We are the results of letters unfinished
When someone immortalized an idea, etchings on paper
Hands cuffed in mid-word
We were born to only half the story
Blaming someone else for telling our history
And we go to fight once in a while
But we stop and think maybe we should sing instead of our stinking present and the blinging future we would like to have

For the worst words we could have heard were the truncated hand-me-downs of leaders cut down in their prime
Once proud baobabs over whom the woodcutter stands, axe in hand, black mask on white face and past and present and no future and emergence of us

The generation whose senses have been lulled by shiny things and skinny people

We are the results of books unread
Because anything that does not bring immediate gratification is not worth our quick-time texting apple-software instant-messaging quicker-than-fast-food moments
We are the children who were not taught to pause
Writhing-crawling-walking-running
Never stopping
And now we will not fight because we have not used that pause to think things over
Our tongues run over words quicker than you thought we could say them
We will leave you the hearer of words unsaid
We are after all the results of wisdom unheard
Comforters of tears unshed
Fighters in a war
That will not fight itself
Murderers of the silence that only wanted to scream
STOPWAIT

Pause
Bloody knife in hand
Heart racing faster than I have been running all my life
You are dead
And I am your child, the survivor
Of patience unfulfilled
Demons not exorcised

Angerhatefrustration
Rage

I am the result of that letter you did not finish

© A Quarcoopome

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/307/half-of-a-yellow-sun.jpg
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel on Biafra, Half a Yellow Sun.

ABC-CLIO is in the process of developing a comprehensive 21-volume Encyclopedia of World History. We are looking for interested scholars to prepare 500-1500 word articles with a global perspective in the area of African History and Culture.

Mr. President I have come
To report to you
That South Africa
Is today free

When President Nelson Mandela said these words facing the grave of John Libangibalele Dube on the 21 April 1994, as he cast his vote in an all-race election in South Africa, he was both participating in and creating history. He became the first president of a free Republic of South Africa and also a torch-bearer of an 82 year political movement under the ANC.

In 1912, John Dube was elected the first president of the ANC (then called the South African Native National Congress), after it was formed the same year. It is quite symbolic that Mandela chose to cast his vote at the polling booth in the Ohlange High School, built by John Dube as a way of cultivating self-reliance and self-determination among his people. Now we can view this history through a documentary produced in 2006 entitled Oberlin-Inanda: The Life and Times of John Dube.

Oberlin-Inanda is produced and directed by the Carleton College professor of French, Cherif Keita. It weaves together the life of South Africa's pioneer educator, entrepreneur, and politician John L. Dube.

The documentary not only shows the incredible vision and energy Dube had but also the various transnational and trans-racial links that made his work so important to South Africa's cultural and political history.

In a presentation that is itself a personal journey for Keita, this documentary allows the viewer to witness the incredible determination that Dube had in using education as a tool to bring about pride and change among his people in Natal.

In a showing to a gathering of scholars meeting held in Lisle Illinois to discuss the role of US liberal arts institutions in promoting the study of Africa, Keita stated that he came upon this project through divine intervention.

A native of Mali himself, Keita has now become pat of the Dube family because of the time, resources, and social networks invested in producing the documentary.

He is working on a sequel that follows the story of William Wilcox who has historical connections to Northfield Minnesota where Keita currently resides.

Born in 1871 to a family of recent Christian converts, Dube was raised within a new frame of morality and sensibility but stayed rooted in his own Zulu culture. In his commitment to his own community, while aware of new avenues provided by this new Christian morality, Dube was able to bring about so much change for his own people.

When he had an opportunity to go to America in 1887 through the help of William Wilcox, an American missionary to the Zulu, Dube got his most important break in life. Keita notes that Wilcox was instrumental in Dube’s trip and stay in America.

As a missionary in Zululand, Wilcox was committed to the empowerment of the local people especially in his determination for Black clergy to take charge of their local congregations. It could be because of this commitment to self-realisation for Blacks that Wilcox recommended that Dube attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia which is famed as the alma mater of Booker T. Washington, who himself was committed to educating Southern Blacks in the US for self-employment and empowerment.

Dube asked Wilcox to help him get into Wilcox’s alma mater, Oberlin College, itself being historically significant because it is the first college in the US to admit women and Blacks. While Dube Dube did not go to Hampton, he ended up pursuing interests in technical training as did Booker T. Washington.

After leaving Oberlin College Dube had a short stint in New York where he was able to attend some lectures given by Booker T. Washington before returning to Zululand to start his own school in Inanda.

Upon returning to South Africa armed with funds raised from White American philanthropists, Dube built the Zulu Christian Industrial School which was later named Ohlange Institute. Arguably the school was modelled after the Tuskegee Institute built by Washington and celebrates some of the most influential South Africans in his time and beyond.

Keita’s documentary runs like a book, with the usual advantage of bringing in vivid images of the past together that he juxtaposes with those of today. He is able to show still photos of Dube, his school, and even some of the earlier versions of the school.

The documentary starts with a shot of Keita in Ohlange school talking to the current students about the history in which many of them may not have taken much interest. He takes the viewer through a series of chronological activities that followed Dube since he left Natal to go to the US and back.

There are a number of issues that Keita raises through this documentary. Throughout the narrative the viewer is aware of the role played by Dube’s networks among Whites in making his dream come true. In a post-apartheid South Africa, it is sometimes hard to realise the foundations of Dube’s success through the financial assistance of Whites but Keita gives us a story of courage, determination, and a struggle for the common good.

This is a must see documentary by those interested in cross-cultural issues and especially in South Africa’s higher education and its links to the US.

Produced and directed by Cherif Keita, 2006, 55 minutes, colour. Distributed by Villon Films, 4040 Ontario Street, Vancouver, BC V5V 3G5, Canada,

* Mwenda Ntarangwi, PhD, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

One Woman's Story…

She lost herself to sacrifice
She thought after a while,
She'd find herself, mould the parts of her she'd lost
Bring back the dreams of her youth

She lost her secondary school education
For the sake of the boys
"The boys have nothing,
you can always get a husband, her parents said.
Her dream to be a doctor
Exchanged for an early marriage
'We need the bride price, they said.

Sacrificed sexuality by facing the knife
Sacrificed her laughter in a marriage gone bad
So she could save her name
As if she ever had a name
Or a personality
She was an empty shell
Filled and emptied at others' whim

From there on sacrifice was her middle name
For the husband, the kids
the in laws, her father, her mother
Her friends, anyone and everyone

So one day she looked it up,
That dreaded word sacrifice
And realized it didn't mean
She had to give up what she desired
Sacrifice is about choosing passion
over other interests!

At 40 she put paid to sacrifice,
She was labeled selfish and unkind
When she left her home for school
To pursue her dream to be a doctor

Word from Africa presented by Africa Beyond and SABDET

Saturday 2 June 2007, 12-8.15pm

A day-long celebration of African languages! Join us in exploring the diversity of Africa and its cultures through literature, music and visual arts. All sessions will have English translations or commentaries, or will be in English. The venue is British Museum. The line up includes Freddie Macha and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

The decision by the International Criminal Court to investigate alleged crimes committed during an armed conflict between the Central African Republic (CAR) government and rebel forces in 2002 and 2003 should ensure the perpetrators are arraigned in court, a victim said. "I contracted HIV [when] I was raped by Congolese rebels in 2002; I will be relieved if the perpetrators of this act of humiliation appear in court to be charged for what they did," a 44-year-old woman said in the CAR capital of Bangui on Tuesday.

Gender in the Pan-African community

NO! - a film on rape in the Black American community

Marian Douglas

'... we so called men, we so called brothers wonder why it's so hard to love our women when we're about loving them the way america loves us.' – the late Black American poet Essex Hemphill

On a warm spring evening in Washington, we drive past a building with a sign describing the address as a cultural center for expats from a certain African country. A crowd gathered outside the building is
all-male. It makes me wonder once again about the nature of gender relations in Black communities other than my own.

As I consider my life and those of my Afro-descendant sisters throughout the Americas, often I meditate on our fates had we been born, the same colours we are today, little more than a century ago.

For the past seven years or so, the month of December reminds me not only of Kwanzaa and Christmas but also of rape. In 1854 a very young Black American woman named Celia is tried and found guilty in a US court of 'law'. She is convicted and sentenced to execution for killing Robert Newsom, her rapist and the man who has imprisoned her in an institution' called – chattel – slavery. Celia is hanged on
Thursday 21 December 1854, just days before Christmas, for defending herself from repeated sexual assault.

Such is the course of American 'justice'. The fact that Celia had been raped regularly and repeatedly was treated as so 'inconsequential' that, according to Dr Melton McLaurin, Celia's biographer, the rapes
were not even mentioned during her trial for murder.

Most of what we now know of Celia's brief and unprotected life is carefully detailed in McLaurin's book, Celia: A Slave, compiled from the historical record - mostly musty and neglected Missouri legal
documents.

Her story and millions more like it form an integral but largely silenced part of what we Black Americans refer to as our 'race memory'. This memory lives within me, and even more so since my own family was enslaved in central Missouri where these events of Celia's life and death occurred.

In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs also spills the ugly truth of being enslaved as a girl, a female, as someone's daughter and as a woman and mother. Jacobs speaks
clearly of how the unspeakable - rapes, exploitation, concubinage, violence, killing and suicide - occurred not just daily but 'yea, hourly' as Jacobs writes, to Black women and girls.

This is the context in which I viewed Aishah Simmons' film about rape within the Black community. What we now need is for our families, communities and organizations to screen and begin discussing this ground-breaking film.

For more than seven years I've researched the lives of Black women and our female ancestors in the Americas, girls and women like Celia and Harriet Jacobs. This is why I want to write about Aishah Simmons' labor of love, this documentary, NO! But Aishah's film is much more than just a movie about rape. It's also a major contribution to help us re-learn our history, an inducement to what I call 're-membering' - re-assembling, pulling together once again - the Black communities of the US and throughout the Americas, and reaching back across the Atlantic to Africa's communities, as well as the Black communities of Europe and beyond.

Because some form of sexual assault takes place regularly in virtually every society in the world, NO! is a film for all people and deserves to be shared. It also illustrates articulately how, in the Americas,
Black women's and girls' historically recent experiences of systematic, collective and societally condoned rape and sexual enslavement trace back to the roots of Europe's various colonial empires throughout our region.

In 19th century America Celia was a young nineteen year old Black woman and a 'baby mother' of two, though actually viewed as no more than a 'slave'.

Sexual exploitation and gender-based violence have been the rule rather than an 'exception' in Black women's and girls' lives in the Americas ever since the slave raids across Africa and deadly trans-Atlantic mass forced migrations of our people.

The 'crime' of our 19 year old ancestor Celia, condemned to death by America's 'justice' system, was having been selected and enslaved by the ill-fated slaveholder, "the master", Robert Newsom. Newsom
actually purchased Celia to supply him with sex. With the blessing and sanction of US law and custom, as a white man, his primary responsibility was to never acknowledge Celia nor his sexual relations
with her, nor his children born to Celia.

NO! is the first documentary where, finally, I see and hear certain connections made between our history and our contemporary, lived experiences of gender and race.

Law professor Adrienne Davis talks of how she now realizes and refers to Black Americans' chattel enslavement as the "sexual economy" it truly was. An enormous, universe-shifting, global economy not only of 'can't-see-in-the-mornin'-til-can't-see-at-night' daily servitude and backbreaking labour, but inextricably also an economy of sex and condoned and condemned sex relationships.

'Black women's reproductive and sexual relationships were an integral part of the political economy', Davis states in the film. She asserts that American slavery '... construed childbearing by enslaved women, and their sexuality, as market and economic relationships that actually created white wealth.'

Farah Jasmine Griffin of Columbia University speaks of the routine sexual assault of our sisters, largely though not only, in the American South as having been a key yet mostly unspoken reason for the massive migration of our families and kin to the US North and West, the 'great migration' of 20th USA.

Simmons is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city that was my home in my earlier life, that's been home to other members of my family. Simmons tells me what influenced her to create NO! was 'the value of African women's lives'.

'The doc speaks for itself. It also looks at Black women's history.'

I ask about public reaction so far. 'It's a complicated answer. There's been so much resistance to my making the documentary, but NO! has a life of her own now.

'Audiences are now changing. There has been some resistance on the part of black men, as far as them being perpetrators as well as victims of racism.

'The Black community tends to rally behind Black men accused of perpetrating sexual assault. Mike Tyson was a big turning point for me. Lots of women castigated Desiree Washington.' She adds that 'when black men are brutalized by white supremacy, people rally around them...'

In this film nothing is romanticised in its reflections on boxer Mike Tyson's conviction for the rape of a woman named Desiree Washington. There's also footage of certain Black male religious leaders coming to Tyson's defense and even appearing to praise him. Black women still often find it difficult or still even prohibited for them to physically enter the pulpit or preacher's space in many Black churches. So it's pretty difficult to watch footage of Tyson as a convicted rapist being physically embraced by 'the brothers' right near that space at once sacred, masculinised, and often still exclusionary of women.

As if Tyson's welcome in the bosom of some Black religious leaders weren't enough, perhaps even more shocking is seeing and hearing Black Muslim leader (and former 'calypsonian') Louis Farrakhan caught on film as he berates, ridicules and derisively mimicks Black women in a speech to an audience. At Howard University, the audience emits a loud and collective gasp.

I was lucky enough to attend NO!'s November 2006 premiere at Howard in DC. It was a mostly Black audience of students and more mature folk, men as well as women. Following the film a lengthy Q&A session featured Simmons and Lori Robinson, another survivor of sexual assault, who's written I Will Survive: The African-American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse (Seal Press, 2003). Robinson recounted how two strangers took her inside her home and attacked her.

The Howard screening was sponsored by the DC Rape Crisis Center, which wisely offered on-the-spot counseling during the premiere. To support the effort I buy a dvd of the film along with Robinson's book.

NO! is divided into eight parts: 'Introduction & Devastation of Date Rape', 'Weapon of History: Slavery, Freedom, Sexploitation', 'Survivors Silenced (Who is a Race Traitor?)', 'Civil Rights & Wrongs', 'Raping
the Next Generation (Impact on Girls)', 'Holding Men Accountable: Campus, Clergy & Community', 'Unequal Justice Under Law', and 'Healing, Faith, & Hope'.

It begins with survivors retelling their own personal and varied experiences of rape and attempted rape. One adult survivor recalls being 12 years old shortly before she was assaulted by an older boy.

In the wake of ex-radio personality Don Imus's 'gutter remarks' about Rutgers University's highly successful women's basketball team, NO!'s critique of hip hop and 'gangsta rap' takes on greater meaning. Video features men surrounding themselves with scantily dressed young women.
The film depicts gangsta hip hop for what it is: a disturbing expression of something very skewed and distorted in the perception of the female, feminine part of ourselves and our own community.

Viewing these clips makes me feel self-conscious and deeply uncomfortable. I remember earlier cultural and political gender battles waged not so long ago by the late political leader, C. Delores
Tucker, who was one of Black America's leading public policy advocates. Dr Tucker raised the issue of the treatment and depiction of Black women in the music industry, not only in the United States Congress but also in local Washington and across the US and beyond. As head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, "C. Delores", as many called her, dared to speak up and speak out.

Her articulate and valid critcism of the vulgarisation and objectification of Black womanhood in so many music videos brought her ridicule by many in the music business and so-called "street" culture.

In the film Aaronette White eloquently describes her assault by someone she describes as the then-most senior Black administrator at the university she attended in the 1980s. White also remembers that at the time, another Black man advised her not to file a complaint because, according to him, no one would believe her over her college administrator attacker.

NO! also pulls together soul-stirring contributions from the older generation of sister-activists, including Spelman College's Beverly Guy Sheftall, and Johnetta Cole, former president of Spelman and
recently retired as president of another institution dedicated to Black women's higher education, Bennett College in North Carolina.

I rejoiced to hear the voices and thinking of veteran sister-leaders, like lesbian feminist writer and activist Barbara Smith, the founder of Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, and former Black Panther chairperson Elaine Brown. Barbara takes us through the early coalitions of lesbian and heterosexual Black women, fighting violence against women, especially within Black and other communities of colour. Internatiionally, did women's rallying cry in the US: 'We cannot live without our lives' reverberate elsewhere among our people?

All of us are called upon to remind each other of the truth of these words, and to teach our younger generations of boys and girls, women and men, who are coming up behind us.

Simmons' film is only made stronger by the contributions of several men. After all, ultimately it is men's responsibility simply to stop inflicting most sexual and other forms of violence.

Enter Essex Hemphill. In a video recorded before his death, the late gay Black American poet recites 'Conditions XXI', a poem he originally entitled 'To Some Supposed Brothers':

'You judge a woman by the length of her skirt, by the way she walks, talks, looks, and acts; by the color of her skin you judge and will call her "bitch!" "Black bitch!" if she doesn't answer your: "Hey baby, whatcha gonna say to a man..."'

Also within the film is a dialogue between Sulaiman Nuruddin and Caribbean-born Ulester Douglas, both working with Atlanta, Georgia-based group Men Stopping Violence.

Admits Nuruddin, 'How difficult it is to challenge my brother, wanting to protect my brother from the white male patriarchy... how I will collude or not talk or be silent about that which needs to be talked
about.'

Caribbean native Ulester Douglas breaks it down further. 'We will protect the race at any cost, even if we're killing our sisters.'

Samiya Bashir's incredible poem, "Treason" stuns the listener, just as another young Black poetess describes going to poetry slams and how after finding her "attractive", brother poets first want to protect her, up to the moment they hear her read a poem about her love for another woman.
After this fateful poem she feels the brothers' intentions and attitudes shift.
'Manhood offended', if given the chance, she says, a few of the same men, moments earlier her friends and admirers, actually would sexually assault her, ostensibly in order to 'teach her a lesson'.

Gwendolyn Simmons, who's also Aishah's mother, paints a self-portrait of being a Spelman student in 1962 and getting involved in SNCC - the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ironically the elder Simmons' own early devotion to 'the Black liberation struggle' ventually brings her into proximity with almost being raped. She describes the would-be rapist, the type of man whom in the 1970s we called 'a movement brother'. Gwen Simmons says he was a well-known SNCC leader and 'a local Mississipian' but does not name him.

Both the poetry-slamming sister and Gwendolyn Simmons' cautionary tale remind me how often rape is very 'local'. It is most often perpetrated by males we've seen and/or know, which contributes to an even greater destrucion of trust, and the equally powerful need to heal and restore our trust in ourselves and others.

The filmmaker describes NO! as her own child; now living its own life. Simmons is very aware of obstacles and perserverance. She completed the film in 2005, eleven years after starting it in 1994.
She tells me the doc grew out of "knowing black women affected by sexual assault and the silence in our community - acute silence in our community - around this issue.'

Aishah's company, AFRO-LEZ Productions, reflects the fact that she's also an 'out' lesbian. Her film moves to break down some of the Black community's silence about loving and accepting our own Black gay and lesbian people. Lesbians and gay men are seen and heard in this film.

From Barbara Smith to the haunting, poignant poetry read by the late Essex Hemphill, to the hilarious, insightful and deeply touching Loretta Ross and others, Aishah's work honors and includes the presence and contributions of 'all her peeps' - all of our people - to our common struggle and to this film.

More than ever, these days Aishah is still busy 'running'. Travelling and too busy for a real interview for the moment, she emails me to say that NO!'s subtitled versions should be available by fall 2007, thanks to a grant from Ford Foundation. Work also is underway on the accompanying educational guide which will be available as a download on the NO! website.

This is a film about all of us as humans. It's not only about pain, but also healing, recovery and self-discovery. While some may try to frame this film as 'controversial' or 'subversive', globally Black communities will benefit by doing whatever it takes and by any means necessary to bring this documentary to the wider audience it deserves - our families, schools, religious bodies, clubs, reunions and other organisations.

Essex Hemphill died of AIDS on 4 November 1995. This line from the film is the last line in his earlier-quoted poem. Reading it on a page isn't the same as watching and hearing him fairly spit it.

'... we so called men, we so called brothers wonder why it's so hard to love our women when we're about loving them the way america loves us.'

Marian Douglas is the author of Marian's Blog -

--
Marian's Blog

Please Sign & Share the Kampala Resolution on Women,
Peace and Conflict -

Children can grow up without ever holding, let alone owning, a colourful illustrated children's book. Years ago Botswana embraced the idea of a "Book Flood" to primary schools through trunks of books and trying to start school libraries. This has helped, but it has not yet turned the tide. The availability of books for pupils to read is only one step in the process of transformation. Molefe, Pansiri and Weeks address availability of reading materials in rural Africa.

Pambazuka News invites submissions of poetry, and literature, film and music reviews for our Culture and Arts section. Please send submissions to: [email][email protected] with the subject 'SUBMISSSION' in capitals.

Zimbabwe born singer song writer Thabani and The Thabani band are releasing their song 'Right 2 demonstrate' on Ditto Music featuring Henry Olonga, former cricketer and political activist who famously wore a black armband demonstrating the death of Zimbabwe.

The musicians have teamed up with UK based Zimbabwean Charity Wezimbabwe to help raise funds for Human Rights Defenders working with women activists, students movements and children's rights.

'Right 2 demonstrate' is an emotive song which demands the right for people to speak their minds in a free democratic society, striking at the heart of Robert Mugabe's violent government which has been stopping people peacefully demonstrating by issuing savage beatings before a disbelieving world.

Pre-order the single today and help the single break into the official UK top 40!! Our goal is to reach 7500 downloads in order to raise £10,000.

The release date is 3 June. But by pre-ordering you raise the profile of the record and its charitable cause and help to get it into the charts. Every penny from the sale will go to organisations who work with groups in Zimbabwe to help rebuild their lives. Please help us today by downloading today.

This work presents a theoretically rich and ethnographically vivid account of the way that song, dance and musical sensitivity weave into the lives of an aboriginal community of Australia. It focuses upon the song and associated emotional experience of women, and the way in which children are socialized into the musical and imaginative discourses and practices of the adult world. It makes a distinctive contribution to the tradition of anthropological analysis which focuses on the located nature of human sensual experience.
ISBN: 978-0-85255-992-5, 288pp, publ. May 2007, £17.95, paperback
ISBN: 978-0-85255-993-2, £50.00, cased

This is a call for poetry reflecting on experiences in Zimbabwe, past and present. Poets must also reflect on the spirit of this country's people through words that survive and vibrate.

For further information: write to Tinashe Mushakavanhu: [email][email protected]

Call for poetry for the journal Agenda's 20th anniversary edition Poetry about women, their lives, successes, struggles and rights in all sectors of society is welcomed.

Length of poetry contributions:
Poems to fit a full page of the Agenda journal (19cm x 24cm)

Deadline: 27 May 2007

Submission requirements:
All submissions must be emailed to [email][email protected]

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/303/41306.jpgRising oil consumption and high commodity prices are the key drivers in a new scramble for Africa.

Take China, self-sufficient in oil as recently as 1993, it became the world's second largest consumer behind the United States in 2003. Like Europe and the US, China is looking to Africa for energy security and diversification.

Sub-Saharan Africa offers attractive oil prospects: non-Middle East and non-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries - although recently Angola surprised many by joining.

Publication of this book this month could not be better timed, the same applies to John Ghazvinian's Untapped: The Scramble for African Oil (Harcourt, 2007).

Nicholas Shaxson, a Chatham House associate fellow is a British journalist. He worked as Reuters' Angola correspondent and later on its London oil desk in the 1990s; subsequently embarking on a freelance career including covering the Gulf of Guinea for the Financial Times and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

This volume hammers home its points through chapters on personalities such as Abel Abraão of Angola; Fela Kuti, Nigeria; André Milongo, Congo; Arcadi Gaydamak, Russia; and three presidents: Fradique de Menezes of São Tomé e Principe; Omar Bongo, Gabon and Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea.

Paradox of Plenty
The thesis is clear throughout, that oil is toxic in Africa, ensuring countries that have it are even less interested in good governance, accountable leadership or poverty alleviation. It also damages non-mineral industries, making nations ever more dependent on oil and gas.

According to Shaxson, oil brings greater instability and only the elite really benefit from the massive wealth.

There is nothing too surprising in this. The World Bank and non-governmental organisations such as Catholic Relief Services in their Bottom of the Barrel report, all highlight the paradox of plenty in oil producing countries.

But Shaxson differs by fleshing out the complexity through character driven narrative that cuts through political correctness and organisational mandate. This book is independent and seeks to drill deep and survey wide in an age where expertise on Africa has become undervalued.

Dracula zones
In his final chapter, Shaxson tries to move the debate forward. He considers what can be done other than just feeling slightly guilty each time we fill the car at a petrol station, knowing that it is not just climate change that is affected by our thirst for oil.

So what can be done? Foreign aid clearly has little impact. Transparency does not seem to have made a major difference either. Attempting to diversify economies away from oil production has not worked well. Saving funds for post-oil days also sounds good, but in practice - as we saw recently in Chad - it can stir up local politics.

Shaxson has three suggestions: pay oil money directly to citizens, a kind of Alaska model; significantly reduce Western dependence on oil by raising taxes on fuel, especially in the US; and regulate the world's 70 odd tax havens better to control dirty money. These 'Dracula zones', as he calls them - or 'fiscal paradises' in French - are not just the Cayman Islands or Jersey, but London and New York too.

Shaxson argues: 'If half of global trade finance flows through offshore structures, and soon a quarter of America's oil imports will be coming from Africa, I would hazard a guess that we have a systematic and fast-growing problem on our hands.' He argues that legislation could solve this but the political will is lacking.

Shaxson's warning is that we ignore the impact of oil and gas extraction in Africa at our peril: its impact will spread. How many policy makers in oil companies or governments will listen to these warnings? At least I hope they read this book.

Poisoned Wells by Nicholas Shaxson is published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

* Alex Vines is head of the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.

* Please send comments to

Lesotho fatše la bo-rra, I sing you/then and now
Each day I sing you/ from mountain to cave I truly
Sing you. Spring is dawning in the valley’s
Old venue for kingly things. Thirty-seven years my love,
Thirty-seven years, and promises-/- the gravestones of our
Heads are cool, too cool for upper rooms in top
Offices, where someone’s already polishing promises-/-

In my dream, hope like a mad river washes the low

Lands, clearing years away/ I hear mothers crying
Over fate/ their tears cleanse my feet and feed
Vrystaat, the fat serpent along Mohokare/ there are
Everywhere men on sticks in silent streets, eyes

Yearning for a sign/ there are faces, violated angels
Outlined in candour beside you, O world, O bright
Unicorn of splendour, prancing in the boorish night.

* Rethabile Masilo blogs at Sotho [http://sotho.blogsome.com/"> and Poefrika [http://poefrika.blogspot.com/">

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

In November 2006 almost every African head of state attended the largest international summit meeting ever held in Beijing. The event highlighted just how important Africa has become to China's future economic growth - something that the Western media is only just starting to wake up to. One of the consequences of China's recent economic boom has been a parallel boom in imports. The export industries that power China's growth need raw materials, fuel and components that the rest of the Chinese economy can't supply.

The Uncertainty of Hope
Valerie Tagwira
This novel has been described by Charles Mungoshi as ‘an astonishing debut’. The various and complex lives of Onai Moyo - a market woman and mother of three children, and her best friend Katy Nguni - a vendor and black-market currency dealer, give an insight into the challenges that face those who are surviving by their wits, their labour and mutual support.

Other newly available titles include:

The Mediator. Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo and the Southern Sudan Peace Process
Waithaka Waihenya

Shona Companion: A Practical Guide to Zimbabwe’s most Widely Spoken Language
D. Dale

African Oral Story-telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

For further information, see:

Alexander Kanengoni's Echoing Silences is probably the most engaging and brutally frank account of Zimbabwe's guerrilla war to be narrated quasi-fictionally. Published ten years ago, it unravels the war's ugly underbelly: regular torture and killing orgies sanctioned by kangaroo courts, raging male sexual predators targeting junior female combatants, indiscipline and betrayal among fighters.the list is endless. What strikes me about the book though is none of this. Kanengoni makes a spot on diagnosis of one of independent Zimbabwe's terminal ailments:

27 years into independence and the wheels of state have come off, it seems to me that the 'culture of silence' among many Zimbabweans-especially those who absolutely should have spoken- is a key factor to the crisis. I'll come back to this later.

In the last chapter of his book, Kanengoni captures a fictional rally addressed by Herbert Chitepo and Jason Moyo, a rally where 'fundamental policy changes to the struggle' are supposed to be announced. Although located in the theatre of struggle, the issues raised there describe a post-independent Zimbabwe.

He writes: 'the Chairman (Chitepo) talked angrily of a series of monumental historical betrayals and he said he and a few others were the living examples of such betrays; and Jason Moyo wondered how politics, the wealth and the economy of the entire country was slowly becoming synonymous with the names of less than a dozen people and he asked how in such circumstances the struggle could not be said to have lost its way.'

Wallace Chuma used to work as a journalist for the banned Daily News in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted at [email][email protected]

The full review can be read on NewZimbabwe: http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/indepex22.16293.html

When you seek to find a gliche in the system
When you feel al l the time that there’s something missing
When you turn around and the doors closed
and your belligerence shows
cause the politicians wearing emporer’s clothes

I’ve got news for you, you’re here too.

When we do the ‘they’
When we call it black or white or grey
When the headlines scream another dead child,
another oil slick,
another hard crime somebody else is doing the time
When you say your life depends on the other man’s outcome
oh there’s so much degradation
the government’s put us in this situation
It’s a black dream you scheme

I’ve got news for you, you’re here too.

When your sister’s raped and your brother’s drugged and the
streets aren’t clean and you look at it all and say, “We’re all headed for a hard fall.”
When you speak of lies
but don’t speak you truth
when can’t make it to the top
and it’s always somebody else’s fault that the ball’s dropped.

I’ve got news for you, you’re here too.

When your agitation is all you can spare
and your rhetoric’s got you all in a rage
when you can’t hold yourself when you fall
and you lay down love and pick up arms
and the silence cries
but your lips – still – don’t – move –
yet in your own living room you’re a prophet of doom

I’ve got news for you, you’re here too.

We tick the minutes spill the seconds
tick the minutes spill the seconds
talk judgement, economics and acid rain.

We tick the minutes spill the seconds
tick the minutes spill the seconds
talk memory, talk more pain.

We tick the minutes spill the seconds
talk of God
talk more, talk more
talk
more
we’re keeping score
and love a waiting at the door

When you move to Australia cause the countries a failure
when mending the situation calls for a band aid solution to put us in line with our constitution
when you can’t understand how ten years of democracy didn’t make it all fit
when you feel the urge to shout “Get over it!”
as if something outside yourself requires the shift
remember people we’re all in the same damn lift!
“Going up orrrrrr down!”

we tick the minutes spill the seconds
tick the minutes spill the seconds
time is a wasting while we’re cutting and pasting
and life is elsewhere
here or there?
outside’s a good place to count the cost
when you’re running that race from the inside
It’s better than dealing with the feeling of being lost,
displaced in your space…

I’ve got news for you
It doesn’t take an apocalypse to mend a century
It doesn’t take blame to alleviate pain
A simple step to the mirror is all it’ll take
A reflection on the reflection is the only thing that can free the present
from hate

Soooo put on your parachute, or strap on a seatbelt
the ride’s scary or sacred
could be heaven’s door or hell’s gate
all depends on your internal state
but unless you’re late, deceased or carried off in a crate
don’t berate the psychosis and add to the neurosis
simply take a look in the mirror at your own thriller
dispense with the polyfiller

I’ve got news for you
you’re here too.

Khadija-Tracey Heeger