Swazi community members and organisations are combining resources to set up a growing network of care centres for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). The centres, called Neighbourhood Care Points (NCPs), cater to the nutritional, educational and emotional needs of the country's growing OVC population at 320 NCPs scattered throughout its four regions.

I would encourage you to encourage your writers not to use the word "tribe" (Pambazuka News 167). For a complete explanation see Thank you for your consideration.

Extract from above URL:

Tribe does not convey the depth of history, tradition, arts, social structure, cuisine, dress, ethics and rituals that these groups developed. We don't speak of the "tribes of Europe," usually "ethnic group" or nationality is used. Similarly Native Americans had their "nations" and confederations. Another choice is to refer to a "people". Again if possible and appropriate be more specific; "the Hausa people," "the Mande ethnic group," or "the Zulu nation."

Angry residents of an informal settlement outside the central commercial town of Manzini have declared their neighbourhood a no-go area for Swazi police following a clash at the weekend between the security forces and political demonstrators. "The police invaded our homes [on Saturday] and beat up anyone they found inside. It is best they stay away to allow us to take care of our own affairs," said Philemon, a resident of Mbhuleni.

Around 500 members of the former rebel movement the Conseil national de défense de la démocratie-Forces de défense de la démocratie (CNDD-FDD), took a formal decision of becoming a political party at a congress held from 7 to 8 August in the central province of Gitega. In accordance with a ceasefire agreement, Burundi’s Ministry of Home Affairs will automatically approve the new political party once combatants begin cantonment.

Relations between the Angolan authorities and the main opposition party, UNITA, appeared to have soured once again over the delay in announcing a date for the country's first post-war elections. On Monday a senior UNITA official told IRIN that the party would continue to boycott the constitutional commission laying the groundwork for a national poll until "the government showed real commitment" to establishing an electoral timetable in preparation for the national poll.

Representatives of the rebel movements in Sudan's western Darfur region have agreed to allow some 500,000 children cut off from regular health services to be vaccinated against such potentially killer diseases as measles and polio, the United Nations announced. Agreement was reached with the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) after a UN team met their representatives last Friday in Asmara, Eritrea, according to the UN in Khartoum.

Amnesty International has written to the Chairman of the African Union (AU), President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, expressing grave concern about the future of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (African Court). During its Third Ordinary Session in July, in Addis Ababa, the African Union's (AU) Assembly took a decision to integrate the African Court and the Court of Justice of the AU into one Court. "This decision is inconsistent with an earlier decision taken by the AU Assembly in Maputo in July 2003, to the effect that the African Court 'shall remain separate and distinct from the Court of Justice of the African Union'," the organization said.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported that a potential humanitarian crisis is looming in the Somali region of Ethiopia where the long rains have failed and up to 1.3 million people are likely to need emergency aid until the end of the year. Preliminary assessments suggest that crops have failed in 14 districts and the agency is calling for immediate delivery of water in some areas where shortages for both human and livestock consumption are reported to have already become critical.

* SMS FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Use your mobile phone to sign the petition in support of the ratification of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. Send a message to: +27832933934, with the word ‘petition’ and your name in the message. You will only be charged the cost set by your network provider for sending an international SMS. More information http://www.pambazuka.org/petition/smssocial.php

* Comment and Analysis: Nation, Race and History in Zimbabwean politics
* Letters: Debating the fair use of Africa’s resources
* Pan-African Postcard: Mobilising the Diaspora
* Conflicts and Emergencies: Why the Darfur tragedy will likely occur again
* Human Rights: Zimbabwe NGO bill dangerous for human rights defenders
* Development: Liberalisation taking away people’s rights
* Health: Discouraging the brain drain
* Education: Teacher supply and demand and the EFA’s
* Media&FXI: Waking up to state-owned newspapers in Zimbabwe

In a bid to prepare for Burundi's upcoming general elections, the cabinet has nominated five members to form the National Independent Electoral Commission, government spokesman Onésime Nduwimana said on Tuesday. Their names will be sent to the national assembly for endorsement and then to the head of state for promulgation, he said.

Angola's main opposition party, UNITA, on Wednesday called for the immediate arrest of those responsible for attacks against its supporters in recent months. After 27 years of civil conflict between UNITA and the government, a peace treaty was signed in April 2002. The country is now moving towards its first post-war national election, although a definite date for the poll is yet to be announced.

South Africa’s presence in the rest of Africa has to be seen in the dual context of its relative economic size and sophistication, together with the insulation the country endured through the apartheid years. The South African economy contributes 19% to the total African economy, one-third of sub-Saharan Africa’s and nearly two-thirds of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) gross domestic product (GDP). This is according to an Occasional Paper from the South African Foundation.

Introduction

One of the central features of the Zimbabwean crisis, as it has unfolded since 2000, has been the emergence of a revived nationalism delivered in a particularly virulent form, with race as a key trope within the discourse, and a selective rendition of the liberation history deployed as a an ideological policing agent in the public debate. A great deal of commentary has been deployed to describe this process, much of it concentrating on the undoubted coercive aspects of the politics of state consolidation in Zimbabwe […]

However the manner in which the ideological battle has been fought by ZANU PF as a party and a state is of particular importance in trying to understand the ways in which a beleaguered state is attempting not only to extend its dominant economic and political objectives, but also its "intellectual and moral unity, posing all questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate level but on a 'universal' plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental group over a series of subordinate groups." (Gramsci 1971: 182.)

For the manner in which Mugabe has articulated the Zimbabwean crisis has impacted not only on the social forces in the country but also on the African continent and in the Diaspora. Such an ambitious political outreach demands that we view the Zimbabwean state as more than a 'simple, dominative or instrumental model of state power,' but as a state with a more complex and multi-dimensional political strategy. (Hall 1996:429; and Hall 1980.)

In this multi-dimensional strategy, the state has monopolised the national media to develop an intellectual and cultural strategy that has resulted in a persistent bombardment of the populace with a regular and repeated series of messages. Moreover this strategy has been located within a particular historical discourse around national liberation and redemption, which has also sought to capture a broader Pan Africanist and anti-imperialist audience […]

Moreover in articulating this ideological strategy the ruling party has drawn on deep historical reservoirs of antipathy to colonial and racial subjugation in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa and Africa more generally, and on its complex inflections in the Diaspora. Thus the Mugabe message is no mere case of peddling a particular form of false consciousness, but it carries a broader and often visceral resonance, even as it draws criticisms for the coercive forms of its mobilisation. […]

Nation and Race.

In Zimbabwe the state has a monopoly control over the electronic media through such laws as the Broadcasting Services Act and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Through such instruments the ruling party has been able to saturate the public sphere with its particularist message and importantly to monopolise the flow of information to the majority rural population […]

Thus, as a report on the ways in which Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) delivered views on the nation in 2002, concluded: “ZBC's conceptualisation on "nation" was simplistic. It was based on race:

The White and Black race. Based on those terms, the world was reduced to two nations - the white nation and the black nation and these stood as mortal rivals. The black nation was called Africa. Whites were presented as Europeans who could only belong to Europe just as Africa was for Africans and Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans. (Gandhi and Jambaya 2002: 4.) […]

For the Mugabe regime the emergence of the opposition MDC in 1999, was a manifestation of foreign British and White influence in Zimbabwean politics. This construction of the opposition thus placed them outside of a legitimate national narrative, and thrust it into the territory of an alien, Un-African and treasonous force that 'justified' the coercive use of the state in order to contain and destroy such a force […]

Having discursively located the opposition as an alien political force, the full coercive force of the state was brought to bear on those regarded as 'unpatriotic' and 'puppets of the West'. Deploying elements of the police, intelligence service, army, the war veterans, party supporters and the youth militia, the ruling party has inflicted enormous damage on the personnel and structures of the opposition […]

Nation, History and Culture.

Scholars have observed that the writing of history has often been used to 'legitimate' the nation- state, both in an attempt to 'naturalise' it as the central principle of political organisation, and to make it the 'subject and object of historical development.(Berger, Donovan and Passmore 1999:xv) In Zimbabwe there has been clear evidence of this process since 2000 in particular […]

As part of the attempts to revive ZANU PF's political fortunes in the 2000 general election and the 2002 Presidential election, the ruling party placed a strong emphasis on reviving the narrative of the liberation struggle in general and the heroic roles of ZANU PF and Mugabe in particular […]

In this narrative of liberation, a common African history and Pan Africanist solidarity, the land has played a determining role as the key marker of a common struggle. It has formed the centrepiece of the ruling party's construction of belonging, exclusion and history. The official discourse on the liberation struggle has been marked by the translation of a multi-faceted anti-colonial struggle into a singular discourse designed to legitimate the authoritarian nationalism that has emerged around the land question since 2000. (Hammar, Raftopoulos and Jensen 2003.) […]

During the 2002 Presidential election this liberation rhetoric was accompanied by a cultural programme that saturated the public with liberation war films, documentaries and dramas, promoting ZANU PF generally and Robert Mugabe in particular, while also carrying strong messages against whites. […]

Amongst the most damaging aspects of the telling of this national narrative through a series of dualisms (black/white, British/Zimbabwean), and compressions of the various aspects of the anti-colonial struggle into a single field of force, has been the enormous loss of complexity of the colonial encounter. The complexity of the settler-colonial period (not least of which included the changing relations between the black elite and different settler regimes) has been flattened into a Mugabe/Blair colonial encounter. (White 2003:97.) While the demonisation of Whites has served the needs of authoritarian nationalist politics in Zimbabwe, it has prevented a more creative, tolerant and difficult dialogue on the European influences in the making of Zimbabwean identities […]

The On-Going National Question.

The Mugabe government has worked hard to generalise its model of resolving the national question, based largely on the model of land reform through violent land occupations, articulated through a Pan Africanist and anti-imperialist discourse. Moreover in this model the human rights question and the democratic demands of civic groups are dismissed as an extension of Western intervention, with little relevance to the 'real issues' of economic empowerment […]

In South Africa the Zimbabwean debate has taken on a particular resonance, not least because of the apparent popularity of Mugabe amongst many South Africans. On a broader level there are many aspects of the history and politics of Zimbabwe that resonate in the current South African context. (Phimister and Raftopoulos 2004: forthcoming; Southall 2003; Melber 2003.) Zimbabwean commentators close to the ruling party have not hesitated to 'shame' the South African government into taking more Africanist political positions […]

Moreover the 'spell' of anti-imperialism and the resonance of the race debate in Zimbabwe, has found a broader canvas for its articulation in the diaspora. In addition to cementing the support of other liberation movements in Southern Africa, ZANU PF has actively cultivated linkages with a few black civic groups in the US, UK and Australia in an attempt to build Pan Africanist solidarity around the Mugabe project. […]

Conclusion

A decade ago I wrote an article on 'Race and Nationalism' in Zimbabwe. In re-reading the piece in recent weeks what strikes me most about the analysis, apart from an underestimation of the potential for a revived nationalist project by the ruling party, was its strictly national focus, which even then was a limitation of the article. In 2004 it is impossible to confront this subject meaningfully without addressing the broader reach of its effects at both regional and international levels. Mugabe has not only defined the national project around a selective reading of nationalist history and an exclusivist construction of the nation, he has also sought to ensure that this message resonates in other black struggles both regionally and internationally […]

ZANU PF has set itself the task of establishing a hegemonic project in which the party's narrow definition of the nation is deployed against all other forms of identification and affiliation. In this project the media and selected intellectuals have been used to provide a continuous and repetitive ideological message, in order to set the parameters of a stable national identity conducive to the consolidation of the ruling party. As Zimbabweans listen to the radio, watch television and read the daily newspapers, all controlled by the ruling party, they are being 'informed' about what it means to be a 'good Zimbabwean,' and a 'genuine African'. They are also being told who is the 'enemy' within and without and advised to confront such 'enemies' with ruthless exclusion if necessary. For the present this political assault has seriously closed down the spaces for alternative debates around citizenship and national belonging.

* These are excerpts from a paper by Brian Raftopoulos, Associate Professor, Institute of Development Studies, University of Zimbabwe entitled Nation, Race and History in Zimbabwean Politics, presented at the University of Edinburgh's Centre of African Studies International Conference on 'States, Borders and Nations: Negotiating Citizenship in Africa' in May 2004. A complete version of the paper will be published in a forthcoming volume. Please see for further information. For a list of references please click on the link below.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Your article on the wise use of resources (Pambazuka News 167) reminds me of what is happening in East Africa.

The British have continued to mine soda ash in Kenya without certification. Now the local community is advocating for revision of the agreements to ensure that their interests are taken care of but government is going against the community. A similar thing is happening in Tanzania where mining of several minerals is now in the hands of South Africans with no agreements with the people who have sacrificed to keep the minerals. Now they are relocated with poorly negotiated agreements that favour multinationals at the expense of local community.

I would like to commend you for the article and advocate for NEPAD to ensure that we do not encourage taking advantage of the local communities because of their lack of negotiation power.

I am a natural resource manager in Kenya and I am worried with the trends taking shape in Africa. There is a need to build the capacities of the local communities for them to be able to renegotiate and come up with resource use arrangements that are morally right and that can contribute to the development of the rural populations and African countries at large.

Enock Kanyanya, Kenya

I read the article written by Joel Bisina (Pambazuka News 167) and it is an interesting and thought provoking insight on the very ugly, sad and degenerating condition of the Nigeria's Niger Delta Region.

There is a marriage of convenience between the Nigerian state and multinational oil companies operating in the Delta areas of the country. This relationship is unhealthy and inimical to the well being of the Delta people and the entire Nigerian people. It is a case of conspiracy with the majority ethnic power elites and a few Niger Delta elites in league with these oil companies to continue to accumulate petrol dollars from the region to the detriment of the people.

Much as this is the pathetic situation of the Niger Delta, several social and economic contradictions are arising which will slow the processes of positive change in the area. The Niger Delta people seem to be very hostile to people from other parts of the country especially other minorities residing and trying to eke a living in the Niger Delta. Niger Deltans need the support of these people and their peers across Nigeria to achieve social justice. It is not a struggle the Deltans can fight to win alone. They must proactively engage other minority groups in the country to push the agenda further.

The conflict in the Niger Delta is not different from those of the Middle Belt region as they both have to do with so called majority ethnic hegemony dominance of minority groups. While majority ethnic groups in Nigeria have aggressively closed their space against the minorities, they are increasingly encroaching on the space of the minority groups. Central to these problems is the law that gives the Federal government complete ownership of the land of Nigeria. With Federal power being controlled by majority ethnic groups, the struggle will be difficult. However, concerted efforts from the minority groups can change the tide. The problem is land ownership; if we can constitutionally wrestle it from the government, nearly all the conflicts in Nigeria would be solved.

The British ambassador has no right to abuse an elected Kenyan government whatsoever (Pambazuka News 167). Britain as a former colonial master continues to exploit Kenyans unprecedently. The purported UK foreign aid to Kenya is less than ten per cent of UK profits repatriated from Kenya every year. No sane journalist will dare to expose these statistics. Instead a lie is perpetuated about a caring and benevolent master at the expense of African dignity.

If UK is such a caring development partner why have the atrocities committed against the people in the war of independence not been acknowledged and reparations made? Are Jews special human beings to have been compensated for the Nazi genocide as Africans wallow in self-hating indignities? Does Kay thinks Kenyans have forgotten about the Hola massacre? Where was Kay when Moi looted the nation's coffers clean? Where was Kay when Moi closed Kikuyu ran banks so that UK banks could flourish?

When Kibaki tries to return the economy to the people, the exploiters jump with 'clean shovels' to the amusement of the 'fickle minded African journalists'. It takes only the courage of a few to change the world. Without the sacrifice of Mau Mau, many of Kay supporters would still be licking the boots of their masters. Thank God Kenyans no longer need to read what their journalists write to be informed. Lets learn to access and analyse information on our own initiative. Politics of ethnic divide and rule will continue to be used to divide 'less informed' Africans. Remember the British propped up KADU at independence so that they could have their way in Kenya.

Moyo is an impressive trinket (Pambazuka News 166). He's adept at making light the tribulations of the ordinary Zimbabwean. He denies there is starvation in his country only because that is not the reality in his dining room in his house.

ZANU PF is right on the land policy. But this is no excuse for the criminal excesses being perpetrated by government elements in the name of land redistribution.

Moyo, redeem yourself before the wrath of the people extinguishes you.

Sibanze Simuchoba, Zambia

President Obasanjo's fight against corruption came under a re-assessment this week from the country's House of Representatives who said that the government was not showing sufficient seriousness in the battle. The House has now resolved to amend the law establishing the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to make it more effective.

Opposition parties in Mozambique have called on Southern African leaders to deal with what they call the violation of democracy in that country. The comment follows the Mozambican electoral commission's decision to allow Mozambicans living abroad to register. There are over 200,000 Mozambicans in other African states and Europe and the opposition claim that it will open the election process to more election fraud. Mozambicans will be going to presidential and parliamentary elections in December.

The Reality of Aid is an independent assessment of the nature and performance of development aid. The project aims to contribute to more effective strategies to eliminate poverty, based on principles of solidarity and equity, by analysing international aid and development cooperation and lobbying for changes in north/south systemic relationships in aid practices.