Reviewing the historic role of African and African-American publications in the struggle for representation and access to information, Walter Turner situates Pambazuka News in an established line of liberatory writing. While illustrating the ability of publications like Pambazuka to catalyse social change, Turner stresses respect for the history of activist media and the importance of continual support to sustain their future vitality.

Celebrating Pambazuka’s 400th issue is celebrating pan-Africanism itself. Through its half a million readership and one thousand plus contributors from all over Africa, Pambazuka has truly set ablaze an intellectual pan-African trail; ‘insurrection of ideas precedes insurrection of arms’, some militant is quoted to have said. Pambazuka is certainly not a call to (physical) arms, but one to intellectual and ideological arms. We need it if the pan-African vision – not a dream – is to survive and continue to guide our thoughts and actions as Africans. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne says, we should make pan-Africanism a category of intellectual thought.

I have asserted many times in the pages of Pambazuka and elsewhere that ‘new pan-Africanism’, rooted in social (popular) democracy, is African nationalism of the era of the so-called globalised phase of imperialism. African nationalism was born of pan-Africanism, not the other way round. Its genesis was rooted in democracy – self-determination and anti-imperialism. Self-determination and anti-imperialism are two sides of the same coin, none of which could be successfully achieved on the level of colonially carved territories. The first generation of African nationalists were deeply conscious of the dangers of territorial nationalisms based on geographical spaces designed as countries by colonialists. Nyerere derogatively characterised African countries as vinchi or statelets! African nationalism outside pan-Africanism is tribalism on the international level, he boldly asserted in the early 1960s. Both Nyerere and Nkrumah believed that without a continental unity, individual African countries would become pawns on the imperialist chessboard or degenerate into narrow cultural, racial, or ethnic nationalisms, or both. In this, unfortunately, they were prophetic as half a century of African independence has amply demonstrated.

On the morrow of receiving the insignia of sovereign states, a few of the ‘founding fathers’ genuinely set out to build nations within the colonially defined borders, which all of them, as heads of states, unanimously agreed were sacred, although unviable. Others set to build their power-bases on the colonially invented or re-invented ethnic ‘identities’. Still others did not survive long enough to do either, or something else, because they were overthrown (Nkrumah) or assassinated (Lumumba) by imperialist machinations. Whatever the case, they all failed to build viable, legitimate states and nations.

Kenyatta’s Kenya and Nyerere’s Tanganyika are illustrative examples. Anchored in ethnic power-bases, which also determined resource allocations, the darling of Western imperialism in this part of the world exploded following the 2008 general elections. The so-called government of the so-called ‘national unity’ was cobbled together by American pressure while pretending to be a miracle performed by the chairman of African Union, Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian president. Tanganyika has not so far exploded, thanks to the legacy of Nyerere’s far-sighted policies, preaching and personal integrity helped by relatively undeveloped class divisions. That is proving to be fragile, thanks to extreme social and economic polarisation wrought by Mkapa’s neo-liberal polices, taken over by Kikwete, over the last 15 or so years. The 2000, and even more so the 2005, elections were marked by racial and religious animosity and ethnic based alliances and campaigning. Under the veneer of peace, unity, and stability, Tanzanian political and even intellectual elites are covertly and overtly involved in religious- and ethnic-based politicking. This came out openly in the last session of the parliament where honourable members were unashamedly polarised along religious lines on the issues of the possible membership of OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference) and the proposal to introduce Kadhi’s courts for the Muslim community.

Even more problematic is the union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar which this year celebrated its 44th anniversary. While the Cold War was the context and pressure from the West to meet what it considered a communist threat undoubtedly played a role, Nyerere’s was driven, at least partly, by his pan-African convictions. He would have preferred Zanzibar to be part of a greater East African federation but his colleagues in Kenya and Uganda were too enamoured with new power and state positions to relinquish it in the interest of a larger association. The failure to form the East African federation bore out Nyerere’s fears. He had argued repeatedly that once African countries went into independence alone, it would be too difficult to dislodge vested interests thus created.

Once you multiply national anthems, national flags and national passports, seats at the United Nations, and individuals entitled to 21 gun salutes, not to speak of a host of ministers, prime ministers, and envoys, you would have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised.

While the political union of East Africa is still marking time forty years later, even economic integration has been in the doldrums. The East African Community collapsed in the late 1970s and was only revived 10 years ago. Ironically, therefore, the union with Zanzibar, whose future is being seriously threatened, and the fragility of regional economic integration, are proving Nyerere’s position in his debate with Nkrumah questionable. It should be recalled that Nkrumah stood for immediate political union of African states while Nyerere argued in favour of a gradualist approach against Nkrumah’s immediate political unification. Nkrumah dubbed Nyerere’s efforts at EA federation ‘balkanisation on a larger scale’ while ‘regional economic groupings,’ he said, ‘retard rather than promote the unification process.’

While logic was on Nyerere’s side, history has vindicated Nkrumah. All experiments at regional political unions did not survive. Senegambia, formed in 1982, was dissolved on 1989 because the Gambia refused closer union with Senegal. Formed much earlier, the Mali federation collapsed within two years. The only union to survive long was the unity of former British Somaliland and the Italian Somalia, which was formed in 1960 voluntarily by the people of British Somaliland voting in a referendum to join the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. With the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 and the whole country breaking up into warlords’ fiefdoms, Somaliland withdrew to form the Republic of Somaliland, which to this date remains unrecognised. Though it remains shaky, this makes the Tanganyika-Zanzibar the longest surviving union between two African countries. The moral is that regional unities, of whatever kind, particularly political, have failed to make it.

Nkrumah’s vision of continental political unity thus remains a beacon of hope. More recently, Muammar Gaddafi has tried to take on Nkrumah’s mantle. But Gaddafi is no Nkrumah. The call for political unification from Gaddafi has found little support. The classical debate between Nyerere and Nkrumah has been resurrected but it is a pale shadow of its former self. There is no Nyerere to argue for gradualism with any legitimacy while Gaddafi is a wrong man to argue a right cause. His maverick tactics and twisting of arms has only resulted in rekindling the Arab-African cultural divide. That brings me to the cultural argument often deployed even by otherwise progressive intellectuals against continental unity.

Pan-Africanism was rooted in anti-imperialist politics. It was a political and not an economic, cultural, or racial project. At a public rally called by PAFMECA (Pan-African Movement of Eastern and Central Africa) in Zanzibar in April 1959, Nyerere said that he did not believe that an African was defined by the colour of his skin. An African, he asserted, is any one who has made Africa his home and is struggling for the rights of his country. This is a political definition of an African, not racial or cultural. Both Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral saw culture as a form and expression of national struggle rather than an ossified custom or tradition. As Archie Mafeje argued, it is one thing to invoke culture – even invent it – as a counterpoint to the assertion and domination by European imperialist culture, it is quite another to make culture a reference point of (political) division.

In conclusion, I return to the point that pan-Africanism was a political project for the first generation of African nationalists and remains so. Africa is at crossroads. We either rise to the progressive, anti-imperialist pan-Africanism as a continental political project of national liberation and social emancipation, or descend into narrow chauvinist nationalisms, be they racial, cultural, or ethnic. I believe we are at the dawn of a new era of pan-Africanism. We have to re-appropriate the pan-Africanist vision, and make it a category of intellectual thought and a guiding post of political struggles.

* Issa G. Shivji is one of Africa’s most radical and original thinkers and has written frequently for Pambazuka News. He is the author of several books, including Silences in NGO Discourse (2007), published in Fahamu Books.

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

The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) has endorsed the McKinney/Clemente ticket in the U.S. presidential race. The endorsement was based on the support that Green Party V.P. candidate Rosa Clemente’s expressed for InPDUM’s “Revolutionary National Democratic Program, during her participation in InPDUM’s 17th Annual Convention, held September 27 – 28, 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

With the World Bank’s recent recalculations on the number of global poor going unnoticed within the majority of mainstream media channels, Adam W. Parsons laments the absence of external scrutiny of the Bretton Woods institutions. The author illustrates the extent to which the bank’s faith in the Millennium Development Goals remains misguided, and asks whether the bank’s figures can be taken as indicative of any real improvement in the plight of the poor.

In a potent critique of the post-apartheid state and its role in the wave of xenophobic discrimination to have gripped the South African nation, Dale T. McKinley explores the roots of the country’s ‘macro-nationalist paradigm’ and its consequences in the shape of the contemporary pogroms of African foreigners. Highlighting the ‘changing of the nationalist guard’ aspect to the ANC’s 1994 election victory, the author argues that the state’s dominant discourse of ‘nation-building’ has its natural corollary in the idea and practice of xenophobia directed at non-South African nationals.

When liberation movements take power, their governments are often marked by military mindsets, categorising people as winners and losers and operating along the lines of command and obedience. Such trends are evident in southern Africa. Democratic discourse in search of the common good would look quite different.

A knee-jerk reaction of ‘Tiers-Mondisme’ is to show solidarity with the struggle for freedom among the ‘wretched of the earth’. Sometimes, struggles are glorified, as was the case back in the 1960s. Frantz Fanon’s book ‘Les damnés de la terre’ (the wretched of the earth) was paradigmatic. His manifesto became a call to battle for the Algerian resistance movement against France, the colonial power.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the introduction. He was quite selective in his argumentation, tending in some spots to glorify violence as an act of emancipation. Indeed, he seemed to see violence as a purifying force that would turn the colonised into full citizens. Fanon himself however spoke out against excessive post-colonial authoritarianism. In penetrating analyses and withering criticism, he described what he had seen, mainly in West Africa, up to his death in 1961.

Fanon critisised the authoritarian attitudes of the African elite, which usurped young states in the course of decolonisation, and their abuses of power when securing privileges for themselves and turning entire states into instruments of control. His early warnings went largely unheeded, however. Not until the 1990s, when the shortcomings of revolutionary movements could no longer be ignored, did Fanon’s analyses come back into the foreground.

VICTORY IN PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE?

When liberation movements in the so-called third world took up arms, they enjoyed support from the socialist countries as well as solidarity movements in the West. Organisations such as the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO challenged Portugal’s colonial power. Their resilience in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique even had repercussions in the Lisbon metropole. They triggered the Carnation Revolution, bringing an end to Portuguese colonialism in Africa in the mid-1970s.

In Rhodesia – today’s Zimbabwe – the ZANU and ZAPU liberation movements fought the white minority regime under Ian Smith, which had declared unilateral Independence (UDI) from the British Empire. Colonial rule came to an end in 1980 when the Lancaster House Agreement was signed and ZANU subsequently won the elections.

In Namibia, the United Nations negotiated a transition period for independence, which was ultimately implemented in 1989–90. South Africa had occupied the country in violation of international law. SWAPO fought against this illegal occupation for a quarter of a century.

Four years later, the Namibian model of controlled change helped South Africans hold their first free elections, which were won by the ANC. The former liberation movement thus assumed political responsibility, and it did so in a legitimate fashion.

One must bear in mind that armed resistance was part of the solution both in South Africa and Namibia. It led to negotiations for transitional arrangements towards majority rule. The compromises required from all sides contributed to the transitional periods working out. At the same time, a decidedly patriotic form of writing history turned the independence struggle soon thereafter into a myth.

ZIMBABWEAN TRAUMA

It bears repetition that the unscrupulously violent character of Zimbabwe’s ZANU regime already revealed itself in the early to mid-1980s, when a special unit killed an estimated 20,000 people, mainly in Matabeleland, where the opposition ZAPU had most of its supporters.

The soldiers of the fifth brigade trained by North Korea, took no prisoners. They killed, tortured, raped and humiliated anyone who seemed suspicious (and it was enough to be Ndebele); men, women, and even children. The only organisation to protest was the local catholic church, which raised its voice to protect the victims. The rest of the world, including those who had originally shown solidarity, had little to say; after all, it simply couldn’t be true.

The violence did not stop until ZAPU agreed to sign a pact with the ruling party. ZANU basically took them over. None of this hurt the Mugabe government’s bilateral and multilateral standing. To the contrary: up to the late 1990s, Zimbabwe was considered a success story, an example of successful transition. Indeed, in 1994 Queen Elizabeth II personally bestowed knighthood upon President Mugabe, who had assumed comprehensive executive powers in the meantime. Not until June of this year was his knighthood revoked.

WOUNDS OLD AND NEW

When a new opposition party, the MDC, took to the political stage in Zimbabwe and turned out to be a serious competitor at the end of the 1990s, the ‘Chimurenga’ (struggle) became a permanent institution. Violence became the customary response to political protest. As political power shifted away from Mugabe after he lost a referendum in 2000, his regime became only more violent.

In 2005, Mugabe and his people launched Operation ‘Murambatsvina’ (Drive Out Trash) in raids on pockets of opposition in Harare and other major towns: more than 2 million people are estimated to have lost their already meagre livelihoods in the process. There is no need to delve into the recent escalation of violence, since the election troubles were reported in detail worldwide.

An estimated third of Zimbabwe’s people has fled the country for political and economic reasons; from exile, they try to support family members who have stayed home. All of this is sad proof that life under a liberation movement is not automatically better than it was under colonialism. The human-rights violations of SWAPO have also been downplayed. In the 1980s, the organisation imprisoned thousands of its own members in dungeons in southern Angola, accusing them of spying on behalf of South Africa. These people lost their liberty in spite of never having been proven guilty; indeed, they were not even brought to trial. Many of them did not survive the torture. Those released are scorned even today.

It could have been different in South Africa. The ANC government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission talked about human rights violations committed by its own members. But the final report containing these findings was never published in its original form. So far, ANC omissions have not been discussed openly.

VICTIMS BECOME PERPETRATORS

There is nothing new about military movements that are supposedly justified in ethical and moral terms quickly losing their legitimacy. Since the French Revolution, liberators have often turned into oppressors, victims into perpetrators. It is not unusual for a new regime to quickly resemble an old one. That has happened time and again around the world.

The Indian psychologist and sociologist Ashis Nandy, one of the founders of critical post-colonial studies, has dealt with this issue in depth. The Intimate Enemy, his book of 1983, discusses how liberators tend to reproduce the past rather than offering genuine alternatives. In this light, the “anti-imperialist” Robert Mugabe turns out to be merely the final executor of the policies of the racist colonists Cecil Rhodes and Ian Smith. Armed combat merely created new repressive institutions of the state for the dominant group within anti-colonial resistance. Former PLO activist Yezid Sayigh argued 1997 in Armed Struggle and the Search for State that this was also happening in the Palestinian liberation movement.

Such power structures often revolve around individual commanders who act to the benefit of their crony supporters. Resistance movements normally adopt rough survival strategies and techniques while fighting an oppressive regime. That culture, unfortunately, takes root and is permanently nurtured. In sum, it becomes questionable whether there is a true difference between the political systems they manage to throw out and what they establish in their place.

In May 1990 Albie Sachs had already spoken of this trend in respect to South Africa. In a lecture at the University of the Western Cape, this South African lawyer, who was crippled by a parcel bomb in Mozambique during his 24-year exile, expressed his doubts about ANC activists being ready for freedom. He worried about the habits they had cultivated. As Sachs put it, the culture and discipline of resistance may have served a survival strategy in the underground, but these skills were certainly not those of free citizens.

Maybe this is why Nelson Mandela became a global icon in his lifetime; the many years he spent in prison kept him away from the daily intrigues and power plays prevalent in an organised liberation movement. Mandela preserved a spirit of human compassion and tolerance that a life of struggle and exile might not have afforded him.

This may sound cynical but might be close to reality. Jacob Zuma, a product of the struggle, cultivates a ‘Zulu warrior culture’. He emerged as a populist alternative to the more intellectual, somewhat aloof Thabo Mbeki, and will probably soon be South Africa’s next president. Zuma has an international reputation for various allegations of corruption, charges of sexual abuse and martial rhetoric (his favourite song is ‘Bring me my machine gun’).

Disappointed by the limits of the liberation they have experienced, many people are looking for substitute saviours. Fortunately, the number of those for whom fundamental values of democracy, liberty and human rights matter more than submissive loyalty to an organisation is growing.

Raymond Suttner is an example. He used to operate underground in South Africa as a member of the ANC, and spent years in solitary confinement as a political prisoner. As a member of parliament and later as ambassador, he represented the ANC government before returning to the academic world from which he originated. In November 2005, he pointed out that ANC ideology and rhetoric do not distinguish between the liberation movement and the people. He thus argues that the liberation movement is a prototype of a state within the state, one that sees itself as the only legitimate source of power.

‘END OF HISTORY’

As we now know, post-colonial life looks a lot like the colonial era did in respect to day-to-day life, the reason being that socialisation factors and attitudes from armed struggle have largely shaped the new political leaders’ understanding of politics, and their idea of how to wield power.

In governmental office, liberation movements tend to mark an ‘end of history’. Any political alternative that does not emerge from within them will not be acceptable. This attitude explains the strong sense of camaraderie between the Mugabe regime and the governments of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa over many years. Typcially, any political alternative cropping up in these countries as a result of disillusionment with post-colonial life will be discredited as part of an imperialist conspiracy designed to sabotage national independence.

These governments never seem to even consider the possibility that their own shortcomings may be the reason why opposition forces are becoming stronger. Instead, they only think along the militaristic dichotomy of friend/foe, leaving no legitimate alternative to their own hegemony.

At the same time, the sad truth is that the opposition forces that do stand up against such governments tend to only add to the problem, rather than to provide a solution. All too often, they only want to share the spoils of the state apparatus and its bureaucracy among their cronies once they are strong enough to constitute a true power option. Again, the relevant categories of thought are only winners and losers.

Democracy however is about something completely different: compromise, and even the search for consensus, in pursuit of the public good. To achieve that, one does not need military mindsets, but rather a broad political debate.

* Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden. This text was published first in Development and Cooperation, October 2008.

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

How many of the following 20 social justice questions can you answer...correctly?

Social justice, as defined by John Rawls, respects basic individual liberty and economic improvement. But social justice also insists that liberty, opportunity, income, wealth and the other social bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to everyone's advantage and any inequalities are arranged so they are open to all. Therefore, we must educate ourselves and others about how liberty, opportunity, income and wealth are actually distributed in our country and in our world.

1. How many deaths are there world-wide each year due to acts of terrorism?

2. How many deaths are there world-wide each day due to poverty and malnutrition?

3. 1n 1965, CEOs in major companies made 24 times more than the average worker. In 1980, CEOs made 40 times more than the average worker. In 2007, CEOs earned how many times more than the average worker?

4. In how many of the over 3000 cities and counties in the US can a full-time worker who earns minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment?

5. In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.65 per hour. How much would the minimum wage be today if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968?

6. True or false? People in the United States spend nearly twice as much on pet food as the US government spends on aid to help foreign countries.

7. How many people in the world live on $2 a day or less?

8. How many people in the world do not have electricity?

9. People in the US consume 42 kilograms of meat per person per year. How much meat and grain do people in India and China eat?

10. How many cars does China have for every 1000 drivers? India? The U.S.? 11. How much grain is needed to fill a SUV tank with ethanol?

12. According to the Wall Street Journal, the richest 1% of Americans earns what percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income? 5%? 10%? 15%? 20%?

13. How many people does our government say are homeless in the US on any given day?

14. What percentage of people in homeless shelters are children?

15. How many veterans are homeless on any given night?

16. The military budget of the United States in 2008 is the largest in the world at $623 billion per year. How much larger is the US military budget than that of China, the second largest in the world?

17. The US military budget is larger than how many of the countries of the rest of the world combined?

18. Over the 28 year history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. How many people have died in the last 4 years trying to cross the border between Arizona and Mexico?

19. India is ranked second in the world in gun ownership with 4 guns per 100 people. China is third with 3 firearms per 100 people. Which country is first and how many guns do they own?

20. What country leads the world in the incarceration of its citizens?

No single person or institution has a monopoly of solutions to Africa’s development challenges. What is worse, ‘business as usual’ has not helped Africa in the last 40 years and is not going to help Africa in the foreseeable generation unless we change our way of thinking. We need to ‘think outside the box’ for new ideas, argues FW Kwoba

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride down the troughs of capitalism and up the peaks of radical social activism. Glancing around the world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual.

First, look to Wall Street where Monday's stock market crash was worse than any since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and where one investment bank after the other faces ruin or bale-out – three of the USA’s five largest flushed down the toilet.

Fourteen years ago, these same New York financiers put extreme pressure on Nelson Mandela’s new African National Congress government (a time I worked in his reconstruction and development program ministry and saw first hand). Mandela was defeated by neoliberal strategies - nicknamed ‘Freedom next Time’ and ‘Shock Doctrine’ by John Pilger and Naomi Klein, respectively, in their excellent South Africa chapters in recent books.

This book is about a little known branch of the African Diaspora—Afro-Mexicans. It discusses their conditions of arrival and establishment in Mexico within the context of Spanish colonialism, and the race-based socio-economic hierarchy known as sistema de castas which provided a basis for the contemporary socioracial terms that are the focus of the main study: indio, blanco, negro and moreno. Today, these terms are used ubiquitously in variable ways as tags of social identity in Mexican discourse. An ethnographic sketch of a representative Afro-Mexican community located in the state of Guerrero then provides a setting for the analysis of their contemporary uses. These are then tied to concepts of “race” and identity in Mexico, all within the wider context of modern global Diaspora formations.

There are indications that after so many false starts, grand standing, braggadocio and unrealistic demands, both sides in the Zimbabwe conflict are finally negotiating genuinely and a deal may be reached soon. It will be a tribute to the much criticised President Thabo Mbeki's tenacity but also a final realisation by the hawks on both sides that neither can finish the other without finishing the country.

One recalls a statement I made at a public meeting in Harare in 2000 soon after the unexpected defeat of Mugabe and ZANU PF in the referendum on the constitution. The Public Forum at Hotel Monomopata was organised by SARIPS (a formidable institute then, under the leadership of Prof Sam Moyo). The CDD Observer Group was led by Former President of Liberia, Prof Amos Sawyer, who also spoke at the forum. One of the speakers, Dr Ibbo Mandaza was booed because of his pro-Zanu PF stance.

My key contribution in that Forum was that the government was not prepared for defeat while the opposition was not prepared for victory. My conclusion was based on extensive conversations we had with different groups and leading figures on both sides. When we met Prof Jonathan Moyo, one of the key figures propelling the government proposals, at his Sheraton residence and office the day before the referendum, I asked him what will happen if they were defeated. His answer was that there was no way they could be defeated and if it happened, there was going to be chaos. When the delegation met Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, the same day, his response when I asked him what would happen if they won, was that there was no way Mugabe would allow it. He was convinced that the government would jail all opposition leaders.

The first edition of this publication was based on the proceedings of the 17th All African Students’ Conference (AASC) held in 2005 in Windhoek, Namibia, which series began in 1988. It covered the major issues arising for the unity movement from the 2005 conference, with diverse contributions from a broad range of participants, including a head of state, the head of a liberation movement, youth, students and various other concerned social groups and individuals.

The first Pan African Leadership Forum (PAYLF) was convened in Accra Ghana 2007. The week-long, international event, held in Accra from June 18-25, 2007 brought together a diverse group of some of the continent’s brightest young leaders and afforded them the unique opportunity to offer their expertise in addressing key issues relevant to the youth, democracy, and development. The international forum was organized by Friends of Africa International (FAI), an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting human rights, democracy, good governance and social justice in Africa.

The 6th Pan-African Reading for All Conference will be held August 10–14, 2009 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This conference is held every two years in a different African country and involves educators from all levels and from at least two dozen African nations. International participants are encouraged to take part in this powerful experience both to meet and learn from African educators and to develop partnerships which benefit both Africans and non-Africans, and which can lead to breakthroughs in education. Program proposals are being accepted until December 31, 2008.

It was August 7, 1998. Suicide bombers exploded 700 kilos of TNT in a truck outside of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The bomb blast ended the lives of 257 people, injured 6,000, and destroyed a fragile peace in a bustling city. At the same time, another explosion rocked the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A little-known terrorist network named al Qaeda organized the attacks, led by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.

Ten years later, the survivors and the victims’ families continue to mourn and to seek justice. Last Thursday, Kenyans from all walks of life gathered at the site of the blast in Nairobi, to remember the dead and to call for greater vigilance. The site has been transformed into the “August 7 Memorial Park” with monuments and gardens and trees. Once called “Ground Zero,” a site of terror and pain, it is now a place of respite, a green corner in a busy city. A granite memorial wall bears the names of the 257 dead, including 12 Americans.

Modern African literature was the child of a renaissance. The roots are to be found in the movement of revendication that began from Olaudah Equiano’s 18th century literary activism, to the work done in the Harlem renaissance in the early years of the 20th century, particularly embodied by two eponymous figures of that movement: the Jamaican Claude McKay, tortured and alienated, and the African-American, Langston Hughes, first discovering his roots on a difficult train-ride from Mexico, and by which he resolved his conundrum through an embrace of Africa. He sang, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Not for him the ambiguity or ambivalence of a Countee Cullen, who asks in a very laden tone, or in the pregnant rhetoric, “What is Africa to me?” Like Claude McKay’s Banjo, Langston Hughes The Weary Blues belted a jazzy affirmation of his debts both to sundered memory, and to the same blood that flows through the veins and rivers of Africa and its humanity. These two became the crossborder figures that helped to animate the conscious movement of ideas, that led Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor, and of course Alioune Diop, to construct “negritude” as a conscious act of self-reclamation: the bold and auspicious move to retrieve, from the cemetery of French assimilation, the identity of the African and the disaporadic scattering, wherever the spirit of the race found new fertile moorings: from the American South to Haiti; from Harlem to Martinique; from Cartegena, Colombia, to Havana, Cuba, and so on as so forth.

From the inspiration of negritude and the work of Presence Africaine, just at the cusp of decolonization, emerged the Black Orpheus magazine of the German-Yoruba, Ulli Beier, and the Mbari movement in Ibadan from 1957; and in 1961, the Transition magazine, published by that Indian Rajat Neogy, all inspired by the African possibility – a moment of renaissance, foregrounded by the inspiring work of the great African icons of pan-Africanism in the 20th century: Nnamdi Azikiwe, George Padmore, I. Akunna Wallace-Johnson, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda - such eponymous figures of modern African history, who dreamed, however the limitations of their later abilities, of a great African century; a century which Spengler had predicted belonged to Africa, given the enui of Europe exhausted by war and by its own linear modernity.

I love to travel. I enjoy visiting distant and new places and learning about new cultures. Of late, however, I have developed a dread for travel not because of a latent fear of traveling by air or road, but more so on account of my strong objection to the increasingly degrading treatment travelers, especially from the global south, are subjected to at embassies and in both northern and southern ports.

My primary objection lies with the fact that the traveler today is subjected to gross violations of his or her privacy and personal rights, demands and practices which a few years ago would have attracted wide condemnation from different quarters. The War on Terror, as well as the desire of western nations to keep migrants (and visitors) from the global south out of northern borders has meant that the civil liberties of populations, especially from the global South wishing to visit the North, are disregarded and even abused.

Malawi’s media diversity continues to grow and vary especially in radio broadcast, a sharp contrast to the previous trend in the first ten years of multiparty politics where newspaper business mushroomed with down-market tabloid papers like the Democrat, the Chronicle, the Dispatch, the Generation and others making in roads and establishing themselves for critical reading.

And as the Daily Times, Malawi News, and the Nation took a traditional and sober stand, other papers in the likes of the National Agenda, the People’s Eye, the Malawian, the Times, the Sun established themselves as either anti government or anti opposition spewing venom at opponents without regard to fairness, truth and balance – the basic tenets of professional journalism practice.

On the broadcast spectrum, the country has witnessed a boom in radio broadcast and prides itself with three broadcast stations (Malawi Broadcasting Corporation Radio one and two and Television Malawi). There are three private radio stations (Zodiak Broadcasting Station, Capital FM Radio, and Radio 101 FM) and 13 community radio broadcasters.

Japan's relations with Africa date back to the 1600s, but since 1993 it has formalised its engagement with Africa through the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). In May 2008 Japan hosted TICAD IV within 2 months of the G8 summit, with the intention of feeding the outcomes of one into the other. The Africa Programme produced a pre-summit report on Japan-African engagement, together with a report on an international conference held at Chatham House to discuss the outcomes of TICAD IV and the G8 summit agenda.

I was born and brought up in a predominantly Muslim community but the best schools around were fee paying Christian missionary schools. Our parents were ambitious enough for us that they had no hesitation about paying (government Schools were free) to get us into these schools. They were strong enough in their faith to trust that we were there 'for their knowledge not their God.’ And so it was. I can recall only one Muslim pupil converting to Christianity for all the years that the school was run by the Baptist Missionaries.

By the time we finished our primary education, the school had become majority Muslim and taken over by the State government and renamed Shehu Primary School.

In those days there was a clear distinction between kids exclusively going to Quranic Schools (Almajirai) and those of us either going only to ‘western’ schools or a combination of both. The Almajirai were often children living far away from their homes having been sent away to seek Islamic knowledge and upbringing by their faithful parents - a decision usually reached by the fathers. But those of us ‘Yan boko’ (pupils in state or missionary schools) generally lived with our parents/guardians. We went to school during the day and returned to the warmth and security of our homes in the afternoon. Quranic schools would then be open in the afternoon during school days and morning and evening during weekends.

The Quranic schools were private initiatives designed to ensure that the student learned the whole of the 114 chapters of the Quran by heart. This was in turn followed by going further into the religion as a knowledge system including learning the Arabic language. Unfortunately for many of us 'yan makarantan boko' the higher you climbed up the western educational ladder the less likely you were to return to the Quranic schools. So you got into the incongruous situation of knowing the Quran or parts of it by heart without actually knowing the Arabic language. Our knowledge was thus short-circuited through the interpretations by Mallams and Sheiks (teachers and learned Scholars).