjoying’ peace, there is no peace in ordinary women’s everyday lives as husbands and lovers who claim to love them beat, kick and plunder their bodies. Of course this is called ‘domestic violence’ and has been found rather difficult to ‘treat’ in the justice system as it is a ‘household’ affair. Of course what is not being admitted here is that this is a security threat on the person of the victimised woman and is a denial of dignity when an external entity can bruise and break her body parts without legal recourse (see UDHR 1948).

The gendered division of labour within the region has resulted in the trivialization and marginalization of women’s work and their economic activities, which is practiced through denial of ownership and impossible access to resources such as land and capital; the criminalization or non regulation of the informal sector and lastly the non-costing of women’s work despite their long manual work.

This further buttresses not just the secondary status of women but is one of the key reasons developing countries have remained stuck in the poverty rut (UNIFEM 2005). SADC’s priority is to address the poverty that is in our region and unless we wake up to the reality that we have exhausted our capacity to further develop and grow the economies of our region based on exclusion and exploitation of women, we will stay in this rut for generations to come. The equality and equity agenda is not just about improving the situation of women, it is about improving the situation of our families which ripples into improving our communities, industries, countries and the region. It is about Africa utilizing all of its human skills in appropriating its resources to the best of its peoples. It is about attaining Africa’s potential by Africans for Africans.

In 2003, SADC came up with the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) to guide SADC policies, programmes and actions. The RISDP re-enforces the strategy of regional integration which Oyejide (2000) argues is the most basic ingredient for attaining high and sustainable economic growth. The task of building a regional community in light of inequalities amongst the member states in terms of development and economic status and indeed those inequalities inherited from the colonial and imperial legacies based on race, gender, class and so forth, requires courageous and capable leadership, skills and resources.

However in light of global trends and the influence of International Financial Institutions (IFI) in local economies of developing countries such as SADC Member States, including trade agreements that are continually being made on North-South differential agreements, integration also becomes about synergies, pooling resources together, widening export markets, and enhancing capacity of the region while negotiating and engaging on international platforms and indeed negotiating for progressions within the region itsself (see ADB Report 2000).

The RISDP also recognizes that greater equality between women and men contributes to both development and economic growth. In light of this, gender mainstreaming has been adopted by SADC as a strategy for ensuring that all SADC policies, programmes and activities take into consideration the fact that women and men, boys and girls are affected differently by macro and micro initiatives and policies due to the gendered nature of our societies. Such disparities that leave women worse off than men must be addressed to achieve the goal of gender equality and equity.

At SADC secretariat level, the Gender Unit (GU) has the task of ensuring that gender is mainstreamed in SADC policies and programmes while at national level Member States have set up National Gender Machineries (NGM) as institutions to do the same in all government structures and initiatives and also advance the empowerment of women. As Win (2005) points out, NGM have failed to achieve the conceptualized and intended gender justice which they promised. They instead became token entities to ‘shut women up’ as either departments in ministries or fully-fledged ministries with other issues lumped together with them such as community development, youth, children etc.

As the ministers of Gender in Africa observed during the Beijing +10 process in October 2004, NGM lack capacity, authority and resources to implement the enormous task of engendering all of government. A capacity assessment of NGM commissioned by the GU also pointed out that NGM have no clear mandates, are peripheral entities in government and are poorly resourced (see GU Needs Assessment Study 2004). Despite this, NGM still remain the most effective institutions to mainstream gender in governments if they address these limitations and adopt the Gender Management System as a strategy. (The Gender Management System (GMS) is a network of structures, mechanisms and processes put in place within an existing organization to guide, plan, monitor and evaluate the process of mainstreaming gender.)

Indeed many peripheral analyses of the gender inequality/discrimination problem blame women for perpetuating this phenomenon. What they fail to acknowledge is the power of the socialisation process which does not separate women from men in reinforcing the messages of superior males and subordinate females stereotypes in our societies (see Oakley 1985). However the greatest challenge with changing gender-based disempowerment is that it is about women who are engaged in personal/intimate relationships with men who evoke their discrimination.

The racial discrimination fight was easier because the “other” was disengaged and not connected to the “us”. However this struggle is about going against the wisdom of a father, the perceptions of a husband, the practices mother taught. So sometimes it seems to be an internal fight between being loyal to what one has always known and believed and what one sees to be the path to attaining their potential, freedoms and security. The progressions that we have attained through legislation and policy changes indeed give hope to women that the equality goal can and will be attained. This is why the Gender and Development Conference called for the upgrading of the SADC Declaration on Gender and Development (1997) and its addendum on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Children (1998) to a protocol. A protocol is a legally binding instrument which Member States will have to enforce. This protocol will incorporate all the targets of existing regional and international instruments and will at the same time incorporate existing issues which are highly impacting on the region such as HIV/AIDS and the trafficking of women for sex trade and other exploitations. Currently member states are in the process of consulting different stakeholders and mobilizing for support for the proposed protocol, targeted to be tabled before Heads of States at their next Summit in August 2006 in Lesotho.

While it is true that discrimination, exclusion and exploitation of women are moral issues that have been justified through traditional and religious interpretations and despite numerous progressive laws, they have continued to prevail and this has lead to myths that propagate ideas that protocols and legislation cannot solve these problems. Truth is, the law cannot change one’s interpretation of the Bible or one’s moral belief. However legislation has codified gender discrimination and to borrow from Martin Luther King Junior’s rationale on legislation (1968); legislation can regulate behaviour and keep a husband from beating his wife to pulp, legislation can penalize and consequently restrain an employer from paying women less than men for the same type of work and legislation can show men that they can not rape and get away with light penalties. Legislation has proved that with the state upholding it, social norms eventually conform to it if it is beneficial to all peoples.

The challenge for SADC is to move the SADC region from goodwill and commitments to implementation and tangible changes women can see in their daily lives. Member States can start by adopting, ratifying and domesticating the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The rhetoric has to be replaced by budget allocations of at least 10% for women’s empowerment and gender related programs in each line ministry’s budgetary allocation. SADC needs to accelerate its pace on increasing women’s leadership in political and other decision-making processes. Current trends are too slow; we missed our target of 30% by 2005 and have not felt ashamed by it.

National Governments must strengthen the capacity of NGM by increasing resources, clout, access, skilled senior personnel and defining clear mandates for them. Women’s NGOs and NGM must discard mistrust and adopt the spirit of the conference resolutions of seeking ways of collaborating and sharing information to achieve national targets. Civil society must continue to mobilize and educate the peoples of the region on action areas and issues identified and prioritised for the next 5 years. The energies generated at the conference must be fanned into even greater momentum as more stakeholders in the region run with the agenda. The SADC Executive Secretary recently pointed out that without peace, all of SADC’s efforts to integrate the region are futile. Truth is they are doomed to fail unless meaningful gender conscious and pro-women paradigms are what inform the region’s developmental and economic growth agenda.

* Janah Ncube is Technical Advisor to the Gender
SADC Secretariat in Gaborone Botswana

* Please send comments to [email protected]

References:

ADB (2000) Afican Development Report 2000: Regional Integration in Africa www.afdb.org

Campbell, H. (2003) ‘Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation’ South Africa: David Philip Publishers

Commonwealth Secretariat (1999) ‘Gender Management System Handbook’. Commonwealth Secretariat UK

Maramba. P, Olagbegi. B, Webaneno R. T. (1995) ‘Structural Adjustment Programs and the Human Rights of African Women. WiLDAF. Zimbabwe

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The time is fast approaching when water, health care and every other essential service become tradable - with enormous implications for the lives of the poor and vulnerable. Oduor Ongwen, the country director of SEATINI Kenya, describes the international agreement that is going to regulate trade in services, the General Agreement on Trade in services (GATS), noting that it is a “dangerous instrument for the externalisation of resources of underdeveloped countries such as those in Africa”.

The service industry is quickly replacing trade in goods as the motor for global economic activity. From tourism to auditing services and from transport to insurance, the frontiers for economic domination are increasingly shifting from industry - manufactures and commodities - to trade in services. Services are currently the fastest growing component of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) accounting for nearly 25% of world trade and more than 76% of FDI flows. It is for this reason that it was agreed at the launch of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986 to include trade in services in the negotiations, in the belief that this would improve the world trade system.

But liberalisation of trade in services could be an uncontrolled avenue for indiscriminate investment deregulation, privatisation of vital public services as well as giving foreign interests a foothold in Government procurement and thus a dangerous instrument for the externalisation of resources of underdeveloped countries such as those in Africa.

Externalisation of Africa’s Resources

While those in control of the commanding heights of the global economy would like to convince us that globalisation is a new phenomenon made inevitable by qualitative development of productive forces, we know better. Africa and the rest of the third world have been integrated into the global economic system since the mid 15th century. Unwillingly, Africa was part of the then dominant international trading system where its role in the international division of labour was to supply natural resources in the form of gold, ivory, cloves etc and human resources in the form of slaves to the “developed” world.

The second wave of globalization was the 1884 Berlin Conference, where the “scramble for Africa” was concluded with the continent divided amongst the leading colonial powers. The division of labour then assigned Africa the role of producing primary commodities - agricultural products, minerals, wildlife resources - for processing and manufacturing interests in the so-called “mother countries”.

Almost half a century after the formal defeat of colonialism, the division of labour not only persists, but has been revised and reinforced through corporate-led globalization. We can identify thirteen avenues for the externalization of Africa’s resources, which include, but are not limited to: Debt servicing; difference in interest rates between North and South; unfair terms of trade; corporate control of world trade; capital account liberalisation; profit repatriation by TNCs; privatization of state-owned enterprises; intellectual property rights; ecological debt; capital transfer; brain drain; immigration laws; and transfer pricing. Liberalisation of trade in services facilitates all these thirteen avenues of Africa’s resource haemorrhage.

Trade in Services

Defined in broad terms, a service is a product of human endeavour aimed at satisfying a human need, but which cannot be categorised as a good. Others have simply defined a service as “a product that cannot hit your foot.” However the General Agreement on Trade in services (GATS) does not define what constitutes a “service”; instead, a guide to the GATS lists 12 major categories covering more than 160 distinct services. These services cover the gamut from birth to death.

The above understanding of services can be misleading since in reality services can be embodied in tangible products. For instance, a magazine is a good while an advertisement appearing in the magazine is a service. Publishing of the magazine is also a service.

GATS is the first and only set of international rules to open up trade in services to competition from foreign firms. Signed in 1994, it has nothing to do with whether the service is provided efficiently or not. It is a corporate boot sale of essential services ranging from water to electricity and the media.

The Agreement, as pointed out earlier, covers twelve broad categories: communications; construction and engineering; distribution, wholesale and retail trade; education; energy; environment; financial services (including banking and insurance); health and social services; tourism and travel; sports, culture and entertainment; transport; and, in case anything is not covered by the foregoing, it comes under “other”.

But critics warn that the reach of GATS could even extend to essential services such as education and health, resulting in their commercialisation by transnational corporations (TNCs). The naked truth is that in the GATS lexicon, ‘public service’ is an aberration. Article I of GATS starts with a proclamation that the Agreement does not apply to “services provided in the exercise of governmental authority”. This would be great if it was not neutralised by the proviso that such governmental services must be supplied “neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more service suppliers”.

In the real world, perhaps it is only in Cuba or Democratic Republic of Korea that there might be some public services that aren’t delivered on a commercial basis or in competition with other suppliers.

The logic and significance of GATS is easy to comprehend. All human activities are to become, in the fullness of time, profit-oriented commodities that can be invested in, bought and sold. And the Agreement makes this irreversible since it is not a finished treaty but an open-ended framework agreement that mandates “successive rounds of negotiations” with the goal of attaining “progressively higher” levels of liberalisation.

This means that what is not opened today will be dealt with tomorrow until, presumably, all services are opened to all consumers by all countries in all “modes” of delivery. Even more alarming is Article IV. It gives GATS powers to interfere, via WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), with government efforts to pass “measures” – laws, rules, regulations, procedures, administrative actions or any other forms – that are deemed to be “unnecessary barriers to trade in services”. In other words, let not your pesky national standards stand in the way of foreign corporate interests.

As an example, one of the sectors that have been presented as being of great benefit to African countries is tourism. It has been posited that with full or substantial liberalisation of tourism, African beaches, nature parks and cultural attractions would be bursting in the seams with overseas visitors, who would bring in an abundance of the “scarce yet much needed” foreign exchange. These benefits are at best exaggerated and worst non-existent. Leakages are encouraged thanks to the inordinate dominance of foreign ownership in the tourism industry. Leakage is described as a process through which part of the foreign exchange earnings generated by tourism, rather than being retained by tourist-receiving countries, is either retained by tourist-generating countries or remitted back to them. This foreign domination of the tourism sector in Africa has intensified under the GATS framework.

Liberalisation of Financial Services: Casino Economy

A typical Third World lesson in financial liberalisation could be distilled from the case of Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB). Having yielded to the pressure from International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the Uganda Government sold off this national asset to Stanbic Bank. UCB had an extensive network all over the country, catering for rural farmers, teachers and civil servants. Most of the branches operated in UCB’s own premises.

No sooner had the sale agreement been concluded than Stanbic closed down all the rural branches, sold the buildings (in the process realising more than four times what it had paid as purchase price) and repatriated the proceeds. No one cared that teachers who used to earn their salaries through the bank now had to spend a two days every month and more money to reach the nearest bank. This is done at the expense of their pupils.

A good number of WTO Members have made commitments in financial services. These cover banking, insurance, securities and capital accounts. A smaller number has made commitments regarding insurance intermediation and transfer of financial information. Fewer still have made commitment with respect to derivatives trading. African countries and China have been cautious. The following could explain the reason why.

On July 2, 1997 Thailand's currency, the baht, had to be floated. Far from being an isolated single country issue, this ignited the financial and currency crisis that was to engulf the East Asian sub-region. This crisis thrust millions of workers, small business enterprises, children and other vulnerable segments of the human race into dire poverty and desperation. The crisis quickly spread beyond the sub-region. Russia virtually succumbed to financial collapse; the Republic of South Africa had to intervene with a raise in interest rates so as to defend its currency. In quick succession, Brazil joined the ranks of crisis countries.

The crisis and its bushfire-like spread have forced certain issues into the domain of international discourse. The question arises as to what extent are the flaws inherent in the current dominant economic order responsible for the trend of slowing economic development and worsening of global income distribution. This issue informs present debate over the global financial architecture.

The debate is carried from two poles. On the one hand, is the Washington Consensus or Wall Street pole which maintains that the crisis - and indeed global economic growth generally - is best addressed by more open trade, export-led, greater deregulation, and more liberalised financial markets. According to this school of thought all that is required is a minor tune-up of the international financial system.

On other hand, is the "main street alternative" which thinks the Washington Consensus model is irreparably flawed and fundamentally bankrupt. This viewpoint contends that the issue is not one of recalibrating the model, but rather of designing a new model that is stable, equitable and pro poor.

When it comes to financial architecture, the fundamental differences between the main street alternative and the Washington Consensus become clear. The latter promotes and uses institutions it controls to impose opening up of the domestic financial markets, better accounting standards, more financial transparency and disclosure and more International Monetary Fund (IMF) surveillance.

On its part, the main street alternative maintains that while improved accounting standards, financial transparency and disclosures are necessary, there is an acute need to reduce speculation and make long term investment, giving proper regard to risk. This requires taxes on the buying and selling of currencies to reduce speculative trading, as well as requiring the investors to commit their investment to a minimum time period.

Water For Life or Profit?

A key concern is that through liberalisation schemes, water is treated like any other commodity to be sold at a profit. Yet we know that water is essential to life and nature. Indeed, water is our common heritage and a public trust. According to a report in the East African newspaper, the water provision in the port city of Dar es Salaam has not improved since it was privatised, yet the World Bank-funded British firm-Biwater has increased the charges manifold.

Today the global water industry is dominated by less than 10 companies – the leading two being French firms, Vivendi and Suez (with water revenue of US$ 11.9 and 8.84 billion respectively in 2001). In 2001, Vivendi and Suez were ranked at positions 51 and 99 respectively on the Global Fortunes 500. The two French companies are facing stiff challenge from German company, RWE, which recently purchased Thames water of UK and American Water Works of the US. RWE is ranked 53 in the Global Fortune 500 with US$ 2.8 billion water revenue in 2001. Other key players in the privatisation of water services include Bouygues (France), Bechtel (US), Severn Trent, Anglian Water and Kelda (all of UK).

Hiking of water prices is not the only concern. Most of the companies entrenched in the water sector have bad records. In 1999, the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate declared the Suez subsidiary, Northumbrian Water, the second worst company in terms of operational performance in England and Wales. The main reason was poor quality – high levels of iron and manganese were found in the water Northumbrian was delivering.

In the UK, five water companies – Anglian, Severn Trent, Northumbrian, Wessex, and Kelda Group – were successfully prosecuted 128 times between 1989 and 1997. On one count in August 2001, Thames Water pleaded guilty and was fined 26,600 Sterling pounds for allowing raw sewage to pollute a stream within a few metres of a residential estate.

Liberalisation and Health Care

Gradually but steadily there has been a major shift in global health strategy in recent years. Thanks to the Washington Consensus, the responsibility for health care provision has moved from the state to the “market forces.” The defining feature of this shift is many deaths from otherwise preventable and treatable diseases; resurgence of diseases that humanity thought were already conquered like tuberculosis and detention of decomposing corpses in ghettoes christened “private clinics” for lack of payments.

David Werner, the author of the renowned and best-selling book, ‘Where There Is No Doctor’, is very clear on why the public should be worried about the shift in global and national health strategies. He recalls how the celebrated concept of universal primary health care had been adopted by virtually all governments at the landmark global health conference that endorsed the Alma Alta declaration.

To advance toward ‘Health for All by the year 2000’, the Declaration promoted the principles that all people are entitled to basic health rights and that society (and thus the government) has a responsibility to ensure that the people’s health needs are met, regardless of gender, race, class, relative ability or disability. The centrepiece of the Declaration was primary health care, a comprehensive strategy that included an equitable, consumer-centred approach to health services and also addressed underlying social factors that influence health.

Hong Kong: The Last Nail

At the recently concluded WTO meeting in Hong Kong, developed countries bulldozed a framework for GATS negotiations that compels countries to negotiate a minimum number of sectors with targets and indicators. These proposals will seriously erode the current flexibilities embodied in the GATS Agreement. These flexibilities were the very reason for African countries’ agreement to the GATS during the Uruguay Round. Furthermore, these proposals would completely change the very architecture of the GATS and the approach to the negotiations as agreed in the Negotiating Guidelines.

Annex C introduces plurilateral and sectoral approaches to the negotiations, which would force African and other developing countries to enter into negotiations in certain sectors, even if they are not yet ready to do so. Sectors that have been mentioned for sectoral negotiations include energy, water (through environmental services) and health (through financial services) - all of which are crucial and sensitive in African countries. Given Africa’s level of development, selling out these sectors to the market forces would pose serious threats to affordability and accessibility to these services by the poor and vulnerable.

* Oduor Ongwen is the country director of the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (Seatini) in Kenya. Previously, he was the Executive Director of EcoNews Africa and chaired the National Council of NGOs in Kenya. He holds a masters degree in Economic Policy of Developing Countries.

* Please send comments to

It is women who bear the brunt of the effects of trade liberalization on social development through a lack of access to basic social services. But, writes Jennifer Chiriga from the Alternative Information and Development Centre, one of the major impacts of trade on women is how the capitalist ethic plays into building masculinity while at the same time playing down the role that women play in society. Alternatives are in the offing, she argues.

The defining trends of current trade and economic relations across the globe and the process through which current international economic relations are played out, and markets for products and services are increasingly being defined, all fall under the rubric of globalisation.

International trade expansion has in the last few decades been manifesting a profound transformation, with the emergence of integration of economic activity, including elimination of restrictions on the free movement across borders of capital, goods, resources, technology and services. All regions of the world are coming closer together through intensified trade, investment, financial transactions, and information technology. Unfortunately the global expansion has not affected developing regions evenly, and Africa continues to lag behind.

The main feature of globalisation is a surge in the power of global capital and reorganizing of global production through multi-national corporations that wield tremendous influence over economies. Globalisation has been quite aptly cited as “largely the game of the powerful…the strong do what they will, and the weak must surrender what they cannot protect” (Tandon, cited in Vale and Maseko, 1998).

Other defining characteristics of globalisation are a more integrated global economy with interdependencies among nations, but the benefits of which accrue to developed economies; decline in investment in production, with companies moving more towards speculative investment, which brings faster and higher profits; diminishing public sector, with the state becoming more business oriented through privatisation of state enterprises, and the phenomenal power of multinational corporations that have the clout to drive global trade and influence governments, as seen by the power of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The WTO is not just about trade, it is about power and control of resources. Developed countries shape and control the trade regimes that affect developing countries and that lead to de-industrialisation, job losses and worsening of poverty. This is evidenced by the experience of developing countries that are undergoing IMF/World Bank enforced trade through neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes, who have been forced to liberalise their external trade, and have subsequently suffered destruction of local industries leading to massive retrenchments.

In spite of the conventional understanding about the creation of an “open” global free trade system, there is very limited “free trade”, particularly for African countries. The relevance of the WTO in the world system is that it is seen as the central institution in a centralised global economy. This has major relevance for African countries as they grapple with huge development challenges. The external orientation of African countries has led to opening up of global markets, resulting in flooding of imports and domination of foreign products e.g. agricultural produce and textiles to name a few, and this has led to massive loss of jobs in rural and urban sectors, threats to food security and abandonment of the social development project. The effects of trade liberalisation on social development is evidenced by lack of access to basic social services, a scenario in which women bear the greater burden.

Gender and trade

One of the major factors in gender inequality relates to how negative perceptions mould gender differences and how the capitalist ethic plays into building masculinity while at the same time playing down the role that women play in society where they occupy the role of secondary earners. Gender is a key determinant of vulnerability to poverty. And women, due to their disadvantaged position in the labour market, hold lower paid jobs, which require lower level of skills etc.

Although gender analysts have for a long time emphasised the negative impacts of trade liberalisation, the link between gender and trade has been tenuous, largely because perhaps gender considerations have been perceived as irrelevant and having no place at the negotiation table where trade issues are discussed. Looked at through a gender prism, trade policies have grave implications for development and well-being of women, due to impact on employment, poverty and the social burden carried by women. Although women are an important and significant constituency, trade policy in the WTO is formulated with no evidence of a gender perspective.

A study on policy links between gender and trade (Informal Working Group on Gender and Trade, 1998) emerged with a number of “reality points” that link gender and trade, and make a case for the importance of putting gender analysis at the center of trade policy:

a) Changes in social service delivery affect women to a greater extent

Trade policies and trade liberalisation can affect the ability of governments to finance social sector expenditure. The observation is that any revenue shortfalls leading to reduction of government expenditure affects social service delivery, and the burden is shifted to the households and women. The study states that in 1993 women contributed over US$11 trillion worth of household work to the world economy, and that trade policy should therefore not ignore women’s unwaged work in social reproduction. Gender planning should be built into the design of trade policies. A very important point made is that social development should be the bedrock of trade policy since women’s traditional roles do not make it easy for them to access opportunities to engage in international trade.

b) Entrenched gender inequalities in the labour market are unfavourable to women

The labour market tends to be segmented on gender lines with inequalities in income, career advancement and conditions of work. Traditionally expansion of trade is based on access to low wage labour, which is mainly female labour. Liberalisation of trade and the surge of foreign capital and transnational corporations, maintain competitiveness through minimising costs of production, especially labour costs. While one can generalise the negative effects on the labour market, for women the impact is higher – they have lower wages and less bargaining power because unions tend to be dominated by male leadership. The danger of trade liberalisation bringing more hardship for women is very real – because sub-contracting and flexible work allows corporations to avoid direct financial responsibility for workers.

c) Women have lesser access to economic resources: credit, skills, technical assistance

Institutionalised discrimination affects women’s access to land and credit from financial institutions, and therefore impacts in a very fundamental way on their role in the economy. When trade barriers are reduced and an infusion of cheaper imports come into the market, women may lose out especially when quality control becomes an issue and introduces lack of competitiveness.

One of the major gaps is that while WTO rules encompass all levels of economic development, there is no gender analysis that assesses these rules in a structured way. While there is a ready source of scientific research documenting the realities of women’s lives and how the economy impacts on them, the conceptual and policy links between gender and trade have to be given more attention and attempts to generate further analysis on the link between gender and trade policy, should raise the following questions:

- Are trade policies geared towards elimination of poverty and gender inequality?

- Do trade rules prevent government and private business from formulating gender-sensitive policies;

- Are trade policies based on competition, which ignores reproductive tasks i.e. reinforcing the masculine model of superiority.

Even as we grapple with the specific gender dimensions, trade policy should not be approached in isolation of macro level economic policy. In this context, the discussion on alternatives raises very broad issues.

Alternative strategies for development

Change is possible through a break from the mainstream model of dominant global capital. The emergence of national, regional and international forums such as the Africa Social Forum (ASF) and World Social Forum (WSF) is a sign that there is an increasing trend of organisations and social movements mobilising to reflect and exchange ideas on alternative visions and actions. The WSF was conceived as a response to the growing struggle against neo-liberalism and an alternative to the World Economic Forum where business leaders from all over the world get together to discuss the economic state of the world, and is an arena of debate, as well as an opportunity for social movements and activists from the north and south to meet and exchange ideas.

There is already a powerful discourse, which is however being undermined by concentration of wealth and anti-democratic power of powerful global corporations. Nevertheless, emergence of regionalism as an alternative, is gaining ground as a possible solution to the dislocation of Africa’s economic potential.

The questions to pose in any deliberations on alternatives are:

- how to engender the political will necessary for the regional project;

- how the geo-political concept of regionalism can be harnessed to engage and challenge the globalised system on a stronger footing;

- how Africa can turn regional integration and cooperation groupings into real frameworks for alternative models of development.

Africa already has some examples of a unique regional integration model that have roots in pan African solidarity. There is potential for strengthened regional blocs to encompass development needs of emerging economies. Regional integration has the potential to break the leverage that industrial countries have over Africa, whose governments need to realise that engaging the local with the regional and continental is the future in terms of economic development.

In response to the questions raised above, one of the key considerations is that social mobilisation of strong social movements and organisations can provide the pressure and impetus that will eventually cause a shift in the global balance of power. Social movements should be the foundation of a people-based process that promotes developmental regionalism, centred on human rights, women’s rights and social justice. Commitment should be to a unified region in which local and community-based development is the primary underpinning of national and regional development programmes.

Through strategic interdependencies we need to redirect trade to domestic and regional spaces, increase manufacturing and production and add value to our primary products. In addition the liberalisation and privatisation policies should be replaced and we should create trade and development cooperation agreements which reflect the realities and needs of the people, and which are not pre-determined or constricted by compliance with WTO terms and conditionalities.

Cooperative development would ensure, for example, that shared resources like energy, water etc, could be approached holistically for the benefit of the whole region. But as long as powerful economies like South Africa continue following a sub-imperialist agenda, it will be a lost battle. African governments must cooperate, coordinate and combine. As someone said at a workshop recently, “extroverted economies will get us nowhere".

* Jennifer Chiriga is Unit Coordinator, Globalisation and Alternatives Unit, Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC), Cape Town

* Please send comments to

Article traduit de l’anglais par Frances Chevalier et Kesini Murugesan, de l’Université du Cap, Afrique du Sud.

Are claims for slavery reparations of US$777 trillion, as made by a 1999 African World Reparations truth commission in Accra, realistic? How does one begin to conceptualise claims for reparations in a broader historical and social context when it comes to centuries of exploitation? M.P. Giyose from Jubilee South Africa makes the case for understanding reparations as a transformation of the way the world functions, ultimately serving to restore and sustain human civilisation.

When a victorious Roman army returned from its conquests, both before as well as after republican times, it entered the city of Rome in a triumphal march. Of course the triumph was bedecked with all manner of loot that came back as the spoils of war. Some of the best treasures forcibly taken from vanquished peoples were entered into the Roman treasury as part of the material gains of war. The conquering imperial armies of England, France and Germany in the 18th and 19th Centuries followed the old Roman tradition. This kind of “revenue” has to be distinguished clearly from what in this discussion we call reparations. By the 19th Century, European war makers had already long developed the custom of a reparations levy. A nation defeated in war was a nation to be doubly punished. At the point of signing a Peace Treaty for the purpose of ending the war, the vanquished nation was given a huge bill or levy which it had to pay the victorious party, not as a form of tribute, but rather as compensation for “losses” or “the expenditure of war” suffered by the victorious nation in the course of prosecuting the given war. With this levy the victors were supposed to repair whatever damages they had endured in war. Of course this was a purely retributive measure, oppressive in every sense. As a result the defeated nations always understood it to be a form of vengeance.

We need to disclaim altogether any connection between what we are discussing with this type of tradition. The nearest parallel we can adduce to the notion of reparations is that of damages as is defined in relevant branches of the law. Put succinctly in legal practice, the aim of damages is to restore the injured party to that position where he would have been if he had not suffered injury. And whilst this is possible in legal practice, and measurements can come close to scientific exactness, the similar process is a lot more complex in the arena of political economy. Damages carried out through history are highly rapacious at the point of commission. They carry with them extensive loss of life as well as incalculable material harm. They also carry a historical legacy that puts back a nation scores of years in time.

If we understand reparations to be a broad genus, we will also accept that it has a number of species. It is difficult, in the result, to define reparations both in terms of its general features as well as its specifics. And the problem is brought about by both the historical as well as social content in the entire process. We will therefore have to satisfy ourselves with a purely descriptive indication of reparations and proceed into our analysis in terms of both the general as well as the specific. Overall, the aim here will be to chart out an economic future for the countries of the South, in terms of a global economic model that is designed to override in mitigation the woeful history of conquest, economic plunder and financial pillage.

Global Reparations – Are They Possible?

Let us begin by delineating the entire historical and social process from which reparations are now being determined. From a purely European point of view capitalism first begins to flex its muscles in the course of the crusades, thus securing a passage for exchanges in goods through Asia Minor to the Indian sub-continent and China. This was reinforced later in the passage around the African continent. Simultaneously other tentacles spread far and wide into the Atlantic and Caribbean and later, onto the Pacific Islands. The ancient Italian City States of Venice, Florence, Genoa, etc., were thus able to make a rapid transition through feudalism onto a capitalist base. The slave trade is one of those reinforcing factors that integrated an African economy, which was at the same time being retarded together with the Caribbean Islands and the Americas. The road was now open for a transfer of wealth and power from the bankers of the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula to an assumption of economic power by the merchant classes in England, Holland and France.

Second, by this time the question of foreign conquest with concomitant ecological brigandage was a settled issue. Thirdly, from quite early on, the 20th Century foreign acquisitions took on a financial and industrial colouration. And it was a perfection of this process that took matters a stage further towards the end of the 20th century. The age of globalisation has been the age of subjugation strictly through the sheer power of money.

Each of these four stages of capitalist development has put to the sword, not just the liberties of other nations; it became crucial in the expropriation of their wealth. At each stage the bonds of enslavement have been taking on a variety of means, namely: the ecology, labour, trade, debt, investment. Throughout this history, the true indebtedness of Northern societies has stood in direct proportion to the changes in these means.

The question we have to pose at this stage is – how can the North discharge the settlement of so monumental a debt to Southern societies? Is such a discharge practicable? The question has to be posed quite regardless of the lies and deliberate promises given in mendacity by such ruling classes as those in the USA, when they pretended restorative programmes of upliftment to the slaves whom they took out of the plantation economy of the South. Can the North truly work out a programme of reparations for the South in the emerging economy of our times?

Let us illustrate these questions by offering two examples of claims by representative groups of people from the economic South of the world. In 1999 a truth commission deliberating under the aegis of the African World Reparations in Accra, made a demand from Northern nations for compensation over the slave trade in the amount of US$777 trillion, to be paid over 5 years. Immediate questions which arise are as follows: Who exactly is liable for this bill? What are the direct particulars of the offence? To whom are the debtors liable? Has the process for these types of reparations been able to establish the actual number of slaves that were extracted out of Africa; the actual number that died in the middle passage; the actual number that were landed in America; the actual societies from which the slaves were drawn in Africa? Are these numbers a hundred million, or ten million, or another number in between? Has there been a determination made of exact losses in labour hours from any particular nations or groups of nations in Africa? Or, is the quantum of this claim a shot in the dark?

These problems are indicated quite articulately in the second example to be cited. In a remarkable document submitted before the nations who had “discovered” a discovery which had been made 40 000 years before, the Native American Chief Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc makes a deposition that is full of scorn, sarcasm, wit and intelligence. At the height he declares: “On this basis, and applying the European formula of compound interest, we inform our ‘discoverers’ that they only owe us, as a first payment against the debt, a mass of 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of sliver, both raised to the power of 300. This equals a figure that would need over 300 digits to put it down on paper and whose weight fully exceeds that of the planet Earth. What huge piles of gold and silver! How much would they weigh when calculated in Blood?”

This is a masterful performance. It refers to one small claim covering a short period of time in historical plunder in a particular location in America, that is, 1503 to 1660. Taken on a world scale, the claims of the countries of the South are literally both astronomical and immeasurable.

On this basis it is perhaps not too difficult to conclude that current Northern societies do not possess a capacity, in spite of their incredible wealth, to repay the debt that they owe the South. In a punitive understanding of reparations equal to that of European powers in the 19th Century, the combined capacities of all Northern societies would not be able to satisfy a pound by pound repayment of all that they owe the South. This is not only a measure of the gargantuan proportions of the Northern debt; it is an indicator of the unimaginable degree in conspicuous consumption that has become the lot of Northern societies in the last six hundred years. Clearly, a rational method has to be designed and adopted so that the scales of history should be re-weighted in a manner that would enable the sustained survival of human civilisation in terms of obligations admitted by all sides in current society.

Immediate Practical Proposals

The question of reparations therefore is definitely beyond dispute. What begins to concern us now as an immediate practical measure, is the vehicle on which we seem to depend for negotiating the reparations question. Given the fact that this matter needs to be viewed from the point of view of the whole world economy, it becomes clear that this issue can only be dealt with in terms of a systemic solution.

During our time the question of one form or another of reparations has posed itself before our policy makers. Currently, the most verbose intellectual among the nationalist tendencies on the African continent, is President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2001, Mbeki pooh-poohed the very idea of projecting the question of economic development in Africa on any such notion. Now, the key thing is that there is a Thabo Mbeki in the heartbeat of every other leader in the countries of the South – save one or two exceptions. How can that crop of persons then become our agents for a reparations programme, whatever its character may be? That is why we have to fall back for the development of strategy and the discharge of tasks on this question on dynamic political movements operating both in the South as well as elsewhere in the world.

Sometimes reparations work occurs in terms of piece meal measures in favour of restorative justice. Some of these may be life and death struggles fought by rural people for land redistribution. At other times conflicts may be joined which are based on some aspects of the debt question. Important examples of this are the struggles over odious debt. These are particularly germane in Southern countries where the debt creating regimes may have been constituted by dictatorships, or at the very least, there might exist a continuing legacy from colonial rape that might compel successor democratic governments to plunge into a debt with corrective intentions. And yet at other moments restorative justice could obtain in the sphere of extending human rights in law. Politically, all these efforts need to be given support especially if they happen on the basis of a fundamental programmatic position.

In terms of advancing a systemic reparations programme, the ideas now on offer are premised on the integrative forces in the current world situation. That situation consists of three parts. We are presented with a single world political system. This under-girds one economic system that exists on the basis of, and in turn, should feed one ecological system. The three parts make one total world system. It is no longer possible therefore, for us to offer any solutions to the problems of the nations of the South, if these are segregated and can only be expressed through division. A cardinal tenet of an integrated world consists in an understanding that separation and separate means with “their own” institutions, can only lead to inequality.

Given these circumstances, measures working in favour of reparations can only be based on the building and sustaining of one world economy - not several pieces thereof. Egalitarian features within the building of the nation will actually express themselves at their very best when they work in conformity with other expressions of the same principle on a world scale. We therefore come to the conclusion that the reorganisation of the world has to occur on the basis of new social foundations – the foundations of a post-capitalist society. This is a society where the forces of equality are universal; they have become the very life force of economics, of the ecology and of politics.

Conclusion

Reparations therefore can be understood to be a means by which social life in the current nations as we know them today can be reformed. In that way they could be seen as an agent for creating “a better life” for impoverished sections of humanity. The need for reparations of this kind is most urgently felt in the countries of the South. However, in the longer view of human history, reparations cannot be viewed as purely ameliorative measures even if they are seen in terms of restorative justice. There is an inbuilt system of “diminishing returns” in this method of sustaining reparations. In the longer view of historical development, reparations should be seen as an agency for restoring and sustaining human civilisation. And in this manner they cannot be a purely national issue. They are an international phenomenon encompassing the combined fortunes of all humankind and all the fauna and flora that keep pace with us in our natural domain.

* M.P. Giyose is chairman of Jubilee South Africa

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In late 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed an Alien Tort Claims Act case in the US District Court in California against Bridgestone, alleging "forced labor, the modern equivalent of slavery" on a Firestone Plantation in Harbel, Liberia. The lawsuit states: "The Plantation workers allege, among other things, that they remain trapped by poverty and coercion on a frozen-in-time Plantation operated by Firestone in a manner identical to how the Plantation was operated when it was first opened by Firestone in 1926." Robtel Pailey investigates modern-day slavery in the "land of the free".

In the early 1820’s, Liberia transformed into a land of exile for repatriated American slaves. In fact, the country was a proverbial refuge from the dehumanizing, deplorable conditions of chattel slavery in the United States. So any mention of the word “plantation” should have Liberians visibly shuddering from the historical legacy that many of its descendants endured.

Ironically enough, a recent development suggests that Liberia itself has served as a breeding ground for modern day slavery disguised in the form of what some would call indentured servitude for the American corporation, Firestone. Declared Africa’s first republic in 1847, Liberia has been embroiled in an asymmetrical relationship with the rubber giant since the corporation first landed on the shores of the country in 1926. Eighty years later, human rights groups have sidestepped Firestone’s alleged abusive practices and lodged a class action suit against the American company for violations of child labour laws, cruel and unusual labour practices, and environmental degradation. Practices, they claim, are no different from the moment the plantation opened. Since 1926, Firestone has allegedly relied on forced labour, involuntary servitude, recklessness, negligence in hiring and supervision, unjust enrichment and unfair business practices.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of workers and their children at the plantation under pseudonyms, names Japanese parent company Bridgestone, Bridgestone Americas Holding, Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire and other units as defendants.

The International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) filed the class-action suit in the name of 12 Liberian workers and their 23 children, who remain anonymous to protect themselves from retaliation. The plaintiffs are bringing their case to the US because the Liberian judicial system has been eroded in the mire of civil breakdown. “The plantation workers are stripped of rights, they are isolated, they are at the mercy of Firestone for everything from food to health care to education, they risk expulsion and certain starvation if they raise even minor complaints, and the company makes wilful use of this situation to exploit these workers as they have since 1926,” the lawsuit claims. ILRF and its allies - Liberian human rights lawyers and activists - serve as an advocacy apparatus for the health and legal rights of Firestone workers in Harbel, Liberia.

The history of Firestone in Liberia is revealing. In 1926, the company signed a concession agreement with the government of Liberia for a period of 99 years. That agreement covered one million acres of land, leased for six cents per acre for a total annual price of $60,000. Large sectors of the indigenous population were displaced to pave the way for setting up Firestone’s largest plantation in Harbel. Even in the company’s infancy, Liberians were recruited to provide forced labour to harvest and cultivate the rubber trees, after which they engaged in “tapping,” the labour-intensive act of using primitive tools to tap the raw latex out of rubber trees for export. Labourers were initially conscripted at gunpoint, and many of the descendants of those labourers serve as plaintiffs in the case against Firestone today.

Despite a surge of civil dissent and democratic outcries in 2005, Firestone signed a new 37-year agreement with the Transitional Government in Liberia to lease the land for 50 cents per acre, a “hike up” from the original leasing agreement. According to a recent report published by the Save My Future Foundation, Firestone exported 167,165 tons of rubber between 2000 and 2003. The price of rubber reaches astronomical highs today at $486 per ton. In the measurement of trade regulations at present, Firestone is receiving $81,242,190 from its production in Liberia. All of the rubber produced in Liberia is sent to the United States for processing into tires, and other materials. No processing, manufacturing, or other value added production is done in Liberia.

The level of poverty in Liberia is so astonishing that people flock to the plantation for a mere pittance. The average tapper generates $900 monthly for the company yet receives barely a tenth of that as compensation from Firestone once fees and services are deducted from wages. As a result, the tappers slog for a mere $3.19 a day. After having worked for Firestone for over 50 years, some retired plantation workers apparently collect less than $50 a month in pension earnings.

Aside from dealing with the poverty of indentured servitude, Firestone labourers must contend with health-related infirmities. The tappers expose their eyes to the potentially blinding latex, applying dangerous pesticides and fertilizers to the rubber trees. The raw latex from the rubber trees is fatal when applied to the eyes, as there have been countless reported cases of workers suffering from permanent eye damage due to exposure. They are forced to carry 75-pound buckets overflowing with the collected latex quota of the day. Unschooled about the dangers of the products they are handling, the workers know not to ask for safety equipment. Many of the tappers have severe scars and bone muscle abnormalities as a result of the tapping.

The labourers work 12-15 hour days, then must enlist the help of their families (including young children and wives) to complete a daily quota in order to ensure a weekly wage. No days off, no paid holidays, no sick leave. A shameful phenomenon in the Firestone scheme is its implied support of child labour. Most of the children are working on the plantations instead of attending school. The few that do attend go to substandard schools in dilapidated conditions. Firestone claims that it provides free education to the children of its workers, but in actuality the workers must pay an income tax automatically deducted from their monthly wages to cover the costs of so-called educational expenses.

The children and their families toil on the plantation by day, and return to the squalor of primitive living conditions at night with no electricity or running water. Firestone blames the country’s more than a decade long civil war for the breakdown of infrastructure, yet members of the Firestone clan aided and abetted the rebel leader-turned president Charles Taylor so as to avoid damage to the plantation when the war raged on. Some of Taylor’s rebel armies were even stationed at Harbel, enjoying the fruits of their fellow countrymen’s literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Miles away from the deplorable living conditions of the Liberian labour force, the company’s managerial staff benefits from the rubber wealth, luxuriating in air-conditioned bungalows and even stopping from their “backbreaking” work as overseers to play a round of golf on the erected course nearby. Mud huts and shanty huts coexist with big, immaculate looking makeshift houses. Firestone claims that the mud huts that exist on the land were created by internally displaced Liberians who flocked to the plantation during the height of civil war in the country. Yet, Firestone owns the land and retains all the responsibilities of its upkeep. Furthermore, some of the conditions existed before the civil war and were entrenched for years.

The entire scenario represents a microcosm of inequitable trade rules benefiting large Western corporations that exploit raw material within the developing world, leaving the indigenous people with environmental spills, physical ailments, and broken morale. The Firestone case in Liberia is a microcosm of American corporate takeover and a flagrant disregard of indigenous rights. It is an extension of the transatlantic slave trade, and should be exposed as such.

* A native of Buchanan, Liberia, Robtel Neajai Pailey currently serves as Assistant Editor of The Washington Informer, a Washington, D.C. based community newspaper.

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Manu Herbstein’s first novel, ‘Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, recently published in South Africa by Picador Africa, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Prize. Set in the late eighteenth century, it tells the story of a young woman who is captured and enslaved in the West African savannah and transported to Brazil. Here, Herbstein reflects on the historical background to his novel and some of its contemporary implications.

Some forty years ago the distinguished British Professor of History, Hugh Trevor-Roper, told a BBC audience: "Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…"

In 1772 or thereabouts, Ama is quietly going about her business at her home in the West African savannah. She is about to be overwhelmed by waves, tsunamis, of history, African and European history, of which she is almost entirely ignorant. Living, as she is, in a quiet, rural, pre-industrial society, we may excuse her ignorance. Given Trevor-Roper’s profession and status, his ignorance was inexcusable. Regrettably, except amongst specialists, that ignorance of African history remains widespread today.

I am not an historian. Indeed I am not any sort of academic. So I ask you to approach the potted historical background which I am going to offer you with some reserve. For one-stop access to the texts I have used you might like to look at the book’s companion web-site, One further caveat: you should bear in mind that much of our knowledge of West African history is derived from European sources, which may be distorted by their unwitting ideological baggage.

Returning to my metaphor of tsunamis, what I am going to do is to describe briefly the dry land on which Ama (or Nandzi, to give her her birth-name) stands as the novel opens and then, again briefly, to describe each of the several waves of history which threaten to engulf her: the histories, if they can be separated, of Dagbon, Asante and Europe; and of gold, kola and sugar.

Human settlement in the West African Sudan

Until very recently conventional history has had it that the peopling of West Africa is, in terms of palaeontology, quite recent, beginning, perhaps, during the last ice age, a period when the Sahara was green. The recent discovery of hominid fossils in Chad may demand a major reassessment of this part of the story.

Be that as it may, the early immigration would in all likelihood have been gradual and slow and the numbers small.

Let me now slip into the historical present tense.

Over the course of many centuries the Western Sudan, the savannah country to the south of the Sahara, becomes populated. Many people live in acephalous societies, some of which, beloved of anthropologists, still exist. Ama’s people, who call themselves Bekpokpam, but are known to others as Konkomba, are one such. They develop, as one might expect, a culture which is intimately connected with their physical environment. So, to give just one example, their religious practices are concerned with protection from a sometimes hostile climate and with encouragement of fertility, both of the soil and of their womenfolk.

History is recorded, by and large, to reflect the glory of strong rulers. Since the Konkomba have no strong rulers, they preserve little of their history. What they remember, principally, is their “tsunami,” when they were overwhelmed by mounted invaders from the north.
Dagbon

The invaders call themselves Dagomba; their state is known as Dagbon.

In the 16th century or earlier, perhaps, the ancestors of the Dagomba live in the vicinity of Lake Chad. They are troubled by the depredations of the “white men from the desert,” that is, Bedouin raiders; and decide to migrate. For a generation or more they wander within the bend of the Niger River, surviving from the proceeds of occasional brigandry. In due course they settle in the vicinity of what is now the city of Tamale, in northern Ghana and towards the Togo border to the east, where they establish their capital, Yendi. This is the country of the Konkomba, some of whom submit and are absorbed by the invaders while others stubbornly retain their own separate identity.

In the early eighteenth century, through the influence of Hausa traders, Dagbon adopts Islam. The Hausa traders arrive each year, after the rains, in search of kola.
Kola
In early times, the tropical forest bars migration from the savannah down to the Atlantic coast; however the Volta River offers one way through. So we have a populated coastal strip separated from the savannah by a 200km wide belt of forest.

The natural environment of the tropical forest is a major factor in determining how, and how quickly, it is penetrated by man. The canopy of the forest is so dense that little light penetrates to the ground. The vegetation at ground level is consequently light. Adventurous hunters in search of game are the first humans to enter the forest. In due course some of them establish small settlements. The trees are enormous and closely spaced. It requires a great input of labour to clear areas for agriculture. The problems are exacerbated by the poor quality of tropical soils. After only three or four crops the nutrients are exhausted and decreasing yields force the farmer to clear new areas.

Powerful economic incentives are needed to make settlement viable. Of these there are two: kola and gold.

The kola tree is indigenous to these forests. Its seeds fall to the ground, where they may be collected. The kola “nut” is a pink and white seed about the size of a thumb. It has a mildly narcotic effect and is reputed to stave off hunger and thirst. Its economic value stems from the fact that Islam does not prohibit its use. In order to realize this value, labour is required to clear the ground beneath the kola trees, to gather the seeds and to transport them in head-loaded baskets to entrepôts beyond the northern extent of the forest. The market for kola encompasses the entire Muslim world.
Gold

From around the eighth century of our era, the kingdoms of the western Sudan, first, ancient Ghana, and then Mali and Songhai, are the most important suppliers of gold to the Mediterranean, exporting, on average, a ton of gold across the Sahara each year. West African gold makes a vital contribution to the monetization of the medieval Mediterranean economy.

School children in West Africa learn of Mansa Musa, the king of Mali who died in 1337. In making the hajj, Mansa Musa takes with him 100 camel-loads of gold and distributes so much of the precious metal in Cairo and Mecca that the bottom drops out of the market.

The trans-Saharan trade in gold reaches its peak around the end of the 17th century. In due course, the local surface deposits of gold become depleted and the Malians send exploratory missions throughout West Africa in search of new supplies. They discover a rich source in the forest of what is now the modern state of Ghana. By that time there is competition from European buyers at the coast.

The kola trade requires labour; so does the mining of gold. And so, too, does the establishment of agriculture, to support the miners and porters and the new aristocrats who are the descendants of the first settlers. Guns and powder purchased from the Europeans at the coast offer the means of obtaining that labour.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, gradual development of the forest economy has reached a level at which the establishment of a large centralized state is a viable project.
The Europeans: Portuguese, Dutch and British

During the period 1400-1600, Europe, emerging from the lethargy of the Middle Ages, witnesses the renewal of nationalism as well as the political transformation from feudalism to nation states. The exploration of the Atlantic leads to the establishment of Europe's commercial empires; and, in due course, to the industrial revolution. The Atlantic slave trade plays an important role in the growth of the European economy.

The Portuguese know that there is gold in West Africa: they aim to bypass the Saharan trade and get access to the gold through the back door. In 1482, five years before Bartholomew Diaz rounds the Cape, the Portuguese aristocrat Dom Diego d’Azambuja arrives, with several ships, at a village on the coast of what is now Ghana. His ships are laden with building materials and after negotiating with the local chief, he starts to build a brick and stone castle, which the Portuguese name Elmina. By 1486 d’Azambuja’s castle of St. George is substantially complete.

St. Georges Castle at Elmina is the oldest surviving European building in the tropics. It is a useful symbolic marker of the beginning of the process of the worldwide expansion of European power which we now call globalization.

In 1637, fifteen years before Van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape, the Dutch expel the Portuguese from Elmina Castle. They are to stay there for 235 years, until 1872, when, seeing neither economic nor political advantage in remaining, they sell the building, by then much extended, to the British.

I first visited Elmina Castle in 1961 or ’62. At the time it was being used as a training college for the Ghana Police Force and was not open to the public. I was living and working at Cape Coast, some 15km to the east of Elmina. One of the small colony of South African schoolteachers there, Manilal Moodley (who was later to become Zimbabwe’s first Ombudsman), was friendly with the Commander of the Police College. Mani took me with him on my first visit to the Castle. I was totally ignorant of its significance and that of the many other slave castles which line the Ghanaian coast. I have to admit that I remained in that state of ignorance for many years. I am comforted by the thought that I was not alone in this respect. My sister, the distinguished Ghanaian novelist, Ama Ata Aidoo, told me many, many years later: “I grew up in the shadow of those castles, but no one ever told me what they were or what they meant.”

The first chapter of Ama which I wrote is set in Elmina Castle and is based upon a story which the tourist guides still tell. It is now chapter 13. It had the advantage that, unlike the rest of the book, it required little research.

Asante

We return to the forest.

In the year 1700 Nana Osei Tutu establishes the Asante Confederacy, Asanteman, with Kumase as its capital. Its economy is based upon the export of kola and gold. It sells gold to the Dutch in exchange for guns. It uses the guns to expand its empire by conquest. Conquest of the surrounding states provides it with the labour it needs to mine the gold and gather and export the kola. It sells the captives in excess of its labour requirements to the Dutch and the English at the coast.

Asante imposes strict limitations upon the activities of foreign traders within its territory. The Europeans are confined to small areas around their castles and forts on the coast. The kola markets are on the north bank of the Volta River, which the Hausa traders are not permitted to cross. In order to consolidate its control of the kola trade routes, Asante invades Dagbon, first in 1744 and again in 1772. It stations a consul in Yendi, the Dagomba capital, to ensure delivery of an annual tribute. The tribute comprises so many sheep and goats, so many pieces of cotton cloth and so many of silk cloth; and 500 slaves. Asante concedes that none of the slaves will be Dagomba. So every year the Ya Na, the Dagomba ruler, sends out raiding parties to capture slaves for delivery to Kumase. Many of the captives are Konkomba. Nandzi, later to be known as Ama, is one.

The labour of slaves makes a substantial contribution to the Asante economy. However the slavery practised by the Asante differs so fundamentally from the chattel slavery of the Europeans, that it hardly makes sense to use the same word for the two practices. In Asante, slaves are absorbed into the population within a generation and became all but full citizens. Indeed Asante law encourages integration by prohibiting the public disclosure of the origins of any citizen.

By the end of the eighteenth century Asante has established political supremacy over the territories that comprise most of modern Ghana and east-central and south-eastern Cote d'Ivoire. It is a sophisticated, complex and wealthy state. It maintains large monetary reserves including its treasury's Great Chest, which when full contains some 200,000 oz., say 5 or 6 tons, of gold.
Europe and Africa

It is instructive to consider some aspects of the state of Europe at this time, the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Britain, emerging as the pre-eminent power, serves as an example.

In 1775 George III signs an order releasing from bondage the women and children, many of them younger than eight years old, who work in British coal and salt mines in conditions not much removed from slavery. The following year the British Parliament debates (and rejects) the first motion to outlaw slavery in Britain and her colonies. Another 32 years are to pass before the slave trade is outlawed and yet another 27 before the practice of slavery itself becomes illegal.

In Britain at this time, Roy Porter tells us, criminals are publicly whipped, pilloried, and hanged; until 1777 Jacobites' heads are spiked on Temple Bar. In 1800 there are some two hundred capital offences in England. Many specify death for small-scale theft such as pick-pocketing goods worth more than a shilling. The penalty for poaching is often transportation.

The British seldom bathe. Before cottons become cheap, clothes are difficult to wash; children in particular are often sewn into theirs for the duration of the winter. The use of underclothes is recent and not widespread. Chamber pots are provided in the dining-room side-boards of the wealthy, to save interrupting the conversation of the gentlemen. Food hygiene is no better than personal hygiene. The streets are full of the excrement of humans and horses. This is a world lit by candles and rush-lights.

There is not a single bathing establishment in London in 1800. By way of contrast, Thomas Astley, writing in 1745 of the ‘Gold Coast Negroes, their Persons, Character and Dress’, says: “They are very careful in washing their bodies morning and evening, and anointing them with palm-oil.”

In 1771 one hundred and seven slave ships sail from Liverpool, transporting 50,000 slaves from Africa. Colonial trade at the time amounts to one third of British commerce. In the 1780’s British slave traders top the international league, carrying more slaves from Africa than those of any other country. By 1790 British capitalists have invested some £70 million in the West Indian sugar economy, an economy which is based almost entirely on slave labour. During the 18th century British slave-traders transport a million and a half Africans. The slave trade is a vital pillar in the eighteenth century economy of the port city of Liverpool, underpinning the growth in its trade and shipping. It is not surprising that Liverpool merchants are amongst the most vocal opponents of legislation outlawing the slave trade in 1807.
Sugar and the slave trade

What was the slave trade all about? Here is one banal, if partial, explanation. In their voyages of discovery the Europeans found and took home three beverages: cocoa, coffee and tea, all of them bitter to the taste. This is what accounts for the dramatic rise in European consumption of sugar (In Britain, for example, 200,000lbs. in 1690; 5,000,000lbs. in 1760.) Add tobacco, rice and cotton, and the labour needed to cultivate these crops in the tropics, and there you have it.
Ama and the Legacy of the Slave Trade

The historian John Hunwick has written that he would “like to see slavery viewed from the perspective of the Africans who were victims of it.” But those Africans are long dead and have left hardly any documentary records of their experience. Who will speak for them?

The French historian Claude Meillassoux writes: “While the slave trade devastated the peasantry who saw their children, and especially their daughters, taken away by brigands or armed bands to be sold to dealers, it enriched the agents and traders in the towns as well as the nobility, the battle-hardened soldiers and the sycophants attached to the royal courts. By a perversion of memory, the sumptuousness of the plundering kings has left its mark on the area in its remembrance of the flourishing slave trade and the glories of the past, while the memory of their peasant victims has been effaced by their poverty.”

In Ama, I set out to recreate such a memory.

Lord Hugh Thomas, writes: “Any historian of the slave trade is conscious of a large gap in (the) picture. For the slave remains an unknown warrior, invoked by moralists on both sides of the Atlantic, recalled now in museums in one-time slave ports from Liverpool to Elmina, but all the same unspeaking, and therefore remote and elusive.”

I have attempted, in Ama, to give that unknown warrior a voice.

It is not for me to judge whether I have succeeded. The late Paul Hair, also a historian of the slave trade, believed that: “The feelings and sufferings of the slaves are partly unimaginable…Standard descriptions which concentrate on those aspects easily comprehensible to modern middle class sentiment cannot tell the whole story.” Perhaps he was right.

Four hundred years is a long time in human history as we perceive it. It is less than four hundred years since the disembarkation of Jan van Riebeck changed the course of South African history.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted for four hundred years.

African slaves were sold in Lisbon as early as 1441. It was 1850 before the slave trade became illegal in Brazil and 1888 before slavery itself was finally made unlawful in that country. During those four hundred years European and American ships forcibly transported some twelve million African men, women and children to the far shores of the Atlantic. Millions more died on the journey to the coast, in the dungeons and barracoons in which they were assembled and in the course of the notorious Middle Passage.

By accident or good fortune, the Atlantic slavers by-passed South Africa: they took many slaves from Angola and some from Mozambique but none, to my knowledge from this country. We have, of course, our own story of the slave trade; but it is a different story.

I believe that Ama is an important book. In saying that, I make no claims for its literary merit: that is for others to judge. However, with the exception of perhaps two other somewhat obscure texts, both out of print, it is to the best of my knowledge the only attempt to tell this story from the point of view of an enslaved African, using the results of historical research now available to us. It is a story which should perhaps have been written by a Ghanaian. But West Africa is only now slowly beginning to emerge from a long period of collective amnesia regarding the slave trade. The damage to the psyche caused by the slave trade is buried deep in the individual and collective subconscious. One historian traces the institutionalized corruption endemic in West Africa back to practices developed during the period of the slave trade.

The situation on the other side of the Atlantic is quite different. When black pilgrims from the Americas visit the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, they are often overwhelmed by the experience and emerge tear-stained and emotionally drained. Many of them carry the pain of their families’ histories within them. It is transmitted from generation to generation. And the reason is not far to seek. From Argentina to Canada, in Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, even Venezuela and, some say, even in Cuba, the descendants of African slaves are socially and economically disadvantaged; many suffer from chronic poverty and experience discrimination in every field. In the United States, the issue of slavery is one which few whites are at ease discussing with their black compatriots and vice versa. This is just one symptom of a deep and hardly recognized malaise in that country. Until the US, and in particular its educational system, comes to terms with the fact that it was constructed on a foundation of the gross abuse of generations of unwilling African immigrants, not to speak of the genocide inflicted upon its native inhabitants, that country will not sleep easy.

And what of Europe? Every person who lives in the countries of the Atlantic rim carries within him or her, the marks of the slave trade, like some unrecognized gene. We are all the descendants of those who suffered and those who, in one way or another, benefited. The Atlantic slave trade is the bedrock upon which the mighty edifice of globalization has been constructed.

We are diminished by our failure to confront this history. So long as a single person of African descent suffers discrimination on account of his descent, all Africans are diminished, Nelson Mandela is diminished, Thabo Mbeki is diminished, John Kuffuor, President of Ghana, is diminished. And it is not only blacks, not only Africans who are diminished: all human beings are diminished, we are all diminished.

Some Englishman has had the chutzpah to establish an African Commission. Has the time not come for Africa to set up its own Commission, a Commission on the State of the African Diaspora, a Commission tasked with the identification and exposure of all discrimination against people of African descent, whatever their nationality, in all countries; and the elimination of all forms of such discrimination? Perhaps we need an international Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with bringing into the open the great harm the people of Europe and their descendants worldwide have inflicted on other peoples in the course of their conquest of the planet. That might achieve some sort of catharsis which might lead us to a new world based on human solidarity rather than greed, patronage and charity.

In March 2007, I predict an epidemic of dislocated shoulders amongst members of the British establishment. This will be the consequence of their attempts to pat themselves on the back in celebrating the bicentenary of legislation making the slave trade unlawful. Would it be too ambitious to aim to celebrate in 2034, two hundred years after slavery was made illegal in the British Empire, the total elimination of its psychological and material effects? My hope is that the publication of this novel, might make a small contribution to that end.

© Manu Herbstein

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2005 was supposed to be a year of action for Africa, with demands for “more and better aid, debt cancellation and more just trade policies”. What happened? Charles Abugre from Christian Aid offers some insights into the demands of the last year and provides pointers on where African civil society should focus their energies in the related areas of aid, debt and trade.

The rationale behind the “more and better aid, debt cancellation and more just trade policies” is that these will create the conditions to ensure adequate resources to finance Africa’s development. Undoubtedly, if fully addressed, these will put more money in the hands of governments and people and ease the resource constraint. We will argue however that on their own – never mind the quality of aid, the speed of debt cancellation, the degree of market opening in the north and the end of export subsidies - these demands will not provide the resources adequate for Africa’s development.

These demands, though relevant, are slightly misplaced in their singular focus on sources of “inflows” to the total denial of the mechanisms of “outflows”. It is the balance of inflows and outflows that create the net resources for development. We will also argue that the singular focus on “inflows” entrenches the sense of Africa’s dependence and perpetuates the myth of Africa’s resource poverty and powerlessness. In addition, in focussing on trade policy per se at the exclusion of what underlies trade, we miss a fundamental explanation for government’s persistence on liberalisation – beyond the view that they are reckless, ignorant, powerless or uncaring.

More and Better Aid

Our demand that governments in the north fulfil their obligation to deliver 0.7% of the gross national products for international development is right. It is indeed a right of African countries in particular, to demand it in view of the fact this promise has been used repeatedly in the past as a bait to secure economic and social reforms in Africa. But realistically, we know it won’t be delivered. The slow pace and low volume of aid increases committed at the 2005 G8 meeting in spite of all the noise, and the subsequent threat by the US to undermine the 0.7% target itself, shows how difficult and risky it is to rely on increasing volumes of aid for Africa’s development. The explanation is simple, to the extent that traditional aid continues to depend on taxpayers in the north, its ebbs and flows will depend on the political temperature and economic performance in the north, especially Europe.

But the key problems of aid are its purpose, its governance and its impact on the psychology and accountability of our governments and elite. Official development aid is hardly ever completely altruistic or single-purpose or hardly ever completely divorced from foreign policy. Consequently, we are constantly going from opposition to one thing or the other associated with the provision of aid, e.g. tied aid, policy conditioning; human rights conditioning, policy leveraging and more recently the increasing link with the war on terror.

Regardless of the rhetoric, aid cannot be separated from foreign policy objectives and to the extent that these shift, the purpose of aid will shift. In any case why not? Why shouldn’t taxpayers in the north demand that their taxes serve values and goals they hold as dear to them? Why shouldn’t they expect their governments to account for the impact of aid, therefore put in place measures to ensure that their money delivers the purpose for which it is given.

Conditionality is an important issue for Africa largely because aid forms too large a share of budgets, therefore risks associated with aid policy are more significant for African than other continents where aid forms a minuscule proportion. Whilst it is proper to keep ensuring that the conditions associated with the provision and management of aid do not exacerbate Africa’s development problems, the real challenge is to reduce its importance to Africa’s development.

The more debilitating impact of development aid is what it does to the mentality of the African elite and to the democratisation and accountable governance process. Governments have developed the myth that their economies cannot survive without aid. In reality it is their governments and the patronage systems that maintain them which are under threat without the aid machinery.

The competition among African governments for inclusion in the club of favoured nations leads to wilful abandonment, to donors, of sovereignty won at the cost of lives in the anti-colonial struggle. The multi-donor budget support arrangement is one manifestation of this loss of sovereignty. Without a break in the aid dependency mentality Africa stands no chance of building democracy based on accountability to citizens. Worst still, the imagery that aid agencies – private and official – find necessary to deploy in order to sustain domestic political interest for aid is often an affront to the African personality and spirit, diminishes the African self-worth and perpetuates negative stereotypes. Whilst we cannot ignore aid, we should not be glorifying it.

Sometimes we in civil society contribute unconsciously to the erosion of sovereignty and the loss of self-worth. We are sometimes quick to demand or endorse “governance conditionality” where aid and debt relief is made conditional to progress in these areas. To monitor compliance often requires even greater involvement and power of donors in domestic governance. It is like saying that new forms of colonisation are acceptable on human rights grounds. This is dangerous. Yet, there are cases where human rights abuses, dictatorship and corruption are at such a level that the impact of debt relief and aid will be to strengthen repression and enrich a few than promote development. What do we do under this situation?

A solution could be based on the principle that regional political bodies are better placed to manage political problems in member states. This is the principle applied by ECOWAS, SADC and the AU in conflict resolution and peace building/keeping. This is also the principle underlying the Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). We propose a Peer Trust Fund to be managed by the AU and used as the financial muscle behind the APRM. Debt relief and humanitarian funds meant for countries abusing the citizens will be paid into this Fund, to be held in trust for the country and be released by the AU as the country makes progress in the governance areas of concern. Such a mechanism will:

- Strengthen and give teeth to the AU’s desire and capacity to promote accountable and democratic governance in the region;

- Act as a muscle and an incentive for the APRM;

- Take away the excuse of creditors not to write off debts owed to Africa or withhold aid needed for humanitarian purposes but which, for reasons outlined above, cannot be channelled directly to an abusing country or to NGOs;

- Allow Africans and their political institutions to drive their own political reforms;

- End the arbitrary and selective means by which donors apply governance conditionality.
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So what should we do about aid:

- Support our northern partners’ efforts to make their governments fulfil their part of the global compact but scale down its importance in Africa’s plan of action;

- Support the establishment of a Peer Trust Fund to assist the AU to deal with the governance issue;

- Increase domestic CSO interests and involvement in budget processes so as reduce the influence of donors on budget governance and steer budgets to deliver public services and fight corruption;

- Oppose donor-driven budget management arrangements that undermine parliamentary oversight and propose parliamentary oversight procedures that are transparent and inclusive of civil society.

Whilst these actions are necessary to improve the quality of aid and reduce its damage, they do not address the resource deficit problem per se.

Debt

The issue of debt is not so much what we demand but whom we address with what messages. First the message of ending the debt burden has been directed largely at one direction – the creditors. The message itself has been one of appealing for understanding whether based on justice or empathy. There is nothing wrong with this in as far as this appeal is coming from our northern partners directed at their publics and governments. Whatever strategies they find as feasible to exert pressure for action should be welcomed by us as long us these strategies neither diminish the African dignity nor undermines the messages coming from Africans.

But directing our energies at appealing to northern creditors suggests our lack of belief in the power of the debtor. However, the Nigerian debt relief effort, no matter how unsatisfactory, and the Argentinean debt restructuring initiative suggest that debtors do have power and can force change. In the Nigerian case, it was the threat by Parliament to withhold appropriation for debt servicing and the subsequent road show that the joint committees of parliament undertook in Europe and America to drum home their threat that forced the Paris Club to rush through a debt relief package. In Argentina’s case, an economic and political meltdown resulting from years of faithful compliance with the IMF’s conditions and faithful debt servicing, forced Argentina to impose a unilateral moratorium on debt servicing and then subsequently unilaterally discounted its debt instruments by 75%. After heaving and puffing both the IMF and the private creditors accepted their lot and Argentina’s economy rebounded.

Africa’s debt overhang of over $200bn provides the muscle for a successful collective African threat. This is the task for the African Union and we should make that forcefully clear. The cancellation of $200bn poses no threat to the global financial system but can save millions of lives. Even a threat of a collective moratorium will send the message clear and loud, especially if this threat were accompanied by an enforceable commitment to transparency and anti-corruption and the channelling of the money so saved into revamping public services. We should not celebrate divisive debt relief initiatives like the one delivered at Gleneagles although we can celebrate the victory in terms of the comprehensive principle, i.e. that all debts, including the debt stock owed to the IFIs must be cancelled.

So where do we go from here in relation to debt:

- Welcome the principle of debt stock cancellation agreed at Gleneagles and at the annual meeting of the IMF/Bank but condemn the selectivity and divisive approach;

- Develop a strategy to pressurise the AU and its member states to adopt a debtor-led strategy;

- Campaign for an International Law to regulate international debt.

Trade

The trade policy focus has been in four areas:

- Defending our domestic markets from further harmful liberalisation;

- Defending our producers – especially our farmers – from demise resulting from “dumping” of subsidised imports;

- Seeking market access without reciprocal market opening obligations;

- Promoting regional integration.

These demands are relevant and we should continue to maintain a focus on them. We should prioritise, in particular:

- The defensive interests of our people: For example, our focus on agriculture should be driven by food security and rural development objectives rather than export promotion. Not only is the latter not realistically attainable in a significant way (except traditional commodities) but detracts from what Africa’s needs are at this moment. In this sense, the key policy focus is to prevent any further market opening (liberalisation) whether this is through aid and debt deals or through multilateral negotiations. Better still, the goal should be to protect the space for flexible policy whereby countries can vary tariff policy to meet development goals, starting with consumer goods and shifting to intermediary inputs of capital goods – whilst relaxing consumer good imports – as the economy develops. It is this flexible and progressive use of tariffs that is essential as an industrialisation strategy.

- Conditions for industrialisation: This intersects with the defensive interest. The key constraining factor for industrialisation is demand - the competition from foreign consumer goods which makes it impossible for local produce to carry on producing let alone innovate. Investing in infrastructure including roads and energy will contribute to reducing transaction cost but are not, at the most constraining to industrialisation. We should not be detracted by the so-called supply-side argument that suggests that investments in infrastructure will correct for competitive pressures. The policy demand is to not give any more market access through the Non Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) negotiations and others whilst securing the policy space necessary to allow for flexible use of trade policy.

- Defend public services: The aggressive push embarked on by the EU and the US at the on-going talks to open up the services sector reflects the shift in the structure of these economies into services. It also reflects the increasing importance of services for profits and services as a means of gaining control of scarce natural resources such as water. Without the universal provisions of public services by the public sector, Africa stands no chance of reducing poverty, managing inequality and conflict and growing the labour force of the future. We should put in all the energy we can marshal to campaign for the universal provision of public services by the public sector, the minimisation of commercial ethos in basic services and the avoidance of market opening commitments.

- Regional markets: The key issue here is to support the AU and sub-regional trading blocks to resist the pressure to make market opening and third-party tariff concessions before the dynamics of intra-regional trade are worked out, not least in the Singapore issues. This suggests the need to postpone the market access aspects of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the EU and to shift energy into campaigning for a reform of Article 24 of the Regional Trade Agreements component of the WTO in order to protect the principle of less than full-reciprocity. In the interim we should back the Stop EPAs campaign’s call for a reform of the rules of origin aspects of the Everything But Arms (EBA) to make it meaningful for African LDCs.

- The Mandate of the WTO and dispute settlement: Developing countries, and Africa in particular, stand to lose with a WTO saddled with a broad rather than a narrow agenda. This is because Africa has the least capacity to defend, let alone promote their interest in multiple negotiating forums. The continent’s heavy dependency on the IFIs for resources exposes it to unilateral liberalisation pressures. Once unilateral liberalisation has been embarked upon, there is always the risk of easily committing liberalised sectors to the lock-in mechanism of the WTO. In addition, making commitments at several fronts imposes an implementation burden, the cost of which is relatively higher for poorer countries than richer ones. It is therefore in the interest of Africa to see a slimmer WTO.

However, the decision to focus on trade to the exclusion of investments is a serious limitation. In the first place, the Services Agreement and the Singapore agenda are essentially about investment. It is important to note also that underlying the market access concessions that African governments give to the north, especially in services, is an expectation of foreign direct investments and its mythical value as the solution to underdevelopment. Similarly, FDI expectations underlie the anti-inflationary macroeconomic policies of governments and debt servicing compliance.

The belief in FDI is so strong that governments have happily adopted negative taxation policies to attract foreign companies. To have a chance of developing trade and macroeconomic policies that promote development, restrain our governments from giving away market access concessions recklessly and channel attention towards domestic resources for investments, we must first effectively champion a more realistic and less jingoistic expectations associated with FDI.

So what do we do in relation to trade and investment?

- Encourage national governments to be more proactive in protecting their markets especially in the area of consumer goods, agriculture and essential public services. They will not necessarily suffer punitive action. Even if they did, their economies may still come out better-off.

- Drum home to national governments that opening markets will not necessarily bring FDI and even if it did, FDI will not necessarily bring about development. Encourage the AU to promote a critical debate on the role of FDI in Africa’s development.

- Continue the campaign for policy flexibility and an end to coerced liberalisation. This is crucial for defending Africa’s producers.

- Scale down the export focus of agriculture (market access in the north) and emphasise its food security and rural development objectives.

- Support the Stop EPAs campaign

Financing Development: Beyond aid debt relief and trade

What matters for ensuring that governments have adequate resources to finance development are net flows. This means factoring in not just inflows such as earnings from trade, or aid or remittances but also what is lost to the rest if the world. Debt servicing is one outflow. But there are several other ways in which resources are lost to the continent. Indeed, the reality of Africa is that the resources that leak out far exceed those that flow in. This is why Africa is a net exporter of capital.

And the sums are staggering. Njukumana et al estimate that between 1970 and 2000, whereas Africa received about $100bn id aid (including loans) it lost $274bn in capital flight induced by debt, trade mis-invoicing and imputed interests. Add cumulative losses due to terms of trade of non-oil producing Sub-Saharan African countries, estimated by the World Bank to be in the area of $400bn or 120% of combined GDP. Add also losses that African countries have incurred simply by opening up their markets.

Africa was made to reduce their rates of protection at a pace three times as fast the countries of the OECD. This has left the continent ridiculously open, relative to its stage of development. Christian Aid recently calculated that over the past two decades, Africa lost in income terms the equivalent of over $270bn from the negative growth effects alone of trade liberalization. This amount alone more than matches the accumulated value of grants, loans and net FDI channelled into the continent.

Add losses due to tax competition, tax evasion and tax avoidance. Taxation which has served developed countries well as a means of redistribution and source of investment capital but which has been undermined through the enforced deregulation which has promoted tax competition, tax avoidance and tax havens. As a result, whereas government revenue from taxation in developed countries average 30% of GDP between 1990 and 2000, in sub-Saharan Africa this has declined over the years to an average of 17.9% of GDP.

Losses from tax competition have largely benefited multinational corporations whilst the tax burden has been transferred to wage earners and small businesses. Some analysts suggest that African oil producers command less than 20% of the profits. The rest are lost to a complicated network of unfair trade practices. The transfer of revenues to tax havens by these corporations and rich individuals further exacerbates the revenue loss. It is estimated that at least $11.5 trillion is currently held in about 74 tax heavens – lost to tax authorities – by wealthy individuals. This does not include laundered profits of businesses which operate through tax havens to avoid tax, nor does it include money illicitly transferred abroad through corruption, drugs and money laundering. These latter elements in any case comprise a much smaller share of resources losses than is generally believed.

As is obvious from above, Africa is not as poor or as helpless as is often presented. Instead, it is a continent that leaks heavily. The task is to plug these leaks. To do so, African civil society must turn attention to addressing:

- Support for campaigns aimed at corporate transparency;

- Campaigns against tax concessions and for progressive tax policies;

- Work with relevant networks to campaign for the end to banking secrecy and tax havens;

- Follow-up on the recommendation of Africa Commission report to pursue and return stolen wealth from Africa and to put in place measures to discourage illicit transfers abroad.

Incidentally, taxation and reliance on domestic sources for financing development also provide a more conducive environment for promoting democratic accountability than the dependence on aid. We have an obligation to plug the leaks.

* Charles Abugre is currently the head of policy and advocacy at Christian Aid. He has been a development activist in Ghana and many parts of Africa and Asia. This is a shortened version of a paper presented to an Africa consultation of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, held in Harare, Zimbabwe from 7-10 November, 2005.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The event Africa Source II, focusing on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) took place between January 8-15, in Kalangala, Uganda. The event specialised in hands on skills development for the Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) sector, bringing together over 120 NGO support professionals, staff and software experts. Becky Faith reports on how participants learnt about using FOSS to increase vital access to information and provide inexpensive and efficient ICT infrastructure.

"When the rules of the game change we have an opportunity to change our circumstances.” With these words Mark Shuttleworth, open source advocate and Afronaut, addressed the 140 participants at Africa Source 2 which was held in a beautiful location at Kalangala, on Uganda's Ssese Islands.

The event was intended to provide NGO activists, educators and technologists space to get hands on experience with Free and Open Source Software, but the participatory and enabling environment meant that participants returned home with more than a handful of free CDs.

The three tracks of ‘Migration for Education and Resource Centers’, ‘Migration for Non Profit Sector’ and ‘Information Handling and Advocacy’ showed how participants from these sectors might use open source tools. What was revelatory was not only the fact that the everyday tools we might use for our work have robust free alternatives but that each and every one of us have skills and experiences that are useful for us to share.

In the information handling track some time was spent exploring collaborative software. An introduction to Wiki's showed how they might be easily set up through sites like http://www.wikispaces.com/ and prove valuable in an educational context. Content management systems (http://www.socialsource.org.uk/pmwiki.php/IssuesAndResources/ContentMan…) were demoed and compared as well as tools for the use of SMS in activism and human rights monitoring such as Txtmob (http://www.txtmob.com/) and Asterisk (http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/). Activists from Egypt discussed the importance of blogging in recent political campaigns (http://www.manalaa.net/egblogs) and how RSS feeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29) were a vital tool in mobilising participation.

Other sessions saw the concepts of open knowledge explored in greater depth. An introduction to copyright and the creative commons movement (http://www.commons-sense.org/) showed how the burgeoning digital commons can benefit Africa and how adoption of creative commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/license/) can actually be a smart business model.

Yet computers can only serve to empower communities if they are adapted for local needs. Africa Source provided an opportunity for the localisation (http://translate.org.za/, http://translate.or.ug/) of popular software such as Open Office and showed how others might go about localising into their language.

The empowerment of disabled computer users was also addressed. Arun Mehta called for help for the visually challenged from geeks - (http://wiki.africasource2.tacticaltech.org/post/main/02mAzpaeWZNprwBC). He would like to see open source screenreaders to help blind and illiterate computer users - the proprietary Windows software costs in the region of $900.

Throughout Africa Source 2 participants were encouraged to offer their skills and experiences to benefit others. Most technical environments offer a strict division between 'techies' (usually male) and non techies, yet the atmosphere at Kalangala encouraged those with any skills or experience to share them with the group.

Africa Source 2 also saw major progress in the development of the African Linux Chix community. Women from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and Egypt got together to discuss how they might advocate for open source amongst women. Mentoring for school-age girls to get them to consider information technology as a career was seen as a top priority. The openness of the FOSS community was seen as a great opportunity for learning and participation by women. To join the mailing lists in English and French visit the site at http://www.africalinuxchix.org/.

* Becky Faith is Fahamu’s production manager.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Website links:

http://www.bytesforall.org/
http://foss4us.org

Julius Kapwepwe Mishambi, Programme Officer for the Uganda Debt Network, a civil society organization campaigning on debt relief issues, comments on the current trend of reduced donor funding for the Ugandan government’s budget support programme. In his analysis he criticises donor aid pointing out some of the negative effects of the donor dependency syndrome, and proposes that Africa needs to explore alternatives for independence from donor aid.

One would be mesmerised, looking at the aid cut trends for Uganda by some of the country’s long time funding partners. Countries and institutions that have been instrumental to Uganda’s budget support have recently reduced their funding by millions of US dollars. The estimates at the end of 2005 are as follows: Ireland and Norway– 4 million each, Sweden - 8 million, the World Bank - 15million and the United Kingdom - 35 million.

Since the late 1990s, the Government of Uganda and donors agreed to a budget support programme captured in Uganda’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper; the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP). Holding other factors constant, an aid cut means the programmes will be starved of resources. My major concern in this regard is the implication of this for the social sectors of health and education.

We ought to recall here that Uganda was one of the beneficiaries of debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. This programme was engineered by the Bretton Woods Institutions - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The World Bank. The initiative was a response to the embarrassment occasioned by the outcomes of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) advocated by these twin cheat institutions for developing economies, particularly in Africa and Latin America. HIPC was also viewed as a response to the heat of the global call, under the Jubilee debt cancellation campaign, for the end to the killer debt burden borne by the developing economies of the world.

So, what was the original intention of aid support of the 1990s in Uganda, at least at face value? Was it aimed at beefing up Uganda’s savings of debt relief resources for anti-poverty efforts, as reflected in the national policy objectives of Primary Health Care (PHC) and Universal Primary Education (UPE) programmes and other sub-programmes in the war against poverty?

To my mother in rural Kumi district in Uganda, and those in the Zambezi region of Zambia and Ruvuma in Tanzania, the anti-poverty programmes have been of direct help, to a certain degree. Consequently, the no-flow of drugs to health centres due to the aid cut makes those categories of people the primary losers. Cutting this type of aid is criminal, defeats morality and such international goals as contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Ironically, the same masters of aid espouse these ideals, at least at face value.

On the contrary, I would argue that aid cuts could be justified for a different category - the expatriate donor community - the type characterized by huge salaries, residential mansions in prime locations in the recipient countries and first class air travellers. The meagre trickle down effects of these expatriate expenditures in our country’s economy cannot compensate for the losses occasioned by the resultant dependency syndrome created by the western world.

The talk of aid cuts is an opportunity for Africa. Africans ought to explore how Kenya has moved on for the past few years with neither aid nor loans from the World Bank. Government securities (bonds and treasury bills) contribute about 6% to the country’s national budget, with the rest accruing from the Kenya government’s own, generated revenues. The government has continued to fund its industrial growth. Africans should opt for frugality so that public expenditure is optimal. For example, Uganda’s expenditure could rhyme with PEAP priority areas, already elaborated upon and jointly updated periodically by the national and local governments, faith-based and civil society organizations, academia and research institutions, individual pressure and interest groups in Uganda, etc. Is it not possible to acquire an affordable yet comfortable car for a government official whose work is over 80% city based? Does a spokesperson for the government need a 4000cc vehicle to ably articulate government positions at a weekly press briefing? How about invoking government standing orders, which provide that government vehicles should only do government business, to reduce the cost of fleet maintenance? Indeed, does a president require 20 armoured cars for his/her security?

Surely, aid conditionality has been an obstacle to decision-making of African countries. The Structural Adjustment Programmes (especially privatisation and liberalization) attest to this. In Uganda for example, the lack of hydropower dams on various suitable sites along river Nile has been a domain of aid influence. As a result, companies in Uganda continue to spend huge sums of money on announcing the schedule for load shedding. These sums should instead be expended on inviting the public to witness the opening of new power sources and resources.

Aid was used to perpetuate the tyranny of the Bath Party led by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and kuku wazabanga Mobutu in former Zaire, for decades. It served to suffocate the interests and human rights of ordinary citizens. But the governance issues that donors have raised should not simply be wished away but squarely addressed. The issues are part and parcel of Africa’s socio-economic and political development aspirations.

* Julius Kapwepwe Mishambi is Programme Officer for the Uganda Debt Network

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Organisers hailed the first phase of the World Social Forum (WSF), which ended on Monday in the Malian capital of Bamako, as having created an "Afrocentric" focus that was missing in previous forums. Quoted by IPS, coordinator Mamadou Goita said: "This is the first time we have had a majority of Africans attending a WSF. Usually there have been less than 100 African NGOs (non-governmental organisations) at any of the other WSFs. It was too expensive for most Africans to travel to Porto Alegre or Mumbai." But after nearly six years, where has the WSF come to? Pambazuka News provides questions and answers about the movement that seeks to challenge corporate globalisation.

1. The WSF has been around since 2001. Where is it now and what happened this year?

The World Social Forum changed its format this year. Instead of one centralized meeting (which until now have been held alternatively in Mumbai, India and Porto Alegre, Brazil), several polycentric events took place. Caracas, Venezuela; Bamako, Mali and Karachi, Pakistan will all host the WSF in January, 2006.

This has been an important progression in the history of the forum, as it serves to expand access to the forum by making it easier for activists and civil society players to participate. The forum thus claims to "offer to progressive forces in Africa a very first opportunity, following to the huge range of popular resistances during the nineties, to significantly set their fights and their alternatives in a global seeking of the construction of a fair world with more solidarity and respectful of People's sovereignty."

The goal of the WSF is not to produce agreements on specific policy positions but to offer a space for dialogue and engagement, with resources to strategise, network and plan joint ventures for the future. It has been successful in creating a loose network of forces around the world who advocate for social, political and economic justice. It has often been called an "anti-globalisation" movement, but is in fact one of the most globalised movements in the history of social justice.

The movement has been criticised, however, as simply a popularized gathering of wealthy NGOs and funders. Past forums have also been dominated by certain interests, leading to debates about whether the WSF represents revolutionaries or reformists. The WSF is anti-globalisation, anti-war, etc. This has also been criticised, leaving many people to question the process of the WSF which is characterised by endless debate and pose questions such as: What is the WSF for? What solutions does the WSF offer? How can the movement move forward, rather than simply critiquing social, political and economic problems as they exist? Further criticisms of the forum focus on the lack of structure or organisational support – whether it be the complicated and often non-functioning website, poor planning at the actual event or the need for more support for participants.

2. There seems to be a lot of criticism over its form, structure and decision making. What does this involve?

The WSF is popularly characterized by a reputation of embodying a complex and confusing decision making process. In order to preserve the plural and open consensus style that is the mandate of the forum, the goal of creating a bottom-up, grassroots event is often planned in an extremely heavy handed, top down manner. Some critics argue that the WSF is not transparent or accountable, let alone democratic and that their Charter of Principles, size, lack of resources and goals of planning massive events make organizing unmanageable. The numerous organisations and individuals involved also offer competing views and ideas, adding to the layers of difficulty in planning such an event.

3. What were the focus areas in Bamako this year?

Each year the WSF appoints thematic areas. This year, in Bamako, 10 were chosen. Topics included war and militarisation, security and peace; globalised neoliberalism; aggression against peasantry; the alliance between patriarchal and neo-liberal systems; culture, media and communication; destruction of ecosystems, biological diversity and resources control; international order and the role of the UN; international trade, debt and economic and social policies; social fights, human rights, social organisations and political rights; alternatives. The areas to be discussed are meant to be kept quite loose, and can be kept extremely localised or made to be more general depending on the needs of the participants.

4. What does the WSF mean for Africa?

Africa will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 and the 50th anniversary of the independence of Ghana. It's also a year in which the World Social Forum will be hosed in Nairobi, Kenya, so the Bamako forum offers the potential for the WSF to entrench itself in Africa ahead of 2007. Malian author and social activist Dr Aminata Dramane Traoré has pointed out that the polycentric organisation of the forum is the first step in the process of rooting the WSF in Africa and mobilizing those people on the continent who have been hardest hit by globalization (http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/wsf2006/viewstory.asp?idnews=442) In the same interview, she went on to say: "Holding the WSF in Africa will increase African awareness as far as the link between poverty and globalisation is concerned. Also, Africans will feel more connected to the process than if it were being held elsewhere." The Bamako Forum has also provided the space for groups from around Africa to articulate their concerns, with the Ogoni people from Nigeria and the Yaaku community in Kenya reported to have made their case in Bamako (http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/wsf2006/viewstory.asp?idnews=476), and sessions dedicating to discussing the issue of land bringing together groups from around the continent (http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,5,925).

5. What global solutions is the WSF generating?

The WSF attracts thousands of people from across the world who work in many different areas and have diverse outlooks, not only about the problems that the world faces, but also in their beliefs about how these problems should be tackled. This has made the articulation of united policy positions difficult and therefore led to frustration in some quarters that while there is a great deal of marching, singing and slogan shouting, nothing much seems to come out of the effort (http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-world/wsf_3211.jsp). Certainly, after six years of existence, its possible to detect a degree of cynicism from veteran WSF travelers that they've heard the same speeches a number of times before. Moreover, while the forums have provided an area for meeting and debate, there's no discernable change to a world where neo-liberalism runs riot and poverty deepens by the day. Before this year's forum there were calls from the likes of Civicus Secretary General Kumi Naidoo for "different civil society actors to find common ground, engage in joint strategising, and plan joint activities for the future" (http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/wsf2006/viewstory.asp?idnews=462). But, says founders of the forum, this is not what the forum was intended for in the first place. "The primary purpose of the forum is to create a space for free dialogue between social movements, and that its openness should not be compromised by confining participants to any narrow statement of intent," says Chico Whitaker in an article on www.opendemocracy.net

6. Who Funds the WSF?

It's very difficult to determine who pays for the WSF: The website cites no sponsors, and it is hard to find any organisations or funding bodies highlighting their role as sponsors. The WSF charter is silent regarding what kinds of international sources of funding may be tapped. The registration fees are minimal. All organisations participating in the WSF are asked to contribute towards a translation solidarity fund, which is intended to help cover the WSF's translation budget.

There is some mention of a funding policy for the WSF held in India, such as the limit of Rs. 25 lakhs limit per donor being raised to Rs. 50 lakhs for WSF 2004. The WSF India website also mentions plans to approach state, local administration, authorities and public bodies to providing facilities free or at subsidised rates and to hold cultural events "with discretion" to raise funds. According to the WSF Charter as adopted in India, the WSF can seek funds from Indian industry and commerce.

Although it appears from the WSF India website that some foreign funding would be raised and managed, Kukke and Shah (http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=148) claim that a decision was taken not to accept foreign funds, and that all funding needs would be "addressed by the local organisations that had come together to host the event”.

7. Are grassroots organisations represented?

The question of grassroots representation is quite closely tied with those around funding. Organisations working on the ground are usually far more cash-strapped than those that network, train, research or sponsor them, and the former usually (hopefully) spend their money largely on meeting the direct needs of their beneficiaries. Several private foundations did manage to sponsor representatives of grassroots women's organisations to attend the events in Bamako, enabling many to make voices heard that are frequently absent in international 'jamborees'.

Sending representatives to WSF meetings is thus only possible with sponsorship, and again, it is difficult to find information about where to go about applying for travel and accommodation grants. This, together with the fact that air travel within Africa is often prohibitively expensive, leaves grassroots organisations based in the country where the WSF is held. However, the relationships between Northern NGOs and African movements are seldom balanced. According to Njoke Njehu: "Governments tend to listen first to the IFI's and to international NGO's before they listen to their own civil society." (http://www.nigd.org/docs/WSFICHolland2005PolycentricWSF2006)

* Compiled by Karoline Kemp and Patrick Burnett, Fahamu and Joy Olivier, Fahamu volunteer

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Further Links

World Social Forum
www.worldsocialforum.org, www.wsf2006.org
Mali Social Forum
www.fsmmali.org
Indymedia
http://sa.indymedia.org/features/wsfmali2006/
IPS Coverage: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31822
Trade Coverage
http://www.icftu.org
Centre for Civil Society
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs
WSF Youth Conference
http://www.fsmmali.org/jeunes/radio

So you’re thinking of going open source? Karoline Kemp looks at the benefits of freeing yourself from the grip of Microsoft domination, touching on issues of cost, accessibility and participation, but also cautioning that issues of infrastructure and compatibility need to be taken into account. The article ends with a listing of useful resources related to open source.

Free and open source software is not a new concept or tool, but is only beginning to gain in popularity. This too is the case in Africa, where, by its very nature, it is beneficial for organisations working with few resources. By way of a brief introduction to Free and open source software (FLOSS), a definition may be useful. Wikipedia defines FLOSS as “computer software and the availability of its source code as open source under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design.” FLOSS has over the years become an area of increased interest, not least because, as University of California FLOSS expert Steve Weber has stated: “Software determines how information is manipulated, where it flows, to whom, and for what reasons.”

That said, FLOSS’s growing popularity can be put down to a number of reasons. These can be identified as the following:

- Reduced costs and less dependency on imported technology and skills;
- Affordable software for individuals, enterprise and government;
- Universal access through mass software rollout without costly licensing implications;
- Access to government data without barrier of proprietary software and data formats;
- Ability to customise software to local languages and cultures;
- Lowered barriers to entry for software businesses;
- Participation in global network of software development;
- Supplier independence;
- Patches or updates become available quicker, which limits breakdowns and security risks.

A further examination of these benefits reveals the following.

Free and open source software is free in the sense that its code is free, and can thus be changed and manipulated. The difference between FLOSS and proprietary software is that there are no restrictions coming from patents, copyrights, licensing fees, etc. Because the code for FLOSS is free, it can be run for any purpose and further, can be studied, adapted, improved and then redistributed. It may not necessarily be free monetarily, but is often much cheaper than proprietary software.

The potentials for FLOSS to NGOs to become autonomous from corporate providers are also notable. Not only does this address economic issues, but it also gives the freedom of self-reliance. This means that NGOs using FLOSS can reduce their dependence on external technology providers. They also own what they have developed, thus building on capacity development. If a community owns their resources – understands how it works, adapts it for their specific purposes and takes pride in the fact that they have reclaimed something that was once not a part of their own infrastructure, then capacity is built.

FLOSS also has a political role to play. Not only does it offer a commercial alternative to Microsoft domination, but it also puts software into the hands of people, making it a freely available public good. This increases the choices available to users and means that software can meet a diversity of needs.

One of the primary advantages of FLOSS is its capacity to be customized and localized.
FLOSS can be used by anyone, but can be advantageous to NGOs in a number of ways. Groups can run and operate computers with FLOSS that have been programmed to meet their specific needs and preferences. The possibilities for software customisation are unlimited.

Free and open source software can also be localized to meet local demands, including the use of local languages. This aspect has huge potential, as it makes accessibility to information and communications technology widespread. This involves writing software so that words appear in a different target language.

Governments are often the heaviest consumers of information and communication technologies in developing countries, thus their participation is paramount to the success of any open source initiative. Historically, research and development of ICTs have responded mainly to global market incentives. Because developing countries do not usually have the resources to invest in these sorts of schemes, they have often been left behind. FLOSS introduces the potential to close this digital divide, and this is one area where the government has a crucial role to play. In addition, both governments and non-governmental organisations in the developed world alike are increasingly becoming computer enabled, which means that they will favour interaction with countries in the developing world that are similarly enabled and can interact effectively with their information and management systems. FLOSS also has the potential to save governments large amounts of money, as well as make them less dependent on the developed world in general terms of technological and skills transfer. Long term cost savings may also occur as a result of reducing reliance on single sources and suppliers.

The development of FLOSS also represents a means for skills development and knowledge transfer. Local personnel can be trained in the field – organisations benefit, jobs are created and African programmers thus have the opportunity to participate in a global market. This potential also creates prospects for further involvement in creating and strengthening the traditional ICT field of a country - business opportunities are thus created.

There do exist certain problems with FLOSS in Africa. The primary pitfall of FLOSS is that it needs, from the outset, someone with enough IT knowledge to implement the software. Having the actual resources – computers and some initial software also pose challenges, as does the ability to pay IT staff. Having the appropriate infrastructure to support all of this is also a problem, but not one confined to FLOSS users. What is unique, however, is the problem of compatibility with other operating systems as well as hardware. Having to adapt software to make it fit with other operating systems poses a big challenge. Being able to find existing FLOSS is also difficult, as it is generally not advertised. Upon finding the appropriate software it is often accompanied by documentation that is not user friendly.

* Karoline Kemp is a Commonwealth of Learning Young Professional Intern assigned to Fahamu.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Sources/Further Reading:

Alternative Routes in the Digital World: Free and open source software in Africa. Victor van Reijswoud and Corrado Topi
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/reijswoudtopi.pdf

Open Software & Open Standards in South Africa: A Critical Issue for Addressing the Digital Divide. National Advisory Council on Innovation (Open Software Working Group)
http://www.dst.gov.za/reports/discussion_docs/NACI%20opensource%20discu…

Open source software in Developing Economies. Steven Weber
http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/ITST_materials/webernote…

Open source software: Perspectives for Development. Paul Dravis
http://www.infodev.org/files/837_file_Open_Source_Software.pdf

Straight from the Source: Perspectives from the African Free and Free and open source software Movement. bridges.org in collaboration with the Tactical Technology Collective
http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource/essay

The Politics of Open Source Adoption, NGO's in the Developing World. Gabriella Coleman
http://www.tacticaltech.org/SSRC_Report

Further links and reading:

NGO in a Box
http://ngoinabox.org/
(Offers peer reviewed and selected OSS tailored to the needs of NGOs)

Martus - http://www.martus.org/
(Offers software that allows users to document human rights abuses, upload them and store them on redundant servers around the world)

Nigerian Open Source Project
http://www.wazobiasoft.org/
(A Nigerian Open Source Project that aims to make software available in the three main Nigerian languages)

Ubuntu Linux
http://www.ubuntulinux.org
(OSS project based on the belief that OSS should be available free of charge, software tools should be useable in their own language and that people should be able to alter it)

Tactical Tech Conference http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource2
Conference in Uganda in Free and Open Source Software in local communities. It is an eight day conference aimed at building the technical skills of those working with African NGOs

Open Source Africa
http://www.opensourceafrica.org
(Aims to bridge the information divide by raising awareness about the benefits (and pitfalls) of open source software on the ground in Africa.)

Open NGO
http://www.openngo.org/
(Builds OSS for non-profit, NGO and social sectors)

Freedom Toaster
http://www.freedomtoaster.org.za/
(Provides free OSS downloads across South Africa)

NonProfit Open Source Initiative
http://www.nosi.net
Informal group of non-profit sector tech providers interested in the way OSS could benefit their work

Source Forge
http://sourceforge.net/
Largest OSS website, hosting OS code and applications

Open Knowledge Network
http://www.openknowledge.net/
Among other things, OKN uses OSS for the creation, display and exchange of locally relevant information)

Linux Chix Africa
http://www.africalinuxchix.org/
(Linux training of trainers in South African Townships)

Resources:

Free and Open Source Software in Africa - http://www.FLOSSfa.net
(Promotes the use of OSS in Africa and partners with the Health, Education, and Government Departments to meet ICT objectives in Africa)

Shuttleworth Foundation
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
(Supports education and social development through technology, including OSS)

Opensource Initative
http://www.opensource.org/
(Non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting OSS for the good of the community)

Association for Progressive Communications
http://www.apc.org/english/index.shtml
(International network of CSOs dedicated to supporting social justice through the strategic use of technology, including the internet)

Tectonic - http://www.tectonic.co.za/
(Source for African OSS news)

Sokari Ekine points out that moving to open source requires not just a change in software solutions but a change in the culture of NGOs to more cooperative and sharing organisations. Ekine believes that issues of expertise and support will be overcome as take up of FLOSS increases and concludes by reviewing some innovative open source projects on the African continent.

Back in June 2005 KnowProse picked up on a paper by Gabriella Coleman, "The Politics of Open Source Adoption, NGOs in the Developing World". Briefly the paper discusses the initial take up of FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and some of the problems NGOs have encountered and continue to have with the transition from proprietary software to FLOSS.

The paper states that: “These challenges are usually magnified in the developing world, where institutional resources and society-wide IT infrastructures are inconsistently available or scarce. Adoption is further are hampered in countries (including nearly all developing countries) where the private sector in open source technologies is underdeveloped.”

Coleman goes on to say that the private sector in FLOSS technologies is essential to providing the necessary local tech support that would put FLOSS solutions on a level terrain with commercial players such as Microsoft. KnowProse adds that:

“There is still a culture within NGOs where they are simply used to buying things with project money. Some open source support costs money through maintenance, but this is a different culture for many - whereas, Microsoft and other proprietary software entities advertise and lobby actively, while offering discounts. The open source advocates have not displayed this ability, and it's unlikely that we will in the future simply because we don't have the budget of a small country.”

I would add to this that NGOs and individuals are often wary when offered something for "free" or when asked to change from traditional software solutions to FLOSS. Moving to FLOSS requires not just a change in software solutions but a change in the culture of NGOs to more cooperative and sharing organisations.

One advantage proprietary software has over FLOSS in Africa is the availability of pirated proprietary software which at the moment still has the advantage of local knowledge and expertise. As Coleman points out:

“The existence of a thriving black market in pirated (proprietary) software, for example, often supports local IT expertise trained in that software - typically in industry standards such as Microsoft software. Some NGOs keep their operating costs down by using pirated software and drawing on these support networks. FLOSS technologies and secondary support networks have generally not overcome this illicit network and its lock-in effects in many countries.”

This brings me to a recent statement reported in Timbuktu Chronicles in which a Nigerian representative for Microsoft said: "Africa has no need for Free Open Source Software." Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160 (£91). "It's easy to focus on cost and say how much is a product, but at the end of the day it's the total impact that's important. You can give people free software or computers, but they won't have the expertise to use it."

Microsoft do have a point here but I believe that the issue of expertise and support will be overcome as take up of FLOSS increases. In other words it is not a given fact that FLOSS will continue to lack support. As the blog Timbuktu Chronicles points out this opens up Microsoft's intentions in Africa which as I see it is to prevent as much as possible the development and use of FLOSS on the continent. One could even ask whether Bill Gates' altruism towards Africa in the form of some £200 million dollars for R&D into Malaria has any link to their ambitions in the African market, which is worth a lot more than $200 million.

So what is the present state of FLOSS in Africa?

WazobiaSoft (Timbuktu Chronicles) is a Nigerian open source software translation project which aims to make software available in Nigeria's three main languages - Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. They choose to use Open Source:

"because it is free and probably the only way people will be able to use software legally at little or no cost".

Wazobia - which is derived from the words for 'come' in the three languages, wa, zo and bia - believe that:

“Wazobia.org is helping in the modernization of core languages in Nigeria. Although, English is the official language in Nigeria, however, we believe that by having local language translation in computing, we will encourage and stimulate growth in Computer literacy. Also, it will be easier for people to become computer literate when the barrier of having to learn English is removed particularly for the people whose primary form of communication is not English.”

OpenCafe (Digital Africa) is a community based computer center that uses and promotes the use of open source with an internet cafe, training, art online project and the Software Freedom Day, both part of their Pan African project which aims to:

"…keep in touch via the Net with bloggers, artists, and Linux users from all over Africa (we also work with people outside the continent.) So we thought it's time for creating an online section dedicated to African FLOSS users, artists and bloggers and everyone else interested in our projects."

Shuttleworth Foundation is a South African based organisation who have identified "improved education" as the major challenge for South Africa and:

“…endeavours to support projects that seek to pilot more effective ways of using existing resources more efficiently in education.”

The Foundation also has an Open Source project which aims to unite the SA open source community and again promote the tak eup of Open Source Software by facilitating, supporting and funding "initiatives on a corporate, private and government level that lead to the awareness, uptake and growth of open source in South Africa."

Their projects include the Freedom Toaster - which enables users to freely burn open source software as they require. Go Open Source aims to encourage the use of open source software amongst non-specialist IT users. Tuxlab Programme for schools, establishes open source computer centers in schools. Translate.org, is a translation project to produce multilingual software for South Africa.

LinuxChix Africa is a project established by a group of African women to promote and highlight the use of FLOSS. They have joined with Kasi Open Source Software (KFLOSS):

“…to develop GNU/Linux and Open Source Software development and technical skills in South African townships. The long term strategy is to replicate this model to rural areas and villages. And of course, Linuxchix Africa will then develop similar parallel programmes throughout Africa.”

* Sokari Ekine produces the blog Black Looks,

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Soenke Zehle traverses the virtual world of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS), examining the practicalities, the politics and the debates surrounding an emerging movement that rivals the multinational software companies.

With a host of corporations, foundations, and organisations active in the fields of advocacy and assistance, free and open source software (FLOSS) has become a dynamic area of info-developmental cooperation. In the eminently pragmatic approach adopted by many of these efforts, the intense controversy over free vs. open source software and the extent to which advocacy should stress freedom over commercial applicability somehow seems a thing of the past. At the same time, the focus on FLOSS as an economic strategy of autonomous development within a global network of capitalism rather than a post-capitalist practice of collaborative creation recalls some of the general ambivalences at the heart of software-political struggles (1).

FOSSFA

In many African countries where computer users are not necessarily owners, important choices are often made by those in charge of establishing public ICT infrastructures. While many companies and organisations have chosen to adopt FLOSS on their own, the status of governments as the largest procurers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) means that government action is bound to stimulate industry in various ways, including the provision of FLOSS training and support. The recently founded Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), currently headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, has therefore identified national ICT policy and procurement procedures as major advocacy targets (2). For Bildad Kagai, co-founder and one of its secretaries, the licensing, localisation, and local skill building advantages of FLOSS, coupled with ‘leapfrogging’ technologies like wireless that help skip an entire generation of expensive infrastructural investments, offer an alternative to the technological dependency and resource drain associated with an exclusive reliance on mainstream proprietary software.

Given the many problems that beset the ICT sector in Africa, FLOSS advocacy is inevitably tied to political reforms in contracting, public services, and competition policy, as well as the creation of FLOSS related employment and business opportunities. FOSSFA has created an effective advocacy coalition: Kenya’s ICT policy now gives preference to open source (and open standards) over proprietary solutions, and FOSSFA also convinced the Committee on Development Information of the Economic Commission for Africa (CODI) to adopt a policy that prioritises FLOSS.

This is no small feat, given that many African states have yet to articulate any ICT policy whatsoever, and FOSSFA is also educating policy makers across the continent about FLOSS (3). The 2004 Idlelo meeting in Cape Town, co-organised by FOSSFA and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources Project (AVOIR) at Western Cape University, was the ‘First African Conference on the Digital Commons’ (4). Bringing some 200 FLOSS activists and developers from across the continent together with international researchers, Idlelo emphasised the need to shift from the mere adoption of FLOSS to the local development of FLOSS applications, the use of FLOSS in education, and the development of non-proprietary open content alternatives. Hoping to be able to recruit government representatives from all 53 African states, Idlelo 2 has already been scheduled for 2006 (5).

South Africa Goes Open Source

The breakdown of Idlelo participants by country reveals the uneven geography of IT development in Africa: by far the largest contingent came from South Africa, followed by Nigeria and Kenya (6). South Africa’s influence in the African FLOSS movement is related to its dominance of the African IT sector at large. But there are other reasons, one of which is the impact of projects sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth (7). Shuttleworth, a South African celebrity entrepreneur known for his space travel – Shuttleworth was the first ‘afronaut’ – as well as his philanthropic ambition, has overseen the development of Ubuntu (an already-popular linux distribution updated in regular release cycles) and his Shuttleworth Foundation has co-launched a nation wide ‘Go Open Source’ campaign (8).

But is South Africa ‘really’ Africa? FOSSFA’s Kagai notes that ICT developments in South Africa are not representative of Africa at large, and some see in the ideas of an ‘African Renaissance’ less a new Pan-Africanism than a mere culturalisation of South Africa’s own economic and geopolitical ambition (12).

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, FLOSS has not been an easy sell. One reason, suggests Ethan Zukerman, might be the overemphasis on free beer at the expense of free speech; a reference to Richard Stallmann’s famous definition of free software (15). Zukerman, a co-founder of GeekCorps – ‘an international non-profit organisation that transfers tech skills from geeks in developed nations to geeks in emerging nations’ – and initiator of ‘BlogAfrica’, believes that many African users continue to associate ‘inexpensive’ with ‘inferior’, a legacy of technology transfer and appropriate technology projects that sometimes amounted to little more than the dumping of obsolete technology (16). And in areas where non-licensed copies of proprietary software are widely available as well as a great deal of corresponding ‘street’ expertise, comparatively expensive manuals and a lack of bandwidth for accessing online support can easily increase the total cost of ownership of non-proprietary alternatives generally assumed to be ‘free’. FLOSS advocates should stress the expandability, transparency and resulting high performance of their software instead.

While a growing number of studies make an empirically based case for FLOSS in general, less is known about the experiences of FLOSS adoption across Africa (17). One such report has been published by Bridges.org, an international NGO with offices in South Africa and the US (18). FLOSS, concludes the report, has become a mainstream alternative. Yet because of the level of expertise required to establish and maintain a FLOSS based computer lab, it tends to work better in large projects that have the resources to address the practical problems of migration, training, and support, in contrast to individual labs that can simply take advantage of proprietary solutions that are already in place.

Info-Political Visions

Beyond the issue of appropriate means, how do the local politics of software relate to competing visions of what ‘info-development’ is and should be about? In the larger info-political vision that frames local decisions over software and standards, questions of autonomy are central, frequently articulated in response to the hegemonic presence of corporate software and IT giants. FLOSS advocates have criticised the most recent wave of international public private partnerships in this area, for example, because they involve only the usual transnational suspects. Microsoft, HP, and Cisco are all well represented in the activities of major development agencies, advertising themselves as ‘partners in development’ to promote ICTs as the vehicles for ‘good governance’ and ‘effective service delivery’, but also to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out grassroots or public sector alternatives, and subvert South-South cooperation.

Take SchoolNet Namibia (19). Having to work with substantially fewer resources than the Shuttleworth Foundation, SchoolNet has nevertheless set up FLOSS-based thin client networks in over a hundred schools, launched an ISP to offer subsidised internet service, and is exploring the set up of wireless access in rural areas. Once they had found that students were a lot more likely to embrace FLOSS than their teachers, and standard advocacy tools were not doing much to change that, SchoolNet launched Hai Ti (‘Listen Up!’), a comic strip that features real life FLOSS users (20). Its contractual agreement with schools specifies that the teams who manage the local computer lab include students as well as teachers. Yet occasionally, SchoolNet finds that their FLOSS-LANs remain unmaintained while students use equipment donated by Microsoft and administered with support from MS certified engineers. Executive director Joris Komen is convinced that Microsoft has targeted Namibian schools specifically because SchoolNet Namibia has become an outspoken critic of the company and its philosophy (21).

Commenting on recent agreements between Microsoft and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Bildad Kaigai of FOSSFA agrees that such deals work to confine the software choices these agencies can make and effectively transfer wealth away from an emergent local software industry. Kagai calls on African leaders to emulate the successful development strategies of Asian countries instead (22).

Other ICT analysts note, however, that African countries will have to do so under dramatically different circumstances. Yash Tandon stresses that “most of the so-called ‘technology transfers’ ... are essentially excuses for transnational corporations (TNCs) to take over local companies, or to carve out a share of the domestic markets” (23). Rather than “stripping naked” to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from the North, Tandon also makes the case for the “creation of a home based Domestic Scientific and Technology Capacity (DSTC), including capacity to undertake relevant research and development, the actual purchase (as opposed to transfer) of appropriate technology from the open market, and a transfer of technology, preferably between South-South, only under certain conditions.”

It seems that third worldist strategies sustained by a generalised critique of neocolonialism have been replaced by the exhausting creation of advocacy networks that hold local governments just as accountable as transnational corporations (24). Yet while visions of Africa’s future have sobered significantly, the emergent dynamic of South-South cooperation still echoes a tricontinentalist spirit. Brazil’s official commitment to what its minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, has refererred to as a ‘tropicalisation’ of open source has been a major push for FLOSS advocacy in Africa (25).

An increasing “post-third wordlist” cooperation is visible in other international info-political fora as well. One example is the campaign for a “WIPO Development Agenda” and a Treaty for Access to Knowledge, supported by a broad coalition of southern governments as well as grassroots organisations (26). The World Intellectual Property Organisation is a UN agency whose current mandate is “the maintenance and further development of the respect for intellectual property throughout the world”.

In the eyes of its critics, this mandate limits WIPO to the role of an enforcer of Euro-American positions on intellectual property, supporting the WTO’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as well as at least condoning the aggressive ‘TRIPS-Plus’ bilateralism both the US and the EU have engaged in to effectively bypass the ongoing review process of key TRIPS provisions (27). The access-to-knowledge campaign puts the question of FLOSS and the struggle over open standards in a much broader context. WIPO defines creativity in relation to the prospect of proprietisation, as culture is defined as the creation of private property. The FLOSS controversy, on the other hand, is not just about reducing the cost of running a computer lab, but over the implications of its approach to “commons-based peer production” (Yochai Benkler): i.e. processes of collaborative creation and an information and knowledge commons actively enlarged in opposition to the “second enclosure” (James Boyle) associated with an ever expanding IPR regime (28).

Take the role of FLOSS developers. Rishab Ghosh, FLOSS Program Leader at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), stresses that licensing costs do matter, especially when GDP is taken into account (29). But another key emphasis in his studies on FLOSS in developing countries is on the skills-building in FLOSS networks. In addition to standard developer skills, open source communities address, almost by default, questions of copyright law and licensing, and introduce users to new forms of collaborative creation.

Info-Political Pragmatism

Ghosh has been a major global FLOSS advocate, and his projects specifically address the use of FLOSS outside Europe. Yet some of his economic arguments are based on the assumption that proprietary alternatives are not locally produced. What Ghosh describes as the benefits of “deep access” offered by locally developed FLOSS applications – customisation, quick bug fixing, as well as the re-use of code in other applications – is exactly how Herman Chinery-Hesse, CEO of Ghana’s successful Soft Tribe, describes his own approach (31). All of Soft’s software is based on “tropically relevant” code, Chinery-Hesse’s reference to the full spectrum of constraints he associates with local computer use: frequent savings to disk help deal with power failures and work offline lowers costs for online access. In the case of Soft’s document management software for the Ghana Human Rights Commission, storage on remote servers addresses possible interruptions caused by a change in government. And unlike Ubuntu, Soft’s applications are optimised for the low-end hardware that dominates Ghana’s offices and cybercafés.

Soft trains the majority of Ghana’s programmers, often left to their own devices in poorly equipped computer science departments. Yet Chinery-Hesse thinks that FLOSS would impede the development of a local software industry, as developers would, he worries, be reduced to installers of pre-existing applications. His main concern, however, seems to be possible tampering with the code both by users and competitors – Chinery-Hesse fears internal mismanagement and has no interest in interoperability that could threaten Soft’s pole position in the local software market. Soft rarely releases beta versions, software does not have an auto-install function, and bug fixes are not generally released. Evidence of Chinery-Hesse’s entrepreurial pragmatism, he has also entered into a cooperation agreement with Microsoft, hoping to take advantage of its global distribution channels to bring an add on from Ghana to desktops around the world.

For Guido Sohne, a former Soft employee and vocal FLOSS advocate, Soft’s deal with Microsoft is a form of technology transfer rather than a simple sell-out, prompted by the departure of some of its key developers without whom their previous portfolio of applications could no longer be maintained (32). Sohne left in part because Soft did not want to explore FLOSS-based alternatives to address this development impasse. Microsoft is there to stay, but it looks like Soft’s emergent competitors are already relying on FLOSS. So while Ghana’s developer community as a whole has not yet embraced FLOSS, this is likely to change.

In the current ‘Africanisation’ of the politics of software, the proprietary/non-proprietary divide is but one of several vectors. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, given the hybrid dynamic of FLOSS itself. In her analyses of the cooperation between corporations and the FLOSS community, techno-feminist Yuwei Lin describes this process as “hybrid innovation”, marked as much by a sense of interdependence and mutuality as by unease over the irresolvable tension between commercial and community-oriented practices (33).

The dependence on corporate support illustrates the paradoxes of immaterial labour and suggests that common assumptions regarding the relationship between FLOSS and visions of a post-capitalist future be revisited. Often understood in terms of an anti-monopolistic practice, FLOSS is not, as such, anti-capitalist. One of the reasons for the popularity of the FLOSS paradigm is that it appears to be able to accommodate a wide range of visions of cultural, economic, and social transformation, from cyberlibertarian views of natural capitalism to the post-autonomist vision of a coming communism, actively anticipated by way of multitudinal self-organisation. Countercultural cachet notwithstanding, the high visibility of FLOSS as a mainstream alternative to proprietary software is due in large part to the support from corporations like IBM or Sun Microsystems, and the commitment to openness reverberates with an info-capitalism attempting to reinvent itself around concepts of trust and transparency.

And while the controversies over software licenses are so intense because their clauses redefine what property means in the network society, not all of FLOSS is geared toward an enlargement of the information commons. Following the popularity of user-defined license provisions like Creative Commons, Sun Microsystems has announced its own “Open Media Commons” initiative to develop FLOSS based digital rights management tools (34). FLOSS, already adopted by cost cutting governments across the world, is also easily aligned with state power – South Africa’s FLOSS and open content strategy includes, after all, the migration to FLOSS of its prison management systems (35). This makes one-size-fits-all approaches to the politics of software almost impossible, even more so in the context of African ICT controversies.

While it is too soon to say what transformative impact FLOSS efforts may already have had, examples like FOSSFA or SchoolNet show that FLOSS is not reducible to an imperial voluntarism out of sync with the “real” Africa. FLOSS‘s collaborative ethic is not a post-materialist luxury limited to those on the sunny side of the digital divide. Instead, the Africanisation of FLOSS in terms of an ‘ubuntu’ philosophy of sharing may soon connect to other collective efforts in a larger Pan-African vision of renewal. This project driven mainly from below is rarely included in the sovereign perspective of afro-pessimist prophecies accompanying the current wave of imperial nostalgia (36).

In his documentary afro@digital, Congolese director Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda retrieves the story of the Ishango Bone, the oldest known table of prime numbers, to suggest that mathematics, and by implication the network society as a whole, needs to be given a new, Afrocentric genealogy. FLOSS advocacy may not have to go that far. Yet perhaps a discussion of software politics in Africa should not begin with the question of software, but with the contradictory images of Africa that linger in the collective post-colonial imagination.

* Soenke Zehle (s.zehle AT kein.org) teaches transcultural media studies at Saarland University, Germany. This is a shortened version of an article that first appeared in Mute Magazine (http://www.metamute.com). It is reproduced here with permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

FOOTNOTES

1 For an account of free software vs open source software in terms of a struggle over discursive hegemony, see David Berry, ‘The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements’, Critical Discourse Studies 1.1 (April 2004), 65–89, http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/berry1.pdf

2 http://FOSSFA.net

3 Bildad Kagai and Nicolas Kimolo, ‘FOSSFA in Africa: Opening the Door to State ICT Development Agendas – A Kenya Case Study’, SSRC The Politics of Open Source Adoption (2005), http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA; CODI, ‘Resolutions of the Fourth Meeting of the Committee on Development Information (CODI-IV)’, UNECA Commission on Development Information (23-28 April 2005), http://www.uneca.org/codi/codi4/codi_iv_report.pdf. See the country policy tables at: http://www.bridges.org/FLOSS/index.html

4 http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/

5 http://www.FOSSFA.net/idlelo2

6 Derek Keats, ‘Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons’, Final Report to Department of Science & Technology South Africa (2004), http://www.catia.ws/Documents/Indexpage/IdleloFinalReport.pdf

7 http://www.markshuttleworth.com

8 http://www.ubuntulinux.org, http://www.go-opensource.org/

9 http://www.freedomtoaster.org/, http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open

10 http://www.edubuntu.org/, http://www.tuxlab.org.za/
A thin client is a computer (client) in client-server architecture networks which have very few resources, so it has to depend primarily on the central server for processing activities. A thin client network centralises maintenance tasks on a (remote) server

11 http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce

12 For a middle of the road assessment of the African Renaissance, see Elias K. Bongmba, ‘Reflections on Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30.2 (June 2004). For more critical views, see Neil Lazarus, ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (Fall 2004), 607-28, and Neville Alexander, ‘South Africa – Example or Illusion?’ An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, New York: Berghahn Books, 2003, 137-73, 188-90

13 John Perry Barlow, ‘Africa Rising,’ Wired 6.01 (1998) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow_pr.html

14 http://www.balancingact-africa.com/

15 Ethan Zukerman, ‘Free Beer Doesn’t Sell’, Linux Journal 111 (July 2003) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6785

16 http://www.geekcorps.org/, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/

17 David Wheeler, ‘Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FLOSS)? Look at the Numbers!’, (May 2005) http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

18 Bridges.org, ‘Comparison study of Free/Open Source and Proprietary Software in an African context: implementation and policy-making to optimise community access to ICT’ (May 2005) http://www.bridges.org/software_comparison/index.html

19 http://www.schoolnet.na/

20 http://www.schoolnet.na/haiti

21 http://tatejoris.blogspot.com

22 Bildad Kagai, ‘FOSSFA responds to Microsoft-UNDP Deal’ (Feb 2004), http://FOSSFA.net

23 Yash Tandon, ‘An Alternative View on Technology’, SEATINI (Sept 2004), http://www.seatini.org/publications/factsheets/technology.htm

24 Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Good Governance: The Itinerary of an Idea’, D C Development and Cooperation 31.10 (01 Oct 2004) http://www.inwent.org/E Z/content/archive-eng/10-2004/tribune_art1.html

25 Rebecca Wanjiku, ‘Brazil opens its arms to Africa’, Highway Africa News Agency (05 April 2005) http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/hana/textviewer.asp?item_id=339

26 http://www.cptech.org/a2k/, http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/dev_agenda/, http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/

27 Peter Drahos and John Brathwaite, ‘Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? Political Organising Behind TRIPS’, Corner House Briefings (Sept 2004), http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/briefing/32trips.pdf, also see http://www.bilaterals.org/

28 Yochai Benkler, ‘Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm’ (2002) http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html; James Boyle, ‘A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?’ (1997) http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm

29 Rishab Ghosh, ‘Free/Libre/Open Source Software for developing countries: skills, employment and costs’, 2nd National Congress on Software Libre, Buenos Aires, Argentina (07 June 2005), http://www.flossproject.org/papers.htm

30 http://www.eriders.net

31 G. Pascal Zachary, ‘The African Hacker,’ IEEE Spectrum Online (Aug 2005), http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/aug05/0805ahac.html

32 My assessment of Soft is based on an email exchange with Guido Sohne (Sept 2005). Also see http://sohne.net.

33 Yuwei Lin, ‘Hybrid Innovation: How Does the Collaboration Between the FLOSS Community and Corporations Happen?’ Knowledge, Technology and Policy 18.2 (Summer 2005), http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lin4_hybrid.pdf

34 http://www.openmediacommons.org/. As the history of commons-based resource management systems shows, ‘commons’ doesn’t necessarily imply the free-for-all often associated with it, and it is not necessarily obvious – a point made frequently by advocates of indigenous and traditional knowledge databases, for example – that ‘commons’ and ‘access restrictions’ are mutually exclusive; what emerges instead are ‘hybridised’ commons that take the information needs of specific communities into account.

35 http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce/CorrectProj

36 Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, London: Free Press, 2005; Seumas Milne, ‘Britain: imperial nostalgia’, Le Monde Diplomatique (May 2005). Also see Chris Landsberg and Shaun Mckay, ‘Engaging the new Pan-Africanism’, Centre for Policy Studies (Sept 2005) http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001537/CSO-Guide_pan-africanism_200…

Henning Melber, Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden, raises questions about the area of “African Studies”, reviewing some of the key debates currently taking place over its motivation, form and content. What motivates scholars to embark on African Studies? Is there a more or less direct political agenda attached to African Studies? To what extent do African scholars have options to define, pursue, and realise their own socio-political ideals and convictions?

A debate on what is supposedly understood as African Studies tends to be dependant on the individual positioning of the respective author(s). There is an obvious historical (in the sense of imperialist) dimension to the matter: African Studies emerged mainly due to a colonial legacy or direct involvement of states and their agents (missionaries, ‘explorers’, traders, officials) in either the colonisation or decolonisation of African regions or people – with the latter as the passive objects rather than the architects of the study areas and subject matters defined as being of interest (of interest to others, of course).

There were strong geopolitical and strategic dimensions, which have motivated to some extent the focus on area studies (including African Studies). Hence one of the questions we are confronted with is that of the social and political interest: what motivates scholars not only to embark on African Studies, but beyond this what allows for employment and support by state institutions in this academic field? Is there a more or less direct political agenda attached to African Studies by those who support its institutionalised pursuance? And if so, which agenda and to what extent do we as individual scholars agree or differ on the underlying motives? Last but not least: how do we contribute by what we are doing and how we are doing it (as institutions and as individual researchers) to such an agenda and its execution? To what extent do we have options to define, pursue, and realise our own socio-political ideals and convictions through and by means of the academic role we play within such institutionalised framework of interaction?

The challenge to position oneself starts with the efforts to define the subject and reach a common understanding. According to a survey among scholars in the United States of America, “mainstream Africanists across the spectrum of US higher education appear to be divided with respect to what constitutes ‘African Studies’” (Alpers/Roberts 2002: 13; see also Kassimir 1997: 161). The differing choices include:

- Study of sub-Saharan Africa (22%);
- Study of the entire continent of Africa (33%); and
- study of the people of Africa, both in Africa and the diaspora (41%).

Alpers and Roberts suggest that African Studies “should also include … the place of Africa in its global context, both historically and contemporaneously”. But they themselves seem not to honour this explicit understanding in its full consequence when summarising that African Studies “is about peoples, both on the continent of Africa and abroad, rather than about a continent called Africa.” Instead, African Studies should be even more than this: it should include foreign interests, policies and influences, as well as perceptions outside of Africa on Africa (whatever the definition of “Africa” then is). To that extent, “Africa” is also seen as a mirror image of international relations, images, projections and their results.

A decade ago Martin and West (1995: 24) warned in the US-context of the profession that the “spectre of irrelevance” is hanging over “African Studies”. What they possibly wanted to alert to is that the future of African Studies rests on shaky grounds in countries like the USA (but also the UK or Germany, for that matter), as long as those in social (political and economic) power have no direct interest in the matters analysed (like in, let’s say, Near or Middle East, East European or Chinese and East Asian Studies, which for obvious reasons serve a direct purpose within dominant interests).

That does of course not mean that African Studies are irrelevant, neither within nor outside academic discourses - even though if that might well have been the perception of those having to some extent the power of definition (if only through executing control over allocating the financial means to make things happen). There were, however, interests emerging once again within the new scramble for control over African resources, in particular oil, which after 11th September 2001 in the US-declared global war against terror contributed to a revitalisation of African Studies as strategic area studies (cf. Barnes 2004).

This is beyond doubt a double-edged sword, as it reduces the continent again to an object of super power rivalry. It is therefore essential to argue with Kassimir (1997:156) for the relevance of African Studies beyond the “utilitarianism” of economic, geopolitical and strategic interests: “Local knowledge and global knowledge are inseparable and mutually constitutive”. One might even go a step further and – for the sake of the argument – maintain that local knowledge is at the same time global knowledge. As Kassimir (ibid.) concludes: “Both global knowledge and local knowledge are necessary for contemporary scholarship; only together are they sufficient.”

For Achille Mbembe, as one of the more prominent (and controversial) African scholars - who by the way has so far not abandoned his roots in the sense of remaining attached to a working environment within the continent instead of moving to an African Studies centre in one of the metropolitan universities - in support of such an approach African societies (like all other societies) can be located “between generality and singularity”, with a “peculiar ‘historicity’ … rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories and rationalities that, although particular and sometimes local, cannot be conceptualised outside a world that is, so to speak, globalized.” (Mbembe 2001: 9)

The unanswered question remains, however: who creates which type of knowledge and for what purpose?

Strong arguments for a legitimate and necessary place of African Studies in the accumulation of knowledge offered Iris Berger (1997: 5): “to transcend parochial Western theories and data, participants with in-depth area-based knowledge will be as essential as ever to true global and comparative dialogue”. She also deconstructs and demystifies the highly sensitive inner-African discussions over what deserves to receive the blessing as “African Studies” in a politically correct Afro-centric view by pointing out: “’Orientalist’ criticisms inevitably lump together a rich and diverse tradition encompassing writings from many perspectives … written by scholars from all over Africa, Europe and North America as well as other parts of the world. By treating some of these areas of interest as critiques of a pristine, homogenous ‘African studies’ rather than integral parts of a diverse and continually changing field, some critics have manufactured a mythical construct that they have then proceeded to dismantle. Furthermore, alleging that there is an “African” interest that scholars have neglected also assumes an essentialist uniformity of perspective among Africans, rather than acknowledging that complex individual and collective identities based on gender, nationality, language, ideology and scholarly orientation mitigate against any single specifically ‘African’ perspective on African studies.” (Berger 1997: 9) As relevant as the identified substantive elements are, she unfortunately ignores the fundamental dimension of social class and corresponding interests.

Berger (1997: 11) also maintains that “more important than the topics of African studies research during the coming years … will be the revitalization of academic life and academic freedom in Africa”. It is particularly interesting to take note of the related concerns and views articulated by Thandika Mkandawire (2002) and Ebrima Sall (2002). At the same time, a raging controversy among African scholars highlighted in recent years the marked differences over what should be considered as “legitimate African Studies”. As one of the protagonists points out: “legitimate criticism of the damaging effects of occidental Africanism has been transformed into an extreme fetishizing of geographical identities” (Mbembe 1999). He identifies the following main obstacles to rigorous academic debate within the inter-disciplinary field of African Studies: nativism (“as if black Africa were all of Africa and all Africans were negroes”), a territorialization of the production of knowledge (“the false belief that only autochthonous people who are physically living in Africa can produce, within a closed circle limited to themselves alone, a legitimate scientific discourse on the realities of the Continent”) and a “lazy interpretation of globalisation” (Mbembe 1999; see also Mbembe 2000).

To discuss beyond the convenient pseudo-radical polemic the (real) danger of (continued) domination of African Studies by “non-African” scholars meeting other than “African” interests (whatever this means) requires firstly a strict definition with the aim to operationalise and translate the terms in practical and political ways. Any premature generalisation confirms the structural side of the (indeed existing) substance of the matter. At the same time, however, it runs the risk of brushing aside the existing individual choices and options of collaboration and interaction. As the “Mbembe-Zeleza” controversy (if not feud) documents (cf. Zeleza 2003, Robins 2004), there is also the danger of a similarly ignorant counter-position, which ultimately results in claiming genuine control over knowledge on the basis of particular dimensions rooted in claims of origin and subsequent entitlement. While aspects of socialisation and individual experiences (with the emphasis on individual) complement collective identities at all times and result in the uniqueness of the human experience in each and every person, we should be careful to use the argument of being “the same” or “the other” for academic controversies as a mono-causal reasoning.

African Studies and the relevant disciplines contributing to the scholarly debate should be considered from a point of view of assumed strength concerning the value of truly inter-disciplinary oriented methods and schools of thought. It demands a dialectical understanding of scholarly work: African Studies benefit from the strength of the various disciplines applied and in return strengthen the various disciplines beyond the immediate space of what is considered to be “African Studies”.

Interesting in this constellation is the positioning of oneself and of others as scholars, activists, and intellectuals. To what extent does it allow “global Africa” to establish common denominators irrespective of origins and identities of the actors involved in the processes (politically, analytically)? Is there a common ground to act, which is able to eliminate (or at least put aside) potentially divisive aspects of one’s personal making (in terms of socialisation impacts through shaping the individual perspectives by means of gender, social class and cultural roots - to mention just a few most significant factors)? Who plays which role in “Africanizing Knowledge” (Falola/Jennings 2002), and to what extent is this at the same time again an expression of “global Africa” – simply because Africa can only be global under the factual circumstances created and confronting us all as human beings at the beginning of this 21st century? Could it be that the challenges “global Africa” is confronted with are the challenges all human beings the world over are tasked to meet?

* Henning Melber has a PhD in Political Science and a venia legendi in Development Studies. He was Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek between 1992 and 2000 and is Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden since then. This article is a revised and shortened version of an editorial to a special issue on African Studies he guest edited for “Afrika Spectrum” (vol. 40, no. 3, 2005).

* Please send comments to

Literature

Alpers, Edward A.; Roberts, Allen F. (2002): “What Is African Studies? Some Reflections.” In: African Issues, (30)2, pp. 11-18
Barnes, Sandra (2004): Global Flows: Terror, Oil and Strategic Philantropy. Presidential Address to the African Studies Association, New Orleans, November 12.
Berger, Iris (1997): “Contested Boundaries: African Studies Approaching the Millennium. Presidential Address to the 1996 African Studies Association Annual Meeting.” In: African Studies Review, (40)2, pp. 1-14
Falola, Toyin/Christian Jennings (eds) (2002): Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers
Kassimir, Ron (1997): “The Internationalization of African Studies: A View from the SSRC.” In: Africa Today, (44)2, pp. 155-162
Martin, William; West, Michael (1995): “The Decline of the Africanists’ Africa and the Rise of New Africas.” In: Issue: A Journal of Opinion, (23)1, pp. 24-26
Mbembe, Achille (1999): “Getting Out of the Ghetto. The Challenge of Internationalization.” In. CODESRIA Bulletin, nos. 3&4, p. 3
Mbembe, Achille (2000): “African modes of self-writing.” In: CODESRIA Bulletin, no. 1, pp. 4-19
Mbembe, Achille (2001): On the Postcolony. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of Califormia Press
Mkandawire, Thandika (2002): “African Intellectuals, Political Culture and Development.” In: Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, (18)1, pp. 31-47
Robins, Steven (2004): “’The (Third) World is a Ghetto’? Looking for a Third Space between ‘Postmodern’ Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Nationalism”. In: CODESRIA Bulletin, no. 1&2, pp. 18-26
Sall, Ebrima (2002): “The Social Sciences in Africa.” In: Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, (18)1, pp. 49-67
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe (2003): Rethinking Africa’s Globalisation. Volume 1: The Intellectual Challenges. Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press

African women are the hardest hit by HIV/Aids in Africa and yet the approach to fighting the epidemic advocated by the Bush administration fails to take account of their specific needs and circumstances. Yifat Susskind examines the "man-made" components of the crisis, including economic austerity measures, US pharmaceutical companies and onerous debt repayments.

Rebecca Lolosoli radiates a quiet authority beneath layers of elaborate beadwork that cover her forehead, neck, chest, and wrists. She smiles readily while addressing an audience of US college students, though to them, her topic is a metaphor for hopelessness. Rebecca is talking about AIDS in Africa, specifically among women in her Indigenous, Samburu village of Umoja, Kenya. "For years, people were dying and we did not know why," she recalls. "Now we know that AIDS can be avoided, but only by making great changes in our lives."

Thanks largely to the work of African public-health and social-justice advocates like Rebecca, growing numbers of people around the world know that sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: three-quarters of AIDS deaths worldwide have been in Africa, and today the continent is home to nearly two-thirds of all of those who are HIV-positive (more than 25 million people). Fewer people know that most Africans living with HIV/AIDS are women, and that young women are now being infected at a rate three to four times higher than young men. For many, this information is absorbed through a mesh of stereotypes that make human misery seem like a natural condition of life in Africa.

But while AIDS - like the litany of this year's natural disasters - may have originated in nature, the magnitude of its destruction is a man-made catastrophe. Consider the following:

- Since the 1980s when AIDS first emerged, the US has demanded "economic austerity measures" in impoverished countries. In Africa, these policies cut national health budgets in half just when public health systems needed to be ramped up to combat AIDS. Today, the pandemic is the single greatest obstacle to economic development in Africa.
- To bolster already-huge profits of US pharmaceutical companies, the Bush Administration has blocked the sale of affordable generic drugs that have saved millions of lives in rich countries.
- Women are made particularly vulnerable to HIV infection because they are denied the rights to refuse sex or insist on condom use. As the majority of those living in poverty and the poorest of the poor, women are more likely to contract HIV and more likely to develop symptoms of AIDS soon after they are infected.

AIDS, unjust economic policies, and women's inequality are mutually reinforcing crises; combating any one of these requires addressing them together. But too often, public health programs, government policies, and even activists compartmentalize issues, missing critical points of inter-connection that are keys to effecting change.

One reason for this myopia is that a singular focus on AIDS as a naturally occurring scourge allows policymakers to avoid tackling tough social issues like economic justice and gender equality. Take the relationship between AIDS and women's property rights in Kenya. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Kenyan women are widowed by AIDS. Because Kenyan laws and customs bar women from owning and inheriting property, women and their children are often forcibly displaced from their homes when their husbands die. Displacement increases women's risk of contracting HIV by exposing them to poverty, homelessness, violence, and disease, sometimes compelling them to trade sex for food and shelter. Protecting women's property rights is an urgent component of HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. But safeguarding these rights entails challenging law and tradition and spotlighting volatile issues related to land tenure and distribution of resources in an impoverished country.

In fact, any successful prevention strategy has to promote women's social and economic rights. Yet the dominant approach remains the Bush Administration's ill-conceived "ABC" strategy: "Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms." Abstinence is not a choice for women who are raped or coerced into sex. Faithfulness is irrelevant for women whose husbands have multiple partners (for African women, marriage is actually a risk factor for contracting HIV). And condoms - presented by the Bush Administration as a "last resort" in the fight against AIDS -depend on men's willingness to use them and both partner's willingness to forgo having children. Moreover, by placing the burden for prevention on individual behavior, the ABC strategy allows policymakers to ignore the poverty and inequality that form the breeding ground for AIDS.

As 2005 ended it was clear that the UN's "3 by 5" initiative to provide anti-retroviral drugs to three million people by the end of the year would l fail by a two-thirds margin. In Africa, nine out of ten people with HIV/AIDS are still denied these drugs, now almost universally available in wealthy countries. The reason? Lack of political will and high drug prices. Universal access to treatment is an achievable goal, but it requires the US and EU to act.

Effective programs that combine HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention have been implemented in Uganda, Tanzania, Thailand and elsewhere. But rather than support the best of these efforts, the Bush Administration has put AIDS policy into the hands of Christian fundamentalists (who have pushed their ideological ABC approach to prevention) and drug-company lobbyists (who have prioritized industry profits over ensuring access to life-saving medicines). Today, the White House is issuing reminders of President Bush's "compassionate" $15 billion program to fight AIDS, particularly in Africa. But that promise was made over three years ago and most of the money has never materialized. In fact, Bush's initiative actually undermined effective international efforts to combat AIDS through the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Instead of paying its fair share to the Fund ($3.5 billion, or one-third of the total), the US has pledged just $0.6 billion for 2006-2007.

This year's debt forgiveness offer by the G8 (the world's richest countries) is yet another empty promise to African AIDS sufferers. It's widely assumed that money freed up by the deal will be used to fight AIDS, but no mechanism exists to make this happen. In fact, the deal still leaves most African countries spending four times more on debt servicing than on health and education - the most critical sectors in the fight against AIDS. Actually converting debt payments into AIDS funding would yield $15 billion a year - the precise amount that UNAIDS needs to fund its programs. We know that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can afford to cancel 100 percent of poor countries' debt without much impact on their operations. But these institutions' largest shareholder, the US, is opposed to unconditional debt cancellation. It's not really about the money, which is negligible in relation to the US economy. Rather, the US leverages the debt to ensure African governments' compliance with policies that suit US interests.

Towards the end of 2005, the United Nations released its annual report on the global AIDS crisis. It was mostly bad news, but it did credit aggressive prevention and treatment programs with reducing the adult HIV infection rate in Kenya from 10 to seven percent between the late 1990s and 2003; and with lowering infection rates for pregnant women in Kenya from a staggering 28 percent to nine percent during the same period.

Rebecca Lolosoli knows first-hand the importance of combining treatment and prevention in the fight against AIDS. Two years ago, Rebecca began working with MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, to bring HIV/AIDS prevention educators to her community. "In our trainings with MADRE, we've learned that we have a right to demand medicine for the women in our community. But our best hope is to avoid HIV in the first place. For that, we women must have the right to say no without being forced or beaten. And women need to be able to own and inherit land so that we can feed ourselves and our children. This is how we can stay healthy. Changing traditional ways is not easy," Rebecca says with a broad smile. "But it has many rewards."

* Yifat Susskind is Associate Director, MADRE. This MADRE article was published by Foreign Policy in Focus

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Sources

1 "The AIDS Epidemic Update," Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), December 2005, http://www.unaids.org/Epi2005/doc/report_pdf.html.

2Ibid

3 Ann-Louise Colgan, "Hazardous to Health: The World Bank and IMF in Africa," Africa Action, April 2002, http://www.africaaction.org/action/sap0204.htm

4 "State of World Population 2005," United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2005/english/ch4/chap4_page1.htm.

5 "Access to HIV treatment continues to accelerate in developing countries, but bottlenecks persist, says WHO/UNAIDS report," WHO/UNAIDS, 29 June 2005, http://www.who.int/3by5/progressreportJune2005/en/.

6 Craig Timberg, "Number of People With HIV Doubled in Past Decade, UN Finds," The Washington Post, 22 November 2005.

7 See: "Uganda: 'Abstinence-Only' Programs Hijack AIDS Success Story; U.S.-Sponsored HIV Strategy Threatens Youth," Human Rights Watch, 30 March 2005 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/30/uganda10380_txt.htm.

8 Raymond W. Copson, "HIV/AIDS International Programs: Appropriations FY2003-FY2005," CRS Report for Congress, RS21181, 13 August 2004, http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/img/assets/5096/crsrs21181fy05.pdf.

9 "US Misses its Own Target to Finance the Global Fund," Oxfam, September 2005, http://www.oxfam.org.uk/press/releases/globalfund_us060905.htm.

10 Charles Mutasa, "Information Sheet on Africa's Debt," African Forum and Network on Debt and Development, 2003.

11 Thomas Maugh II, "HIV Rate Grows in Most of the World," Los Angeles Times, 22 November 2005.

12 Sony Kapoor, "Can the World Bank and IMF Cancel 100% of Poor Country Debts?" Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation for Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, September 2003, http://www.debtireland.org/ resources/Can-the-World-Bank-and-IMF-Cancel-debt-P.htm.

13 "The AIDS Epidemic Update," UNAIDS/WHO, December 2005.

Msia Kibona Clark explores the relationship between African Americans and the ‘new Diaspora’ of African immigrants to the United States. The relationship is not one that is without conflict, she writes, but argues that the two groups can no longer continue to segregate themselves from each other. In the future, the voice of African immigrants is likely to gain ground in areas of both domestic and foreign policy as Africans and African Americans prove to be valuable resources to each other.

(See French version below)

Africans and African Americans have always had a delicate and intricate relationship that has been influenced by history and perceptions. Phillipe Wamba, himself bi-cultural, once described the “fascination” Africans and African Americans have for each other as two groups which have been “gazing at each other across the Transatlantic divide like a child seeing itself in the mirror for the first time”. Well, today that “Transatlantic divide” is getting narrower. More and more Africans are coming to the United States, and these “distant cousins” are forced to, at the very least, acknowledge each other.

This acknowledgement, however, is not translating into a family reunion. African and African American social relations are dysfunctional at best and hostile at worst. The tensions that exist between Africans and African Americans in the US promise to reach a boiling point. In fact, there have been random cases of conflicts between African and African American students in American middle and high schools, as well as workplace conflicts over the hiring and promotion of one group over the other. While there are bright spots of cooperation and interaction, Africans and African Americans tend to segregate themselves from each other while harboring stereotypes and misconceptions that have prevented wide scale social interactions.

Every year Africans are entering American cities in larger numbers. In 1989, over 25,000 Africans immigrated to America. In 2001 the number of African immigrants doubled to more than 53,000. Over 75% of the African immigrants in the US today, in fact, arrived after 1985. And these numbers don’t include the more than 10,000 African students that enter US universities every year. In fact, many historians estimate that more Africans have immigrated to the United States since 1980 than came to the United States during the entire period of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Many of these Africans are moving into metropolitan areas, like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, and changing the face of African America, in much the same way West Indians did generations earlier. While there have always been Africans in America, the dramatic increases in African immigration in the last twenty years have made them an important part of the American landscape in general and the African American community in particular. In the past, the majority of African Americans, who did not consider African immigrants a strong presence, and who often did not even know they were here, overlooked the small numbers of Africans in the US. With the current, and rising, number of African immigrants in America, African Americans are encountering Africans on a daily basis, from New York City to rural Alabama to the midwestern cities of Ohio and Minnesota.

This trend is also having an impact on the African American community in the Washington, DC area. With between 80,000 and 93,000 Africans, the area hosts the largest number of African immigrants in the country. African immigrants (80,000-90,000) in the Washington, DC area even outnumber Caribbean immigrants (49,000) in the area. Washington, DC is, in fact, home to a diverse group of pioneer African immigrants who have made up the community’s diplomatic core and which have provided foundations for recent African immigrants. Washington, DC, is also home to one of the nation’s oldest majority Black metropolitan areas and one of the nations largest historically Black universities (HBCUs), Howard University, all making for an interesting mixture of peoples of African descent.

Africans and African Americans in the Washington, DC, area, like in other parts of the country, come into direct contact with one another at school, at work, and in their neighborhoods. These contacts are shadowed in stereotypes of Africans as either poor and uncivilized or smart and arrogant. African men are also seen as domineering and African women as passive and accepting of the abuse they get at the hands of oppressive African men. African Americans are seen as lazy, obsessed with racism, and lacking a culture. African American women are seen as loose, while the men are seen as violent criminals. The Nigerian slang word “Akata”, which Americans were first exposed to in the film “Sugar Hill”, is a word used by some West Africans to refer to African Americans. The word, roughly translated, is a derogatory term meaning “savage”, “slaves”, “captives”, or (like in Sugar Hill) “cotton picker”. These are some of the images that tend to hover over any contact between Africans and African Americans.

Not wanting to paint a completely hopeless picture of African/African American relations, there are important areas of cooperation between the two groups. Outside of the many friendships that have been formed by members of either group, African immigration to the US has also translated into more marriages between Africans and African Americans. Some research says that there are more Africans married to Americans of African decent than to Americans of European decent. There is also cooperation in the realm of activism. While Africans have yet to become involved in large numbers in domestic issues (police brutality, affirmative action), African Americans have a long history of championing African causes. Organization such as Africa Action, Africare, the African American Institute, IFESH, and TransAfrica are all African American organizations that employ and work with Africans on issues impacting Africa. In the area of pop culture, R&B artist Akon, a Senegalese, has made a name for himself in an African American dominated genre. Also, hip hop artists like Common and Wycleff Jean have collaborated with African musicians, linking hip hop artists in the Diaspora to those in Africa, something unheard of ten years ago.
Overall contacts between Africans and African Americans are often complex and multi-layered. Economic background, level of African-centered consciousness, length of time in America, age, and family influences, all play a part in the interactions between Africans and African Americans.

For example, Africans who have been in the United States longer, tend to have a better understanding of the African American community and the politics of race in America. This is especially true of those Africans who immigrated to the US at a young age. This younger group is more likely to have African American friends and to socialize in circles outside of their immigrant community. Another very important link in African/African American contacts are bi-cultural children. Those born of one African and one African American parent are often the link that ties the two communities together. They often spend much of their lives translating the culture of one group to the other. It is often a mixed blessing to be bi-cultural, to be part of both communities, and to be caught in the middle of the tensions that both communities continue to hold on to. This group, however, also serves as a critical link in any hope of bridging the gap between these communities.

The case of bi-cultural children and young African immigrants brings up another interesting piece to this puzzle: identity. For the African American community, identity has been an important part of African American self-determination. African Americans have always determined who and what constituted an African American identity. African Americans have traditionally been thought of as those whose ancestors came to America via the transatlantic slave trade. African immigration is now challenging that identity in ways West Indians did not. Today’s African Americans may not necessarily have a history rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. Second-generation African immigrants and bi-cultural children have a different history and culture, but a number of them identify, at least partly, as being African American. Some of these Africans have never been to Africa, and look, sound, and act (and in some cases, feel) more like African Americans than they do like Africans.

The research, in fact, says that children of African immigrants are African American. While other research refers to this recent wave of African immigrants in the US as the “new Diaspora” and to the Africans who are coming to the US as the “other African Americans”. Academia, however, does not necessarily determine real life perceptions. Identity is fluid and multi-layered, and at times conflicts. As more Africans are arriving on American shores, African Americans have to deal with the implications of these “new African Africans”. No longer can the two groups continue to segregate themselves. Groups like the NAACP and the Urban League have, in the past few years, begun to at least acknowledge the presence of African immigrants in America. That has to translate into an inclusion of their issues in the African American agenda. African immigrants represent a legitimate voice in this country and have the potential of reaching a similar level of influence that other immigrant groups have in the areas of both domestic and foreign policy. We already see Africans playing an increasingly larger role in lobbying American foreign policy in Africa, a role that was primarily filled by African Americans. Aside from all the wonderful ideas of Pan Africanism, Africans and African Americans would prove to be valuable resources to each other. Likewise, the definitions of who is African American will likely change in the coming generations to make room for the Africans who are continuing to arrive in the United States in record numbers.

* Tanzanian born and American raised, Msia Kibona Clark is half Tanzanian and half African American. She holds a BA in Political Science from Johnson C. Smith University, an MA in Comparative and Regional Studies from American University, and is a current PhD Candidate and Sasakawa Fellow in Howard University's African Studies Department. Her research focuses on African immigrants in the US and their impacts on African/African American interactions and identity. In addition, Msia is the Ugandan Country Specialist with Amnesty International, works as a Book Reviews Editor with AllAfrica.com, and has done consulting and lecturing with several organizations.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Les Nouveaux Afro-Américains ou l’influence de l’immigration africaine sur les relations panafricaines et l’identité noire aux Etats-Unis
de Msia Kibona Clark

Les Africains et les Afro-américains ont toujours eu des rapports fragiles et compliqués qui ont été influencés par l’histoire et les perceptions. Philippe Wamba, lui-même biculturel, décrit la « fascination » qu’ont les Africains et les Afro-américains l’un pour l’autre comme deux groupes « qui se contemplent à travers le Transatlantique comme un enfant qui se voit dans un miroir pour la première fois ». Aujourd’hui, cette ligne de partage transatlantique se rétrécit. De plus en plus d’Africains partent pour les Etats-Unis, et ces « cousins éloignés » se voient obligés, tout du moins, de se reconnaître.

Toutefois, cette reconnaissance ne se traduit pas en rencontres familiales. Les relations sociales entre les Africains et les Afro-américains sont au mieux, troublées et au pire, hostiles. Les tensions qui existent entre les Africains et les Afro-américains aux Etats-Unis promettent d’atteindre un point d’ébullition. Il y a eu, en effet, certains cas de conflits entre des étudiants africains et afro-américains dans des établissements d’enseignement secondaire du premier cycle et des lycées américains. On note également des conflits sur le lieu de travail déclenchés par l’embauche et la promotion d’un groupe par rapport à un autre. Même s’il existe des cas plus positifs de coopération et d’interaction, les Africains et les Afro-américains ont tendance à s’isoler les uns des autres tout en nourrissant des stéréotypes et des idées fausses qui ont empêché des interactions sociales plus répandues.

Chaque année le nombre d’Africains arrivant dans les villes américaines s’accroît. En 1989, plus de 25 000 Africains ont immigré aux Etats-Unis. En 2001, le nombre d’immigrants africains a doublé, atteignant plus de 53 000. En effet, plus de 75% des immigrants africains aux Etats-Unis aujourd’hui sont arrivés après 1985. Et ces chiffres n’incluent pas les plus de 10 000 étudiants africains qui se font inscrire dans les universités américaines chaque année. En fait, plusieurs historiens jugent que le nombre d’Africains qui ont immigré aux Etats-Unis depuis 1980 dépasse ceux qui étaient venus aux Etats-Unis durant toute la période de la traite transatlantique des Noirs.

Bon nombre de ces Africains se déplacent vers des régions métropolitaines, telles que New York, Los Angeles et Washington DC, modifiant ainsi le « paysage africain » des Etats-Unis, de plus ou moins la même manière que les Antillais quelques générations plus tôt. Alors qu’il y a toujours eu des Africains aux Etats-Unis, la croissance spectaculaire de l’immigration provenant de ce continent pendant les vingt dernières années leur ont assuré une place importante dans le paysage américain en général, et plus particulièrement dans la communauté afro-américaine. Dans le passé, la majorité des Afro-américains, qui ne considéraient pas la présence des immigrants africains comme étant significative, et qui souvent ne savaient même pas qu’ils étaient là, négligeaient la communauté peu importante d’Africains aux Etats-Unis. Avec le nombre actuel d’immigrants africains, qui est en hausse aux Etats-Unis, les Afro-américains et les Africains se rencontrent au quotidien, depuis la ville de New York jusqu’aux régions rurales d’Alabama en passant par les états du Midwest tels que l’Ohio et le Minnesota.

Cette tendance influe aussi sur la communauté afro-américaine de Washington DC, région contenant le plus grand nombre d’immigrants africains du pays entier, entre 80 000 et 93 000. Le nombre d’immigrants africains (80 000 - 90 000) dans la région de Washington DC est même supérieur au nombre d’immigrants venant des Caraïbes (49 000). En effet, Washington DC est le domicile d’un groupe comprenant divers immigrants africains pionniers qui ont constitué l’essentiel du corps diplomatique de la communauté et qui ont bâti les fondations pour la récente immigration africaine. Washington DC abrite également l’une des régions métropolitaines à majorité noire les plus anciennes ainsi que l’une des plus grandes universités traditionnellement Noires (HBCUs), l’Université de Howard, tout cela contribuant à un mélange intéressant de peuples d’origine africaine.

Tout comme ailleurs dans le pays, les Africains et les Afro-américains se rencontrent à l’école, au travail et dans le voisinage. Ces rencontres sont imprégnées de stéréotypes, qui dépeignent les Africains comme étant pauvres et barbares ou raffinés et arrogants. Les hommes sont aussi perçus comme étant autoritaires alors que les femmes sont soumises et acceptent les abus exercés sur elles par l’homme africain tyrannique. Les Afro-américains sont considérés comme des paresseux, obsédés par le racisme et dépourvus de toute culture. Les Afro-américaines, quant à elles, sont perçues comme ayant des mœurs légères alors que les hommes sont des criminels violents. Le mot argotique nigérian « Akata », auquel les Américains furent confrontés pour la première fois dans le film « Sugar Hill » est un mot utilisé par certains Ouest-africains pour faire référence aux Afro-américains. Le mot, traduit de façon approximative, est un terme peu flatteur signifiant « sauvage », « esclave », « prisonnier » ou (comme dans le film), « cueilleur de coton », voulant dire « sale ». Ce sont là quelques unes des images qui planent sur tout contact entre Africains et Afro-américains.

On est loin de vouloir peindre un tableau totalement désespéré des relations africaines / afro-américaines car il existe aussi des terrains importants de collaboration entre les deux groupes. En sus des relations amicales entretenues entre les membres des deux groupes, l’immigration africaine aux Etats-Unis a aussi abouti à une augmentation de mariages entre Africains et Afro-américains. Les recherches avancent qu’il existe plus d’Africains mariés à des Américains d’origine africaine qu’à des Américains d’origine européenne. On note également une collaboration dans le domaine de l’activisme. Alors que les Africains ont encore à s’engager en grand nombre dans les affaires locales (la brutalité policière, la discrimination positive), on sait que les Afro-américains défendent depuis très longtemps la cause africaine. Des organisations telles que Africa Action, Africare, The African American Institute, IFESH, et TransAfrica sont toutes des organisations Afro-américaines qui emploient des Africains et travaillent avec eux sur des questions concernant l’Afrique. Dans le domaine de la culture Pop, l’artiste Sénégalais de RnB, Akon, s’est fait un nom dans un style de musique dominé par les Afro-américains. De plus, des artistes hip hop tels que Common et Wycleff Jean ont collaboré avec des musiciens africains, rejoignant les artistes hip hop de la diaspora à ceux de l’Afrique, du jamais vu dix ans auparavant.

En général, les rapports entre Africains et Afro-américains sont souvent complexes et multidimensionnels. Le milieu économique, le niveau de conscientisation à la chose africaine, la durée de leur présence en Amérique, leur âge, les influences familiales, tout influe sur les rapports entre Africains et Afro-américains.

Les Africains qui sont aux Etats-Unis depuis plus longtemps, par exemple, ont tendance à mieux comprendre la communauté afro-américaine et la politique des races en Amérique. Cela s’applique surtout aux Africains qui ont immigré aux Etats-Unis à un jeune âge. Ces derniers, plus jeunes, ont probablement plus d’amis afro-américains et ont tendance à fréquenter des cercles autres que leur communauté immigrante. Les enfants d’origine biculturelle constituent un autre lien très important dans le contact africain / afro-Américain. Ceux nés de parents dont l’un(e) Africain(e) et l’autre Afro-américain(e) sont souvent le lien unissant les deux communautés. Ils passent fréquemment une bonne partie de leur vie à transmettre la culture d’un groupe à l’autre. Dans de nombreux cas c’est souvent un avantage incertain d’être biculturel, de faire partie des deux communautés et d’être pris au milieu de tensions auxquelles chaque communauté s’accroche encore. Toutefois, ce groupe sert aussi de lien crucial dans tout espoir d’établir un rapprochement entre ces deux communautés.

Le cas des enfants de naissance biculturelle et des jeunes immigrants africains confère une autre dimension intéressante à cette perplexité : l’identité. Pour la communauté afro-américaine, l’identité a toujours constitué un élément important de leur autodétermination. Depuis toujours les Afro-américains ont l’habitude de définir de qui et de quoi est constituée l’identité afro-américaine. Les Afro-américains ont traditionnellement été considérés comme ceux dont les ancêtres étaient arrivés en Amérique lors de la traite des Noirs. Aujourd’hui, l’immigration africaine remet en cause cette identité comme ne l’ont jamais fait les Antillais. L’histoire des Afro-américains d’aujourd’hui n’est pas forcément ancrée dans la traite des Noirs. La seconde génération d’immigrants africains et d’enfants de naissance biculturelle possède une histoire et une culture différentes, mais certains d’entre eux s’identifient, du moins en partie, aux Afro-américains. Certains de ces Africains n’ont jamais été en Afrique, ils agissent (et dans certains cas, se sentent) plus comme des Afro-américains (auxquels ils ressemblent d’ailleurs) que des Africains.

En fait, les chercheurs s’accordent à dire que les enfants d’immigrants Africains sont des Afro-américains ; par ailleurs, d’autres chercheurs font référence à la récente vague d’immigrants africains aux Etats-Unis comme « La Nouvelle Diaspora » et aux Africains qui vont aux Etats-Unis comme « les autres Afro-américains ». Toutefois, les recherches et les études effectuées ne définissent pas forcément les perceptions réelles de la vie. L’identité n’est pas de caractère fixe et elle comporte plusieurs aspects qui se contredisent parfois. A mesure que plus d’Africains atteignent les côtes américaines, les Afro-américains ont à faire face aux conséquences de l’arrivée de ces « nouveaux Africains africains ». Les deux groupes ne peuvent plus continuer à s’isoler l’un de l’autre. Depuis les dernières années, des groupes tels que NAACP et The Urban League, reconnaissent au moins la présence d’immigrants africains en Amérique. Cela signifie que leurs problèmes doivent faire partie de l’ordre du jour de la communauté afro-américaine. Les immigrants africains représentent une voix légitime aux Etats-Unis et ont la capacité d’atteindre un niveau d’influence similaire à celui que d’autres immigrants ont en matière de politique locale aussi bien qu’étrangère. On aperçoit déjà des Africains qui jouent un rôle de plus en plus important dans le lobby de la politique étrangère américaine en Afrique, rôle qui était au début rempli par des Afro-américains. En sus des idées extraordinaires du panafricanisme, les Africains et les Afro-américains représenteraient des ressources précieuses entre eux. De la même manière, la définition de l’Afro-américain changerait probablement pour les générations futures, laissant la place aux Africains qui continuent à affluer aux Etats-Unis en nombre record.

* Msia Kibona Clark, de naissance tanzanienne, a été élevée aux Etats-Unis ; elle est mi tanzanienne et mi afro-américaine. Elle détient un diplôme en Sciences Politiques de l’Université Johnson C. Smith et est également titulaire d’une maîtrise en Etudes Comparées et Régionales de l’Université Américaine. Boursière Sasakawa au sein du Département des Etudes Africaines à l’Université de Howard, elle prépare actuellement son doctorat. Sa recherche porte sur l’immigration africaine aux Etats-Unis et son incidence sur les relations africaines / afro-américaines et l’identité. De plus, Msia représente l’Ouganda au sein d’Amnesty International et travaille comme rédactrice de comptes rendus pour AllAfrica.com. Elle a aussi été consultante et conférencière auprès de plusieurs organisations. Lors de ses fonctions professionnelles et de ses recherches qui portent sur la Diaspora africaine ainsi que sur la pensée féministe, elle a été amenée à visiter l’Afrique orientale et occidentale, Cuba et le Brésil.

Msia Kibona Clark étudie le rapport entre les Afro-américains et la « nouvelle diaspora » des immigrants africains s’installant aux Etats-Unis. Elle estime le lien non pas sans conflit mais elle est d’opinion que les deux groupes ne peuvent continuer à se dissocier l’un de l’autre. A l’avenir, il est probable que la voix des immigrés africains se fera entendre de plus en plus dans le contexte de la politique intérieure ainsi qu’étrangère à mesure que les Africains et les Afro-américains se révèlent mutuellement utiles.

Texte traduit de l’original sous la direction de Vanessa Everson (maître de conférences au sein de la section de français de l’université du Cap) par Kesini Muregesan.