A leading Zimbabwean human rights activist was seized yesterday by suspected secret police, in the most high level abduction operation yet by President Mugabe’s government. Fifteen armed men in civilian clothing burst into the home of Jestina Mukoko, the executive director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, in the small town of Norton 40km west of Harare at 5am, lawyers said.

In my undergraduate course (Human Rights and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa) at Barnard College, Columbia University, I required students to subscribe to and to read Pambazuka weekly. Occasionally we would discuss the readings in class. It was a real success. I was surprised by the number of students who chose the topics of their research papers on the basis of articles they had read through Pambazuka. My main suggestion would be to try to include more news from West Africa. Best wishes and thanks for making Africa so visible to my students.

A top-ranking official of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF has publicly admitted that Mugabe is merely the “de facto” and not legally the Zimbabwean Head of State. Zimbabwe’s former ambassador to China and a senior Mugabe aide Chris Mutsvangwa conceded Friday that Mugabe can only become Zimbabwe’s legitimate President when the pending Constitutional Amendment 19 Bill is passed into law.

Great piece, Herbert Ross, . The political situation on South Africa (SA) is particularly worrying for me and a lot of other Africans. I saw in SA during Mandela's presidency that we were seeing a model form of Governance that would be an excellent example for the rest of Africa... As here was an African nation, run by Africans with a constitution that was the envy of the world. There would have been no more excuses, I thought, by other African heads of states about "democratic" governance, rule of law etc being an imposition by outsiders.

How they (African dictators) love to winge and whine about these "foreign concepts". Lately I have been very disappointed by what has been happening in SA. First the babaric and heinous crimes committed again other fellow Africans recently and now the chisms within the ANC - the tit for tat child like behaviour we see within the ANC Elite. I am totally embarassed by it!!!!!! Hah!! I was actually fooled to think that something that positive can come out of Africa.

As you rightly said, this is a time for SA to re-examine what had happened and to make sure that safeguards are put in place to prevent it happening again. No !! No !! not for Africans!! they just have to go personal on every thing. Attack and kill if they dont get there way. The new breakaway party is being threatend with violence for deciding to separate and yet I heard no statements of restraint from any of the current leaders. Thabo Mbeki may have had his problems, but thats no reason for the ANC to commit suicide by electing someone with attitudes that makes you think you are in another past century in Africa. No what Africa needs is an electorate that is sophisticated enough to boot out the self serving, unscrupolous, dictators where ever they are.

In addition to writing short stories, John Eppel is also an award-winning poet and novelist. His list of achievements is impressive. His first novel, D.G.G. Berry’s The Great North Road (1992), won the M-Net Prize in South Africa. His second novel, Hatchings (1993), was short-listed for the M-Net Prize and his third novel, The Giraffe Man (1994), has been translated into French. And his first poetry collection, Spoils of War (1989), won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. Other poems have been featured in anthologies that include The Heart in Exile South African Poetry in English 1990-1995 (1996) while his short stories have appeared in anthologies that include Writing Now: More Stories from Zimbabwe (2005).

In a recent interview with , John Eppel spoke about his writing.

Daniel Volman gives us the history and reasons for the creation of Africom, and why it will have disastrous consequences in and for Africa. He looks at Obama's likely support for Africom but also calls on us to engage Obama over the future of Africom.

Thinking through about how the American left has reacted to Obama's election, Amiri Baraka argues that progressives are in danger of being left behind the masses of people who voted for Obama. Arguing that the "task of the revolutionary is to lead the people by taking what they already know and giving it back to them with the focus of the present the past and the future" Baraka calls for a people's democracy through a new democratic coalition.

"It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty," writes Mahmood Mamdani. " ... There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. ... Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe. What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact."

In the wake of Barack Obama’s presidential election victory, Doreen Lwanga considers the state of relations between African-Americans and Africans living in America. The author explores some of the derogatory influences, driven most notably by sections of the Western media, informing negative stereotypes on the part of both black Americans and new Africans, stereotypes that perpetuate misinformed and divisive views within the wider pan-African community. In this historic period of the first election of an individual of African ancestry to the highest seat of US power, Lwanga argues that any residual suspicion and negativity between these two broad groups should give way to lasting solidarity and unity.

Obama represented the best hope for the kind of change that could be achieved through electoral means. This was not merely because he was ‘black,’ but because he was intelligent, calm, organised, and a reassuring campaigner. His victory shows the Left what galvanises popular politics of change. His inauguration, even apart from the historicity of his ‘blackness,’ is being welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the US population as proof of the ‘mystery and majesty’ of electoral democracy. From this the Left needs to learn.

cc. The invitation to guest-edit a special issue of Pambazuka News wasn't something we pondered at AIDS-Free World; it's something we pounced on. We consider Pambazuka a precious commodity: a consistent source of timely, credible, thought-provoking, expectation-defying news and views. Our subscription has helped keep us informed and made us better at what we do, which is to push and prod for more urgent and more effective global responses to AIDS. And so we snatched at the opportunity to be involved in an issue devoted to HIV/AIDS, and our Political Advisor, Gerry Caplan, began working with the Pambazuka staff to solicit articles and essays about the most confounding of the African pandemic's unsolved problems.

The topics covered in this issue aren't naturally uplifting. Whether it's the world's persistent blind spot concerning TB and that disease's morbid attraction to HIV; a seemingly universal ignorance about people with disabilities that places 10 per cent of the human population at heightened risk of contracting the virus; or evidence that Zimbabwe's government orchestrated a campaign of sexual violence for political ends, and will likely do so again while the world stands by, the issues underlying HIV/AIDS are not for the faint of heart.

But in the 18 months since we started AIDS-Free World -- an advocacy organization with a mission to speak up and speak out, to challenge authority and demand responsible leadership, to subject the status quo in AIDS prevention, treatment and care to unflinching critique, to build not only awareness but impatience and outrage over unnecessary suffering -- beyond what has seemed like a mountain of inertia and indifference, we have also glimpsed countless reasons to be hopeful. You will read about some of them in this issue, too. One is the long-awaited recognition by UN member states that the world body has failed women -- not least by allowing worldwide gender inequality to give rise to an explosive AIDS pandemic -- and a current move to create a new UN agency for women. Another is the small but hopeful indication that beneath a surface of machismo, and with the right prodding, significant numbers of men are actually as anxious to be free of the cycles of violence against women as women are themselves.

We wish Pambazuka News continued success as it explores and exposes the issues that present Africa with its AIDS-related trials and triumphs. AIDS-Free World will also keep poking and prodding, unafraid to analyze, assess, critique and take principled stands. We invite you to visit our website at www.aids-freeworld.org, where starting next month, you'll find our 2-minute daily video commentaries on the AIDS-related news of the day. It was a privilege to contribute to Pambazuka's World AIDS Day issue, and it's an honor for AIDS-Free World to count ourselves among this special news service's informed, inquisitive readership.

* Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan are Co-Directors of AIDS-Free World

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

In this paper, Rebecca Hodes and Lesley Odendal address the double scourge HIV/Aids and tuberculosis facing South Africa’s young democracy. They point to a number of factors that have led to the current situation in the country. A combination of political, economic and social factors has led to a rapid spread of HIV, coupled with a growing prevalence of TB. The Treatment Action Campaign has engaged in a battle to tackle the problem by providing health services as well as advocating for policy changes to enable greater access to treatment, thus providing a model for civil society involvement in fighting the health crisis.

Bafana Khumalo spoke at the recently concluded World Aids Conference held in Mexico, outlining the work that Sonke Gender Justice Network has been doing to educate men on issues of gender awareness and sexual health. The organization takes cognizance of the pivotal role played by men in protecting the rights of women. This article reveals the challenges faced by women in South Africa, where the legacy of Apartheid, and negative cultural attitudes all have an impact on the incidence of gender-based violence. The One Man Can campaign seeks to address the problem of gender-based violence by educating and sensitizing men to the rights of women.

Access to HIV testing and antiretrovirals for prevention of mother to child HIV transmission has grown substantially over the past four years in the countries most severely affected by HIV, UN agencies reported today – but around 40% of women in the high prevalence countries of southern Africa are still not being offered an HIV test during pregnancy.

On this twentieth World AIDS Day, we are at the dawn of a new era. Fewer people are being infected with HIV. Fewer people are dying of AIDS. This success owes itself to people all over the world who are taking the lead to stop AIDS. Governments are delivering on their promises to scale up universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. But this is just the beginning. There is no room for complacency. AIDS will not go away any time soon.

Umaru Yar Adua, the Nigerian president, has announced a list of ministerial nominees including a former Opec chief, almost three weeks after sacking half the cabinet. Yar Adua on Tuesday sent the list of 13 nominees to the senate for approval, in order to complete the cabinet reshuffle.

A basic income grant (BIG) is a universal transfer to all those with the right to be in a country (citizens by birth, by naturalisation, or persons with rights of permanent residence). The purpose of this article is to reflect not so much on the basic income grant (BIG) itself, but rather on the reasons why it is unlikely that any other policy can address the problem of mass unemployment and associated poverty in South Africa.

A little while back, we asked who is and isn’t fighting corruption effectively in Africa. This week, a number of examples bring us back to the subject. In Tanzania, two former ministers have been charged with flouting procurement rules over the award of a tender for auditing gold mining back in 2002.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos called on Friday for a new constitution to allow the first presidential poll in almost two decades, a vote he is widely expected to win. Dos Santos, who has ruled the oil-producing African country for 29 years, said the new constitution would make clear whether the president would be elected directly by Angolans or by parliament.

Zimbabwe's political rivals have agreed on a draft constitutional amendment to allow them to form a power-sharing government, but obstacles remain, the opposition said on Friday. On-off talks between President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC have made little progress since they reached a deal in September seen as the best hope of pulling Zimbabwe back from economic collapse.