The new issue of Chimurenga is, yes, about football. And politics. But no, we are not talking about soccer as a capitalist apparatus, or as a substitute for war, or about South Africa’s ability to successfully host the 2010 World Cup, or about Fifa’s global developmentalist rhetoric – the writing and art actively side-step football clichés and branded discourses.

The third issue of ICC-Africa is available now on the CICC's website. This issue is a "Special ASP" issue prepared for the fifth session of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court which starts on 23 November 2006.

The Africa International Trade Review is a bi-annual peer-reviewed journal published jointly by the University of Pretoria, the University of Western Cape and the Plato Institute, a non-profit think-tank based in Kenya, through PULP.

The honours for Best Feature Film at this year's Cape Town World Cinema Festival have gone to the Korean film, King and the Clown, directed by Joon Ik Lee. This 16th century dramatic comedy focuses on the intrigue and drama of court life. The Jury motivated, "This story about 16th century actors in the Korean Court completely transported us as it brought old theatre forms alive.

In our series on trade justice, Pambazuka News was at Levellers Day in the small village of Burford in Oxfordshire in May 2006. This annual event marks the anniversary of the execution of three soldiers who were part of the Leveller pro-democracy movement in 17th century England. Pambazuka News caught up with Karen Chouhan from the National Assembly Against Racism, Salma Yaqoob from Birmingham Stop the War Coalition and ex-MP Tony Benn to get their thoughts on what trade justice means to them.

Emerging rapper PlanBe talks to Sokari Ekine from Pambazuka News and explores violence and rape in South Africa with emerging rapper PlanBe. He performs his rap Stand Against.

The overall Western attitude towards Africa is that the continent is trapped in a tribal time warp. The Western media plays a vital role in perpetuating this misconception. Milton Allimadi points out that Western journalists and editors still have the same colonial attitude towards Africans. “…Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis,” writes Allimadi.

Africans must insist that Western media stop referring to Africans as “tribesmen” and to conflicts in Africa as “tribal.” Not only is it demeaning and racist, but it clouds many complex issues and exonerates incompetent journalism, with even deadly consequences.

For example, when the Rwandan civil war erupted in genocide, Time magazine and most major Western publications, including The New York Times, referred to the conflict as ‘tribal’. Moreover, the Clinton Administration, as part of its argument against major international intervention to halt the killings, reasoned that ‘tribal’ conflicts could not be halted. Western reporters were then absolved from terrible reporting which ignored the fact that the war had been going on for four years before the genocide; that Uganda had trained and armed Tutsi refugees into a guerrilla army and sent them into Rwanda because it wanted to get rid of them from Uganda; and, that the French had for years armed the Rwandan army, giving its government the false belief that they did not have to seriously negotiate with the refugees who wanted to return home. All these factors were subsumed under the rubric of ‘tribalism’.

When Africans ask another African what tribe he or she is from, it does not have the same meaning or carry any of the racist and demeaning connotations as when the word is used by Westerners, especially by journalists. There is no better way to explain this than to borrow from the late Okot p’Bitek, the Ugandan author. “Western scholarship sees the world as divided into two types of human society,” wrote p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), “one, their own, civilized, great, developed; the other the non-Western peoples, uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other tribal.” P’Bitek added, “And when we read of ‘tribal law,’ ‘tribal economics,’ or ‘tribal religion,’ Western scholars imply that the law, economics or religion under review are those of primitive or barbaric peoples.”

Western journalists and editors, I maintain, still have the same attitude towards Africans. Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis.

Although articles about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times date back to the 19th Century, it was only after the Independence movement swept across the continent in the 1960s that most Western publications started sending reporters to Africa on a consistent basis. Many lessons can be learned from that early engagement. For example, when The New York Times sent Homer William Bigart to cover decolonization in West Africa, the reporter expressed disdain for Africans in a personal letter to his foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman, back in New York, in early 1960s.

“I'm afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics,” Bigart, a respected reporter who had already twice won America’s highest journalistic honour, the Pulitzer Prize, wrote. “The politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork…I vastly prefer the primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population explosion everyone talks about.” Wallace was a racist Southern politician in the United States at the time.

One might wonder how Freedman, editor at America’s most prestigious newspaper responded to this instance of undiluted racist expression from his correspondent. Was he admonished? Was he recalled from his assignment? Hardly. On the contrary, Freedman chimed in with his own celebration of alleged African barbarity. “This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public,” Freedman wrote to his reporter in a letter dated March 4, 1960. “By now you must be American journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in the New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?” The reference to a nickel was to the fact that the Times in those days cost five cents.

These repugnant views towards Africans, held by the reporter and his editor, correlated perfectly with the “articles” published about Africa. The Times’ foreign editor, and his reporter did not take Africa seriously, to say the least, and this attitude, and disposition towards Africa is still very much reflected in much Western writings about the continent.

For example, after Bigart left Ghana and “reported” from Nigeria, an article was published in The New York Times, on January 31, 1960, under the contemptuous headline, “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” In the news article, Bigart expressed the same disdain contained in his personal letter: “A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi,” he wrote. He further added, “A momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra…”

There were several other articles written by Bigart, and published by The Times, during this period. On the most momentous period in Africa’s history, America’s premier newspaper decided to ridicule and insult the continent, and generate feelings of contempt towards Africans amongst its readers.

This essay will not explore the many reasons that occasioned this so-called ‘journalism’. Suffice it to say that by the time reporters like Bigart arrived on the continent, the Western psyche had been conditioned by centuries of Western writing to accept only the worst from Africa, therefore the ‘journalism’ had to conform to the readers’ expectations of cannibalism, savagery, backwardness, primitiveness, diseases, and all the other negative attributes.

For example, today when we read the ‘journals’ of the so called ‘explorers’ such as H.M. Stanley, Samuel Baker, and others, who chronicled their adventures in Africa, it is clear that many of the accounts and encounters and conquests over African ‘savages’ were concocted - figments of their imagination. Yet, these were the writers whose books are still consulted by ‘modern’ Western reporters today.

So conditioned were writers and editors to expect the ‘backwardness’ that when the ‘savages’ did not cooperate, the ‘journalism’ was simply manufactured to fit. For example, when Lloyd Garrison, a Times reporter and descendant of the famous American abolitionist once filed a story from Nigeria in the late 1960s, he received the shock of his life. By the time his article was published in The Times, editors had taken it upon themselves to insert a scene about “primitive” Nigerians, even though the reporter himself had not encountered them - it was purely imagined and concocted by his editors in New York.

“The reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running around half naked,” Garrison complained, in a letter to the infamous editor, Freedman, dated June 5, 1967.

“Tribesmen connote the grass-leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive, which in a country like Nigeria just doesn't fit, and is offensive to African readers who know damn well what unwashed American and European readers think when they stumble on the word,” he added.

It is therefore ironically tragic that 40 years later, The New York Times and most other Western publications are yet to take the advice and warning of the then New York Times correspondent. One also wonders how many ‘tribal’ scenarios are still concocted by Western writers who travel to Africa. That is why it is even more important that Africans insist that Westerners stop using the ‘tribalism’ as an excuse for lack of in-depth reporting.

• Allimadi is the publisher of The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York, and the author of The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (Black Star Books, 2003).
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The Dimitra database contains profiles on organisations based in Africa, Europe and the Near East that have projects or programmes involving or concerning rural women and development. The database does aims to showcase the development trends in the different countries, with descriptions drawn from information submitted by the organisations concerned.

The AMU Commission on Mathematics Education in Africa and the Tunisian Association of Mathematical Sciences host from November 6 to 9, 2006, in Hammamet (Tunisia) the first Pan-African Space on Mathematics (PASM). The specific theme of PASM 2006 is innovation in mathematics education.

After more than 20 hours of deliberations early this month, the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was unable to agree on a new executive director. Despite the resulting delay, some observers say the failure actually indicates how seriously the Fund is taking its mandate to build a consensus between developed and developing countries.

Zimbabwe's privately owned cellular companies last week won a court order against a government attempt to force them to route international calls through a state-controlled gateway. High Court judge President Rita Makarau granted the interdict to Econet Wireless and Telecel.

The Financial Gazette has, in partnership with leading mobile telephone operator, Econet, launched a hassle-free classified advertising solution called 'TXT Classifieds', which enables advertisers to place their adverts with the Fingaz straight from their mobile phones. The service takes off from next week, November 16. Pilate Machadu, the Fingaz sales and marketing manager, confirmed the development, saying the service was created with convenience in mind.

Bona fide representatives of the media –print and electronic, photography, radio, television and film- will be accredited for coverage of the World Social Forum 2007, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, 20-25 January 2007.

World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) condemns in the strongest terms the broadcast suspensions carried out against Kinshasa-based Radio Réveil FM, along with six other radio stations and three television channels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) correspondent in Lesotho, Thabo Thakalekoala, who is also the regional chairperson of MISA, has been inundated with threatening anonymous calls that complain about his reporting, ever since the former minister of communications, Tom Thabane, defected from the ruling Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) to form the All Basotho Convention (ABC) on 9 October 2006.

Journaliste en danger (JED) calls for a radical reform of state-owned radio and television stations so that they might effectively serve the public interests. In a report on media coverage during the election period, JED noted that a large number of Congolese media failed to live up to their role.

Reporters Without Borders has called on the Eritrean government to urgently produce evidence that three journalists illegally held since September 2001 are still alive, as information from credible sources indicates they died in the course of the past 20 months in a detention centre at a place called Eiraeiro, in a remote northeastern desert.

During the struggle for Kenyan independence, the Mau-Mau controlled over 50 newspapers and many printing presses, setting up libraries in liberated territories in forests and cities, writes Shiraz Durrani. It’s facts like these, he says, which are largely buried in an information system inherited from the colonial era, a system which fails to serve the majority of African people.

“Silence in the library”

Perhaps the best way to understand the contradictions facing libraries in Africa today is through a story. It is only when social contradictions are accepted and understood that attempts can be made to resolve them. And resolve them we must, if libraries and information are to play their part in creating a new Africa where there is justice, democracy and development for all. The story is “silence in the library”:

“Nyanjiru wakes up at 4 am; a water debe on her head, she walks for an hour and a half to the nearest stream. Then she climbs back from the river to her home, picking dry wood on the way for fire; she arrives home three hours later to start the day's other work: crying children to be calmed with bits of left over food, chicken to be fed and watered; then to start digging her half acre shamba in the hot, burning sun. This is the daily routine for a peasant.

And then there is Kamau. Kamau pats his dogs fondly as they surround his new Volvo. This is his daily ritual. He realises that the gates are not open yet and hoots loudly. Where is Mutua? Does he not know that today is the library board meeting and he has to report early? They are to discuss library regulations. He has prepared a long list of ‘don’ts’. As Mutua opens the gates, Kamau speeds out, the silent sound of the Volvo soothing his mind. He starts thinking about library rules. Yes, users must be controlled. Only last week he found a fellow eating mandazi in the library. How can that be allowed? Kamau had him thrown out. The first rule is going to be about eating in the library. And then of course ‘Silence: silence in the library’”.

In such an atmosphere works the modern librarian. Inside the stone walls of the library, in total peace and calm among the well preserved volumes, the liberian is oblivious to the ruin and chaos of hunger, starvation and mass exploitation outside.

The contrasting lives of Nyanjiru and Kamau can be found anywhere in Africa. Their activities are taking place within miles of each other and on the same day. Yet the two are so removed from each other that they may easily be on different planets or in different historical ages.

The library is a concrete structure inaccessible to Nyanjiru, and Nyanjiru as a library user is unacceptable to the librarians. For Nyanjiru there is no time to waste, no compromises to be made. All her labour and thoughts are to satisfy her family's basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Anything that helps her in this work, she accepts with open arms and mind. Anything that prevents her from acquiring what she needs, she will fight. Her information needs are clear - she wants information which will help her to support and protect her family.

On the other hand is the library service - set up during colonial days, with a colonial vision, through ‘assistance’ from a colonial, neo-colonial ‘mother’ country. A mother whose very touch brings death. “Silence please; please, silence in the library”.

Silence, in spite of Nyanjiru’s dying children; silence, in spite of Nyanjiru’s twenty hour working day; silence, even though Nyanjiru's hard labour fails to fill her family’s stomachs. Nyanjiru knows no library. No library wants to know Nyanjiru.

The story of Nyanjiru and Kamau highlights the key need in Africa today: development – development of people, resources, industries, agriculture, art, culture… But “development” does not take place in a vacuum. In order to develop, people and societies need relevant information and knowledge in a number of fields such as science, history, geography, history, technology. Yet, under capitalism, information and knowledge and the very process of learning and education have become commodities to be bought and sold on the “open” market. Those without resources to purchase information end up having no access to it. The irony is that even those who produce information often have no access to that information which is taken from them, copyrighted, patented, repackaged, and sold at prices which the original producers cannot afford.

Thus peoples, countries and societies have been forced into “un-development” and inequality by the economic policies and practices of international finance and transnational corporations using the mechanisms of international financial and political control, such as the IMF, WTO and the UN.

But are these issues that should concern the library profession? Some say it is not our “business” to get involved in “politics” as we are professional people, not politicians. But if we accept that Africa needs a second war of liberation – economic liberation this time – then we need to accept that no liberation can be successful without appropriate information vision, strategy and tactics as well as trained information activists. This is the lesson from the major revolutions in the world. This is also the lesson from Africa’s long history of wars against colonialism and imperialism. And this is where we find a relevant social role for African librarians and information professionals and activists today.

The first requirement for liberation from an inequality imposed on Africa is access to information about the real reasons for poverty. Yet the information and communication systems created by the departing colonial powers were not expected or equipped to put this information before people. They were merely tools for a small, rich elite to impose its world outlook and culture on the poor and exploited majority of people. Post-independence systems and policies have made no fundamental change in this colonial-inspired information framework. We urgently need to seek a role for the information profession that is relevant to the needs of Africa in the 21st century.

An important task for Africa is to document fully the achievements, successes and failures of the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Information about these can arm us for current and future struggles. This has not been fully documented. But if the history of African struggle for political and economic liberation is poorly documented, the struggle for African information liberation is even less well documented and understood.

It is not a matter of general knowledge, for example, that during the Mau Mau war of liberation in Kenya, the combatants controlled over 50 newspapers and many printing presses; they set up libraries in liberated territories in forests in cities, ran an efficient information collection system, and created their own distribution network, using “traditional” and modern methods available to them. This complex communications system was created and managed by activist librarians and information workers who were active not only in the information field, but in the larger political and social fields as well. Their experience, if fully documented, can help us find a relevant role for the information professional in Africa today.

And yet today, we tend to follow blindly the “Western” model of public library services which actively seeks to remove politics from information theories and practices. This model has not been successful in the “West” itself to provide information to all, particularly to those politely referred to as “socially excluded”. Yet we in Africa have not fully challenged this situation. It is only by subjecting our current policies and practices to a vigorous challenge that new and relevant theories, policies and practices can emerge.
Opportunities for information liberation

Just as in the political field, so in the information field, there are major developments when social contradictions are at their sharpest. It is at such key points in history that opportunities arise for making revolutionary changes in the way information and politics are organised. Colonial Africa has had a number of opportunities to change its societies for the better and serve the needs of the majority of people.

One such opportunity was in late nineteen fifties and early sixties which saw achievement of political independence in many countries. It was a time when foundations of the old colonial world were being destroyed and those of new free societies were being laid.

Many activists had the vision of a society where all would have free access to information and knowledge created by the work of all. It was a time of immense change and high hopes for a just, equitable future after decades of colonial oppression and exploitation. This was the time when people did influence events in a major way, underscoring what was said at the World Summit for Information Society (2003): it is “people who primarily form and shape societies, and information and communication societies are no exception”.

But the opportunity at independence to challenge the very basis of social organisations such as libraries was lost. Library services continued to function on the same basis as under colonialism, targeting their services to the elite, although now this included some more people and became “multiracial”. Class divisions, which formed the real divisions in the society, were deliberately played down, and racial, “tribal” and other “divisions” were brought into prominence. An information service operating in the real interest of people would have ensured that this “information blind-spot” was removed and the question of who the library actually serves would have been resolved in favour of the majority of working people. Thus an information service using resources from all but serving a few was developed. This situation has more or less continued until today.

But today, there is another possibility for change. Changes at a global level in the last 25 years now present Africa with another opportunity to make a fundamental shift in the way societies are organised – and in the way information services are organised. If managed correctly, we can make the transition to a people-orientated library service that did not take place at independence.

A key requirement for development of Africa is a redrawing of the “information map” to reassess our information work. We need to assess the relevance of the sources of information we provide to the people and to review whose point of view such information reflects. We need to look afresh at the form and content of information in our libraries and look at what languages they cover. We need to see if the information is targeted correctly and review how outcomes are monitored. Our information needs to reflect Africa in a new perspective and reinterpret its history from the point of view of African working people.

The world-view that people are daily presented by the Western media needs to be challenged for African people to see themselves as equal partners in a global context. An alternative vision and view of the world needs to be made available to every African. No people can develop under a situation of daily images of their own powerlessness and inadequacy, where facts about their exploitation are hidden and their suffering is shown as resulting from their own fault. In order to build our self-confidence we need to see the world from our own perspective in which the “other” is just that – the other.

Collection building

An important area that needs to be addressed urgently is the collection policy and practice of African libraries. Again, this is not the forum to go into this in detail, but the following needs to be addressed:

- Material from African liberation struggle. The enormous amount of oral and written material generated during the long history of African struggle against colonialism needs to be collected, documented and made available. Developments in information and communications technologies make this task easier than it was some years back. Part of this process is the need to get back from colonial countries the vast amount of African documents, material culture, and archives stored in London, Paris and other colonial capitals.

- Documents of the Pan African movement need to be included in the above, as do material on slavery whose effects Africa has not recovered from even today.

- Documentation on the policies and activities of organisations and leaders active in the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements (before and after independence) need to be made available through every public and University library in Africa. These should include organisations and leaders in every African country. For example, films on Lumumba and other anti-imperialist activists need to be collected or commissioned.

- African libraries seems to be flooded by material from a Western, imperialist point of view. There is a need to actively collect material from an alternative, people’s, point of view. This should include material on the World Social Forum (WSF) as well as on the people’s anti-globalisation movements.

- Material from a Pan-African and internationalist perspective. African libraries need to collect material from other African countries, organise a translation service to make material available to all, and promote major regional African languages throughout the continent (e.g. Kiswahili, Arabic, and Yoruba).

- Collections on social and economic development. Experiences on development in other parts of the world needs to be made available to African planners, teachers, lecturers, extension workers and others as a way of disseminating it to people. Thus experiences from China, Cuba, Venezuela and India should be actively collected.

* Shiraz Durrani is a Senior Lecturer, Information Management, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University. He is the author of the book “Never be Silent: Publishing and imperialism in Kenya, 1884-1963”. Durrani formed the African Progressive Librarian and Information Activists’ Group (PALIAct), a partnership with a group of progressive African librarians and information workers. PALIAct seeks to develop people-oriented information services decided upon by workers, peasants, pastoralists, fisher people and other marganilised individuals and groups whose information needs have not been met. It involves working in partnership with other professionals and service providers.

* This article is a shortened version of a paper presented to the XVII Standing Conference Of Eastern, Central, & Southern African Library & Information Professionals (SCECSAL XVII), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 10th- 14th July 2006 (http://www.tlatz.org/scecsal2006/) The full length paper is also to be published in Journal of Pan African Studies. Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The November issue of ReConnect Africa is now online. Connecting Africa to the global world, ReConnect Africa is a unique online publication and portal that provides essential information to Africans around the world about careers, enterprise and jobs in Africa. The November issue focuses on South Africa, highlighting the country’s achievements, challenges and people management issues and signposts essential services for employers and recruiters in Africa and for professionals and job seekers in Africa and the Diaspora.

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