At first it seems a contradiction in terms: the toil of generations of African slaves and the quiet reflections of poetry. As a new anthology demonstrates, however, poets on both sides of the Atlantic focused an early, bright, harsh and unwavering light on slavery even as the slave trade flourished and plantation owners prospered from it. A newly published book, Amazing Grace, An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810, brings together a remarkably diverse cast of more than 250 poets.

Some of the contents of this issue are:
* Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana  p. 671 Richard Werbner  
* From a Phone Call to the High Court: Wayeyi Visibility and the Kamanakao Association's Campaign for Linguistic and Cultural Rights in Botswana  p. 685 Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo
* Navigating the 'Neutral' State: 'Minority' Rights in Botswana  p. 711 Jacqueline S. Solway

* Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John Saul by Jeremy Cronin
John Saul has had an extensive and committed involvement with Southern Africa. His analyses are taken seriously in left circles in South Africa. Sadly, perhaps understandably, his most recent extended visit to this country has left him feeling deeply disappointed (“Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement,” Monthly Review 52, no. 8, January 2001, pp. 1–51).
* Starting from Scratch?: A Reply to Jeremy Cronin by John S. Saul
It is interesting that, on one of the two main fronts of inquiry opened up in my original essay, Jeremy Cronin professes—despite the wounded tone he adopts throughout and for all his talk about my “frozen penultimates,” “sneers,” and “derision”—to be in considerable agreement with me. This concerns my reading of the overall trajectory of socioeconomic policy that the African National Congress (ANC) government has adopted since 1994.

AfricanColours third 'artist@work' is featuring Fred Mutebi (Uganda): The process of moving from light to dark is creating forms, shapes, perspective, contrasts and hence drama in the finished artwork. By playing around with different hues of colour and tones, Mutebi creates light in the art work.

It's not about formal skills and it's certainly not about your shape or your size. What it is about is making things happen: having the attitude of mind to deal with impossible problems, being able to mould a team and squeeze money out of investors. That's the low-down on ICT entrepreneurs as contained in a CD-rom called 'Entrepreneurship and ICTs: The Art of Making Things Happen'. The CD-rom, produced by the organisation Balancing Act (http://balancingact-africa.com), aims to help entrepreneurs who want to launch a business in the ICT sector or who are already running an ICT business and want to find ways of developing.

Adu Boahen has been a leading figure in the writing of African history since the 1950s. His loud insistence that African history should be written from an African perspective has borne considerable fruits. The essays in this volume reveal the wide range of Adu Boahen’s scholarship, namely, a commitment to studying precolonial history, indigenous belief systems, inter-group relations, colonialism, and the challenges facing postcolonial Africa. In this collection, Ghana becomes the window to peer into Africanist scholarship and the world thus envisioned. The contributors are drawn from the students, peers, colleagues and successors of Adu Boahen; as they celebrate his scholarship, they lead us into the New Africa for which Boahen and the pioneers tirelessly worked.

"This excellent collection brings us right to the cutting edge of class analysis, social struggle and socio-economic liberation in Africa. For all the progress made these last years in understanding and promoting African social movement mobilisation during the neo-liberal epoch, a missing link has been labour - this book fills that crucial gap." - Patrick Bond, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

It has been reported that British journalists have been refused visas to accompany international cricket inspectors on their fact-finding tour of Zimbabwe.

Extracts:
* State Failure in the Congo: Perceptions & Realities 379-388
Theodore Trefon, Saskia Van Hoyweghen & Stefaan Smis
* Community & the Congo Conflict 411-430
Stefaan Smis & Wamu Oyatambwe
* Democracy & the Money Machine in Zaire 445-462
Tom De Herdt
* Making a Killing: Criminality & Coping in the Kivu
War Economy 517-536
Stephen Jackson
A New Political Order in the DRC: The Challenge
of Multinationalism 581-590
Mwayila Tshiyembe

Two South Durban victims of Shell Oil environmental abuses in South Africa, Bobby Peek and Desmond D’Sa, joined activists from the United States to hand over a new book, "Riding the Dragon: Royal Dutch Shell & The Fossil Fire," to the Royal Dutch Shell International MD. groundWork Director Bobby Peek is a Goldman Environmental Prize winner and a Shell neighbour in Durban, South Africa. Desmond D’Sa is the Chairperson of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, campaigning for pollution reduction and clean up from Shell in Durban, South Africa.

Look what it has done to me
First it was my papa, then my mama followed
Both gone for a journey
A journey never to return.

Here I stand alone in the world
With nothing to call a family
With nowhere to call home
An orphan I have become
Yet I am so young

Now my future is so uncertain
But I weep for you
I weep for us
Weep for us
Who are busy killing the future
Creating a generation of AIDS orphans.

The shift in the U.S. global role precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001—although the events were unexpected—was a long time in the making. In this challenging work, Gilbert Achcar analyzes how this shift came about and examines its fateful consequences. Achcar’s Clash of Barbarisms traces the rise of militant and anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to its roots in U.S. policies aimed at control of the oil reserves of the Middle East, and above all, Saudi Arabia—the “Muslim Texas.” Achcar examines the political premises of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and shows how these led to the massive miscalculation of the September 11 attacks, with results both politically counterproductive and morally reprehensible.

Half way into his journey through Africa, Paul Theroux is standing by the roadside in northern Kenya, looking, by his own account, a little down-at-heel. Pushing 60, he has a hole in his jacket and a tough journey through Ethiopia behind him. The truck he arrived on has a broken spring and isn't moving. So he asks a couple of passing Americans in a gleaming white aid agency vehicle for a ride. And they refuse. I'm not an aid worker, but I was working in Kenya myself at about the time Theroux passed through. And I have a four-wheel drive, though it's neither new nor shiny. Would I have given him a ride? Maybe. But if he started ranting on about aid workers the way he does in this book, I would have had to suggest that he quieten down and do some research.

Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaételeu and his favorite sons Zoaétoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaételeu, a puppet under two dictatorial regimes, is swept into the frontline of politics, where his fortunes unravel. Along with his caustic portrayal of failed government—clearly a reflection of his native Cameroon—Beti's realism provides an intriguing view of the struggle for balance between traditional life and imminent change in African culture.

This is an extraordinary first novel by a Tanzanian women writer. The central character, Doreen, tells her story in the first person narrative. Born into a women-headed household in a rural area, her inner life and development mirror her life's passage: education, career, the town, marriage and motherhood. Whilst not didactic nor impinging on beautifully crafted writing, the novel deals with gender politics from a local level rather than a western oriented feminist stance. Both fatalism and seperatism are rejected and the book is imbued with insights and touchstones about the female condition.

In this participant's account, Víctor Dreke describes how easy it became after the Cuban Revolution to "take down the rope" segregating blacks from whites at town dances, yet how enormous was the battle to transform social relations underlying all the "ropes" inherited from capitalism and Yankee domination. He recounts the determination, internationalism, and creative joy with which working people have defended their revolutionary course against U.S. imperialism--from Cuba's own Escambray mountains, to the Americas, Africa, and beyond.

* The African National Congress and the policy of non-racialism: a study of the membership issue p. 133, Nhlanhla Ndebele
* Judicial decision-making and the use of panels in the South African Appellate Division, 1950-1990 p. 147, Stacia Haynie
* Political culture and democracy: the South African case p. 163, Carlos Garcia-Rivero, Hennie Kotzé, Pierre Du Toit
* Communitarian deliberative democracy and its implications for political discourse in South Africa p. 183, Yusef Waghid
* What price truth? South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in critical perspective p. 209, Christian M. De Vos

Artist Beezy Bailey has organised a fundraising auction that will take place on November 19 at the Good Hope Suite, GrandWest Casino, Goodwood. Fifty-five of South Africa's top artists, including Marlene Dumas, will donate their work. Patricia de Lille will be the key speaker and she will talk on the issue of AIDS orphans. The Night of 100 Stars and the Adele Searll Memorial Trust will administer the funds.

The master of museve music, Somandla Ndebele, marks the dawn of a decade as a professional musician with the release of a compilation album. Ndebele's new album, Tsanangudzo, can best be described as a chronicle of his short but illustrious career. It is a compilation of eight songs he performed with his Denda Brothers band since 1989, when they released the single Mandiomesera.

Published in April 2002 by the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, the Compilation of Decisions on Communications of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1994-2001 is the first volume to collect all the jurisprudence of Africa’s regional human rights mechanism. Including nearly 500 pages of decisions and the African Charter, the Compilation shows the development of the African Commission’s jurisprudence in respect of Article 55 communications over the past eight (8) years. The Compilation is organised in an easily accessible format indexed both by the provisions of the African Charter that have been breached by states parties, and according to the countries against which communications have been submitted.