A special envoy of the United Nations Secretary General, Jan Eliasson, today arrives in Sudan to open fresh talks which aims to foster political negotiations among parties to the Darfur conflict. Mr Eliasson met the African Union-UN Joint Mediation Support Team in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. His discussion with the team had centred on preparations for the proposed joint international meeting on the Darfur political process in Libya.

One of Nigeria's main opposition parties rejected an offer to join a coalition government on Friday because it considers the ruling party's victory in a recent election was illegitimate, reports Al Jazeera. Umaru Yar'Adua, the new president, has invited the three main oppostion parties to join the government to give him greater legitimacy.

In April 2007, equalinrights facilitated and supported a five day workshop for 21 representatives of grassroots organisations in Vihiga, Kenya. The main theme was: ’Empowering rural grassroots stakeholders to confront poverty through human rights-based approaches‘

The World Bank announced Monday that it provided a record US$5.7 billion in credits and grants to Sub-Saharan Africa in the fiscal year ending 30 June 2007, up from US$4.7 billion in fiscal 2006.

A statement from the bank in Accra, venue of the ongoing 9th AU Summit, said the development arm of the bank – International Development Association (IDA) - provided the funding.

Timelines and the method for Africa’s integration are to be set out according to the Accra Declaration, adopted late on Tuesday night by the 9th Ordinary Session of the African Union Heads of Summit.

“We emerged from the Grand Debate with a common vision,” AU Chair John Kuofor and President of Ghana said on Tuesday, minutes before midnight.

A statement from the Rastafari People at the African Union Grand Debate was issued on July 2, 2007. It states: “The World Conference Against Racism declared the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. This year, Britain and America have celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the end of that wickedness. The Republic of Ghana, for its part, has also seen fit to do something to atone for this crime against humanity and the complicity of some chiefs in the deportation of their own people into what became the MAAFA - an African Holocaust.

If it is morally and spiritually correct to talk about the wrongness of forcibly transporting African people from Africa to the Americas, then it is absolutely correct at this time to talk about the rightness of transporting African people from the land of their captivity to their ancestral homeland which is this continent known today as Africa."

The Accra Declaration was (www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/images/uploads/ACCRAJuly2007AUSummitDECLARA…) adopted by Heads of States at the conclusion of the African Union Summit. The Declaration reflects some of the demands of civil society, particularly in regards to “the importance of involving the African peoples in order to ensure that the African Union is a Union of peoples and not just a “Union of states and governments”, as well as the African Diaspora in the processes of economic and political integration of our continent” and the need for “freer movement of persons, goods, services and capital” as were elaborated in the final CSO Communique on the Grand Debate (www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/images/uploads/Final_Accra_CSO_communique.p…).

The UN has admitted that a report on the disputed Western Sahara region, a long-standing row between Morocco and the Polisario Front, was biased in favour of Morocco, Al Jazeera reports. A new report was issued on Monday, after Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, acknowledged the bias.

Daily Graphic - The President of Liberia, Mrs Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, has urged African leaders to endorse without delay the concept of a United States of Africa. She has also prodded them to instruct, in no uncertain terms, all regional economic commissions and community institutions to formulate and adopt the road map and the time table for the achievement that goal.

“This will allow institutions to move forward in peace with progress.” she added.

Recent evidence suggests higher education is both a result and determinant of income. A report by Uganda's Economic Policy Research Center examines the impact of higher education in Uganda’s development process and identifies ways to enhance its impact.

An independent United Nations human rights expert has called on Côte d’Ivoire’s Government to ensure that the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the divided West African country have the necessary means to make a safe and sustainable return to their home towns and villages.

Portugal, the new holder of the European Union's rotating presidency, has promised that Africa will be one of its key priorities for the next six months. Prime Minister José Socrates, whose government took over the Union's helm Jul 1, is hoping to fulfil a long-standing Portuguese ambition of hosting a summit between the EU and African heads of state in Lisbon this December.

In neo-liberal circles, The Market is packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation, writes Francis Nyamnjoh in his paper, "Africa in the New Millennium: Interrogating Barbie Democracy, Seeking Alternatives".

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua's list of 35 proposed ministers was announced on Thursday and political insiders said it was a tentative break with the era of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The portfolios were not specified, prolonging the suspense over who would get the key oil and finance jobs.

Leading up to the 200th commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade and the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, Pambazuka News carried a series of four special issues during 2006 and 2007 that included articles designed to raise awareness and debate on issues of trade and justice. These and other articles from Pambazuka News have been gathered in this book.

We have chosen a deliberately provocative subtitle for this book: ‘How trade undermines democracy and justice’. Two years ago saw large mobilisations around the world, calling for ‘trade justice’. The campaigners were lobbying for the introduction and implementation of new world trade rules, ones that would work for all people, instead of benefiting those who already have the most. They argued that the global trading system should be rebalanced, taking into account the needs of the poor, human rights and the environment.

But, can trade in the era of globalisation be ‘fair’ or ‘just’?

Drawing on lessons from the slave trade, studies of the international finance institutions and the struggles of many African people to make a living, these essays provide insights into how free trade policies have a profoundly negative impact on democracy and justice in Africa. Whether it is the effects of trade policies on informal street traders, who in Africa are often women, the decimation of a country’s health system as a result of the World Bank’s obsession with low inflation, or the sacrificing of community rights in the interests of multinational corporations, it is clear that ‘free’ trade policies impose a profit first and people last regime in Africa.

Many of the book’s contributors will be familiar to the readers of Pambazuka News. They include Charles Abugre, Tope Akinwande, Soren Ambrose, Nnimmo Bassey, Patrick Bond, Jennifer Chiriga, Cheikh Tidiane Dièye, M.P. Giyose, Manu Herbstein, Mouhamadou Tidiane Kasse, Salma Maoulidi, Stephen Marks, Mariam Mayet, Henning Melber, Winnie Mitullah, Patrick Ochieng, Oduor Ongwen, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Liepollo Lebohang Pheko and Jagjit Plahe.

The publication of this book was made possible with the support of HIVOS,

ISBN: 978-0-9545637-1-4. 180pp, July 2007, Oxford and Nairobi: Fahamu
Price £11.95

For further information and details of how to order, please see http://www.fahamu.org/pzbook.php For review or inspection copies, or any additional information, please contact Stephanie Kitchen, Publications Manager, [email][email protected]

FEATURES: Francis Nyamnjoh interrogates 'Barbie doll democracy'
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Marie Huchzermeyer on anti-poor legislation in KwaZulu Natal
- Stephanie Kitchen discusses Chinua Achebe and the Man Booker International Prize
- Sokari Ekine reflects on the US Social Forum
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeeen Abdul Rahameem – Another wasted opportunity at the Africa summit in Accra
LETTERS: on the removal of African agency by David Soori
BOOKS AND ARTS:
- Review of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
- Review of 'Migritude' - an oral poetic performance by Shailja Patel

WOMEN AND GENDER: Egypt bans female circumcision
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Consolidating the peace in Congo
HUMAN RIGHTS: Ethiopian crackdown punishes civilians
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: South African slum dwellers oppose bill
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Funding sought for hungry refugee children
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Nigerian party rejects coalition
AFRICA AND CHINA: China to search for oil in Sudan
DEVELOPMENT: Africa in the new millennium
HEALTH AND HIV/Aids: Algerian imams join in fight against Aids
EDUCATION: Higher education drives Uganda’s development
LGBTI: Radio show back on South African airwaves
ENVIRONMENT: Why Uganda hates the plastic bag
LAND & LAND RIGHTS: Reducing poverty in rural Uganda
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Gabonese publisher jailed
NEWS FROM THE DIASPORA: African Americans celebrate Lumumba’s birthday
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: Rwanda leads Africa in ICT revolution
PLUS: e-newsletters and mailings lists; courses, seminars and workshops and jobs

*Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit

During the opening of the African Union Executive Council on June 28, President Alpha Oumar Konare, Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union (AU), referred to the issuance of the first diplomatic African Union passports in May 2007 as a symbolic gesture toward African citizenship. Civil society organisations (CSOs) attending the summit called for the AU to move beyond symbolism to action.

Launching a campaign to demand full freedom of movement across the Continent for every African, CSOs created African Citizens’ passports “valid until the member-states of the African Union issues an African Passport as required to fulfill the vision of a people driven African Union and a United Africa”. The passports were personally issued to the Hon Nana Akufo-Ado, Foreign Minister of Ghana, Hon Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, Foreign Minister of Senegal, Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo and South African artist Hugh Masekela as well as being distributed to 53 national delegations attending the Executive Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the AU.

The African Citizens’ passport is a response to a growing demand for an end to the humiliations and violations of rights suffered by Africans at borders throughout the Continent. Millions of African refugees, travelers and undocumented workers currently living outside of their countries of birth are exposed to discrimination and the denial of the rights to an identity, to freely work and access essential services. Women are disproportionately affected by arbitrary arrest, harassment, extortion and intimidation at border crossing as they represent the majority of cross-border and informal traders.

“We make all the noise about African unity yet Africans live within their Continent as refugees”, stated a young Ghanaian poet, DK Oseir Yaw on the need for African citizenship.

Mrs. Julia Dolly Joiner, Commissioner for Political Affairs of the AU Commission stated the benefits of freedom of movement across Africa at the Launching of the African Union Diplomatic and Service Passports. She noted that “free movement in the Continent will ultimately have a positive impact on the political, social, economic, cultural and developmental fronts, and contribute to greater integration, increased trade, investment, tourism, technological advancement, labour mobility and employment opportunities, student exchange through diverse educational opportunities, peace and security, larger markets for African goods and services, reduced brain drain, greater unity and prosperity, amongst others.”

The pan-Africanist vision of a unified Africa with one identity and one citizenship was espoused by leaders from Nkrumah to Nyerere but has yet to find concrete undertaking other than in national laws. Renewed momentum was given to the call for African citizenship and the establishment of the African passport during the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, organized by the AU Commission in October 2004 in Senegal. Indeed, the right to freedom of movement is enshrined in several international and African instruments including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community.

The launching of the African Union Diplomatic and Service Passports in May was part of the AU's Priority Programme on Free Movement of Persons detailed in the 2004 - 2007 Plan of Action to Speed Up Integration of the Continent. The objective of the Plan of Action is said to be the promotion of rapprochement between the people of Africa and their interests and the building of collective awareness through free movement of people, goods and services across the Continent. As the Grand Debate on a Union Government concluded this week with the Accra Declaration, Heads of States recognized “that opening up narrow domestic markets to greater trade and investment through freer movement of persons, goods, services and capital would accelerate growth thus, reducing excessive weaknesses of many of our Member States” but failed to take concrete action to enable this freedom of movement. In order to move the debate into action, Heads of States of the AU could begin by abolishing the need for visas for African citizens traveling within Africa. Currently, an African from Kenya requires a visa to travel to Senegal and is forced to submit to the colonial paradigm by having to apply for such a visa from the French embassy. Conversely, a Senegalese citizen traveling to Kenya is forced to apply for the visa from the British embassy in Dakar. Yet, the abolition of visas is not unprecedented in Africa. In the ECOWAS region, citizens of West African States can travel without visas throughout the 15 countries. It is only this type of action that would directly and concretely affect the lives of millions of Africans and capture the imagination of the people which would revive a faith in the pan-African sentiment of State leaders. As Emmanuel Akwetey of the Ghana AU Civil Society Coalition argues, “We cannot have a union of African states or even a continental government without continental citizenship. If citizenship is the fundamental basis of any democratic national state, why shouldn’t it be so at the level of the Africa Union?”

Last week Atlanta, Georgia hosted the first US Social Forum. Sokari Ekine provides some reflective thoughts on the gathering.

10,000 people came together last week in Atlanta to celebrate grassroots activism across the United States (US). This was the first social forum to be held in the US. That it was held in Atlanta Georgia, home of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King was not lost on many participants. On the downside, there was the overbearing presence of the Market Place; exclusion of some citizens; over-representation of the Latino community and under-representation of other immigrant communities. However as good opportunities to network and some valuable issues emerged, such and the need to be less self-congratulatory and more reflective.

The opening march was attended by about 10,000 people. It was an uplifting experience to be amongst so many mainly African American and Latino activists from across the US. The main focuses were Katrina/the Gulf Coast, immigration, sexuality and social justice. In contrast to the World Social Forum (WSF), the US forum was not hijacked by the large NGOs, though there were a fair number of smaller US based ones present. Still, the majority of participants appeared to be from truly grassroots community organisations.

Logistically the forum was spread out across various hotels as well as the main Civic Center. This made it difficult to move from one workshop to another, with only a 30 minute break allocated between each one. It also felt very strange to be discussing neoliberalism and anti-imperialism in downtown Atlanta hotels, such as the massive phallic design of the Westin, where the only food available was provided by Starbucks. Atlanta is a city dominated by Coca Cola, the headquarters of Coca Cola with its own museum round the corner from the downtown hotels. Similar to the WSF, the issue of exclusion, cost of hiring space for organisational tents (as high as US$1000), exorbitant cost of food and the excessive Forum Marketplace were all features of the USSF. To enter the Civic Center you had to pass through not one, but a group of ‘guards’ who demanded to see your pass, thus preventing local Atlanta citizens, including a large homeless population, many of whom where just round the corner, from participating. Rumour had it that there had been a discussion over searching people’s bags but fortunately this idea was abandoned.

The $15 minimum entry fee also added to the exclusion of the homeless. You had the ironic situation of activists supposedly working with the marginalised communities having to walk past the homeless everyday as if they were a group of invisible men and women. Close by there was a sign reading ‘Commercial solicitation prohibited. No direct verbal address allowed’, presumably aimed at preventing the homeless from engaging with the rest of the public.

Three notable sessions were the on Gulf Coast reconstruction in the post-Katrina era, ‘Race and Immigration – Immigration Rights’, and from the Africa Tent, ‘Zimbabwe: The Way Forward?’. The Gulf Coast panel brought the house down with reports and moving testimonies from all the activists working on the ground. The main issue was that of the ‘Right to Return’, the right to land and housing as per pre-Katrina, and the struggle against developers and forced removal of local people.

Like the Gulf Coast session, these sessions were well attended. However it was clear that the US immigration activists’ movement is very Latino-centric and even within the Latinos it is very ‘Mexican’ centric. This is something that seriously needs to be addressed, as large numbers of immigrants are being marginalised and made invisible within the movement. African Latinos from across South America, people from all parts of the Caribbean, African and Arab immigrants were very much under-represented. A number of participants felt they had no voice whatsoever. Despite their speaking out, one still left wondering whether or not there needs would be addressed.

The discussion on Zimbabwe was excellent, though very polarised between those who supported the Mugabe regime and those that felt Africans and African Americans needed to condemn Mugabe and other dictators across the continent and work towards democracy and human rights, with social movements and civil society groups taking a lead. There was an assumption amongst some people that because Mugabe was condemned by America and the West that Mugabe himself was the victim; rather than of the reality, which is that the ordinary people of Zimbabwe are the victims of Mugabe’s repression and face resultant daily economic misery.

I missed the People’s Movement Assembly but attended the closing ceremony which was basically a couple of hours of self-congratulatory speeches around the forum with very little reflection and self-critique. I spoke with many participants. There were complaints that too many of the workshops were like lectures with short question and answer sessions and not solution orientated and participatory enough. The real success of the forum was outside the workshops, and the networking that took place between groups and individuals. For many grassroots groups this was the first opportunity to meet with people from other parts of the US working on similar issues. If contact between the various movements can be maintained, then there is hope that the forum will be the beginnings of a strong grassroots opposition to mainstream America, neoliberalism, racial oppression and criminalisation of the poor and immigrant population.

Future social forums must seriously address the issue of exclusion whether through the cost of participation, or as in Nairobi and Atlanta, the physical prevention of sections of the local community being refused entry and by virtue of being economically challenged, prevented from eating, let alone having access to water. Water was being sold outside the Civic Center at the USSF for $1 for a small bottle of water – people would not have had to buy this if sufficient water barrels were available. Two friends of mine who had applied for ‘camping space’ from the list of accommodation provided by the USSF website. On arriving they were told by the ‘commune’ that they had to pay $10 each per night – an amount they could not afford. They were then in the position of having to look for alternative space to stay. Eventually they found a household that agreed for them to stay in their backyard but refused them the use of any of their facilities. Thus to use the toilet they had to sneak into the ‘commune’ and use the bathrooms in the Civic Center. This is not acceptable at a social forum whereby so called progressive peoples take advantage of their comrades by adopting the very same market principles that they claim to object to.

Despite all this, I did however feel privileged to have met many US grassroots activists working on a range of issues and from across the country. It is important to know that there are people living in the ‘belly of the beast’ that are fighting from within and are aware of the impact of that beast on the people of the global South.

* Sokari Ekine is online editor of Pambazuka News

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

Inspired by the market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. Francis Nyamnjoh assesses the lessons Africa has learned from the implementation of Barbie democracy and examines alternatives to the market model for Africa.

The idea of writing a paper on Barbie democracy came to me from reflections on the idea of ‘The Market’ and the sort of socio-political institutions this model has tended to inspire. In neoliberal circles, The Market is packaged and presented as omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. It is said to guarantee success for those disciplined by its orthodoxies. It chastises resistance, dissidence and creative difference by a ruthless and reckless extravagance of force, propaganda and self-proliferation. By downplaying the positive dimensions of its sacred aura, The Market has demonstrated it has little tolerance for human sentiments of compassion, solidarity, sociality, conviviality, negotiation, and community, which render one vulnerable in the face of it. The Market comes across as an autocratic and demanding catalogue of insensitivities. As a God-substitute, it trains its followers to develop hearts of stone, which it prescribes to people seeking a better life and to those merely committed to staying alive. Disciples present The Market as the one best solution for the predicaments facing individuals and communities globally. They blame everything and everyone but The Market in case of falls and detours on their way to Calvary. The logic and motto are simple: in victory The Market takes credit, in failure or mitigation, The Market is not to blame. Heads or Tails, The Market always wins.

Among external factors championed in the face of The Market are values that insist on success as a collective pursuit, where achievement is celebrated when it accommodates the dregs of humanity as well. Although portrayed as a constraint by The Market, these values and the notions of success they engender are informed by ideas of personhood and agency that see the individual in the community and the community in the individual. Following this view, people cannot be considered successful individuals independent of the relationships forged with others in their communities. Such an understanding discourages the distinction between the rich and the poor, since it refuses to endorse the privatisation of talent, luck and success, even when these can be traced to particular individuals and communities. This outlook is, instead, informed by a view of humanity as simultaneously free and constrained, and therefore subject to a negotiated, interconnected and interdependent existence.

The Market thus equates success with the actions of those who discipline and punish their own humanity and that of others. The Market recognises sterile accumulation and celebrates individuals who sacrifice the sociality and humanity it perceives as standing in the way of individual self-fulfillment. Hence the slogan: there are no sentiments in business. The Market privileges statistics over people, just as it does profit, and is more comfortable with figures than with actual cases of human victims of its exploits. This makes of surveys and quantification methodologies of collusion and subservience, and ethnographies and qualifications methodologies of emancipation vis-à-vis The Market and its diktats.

The Market, in a way, is comparable to the psychoanalyst. The couch is to The Psychoanalyst what structural adjustment is to The Market. Both The Market and The Psychoanalyst are insensitive to external factors (except when it comes to apportioning blame), and are stubbornly standardised, routinised and predictable in their assumptions and prescriptions. While ready to claim success, both refuse their share of failure. To both, there is no possibility that the structures and assumptions which inform their existence and functions could be part of the problem for which their patients are seeking solutions. The formula for success and failure are to be found in the patient, exclusively. Every individual or community must look within for inspiration to overcome predicaments.

It is within this framework of the real or assumed omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of The Market that this paper examines Barbie democracy in Africa, where states have inadequately asserted themselves vis-à-vis orthodoxies informed by The Market, despite popular and ongoing processes to harness the continent’s distinctive creativity, adaptiveness, sociality and conviviality in relationships.

Inspired by The Market logic, the world is currently hostage to a stifling vision of democracy informed by a very narrow idea of what it is to be beautiful, healthy, successful and free. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the colossal investment that consumer capitalism has made in slimness, the greatest icon of which is Barbie. This image is made and sold aggressively around the world by global consumer and entertainment media to be consumed as the ideal to which all must aspire, if they are to attain the good life. With a focus on consumption as the ultimate unifier, a supreme indicator of cultural sophistication and symbol of civilization, individuals are seen and treated as autonomous agents glued together by a selfless Market slaving away for their cultural freedom, development and enrichment as global citizens. By emphasising the ‘unregulated flow’ and ‘transnationalisation’ of the streamlined, standardised and routinised cultural products of the global media industries, The Market is able to slim all differences down into Barbie proportions. Barbie-like celebrities are recruited to endorse slimming diets, which more ordinary people are then persuaded to follow, with results that entail varying degrees of disappointment.

Its rhetoric of benevolence and munificence notwithstanding, The Market is more about closures than free flows. The agents that sustain it globally promote a largely one-way flow in consumer products that favours a privileged minority as it compounds the impoverishment of the majority. The Market and its corporate media police global material possibilities and consciousness, mostly by denying access to creativity perceived to stand in the way of profit, power and privilege. The result is a Barbie-like socio-cultural, political and economic world devoid of complexity, richness and diversity. In the light of such an impoverishment of difference, plurality is mistaken for diversity, as if an appearance of plenty could not conceal a poverty of perspectives.

Ordinary individuals and marginal communities are thus left literally at the mercy of the Barbie-like information and entertainment burgers served them in the interest of profit. There is a tendency towards convergence in outlook and content, regardless of the nationalities or cultural identities of individuals and communities at the beck and call of The Market and its global gendarmes, the corporate media. The Market and its advocates are most comfortable with passive, depoliticised, unthinking consumer zombies who guarantee profitability at the least possible cost in the name of consumer sovereignty.

Seen in terms of democracy, Barbie (slimness) is imbued with the mission of freeing the individual of relationships or the excess bulk (obesity) of responsibilities standing in the way of personal consumer success. Salvation is to be found in slimness. According to this perspective, the slimmer an individual’s burden of relationships and responsibilities, the better their life chances. Instead of encouraging the rich to get fat with responsibilities and relationships of support to the hungry, consumer capitalism systematically invests in the rich to be thin and unburdened, as it fattens the poor with unfathomable responsibilities, dependencies and a pounding sense of worthlessness and self-persecution.

This Barbie model takes the form of a dictatorship that makes a misery of ordinary lives. But Barbie-isation is at best a bazaar to which millions are drawn but few rewarded or given real choices. Just as obesity is considered an abnormality, so are relationships and sociality seen as dangerous if not watched at close range. A real or false sense of success means that people need not be obsessive about coping with deprivation. In the words of The Economist, [1] ‘People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies’ [2]. Persuading people to get thinner becomes an obsession to be supported with public-health warnings and media pressures.

In America for example, the risks notwithstanding, obesity-related stomach stapling operations are on the increase, as people desperately seek to lose weight [3]. According to Dr Trisha Macnair, the despondency of many people who are overweight ‘means that they will go to extremes to reach their goal, try wacky diets which defy common sense, pay large amounts of money for dubious “quick fix” remedies, and even turn to drugs from anonymous clinics, in the hope that somewhere there is an easy answer’[4]. It seems so easy: if only ordinary, overweight or overburdened consumers could follow the slimming menus prescribed by those who know best, they just might realise their dream body, beauty, health, comfort and freedom. In this way, relationships or ties with others are seen as fat that stands in the way of a perfect dream: something that must be burnt out of existence with health foods, slimming pills, fitness exercises, etc. The bulk and bulky are, at the end of the day, mostly disillusioned and disaffected, as the more they strive, the less the satisfaction that comes their way. Instead of learning meaningful lessons on how to bear the burdens of life, they are being schooled on how to shed the burdens of life.

If Barbie has been sold to the rest of the world as an American icon, to most Americans she remains a distant dream and a constant source of embarrassment. Obesity is the order of the day, spawning an industry that generates billions of dollars from products and services consumers hope will help them keep fat in check. According to a recent article on ‘the obesity industry’[5] , nearly one-third of adult Americans ‘are thought to be obese’, and ‘American girls today shop for clothes that are roughly two sizes bigger than those worn by their mothers’. While ‘most Americans are well aware of the risks of obesity’ and believe themselves ‘personally accountable for their weight’, and while ‘miracle slimming drugs and the latest dieting fads become best-sellers’, ‘people are not prepared to give up taste as their solution to this problem’. They refuse to translate Barbie into reality through embracing ‘more healthy lifestyles’, even if they would rush to try out new ‘easy and tasty ways to lose weight’ proposed by those seeking ‘fat profits in fat people’. Sales of healthier foods may be booming, but few are getting thinner as a result. As The Economist observes [6], ‘once people get fat, it is hard for them to get thin’. The future, far from being one of slim Americans paying tribute to Barbie in their fantasies or realities, The Economist foresees ‘a growing herd of fat people’ providing ‘lots of demand for firms supplying everything from bigger towels to bigger beds and, alas, bigger coffins’ into ‘an early grave’[7]. Everywhere, bulk seems to be winning over slimness, with global estimates rising from 200,000,000 adults in 1995 to 300,000,000 in 2003. Whether motivated by culture or by gene, Americans, like everyone else, are, to quote The Economist [8] once more, ‘constantly trying to pack away a few more calories just in case of a famine around the corner’. The same is true of communities and cultures, hence the resilience of relationships and responsibilities even amongst those individuals, communities and cultures most rigorously committed to shedding the burdens of life.

Barbie may well not be anyone’s reality after all, even as she is projected, celebrated, appropriated, and aggressively marketed as an icon. Indeed, those who most passionately pursue the Barbie ideal, quite paradoxically, never really become Barbie at the end of the day. If they don’t simply grow into a muscular Ken as global gendarme high off imperial dogma, they become sickly (as in the case of anorexia, for example) from all the sacrifices they have made, and are hardly, at a closer look, worth all the investments, torture and deprivations endured [9]. The pursuit of Barbie is at best a mirage, at worst a consumer misadventure. If Barbie epitomises consumer capitalism, obesity is to be likened to the community of ties, which individuals are under sustained pressure to break in order to realise consumer success. But since individuals, even in the worst of circumstances, are social beings above all else, shedding relationships and responsibilities is seldom an easy option, and very few succeed in being happy when their ties with others are dead and buried.

Barbie democracy in Africa

What lessons has Africa learnt from its encounters with the Barbie import labelled ‘liberal democracy’? It is commonplace to claim that liberal democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a well-built, well-fed person, truly rich in bulk and all the cultural indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie-like figure. But instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty for emphasising too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker questioned, nor their audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform their peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty obtain. This insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand their coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail. The history of difficulty at implementing liberal democracy in Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal democracy towards greater relevance. And this call for domestication must resist the ploy by opportunistic agents that have often hidden behind nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate high-handedness and intolerance.

The greatest shortcoming of liberal democracy is its exaggerated focus on the autonomous individual, as if there is anywhere in the world where people can exist outside of communities or in total absence of relationships with others. Losing the weight of community, solidarity and culture is not an easy feat even to the most dedicated disciples of the Barbie model. By investing so much rhetoric in the rights of the independent, liberal democracy is left without a convincing answer pertaining to the rights of the dependent. Although in principle liberal democracy promises rights to all and sundry as individuals, not everyone who claims political rights is likely to have them, even when these are clearly articulated in constitutions and guaranteed legally. The American democratic system for instance, which champions the Barbie model, offers some interesting examples of how Americans, assumed to be autonomous individuals by law, find themselves bargaining away their political, cultural and economic freedoms in all sorts of ways under pressure from the consumer capitalist emphasis on profit over people.

Notwithstanding the Barbie rhetoric, The American Dream does not come true for everyone who embraces it. The citizenship and consumer sovereignty promised all Americans, can in reality be afforded only in degree and by those who manage to harness the limited economic, cultural and social opportunities that translate into reality, legal and political rights or abstract notions of the autonomous individual. The rest, to get by, must negotiate themselves various levels of subjection and alienation, often with devastating costs to their humanity and that of their dependants or others. Being a rights-bearing individual ceases to be as automatic in reality as is claimed in principle. For those who succeed after hard struggle, the tendency is to monopolise opportunities, since it is, quite paradoxically, only by curbing the rights of others that advantages are best guaranteed in effect. Like with fighting obesity, the majority are those who struggle on a daily basis to fulfil themselves, with varying degrees of failure. This is an effort which, under consumer capitalism, is blamed on the individual to the extent that he or she has failed to sacrifice others through the sacrifice of history, memory, relations or community. Most acquire few advantages despite the profound alienation, inequality, violence, cultural and social malaise, psychic and emotional disorders and exploitation taking place in America today (and increasingly elsewhere) linked to consumer capitalism’s suffocating grip on human imagination and creativity. These limitations of Barbie democracy in the American context may well appear a more palatable form of subjection to some Africans by comparison, but the need to address the rights of the casualties of independent success is no less compelling in America.

Since Barbie democracy appears uncomfortable with salient relationships, community and creative diversity, Africans who subscribe to its rhetoric as leaders find themselves reduced to a Jekyll-and-Hyde democracy: tolerant in principle but muffling in practice. Such African leaders, whether in government, the opposition or civil society, are forced to keep up appearances with Barbie democracy in a context where people are clamouring for recognition and representation as cultural, religious and regional communities. The competing claims for their attention by internal interest groups and external forces explain the apparent contradictions, hypocrisy and double standards that ensue when their actions are appreciated exclusively from the standpoint of Barbie democracy.

Africa’s alternative to Barbie democracy

Despite the noted shortcomings of Barbie democracy, the quest for the missing cultural link in African democracy requires serious negotiation and flexibility, to avoid throwing the Barbie baby out with the bath water. It requires a creativity and nuance that emphasise interdependence between the individual and the community, and between the state and the various cultural configurations that dwell within it. The vision should be a democracy that guarantees not only individual rights and freedoms, but also the interests of communal and cultural solidarities, big and small.

A compelling argument can be made to the effect that the problem in Africa has been undomesticated Barbie democracy, not democracy as pursued in broader forms and possibilities. For democracy to be meaningful in the new millennium, there is a need for honesty about the limitations of the Barbie model, and for recognition of the complex realities, interconnections, and diversities that animate the lives of social actors everywhere. The direction and quality of democracy in the new millennium would depend on an open marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community interests, since individuals continue to belong to solidarities despite attempts at conversion by Barbie. It is a fact of life that most people are committed to primary forms of belonging, to which state and country are only secondary, and promoters of Barbie democracy ought to be more honest about this, to avoid opportunism. It is by acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who straddle different margins of identity and belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’, that democracy stands its greatest chance anywhere. If harvesting rights and entitlements requires the denial of rights and entitlements, the only democracy that would make sense in the new millennium is one that reconciles autonomy with dependency, citizenship with subjection. And as the most subjected continent where opportunism has blossomed, Africa should play a leading role in bringing about a democracy more in tune with the rights of dependants.

REFERENCES

This is an updated version of an earlier paper in Dutch published in Internationale Samenwerking (Publication of Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Development Cooperation), No.12, December 2003, pp.28-30.
1] December 13, 2003, p.11
2] I would extend it beyond people to include communities and solidarities of various kinds.
3]
4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/features/obesity_surgery.shtml
5] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69
6] December 13, p.11, 2003
7] The Economist, September 27, 2003, pp.68-69; December 13, 2003, p.11.
8] December 13, p.11, 2003
9] Just by way of a quick example, the UK Daily Mail of October 22, 2003, pp.24-25, carried the confessions of five women who tried celebrity diets for six weeks, and all complained about the disturbing unseen effects on their bodies. One found the diet a nightmare that didn’t seem healthy, made her feel nauseous, and gave her stomach pains all the time. To another, her diet was horrible, tiring and difficult to follow because too prohibitive. A third branded the diet an expensive hassle, and a fourth, who was ‘incredibly tired and desperately missed tasty, easy food such as pasta and rice’, wondered if ‘anyone could live like this for long’

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Associate Professor and Head of Publications and Dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Email: [email][email protected], Website: www.nyamnjoh.com

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

The proposed Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act by the Provincial Government of KwaZulu-Natal is the latest in a long list of anti-poor legislation in South Africa dating back to the period of apartheid rule. Marie Huchzermeyer asserts that the Bill is anti-poor, not in the interest of the 'slum dwellers' and is unconstitutional.

The proposal for an Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act by the Provincial Government of KwaZulu-Natal was preceded by seven years of slum eradication rhetoric. Since the launch of United Nations Millennium Development Project in 2000, which includes as Goal 7 Target 11 to improve the lives of 100,000,000 slum dwellers by 2020, President Mbeki has mandated the national Department of Housing to work towards achieving ‘shack-free cities’. The aim to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 has since been a controversial element of housing politics at national, provincial and city level throughout South Africa.

100,000,000 slum dwellers, the target of the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) was a mere 10% of slum dwellers globally in the year 2000. Why was this modest goal to improve the lives of some slum dwellers translated in South Africa into slum eradication or elimination? Why are Provinces not instead preparing legislation to ensure the improvement of the lives slum dwellers?

The South Africa government are not the only culprits for having misinterpreted a global commitment. UN-Habitat, the United Nation’s Human Settlement Programme based in Nairobi, officially refers to the slum MDG as the ‘Cities Without Slums MDG’. The slum improvement MDG target of 100,000,000 slum dwellers by 2020 was drawn in 2000 from an inappropriately titled programme, ‘Cities Without Slums’, of Cities Alliance, a UN-Habitat and World Bank supported initiative. Its promotional material, which advocates for participatory city- and country-wide informal settlement upgrading, is branded with the ‘Cities Without Slums’ slogan.

As any marketing expert could have predicated, the brand said more than the content. Many country governments have failed to differentiate between the normative principle of the slogan, that cities should not have slums, and the operational target of improving the lives of 10% of slum dwellers. Instead, tragically, the slogan became the target, namely to eradicate slums – through mass evictions in Zimbabwe in 2005 and Abuja, Nigeria, in 2006 and through slum elimination legislation in South Africa in 2007.

Measures taken in most provinces to eradicate informal settlements are not constitutional. Illegal evictions are rampant, be they through the use of force, in the absence of court orders, or in contempt of court interdicts. Very few informal settlement dwellers have access to legal representation and can fight for their rights in the courts. And yet, numerous court records exist to prove the proliferation of illegal and unconstitutional slum interventions.

To improve the lives of slum dwellers in this country requires in the first instance strengthening and enforcement of the legislation that prevents illegal evictions. Any new legislation must focus on ensuring that the state fulfils its constitutional obligations in relation to the right to housing, and in particular, as required by the Grootboom Constitutional Court ruling in 2000, in relation to those living in intolerable conditions.

New legislation should mandate (a) the recognition of informal settlements and other so-called ‘slums’, (b) emergency preparedness and (c) participatory upgrading as promoted by UN-Habitat as ‘best practice’, with relocation as a last resort. Chapter 13 of the National Housing Code provides the methodology and funding for such intervention, including rehabilitation of informally occupied but unsuitable land. This may be land that is waterlogged, threatened by floods, unstable due to mine or refuse dumps or geotechnically compromised through steep slopes, clay or dolomitic soils.

Instead, the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature has approved a Bill that, while mentioning the progressive realisation of the right to housing in passing, introduces draconian measures to remove the phenomenon of informality from the urban landscape and to prevent it from re-emerging in any possible form. Owners of informally occupied land are mandated to institute evictions within a period stipulated by the municipality, and owners of vacant land are mandated to prevent informal occupation through measures such as fencing off and posting of security guards.

These measures were contained in the notorious 1951 ‘Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act’ of the apartheid government. They were unacceptable then, and remain so today. According to UN-Habitat (and Cities Alliance/Cities Without Slums for that matter), the first and most important measure for improving the lives of slum dwellers is to ensure security of tenure, i.e. to put an end to evictions. While the Bill does not recognise tenure insecurity as a criteria for identifying slums (whereas UN-Habitat does), by approving the Slum Elimination Bill the Provincial Legislature has overnight reduced tenure security for millions of slum dwellers in the Province, increasing fear and uncertainty and thereby worsening their lives.

Indeed, most slum dwellers are aware that the Bill is approved. Many official ‘hearings’ were held on the Bill, although none of the objections that were raised were taken seriously by the legislature. The process and content of the Bill, as well as experience of tenure insecurity and illegal interventions, have increased the mobilisation of slum dwellers. Media coverage on the Bill has been extensive and critical, contrasting the phenomenal public relations exercise of the MEC for Housing, who pulled wool over the eyes of the Legislature and of many influential experts and commentators regarding the intentions and measures of the Bill. Slum dwellers, as often argued by Abahlali’s leaders, are the real experts of poverty – and they are rightly living in fear because of the Bill.

The Bill undoubtedly is not in the interest of slum dwellers. It does not recognise insecurity of tenure as a problem and deepens the insecurity of slum dwellers as a first step to eliminating slums. By prohibiting and preventing unlawful occupation of unutilised land or buildings, the Bill pushes responsibility for sheltering the poor onto already under-housed people – relatives and acquaintances living in formal but already overcrowded units. It is they, and not the middle class, that may open their doors in solidarity when informality is no longer tolerated as an option.

Preventing the invasion of unutilised land through fencing off and guarding is exclusionary, and rewards those that hold undeveloped strategic land for speculative purposes. It indicates that despite a decade of Brazil-South Africa dialogue on urban policy (particularly in Ethikwini/KwaZulu-Natal, facilitated at great cost and funfair by Cities Alliance/Cities Without Slums), South Africa has still not grasped the concept of a social function of land, which the Brazilian Constitution and subsequent legal statues use to ensure that strategically located, unutilised, privately owned land is developed for the poor.

What KwaZulu-Natal has also still not learnt from Brazil is that slums, as embarrassing as they may be to city managers, must be understood as temporary relief to the housing crisis, and that improvements must involve the occupants rather than displace them. Instead, the Bill signals scepticism about the viability of improving or upgrading slums. In its preamble, it suggests that formal housing projects require protection from ‘slums’, ignoring the reality that slum dwellers are, more often than not, threatened by housing developments for which they make way, or to which they are forcefully removed and which have little relevance to their lives and economies.

The Bill, if not rejected outright, requires fundamental revision (and renaming) so as to centre on the protection of poor communities from state and market driven displacement. This is particularly pertinent in the wake of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The Bill needs to be sensitive to what it really means to improve the lives of slum dwellers.

The Bill is as yet not gazetted. It is the Constitutional responsibility of the Premier to ensure that the Bill does not contradict the Constitution. Social movements and housing rights groups are already preparing to challenge the Act in court, should the Premier ignore their advice and go ahead with gazetting the Bill.

* Marie Huchzermeyer, School of Architecture and Planning - Wits University