A close partner of the UN refugee agency has persuaded some of Spain's top artists to support an exhibition and online auction to raise money to tackle malnutrition among young refugees in four African countries. The Spanish Committee for UNHCR, with the emceeing skills of UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Jesús Vázquez, launched "Refugi@rte" in Madrid last Tuesday.

Keir Thomas, author of numerous Linux how-to books as well as Ubuntu-specific guides, has released a new book called Ubuntu Pocket Guide. The compact 166-page guide to using Linux is available in both printed form as well as a free PDF download.

Ethiopia was never a member of the Casablanca group. And Haile Selassie was not enthusiastic about Nkrumah's call for immediate continental unification. Nyerere offered to delay Tanganyika's independence so that Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika could form an East African federation. That was a Pan-African quest and a realistic approach towards African unity...

While calling on Obama to “pursue a policy change that we can believe in” Tajudeen also argues against our seeing Obama as a messiah who will solve all of the world’s problems. Rather his election should give “both Americans and the rest of us a chance to look at things afresh and probably find a solution that we can all live with even if it may not be perfect.”

Ubuntu’s open source project-hosting service Launchpad will release its underlying code as open source software on July 21. The announcement comes via the Launchpad News. The most recent Launchpod podcast talks with Launchpad Ombudsman Karl Fogel about the decision.

Offering a counterweight to negative images of an aid- and handout-addicted Africa, Mukoma Wa Ngugi discusses and commends the work of the local organisations around the continent. Often operating with minimal funding or media support, these organisations deserve to be the focal point in new approaches of genuinely helping those who help themselves, writes Wa Ngugi.

First, not quite, but we have to start somewhere,
There were the Arawaks, the Caribs and the Amerindians
Then their land became known as Hispaniola,
As Saint Domingue, as the economic jewel
Of French overseas possessions
Thanks to Africans kidnapped, chained, shipped
Processed, codified, stamped as property
While always knowing they belonged
To no one but humanity
And through fidelity to humanity
Turned Saint Domingue into Haiti
Fraternity, equality and liberty
Their only motto
Defeating the obscurantist
Philosophers of the Enlightenment
For thirteen years, 1791–1804
Without support
From humanitarian abolitionists
Defeating the most powerful armies of the day
Spain, England, France
Fidelity to humanity
Their only prescription

Plan B was out of the question
Humanity had to prevail
But its sworn enemy had a plan B:
With lethal vengeance
Napoleon reinstated slavery
Take no prisoners, his motto
Severe, if necessary, capital punishment
Against the trespassers of
Nascent capital yet to be named
Capitalism the crusher of humanity

With exemplary brutality
Long before the birth of Gaza-upon-Mediterranean
Haiti was turned into the poorest nation
– Gaza-upon-Atlantic –
For having dared simply
To challenge and obsoletify
The Black Code of Louis XIV
Rules of engagement against/for
Slaves balancing terror, torture, fear, death
Ensuring the endurance of slavery
Beyond the monarchy
Thanks to a self-proclaimed emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte the impostor

Plan B prospered so well beyond
Napoleon’s dreams of restoring slavery
We may all ask, maybe naively
Had he known his treatment of Africans
Would later inspire Hitler’s
Holocausting of the Jews
Would he have seen Africans
As humanity and not as property?

Not every French was/is a fan of slavery’s restorer:
Taubira Law of 2001 declares
Slavery a Crime Against Humanity
Could it be that France might
Be restoring Fidelity to Humanity?

But could it be too late when
Humanity or those who pretentiously
Speak for it refuse to know
The distinction between
Might and right
Right and wrong
Charity and solidarity

Could it be too late when
Survivors and/or their descendants
Of an unthinkable crime think
The best way to stand up for humanity
Is to slaughter/bomb humanity as deliberately
And brutally smart as possible?

Could it be too late when
Slaughtering humanity
Can be done with impunity
Thanks to a genocided past
As if anything can be traded, erased,
Commodified, genetically modified
To fit a globalised paradise
Where no one will know
The difference between
Gaza-upon-Atlantic
Haiti-upon-Mediterranean
Except for those who vowed
Fidelity to humanity

Can’t we see the obvious consequences of
Relentlessly violating humanity
Now Palestinians, then Africans centuries ago
Today displaced, refugees, best fodder
For humanitarian missions
The modernized version of abolitionists
On a mission which has not changed:
Violate humanity,
Eradicate it if too vocal
But Sabra, Shatila can still be heard

Palestinians are full members of humanity
Homelessed in their homeland, denied existence
By all means, constantly searching
For the ultimate way
Of getting rid of them
Their annihilation will not be called
A Crime Against Humanity because,
By definition, it has been repeated forever,
It only happens at Auschwitz, and other
Concentration camps in a World War

Palestinians are like Native Americans
Whose land was taken, whose genocide
Refuses to be called a genocide
Palestinians, Africans interchangeable destinies
Torn from their land, thrown into ships,
Refugeed in strips of land
Enslaved, imprisoned, less than property
Therefore not fit to come under
A Crime Against Humanity

Palestinians, Africans, in the same boat
When the unending story of negating humanity started
Like Africans they are being processed and branded
Fit to be fodder for humanitarian crisis because what is being done
Must not be called
A Crime Against Humanity

For fear of trespassing which taboo?

No one dares to call the slaughter of civilians
In Gaza by its proper name
A Crime Against Humanity

For fear of trespassing which taboo?

From the times of the Arawaks
Violating, torturing, liquidating
Humanity with impunity
Has led to greater and greater
Crimes against humanity
Franchised differently
Preparing the biggest holocaust
Humanity has ever known and,
When that unfolds, as before,
We shall hear the usual
Shameful lame lie
‘We did not know’.

* Jacques Depelchin is a CAPES fellow at the Universidade Federal da Bahia.
* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Considering the ultimate limitations of instructing Kenya’s children in ‘civilised’ acts like eating a banana with a knife and fork at the expense of an education true to the nation’s history, Wangui Kimari wonders whether the current educational system simply upholds students’ self-effacement.

With Ghana witnessing elections broadly heralded as free and fair, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem considers the country’s enduring two-party political system. Arguing that John Kufuor’s outgoing administration simply owed its electoral success to a fortuitous set of circumstances, the author delves into the country’s post-colonial history and considers the persistence of the Danquah-Busia/Nkrumahist divide in contemporary politics.

The African Union (AU) is hoping to set up a communal fund to pay for education, science and technology programmes on the continent. The fund would be held by the African Development Bank (ADB), and be open to contributions from international donors as well as from African governments.

Though applauding the success of this year’s record-breaking Stand Up action on global poverty, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem wonders whether revitalising the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will simply amount to lining the pockets of a few individual African recipients in positions of power. Taking up the example of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda, the author situates such latent misappropriation of resources within a broader problem of one-time liberation leaders lingering in power. Once a genuine force for changing the system, Yoweri Museveni’s NRM, Abdul-Raheem argues, have now become the system.

In this week’s postcard Tajudeen takes issue with what he calls ‘noisy western diplomats’ and their tendency to speak out injudiciously against the misdeeds of African governments. In the same vein, he deplores African envoys for their silence in the face of misrule and injustice on the part of host governments. He calls on African diplomats to stand true to the shared values on human rights, protection of the weak and vulnerable respect for the dignity of Africans, and not to abdicate this role to western diplomats

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor reflects on the just concluded US presidential election and Barrack Obama’s victory. He ponders the historical significance of an African-American being elected to the White House. Through the lens of his forebears’ experiences as African-Americans and their views of the changing political landscape in the country, he underlines the fact that Obama’s election cannot escape the enduring effects of racial discrimination and segregation on the psyche of the American people.

It is wrong to execute an innocent man. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will now consider whether it is constitutional. Troy Anthony Davis, convicted of murder, is asking the courts to hear evidence that key government witnesses have repudiated their testimony against him. But so far the courts have decided that, while he may be innocent, procedural rules prevent them from taking a second look.

Reflecting on the media attention given to Barack Obama’s illegally resident auntie Zeituni in the run-up to his election victory, Steve Sharra explores what Obama’s presidential campaign has revealed about American politics. Identifying a noticeable shift in the way the now president-elect approached the issue of ‘Africa’ from his first and second autobiographies, the author argues that while a marked change may have occurred in civil rights in the US, much of the country retains established assumptions about the African continent. While Obama may personally understand the importance of changing the image of Africa and Africans in the eyes of Americans, change in this regard will prove a slow and deliberate process if it is not to antagonise sectors of US society thoroughly resistant to the idea of person of African ancestry leading their nation.

Organizations representing Caribbean civil society organizations and social movements have written to G8 finance ministers, the World Bank, and the IMF, to demand an immediate and unconditional cancellation of Haiti's external debt.

Following Barack Obama’s historic electoral victory, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem reviews the new president-elect’s global appeal and comments on prospects for the future. Cautioning against any notion that Obama’s presidency will automatically reverse the fortunes of the poor and downtrodden, the author nevertheless celebrates the historic ascendancy of an individual whose own path will serve as a potent example for others around the world.

Since 2003, photographer Abdi Roble and writer Doug Rutledge have been documenting the lives of Somali immigrants in the United States and of the people forced into the vast refugee camps that were set up in Kenya in the wake of the 1991 civil war in Somalia. In The Somali Diaspora, Roble, who immigrated to the United States from Somalia in 1989, and Rutledge trace the journey of a family from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, home to more than 150,000 Somalis, to new lives in the United States.

In a response to Issa Shivji’s featured in Pambazuka’s 400th issue English-language edition, Kwesi Kwaa Prah asks what can be achieved with pan-Africanism as a ‘category of intellectual thought’. Problematising the extent to which pan-Africanism could ever represent a politically neutral philosophy, the author suggests that its proponents can be located across the political spectrum and argues that while colour may have provided a useful racially-based organising tool, it should never override the essential inclusivity of the African identity.

In regards to , I have several problems with this method of thought not the least of which is the author's serious legitimization of the bankrupt ideals of Julius Nyerere. Indeed, one could argue that for the weakness and arrogance of Nyerere at the founding of the OAU, Africa could have acheived a much stronger Union. We tend to forget that the Union of African States was the correct model to follow. But, the Union of African States gave way to the OAU in order to keep the likes of Nyerere in the overall African fold. Nyerere's regionalism was really nothing more than a sabotage of Nkrumah's program of a strong African Union.

It is true that regionalism, even Nyerere's sub-continenlaism was a failure if for no other reason than that it was meant to not succeed towards African Unity. Tanzania was a feable attempt to unite two little East African states. Such a structure did not even rise to the level of regionalism much less sub-continentalism becasue it did not include East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Mozambique or Ethiopia. Recall that Ethiopia was a member of the Casablanca Group and as such, Ethiopia was very friendly towards Nkrumah's project for Continental Unity.

Stop apologizing for Nyerere. He lived a long life. And, he was head of ststae for many years. He had plenty of time to correct his mistakes. But, he never did. I think he failed to do so becasue Pan-Africanism was never a part of his commitment nor internal ideological make up. Indeed, I know of nothing prior to the OAU that indicates any commitment on the part of Nyerere to Pan-Africanism. Of course he sang the Pan-Africanist song just as he sang the socialist song. But, Nyerere's idea of Pan-Africanism was not Pan-Africanism which was defined by Nkrumah as the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism. And, Nyerere's socialism may have include some socialist policies, but it was NOT scientific socialism. In fact, Nyerere went so far as to emphasize this point by calling his socialism "African socialism".

Unfortunately, the author does not even rise to this occasion. Instead he mentions something that none of us has ever heard of before now; namely some kind of weird liberal democracy. I mean, really! In these times in which even the most right wing free market capitalists, such as George W. Bush and Gordon Brown, have been forced to use scientific socialist methods to try and rescue world capitalism, we in Africa are still too cowardly to acknowledge that anything short of scientific socialism, such as what we see in China, will NOT lead to African Unity and NOT solve African problems.