The problem with healthcare in Haiti is that there is no system, no structures, no plan - at least not one that has been implemented. The healthcare facilities are wholly inadequate

INTRODUCTION

This statement was delivered at a public education forum organized in response to a comment made Dr. Rinaldo Walcott who was one of the panelists at the event.

Rinaldo Walcott is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. His areas of specialization are cultural studies and cultural theory; queer and gender theory, and transnational and diaspora studies. He is the author of Black like Who?: Writing Black Canada and the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. (See )

THE STATEMENT

The Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity (NPAS) called this public education event because we believe that identity matters. As Afrikan people, our individual and collective identities are consequences of our history.

We cannot speak of Afrikan history without speaking of the ways in which the Western/colonial world has tried to interrupt it. For this reason, topics of enslavement and ongoing colonial violence remain heated discussions. Tonight, we encourage fruitful discussions on these things in relation to how we understand ourselves as Afrikan people. We also want to share NPAS’ vision of Afrikan identity and struggle.

We believe that as Afrikan people, our identities matter because they are shaped by rich naming practices, creation stories, ethics, relation to the land and traditions of liberatory struggle, resistance and celebration and revolution.

Our identities matter because they reach across the oceans and borders that separate us to find a global oneness. Our identities matter because out of diversities in sexuality, gender, gender identities, ethnicity, age, producer class status and ability. We remain a single people.

Our identities matter because they continue to survive and facilitate the lives and experiences, as well as organizations and liberatory strategies and tactics, which we build in opposition to and that imagine and move beyond the violence inflicted by enslavement, genocide, global colonialism or imperialism and capitalism.

Our identities matter because our history expresses a tendency towards and necessitates anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-heterosexist politics.

Lastly, our identities matter because, being shaped by the present world and the foundation of the past, they have equipped us with the insight, courage, inspiration and imagination necessary to create the liberated and just future.

NPAS asserts that our identity as Afrikan people informs our histories of liberatory struggle, resistance, survival and achievement. In the present stage of the struggle, we view the parallel institutions of enslavement and colonial genocide as running counter to our transformative conceptions of the world. These institutions have attempted to divide our people; to sever us from our Indigenous homelands and values; to make us ashamed of our Afrikaness ; and to instigate internal violence and rivalries.

But these institutions of domination have also offered us instructive lessons. From enslavement and genocide we’ve learned that a world shaped by white supremacy, labour theft and exploitation, sexual violence, environmental warfare, and state violence is one that seeks to destroy us and the broader humanity. Therefore, we stand in permanent opposition to this world. We continue to survive in spite of the forces that oppress us. We strive to recognize and resist all forms of oppression, including those in which we remain complicit.

We endeavour to root our identities within the legacy of revolutionary ancestors, histories, people, and ideologies. The preceding approach to liberation will ensure our active, careful[3], and successful resistance to and healing from colonialism, capitalism, white supremacist doctrine, and all forces of oppression that disconnect us from our personhood.

In short, if who we are is Afrikan people, then what we want is the full and complete emancipation of our people - a liberation that necessitates and entails the liberation of all peoples. This orientation is the foundation for both the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity and the approach to Pan-Afrikanism through which we continue to organize, resist, and reaffirm our value as Afrikan people.

END NOTES

[1] Delivered at the “Who am I? What am I doing?: Identity, Pan-Afrikanism and White Domination” public forum at the University of Toronto (Canada) on January 19, 2013.

[2] Members of the working-class and peasantry and the revolutionary petty bourgeois who have committed Cabralian class suicide and become one with the people.

[3] Not simply in the sense of 'cautious/prudent', but also in the sense of 'with care' - it is absolutely indispensable that we strive to learn to care deeply enough about liberation to live for it, whether or not we're ready yet to talk about those things and people we're willing to die for. we'll die someday anyway, and until then there's work to do.

Malawi has gone from bountiful maize crops to renewed uncertainty: Strong, democratic leadership and sound policies are essential for ensuring food security

The new health extension worker programme has been successfully implemented in several countries and its supporters are optimistic that it will help Namibia fill gaps in its over-stretched health system.

African civil society organistions are calling for an immediate and complete ban on the growing, importing and exporting of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on the African continent. 'We call upon the governments of Africa to take the necessary steps to protect the health of their populations by supporting this call and commit to conducting independent and authoritative long-term food safety studies.' A petition can be signed online.

More than 3.5 million people in Sudan's conflict-plagued Darfur region will be vaccinated against yellow fever which is suspected of killing nearly 100 people in the past seven weeks, officials said. '(The) vaccination plan has been finalised and will cover vaccination of approximately 3.6 million,' said a joint report from the UN's World Health Organisation and Sudan's health ministry. A WHO official earlier told AFP the inoculations could possibly begin by early December, after reconfirmation of the diagnosis from a laboratory in Senegal.

With South Africa still reeling from mining sector strikes in Marikana, Cosatu has called for nationwide stay-way in the agriculture sector in support of farmworkers in De Doorns who today entered their second week of striking for higher wages. Passop’s organiser in De Doorns, Owen Maromo, said none of the striking farmworkers reported to work. He said about 5,000 strikers had gathered on an open field in the Stofland informal settlement waiting for Cosatu provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich to address them.

African leaders were criticised for failing to prioritise immunisation with life-saving vaccines for children under five years of age to prevent deadly infectious diseases. Delegates and speakers at the International African Vaccinology Conference in Cape Town said there was little political will among African leaders who were out of touch with the needs of their communities. They also agreed that more pressure must be put on African countries to develop and produce their own vaccines to drive prices down and meet demands.

Researchers unveiling critical trial results of a potentially major anti-malaria vaccine are expressing disappointment that the drug’s efficacy levels have proved lower than they had anticipated. Following on decades of research, the third phase of testing on a vaccine known as RTS,S found that the drug reduced malaria rates among infants (age six to 12 weeks) by about a third, far lower than expected. The study, funded largely by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is part of the largest malaria trial ever conducted, taking place in seven African countries.

An estimated 135,000 children are at risk of polio in Somalia’s port city of Kismayo, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Three years ago, Al-Shabab insurgents banned polio vaccination in Kismayo and other parts of central Somalia.

There is a new, but deceptive, foreign drive to end hunger in Africa through large-scale agribusiness. Yet helping poor households in rural Africa feed themselves in an affordable manner means introducing low-cost, sustainable enhancements to farming.

With just over one year left to achieve its target of having some 1.1 million men circumcised as part of HIV-prevention efforts, Kenyan male circumcision programmes are ramping up efforts to bring more men into clinics, compensating them for their time and encouraging them to bring friends in for the procedure.

Incomes have slipped to their lowest level in a decade since Madagascar’s 2009 coup d’etat, and, in parallel, domestic violence has sharply risen. The rising poverty has exacerbated women’s vulnerability in this deeply traditional society. Locals report more domestic conflict over family resources, as well as increased alcohol and drug abuse. Impoverished women also have fewer options to escape violence and are less able to advocate for the safety of themselves and their children.

South Africa grants almost every patent application it receives, making its patent regime one of the world’s most lenient. While pharmaceutical companies cash in, patients face staggering healthcare costs, and medicines like cancer treatments, third-line antiretrovirals (ARVs) and treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) are often priced out of reach. According to activists from Médecins Sans Frontières’s (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines and the South Africa AIDS lobby group the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), easy patents mean companies can extend their exclusive right to manufacture and sell certain drugs, a process known as evergreening.

A large number of clinics and hospitals in the Eastern Cape are experiencing critical medicine shortages and stock outs while surgery and other procedures have virtually grind to a halt due to a wildcat strike by staff at the Mthatha Health Complex (MHC). The strike is affecting over 100 rural clinics and a number of hospitals, with some using their own vehicles to drive to Mthatha in the hope of getting drugs from the medicines depot. Regional hospitals have also reported that referrals for anything from x-rays to surgery has virtually stopped.

Increased agricultural development in Zambia will actually compromise the country’s food security as peasant farmers continue to be driven off their customary land to pave the way for large-scale local and foreign agribusiness, according to the University of Zambia’s dean of the school of agriculture, Dr. Mickey Mwala. 'Smallholder farmers are the people responsible for food security in Zambia. So, evicting them could have a long-term effect on the country’s food security situation, if prolonged and extended,' he told IPS.

Fears are growing over an emerging form of intestinal disease in Africa, to which HIV positive people are particularly vulnerable. Medical experts have expressed concerns that health infrastructures across the continent lack the capacity to detect or cope with the dangerous bacterium. The scientists say that invasive non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) thrives in the blood systems of people in Sub-Saharan Africa whose body immunity is weakened by HIV/AIDS.

Experts have called on governments and development organizations to put in place measures to significantly reduce the amount of food lost in the global food delivery chain. 'The amount of food lost along the food supply chain should be reduced as a way of reducing wastage within the food production system and also as a way dealing with global food insecurity,' Joseph Alcamo, chief scientist at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), told IRIN.

One of the only chances small-scale food producers have to gain competitive access to local and global markets is by banding together in cooperatives, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva told a meeting of the World Cooperatives Congress in Manchester. The International Year of Cooperatives is being observed in 2012. 'Cooperatives follow core values and principles that are critical to doing business in an equitable manner, that seeks to empower and benefits its members and the community it is inserted in,' Graziano da Silva said in a keynote speech. 'This is especially relevant in poor rural communities, where joining forces is central to promoting sustainable local development.'

The Kimberley Certification Process (KP) was ostensibly designed to keep 'blood diamonds' off global markets. Not only has it failed to do so, but it is actively promoting the human rights atrocities it pledged to wipe out. At least that's the view of Khadife Sharife and Nick Meynen expressed in a strident denunciation of the KP published on 15th October 2012. Sharife and Meynen also claim that the world's largest purveyor of diamonds, De Beers, actively corrupted the application of the Kimberley Process to Angola, at a time when De Beers was majority-owned by Anglo American.