The United Nations has urged a prominent Darfur rebel leader to join efforts to end the devastation in Sudan’s western region, even though Abdel Wahid Nour, leader of a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, has declared he would not participate in peace talks next month.

Thirty Ethiopian opposition leaders have been pardoned and freed from prison just days after being given life sentences over election protests. Three minibuses have reportedly left the prison while the group's supporters whistled and shouted for joy outside. The group always said the trial was political and refused to enter a plea, leading to the men's conviction.

Although many ordinary shoppers may have bought a few reduced items during the government enforced price controls over the last three weeks, the so-called Operation Dzikisa Mitengo (Reduced Prices) has been an even greater opportunity for the elite in the country to loot with impunity. And those authorised to monitor the exercise have also taken advantage of their positions and helped themselves to goods, while applying the law selectively to their advantage.

It was 3am when armed security agents hammered on the door of Khairat al-Shater's flat in Nasser City; his daughter Zahra could only watch and comfort her distraught children while her father and husband, Ayman, were detained as Hosni Mubarak's latest crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood got under way. "The Brotherhood are good people," insisted Zahra, in a hijab of the kind increasingly seen on the streets of Cairo. "We believe in peaceful change and the regime is crushing us.

Members of Angola's main opposition party streamed into a conference hall on Thursday to cast ballots in a leadership race overshadowed by the ghost of Jonas Savimbi, the guerrilla leader who founded the movement. Larger-than-life images of Savimbi, killed by Angolan government troops in 2002, greeted more than 1 000 delegates of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) who gathered in the town of Viana, 20km outside Luanda.

“Onyo! Onyo! Onyo! Warning! Warning! Warning! … A warning has been issued to the people who are not from this region! This is our land from before! … Time has come for you to leave our land and return to yours! … Whoever disobeys will die! The Rift Valley Land Owners & Protectors army is ready to fight for its right till the last blood drop is shed!”

Only a few years ago, oil-rich Gabon had to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help to reform its economy, which had accumulated an unsustainable level of foreign debts. Today, a recovered Gabonese economy enabled authorities to negotiate an early repayment of its US$ 2.3 billion debt burden.

The national anti-corruption agency of Namibia has decided not to investigate further the controversial awarding of bidding to top officials in the Office of former Namibian President Sam Nujoma. Human rights activists call the decision a "severe blow to Namibia's anti-corruption crusade."

More than 30 opposition members in Ethiopia have been given life sentences for their role in 2005 election protests. Adil Ahmed, a high court judge, gave life terms to 34 of the 38 defendants, including Hailu Shawl and Bernahu Nega, two senior leaders of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) party.

Survival has submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Committee detailing the Botswana government’s failure to implement the December 2006 ruling in the case of the Kalahari Bushmen. The committee will meet to consider issues relating to Botswana’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Algeria's National Council has approved the lower National Popular Assembly's amendments to the electoral law. The changes impose more difficult conditions for small and new parties to field candidates for election. The senators also approved the postponement of local elections from September until November.

A powerful group of developing countries has accused Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of trying to downgrade the U.N.'s focus on Africa by consolidating several key posts without General Assembly approval. The Group of 77, which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, urged the secretary-general in a letter obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press to reconsider the changes and respect the mandates of the General Assembly.

Is there a connection between language and the enslavement or liberty of a people and their capacity for development? What have been the experiences of African countries between political independence and 2006, the year of African languages? In this article, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III elucidates these questions. He also describes the approaches of the AfricAvenir Foundation to raise consciousness about language and development amongst the people and the decision makers.

1. Language, thought and the colonial context

Language and the articulation of thought

When a child is born and their tongue remains ‘attached’ or ‘stuck’, the child will not be able to speak correctly. It is imperative that this organ, which allows us to modulate the sounds of our speech and articulate the words we wish to pronounce, is freed if the child is not to remain handicapped for life. In my Doula tradition, we carry out this benign operation fairly early on. If, later, we see that a child is becoming particularly loquacious, then the tradition is to crack a special nut in the baby’s mouth (‘ba bo mo kasso o mudumbu’).

The language we use enables us to articulate our ideas, feelings, faith, dreams and vision of the world. Language allows us to recount our everyday, to interrogate our past and plan our future. It enables us to articulate constructed thought. And thought is a vehicle of development – or regression.

Thanks to the creation of thought and its practical or technical implementation, discoveries are made, acquisitions preserved, change comes about, predictions and probabilities are programmed, and potential dangers are forewarned of. But it is also thanks to thought that hatred, wars and destruction materialise. Thought and the articulation of ideas are at the centre of human existence; they determine the quality and the rhythm of our progression on earth.

The colonial experience of African countries determinedly applied the breaks to the articulation of the collective thought of the African peoples. The coloniser’s language was imposed as the only officially recognised language. African languages were condemned to the domain of folklore as ‘vernacular languages’ or ‘patois’. Thought, that continued to be articulated by individuals in their ‘patois’, was not recognised and was marginalised. But the collective articulation of the ideas of a given African people no longer identified with the thought transposed by the coloniser’s official language. In the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa in African lands, the articulation of thought thus suddenly became a question of contested political power.

The shock of encounter in the articulation of ideas, in the African colonial context, could not admit compromise. The colonist’s language assumed exclusivity in the public life of the colonies. Thought expressed in indigenous African languages became marginalised. It was labelled primitive, barbarous, backward, incapable of intellect, incapable of communicating progress or development. Knowledge communicated in African languages was thus characterised as non-knowledge by the colonial master. In reality, thought expressed in an African language felt subversive because it could neither be understood, nor controlled, nor commanded by the colonial master. It had to be defeated or reduced to silence.

Despite the presence of the coloniser, African populations did not stop thinking or articulating their ideas in their own languages. But as they lived as conquered, dominated peoples, whose territories remained occupied militarily, often for over a century, all public support for the articulation of their ideas was suppressed. These ideas had all but disappeared from public spaces and were unknown in the administration, schools, media, and, to some extent, in churches.

Language and transformation in the postcolonial period

Africans themselves had passed through the filter of the colonial administration, schools or church seminaries. Indeed, they had no other sources of information other than the media, articulated in the language of the coloniser. Thus they ended up convinced that Africa would not produce original thought worthy of progress and development. Ideas of progress could only be articulated in the language of the European coloniser.

These same Africans would assume power in African countries after the independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They continued the application of the colonial project by imposing the former coloniser’s language on the African people. Despite formal independence, which the Asian countries also acquired, thought in Africa remained colonial in linguistic articulation and expression, interleaved in the norms and structures of language and dissemination determined by the European metropoles.

Now, for these same European metropoles, Africa is only a marginal, peripheral continent, very much of secondary concern in the global strategy of power sharing in the world. According to this strategy, Africa must be severely contained, marginalised, controlled, weakened and dominated in order that the winners of globalisation may continue to draw from it what they need to nail their power and globalised supremacy.

African populations, continuing in their overwhelming majority to live their daily lives in their languages, which are no longer used as a means of communication and administration, do not even really understand the strategic games they are embarking on. They remain for the most part ignorant of the concepts, discourses and programmes elaborated for them at national as well as global levels. These populations thus remain in a state of paternalistic dependency. They did not conceive, and do not even have access to, the debate about the fate reserved for them in the framework of globalised competition.

The official language of the public domain operates as an insurmountable barrier for such African populations, who, in fatal error, have sometimes ended up internalising the notion that all these discourses in the white people’s language, which they only understand approximately, do not concern them. They believe that the powerful African elite and international organisations will seal their fate, while they do not have the right to speak. We often hear people saying that they have become powerless in the face of destiny, and that only a divine power could break the conspiracy created by the alignment of the interests of the postcolonial local elite with the powers of foreign organisations.

2. The postcolonial state and linguistic schizophrenia

Permanent structural violence and hijacking the discourse

African populations thus live, for the great majority, in a permanent state of structural violence. This violence confiscates all elaboration of thought and fundamental discourse on the life and future of a given African nation. The tiny minority which has gone through the filter of Western schooling, and has become incapable of articulating thought and discourse in its own African mother tongue, largely shares the foreigner’s discourse on Africa. Those who try to oppose it do so by derisory means: opposition itself being articulated in a language that the population does not know or hardly understands.

The opposition that should claim back the articulation of thought and discourse in people’s everyday language lacks structural support. The ordinary people, although implicated, do not have access to the opposition discourse, purportedly articulated in their favour – as this is in the white man’s language. Some may contest my argument with the assertion that French, English, Portuguese and Spanish have become African languages, since in most cases these languages are the only ones used in schools, the administration and the media, in short, in everyday public life, and because this has been the case for more than a century.

Statistics frequently account for the African population of a country by simply considering them as speakers of the former colonial language. Nigeria, with its 470 African languages thus becomes an anglophone country. The two Congos with the 221 languages of the DRC and the 60 languages of Congo Brazzaville become francophone countries.

Certain discourses in Africa today try to demonstrate, more and more insistently, that European languages such as French, English and Portuguese have become African languages. Advantage should be taken of their status as African languages, notwithstanding of course, the peculiar linguistic development, by which Africa has enabled the enrichment of European languages, on African soil. Despite all this, it remains true that the imposition of European languages on Africa has not succeeded in wiping out the African people’s daily use of their own languages.

Linguistic schizophrenia and development

Africans today thus live in a situation of permanent linguistic schizophrenia, by which personal and intimate matters are articulated in African languages in the strictly private space – at home, in rituals or in convalescence. Whereas anything considered important will unfold in the public sphere in European languages, which are barely known or commanded. Structural violence engenders linguistic schizophrenia, which separates or removes the citizen from the sphere of thought and discourse about the stakes of the nation.

Modern Africa is participating powerlessly in an intellectual genocide that is structural because it is perpetrated every day by the administration, schools, the media etc. Anyone who fails to fundamentally turn their back on their African language and culture, and does not manage to learn the white people’s language (‘bwambo bwa mukala’), is rejected by the system. That citizen will be condemned to survive, or otherwise, in the so-called informal sector, abandoned by the administrative structures and international cooperation. For it is only in this so-called informal sector, which ‘gets by’ that everyday articulation of thought and discourse is permitted in African languages.

Thus, only Africans who have successfully passed through the filter of structural linguistic violence are in a position to read, and perhaps to understand, the foreign discourse on the development of African countries: a discourse articulated exclusively in European languages. The debate on development in Africa remains conceived, elaborated and pronounced in languages which are barely understood or grasped by the overwhelming majority of Africa’s populations, who therefore cannot not participate in the debate. They cannot understand, criticise, amend or reject the outcome of the debate. And yet, it is they who are invited to implement it.

Thus we are living with a debate that is in essence anti-democratic, as it is neither communicated nor shared by the majority of the population. It simply imposes itself through the trick of structural violence. Discourse on the development of Africa will struggle to become an African discourse as long as it is not conceived, developed, criticised, amended and rejected by African populations themselves, in the languages they command and use every day. This is a terrible situation as it affects the lives of several hundreds of millions of people who should, but do not really manage to, get to grips with it.

The new political and international legal framework

The current historical situation presents the African elite with a deep dilemma. To remain or accede to power, it must conform to the rules of the game that govern the system of domination on the African continent. It knows it must negotiate power by forcing itself to satisfy those outside the continent who determine who remains in power in any given African country. Given that this is the underlying situation in most African countries today, African political actors will wisely refrain from requiring African populations to re-appropriate for themselves the articulation of thought in African languages. Others will simply refuse to support the demand for an African re-appropriation of the discourse on African development; they will recognise the danger of destabilising their own political position.

Resolutions of international conferences, conventions signed by states and ratified by parliaments such as the Unesco convention of 2003 for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, the declaration by the African Union that 2006 would be the year of African languages, or current programmes in the francophone zone promoting partner African languages in primary schools all provide new legal and political bases and a recognisable framework for actions that avoid the suspicion that they are intended to destabilise existing regimes. But as reality shows us, very few African political leaders genuinely demonstrate the backbone to give back to their people the power to articulate their own destiny.

The directives of the African Union are, however, sufficiently clear today, thanks to the determination of such countries as Mali, South Africa, Nigeria etc. Besides these official measures, acts of civil courage and the commitment of African civil society have enabled initiatives to re-appropriate the discourse on the collective destiny of the African peoples.

3. Methodologies trialled by the AfricAvenir Foundation

It is in this context that our modest organisation, the AfricAvenir Foundation for African renaissance, development, international cooperation and peace, based in Douala, has been trying for some years to stimulate a debate in the media about the introduction of African languages into the public domain, and to suggest how this could be done.

Discussion forums and African indabas

These discussion forums organised in Douala and in indabas in the surrounding villages in 2004–06 have illustrated the hunger of the local peoples for their Cameroonian languages and, above all, their willingness to contribute personally to their promotion. However, they want to see that there is the political will to set up an institutional structure so that individual efforts can be brought together and channelled.

African language competitions in schools

Cameroonian language competitions, organised by the AfricAvenir Foundation in 2004–05, have confirmed the enthusiasm of the 1,600 pupils, representing 16 educational establishments who participated in the competition for African languages. For the first time in their lives, these pupils, educated exclusively in French and/or English, participated in a competition in which they were allowed to articulate their ideas and feelings in their Cameroonian language through rhetoric, translations, readings, song, poetry, dance etc. However, the pupils participating in the competition, and their families, became conscious of the seriousness of the gaps in their knowledge of their own cultural heritage. A general determination to use their languages more fully in their everyday lives was born.

Storytelling afternoons and soirées

Storytelling afternoons in schools and the soirées at AfricAvenir in 2004–05 have led to the discovery of a fabulous African world to which young schooled Cameroonians no longer have access. Stories told in Cameroonian languages with a short translation in French provided at the beginning of the session evoked more than curiosity – the pupils returned to their parents asking for storytelling evenings in their languages at home. Moreover, once the brief summary had been given in French, the same public attentively followed the stories in Douala, Tpuri, or Ewondo for over three hours!

Religious choirs, rap and song evenings

Christian choirs invited to the foundation sing in Cameroonian languages in church on Sundays, which is already a well-established tradition. Cameroonian singers mostly use Cameroonian languages, particularly the Douala language, in their songs. Whether their performances include religious or secular music, they are well attended.

In a new initiative, we are keen to have rap sung at AfricAvenir in Cameroonian languages. Indeed, young people have asked us to organise a rap competition in our languages.

African language cinema months

Our programme of films in African languages allowed us in 2005 and 2006 to look beyond Cameroon and show many African films, including for example those by the Senegalese Sembène Ousmane in Woolof, subtitled in French. The audiences confirmed that it was perfectly possible to make a film in an African language and have an international audience. Sango Malo, the film by the Cameroonian Bassek ba Khobio, demonstrated that several Cameroonian languages could be used in the same film without causing any difficulties for the audience. On the contrary, when we heard our own languages spoken in the film, we recognised ourselves in it more closely, and appreciated the multilingualism of Cameroon.

The book and CD collections at the Cheikh Anta Diop library

To support the learning of national languages, the AfricAvenir Foundation has undertaken to collect stories in Cameroonian languages that have been published in specialised journals anywhere in the world since the end of the 19th century. Research was carried out in the libraries of the former European colonial powers and stories, some of which had been published before 1900, were photocopied and classified into two main chronological groups. These can be consulted in the foundation’s Cheikh Anta Diop library in Douala.

The foundation’s library also commissioned a team to look in bookshops and cultural, linguistic and religious centres for any books or pamphlets published in Cameroonian languages. This work proved tiresome, as the bookshops and distributors only disseminate books in the official languages – French and English. To date, we have however managed to collect 251 books in 81 Cameroonian languages at the Cheikh Anta Diop library. The result of this initiative was publicly exhibited during 2007.

Publication of illustrated works of multilingual stories

Another team at the AfricAvenir Foundation is preparing the publication of a book of the story ‘Masomandala’ or ‘Jeki la Njamb’a Inono’. This epic was published in the German colonial period, in German in Germany, and in the Douala language. It has been taken up again by our team, which comprises a Cameroonian professor of German, a Douala language specialist, an Ewondo language specialist, a writer, and a book illustrator. This epic, which is about 50 A4 pages long, currently exists in Douala, Ewondo, French and German translations. A trilingual edition is planned in two volumes, Doula–French–Ewondo for Cameroon and an illustrated edition for Germany.

Effectively this epic, collected around 1901, brings to life a profoundly African world and its myths, beliefs, philosophy, political and social organisations, means of resolving conflicts and economic mechanisms. We find ourselves interrogated by an Africa of unsuspecting wealth, demanding its place in our modernity.

This alternative ‘global approach’ practiced by AfricAvenir has only been possible thanks to the support of the Austrian ministry of culture and science since 2004, and that of the Styrian province in Austria (Steiermark) in 2006. Without their support our work would have remained purely theoretical.

Conclusion

As we have argued in this presentation, language is a fundamental means for articulating individual and collective thought. When a language is taken away from its people, when it is forbidden to them, when it becomes marginalised in public life, the people’s thought is also marginalised, the people lose their words and the power to conceptualise and articulate their being. The foreign language, which henceforth occupies the public space, is accompanied by political and linguistic structural violence, bringing in its wake its own vision of the world, present and future ideologies, philosophy, values and dreams. It subjects the dominated population to foreign needs, which are frequently and directly opposed to the needs of the subjugated people.

Thanks to the struggle of Africans for a profound renaissance of the continent, and thanks to new inter-African and international conventions, a more appropriate structure is emerging which will permit African peoples to re-appropriate the articulation of their thought in their own languages, even if their populations – who are by tradition multilingual – also use languages of international communication. This transformation, so long as it is accompanied by consistent political will, will open up a new path for development, articulated by Africans themselves, from which international cooperation can only gain in quality and effectiveness.

* Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III is a professor at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon. He is president of the AfricAvenir Foundation,

This paper was given at a symposium on African languages held in October 22006 at the University of Vienna, Austria. It was originally published in French in Pambazuka News on 7 June 2006, [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org.

Steve Fake and Kevin Funk argue that in calling for UN intervention as a solution to the Darfur conflict, the Save Darfur movement is not only ineffectual, but is inadvertently propping up the US government’s contradictory posturing between on the one hand condemning Khartoum, and on the other, praising the Sudanese government for its support of the 'War on Terror'. In the end, it is doing nothing.

The United States has substantial ties with the Sudanese government. However, buoyed by a large grassroots movement to 'Save Darfur', Washington has also strongly condemned Khartoum for the crisis in the beleaguered region. The contradiction is striking – on one hand, the United States highly prizes Khartoum for its key role in intelligence-sharing in the supposed 'War on Terror'; yet simultaneously Washington has taken the lead in declaring (for domestic political reasons) that the Sudanese government is carrying out 'genocide' in Darfur. Adding fuel to the fire, Sudan is an area of great strategic interest to the United States, as it seeks to both prevent the consolidation of Chinese influence in Africa, and gain control over Sudan's substantial oil reserves.

It is within this framework of contradictory posturing and US geopolitical motives that are less than humanitarian that the activist movement addressing Darfur operates. Spearheaded by the 'Save Darfur Coalition', a collection of high-profile human rights and civil society groups, much activism has been dedicated to prodding Washington into action, generally through supporting the deployment of UN 'peacekeeping forces'; some commentators have called directly for 'humanitarian intervention' in Darfur. Yet given the strategic and hegemonic interests at stake for the United States in Sudan, salient questions arise about how activists can circumvent Washington's machinations and pursue a truly humanitarian agenda.

Concerns about the coalition

For its part, the Save Darfur Coalition has often legitimated concerns that it is patently unaware or even supportive of Washington's plans for the region, and ignorant of fundamental issues of the conflict. Most prominently, the coalition has at times been guilty of sidetracking Darfurian and Muslim activists, describing the conflict in harshly oversimplified ethnic terms, receiving official sanction from and doling out praise to the Bush administration, and failing to consider Washington's potential interest in a UN deployment or 'humanitarian intervention' – or the potentially dangerous outcomes of such actions. The very size and prominence of the movement is a reflection of its political harmony with centres of power in the United States. Accordingly, while doing much to propel this humanitarian catastrophe onto the national radar, the movement as a whole has demonstrated considerable myopia in both its actions and rhetoric.

This is not to say, however, as suggested by the tone in some left-wing commentary, that just because many Darfur activists have a naïve credence in US benevolence, and fail to recognise that Washington clearly has ulterior motives at stake, that the question of aiding Darfurians should be tossed aside. As the commentator Justin Podur summarises, the real world demands not allowing genuine concern for victims of atrocities to be transmuted by interventionist hypocrites into apologetics for an imperialism that will ultimately produce more victims of more atrocities. But those same victims deserve better than mere denunciations of intervention and its apologists as hypocrites and warmongers.

There are several measures that can be taken with minimal danger of promoting US foreign policy objectives. The extent to which these steps have not been pursued is itself a clear indication of how much substance lays behind Washington's fiery rhetoric on Darfur.

To take but the most elementary point of departure, one would expect that if actually concerned with Darfur, the United States and the rest of the West more generally would shower humanitarian funds onto the aid organisations operating in the region. This, of course, is consonant with the wishes of Darfur activist groups, and is the bare minimum that could be expected of the munificent leaders of Western civilization, renowned as they are throughout commercial media and our intellectual culture as committed to alleviating suffering around the globe.

Returning to Planet Earth, one finds the relief agencies in a similar situation to the Darfurian people – teetering on the edge of collapse. Due to insufficient financial support, services to displaced victims such as health care have been restricted, 'feeding centers have had to be closed, food cannot be distributed, staff are being reduced, [and] teachers in camps are no longer being paid'. At one point, the World Food Programme was forced to cut its food rations in Sudan by half, due to funding shortages – especially serious since the UN estimates that there are some 4,000,000 Darfurians 'in need of aid to survive'.

Impasse over peacekeepers

As frequently recounted in the press, the UN and the West, led by the United States, are at an impasse with Khartoum over its refusal to allow in a force of around 20,000 UN peacekeepers. (Though the latest news is that Sudan has assented to a joint UN-AU force of 17,000-19,000 troops, Khartoum's repeated history of obstructing the implementation of agreements warrants considerable scepticism of this development.)Tellingly, less noted has been the West's position towards the African Union (AU) forces already on the ground in Darfur. Again, if the heated rhetoric from Western capitals contained any meaningful shreds of reality, the AU troops should enjoy boundless support–especially from those declaring 'genocide' in the region.

Yet instead of being met with jubilation and generosity by Western leaders, the AU's own call for its forces to be increased to 21,000 has been greeted by silence, beyond empty moral platitudes, a demonstration of how seriously Darfurian lives are taken in the West. Further exposing the hypocrisy, the former UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Sudan, Jan Pronk, has made the common sense request for the international community to use the funds that would be spent on a UN force – he estimates between US$1 billion and US$1.5 billion to aid the AU peacekeepers. Again, such proposals are studiously ignored, once more demonstrating Washington's unwillingness to actually aid Darfurians.

For its part, the larger Save Darfur movement has generally failed to emphasise the issue of fully funding the AU, demanding more prominently a UN deployment; or, as some have urged, a 'humanitarian intervention'. Yet such advocacy fails to account for several key realities, even beyond the stark implausibility of the United States supporting international action for non-selfish motives.

Even if well-intentioned, it is entirely possible that an intervening force would cause more harm than it could potentially alleviate, especially given Khartoum's disapproval of its deployment, and the possibility of an insurgent movement rising against it. Crowds of Sudanese have demonstrated against a UN presence, and the contention that UN forces would turn Sudan into 'another Iraq' resonates strongly in the region for reasons that should be clear, with Pronk noting that many in Khartoum fear that al-Qaida would be drawn into the country.

Ground invasion nightmare

Indeed, disaster scenarios are not difficult to imagine. Gareth Evans, president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group, observes that 'On all available evidence, a ground invasion would not only be a nightmare to effectively implement, but would lead to the collapse of the extremely fragile north-south CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement], and make impossible the work of the humanitarian agencies in Darfur' – an outcome with potentially catastrophic consequences.

This conception of a UN presence in Sudan also ignores a fundamental element in this, or any 'humanitarian' mission – that sending in troops might stabilise the situation, but without a working political agreement to enforce it will not necessarily lead to any sort of just, long-term outcome to the underlying issues. For example, Pronk, who was ordered to leave the country by Khartoum in October 2006, rightly comments that a 'Military presence in order to keep the peace is a condition, not a solution in itself'.

Aside from the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), which was heavily backed by the United States and deeply unpopular amongst Darfurians, remarkably little interest has been shown in developing a political solution by the United States, nor the Save Darfur movement, which has instead latched onto its cure-all of UN troops. Commenting that those seeking an intervention 'are suffering from a salvation delusion', Alex de Waal, a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard and a director of Justice Africa, London, criticises the framing of the entire debate about Darfur, arguing that:'A political settlement has been completely overlooked or downplayed by the US. The whole debate has gone off on a red herring—UN troops.'

Darfurians deserve better than a potentially ill-conceived UN intervention, which may plunge the region into further chaos and serve as a vehicle for US geopolitical interests. Their suffering also merits more than the crocodile tears being shed by Washington, or an activist movement which has done much to bring attention to Darfur, but has largely failed to realise that a Western-backed force would not be equivalent to 'the armed wing of Amnesty International'.

Other paths to pursue

In addition to funding relief organisations, which is evidently of less importance to Washington than saber rattling, there are other paths to pursue, if one cares to seek them. Activists must push the West to support negotiations between Khartoum and Darfurian rebel groups, instead of advocating an agreement such as the DPA that does not reflect popular demands.

Pressure should be applied on rich countries to compel them to grant asylum to Darfurian refugees. Washington should be obliged to pay reparations to the people of Sudan for bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998, an attack which killed perhaps 'several tens of thousands', and supporting Khartoum in the 1980s as it waged a bloody civil war that would claim over 2,000,000 lives.

Finally, the West cannot be allowed to continue hampering the AU forces in Darfur; these troops require full funding, a broadened mandate, and a proper opportunity to halt the violence in the region – not to be completely sidelined for the 'red herring' of UN troops. The fact that these steps have not been taken is sufficient to understand Washington's true position vis-à-vis Sudan–a reality that should not be lost on Darfur activists.

For additional commentary, please see

Washington DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, June 20, 2007.

Web location: http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/4314

* Steve Fake and Kevin Funk are social justice activists who are currently writing a book about Darfur. They maintain a blog with their commentary at http://confrontingempire.blogspot.com/. They are contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus.

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

The criminalization of Female Genital Mutilation, part of some of the cultural inhibitions stifling Ghana’s progress, by the Parliament of Ghana, indicates attempts to rediscover the state from its roots. It raises the fact that, unlike years ago, the elected representatives are expanding their thinking in relation to Ghanaian norms, values and traditions in Ghana’s progress. The act simultaneously touts the good aspects of the Ghanaian culture and also attempts to refine the ancient cultural inhibitions that have been stifling Ghana’s development process. At deeper level, there is clear demonstration that the law-makers, as the key face of Ghanaian elites and prominent directors of progress, are increasingly having fuller grasp of Ghana’s development process.

Still, by this act, including the heated debate it generated, as the Ghana News Agency (June16, 2007) reported, the elites are “rediscovering the state,” from the roots of its original Ghanaian indigenous values, and “starting to consider the challenges ahead,” as the inhibitions within the values of the 56 ethnic groups that make-up Ghana nation-state pop up now and then in the drive for progress. The Ghana nation-state cannot work harmoniously if there are huge in-built unrefined inhibiting values that stifle it. The attempts are not only to refine the inhibitions within the culture but intellectualize it, enlighten it, as Prof. Kojo Yankah, of the University of Ghana, would say, for progress. For years, such inhibiting cultural practices such as the destructive Pull Him Down syndrome (Prof. Kwesi Andam, of University of Science and Technology, thinks is partly responsible for the decline of the once prosperous Fanteland); immense dabbling in the irrational juju-marabout mediums that twists reasoning(coup-makers used this and nearly blew Ghana into pieces); human sacrifice (there are campaigns Africa-wide to stop this practices); and the excessive interpretation of events as caused by witchcraft and not human agency, have impacted negatively on Ghana’s progress.

As the main centre for national reasoning and reflection, as the fountain of human rights, effectively human refinement, as the key forum of national struggles, and the main juggler of the contending issues of a nation-state slightly founded on the wrong footing, the Parliament of Ghana refracts both the inhibitions and the positive parts of Ghanaian values and traditions, its ex-colonial legacies and the deftness to appropriate as much as practicable global development values for Ghana’s progress. In this sense, the Parliament has huge task, unlike years past, to deal with not only the emerging challenges but the good parts of Ghanaian values and the inhibiting parts such as a shrine near Kumasi ritually sacrificing deformed babies for host of material demands from juju-marabout-minded Ghanaians. How do you change such thinking in the larger development process?

Such long-running counter-productive cultural practices have led some critical observers to question African elites inability to boldly attempt to refine them and led to all sort of views about Africa’s values, especially as science grow globally and certain human events are thought not to be caused by demons, divine feat, evil spirits, or unforeseen forces. From afar and inside Africa, some observers have argued that Ghanaian/African elites cannot think and have no confidence in their own values as critical domains for progress. The German thinker, Friedrich Hegel, thought that Africans cannot think or are philosophically weak. The late Senegalese President, Leopold Senghor, perhaps influenced by Hegel, thought Africans cannot think and brought in Europeans when he has developmental challenges. The Ghanaian law-makers are saying today that both Hegel and Senghour were wrong, that Africans can think from within their values in the global perspective in the context of their norms, values and traditions. Hence, the criminalization of FGM.

Either from the twisted views of Hegel or Senghor, which pretty much reflected the jaundiced European views of Africa’s values and traditions, as the French would tell you with their warped view that Africans needed to be “civilized” because they cannot think and are “primitive,” there have been long-running perception that African elites, after freedom from colonial rule, have not been able to intellectually come out with the thinking that allows them to model their progress from within their norms, values and traditions, and deal with the emerging development challenges effectively. When Ghana’s Dr. Y.K. Amoako, ex-chair of the Addis Ababa-based UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, observed that Africa is the only region in the world where its development paradigms are foreign dominated, Dr. Amoako was effectively saying that Africa’s elites have not being able to overturn the European views of the fact they are so weak that they cannot think from within their values and need foreign values and traditions to develop. Pretty much disturbing! The contention is how Ghanaian/African elites can think through their values and traditions to come out with development paradigms that reflect their environment as the Southeast Asians and other prosperous nation-states throughout the world have done and are still doing a la globalization.

One mistake Ghana’s Founding Fathers did was failing to structure and direct the nation-state from within Ghanaian values and traditions. If the Founding Father had examined the contradictions and atrocities within the values and traditions and laid them out for rigorous refinement in Ghana’s progress, as the current law-makers are attempting to do, the Founding Fathers would have set the path, long ago, for enlightened processes for progress. The criminalization of FGM, in the broader context of nation-building, represents a rebirth – indeed, a reconnection between the “state” (as the political authority) and “nation” (as the root, values and traditions) – since there are conscious attempts to awaken the long-suppressed values, appropriate the good parts and refine the inhibiting aspects for national development.

The ravaging of Africa has been enriching Europe and North America for more than 500 years. First, European empires imposed slavery and colonialism on the continent. After 1945, the United States took over as the dominant neo-colonial power. This is the subject of a 4-episode series written by Asad Asmi and produced by Kristin Schwarz. Twenty-eight activists from 16 African countries were interviewed for the series. The documentary is based on Asad's award-winning article of the same title.

No one denies that it is only through a Union government and unity of purpose that Africa can claim its rightful stake in the world.

Barring unity, Africa would continue suffering the depredations of Western nations bent on exploiting its vast resources for self-enrichment.

But so vast are the challenges Africa has to overcome that a really radical approach is needed if the dream of a United States of Africa is to be realised, which means there is no room for placating the West in this revolutionary undertaking.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the head of the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have strongly endorsed a summit to be held later this year aiming to boost information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure in Africa to advance development on the continent. The Connect Africa Summit, will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, from 29 to 30 October.

With an estimated 200 million migrants around the world, governments must strengthen the positive impact of migration on the development of home countries by ensuring people move in a way that is safe and legal, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said. "We cannot stop this force of human nature, but we can do a great deal to build a better migration experience," Ban said on 10 July in Brussels during the opening of the first Global Forum for Migration and Development (GFMD).

The UN mission in Cote d’Ivoire (ONUCI) said in a June report that corruption is so widespread in the Ivorian justice system that “people have come to believe, even though fortunately it’s not always the case, that it is impossible to get a favourable decision without handing over money.” The report said bribes are also given in the form of sexual favours.