Productivity among workers in the private sector who receive antiretroviral therapy through employee health schemes may not always return to pre-illness levels, according to findings from Kenya. Jonathan Simon of Boston University told the HIV Implementers’ Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, that companies may have to look at earlier initiation of treatment if they want to see workers return to full productivity.

China has granted Guinea Bissau a donation of US$4 million, as part of a protocol for financial support signed Thursday in Bissau between the two countries. The funding is to help the Guinean government to overcome its budgetary difficulties, which have made it impossible to pay the salaries of public workers, with the protocol having been by the Guinean Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maria da Conceição Nobre Cabral, and by China’s ambassador in Bissau, Yan Ban Ghua.

Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan and his Zambian counterpart George Mpombo agreed Wednesday to further expand cooperation between the two countries' armed forces. In his talks with Mpombo, Cao said the people of China and Zambia enjoy a traditional friendship and support each other. Since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the two countries have conducted fruitful cooperation in the political, economic, cultural and other fields.

As part of its Knowledge Building and Mentoring Programme, the Conflict, Security and Development Group (CSDG) at King’s College London in collaboration with the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), is pleased to announce a call for applications for the MA Studentships and Mentoring Programme 2007-8.

The Centre for Democracy & Development (CDD) is seeking an administration volunteer/intern to work in the organisation’s International Office in London to cover expanding demands on current staff. There is a possibility for future part-time paid employment as administrator. Deadline for applictions is 20 July 2007.

Acknowledged as an excellent way of “getting information across” and supporting those who need to “learn as they do’”, the All In Diary is an innovative and practical tool developed to support humanitarian workers. Within a personal organizer, it incorporates customized diary pages to plan and record activities, and log notes and information for on-going evaluation, organizational learning and effective staff handover. It also provides essential pointers on 50 topics related to good humanitarian practice, plus additional CD and web-based tools and resources in relation to each topic.

The world is facing urgent and complex problems which are global in their nature and thus beyond the capability of national governments to solve alone. How can foundations contribute to solving these problems? This article by Peter Laugharn, appearing in the June issue of Alliance magazine looks at the current state of international funding and makes a number of proposals aimed at helping foundations make a more significant contribution.

The Africa-America Institute, a New York City nonprofit organization with African tertiary education and professional training mission seeks a Program Assistant, African Higher Education and Training (AHET). The Program Assistant (AHET) is involved in a wide range of activities that support the placement and monitoring of individual and group participant training and scholarship programs administered by AAI. The Program Assistant supports the Program Officer with administrative and clerical duties.

Interview of Dr. Martyn Davies, director of the Centre for Chinese Studies, at the World Mining Investment Congress on the subject of China's increasing attempts to cut out the middleman and source metals directly from Africa.

Become an essential part of a growing, dynamic organization. ACTION for Conflict Transformation (ACTION) is a global network of grassroots peace builders with a Support Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. Closing date for applications: 26th of June 2007. Interview will be held on the 1st week of July.

World Bank presidential nominee Robert Zoellick would try to get China to listen to western concerns that it was exploiting investment opportunities in Africa while ignoring corruption in the region, he said yesterday. China has used its economic weight to invest in Africa, but has drawn criticism from western aid groups that it fosters misrule by failing to demand accountability.

Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, a dual citizen of the United States and Iran and an internationally-respected scholar, social scientist, and urban planner, was arrested and imprisoned in Iran on May 11, 2007. Along with several other Iranian-American scholars, Dr. Tajbakhsh has been charged with acting against national security and espionage.

The Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8) agreed to allocate 60 billion dollars in new aid to Africa in "the coming years", to beef up the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and to improve primary education across the continent. But the summit of the heads of government of the G8 failed to satisfy its own commitment, made at the 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, of doubling aid to Africa by 2010.

PLATFORM is looking for a Project Co-ordinator for the Remember Saro-Wiwa project, working to drive forward this unique initiative that combines the arts, human rights and the environment. Deadline for applications is 6pm Thursday 21st June 2007.

Rich countries' pledges of more aid to Africa are undermined by the lack of a delivery timetable which prevents the world's poorest nations from planning development, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday. Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, director of the IMF's Africa department, welcomed the $60 billion pledged last week in Germany by leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/308/katemost-blackedup_41974.j…, 'the continent of terra incognito was, and continues to be, constructed as "nothing" and corpulent darkness'. Annwen Bates on the visual representations of the spectacle of aid in Africa.

You are a celebrity humanitarian and guest-editor of a well-circulated glossy. The territory is Africa. The topic is staving its demise. In the 1980s this would have been a famine. Today it is poverty and HIV/Aids. Readers will judge your cause by the cover, so select the visuals with care. What will you choose: an outline of an uninhibited continent, an abandoned toddler or a panic-eyed, skeletal mother clutching her dying baby? Do not feel limited by this empty outline of the place and its people, the abandoned children and wilting women. They are quite interchangeable, even mix'n matchable. Just this morning, I read about Bob Geldof’s recent guest-editorial of the German magazine Bild. Online, I found an image of the cover: a skeletal creature that looks more alien than human, crying out, in a silent Munch-like scream, for help. A white outline of the continent frames the child - just in case the reader is at a loss of the child’s origin. Here is the innocent victim, says the ‘chalk’ outline. This is the latest tragic embodiment of Africa’s lack. As I listened to this tale of human woe, I heard the name recur with frightening frequency.

Africa! Africa! Africa! (Thabo Mbeki). Lack has been Africa’s crime for centuries. The continent of terra incognito was, and continues to be, constructed as ‘nothing’ and corpulent darkness. What is of particular interest is the visual representations of this mythology of lack. During the colonial project, Africa's nothingness was the absence of Christianity, science, education, medicine and civility. Today, indeed for the last 30 or 40 years, nothingness is the darkness of disease, civil war, disorganisation, corruption and an inevitable decline into apocalyptic demise. (Africa has been in this state of demise for the last 400 years or thereabouts.)

Visual historian Deborah Kaspin suggests, like many who have studied representations of the continent, that the pervading standardised images of Africa are not fundamentally of Africa at all. Rather they 'arise from a Western bourgeois mythology of any and all wilderness, inhabited by creatures who are, alternatively, innocent and savage, naked and hairy, dark-skinned and ghostlike. The mythology is ubiquitous'.

Consider the child of Geldof's cover. Innocent in its form of child, yet savage as the embodiment of a ravaging disease mixed with poverty. Vulnerable in nakedness, but strangely inhuman. The child is dark-skinned, but also vanishes ghostlike into its own skeleton. Captured for posterity in a photograph, it is saved from its own terra incognito African wilderness to become the poster child of Geldof's cause. 'Postcolonial imagery presents the Third World as spectacle', writes image scholar Jan Nederveen Pieterse.

The Bild magazine cover is an example of a genealogy of the spectacle of Africa, which extends as far back as ethnographic and anthropological photography, as well as the trade and progress exhibitions of the 19th century, such as the Grand Exhibition of 1851 in London. Professor Annie Coombes writes in Reinventing Africa, the live subjects were set up in tableaux with 'authentic' huts, clothes (or lack thereof) and, at set times, performed 'authentic' activities, such as hunting. The German word Bild, means picture, and has an added meaning from theatre, scene. Uncanny that the image is also a scene. The spectacle of Africa is photograph and production still from the tableau of 'authentic' Africa and Africans readying themselves to be played out.

Granted, in this continent of 53 countries there are problems which cannot just be waved away as false naming. Even thinking of the image staves my typing. How dare I write in the sight and deafening appeal of another human being? Problems are the dilemma of our world, not just of Africa. Yet, it is curious that Western myths about their potency and power over Africa's primitive incompetence persist in 2007. Is Africa, the place and the people, concealed by the suggested false delineation?

Perhaps it is helpful to think of false in connection with the word's origin falsus, as related to 'fail'. Africa (I still want to question this blanket geographic label 'Africa' and its use for everything from place to people) is left with a deceitful or unfaithful cartography, portraiture and name. Why? Most of the colonial empires made fat on these myths collapsed, we believe, more than 30 years ago. Much post-colonial theory suggests the condition of Other-ing. Historians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, cultural theorists suggest that to assert self, one must stand in opposition to an Other.

For white, bourgeois, educated European males of late 18th through to the 20th century, this was the black, uneducated African woman who, by virtue of her primitivism, existed in some ahistorical moment, most definitely not that contemporary moment in time. 'The image formation of outsiders is determined primarily by the dynamics of one’s own circle' (Pieterse). Of colonial project representations of Africa and Africans, he observes, '[w]hat was really at stake in all these perspectives on "the savage" was European positions and programmes'.

In 2007, an age filtered by the lenses of post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism and the general questioning of white, bourgeois, educated European male supremacy, it is interesting that those who embody their Otherness are once again on all sorts of pages. From women selling chocolate in fair trade advertisements to Aids orphans abandoned in fields, what do these images potentially reveal about European positions and programmes?

Lack, ahistoricity, references in setting an arcadia rendered anarchic hint at a world so different to the wealthy, 21st century, urban world of those on the other side of this paper-thin reality. At the end of his study Pieterse concludes, 'The images of aid to the Third World are variations on this formula; fundamentally patronising, they are ahistorical, preoccupied with symptoms and oblivious to causes, and, not for all their global scope, parochial'. Why is post-independence Africa still newsworthy and cause-worthy to European humanitarian crusaders?

Paula Treichler offers Aids in the Africa (the Third World) as the 'latest incarnation of the "darkly unknowable"'. This is neo-colonialism with intrepid explorers. However instead of searching for the source of the Nile, they seek to bring the universals of health and material justice. For 'Europe is the light of the world, and the ark of knowledge: upon the welfare of Europe hangs the destiny of the most remote and savage (sic) people'. Let us replace 'savage' with words that have more currency in 2007; words like uneducated, oppressed or suffering. The words from the Edinburgh Review seem to belong not in the early 1800s, but could be on Bild page today. Geldof's partner in making poverty history is U2's Bono. He is to guest-edit the July edition of the magazine Vanity Fair (the US edition). It will be interesting to see the 'Africa in 2007' that he covers. It may include articles about cellphone entrepeneurs, print media franchises, tertiary research, but I suspect it is more likely to be yet another programme for the ever continuing show: Africa: the lacking continent.

References
Kaspin, Deborah, 2002, Conclusion: Signifying Power in Africa. In Landau, P.S. And Kaspin, D.D.
Images and Empire: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Mbeki, Thabo., 2002, Africa: Define Yourself. Cape Town, Tafelberg.
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 1992, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. London, Yale University Press.
Treichler, P.A., 1999, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicle of AIDS and HIV Infection in the Third World. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press.

Links:
http://www.africacentre.org.uk/+ve-ve.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2d9qkc

* Annwen Bates is a research student at the University of Western Cape.

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

This is the second of a two-volume work taking stock of the study of Africa in the 21st century: its status, research agenda and approaches, and place. The volume is divided into two parts, the first entitled Globalisation Studies and African Studies, and the second, African Studies in Regional Contexts.

Topics considered include: African and area studies in France, the US, the UK, Australia, Germany and Sweden; anti-colonialism and Russian/soviet African studies; African studies in the Caribbean in historical perspective; the teaching of African history and the history of Africa in Brazil; African studies in India; African studies and historiography in China in the 21st century; and African studies and contemporary scholarship in Japan.

'This two-volume collection…establishes entirely new parameters for Africanist scholarship…[it is] interested in answering the question: What is Africa's place in the world today'– Ato Quayson, professor of English and director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto, Canada.

ISBN: 978-2-86978-198-6, 416pp., publ. 2007
Africa: 35.00 USD; CFA 17,000; elsewhere: US$49.95/GBP39.95

Orders:
Africa -
North America - www.africanbookscollective.com

When the world's wealthiest nations meet at the G-8 summit in Germany this week, aid workers plan to remind them that education pledges they made to children--the majority of them girls--are not being met in the world's worst conflict zones.

Amnesty International has warned that the internet "could change beyond all recognition" unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms. The warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights. The "virus of internet repression" has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group. Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

Long seen as funding the continent's wars and doing little other than seeking out petroleum and mineral resources, Russia is now looking to kick-start better trade relations with Africa, and has made its first move by writing off the majority of the continent's debt.