Egyptians should boycott the coming presidential elections or vote for one of the opposition candidates, a group of local human rights organisations said on Saturday. In a joint statement, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (HRINFO), the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, the Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, the National Association for Human Rights and Human Development, the Egyptian Association Against Torture, and Al-Fagr (Dawn) Institution, expressed their fears that the re-election of President Hosni Mubarak would only lead to more oppression.

Ethiopia's ruling party has retained power after winning a majority of seats in national elections marred by violence and alleged fraud, according to final results released by the election board on Monday. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's ruling coalition, which has held power for 14 years, took 327 seats, winning another five-year term, the National Election Board of Ethiopia said.

The African blogging scene is as diverse in its content as it is in its representations of culture and politics. One of the great things about blogs and blogging is that anyone of us can become a writer, poet, political or sports commentator, book or film reviewer or just write and publish our daily lives online.

is a Kenyan blogger who has taken up the mantle of poetry and journal writing on her blog. I visit Mshairi regularly as it is a haven of tranquillity to read her poems and posts and I would like to invite Pambazuka readers to join me there.
A year ago today this blog was begun. Out came the pad and the purple (ink) pen. In total I have posted more than 50 poems. Of the poems, I have a growing group of anonymous people who trust me enough to send me theirs. 150 posts on life and love and on women, on Africa and on people. In between are the posts on music, books, Star Trek, science fiction...Inspired by people already in my life and those I met through blogging, I have written about the little things that make sense and big things that did not.

On a heavier note I thought I would do a short roundup of what African bloggers are saying about Hurricane Katrina.
Mental acrobatics points out that Halliburton of Dick Cheney fame (remember them?) have been given the first of many contracts for rebuilding after Katrina.

The Sand Monkey gives us an excellent web roundup of Katrina and the fallout….

And for what has to be an act of extreme stupidity, Kanye West blasts Bush in the Middle of a live-televised Benefit for the Red Cross, claiming that he doesn’t care about black people and that the government is delaying the aid because the victims are black, which cause the Phone lines to be filled with complaints instead of donations. But then again, what do you expect from the son of a former Black Panther who believes the CIA gives people AIDS?

Too bad that I like his music.

Meskel Square blogging from Ethiopia reminds us...

Just in case anyone needs one after New Orleans, here is another reminder that nature can be a very scary thing…..At least thirteen people were killed after being hit by hail stones and washed away by floods in Alaba Special Woreda in SNNPR on Saturday, August 27.

Soul South asks the question What is racism?

One of my favourite blogs, Language Log, points to some racism in Louisiana by means of an animated image. This is, after all, Language Log, so it begins with a comparison of the two words Finding and Looting. Watch, read and decide whether its racism or not. Click on the "juxtaposition of photos and captions" link. People have responded to this and Language Log duly posts their reactions. My reaction? That's Racism!

This issue includes:
* The Alternative Genealogy of Civil Society and Its Implications for Africa:
Notes for Further Research by Ebenezer Obadare,
http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?jid=127& id=22293
* The Role of NGOs in Fostering Development and Good Governance at the Local Level in Africa with a Focus on Kenya by Walter O Oyugi,
http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?jid=127& id=22294
* The Politics of Marginal Forms: Popular Music, Cultural Identity and Political Opposition in Kenya by Peter Wafula Wekesa,
http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?jid=127& id=22297
Visit Africa Development at http://www.ajol.info/

Your Excellencies,

Ahead of the UN World Summit in September, we the following fifty national, African and international organizations and networks working in all four corners of Africa write to set out our expectations for the summit on poverty, peace and security. We write under the umbrella of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), an alliance of millions of people and organisations united in the belief that 2005 offers an unprecedented opportunity for change.

Five years after your office signed the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, we are in serious danger of failing to achieve even these, the most minimalist of targets.

To achieve the MDGs, we believe that your Government must actively demand better terms for Africa on aid, trade justice and debt cancellation.

* Access the full letter and media release by clicking on the link below.

As campaigns for Liberia’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections kick off, African and International Organisations have called on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and African Union Chairperson President Obasanjo of Nigeria to ensure Charles Taylor does not interfere in Liberia’s democratic process from Nigeria where he is currently exiled. In a statement issued on September 01, Mr Shina Loremikan of the Coalition Against Impunity campaigning for the trial of the former Liberian leader before the UN- supported Special Court for Sierra Leone stated: “ECOWAS and President Obasanjo must ensure that Charles Taylor does not, cannot and is unable to distort Liberia’s electoral process and results.”

In reflecting on the rights of indigenous people in Africa, Angela N. Khaminwa remembers the story of a young man taken from the Belgian Congo in 1904 and placed on display at a US zoo. Unless traditional communities are recognized as an inherent part of national identity, she warns, modern day society risks a continuation of the gawking of a century ago.

Recently, I was half-surprised to learn about Ota Benga, one of the many twisted stories that characterize attitudes that Europeans held of Africans in the early 1900s. In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Twa, was taken from then Belgian Congo to the United States by an enthusiastic explorer. Treated as sub-human and a biological curiosity, he was ‘displayed’ at the St. Louis World Fair and later placed in the Bronx Zoo in a cage together with a parrot and an orangutan.

The image of a man caged and gawked at by children and adults is painful to visualize. However, despite the cultural changes embedded in the last 100 years, it seems that this gawking still occurs, albeit in less stark forms. People behave in strange ways when they think, or are convinced, that they are more culturally (and this is almost always equated with morally) advanced than others. The view of the traditional from the modern generates narratives wrapped up in generalizations, paternalism, and prejudice. The rush to modernization inspires a collective vision of a modern culture that pushes those who can’t - or won’t - assimilate to the margins of the national milieu.

An example of this marginalized existence can be gleaned from the Twa, the community from which Benga came. Today, many Twa are forced to self-exploit by relying on the gaze of others to survive financially. “An estimated 80% of Batwa earned capital from begging. Batwa are most able to support themselves when they mold themselves into the stereotypes expected of them. To remain docile, submissive and animal-like reaffirms the social hierarchies to which other groups have assigned them” (Refugees International, 2004).

Surviving socially is also problematic. Twa negotiate prejudice daily. “Many Ugandans … will not sit or eat with Batwas or allow inter-marriage. Batwas are often banned from collecting water from wells used by other groups. … Batwas are forced to remain in the margins of public places, and when selling goods must sit on the outskirts of markets, away from other vendors” (The Defender, 2002).

These types of experiences are not unique to the Twa. To various degrees, indigenous communities are subject to bias and discrimination which affects access to social services, inhibits chances at employment, and restricts participation in politics.

This exclusion replays the story of Ota Benga. In this redux, many are the gawking (and sometimes disinterested) observers barely recognizing, valuing, or protecting cultural worth. Core claims to land and natural resources have been muffled by reframing or misrepresentation. This leads to escalating social tension that pits modern and seemingly suave communities against traditional communities viewed as ill-equipped to handle modernity.

There are numerous basic questions that come to mind when considering the conditions of indigenous people. Firstly, are current definitions of indigenity appropriate to the African context? The ILO Convention (No. 169) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples
in Independent Countries defines indigenous communities as: tribal communities in independent countries whose socio-cultural conditions distinguish them and who are regulated by “customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations” and/or communities who occupied a country or region at the time of colonization or present boundaries and who retain their socio-political institutions.

The latter definition allows us to differentiate between black and non-black Africans but is an inappropriate fit in the context of minority and indigenous peoples’ rights. The former definition emerges as the most fitting for the continent (including groups such as the Pokot in Kenya and Uganda, the Barabaig pastoralists in Tanzania, the San in Southern Africa, and the Hadzabe in Ethiopia). But there are still significant levels of ambiguity surrounding the term.

Secondly, is there pressure on indigenous groups to assimilate? There appears to be tension around the idea of the wholly traditional (read historic) and the partially traditional (read contemporary) world. Despite the fact that many cultures in Africa have evolved into distinctly modern cultures, their nature is to assimilate. Social pressures focus on conformity to a generalized idea of modernity. This leads to a strong in-group dynamic which views the outsiders (the indigenous communities) and their agendas suspiciously.

Thirdly, does the action of recognizing an indigenous group jeopardize national cohesion? The hesitancy of governments to address the issue of internal difference full-force may be due to a need to promote national cohesion because it may result in giving a community additional protection and thus be perceived as politically favouring a community.

Fourthly, does recognizing a group as indigenous narrow development? Indigenous groups are entitled to certain rights under international law including access to ancestral land and attendant natural resources. (For example, the rights of the peoples concerned to the natural resources pertaining to their lands shall be specially safeguarded. These rights include the right of these peoples to participate in the use, management and conservation of these resources.) These claims may be in direct collision with government (or special interest) plans.

These questions are key points to consider, and return to, when considering indigenity on the continent.

We may not all agree in the definition of indigenous or the categorization of communities as indigenous. Regardless of what label we place on ethnic communities that maintain traditional lifestyles and livelihoods, there is no doubt that many of these communities are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation. Dispossession, poor access to health services and appropriate education systems, exclusion from participation in development, denial of cultural and language rights, and extinction as areas in which indigenous groups are vulnerable are some of the results (African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights, Working Group Report, 2002).

In addition, as a 2004 report by the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples’ states, “Indigenous peoples bear a disproportionate share of the social and human costs of resource-intensive and resource-extractive industries, large dams and other infrastructure projects, logging and plantations, bio-prospecting, industrial fishing and farming, and also eco-tourism…”

It is clear that they require some form of government recognition of their disenfranchised position and subsequent protection and remediation. Indigenous communities must also play a role by proactively engaging with the government, realizing that changes on their part will be necessary to avoid chronic economic marginalization and underdevelopment.

The reverberations of engagement between the old and the new will never diminish. Modernity will continue to clash with the traditional as long as life progresses. We must recognize traditional communities as a valuable cultural resource that forms an inherent part of the national identity and should be promoted and preserved. If not, we will continue to gawk, uncaring, and in the process lose our humanity.

* Angela N. Khaminwa is a consultant based in Nairobi. Her area of interest is social inclusion, coexistence, and conflict.

* Please send comments to

Drought and famine are not normal conditions for any group of human beings, but what is normal is people in the west being lied to about the causes, writes Judith Amanthis, who lists various IMF policies as being responsible for the food crisis in Niger.

The IMF and the World Bank, and the EU as well, are killing Africans in their thousands in Niger, Mali and throughout the Sahel region of Africa. By August this year in Niger alone, three million are threatened with death from starvation. Up to 800,000, especially children, have already died. Niger is the second most impoverished country on this earth. Starvation, according to one aid agency, is normal there.

Drought and locusts destroyed crops, it's true, but the rains were down only 11% from normal. There is some food in Niger. The problem is that large numbers of people, especially in the rural areas, are just too poor to buy it when their crops fail. Why? First, subsistence farming in Africa doesn't bring in much money, or any money. It has no western financial backers. Second, in March 2005 the Niger government, having secured Highly Indebted Poor Country status for Niger, implemented an IMF condition on further loans: it put a 19% VAT on basic grains whose price had risen by up to 89% over the past five years. Traders naturally sell to the highest bidder. In this case they sold grains to other West African countries. The free market knows no borders, colonial or otherwise.

Many of the rural people in the Sahel region are nomadic livestock farmers. In Niger the market in livestock has slumped. Farmers who would have sold cattle and other stock to bring in money to buy food are now unable to sell starving animals on a glutted market where prices have fallen by 25% over the past five years. Many villages are now almost entirely women, children and the old, because the men have gone to the urban areas or other African countries in search of food, work and money. African women and children are as usual forced onto the front line.

But the western picture of starving peasant women and their children is one-sided. In March hungry women and men in Niamey, Maradi and Tahoua came out in protest against food prices. Placards read, 'We're hungry. Help us'. So there are angry urban dwellers and workers as well, who are well-organised and prepared to risk imprisonment - the government's response to the protest, according to one source - to get what they need. The pattern is similar throughout Africa. The people's struggle to survive and pressurise their governments into acting for them rather than for the western powers gets left out of the news altogether.

One of the IMF's most shocking acts of war against Africans in Niger has been to demand another condition on aid: the sale of emergency grain reserves. Over the past five years, this policy has contributed to famines in other parts of Africa, notably Malawi in 2002 and again this year. In fact famine stalks large swathes of central Africa. The rationale? Cheap grain is not to flood the market before harvest time. For this reason, the Niger government’s ‘cheap’ grain came on the market too late and too expensive.

Long term drought and famine can never be normal for any group of human beings. What is normal is people in the west being lied to about the causes of Africans' suffering and what Africans are doing about it.

Western oil and forestry companies who have created climate change are as implicated as well. Western Europe and the US are responsible for 50% of the world's carbon emissions, and forestry multinationals are destroying the earth's 'lungs', including the great Congo River Basin forest, at 26 hectares a minute (37 football pitches). Greater heat and erratic rain in the Sahel region means the Sahara Desert is creeping south. Areas like northern Nigeria and Senegal are drying up as well. In erratic weather, locusts breed more heavily, but since the mid 1980s, the West African regional organisation, OCALAV, which was set up at independence in the early 1960s to control locust swarms and other plagues has been restructured. Its funding has been cut. African governments which have restructured entire economies to make life easier for multinationals can no longer pay for services vital to the people's survival.

These same governments - eight throughout the Sahel and West Africa - have welcomed US military personnel into their armies so that young African men can be trained to protect western imperialism in the 'war on terror'.

As for cross border and selective use of pesticides, first, it's unaffordable by African governments, and second, it's unmanageable. Inter-governmental co-operation has broken down in the age of G8 grotesqueries. Live 8 put money in western multinational and individual bank accounts, period. Killing locusts at the hopper stage, before they take flight - often across colonial borders – and devour people's crops, is essential. Whatever the pros and cons of using pesticides to control locust swarms, ordinary Africans have, over a period of hundreds of years, had control of their environment stolen from them, and with genocidal consequences.

In June this year, President Tanja of Niger met with George Bush. As well as the Sahel region’s strategic importance in the ‘war on terror’, Niger is the world’s third largest uranium exporter. A new generation nuclear arsenal is in the US pipeline and Tanja is handing Africa’s uranium to US arms manufacturers on a plate.

In early August, Tanja was vilified in the western media for denying that millions of people were starving and for complaining that only a fraction of the promised aid from the west had arrived. At the same time the UN congratulated the government of Mali for dealing better with the imminent death by starvation of millions more Africans. The argument is clear: if some African governments are efficient enough to keep the lid on wholesale famine, the problem must be down to an individual, to who holds presidential office. What wasn't mentioned was that the free food handed out by the UN and the government to people in Mali was, according to a BBC World Service report, only obtainable in one particular area if you worked for an Oxfam water development project. The reporter asked a woman who was digging a hole to conserve rain water if she was happy to be getting food. She and everyone else working with her laughed uproariously.

* This article is from Kilombo, the African Liberation Support Campaign Network's journal.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

World leaders are now preparing for the millennium summit to be held in New York next month, described by the UN as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to take bold decisions". Yet the current draft outcome simply repeats what was agreed on aid and debt last month in Gleneagles. The reality of that G8 deal has recently emerged - and is likely to condemn the New York summit to be an expensive failure.

With 10 years to go to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target date of 2015, current trends will leave most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa far short of most targets. The gap between trend and target can be expressed in statistics. But behind the statistics are human costs. This note provides a preliminary assessment of the potential scale of these costs. It draws on a global trend projection analysis developed by UNDP’s Human Development Report Office (HDRO). The analysis uses country-by-country data for the period 1990-2003 to build global and regional aggregates that capture changes in the distribution of poverty, child mortality, children out of school and other indicators.

The South African portfolio committee on foreign affairs has heard the perspectives on reform of the United Nations from three leading South African think-tanks: the Centre for Policy Studies, the Africa Institute of South Africa and the Centre for Conflict Resolution. The heads of all three civil society organisations appeared to agree that there will not be widespread reform of the United Nations, particularly its powerful Security Council, when the UN General Assembly meets next month to discuss the issue. This is largely because of the no-compromise position taken recently by the African Union forum of foreign affairs leaders dealing with the issue of a veto for new members with permanent seats on the Security Council.

Five years on from the Millennium Summit world leaders are meeting, from 14 –16 September, to discuss progress on the Millennium Development Goals at the UN MDG +5 Summit. Thus far, efforts to reach the MDGs have fallen woefully short of what is needed to achieve them. Which is why, just ahead of this Summit on 10 September, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is organizing White Band Day 2 – the second in a series of massive international mobilizations from GCAP.

Following the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the International Facilitation Group of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), met in Bangkok, Thailand recently to evaluate the progress that has been made and to plan for the next phase of mobilisation. Given that GCAP was only launched on 27 January 2005 at the World Social Forum, participants felt that while more progress was sought from the G8 leadership than was achieved, civil society had made significant progress in bringing together a broad based coalition to push for progress to eradicate global poverty. The focus now is on the UN World Summit, a gathering of heads of government at the UN General Assembly in New York from 14 - 16 September. This is supposed to be an occasion where governments account for what they have achieved in terms of earlier commitments made at UN Summits and the Millennium Declaration adopted in September 2000. Even though most of us in civil society feel the Millennium Development Goals do not go far enough, it still looks like the assessment governments will make in September, if they are honest in their self evaluations, is that progress in achieving the goals has been dismal. (Sourced from e-Civicus)

Beginning as a task force in 2001 and in 2004 after the launch of the poverty reduction strategy program, PANE decided to focus its energies from a task force into a network which now consists of more than 70 civil society organizations (CSOs), non governmental organizations (NGOs), professional associations and research institutions working on poverty and related issues in the country. PANE has thus far conducted familiarization and awareness raising workshops in five regions based on sustainable development and poverty reduction (SDPRPs), the role of civil society in poverty reduction in general and MDGs in particular and also formed chapters in all these regions. Additionally, they have conducted monitoring and evaluation of MDG performance mechanisms in Ethiopia covering 75 percent of Ethiopia's population. PANE plans to continue similar activities in the rest of Ethiopia. PANE has conducted the Service Delivery Survey using a Citizens Report Card approach. This is a work in progress and only now is the fieldwork and report-writing being finalized. It was conducted by the support from the UNDP and Action Aid Ethiopia. In spite of the obviously great successes of PANE, GCAP has not been officially launched in Ethiopia despite several attempts. This has apparently been due to cancellations of all mass rallies planned by PANE by the Ethiopian government. PANE has thus tentatively set the official launch date for mid-August and this time they hope they will not be hindered. Contact Eshetu Bekele: [email protected] (Sourced from the GCAP newsletter No 10, 29 July 2005).

African Bullets and Honey (http://bulletsandhoney.blogspot.com/) reports on a Times of London article on “The Love Affair Between the Maasai and the English!”.
The language of the article is blatantly racist and mimics something out of a 19thCentury travel journal through “darkest Africa” to serve the tables of Victorian Britain in the construction of race and racism!

“The Masai embodied everything the English yearned to believe about primeval Africa; they were tall and slender and handsome, noble savages who looked the part, brave to the point of foolishness, peerless hunters and trackers...The only mammalian bipeds allowed to walk through the vigorously wardened spot are the Masai, who follow their bony cattle to waterholes and salt licks, lean ruminatively on their lion-killing lotus-bladed spears, and generally pretty up the place in their red togas, muddy punk hairdos and elaborate jewellery.”

Ghanaian blogger Life of David (http://davidmends.blogspot.com/) exposes corruption and misdeeds by the British government’s Department of International Development (DFID) in which some £18million in aid to Ghana was “blown” away.

Sticking with the theme of “corruption”, Nigerian blogger Grandiose Parlour (http://grandioseparlor.blogspot.com/) reminds us that corruption in Nigeria is still alive and kicking this time in the form of Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.

"…Nigeria Vice President Atiku Abubakar broke the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria on December 1, 2000. This is one and a half years after becoming the Vice President of Nigeria. On that day, he and his wife, Jennifer, bought a mansion in Maryland for $ 1,750,000. The house, a two storey building was constructed in 1988. The land area is about 2.3 acres. Today, that house is valued at over two million dollars.”

The VP has since had his home in the US searched by FBI agents but of course he is already denying any wrong doing saying:

"You see, I went to the US when I was in exile, when Abacha hunted us out, when we asked him to handover to a civilian government, then I have been having a home in that place and of course my wife has been having a home in that place since 1994. So what are you talking about?”

Nothing much has changed then has it?

A refreshing story from Inside Somaliland (http://insidesomaliland.blogtales.com/) on Somali music and instruments in which she focuses on “Dararamle, a very well known Somali singer/composer in the country”. Some great pictures here as well.

Exactly one year ago 10 people died in an explosion at a Sasol petrochemical plant in Secunda, South Africa. Mzansi Afrika (http://mzansiafrika.typepad.com/mzansi_afrika/2005/08/sasol_watch.html) reminds us the multinational Sasol, has done everything in its power to hamper the enquiry into the murderous blast.

“For one thing, the petro giant has refused to make their own internal inquiry into the accident public, for another they have paid minimal compensation to the families of those killed or injured. Many of those affected by the incident were contract workers, and because they were not directly employed by Sasol, the corporation was able to avoid paying any compensation other than covering hospital bills and funeral costs.”

The issuing of rules and directives for the upcoming Egyptian presidential elections by the Presidential Election Committee (PEC) on 28 August has enraged both the judges and civil organisations hoping to supervise the poll on 7 September. According to Nasser Amin of the Arab Center for Independence of the Judiciary and Legal Profession (ACIJLP), the committee has left the names of the 500 most outspoken judges off the list of those supervising the election.

Many in South Africa have long held that it would not be a bad thing for democracy if there was a split in the ruling ANC alliance. But the recent showdown in the ANC-SACP-Cosatu alliance over former deputy president Jacob Zuma has given a glimpse of what this political landscape might look like and as Sam Sole writes in a commentary for the Mail and Guardian, "it's not pretty". Sole recounts the words of political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi's categorisation of the support for Zuma as the "coalition of the irrational" and warns: "The profound absence of discernable Zuma policy positions on anything, let alone a recognisable record of support for traditional left positions, should give us all pause."

The Justice Initiative and INTERIGHTS has called on Angola to comply with its international human rights obligations, following the expiry of a UN-imposed deadline on the southern African country to act to protect freedom of expression. The open letter to Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos followed a March 2005 decision of the UN Human Rights Committee that Angola had violated journalist Rafael Marques de Morais' freedom of expression, by jailing him in 1999 for writing articles critical of dos Santos. The Committee gave the Angolan authorities 90 days to compensate Marques and take steps to prevent similar violations in future. No such steps have been taken to date.

The world’s largest ever anti-poverty campaign is gravely concerned that countries including the United States are undermining the Summit outcome, and ensuring its failure. The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) warns that by cutting agreed wording designed to end poverty, governments are trying to edit away the future of the world’s poorest people. The current draft of the Summit outcome declaration contains strong statements on fighting poverty. However, the United States has proposed deleting key wording on tackling global poverty and disease. The proposed US changes include cutting all references to the Millennium Development Goals - the internationally agreed targets for halving world poverty. The US also wants to cut all references to small arms controls and weaken wording on all governments’ responsibility to protect civilians in cases of mass killing such as the Rwandan genocide.

Zimbabwean human rights activists condemned sweeping constitutional amendments approved by parliament on Tuesday, arguing the government has undermined basic freedoms. Describing the proposed changes to the constitution as the "worst piece of legislation yet", Joseph James, president of the Law Society of Zimbabwe, said lawyers "across political and ideological lines" had, for the first time, taken a stance against the new legislation.
Related Link:
Serious concerns over ammendment bill
http://www.zlhr.org.zw/media/releases/aug_04_05.htm