Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, hailed as the father of modern African writing, has been awarded the £60 000 Man Booker International Prize. His award capped a triumphant month for Nigerian authors as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last week landed the Orange Prize, one of the literary world's top awards for women writers.

The Zambian government is under increasing pressure from business and labour to increase its mineral taxes in the wake of surging copper prices on the world market but, ­analysts say, a revision could lead to litigation. Copper prices on the London Metal Exchange have shot to record highs of about $8 000 per metric tonne -- from the average of $1 200 six years ago -- in what is considered the biggest base-metal bull market in 50 years, fuelled by strong demand from China and India.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/Doreen-Lwanga.jpgDoreen Lwanga visits the DeBeers Venetia mine complex in South Africa and comes away impressed by their social programmes for employees.

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of visiting DeBeers Venetia Mine in the Limpopo province at the invitation of a colleague Mr Khathutshelo ('K2') Mapasa, the Ore-Processing Manager at Venetia Mines. K2 and I met in 2005 when we were graduate students in Boston, where he was pursuing the Executive Development Program at Harvard Business School. Since then, we have stayed in touch and exchanged views on the behaviour of corporate entities and corporate social investment/responsibility. Since I was going to South Africa on vacation, K2 proposed that I visit Venetia Mine to get a visual tour of diamond mining, understand DeBeers’ corporate working world and its contribution to the communities where Venetia Mine is located in Musina, and Blouberg, which is also a major labour-sending area to the mine. This visit was a timely follow-up to my previous response to Del Hornbuckle’s review of the film Blood Diamonds in Pambazuka News () which I actually watched on my British Airways flight into Johannesburg.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/308/famous_tiffany_41975.jpgCo… from a social activist/scholarly research background, I must say that the visit to Venetia Mine was an eye opener. I had the opportunity of interacting with K2’s colleagues at Venetia in the Financial Management department, the Public and Corporate Affairs (PCA) and the HIV/Aids programme. I spent most of the day with two ladies, Tebogo Rametse and Nicolette Willemse of the PCA Department at Venetia Mine who took me on a whole day trip into the mine, and to Mapungubwe National Park that DeBeers supports to preserve.

We toured the open–pit mining operations at Venetia Mine, observed the process of extracting kimberlite from the ground, and the entire treatment plant complex where machines crush, re-crush, refine and liberate the diamonds from the kimberlite. Mapungubwe National Park has a wide variety of game including varieties of flora useful to the local inhabitants for medicinal purposes. Within Mapungubwe Park sits the Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape and the Mapungubwe World Heritage Site discovered in 1933, and the royal tombs of the K2 People (no relationship to K2 Mapasa) preserved by the South Africa Department of Arts and Culture.

Apparently, three different groups are claiming rights to the Mapungubwe Archaeological site, including the land on which Venetia Mine is located, allegedly because each of them lived in the area at the same time. The Mapungubwe collection consists of a variety of materials, including the famous golden rhino, gold sceptre, gold bowl, other gold ornaments, copper, iron, ivory, trade glass beads, Chinese celadon and ceramic ware is on permanent exhibit at the Mapungubwe Museum at the main campus of the University of Pretoria. North of Mapungubwe Park is the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers where the southern most tip of Botswana and Zimbabwe meet the North of South Africa at the Limpopo River. Here, many Zimbabwean migrants, afraid of being intercepted by the South African border police, swim across the Limpopo River braving the crocodiles, and traverse Mapungubwe National Park at the risk of being eaten by lions, to enter South Africa.

After our tour of the mines and the National Park, I chatted with Kefilwe Mokgoko, in-charge of the HIV/Aids programme at Venetia Mine to learn about DeBeers HIV/Aids policy, in light of my professional work on HIV/Aids and higher education in African universities. DeBeers has an impressive HIV/Aids and ARV programme, which is perhaps the only comprehensive programme established by any corporate entity for employees and their spouses/life partners. DeBeers began its engagement with HIV/Aids as a 'morally right' thing to do. The programme has since evolved into an economic investment in its employees’ welfare given the impact of consistent sickness and absence from work on mining operations. In 2005, Venetia Mine started its HIV/Aids Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) programme, and 95 per cent of the workforce has since benefitted. All employees that are tested HIV positive including their spouses and life partners are offered free ARV treatment and counselling. The challenges are to monitor adherence to treatment for HIV positive employees and their spouses/life partners, ensure that HIV negative employees remain so, and fight stigma, myths and negative beliefs surrounding HIV/Aids. Steps have been taken to train HIV/Aids peer-educators who then conduct HIV/Aids education sessions during working hours. Ultimately, the team at Venetia Mines plans to roll out the counselling and testing programme as part of the usual medical procedure all Venetia Mine employees undergo.

There is also high emphasis on safety and security of employees, particularly in the operations of the mine, not only because every accident hurts the productivity of the mine but also because it hurts the family fabric that Venetia Mine sees itself. The management team endeavours to plough back financial rewards for high performance with the team instead of banking all of it into shareholders’ pockets. K2 explained to me that in February 2006, the company declared a gainshare or bonus of 94 per cent of annual benefit value income for all employees due to outstanding performance of Venetia Mine in 2005.

Employees testified that there were able to meet those needs they had put off for a long time, and some were able to build or complete their houses. Besides participating in research and preservation of Mapungubwe National Park, Venetia Mine also supports education programs, teacher training and retention in local schools, skills development and community health and welfare. For instance, the company provides matching grants to strengthen learning at Early Childhood Learning Centres in Musina and Blouberg municipalities. There is a concerted effort of recruiting labour from surrounding communities, unlike most mining operations that create 'mining towns' and import labour from far. As one management staff explained to me, not only do most employees come from within the Musina and Blouberg towns, but also for the first time a member of the Venetia Mine Management Executive - the Ore-processing Manager Mr. Mapasa originates from the surrounding region of Venda.

At the end of my trip, I suggested to the Venetia Mine PCA team to increasingly engage the public and social activists with information on DeBeers’ social investments/response. This is particularly important for the diamond industry where we hear less about the 'unbloody' diamonds mining and mostly about the cruel mining conditions, conflict diamonds and corporate greed. To date, DeBeers has kept an internal communication strategy and shied away from making public statements about their social engagements to avoid being seen as bragging about their social investments. Fortunately, this attitude is changing within the company and PCA team is designing more strategies to bring its 'corporate social facts’ to the public. To its credit, Venetia Mine won the National Productivity Award in 2006 from South Africa’s National Productivity Institute. It is ranked the biggest diamond producer in South Africa and the third producer for DeBeers globally after Orapa and Jwaneng in Botswana. As for the intersection of diamonds with my professional work on higher education in Africa, the Oppenheimer Foundation, in partnership with Ford Foundation office in Southern Africa, has ploughed some profits from DeBeers diamonds to create an Endowment Chair for the Centre for Human Origins at the University of Witwatersrand.

* Doreen Lwanga’s writings focus on the intersection of African political, human and economic security and pan-Africanism.

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

Rwanda is a small sub-Saharan African nation that is learning to adjust to global warming and the effects of climate change. Decreasing water levels have contributed to loss of agricultural productivity and an energy crisis due to loss of power generated by hydropower stations.I n this Development Gateway interview, Patricia Hajabakiga, Rwanda Minister of State in Charge of Lands and Environment, talks about how Rwanda is adjusting to, among other things, unpredictable climate patterns.

Millions of dollars worth of timber revenue is being lost each year in Tanzania because of poor governance and rampant corruption in the forestry sector, according to a new report by TRAFFIC International.

The Hadzabe indigenous people of northern Tanzania are facing "a direct and serious threat to the survival" as their hunting and gathering grounds are falling prey to powerful safari organisers. Royals from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and their UAE Safari Ltd count on Tanzanian government support to drive out the Hadzabe, also called "Bushmen".

Several months ago, residents of the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, were struggling with disposal of household waste. Fast forward to June 2007, and matters have taken a turn for the better -- thanks to a waste management process imported from neighbouring Rwanda, and put into effect by the recently-created Association for Development and the Fight Against Poverty (Association pour le développement et la lutte contre la pauvreté, ADLP).

Activists have underscored the need for progress with both climate change and poverty alleviation - key items on the meeting's agenda - for there to be real improvement in Africa's living conditions.

Nigerian oil workers threaten to physically prevent the takeover of Kaduna Port Harcourt refineries by their new owner, Blue Star Oil, a Nigerian consortium.

One of the main militant groups operating in the Niger Delta says it will suspend hostilities for one month to allow the government of new President Umaru Yar'Adua to create a plan for peace in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. The group has also released six foreign hostages. But as Sarah Simpson reports from Lagos four more foreign oil workers have been kidnapped in the oil-rich region.

Minority Rights Group International released a report on Batwa lifestyles and identity. The Batwa forest people of Rwanda (also known as Pygmies) are recognized as having been the first inhabitants of the land. Traditionally the Batwa were forest hunter- gatherers, living throughout Rwanda. According to recent estimates, however, out of Rwanda’s total population of just over 8 million people, only between 20,000 and 27,000 are Batwa.

George Bush has thrown international efforts to control climate change into confusion with a proposal to create a "new global framework" to curb greenhouse gas emissions as an alternative to a planned UN process. The proposal came less than a week before a G8 summit in Germany and appeared to hit European hopes that the world's industrialised nations would commit to halving their emissions by 2050.

Uganda's government has scrapped plans to convert thousands of hectares of rainforest on an island in Lake Victoria into a palm oil plantation, according to the country's environment minister. The announcement on Saturday follows protests, in which three people died, over a similar project by a sugar production company.

The World Environment Day slogan selected for 2007 is Melting Ice - a Hot Topic? In support of International Polar Year, the WED theme selected for 2007 focuses on the effects that climate change is having on polar ecosystems and communities, and the ensuing consequences around the world. The main international celebrations of the World Environment Day 2007 will be held in Norway.

The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. But, as is argued here, the whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that everyday threats to biodiversity in Africa have disappeared into oblivion.

George Berkley, the 18th century Irish philosopher and theologian, is most well known for the conundrum, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'

Today, this insight on the ‘truth and the existence of things’ is ever relevant to our research institutions and what it is they are doing for nature conservation. If no one perceives or documents the loss of biodiversity, then the tree will not make a sound when it falls. Because the tree did not exist in the first place.

Now the caveat of Berkley’s philosophical meandering is this: he did not claim the existence or non-existence of entities. He claimed that man’s suspicion that things exist actually enlivens the existence, and therefore makes it ‘real’. So, conservationists not only suspect existence of many as yet unnamed gems of biodiversity, but they are quite certain of their bountiful existence.

This matters a lot, because almost 300 years after Linnaeaus gave us the tools to classify and name species, scientists in the 21st century continue to make startling discoveries. Think of the Bornean leopard subspecies now dominating the headlines. In southern Africa, recent discoveries include the Upemba lechwe antelope from the Katanga area in Zambia; the scarabid insect order that was discovered on Namibia’s Brandberg, and the monotypic tree genus, Icuria, from coastal Mozambique.

And yet, the brows of our botanical research institutions are deeply furrowed. It seems they are grappling with the practical ramifications of understanding the effects of climate change on unknown species in unknown landscapes. Is it possible to study climate change effects on things you don’t know even exist and for which you have no information? James Berkley would have thought so.

The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. Drier and warmer weather patterns forecast increased hunger of starving bellies and thirst in barren landscapes. Nature will suffer too. And, global warming will also throw its shadow on undocumented virgin territories.

The use of surrogates is a kind of information replacement therapy useful to climate change studies. Frogs, spiders or birds can be used as methodological substitutes. Even the properties of ecosystems can be helpful in filling the void. What it actually amounts to is that nature can be helped without actually knowing for sure that it actually exists. This amazing metaphysical feat that brings together rather elegant ideas on truth and science into the real world appeases most people; except, I would imagine, the pragmatic, gung-ho field practitioner. The one-and-only bush James Bond with the khaki micro-shorts and the steely resolve to protect nature at all costs.

Thus, on how ‘science noire’ is perceived: Our James Bond practitioners work at the coal face. They require precise, unfaltering answers on how to deal with prevailing, every-day threats like poaching, the bushmeat crisis, depleting firewood trees, and the trafficking of tropical timber. Try fleecing them with hypothetical academic grey matter, and they may ridicule the desktop climate change nerds to ‘get real and get with the real programme’.

The whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that Africa’s everyday threats have disappeared into oblivion. But, those involved in the scourge of biopiracy and land rights conflicts, and the violations of oil multinationals thieves are all bastards who are omnipresent in the pillaging of Africa’s natural resources.

Climate change hides all this exploitation and injustice under the carpet. The very threat of the climate change agenda is that its appeal is so earnest that it makes us forgetful of the biodiversity skullduggery. It turns away political focus and public interest. It blinds budget frameworks and it softens the policing of biodiversity regulations. And this is the heart of the problem.

Quite frankly, I am bored hearing that climate change is a new vehicle for getting recalcitrant corporates around the environmental table. Almost as if to say, that, what the biodiversity agenda could not achieve, climate change can.

Climate change can leverage funding from businesses that the biodiversity movement could not. Yes, it is true and that's great. But the one magnificent achievement that makes the biodiversity movement stand head-and-shoulders above the climate change buzz is the fact that it instilled a love and respect for nature. It wooed us with the miracles of nature: rivers and mountains, gorillas in mist forests, polar bears in snowscapes, indigenous tribal groups and cultural rights. It inspired appreciation for exotic travel (think ecotourism) and ardent support of charities (e.g. 'save-the-girl-child-in-Africa'). And, it gave us big, flirtatious hearts, generosity and a sense of diversity in a complex world.

Climate change has instilled a fear of nature - a dark uncertainty and a shared global fate. The passion for nature has been replaced with diplomacy: now it is all clinical thinking, economic elbowing and political stratagems. It even raises suspicion and rivalry at work – who is the culprit who left the lights on? May the person who flew to Paris instead of taking the Eurostar rot in hell. The love affair with nature, it seems, is over.

Everything we had planned, for a sustainable future in Africa in the 1990s, post-Rio epoch, such as the protection of ecologically sensitive habitats, animal migration corridors, CBNRM models – now needs to be fundamentally rejigged. Strategies that have taken so long to devise in Africa need to be modified. Why? Because climate change says so: new objectives should examine how existing strategies must be altered in relation to climate change. This is all good and well.

But, African conservation scientists need to keep banging the drum that the conservation problems of yesterday, are still the problems of today. Instead of nodding in agreement and cosseting the new climate change dogma, scientists need to emulate the classic character of the bush James Bond. We need to be bold. Speak out, and find ways to utilise the climate change ethos to keep Africa’s everyday biodiversity issues mainstream. Needless to say, I have great respect for committed practitioners who keep a beady, slightly sceptical eye on the horizon. Or perhaps its just the fantasy of the khaki shorts that is so alluring.

No matter how one looks at it, it will become increasingly difficult to locate a secure research space for many conservation scientists, taxonomists in particular. Intrepid adventurers who obtain samples of species potentially new to science will get little joy under the new research banner. Herbaria have built their tradition on naming species. Every African country has at least two state-run herbaria. If African conservation scientists do not ‘get with the real programme’ in order to boom, then they are certainly going to bust out and turn into white elephants.

George Berkley’s oft-quoted discourse on the nature of things presents a marvellous revelation. All sorts of stuff that affect named and unnamed forms of biodiversity can take place in nature, of which we are not directly aware, like climate change. Even if we don’t hear the sound of a tree falling, it remains the human responsibility of good virtue to take action. Conservation scientists should not forget the real biodiversity issues in Africa. Cherish nature and keep the love alive.

* Janice Golding is a doctoral candidate from South Africa at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.

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

African leaders should champion the awareness of climate change and the threat it poses to the region among the continent’s population, urged Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. "The threat of rising seas and melting snow all seems very far [away] to people in the continent," said the Kenyan conservationist on 22 May at the UN Environment Program (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi.

Bushman leader Roy Sesana will meet with British MPs at Westminster this Wednesday 23 May to seek support for his people’s ten-year struggle to return to their land in the Kalahari desert, Botswana. Despite the Bushmen’s dramatic court victory in December, the Botswana government is trying to prevent them returning to their land.

Magharebia reports that Algeria has created a multinational company called the Oil Spill Response Company, with the mission of combating marine pollution caused by hydrocarbons. The Algerian-registered company plans to cover more than 20,000 km of coastline ranging from the Suez Canal in Egypt to Cabinda Bay, Angola.

Amy Goodman interviews John Ghazvinian, author of the book "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil." It’s a little known fact that the United States today imports more oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia. More than $50 billion in foreign investment in African oil is expected over the next three years by the
United States. The book compares the global competition for the continent’s oil resources to the nineteenth century scramble for colonization.

A Climate Change Briefing Paper published by Tearfund asserts that in developed countries progress on mainstreaming climate adaptation has been limited. Many countries have carried out climate change projections and impact assessments, but few have started consultation processes to look at adaptation options and identify policy responses.