A meeting of the members of the Indian Ocean Commission in Addis Ababa last week decided to give the go-ahead to connect their island-members by fibre to each other and the rest of the world. The connecting cable would be available on non-discriminatory terms and under a low-cost, high volume regime. The project has its origins in a consultants’ study started in mid 2007 and completed at the end of last year. The study looked at the likely demand from the different island members and the technical and financial feasibility of the project.

China’s global expansion is much talked about, but usually from the viewpoint of the West. This unique collection of essays, written by scholars and activists from China and the global South, provides diverse views on the challenges faced by Africa, Latin America and Asia as a result of China’s rise as a significant global economic power. Chinese aid, trade and investments – driven by the needs of its own economy – present both threats and opportunities for the South, requiring a nuanced analysis that goes beyond simplistic caricatures of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

China’s engagement cannot be understood independently of the imperial expansion of the US in the global economy. ‘Chinese production and American consumption,’ writes Walden Bello, ‘are like the proverbial prisoners who seek to break free from one another but cannot because they are chained together. This relationship is progressively taking the form of a vicious cycle.’

Arising from a conference held in Shanghai in May 2007, when the African Development Bank was also meeting in that city, this book provides a fresh perspective that focuses on the economic, social and environmental impact of China’s expansion. It represents the first attempt to establish a dialogue between civil society in China and the global south.

The contributors include Dorothy-Grace Guerrero, Walden Bello, Luk Tak Chuen, Shalmali Guttal, Yu Xiaogang, Ding Pin, Xu Weizhong, Dot Keet, Barry Sautman, Yan Hairong, Lucy Corkin, Ali Askouri, Yuza Maw Htoon, Khin Zaw Win, Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa, Fu Tao and Peter Bosshard.

Edited by Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji

ISBN: 978-1-906387-26-6 258pp 2008 Fahamu and Focus on the Global South £16.95 / US$33.95

From reviews of Fahamu’s previous book on China, African Perspectives on China in Africa (2007):

‘…a timely book on a subject of critical importance. We should use it to strengthen Africa’s hand in negotiating with China…’
Irungu Houghton, Pan African Policy Advisor, Oxfam GB

‘…the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China.’
London Review of Books

‘anyone interested in economic developments in Africa – and China – will find much useful material here.’
Charlie Hore, Socialist Review

Women for Women International, a non-profit humanitarian organization, seeks submissions for the Fall 2008 issue of its bi-annual academic journal, Critical Half. This issue will focus on global women’s movements and women’s movements globally in various contexts, including politics, women’s rights, social change, religion, and economic endeavors. Women’s movements may be global in their organization or effects, as in the international feminist movement, or they may be global in their concerns but local or ‘grassroots’ in their organization and immediate impact.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) seeks a senior professional to support its external relations strategy in order to strengthen understanding and support for work on gender equality and women's empowerment in the inter-governmental bodies - the UNDP-UNFPA Executive Board and the UN Commission on the Status of Women - and will also support UNIFEM's cooperation with its Consultative Committee. The Advisor will also cover other inter-governmental processes that are relevant to efforts to advance gender equality and women's empowerment. Closing date: March 03, 2008.

The CEDAW South East Asia Programme (CEDAW SEAP) is a programme of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), supported by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The Programme goal is the realization of women's human rights through the more effective CEDAW implementation.The programme seeks a Human Rights Specialist. Closing date: March 03, 2008.

The International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics, iKNOW Politics, is designed to increase the number and effectiveness of women in political life by utilizing a technology enabled forum to provide access to resources, expertise, dialogue, and knowledge creation on women's political participation. iKNOW Politics seeks Network Facilitator: International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics (iKNOW Politics) / UNIFEM / New York, NY, USA. Closing date: February 25, 2008.

The Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies—with support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and co-sponsorship from the Conflict and Human Security Studies Program at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point; the Fletcher Institute for Human Security; the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University; and Synexxus, Inc.—presents a two-day conference, “Countering Terrorism in Africa Through Human Security Solutions” on Thursday, February 28 and Friday, February 29 at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

The Institute has the opportunity to fill alternatively 1 PhD Grant, or 1 postdoctoral Grant Starting May 2008 (negotiable). The grant is to be awarded in the context of the Max Planck Fellow Research Group "Law, Organizations, Science, and Technology" (LOST) headed by Professor Richard Rottenburg (Max Planck Fellow). The current research focus is on "Biomedicine in Africa". Special attention is given to medical practice and argumentation in juridical contexts such as in the control of epidemics, the legitimisation and legalisation of diagnostic and healing practices, intellectual property rights, medical evidence in various forms of courts of justice etc. (for more details see

Edward Ball argues that in addition to a troubled Bush Africa legacy, Bush's family owned slaves

The image most people have of slavery involves a cotton plantation with a big white house, a black village where 300 people live in cabins and a cruel overseer in the wings. This was not the model followed by the ancestors of President George W. Bush when, 175 years ago, they enslaved about 30 people on the shores of the upper Chesapeake.

A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, mentions in passing that at one time some of the president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell on the links between the White House and the antebellum past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held "family secret." The Bush Tragedy, a revealing book about family dynamics in the Bush political dynasty, treats the slavery matter only briefly, focusing instead on the "spectacular, avoidable flame-out" of the receding administration. But the story that joins the 43rd president to predecessors who held title to dozens of people bears retelling in detail.

The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the IllinoisTimes, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.

It's not as though the president is the only politician whose family owned slaves. Of the first eighteen presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses Grant, twelve owned people, eight of them while in office. At one time, Andrew Jackson was even a slave trader. Since Emancipation in 1865, a number of presidents have come from families that once contained slave masters. Even the current presidential hopefuls are likely to have slave owners among their ancestors. The descendants of slaveholders do not wear special tattoos or announce themselves in secret handshakes, but most know who they are.

The tragic story of America's slave days inspires disabling levels of fear among whites and anger among blacks. Probably neither the 43rd president nor his father, the 41st, possesses the introspection needed to grasp the relationship between the Bush family's slaveholding past and its present circumstances without escaping into defensiveness. Still, President Bush has talked about slavery from several microphones, most memorably in a 2003 speech on Gorée Island, one of the "slave castles" in West Africa from which captive youth and children were dispatched to the Americas. Speechwriters likely supplied the words on that occasion when the president said, "slavery was one of the greatest crimes of history." But the words fell short of an accounting by the White House for America's role in the Middle Passage, and they came before the revelation of the Bush family's own link to the slave past.

As for the African Americans in this tale, the Walker family slaves, neither names nor biographical details about them have survived. According to the genealogist who uncovered the records, Robert Hughes, the census accounts show that they lived at four different farms in Cecil County, Maryland, on a string of land called Sassafras Neck, which separates two slender rivers that empty into upper Chesapeake Bay. There, in 1790, William and Sarah Davis, direct ancestors of the president, owned seven people, while another branch of the family owned five. Twenty years later, in 1810, a third couple in the president's ancestral clan were counted as masters to eighteen people. The last appearance of the family as slaveholders of record comes in 1830, when George E. and Harriet Walker, great-great-great grandparents of President George W. Bush, owned 321 acres and two slaves, a female between 10 and 24 and a male between 24 and 36. The namelessness of the slaves is the fault of the so-called slave schedules used in the census, which called for nothing more than approximate ages.

With their small farms, the Walkers and their cousins did not belong to the class of oligarchs, whose vast plantations held scores or hundreds of workers. I've looked, and there were dynasties in Cecil County, places like Cherry Grove, former residence of a Maryland governor, and Mt. Harmon, a vast tobacco estate with a Georgian mansion. The president's forebears probably saw themselves as little people in competition with these fat-cat neighbors.

Still, all slaveholders were also slave traders. The president's family had to avail themselves of a slave auction on at least two occasions: initially, to buy people, and later, when a Walker farm failed, to sell some of the same people, much the way a stockholder liquidates an investment. No story has surfaced about how it happened, but in the mid-1830s, it appears that George E. Walker, the president's third great-grandfather, lost his land. After that, in 1838, he packed his family into a wagon and went west, settling in southern Illinois on a homestead near the town of Bloomington. It is from this branch of migrants that the current Bush clan descends.

Since the Walkers, in effect, declared bankruptcy, and there is no evidence they kept slaves after 1838, it is difficult to follow a money trail from the family's commercial stake in slavery to the White House. However, before he took his family west, it's likely that George Walker sold the people he owned, handing them off to a speculating slave dealer; thereby financing the family's fresh start in Illinois. Things get worse when you contemplate the probable circumstances. In the 1830s, the old tobacco economy of Maryland and Virginia was waning, while the new king, cotton, had caused Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to boom. The tobacco states were selling tens of thousands of slaves to the cotton states, and sending these people south. It is quite possible the Walker slaves were marched 500 miles from Maryland to Alabama to end up on a giant cotton plantation, where the work regime - large crews on vast, unshaded fields - was crueler than the one they'd left behind.

The Walkers eventually quit farming and made a fortune as dry goods wholesalers in Missouri; later, they made another as investment bankers in New York. Nearly all the Bush/Walker family money dates from this more recent period, after the Civil War.

The family, nevertheless, seems to have looked back with nostalgia on their old slave hold. There are two pieces of evidence for this. In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg refers to one of the later patriarchs, David Walker, as "a believer in eugenics and the 'unwritten law' of lynching," and cites as proof a letter Walker published in the St. Louis Republic in 1914. Black people, he wrote at the time, were more insidious than prostitution and "all the other evils combined."

The second piece of evidence is within living memory. In 1930, when they could afford it, the family again embraced the antebellum lifestyle. That year President Bush's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, bought Duncannon plantation, an old cotton estate in South Carolina, to use as a hunting retreat and vacation home. His namesake, George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, spent many youthful vacations on Duncannon, where teams of black cooks, valets, and drivers served him and opened doors when he approached. The Bush heirs no longer own Duncannon plantation; but for a time, the estate provided a version of the baronial life, to which the antebellum Walkers aspired, but never achieved.

The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the past; but in a better world, they would be accountable for that past. They would make an effort to deal with the slave story, talk about it, and try to come to terms with it.

At present the Bush political dynasty seems to be dying in misrule, finished off by a president who, as Weisberg writes, is "driven by family demons, overflowing with confidence, and lacking any capacity for self-knowledge." The Bush clan may not be capable of reckoning personally with the tragic inheritance of the slave days. But this week, on a state visit, the president sets foot in three countries that sent hundreds of thousands of captives to America. Today, some of the tens of millions of descendants of those captives want a White House that is accountable. In West Africa President Bush had a superb opportunity, like one presented to a physician attending a wound. A sound physician would have chosen instinctively to apply medicine, not simply turned away in denial and neglect.

*Edward Ball is the author of Slaves in the Family and, most recently, The Genetic Strand.

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

A new report released on February 13th shows that planting genetically modified (GM) crops is causing an increased use of harmful pesticides in major biotech crop producing countries. The 2008 edition of the Friends of the Earth International “Who Benefits from GM crops?” report series is titled “The Rise in Pesticide Use” and concludes that GM crops on the market today have on the whole caused an increase rather than a decrease in toxic pesticides use, and have failed to tackle hunger and poverty.

The value of trade between China and Africa had increased by 24% to $74 billion between 1995 and 2007 according to figures released by the Trade Law Centre of Southern Africa (Tralac). A researcher at Tralac, Taku Fundira, says Chinese imports from Africa increased by 27% over the review period while Chinese exports to Africa increased slower at 23%. "This resulted in a small trade deficit of $1.1 billion for China with Africa in 2007.

Established in 1978 at Columbia University, the Center for the Study of Human Rights is committed to three core goals of providing excellent human rights education to Columbia students, fostering innovative interdisciplinary academic research, and offering its expertise in capacity building to human rights leaders, organizations, and universities around the world. CSHR is seeking applications for the post of Associate Director.

This new title from James Currey publishers examines the nature and objectives of violence in the region in the 19th century. It is particularly concerned with highland Ethiopia and the Great Lakes. It will be of interest to those interested in pre-colonial African history, military history, and anyone involved in modern development and conflict resolution seeking to understand the deeper historical roots of African warfare.

This new book from James Currey publishers looks at the perceptions of one of the main themes of African history: slavery. There was no single form of slavery and the line between enslaved and non-slave labour was fine. This book challenges the assertion that domestic slavery increased in Africa as the result of the international trade.

After the sun sets on the streets of the Guinean capital, Conakry, children drift by darkened storefronts and settle into nooks between buildings, curling up to sleep on the pavement. Residents in the city told IRIN they had noticed more and more children living on the streets in recent years - children like orphans Abubakar and Alya who have been on the street together for one year.

Developing countries' shares in technology exports are continuing to grow but the digital divide remains, says a UN report released on 6 February. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, 'Science and technology for development: the new paradigm of ICT', explores the role of information communication technology (ICT) in enhancing innovation in developing countries and confirms its influence on development.

These guidelines are designed to help non-governmental organisations to include comprehensive information on the incidence of violence in their reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.. NGOs have a unique role to play and they alone can give meaning to the data and statistics presented to the Committee. It is by making this information available that corrective measures can be identified that will move the NGO community towards its goal of ending violence.

The SEED Initiative is seeking submissions for "The 2008 SEED Awards for Entrepreneurship in Sustainable Development". We welcome innovative ideas from any group in a developing country, which is working in partnership with others to generate environmental and social benefits in an entrepreneurial way. The Award is not a cash prize - but the services offered have a value of US$25,000. The call is open until the 16th March 2008.

The Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF) provides fellowships for established scholars whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. These fellowships permit professors, researchers and other senior academics to find temporary refuge at universities and colleges anywhere in the world, enabling them to pursue their academic work and to continue to share their knowledge with students, colleagues, and the community at large.Application Deadline: January 31st, 2009.

The program has now been finalized for the February 21 – 22 protest. The Global Zimbabwe Forum need to contact as many Zimbabweans as we can reach to come to the demonstration. Please contact by email or by phone as many friends as you can reach.
We need to know by Wednesday next week how many people we can expect at the demonstration.

The following have been tasked with coordinating recruitment efforts:

New York.Fungisai and Alice (516) 967 4613/(646) 577 5289
Pennsylvania Nick Mada (610)2469462 [email][email protected] Stan Mukasa (724) 467 0001 [email][email protected]
Ohio/Michigan Zvidzair Ruzvidzo/Allan Banda Phone :614 622 0427 [email][email protected]
Washington DC "Robson Nyereyemhuka"[email protected]
Indiana Alan Bako (317) 345 2368
Accommodation arrangements are being made byMaswela at [email][email protected] (513) 410 9495
Scheduled speakers for the protest are Ralph Black Handel Mlilo Ruzvidzo Zvidzair Nassar Rusike
The Event MC and also in charge of publicity will be Briggs Bomba
The next conference call will be on Thursday, February 14, starting at 9 p.m.
Conference details:
Number to Call ---: 1-605-475-6000 Access Code---- : 875057# Time----------:9.00PM (Eastern Time)