A R9-million housing development will soon be unveiled to cater for an estimated 5, 000 descendants of former Zanzibar slaves in KwaZulu-Natal. The Zanzibaris, one of the smallest minority groups in the province, were forcefully removed from King's Rest in Bluff, south of Durban and taken to Chatsworth in 1961 as part of the apartheid government's land policies.

Even though Nigeria's forests are only some ten percent of the size they were just two decades ago, they still provide an incredibly rich and diverse habitat. From the tropical highlands to the lowland rainforest, from the plateau grasslands to the savanna, from the swamps to the mangrove forests.

The forests of Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria are the last remaining rainforests in Nigeria and are home to 2,400 native forest communities comprising 1.5 million people, the highest primate diversity on the planet --including the world's most endangered gorillas--, and an estimated 20 percent of the world's butterfly species. For global logging companies, Nigerian forests appear to be an easy target. Environmental regulations in the country are rarely enforced, and many officials in the recently ousted Abacha dictatorship were notoriously corrupt --more interested in personal gain than in the protection of Nigeria's natural resources.

Hong Kong-based Western Metal Products Company (WEMPCO) is one of the most destructive companies operating in the region (see also http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Nigeria/Odey.html). Although they own the rights to log in some areas of Cross River State, WEMPCO flaunts regulations and logs illegally in the forest buffer zone surrounding the Cross River National Park, not only threatening to decimate the forest's magnificent hardwoods, but also endangering the livelihoods of Cross River State's forest communities.

Logging has significantly reduced animal habitat, shrinking the animal populations that serve as a traditional source of protein in Cross River State. The bushmeat that was once plentiful is now scarce. The plundering of trees which provide shelter has left whole areas without windbreakers or sufficient trees to check the devastating rainstorms. Thus, the roofs of houses are often blown off by the slightest rainstorm.

Since 1996, environmental and human rights groups across the world have been campaigning against the destructive logging activities of WEMPCO which has operated in Cross River State since 1992, illegally harvesting and exporting the state's forest resources, inciting and inflicting violence and threatening those who have spoken out against their activities.

Prior to doing business in Cross River State, WEMPCO was kicked out of Nigerian Ogun State, for the same flagrancies of forest management policies and laws.

Indeed, the threats to the rainforest continue. The Nigerian government commissioned in 2003 the operation of WEMPCO's wood processing factory and approved a new 540 square mile logging concession located on the river upstream from many forest communities and the national park. The logging concessions will devastate the remaining forest in the buffer zones surrounding the national park. The mill's voracious appetite has the capacity to process twice the amount of wood legally designated by the concessions, sending the company looking for more hardwood in nearby Cameroon. By-products of WEMPCO's hardwood processing mill threaten to pollute the water sources of two million tribal people and threaten the habitat of the endangered gorilla and many other rare primate species.

Now, the NGO Coalition for the Environment and its members, including 2003 Goldman Prize Winner Mr. Odigha Odigha, Mr. Odey Oyama of Rainforest Resource Development Centre and Mr. Oronto Douglas of Environmental Rights Action, which has been actively opposing WEMPCO's logging activities, has something to celebrate. The Governor of Cross River State, Mr. Donald Duke, has recently approved the closure of the WEMPCO wood-processing factory and the immediate cessation of the company's forest-related activities due to what it described as unwholesome activities contrary to the earlier agreement reached with the company.

However, the great menace of an unsustainable global log trade pervades the whole logging activity, either legal or illegal. That is why West Africa Rainforest Network continues pushing for a ban on all commercial logging for the next 12 months.

* SOURCE: World Rainforest Movement B U L L E T I N 86 September 2004, E-Mail: [email protected], Web page: http://www.wrm.org.uy Article based on information from: "West Africa Rainforest Network", http://www.earthisland.org/warn/ ; "Odigha Odigha", http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipients/recipientProfile.cfm?recipientID…

It seems as if our lives our based on a series of deeply-ingrained myths that together function in a way that sets us on a path to serve power and in turn replicate the system that produces us. Often myths like old wives tales or those contained in children's stories are harmless, but the problem with the myths of capitalist society as we know it is that they hide the price that other people pay so that only a few can live a life that sets out to completely obliterate the future.

Mining is one such myth. In the capital cities of the world, the end products of mining are displayed in all the glitz and glamour appropriate for those who can afford to indulge the luxury of adorning their bodies with gold and diamonds. This is to say nothing of fashionable mobile phones which could not be made without the mining of coltan or the tank-like four by fours that housewives use to scoot to the shops, which could not function without the mining of oil. The list is endless, but the point is that in schools, universities and society at large mining is presented as a bastion of the economy and is symbolic of wealth and development.

Rarely does the human cost of mining surface into mainstream discourse and even where it does it is explained away as a necessary evil or, as in the case of reparations claims for past abuses, historic indiscretions which have since been rectified by a caring and humane industry. This makes possible, for example, reparations claims being incorporated into mainstream discourse without causing too much of a stir. Somehow the fact that survivors of asbestos mining who have collectively hacked their lungs out in violent coughing or even just slowly suffocated to death in the interests of shareholder profit does not result in a realisation of the horrible price that mining exacts.

Even if some development benefits are conceded to the mining industry, human society has paid a bloody price in the name of the mining industry and it continues to do so. The only consolation is that the difference between mining 50 years ago and mining today is that the myth is no longer as strong as it used to be because it has become obvious that the resources that mining relies on are finite and that therefore the entire endeavour is inherently unsustainable. And with that realisation comes a broader understanding that society, as social commentator George Monbiot has explained it, has all along been "borrowing from the future to pay for the present".

Mining: Social and Environmental Impacts, published by the World Rainforest Movement, sets out to highlight the "depredatory activities" associated with mining and to show that these activities are unsustainable not only because they exploit non-renewable resources but also because they leave behind them destruction of the environment and society, which is often irreversible.

Ricardo Carrere, World Rainforest Movement international coordinator, writes in his introduction that the hope is for the book to serve as a tool to support local struggles against mining, to generate awareness on the issue and to strengthen campaigns against mining ending in the destruction and degradation of wider forest areas and of local livelihoods and cultures.

The book covers Africa, Asia, Central America and Oceania and its value is that it brings together the impact of mining across a wide range of countries, thus making it possible to see the systematic way in which rights have been violated and the environment destroyed. The section on Africa, which covers the Central African Republic, DRC, Core d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, is particularly useful.

All too often coverage of the impacts of mining and the complicity of industry players and international financial institutions in human and environmental degradation tends to focus on mega-projects, like the Chad/Cameroon oil pipeline or the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. When problems are identified it is easy for them to be explained away as exceptions or again, necessary indulgences in the interests of a greater concept of "human development". The value of this book is that it shows just how widespread mining abuses actually are and in so doing makes a small contribution towards breaking down the myth that mining is a global good, perpetrated for the benefit of all.

* For copies contact [email protected]

* Reviewed by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu

Out here in the sandy moonscape of eastern Chad, you don't expect to see a diminutive Frenchman marching around, muttering, and staring at his global-positioning device. But Alain Gachet has come here to outdo generations of witch doctors, water diviners, and PhDs. He aims to pinpoint, with scientific certainty, the right places to dig the costly wells that pull precious water from beneath the sand. About 200,000 refugees have fled to Chad from Sudan's violent Darfur region. They each need four gallons of water a day.

At the Kenya National Archives, only copies of the controversial Anglo-Maasai treaties of 1904 and 1911 are available, while the originals remain in the UK. The future of the disputed lands looks grim for the Maasai people as according to the treaty copies, Maasai leader Laibon Olonana signed away millions of acres of Maasai land to the colonialists on a 999-year lease.

Senior Zimbabwean officials have inflated the official number of elephants in the country so they can benefit from the ivory trade, a conservationist has said. Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwean Conservation Taskforce said the elephant population had fallen to 60,000 at the most, yet the government put the figure at more than 100,000.

Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative and educational materials free to share and re-use, unveiled today its Developing Nations copyright license. Like all of Creative Commons' legal tools, the Developing Nations license is free of charge and allows authors and artists to invite certain uses of their work, upon certain conditions -- to declare "some rights reserved" as opposed to the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright.

Botswana is constructing an 8-foot high electric fence along its border with Zimbabwe at a time when many Zimbabweans are crossing over to Botswana in search of a better life. On 15 September 2004, BBC Africa Live asked: Do you want tighter border controls in your country? Or should Africans be able to go wherever they want on the continent? What are the consequences of tighter border controls to a more united Africa?

Nigerian officials announced on Monday that Nigeria was not going to be handing over the disputed and potentially oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to the Cameroonian government by the previously set date of 15 September 2004. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2002 that the Peninsula belonged to Cameroon,therefore demanding that Nigeria withdraw its armed forces and civilian administration.

Oil communities and other stakeholders in Delta state rounded up a three-day seminar in Warri on "Multinationals and Ethnic Conflicts in the Niger Delta (Delta)" recently, maintaining that the ways out of the crises in the region are for the oil-bearing communities to be part of the control of their oil resources and the Federal Government to amend the obnoxious, repressive and draconian laws in the statute books that conferred unilateral powers on the centre over the said resources.

An ambitious plan to open a big marine park that includes a large area of land with over 30,000 people living on it has been launched in southern Tanzania. Unlike most marine parks which have no human habitation, the Mnazi Bay - Ruvuma River Estuary Park will have to match the goals of marine conservation with the needs of the fishermen and farmers who live off the sea.

It’s another case of natural resources proving to be a mixed blessing. While Sierra Leone’s government gratefully accepts revenues generated by the country’s fishing industry, illegal trawling by foreign vessels is providing cause for concern. "We’ve been able to generate close to four billion leones (about 1.6 million dollars) for this year alone compared to about two billion leones (just over 800,000 dollars) in 2002. This is remarkable, and would help shore up our ailing economy," says Okere Adams, minister for fisheries and marine resources. The profits stem partly from fishing licenses and royalties.

The Tanzanian government and the World Bank have devised a means of exploiting the country's natural gas resources to increase the country's much needed electrification. A private international consortium, Songas, has built a 200-km underground pipeline at a cost of US $295 million to carry natural gas from the island of Songo Songo to the industrial area of Ubungo in the country's commercial centre, Dar es Salaam.

Booming global trade in rare forms of wildlife ranging from tropical fish and trees to African lizards is threatening many of them with extinction, conservation group WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) said last Thursday. The Swiss-based body urged governments at a global conference next month to agree to restrict trade in obscure species, which have a high market value as culinary delicacies, aphrodisiacs, or pets.

In Harare, Zimbabwe, severe water shortages and water contamination have caused many schools to cut short their hours of class or not reopen at all. Without clean water water supplies in Harare, serious health concerns could arise.

Your interview with Rudy Amenga-Etego is worthy of commendation (Pambazuka News 171). I completely agree with him that the privatisation of water is not the best option for Ghana and Africa in general, which has no welfare provisions. It goes to show the failure on the part of African Governments to provide for the people they are supposed to govern. The failure of these essential amenities are due largely to the corruption that has become endemic in governance in Africa. The privatisation of water will further impoverish the people who have no means of livelihood. The act should be resisted.

Guinea has agreed to hand back to Sierra Leone the disputed border village of Yenga. Guinea had occupied Yenga since 1998 in order to support the Sierra Leone government forces in their civil war against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel movement and then remained there after the civil war ended in 2002. Despite previous border disputes between the two countries, they have now agreed that Yenga belongs to Sierra Leone.

The Namibian Farmworkers' Union (Nafwu) has accused the government of using land expropriation as a political tool and dragging its feet in giving land to the landless.

Mauritania and Mali have issued preliminary estimates of heavy crop damage as governments across West Africa struggle to control a plague of locusts that is growing larger by the day. Mohamed Abdallahi Ould Babah, the director of Mauritania's locust control campaign told IRIN on Tuesday that hopper bands - concentrations of young flightless locusts - were invading fields in the southeast of the mainly desert country, destroying young shoots of sorghum, millet and beans.

Plans to eradicate alien weeds infesting southern Africa's rivers have been "indefinitely" derailed by administrative delays, a World Bank official confirmed on Wednesday. A multimillion-rand anti-infestation project was due to start in 2003, but has been delayed by the relocating of the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) water section to Gaborone in Botswana.