Africa’s ability to manage the protection and finance the development of her children has been compromised by debts, diseases, armed conflicts and bad governance. As a result, the situation of the African child is alarming. The following are some of the glaring and shameful statistics:
- There are 80 million child workers across Africa and the number is expected to rise to 100 million by the year 2015.
- 120,000 child soldiers (under 18 years of age) have been recruited into Africa’s armed conflicts.
- 300 million African children live on the very margin of survival as victims of abject poverty despite the global prosperity.
- Some 12,100,000 African children are HIV/AIDS orphans and 2.4 million children under the age of 15 years are HIV positive.
- Some 30 per cent of African children of school going age are not in school. Generally, the average government spending on education amounts to 15.2 per cent of the total national budgets.
SOURCE: (UNICEF, Africa Recovery, ILO)

Burkina Faso's parliament has voted to change the country's electoral code, which the opposition fears will clear the way for another term in office for President Blaise Compaore in elections scheduled for November 2005. These changes, which were passed through parliament late Tuesday, will see the electoral unit of Burkina Faso changed from the region of which there are 15, to the province, which number 45.

Togo is hoping to restore normal diplomatic and economic relations with the European Union by promising to adopt a series of reforms aimed at improving democracy in the country and respect liberties. Togolese government delegates opened talks with EU representatives in Brussels on 14 April. The Togolese government subsequently drew up a list of 22 commitments, promising, amongst other things, "to guarantee political parties the ability conduct their activities without fear of harassment" and "to ensure a transparent and democratic electoral process in the coming six months".

Guinea Prime Minister Lounseny Fall has resigned, while on a visit to New York. During an earlier stopover in Paris, he told the weekly Jeune Afrique-L'Intelligent that he was resigning because President Lansana Conte did not give him enough room for manoeuvre to salvage the Guinean economy. A BBC correspondent in Guinea says it is likely that the minister announced his resignation from abroad because he feared for his safety and that of his family.

Police in Nigeria fired tear gas Monday to break up demonstrations over last year's presidential elections, which opposition members claim were rigged. In the capital, Abuja, police used tear gas on a convoy of vehicles carrying opposition leaders. There was similar action against protestors in the largest city, Lagos, where about 20 arrests were made.

In 1994, the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) was feted for its fair and efficient organisation of a poll that ousted autocratic ruler Hastings Kamuzu Banda. A decade on, however, the lustre has been rubbed off of the organisation. It now finds itself at the centre of a row about alleged irregularities in the run-up to general elections on May 18. The MEC says it has limited powers to address these problems – but this claim has been disputed by various legal experts.

Few would have predicted that a small, impoverished mountainous kingdom in southern Africa would set new precedents in the global fight against corruption, but, against all odds, the government of Lesotho continues to do just that. For the past five years, Lesotho has been doggedly prosecuting multinational companies who paid approximately $2 million in bribes to the former chief executive of the World Bank-funded Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a massive dam scheme that affected thousands of rural families. Their efforts have been remarkably successful. The former chief executive was sentenced to 12 years in prison; a South African man pled guilty to acting as a conduit for the bribes; and, most importantly, three multinational companies have been convicted and fined.

Global levels of fresh water resources per capita declined by 1.6 percent between 2001 and 2002 due to growing populations’ pressure on water resources, according to the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book 2004, launched last week at the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. The decline, which is the result of demographic increase, is even more dramatic in water scarce regions such as the Middle East and North Africa where growing populations decreased fresh water resources per capita by 2.5 percent.

The World Bank is accelerating its funding for large dam projects to the detriment of the environment and locals in the countries where the projects are built, a report released last Thursday said. "So often it's the poorest that pay the price for projects that are supposed to bring development," said Peter Bosshard, main author of the International Rivers Network report. "Bank-funded dams have displaced more than 10 million people, flooded millions of hectares of lands and pushed many countries deeper into debt. Yet the bank is set to repeat its mistakes all over again," he added.

* Editorials: World Press Freedom Day: Demanding a right to expression
* Pan African Postcard: new section
* Conflicts&Emergencies: Update on the Sudan peace process
* Human Rights: Student activist arrested and beaten
* Women and Gender: To the moon and back - Women and water
* Elections and Governance: Ten years of democracy in rural South Africa
* Development: The breaking of the Bank
* HIV/AIDS: World Bank shows low credit in response to HIV/AIDS crisis
* Education: World Youth Report - the global situation of young people
* Environment: Nations agree on climate watch system

When armed men raided the printing press of Gambia's The Independent newspaper on 13 April, five of them opened fire on staff while a sixth doused the printing press with petrol and set it alight. It was the second time in six months that the newspaper's printing press was targeted, but employees complained that it took the police five hours to arrive at the scene, even though there was a police station only one kilometre away.

Earlier in the month, eight internet users in Tunisia who said they had simply used the Internet to download files about the situation in the Middle East where accused of promoting terrorist attacks and sentenced by a Tunis court to up to 26 years in prison. Reporters sans frontières (RSF)
commented at the time: "The trial of these young people demonstrates the Tunisian judicial system's outrageous contempt for the rights of the defence. Simply consulting Internet sites cannot be considered evidence of a terrorist plot. The Tunisian regime is trying to terrorise Internet users and silence dissent."

On Friday, April 2, Ethiopian authorities jailed Merid Estifanos, former editor-in-chief of the private, Amharic-language weekly Satanaw. This was after he was unable to pay bail in a criminal defamation case stemming from a September 2001 opinion piece titled "The Hidden Agenda of Prime Minister Meles." Estifanos did not write the article, but as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, he was held responsible for its content. The Committee to Protect Journalists said: "We call on Ethiopian authorities to release Merid Estifanos immediately, and to work toward removing criminal penalties for press offences."

These are arbitrary selections of press freedom and freedom of expression violations during the month of April. They are by no means unique. The routine stories that surface from around the continent on a daily basis paints a picture of a media environment where journalists are routinely harassed, suppressed, beaten, tortured and imprisoned.

Last year, on the occasion of the inauguration of the African Union, Pambazuka News carried an editorial which highlighted the shocking state of press freedom on the African continent. The editorial stated:

"This distinguished gathering of Ministers did not think it necessary to respond to the urgent issues such as warnings by the World Food Programme of looming food shortages and famine in several African countries .By no coincidence, the governments of these countries have been identified by several international and African press freedom and freedom of expression organisations as suppressing press freedom and freedom of expression. In almost all cases, the rights to association, assembly and political participation have also been curtailed."

Noting the serious development challenges faced by the African continent - education, healthcare, HIV/AIDs, agriculture, provision of adequate housing and conflict resolution - the editorial pointed out that these challenges could not be met without the active participation of the citizens of African countries. It said:

"Active participation of citizens in shaping policy and decision making of their countries is however impossible if their own governments continue to deny them the rights necessary to ensure such participation. These include the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association and political participation, as well as media freedom to facilitate a free exchange of information, ideas and opinion."

But, the editorial went on to say, these rights continued to be violated by numerous governments despite the fact that virtually all African countries had signed up to or ratified the constitutive Act of the African union, the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other similar documents.

One year later and the almost daily violations of press freedom and freedom of expression rights in multitude countries continue almost unremarked except for the shrill protests of various media freedom bodies. As the African Peer Review Mechanism (ARPM) of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) kicks in with its first reviews, it will be interesting to see whether the ARPM shows any teeth when it comes to reporting on press freedom and freedom of expression violations.

According to an AU/Nepad paper giving guidelines for countries to participate in the ARPM, the purpose of the ARPM is to foster the adoption of appropriate laws, policies, standards and practices that lead to, amongst other aims, political stability. Although the media is not specifically listed, it is difficult to see how a respect for media freedom and freedom of expression could be excluded from the definition of political stability. Country review visits by the ARPM team will indeed be responsible for carrying out widespread consultations that include the media.

But As World Press Freedom Day approaches on May 3, it is important to note that there has been little progress towards the enforcement of the right to freedom of expression on the African continent. Until such time as institutions and leaders commit to entrenching media freedom and freedom of expression as a basis for development on the continent and not as a concession benevolently handed out - and withdrawn - on a whim, World Press Freedom Day in Africa will be marked for the bravery of those journalists who go to work under a cloud of repression, rather than a day for the celebration of a right fulfilled.

* Please send comments to

* Related Link:
Release of MISA's Annual Publication, 'So This Is Democracy?: State of Media Freedom in Southern Africa'
http://allafrica.com/stories/200404280686.html

Renewed efforts to bring Zimbabwe's two feuding main political parties back to the negotiating table have hit a brick wall with Zanu PF showing signs of ill-feeling over the sincerity and impartiality of the arbitrators. Impeccable Zanu PF sources confirmed that there was a whiff of suspicion within their ranks, with some senior party officials, who are jealously guarding their positions, alleging that some of the church leaders pushing for the negotiations were sympathetic to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The church leaders from various denominations have been at the forefront of trying to bring the MDC and the ruling Zanu PF to the negotiating table which they abandoned almost two years ago.

On a tour of the north of Ivory Coast, the leader of the New Forces, Guillaume Soro, has announced a range of measures to restore normality in the territory under New Force control. In particular Mr Soro has called for the creation of New Forces police and customs officers. Some say that is the first step towards the north declaring its independence.

Federal President Azali Assoumani suffered a setback in parliamentary elections held at the weekend when parties aligned to the archipelego's three regional presidents gained the majority of seats in the national assembly. Following run-off elections for the federal assembly on Sunday, supporters of the presidents of the three semi-autonomous islands hold 12 of the 18 elected seats in parliament, against six for the federal president's party.

Interahamwe militia in the western town of Kibuye allegedly forced captured children to reveal where adults in the Bisesero hills were hiding during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. This was revealed Tuesday by a prosecution witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), where a former councillor of Gishyita (Kibuye), Mika Muhimana, is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed against Tutsis between April and July 1994.

We need to raise awareness of the need to redistribute the world’s resources, embracing the principle of sharing at all levels of society.

The current world economic system doesn't work. A world ruled by financiers and economists with no regard for human suffering or ecological damage is not sustainable. Unfair trading practices, set up by the World Trade Organisation and the G7 squeeze the third world to a point where famine and war are the result. When I think about the ever-worsening situation in the Third World I am reminded of an incident one summer in my childhood.

My sister and I went to stay with our aunt and uncle on their farm. When we arrived my uncle and aunt told us that the field of kale behind the farmhouse was full of caterpillars. Excitedly, we ran out into the field to look at them. Every leaf of every kale plant was covered in caterpillars, big ones, small ones and tiny ones.

As the days passed, the army of caterpillars marched across the field towards the house. They ate every leaf of every plant, leaving a forest of skeletons in their wake. Big fat caterpillars walked over the smaller ones, squashing them as they went. And when they reached the edge of the field they crawled towards the house, up the walls and in through the windows. We shut the windows. The caterpillars crawled over the gutters, up the roof and down the chimneys.

Everywhere we looked there were caterpillars: on the walls, the ceilings, under the chairs, in the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the toilet. They stuck to the walls and ceilings of the house, turned into chrysalises, then never hatched. Every one of those caterpillars died.

As I look at the world today I see the caterpillar metaphor in action. The rich crush the poor, with bombs, wars, crippling interest rates on loans and unfair trade. I see desperate poverty, leading to population explosions, and I see the destruction of the environment on a par with the caterpillar’s destruction of their field of kale.

Just as the caterpillars destroyed their source of sustenance, so we humans are destroying our environment. We are destroying the very source of the air we breathe: the tropical rain forests. Our rich, like the big fat caterpillars, get richer and fatter while our poor, like the small thin caterpillars, are crushed to death or left with nothing to eat.

But all, fat and thin, rich and poor, are crawling towards eventual self-destruction.

But there are other models in the insect kingdom. Both ants and bees base their success on co-operation; the sharing of duties and resources to build highly successful communities. Ants that live in the topical rain forest co-operate not only with each other but with every aspect of their environment. Bees also work together co-operatively. Some would say that the bee model is regimented and smacks of communism. But the model merely demonstrates that sharing benefits both the community and the environment.

Part of the human race knows that sharing is the responsible way forward: the part which created the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the hundreds of organisations that attempt to mitigate the disastrous consequences of unjust economic policies.

Even the World Bank was originally set up with a view to ending world poverty. But the problem with the world at the moment is that we do not have a queen bee, a head ant, a co-ordinating centre; in other words a world government. World power is in the hands of financiers, under the auspices of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. These institutions dictate the terms of trade and protect the interests of the West, to the detriment of the rest of the world. The world deserves better than this.

The Brandt Report (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/News/PressReleases/files/pr_africacom_brandt_bac…), for example, puts the needs of the world’s people first. It is the blueprint for a world government. Every member of the world’s society needs food, clean water, a roof over their heads, health care and education. The Brandt Report makes clear that we need to share responsibility for the world’s resources and the environment.

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in his book ‘Globalization and its Discontents’, explains in great detail how the current world economic situation evolved and what is wrong with it. The foundations of the current world economic system were laid by the United Nations in 1944 at Bretton Woods, in the US. Those present discussed how to rebuild war-ravaged Europe and as a result they set up an International Bank for the Reconstruction and Development of Europe. This later became the World Bank. They also set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to maintain world economic stability, so that there would be no more world economic depressions. As Joseph Stiglitz points out, these were good and worthy ideals at the time.

Over the years the power of the World Bank and the IMF, under the G7 (the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, France and the UK) grew and grew until they had economic dominion over the whole world. The World Trade Organisation was created, to set the price for third world exports, mainly raw materials and crops. The price for these commodities has fallen constantly ever since, making it harder and harder for these countries to repay the interest on their loans.

The economic system created in 1944 in the spirit of remorse and idealism, developed into a global economic network with a stranglehold over the third world. A world governed by financial institutions is not, and cannot be, a stable, sane or healthy world.

In the 1980s the World Bank and the IMF really began to squeeze the third world. It was during this period that Reagan and Thatcher came to power and began to promote the doctrine of monetarism and the free market economy. The IMF, the World Bank and the US treasury came to an agreement called the Washington Consensus (representatives of Third World countries were not invited to the meeting). They called for Capital Market Liberalization, i.e. forcing third world countries to open up to imports which they could not compete with, while using import tariffs to protect their own vulnerable industries.

The 1980s also saw the introduction of the iniquitous structural adjustment loans by the World Bank and the IMF. These loans were tied to so many conditions that third world governments were forced to cut back on essential spending, such as education and health programmes. This, over a period of decades has led to a worsening of health in the third world. Twelve million people now die of preventable diseases every year, and of these the largest number dies from dysentery and diarrhoea.

Since the people affected by diseases live in some of the poorest countries of the world, there is no incentive for the world’s pharmaceutical companies to put money into research and development of new drugs or vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies play an important part in Western health schemes, carrying out research and developing new medicines. But since they are inextricably linked into the current world economic system, which is driven by the profit motive and competition with each other, they feel that they are forced to gear their research towards finding drugs to treat the diseases which affect the developed world: cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc., drugs which they can sell at a profit. Only ten percent of research money worldwide is devoted to ninety percent of the world’s diseases.

The current world economic system is failing the majority of the world’s population. Profit-driven research will always be geared towards the development of drugs to treat the diseases of those who can pay. A world system based on sharing would look at need, rather than profit – as the driving force behind research.

A World Government based on the principle of sharing would share responsibility for the health of the world population, direct research and development towards all the diseases which affect the world, not just those that affect the West.

A world economic system based on sharing would want to share responsibility for the health of the world population. A world economic system based on sharing would want to preserve ancient knowledge of traditional medicine, share responsibility for protecting rare medicinal plants, for growing and harvesting these plants and making them available to all those in need.

The current economic system exploits the environment shamelessly, leading to its destruction. We are destroying the world’s tropical rain forests, an invaluable and irreplaceable source of medicinal plants.

Sharing is not just about sharing resources. It is also about the sharing of knowledge, both the high tech knowledge of the developed nations, and the detailed, intimate knowledge of the environment of the people who inhabit it. The current global economic system exploits both the environment and the people who live in it. The emphasis on profit denies all other values, such as traditional knowledge and respect for the environment. This is extremely dangerous, and if it continues will lead to complete ecological destruction, followed by the death of a large proportion of the human species. We need a world government to instil in everyone the necessity of sharing responsibility for the environment.

Sharing the world's resources, knowledge and responsibilities is the only way for the human species to survive. The infrastructure for such sharing is already in place. All that is required now is a shift of consciousness on the part of human kind, away from the idea that competition should be the basis of our economic system, towards the idea that sharing would be of benefit to all.

* Mohammed Mesbahi is the Chair and Founder of a London-based organisation called Share the World’s Resources (STWR). This article was submitted to Pambazuka News by email.

* Send comments on this article - and other events in Africa - to [email protected]

In 1992 the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was established as a regional organisation with a mandate to promote economic integration, poverty alleviation, peace, security and the evolution of common political values and institutions.

There were great expectations that the demise of apartheid and the Cold War would usher in a period of sustained stability and development at national and regional levels. Yet over the following decade SADC region remained wracked by a high level of conflict that included civil wars in the DRC and Angola, as well as violence and state repression in other countries.

SADC was largely ineffectual in these situations, distinguished less by its peacemaking efforts than by its fractious internal quarrels. The formation of SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security - a common security forum whose stipulated functions include the prevention and resolution of conflict - was itself bedevilled by acrimonious disputes among member states over a ten-year period. In this commentary I address three questions: what accounts for the difficulty in establishing the Organ? What are the reasons for SADC's poor record of peacemaking? And why was the analysis and prognosis of many academics and activists so flawed in the early 1990s?

Many analysts attribute the difficulty in establishing the Organ to disagreements over its status and structure or to competition and animosity between South Africa and Zimbabwe. These diagnoses are superficial and incomplete.

Three more substantial problems have prevented SADC from creating an effective security forum. First and most importantly, there is an absence of common values among member states. There are two key lines of division: between democratic and authoritarian tendencies in the domestic policies of states, and between pacific and militarist orientations in their foreign policies.

As in the case of Europe, a viable regional organisation with a political and security mandate can institutionalise the common values of its members, develop common policies and contribute to peace and stability. However, the viability of such organisations depends in the first instance on the existence of common values.

In the absence of sufficient normative congruence, states are unable to resolve or transcend their major disputes, achieve cohesion and act with common purpose in crisis situations. In the realm of political governance, there are many de jure democracies whose executives are intolerant of dissent, hardly accountable to parliament and insufficiently committed to respect for human rights and the rule of law.

According to Jonathan Moyo prior to becoming Zimbabwe's Minister of Information, “the assertion that the majority of African governments are now democratic… has no empirical basis. It is true that multiparty elections are now common in Africa but this truth does not describe a fundamental development. The change is strategic, not substantive. …Just look at Zambia and Malawi since the fall of Kenneth Kaunda and the late Kamuzu Banda. Zimbabwe is following suit with reckless abandon”.

In 1993 SADC's Framework and Strategy document, prepared by the SADC Secretariat, called for the forging of common political values based on democratic norms, the creation of a “non-militaristic security order” and the establishment of mechanisms for conflict avoidance, management and resolution.

The document highlighted the need to address non-military sources of conflict and threats to human security, such as underdevelopment and abuse of human rights. The proposed strategies and mechanisms included a forum for mediation and arbitration; the ratification by states of key principles of international law; a non-aggression treaty and non-offensive defence doctrines; democratic civil-military relations; and reductions in military force levels and spending.

Many states did not support this anti-militarist agenda, however. Progress towards establishing a security forum was delayed over the next seven years by antagonistic and recriminatory debates around the Organ's status and structure as manifestations of underlying political and strategic differences among member states.

The second reason for the difficulty in operationalising the Organ lies in the reluctance of SADC states to surrender a measure of sovereignty to a security body that encompasses binding rules and decision-making in the sphere of high politics and the possibility of interference in domestic affairs. This reluctance derives from the political weakness of states and the absence of common values, mutual trust and a shared vision of the security body.

Third, Southern Africa is characterised by small economies, underdevelopment and weak administrative capacity, which undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of all the SADC's multilateral forums and programmes. Ten years after its formation, SADC estimated that only twenty per cent of its 470 projects met the criteria for properly integrated regional projects, the rest being essentially national projects.

In addition to its inability to prevent violent conflict, SADC does not have a record of successful peacemaking. In many intra-state conflicts it has refrained from critical comment and diplomatic engagement, treating violence and crises in governance as purely domestic affairs.

In the case of state repression and abrogation of the rule of law in Zimbabwe, on the other hand, SADC has repeatedly expressed solidarity with the government.

There are several reasons for these responses. First, SADC states are keen to avoid adversarial relations that might jeopardise regional trade and functional co-operation. Second, governments that are not fully democratic are naturally unwilling to speak out against neighbouring countries that engage in undemocratic practices. Third, Southern African states are determined to maintain a posture of unity and solidarity.

Forged in the heat of the struggles against colonialism and apartheid, this posture militates against public criticism of each other. The imperative of solidarity is greatest when foreign powers raise concerns that are perceived or can be portrayed as reflecting a 'neo-colonial' agenda. Solidarity of this kind enhances regime security at the expense of human security, masks rather than transcends the substantive disputes between states, and does not constitute a foundation for a common security forum.

Fourth, SADC's poor record of peacemaking is due to the impasse around the Organ. The absence of an agreed set of norms, strategies and procedures for addressing high-intensity conflict has contributed to collective inertia, divergent and parochial approaches by individual states, ill-conceived interventions of doubtful legality, and a confused mixture of peacemaking and peace enforcement.

Most of these problems were evident in SADC's response to the crises in Lesotho and the DRC in 1998. The dispute between member states around the DRC crisis crippled the Organ and gave rise to the notion of “two SADCs”, with two camps pursuing contradictory pacific and militarist strategies.

In the early and mid-1990s a number of academics and activists were involved in efforts to establish a common security forum and were optimistic about its prospects. What mistakes did we make? The reasons might offer insights into future activities and policy recommendations.

First, we based our models of common security on the European experience without analysing adequately the nature of our own region and of its states in particular. We were strong on ideas and norms but weak on analysis. Second, we relied too much on the compelling need for a common security body and paid too little attention to the requirements for its success. Third, we overestimated the durability of the political bonds forged during the liberation struggles and underestimated the significance of the political differences between states.

Many analysts continue to make this mistake, arguing that the Organ breakdown can be overcome by states forging a political consensus on human security, democracy and respect for human rights. If states do not support these norms and values at the national level, however, they will not support them at the regional level. Regional policy on security is a product of national policies on security.

Fourth, we were preoccupied (as many analysts still are) with the architecture of security arrangements when the critical issues in fact lie elsewhere: structure follows strategy; strategy follows objectives; objectives are shaped as much by values as by interests; and the Organ breakdown has occurred at the level of foundational values.

In general, we overstated what was possible at the regional level and understated what was required at the national level. Where democracy and human security do not exist, they are most likely to be attained through broad-based popular struggles.

* Laurie Nathan is a Visiting Fellow at the Crisis States Programme, London School of Economics.

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* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. While we are pleased that several print publications have used our editorials, we ask editors to note that if they use this article, they do so on the understanding that they are expected to provide the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

I have managed to read some of the Pambazuka newsletters and found some very useful papers and information there, so for those responsible thanks and keep up the good work.

I am keen to hear views on the current news that truces are being drawn and views regarding the politics of these positions (Sudan). I may probably not be able to directly act or contribute at this stage but it has been useful to have the input and views of those closely involved, even when I do not agree or fully understand the positions being taken but I hope it enables me to be informed enough to make good judgements should opportunities to support come.

Speakers at a symposium organized by the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) on Tuesday raised concerns about the level of political corruption in Ghana and the likelihood of it undermining the country's democratic processes and the rule of law. The panellists at the symposium on: "Political Corruption in Ghana" said government should put in place measures to strengthen anti-corruption agencies, enhance the education of civil society organisations and streamline political party financing in the country.

No one story explains post Apartheid South Africa, a nation trying to enact political, economic and racial reconciliation, all at the same time. The towns of Riviersonderend, Ceres and Swellendam, located in the Western Cape province's rural farm belt, each offer radically different profiles of the nation, on this the tenth anniversary of South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. "We have got political freedom, but not economic freedom," declared Alan Thompson the Colored African National Congress deputy Mayor of Swellendam-the third oldest European-founded settlement in the country. Then he grinned stressing ANC success: "Structurally many things have changed, the streets have been tarred, housing has been built, there is electricity [in the townships]."