2thirds World

US universities in Africa 'land grab'

2011-06-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out

John Vidal and Claire Provost

US universities are reportedly using endowment funds to make deals that may force thousands from their land in Africa. Photograph: Boston Globe via Getty Images

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.

The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one of Africa's largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

Emergent said the deals were handled responsibly. "Yes, university endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors," a spokesman said. "We are investing in African agriculture and setting up businesses and employing people. We are doing it in a responsible way … The amounts are large. They can be hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive."

Chinese and Middle Eastern firms have previously been identified as "grabbing" large tracts of land in developing countries to grow cheap food for home populations, but western funds are behind many of the biggest deals, says the Oakland institute, an advocacy research group.

The company that manages Harvard's investment funds declined to comment. "It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report," said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment.

Oakland said investors overstated the benefits of the deals for the communities involved. "Companies have been able to create complex layers of companies and subsidiaries to avert the gaze of weak regulatory authorities. Analysis of the contracts reveal that many of the deals will provide few jobs and will force many thousands of people off the land," said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland's director.

In Tanzania, the memorandum of understanding between the local government and US-based farm development corporation AgriSol Energy, which is working with Iowa University, stipulates that the two main locations – Katumba and Mishamo – for their project are refugee settlements holding as many as 162,000 people that will have to be closed before the $700m project can start. The refugees have been farming this land for 40 years.

In Ethiopia, a process of "villagisation" by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies.

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues.

In Mozambique, where up to 7m hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South Africans businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the US. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created.

"No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security," said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia. "These agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors."

"The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking", said Mittal. "The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

Research by the World Bank and others suggests that nearly 60m hectares – an area the size of France – has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa in the past three years.

"Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms," says the report.

"We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as squatters, are forcibly removed with no compensation," said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at Oakland, said: "This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world's poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens."

Why did Britain abolish slavery?

2011-06-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

Dave Packer

There have been many articles in the left press and the media on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Here David Packer analyses the forces that led to its abolition and subsequently the slave mode of production itself in the New World.

There is much controversy about the reasons for the abolition of the slave trade and the subsequent progressive abolition of the slave system itself in the New World. Some have argued that in Britain, it was the power of the moral/Christian arguments presented by the abolitionist movement, led by the great parliamentarian, William Wilberforce. The perpetration of this myth was the intention of the official ‘Wilberfest’ promoted by the British state. Others have pointed to the international impact of the French Revolution, or emphasise the growing crescendo of slave rebellion in the New World colonies, or inter-imperialist competition between the European powers, or to changing economic conditions in the development of capitalism.

I argue that all these historical questions combined in a complex dialectic, but the underlying force at play was the changing economic requirements of capitalism in Britain and in North America. [1] In addition, after the British abolition of the trade and its attempts to suppress it internationally, important changes in the relations of production and reproduction of the slave mode of production occurred. This resulted in changes in the relation of social forces between slaves and masters, which made slavery increasingly untenable.

Critical events: Haiti and the slave revolts

The vital changes that brought the transatlantic trade to an end occurred not in Europe, but in the colonies where the slaves were put to work in the plantation system. Although the abolitionist movements in Britain, the USA, France and elsewhere were important, they played a secondary or auxiliary role to the struggles of the black slaves themselves.

Political and social change inspired by the American and French Revolutions, stimulated both slave revolts and abolition movements alike, which often became inextricably linked with independence movements. The 1791 slave rising in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which transformed into a struggle for self-determination and national independence, was two years after Revolution in France and the first successful slave revolution. In response, the French revolutionary government was inspired to abolish slavery in 1794, though this was restored under Napoleon in 1802. The final victory of Haiti’s ‘Black Jacobins’ over British invasion and then Napoleon’s attempt to re-take the island in 1803 led in 1804 to recognition of Haiti’s independence. [2] In 1816 Simon Bolivar was inspired and materially aided by the revolutionaries in Haiti, in the invasion of mainland South America that eventually defeated the Spanish Empire. The army included many black troops.

In British Jamaica the continuing resistance of the Maroons (warrior communities of escaped slaves) were a constant thorn in the side of the colonial government and the planters, despite the compromise treaty that resulted from the Maroon Wars led by the woman liberation fighter, Nanny of the Maroons, fifty years earlier. Also it was the revolt of 20,000 slaves in Jamaica in 1831, and its horrific repression, which influenced the passing of the 1833 bill abolishing slavery itself in all British colonies - which only finally took effect in 1838 after £20 million in compensation was paid to the planters for their loss of property (£20 billion in today’s money).

In the US, the slave trade had also been formally abolished in 1808, however, despite the efforts of abolitionist movements the US flag continued to be used by slavers to avoid the stop and search blockade organised by the British Navy. At the same time a successful internal trade in slaves continued on a far larger scale than foreign importation. It was only with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that serious efforts to suppress the slave trade began.

The movement for abolition in Britain

The slave rebellions stimulated abolitionist movements everywhere, however even after the abolition of the trade slavery in the colonies continued and even Wilberforce defended this on the grounds that slaves had to be educated and prepared for their freedom to avoid disaster.

The British abolition campaign was formally founded as a nationally organised campaign in 1787, in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, although some of its leaders and component organisation, such as the Quakers, had been active before that date.

Anti-slavery movements in Britain and America took the form of a radical, mostly protestant, non-conformist Christianity, although William Wilberforce, its parliamentary leader in Britain, was a radical evangelical Anglican and a Tory. However, abolitionists were originally a small minority of Christians, including among Protestants, and Christianity as a religious movement was not for most of its history anti-slavery. It is dishonest for Christian churches today to dress in the mantle of the anti-slavery movement. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century most Christians, especially their leaders, defended slavery as Christians had done since the Roman Empire and the teachings of such early authorities such as St. Augustine. [3]

There was a more radical wing of abolitionism. Thomas Clarkson, unlike his Tory friend Wilberforce, or the evangelicals, was a sympathiser of the French Revolution. In many ways he was the central leader of the movement but is only commemorated by a small plaque in Westminster Abbey, compared to the large marble statue of Wilberforce. There are many examples of Wilberforce’s political and social conservatism, for example, he supported repressive legislation, introduced by his friend William Pitt, after the outbreak of war with revolutionary France.

Despite the advances of the enlightenment and of socialism, during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries most ideas and political causes were still expressed in religious form. And this includes abolitionists and the slave owners, traders and investors. The Anglican Church along with several Bishops owned slave plantations in Barbados, among the most brutal in the Caribbean. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which owned the Codrington plantation on the same island, had the word ‘Society’ branded on the chests of their slaves like the logo markings on other forms of property.

If the motives of the slaves themselves for resistance and revolution are clear, the motives for the abolition movement in Britain are less so. First, it was not just a moral crusade by a few upper class leaders but a political movement with a social base that was mainly plebeian who saw slavery as a threat to their own liberties. The movement was a broad alliance of artisans, small farmers and other petit-bourgeois layers, together with exploited workers, many of whom sympathised with the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the French Revolution and in a few cases socialism, but whose leaderships were often drawn from the articulate professional classes and the gentry, like Wilberforce himself, and his allies in parliament.

It was this broad, multi-class mass movement, far more than a single issue campaign, which included many of the 10-15,000 black people living in London at the end of the eighteenth century, which is virtually absent from the Wilberforce biopic, Amazing Grace.

Economic shifts

Underlying both these political and social movements, systemic developments in the growing world capitalist economy were taking place; in the vanguard was British imperialism and its industrial revolution.

The New World plantation system was a highly developed form of the slave mode of production that, unlike ancient slavery, was integrated into and increasingly driven by a growing capitalist world market. In Capitalism and slavery, Eric Williams argued that the profits from New World slavery had significantly contributed to the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital that enabled the industrial revolution, especially in Britain. However, by the end of the 18th century, the profitability of plantation slavery was in decline and so was the slave system as a whole. This latter point is contested at least for the period before the abolition of the slave trade. However, it was certainly in decline relative to the overall development of British capitalism, which is Williams’ main point. It had played a crucial role during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the process of accumulation of capital, but became increasingly secondary and eventually marginal to later development. There were now more profitable outlets in industry and commerce for investments than in the dirty slave business.

At its high point towards the end of the eighteenth century the Atlantic triangular trade supplied about one third of all European imports and could make up to 200 percent profit on investments. In Britain a copper and brass industry was created along the Avon valley to supply Bristol with quality metal goods to be traded for slaves in Africa. Similarly the iron industries of the Severn valley did the same. Wealth poured into ports such as Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow, which provided more capital for investments and credit to kick-start the industrial revolution. By 1770 ‘Britain’s colonial markets absorbed 38% of her exports’. [4] But it was during the last quarter of the eighteenth century that industrial take-off occurred leading to a gradual relative decline in the importance of the slave colonies.

It was the existing dynamism of emergent British capitalism based on wage labour that enabled Britain to become the dominant slaving nation. By the end of the eighteenth century there were fifty factories in Manchester alone employing hundreds even thousands of workers. [5]

Rapid industrialisation required new larger markets and drew in more and more capital investment, pushing the Atlantic trade system into relative decline. British capitalism had outgrown the triangular trade.

Imperial competition

There were other factors in the equation. We have mentioned the revolutionary 1791 victory of the Black Jacobins in Haiti, now a dangerous beacon to slaves everywhere. At the same time, the loss of Haiti was seen in Britain as a welcome blow to French interests, which had been more dependent on slave profits than the British. Although Britain had been the premier slaving nation, slavery now appeared to benefit Britain’s competitors more than Britain itself. Prior to revolution in Haiti, this one large island colony had provided France with two thirds of it foreign earnings. In particular, Napoleonic France needed the profits from slavery more than industrialising Britain did.

The abolitionists, whose ideology corresponded to the interests of egalitarian and democratic artisan and proletarian classes in alliance with Christian fundamentalists had started with the support of only nine MPs. But, political instability in the colonies, changing economic priorities and now war with France, led a once marginal anti-slavery lobby to gradually gain ground within sections of the ruling class and their representatives in parliament, which now turned to support measures against the slave trade.

In May 1806 parliament passed an act, supported by the abolition movement, banning British subjects from participating in the slave trade with France and its allies. The pro-slavery lobby was outmanoeuvred because the bill was presented as a patriotic war measure directed against French interests. It was a major blow to the slave trade and laid the ground for the 1807 act of abolition. The Royal Navy’s subsequent campaigns against the international slave trade were presented as a moral crusade by Britain, but was much more a form of economic war against its less economically developed competitors.

An Alternative view

Mike Macnair in Weekly Worker states that the evidence does, ‘not suggest even a relative decline in the profitability of plantation slavery and the slave trade at the time of the rise of the anti-slavery movement.’ [6] He continues, ‘We have to set the purely cynical narrative on one side. The 1807 ban on the slave trade was not a cynical manoeuvre in British capitalist interests. It was a limited concession dragged out of a hostile capitalist establishment by an organised mass campaign.’ It was of course both these things and more. After the death of William Pitt and a governmental crisis, the abolitionist campaign made significant headway in the general election. The abolitionists were able to obtain pledges from many candidates to vote for abolition. Macnair considers that: ‘The immediate political context made it a little easier to drag this concession out.’

This view fails to adequately explain the shift in bourgeois public opinion behind the abolitionist movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the growing intensity of slave resistance in the colonies. It was the forces of political resistance, both of the abolitionists in Britain and especially rebellion in the colonies together with revolution in Europe that were decisive.

Macnair makes clear his view that it was the British abolition movement, ‘the first modern citizens movement’, that was central to the abolition of the slave trade. This emphasis is derived from the popular account of it found in Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild (2005). I do not wish to minimise the importance of the abolition movement, (the sugar boycott led by Clarkson, opposed by Wilberforce, signed up 300,000 supporters), or even its reformist leaders like Wilberforce, but this slanted view underestimates the international context, in particular the growing resistance of slaves themselves, most notably in revolutionary Haiti. It also underestimates the ‘cynical’ response of capital to its changing needs.

The decline and fall of the colonial slave mode of production

After the British abolition act of 1807 the trade went underground and ceased in stages. Although in 1820 the plantations were still profitable, by then the policing of the seaways by the British navy was taking its toll. Profits and investment were in relative decline. Historically all large-scale slave systems require a constant replenishment of cheap stolen labour power for an adequate realisation of surplus value. However, if these conditions fail, at a certain point the costly reproduction of labour –‘slave breeding’ - that had previously been discouraged, except in North America, becomes a rational economic choice.

Growing shortages of labour, which could not be adequately solved by smuggling slaves, forced the plantation owners to institute a labour regime of hutted slaves, who were now encouraged to raise a family, often maintained by small plots of land, and who could work together as a family on the master’s plantation. It was only in North America where the internal reproduction of slave labour proved viable in the long term. [7] This was the system that came to predominate during the nineteenth century. It was different in important respects to the far more profitable and brutal all male slave gang system (who lived in guarded barracks), which had predominated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Caribbean. In eighteenth century Barbados four out of ten slaves died in three years due to brutality and overwork. This inhuman system, with parallels in the Roman ergastulum at the time of Spartacus, is marked by great gender inequality, with mostly segregated female slaves representing less than a quarter of the slave population, who were employed in the great house as servants, or in market gardening, processing, etc.

Although inhuman, cruel and highly exploitative, the hutted slave is only a step away from a dependent tenant, or a system of peonage. The successful encouragement of family life required better conditions creating greater self-respect, social solidarity, and a better relationship of forces in relation to the master class. Slave resistance could no longer be contained.

As Norman Traub summarises: ‘Slavery perished because it became politically [I would also add economically] untenable, perishing in stormy class struggles in the colonies and the metropolis.’

Dave Packer is a longstanding member of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. Packer has held a number of leadership roles in the International Socialist Group and the Fourth International. Dave is a former editor of Socialist Outlook.

NOTES

[1] See, Eric Williams, (1944) Capitalism and Slavery and the more recent and detailed account in Robin Blackburn, (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776- 1848; also the companion volume, (1997) The Making of New World Slavery. For a good comparative discussion of slavery, ancient and modern, see David Turley, (2000) Slavery.

[2] See CLR James, (1938) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Laurent Dubois, (2005) Avengers of the New World: The story of the Haitian Revolution, also, a recent article Norman Traub, Slave Revolts that Blazed a Revolutionary Trail for All, Socialist Resistance, no.44. April 2007, which in addition discusses the historical consequences of the slave trade for Africa and its continued imperialist exploitation.

[3] See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, (1981) The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.

[4] See Norman Traub, above.

[5] Chris Harman, (1999) A Peoples History of the World, Chs. 5 & 6.

[6] See Mike Macnair, ‘Abolition and working class solidarity’, Weekly Worker, 664, March 15 2007. This is one of the more interesting recent articles on abolition, although controversial in places. Paul Hampton of Workers’ Liberty also wished to accentuate the central role of the British abolition campaign and mass action, emphasises ‘the role of the workers.’ www.workersliberty.org/node/7560.

[7] In 1800 there were 3 million slaves in North America which grew mainly through internal reproduction to 6 million in the 1860s. However, during the eighteenth century 1.6 million slaves were taken to the British Caribbean but at its end in the 1830s there was a population of only 600,000 slaves. See Harman, A Peoples History of the World, Chs. 5 & 6.

Africa and the oligopolies

2011-03-04T16:15:00.000-08:00

Occupied territory: Africa and the oligopolies

Firoze Manji, the Kenyan editor of Pambazuka News,

talks to La Decroissance.

Firoze Manji

African governments, once the product of our liberation struggles, are ‘more accountable to Northern governments and to the international financial institutions than they are to citizens’, says Firoze Manji.

LA DECROISSANCE: You assert that in Africa, ‘NGOs unconsciously take part with the current oppression’ and you go as far as comparing that with the French collaboration of the Vichy regime. What could we say to all those well-wishers from the rich countries who think they are helping Africa with those NGOs supporting development?

FIROZE MANJI: Some have criticised me for the use of the analogy about collaborators and the Vichy regime in France. It is true that Vichy was a collaboration with an occupying force. But I would argue that African countries, like many countries of the global South, are also occupied territories. Only in this era, we are dealing not with colonial occupation, but with occupation by corporations and oligopolies. They control production of almost all aspects of life.

Our governments, once the product of our liberation struggles, have been rendered supine clients of corporations and of the international aid system over the last thirty years as a result of the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes. Our governments are more accountable to Northern governments and to the international financial institutions than they are to citizens.

Social and economic policies are all set by these institutions, not by the citizenry. And the implementation of neoliberal policies involved forcing the state out of support for the social sector – health, education, sanitation, water , communications, agricultural production (at least small scale production) etc, leaving these sectors to be privatised by international corporations: The health sector is effectively privatised, with good health care for the rich, but facilities worse than under apartheid for the vast majority.

Water, energy, communications – all these profitable sectors have been privatised. And as the state retrenched from the provision of services, it was left to the other private sector – the development NGOs – to provide services to the poor, with the assistance of the aid industry. What was once our birthright, won through the struggles for independence and liberation, are now charitable services provided not as a right, but nobless oblige by the NGOs who are accountable only to their funders.

But let me make my point clear here: I am not concerned with the motives of the people who work for these NGOs: I am sure many of them do the work out of genuine concern for the poor. But objectively what they end up doing is being the sweet pill, the ‘human face’ of neoliberal policies. The NGO sector is not homogeneous: There are a few who genuinely act to speak truth to power, to challenge the process of pauperisation that has condemned the vast majority of our people to misery. But the majority of the NGOs speak about ‘poverty’, but actually do little to challenge those forces, including the oligopolies, who create pauperisation. So back to the Vichy state: If you don’t challenge the legitimacy of these occupying forces, then many would be justified in describing your actions as collaborators in the process of pauperisation.

LA DECROISSANCE: In France there is an ‘anti-development’ or ‘post-development’ movement. It is composed of persons who, like you, have contributed to development and have then changed their minds. For those like Serge Latouche or Majid Ranemah, development is the new name of colonialism. Are those ideas a reality in Africa today?

FIROZE MANJI: I think there is growing discontent about the whole idea of development. Supposing we were living in a time of slavery: Would we be building schools and hospitals for slaves, digging wells for slaves? Or would we be challenging the very system of slavery?

I don’t think the idea of development as the new name of colonialism is new: Nkrumah and others wrote about the process of neocolonialism – and the aid industry is very much part of the infrastructure of neocolonialism. What I think we should be outraged about is that what is called ‘development’ is in fact the use of public funds to subsidise and facilitate the work of the oligopolies, the transnational corporations who are the principal beneficiaries of functioning ‘development’.

But I don’t think this is colonialism: this is a form of imperialism, a way of extracting wealth from our countries, subsidised by public taxes. Imperialism has evolved over the last hundred years, and the accelerated financialisation of capital has created conditions in which there is a frantic drive for accumulation by dispossession. That is fundamentally what is going on.

And the aid industry is providing the oil to make that machinery work effectively in the interest of capital. Instead of using euphemisms like ‘development’, we should be calling it what it really is: Capitalism in the peripheries in the age of financialisation and the centralisation of capital on a global scale. This is important, because it allows clarity about what is going on, and at the same time poses the question: If accelerated pauperisation of the many is a characteristic of capitalism in the peripheries, what then should be the anti-capitalist alternative?

LA DECROISSANCE: You criticise the new technologies, but even among European ecologists, they are presented as the means that could topple the regimes of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak in North Africa. Those new technologies aren’t more of a problem than a solution?

FIROZE MANJI: We should be careful to avoid fetishising technologies – that is, we should stop pretending that inanimate objects have some kind of social or other magical power. Technologies like the mobile phone are tools, nothing more. Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were overthrown by a social revolution – primarily led by the youth. They used these new media technologies to further their cause. To attribute their success to mere technological things is to take away agency from social movements, from the oppressed and the exploited. If it was just the existence of tools that was sufficient to topple despotic regimes, how come we have not seen the same thing happen in the US or France where the penetration of mobile phones is much larger than in Egypt or Tunisia! People make revolutions, not toys – however technologically ‘sexy’ they might be.

LA DECROISSANCE: Do you know the Degrowth movement in France ? The ‘growth objectors’ are supporting a relocalisation of the economy but most of all a way out of an accounting and quantitative vision of the world, ‘less but better’ for the rich countries. Degrowth follows the ideas of Gandhi, Schumacher or Illich. Could it be a solution for Africa?

FIROZE MANJI: Look, we have lived the last hundred years in Africa with ‘less is better’. So enthusiastic have the ruling classes been about less-is-better that the last 30 years have witnessed massive pauperisation – the poor have got poorer, while a minority have got richer. Solutions have to address the problem. The escalating pauperisation of the global South has not been the product of growth, but of grand scale larceny and exploitation. So ‘degrowth’ is not a solution to that problem.

Certainly there is much to be explored about localisation of the economy: Africa produces almost exclusively for the capitalist oligopolies of the North, but has very little trade with its own neighbours, and indeed does not even produce for the needs of its own population. I would argue that far from having de-growth, what we need is a democratisation of production, democratisation of the economy, so that citizens themselves decide what is produced, how it is produced, how much is produced and under what conditions the production takes place, and what is done with the surplus. We actually need a growth in this form of production.

But that said, I believe that many of the adherents of the degrowth movement reflect the level of discontent with the way in which capitalism operates, and I can see that they are seriously trying to work out another way of running the economy. I may not agree with their solutions, but I respect the reason for the discontent they have with a system that threatens the future not only of humanity but of the planet itself.

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WHAT ABOUT AFRICA?

By Joan M. Veon
The Women’s International Media Group, Inc.

Since the last G8 in England seven years ago, the focus has been aid for Africa. In 1998, the churches organized the Jubilee Debt Relief Campaign. The terminology used was to remind world leaders of the Biblical Year of Jubilee recorded in the Old Testament where the debts of debtors were forgiven. I remember going to a non-governmental organization-NGO workshop where I interviewed a key leader about his proposal for global taxation. I asked him what they were going to do with the huge flows possible from a global tax. He told me that there would be enough for both Africa and the United Nations! Seven years later, both debt forgiveness and the concept of global taxation have come full circle. This is it. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Over the last ten years, the idea of global tax has gone through a number of revisions. Last year French President Jacques Chirac put the idea of global tax on the leader’s agenda and promised concrete recommendations. His proposed “International Solidarity Levy” would levy a tax on airline tickets. I find this curious since most airlines are bankrupt. What a carrot! Countries in favor include Brazil, China, and Germany. Currently there are no international treaties that prohibit the creation of a flat tax on airline tickets since a number of airlines already have various types of taxes on airline tickets for airport renovation and the like. The rate would be personalized according to country acceptance. Revenues would be collected by the airlines and passed on to the respective country which would supplement their foreign aid funds.

Before the world commits to the French plan which has been laid on the table and is in the process of being proposed now to the leaders of the entire world at the September United Nations General Assembly, there are a number of questions that should be asked, “How come Africa had no problems while they were colonies of Britain?” and “Why has Africa been the focus of wars and revolutions since the time of de-colonization?” Complex questions have complex answers. For people seeking truth, we will take a look at the Commonwealth, World Bank loans, NSSM200, the conditions being put on Africa, and global taxation.

First, let us take a look at what the Commonwealth of Nations is all about. According to the Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org, “The Commonwealth of nations is a voluntary association of independent sovereign states, mostly formed by the United Kingdom and its former colonies.” Today there are counties that acknowledge the British monarch as head of state and those that only recognize the queen as Head of the Commonwealth.

The old British Empire, we are told, was dismantled after World War II beginning with India. When de-colonized, many countries became republics. The London Declaration, which provided for members to accept the British monarch as Head of the Commonwealth regardless of their domestic constitutional arrangements, is now considered by many to be the start of the modern Commonwealth.

The population of the Commonwealth is about 1.8 billion people which comprise about 30% of the world’s population. India is the most populous member with a billion people while Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have more than 100 million people. The land of Commonwealth nations equals about twenty-five percent of the world’s land area.

When the UN was formed in 1945, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK had three votes. As Britain de-colonized countries, the newly de-colonized countries were made voting members of the United Nations. Between 1946-1989, a total of 42 countries were de-colonized, thus giving the Commonwealth the potential of 54 votes which includes those countries that were already independent.

Apart from the votes which the Commonwealth has at the United Nations and at other international organizations, it is important to understand that the war, genocide, and the problems of poverty did not exist in Africa before de-colonization. Interestingly enough, of the twenty countries de-colonized between 1960-1969, seven are today Highly Indebted Poor Countries. They include Ghana which is rich in gold, bauxite, manganese and diamonds; Guyana which is rich in bauxite, manganese, gold and diamonds; Uganda which is rich in copper and cobalt, Tanzania which is rich in gold, diamonds and coal and Zambia which is rich in copper.

So why are they have trouble in today’s globalized world? We can go back to World Bank loans during the 1970s which were forced on a number of African countries. Under World Bank President Robert McNamara, who served as president from 1969 to 1981, World Bank economists forced their way into countries in order to come up with a financial plan for their new development. Even the president of that country was not privy to what the plan said, but was under the gun of the World Bank to take loans to carry out these grandiose projects. The idea was that the income generated from the project would provide monies to repay the loans. Unfortunately that did not happen. These are now the Highly Indebted Poor Countries which you and I are being asked to bail out through increased foreign aid, debt forgiveness, and/or international taxation. Talk about a transfer of wealth!

If this did not de-stabilize Africa, there is more devastation that they have been subjected to. Interestingly enough, it occurred AFTER de-colonization. In 1974, President Richard Nixon was presented with a study by the National Security Council which is called, “NSSM 200 - Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This 250 page report was a result of a four year study which he had requested on August 10, 1907 in National Security Decision Memorandum 76. This memorandum recommended that the U.S. propose a United Nations study of “world population problems and measures required dealing with them as a top priority in the Second Development Decade.” When the study was completed in May, 1974, it was sent to Nixon along with a memo by Dr. Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor, in which he recommended the need for the U.S. to provide leadership “in world population matters.”

NSSM200 suggested that the U.S. needed “access to minerals which are necessary for military and industrial uses and for which the U.S. must reply on imports. Where these ‘strategic and critical’ materials are concerned, therefore, U.S. economic stakes in the developing world coincide with military considerations” (NSSM 200). Furthermore, it points out that if the resources found in a number of Lesser Developing Countries are important to the U.S. and if those countries develop with a normal increase in population, they will have a greater need for their resources, which means the U.S. will not have access to them. In other words, it was to the advantage of the U.S. to keep these countries from developing so the U.S. could have access to them.

The report identified using foreign aid funds as a way of “helping” the leaders of targeted countries to embrace population reduction. The report placed the agenda of population reduction on the shoulders of the United Nations, non-governmental organizations, and a number of UN agencies and commissions.

The United Nations did exactly what the U.S. government told them to do. They made population reduction a key focus of their agenda through Agenda 21 and sustainable development. At the UN Conference on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, African women asked representatives from Planned Parenthood International why they could only get condoms and not aspirins at their health clinics.

According to the British publication, Newstateman, after more than $400B of overseas aid channeled through African governments, the African people are on the whole poorer than they were 30 years ago.

So how much does Africa owe the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? According to John Hilary from War on Want, about $532B is owed by the 60 Highly Indebted Poor Countries. Currently only 18 countries have qualified for debt forgiveness because they have met the conditions World Bank conditions. The amount of debt forgiveness is $40B but the debt servicing of the remaining $492B is $45B a year.

The World Bank’s program for Highly Indebted Poor Countries-HIPC is funded by pledges and paid-in contributions. Steps poor countries have to take to qualify for a reduction in debt include: changing their structure of government to be “more accountable”, make all financial figures public (transparency), privatize their energy sector, water, electricity, etc. and work through regional blocks with other cities and states. This is regional government which is appointed, not elected officials. In order to deprive the people of the world of representative and accountable government, regional government is being super-imposed over elected officials. In the U.S. President Nixon opened the door to regional government. In addition, the people of Europe have said no to regional government.

Today what you see is the plea for business to come in and partner with African governments. The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum has called for “ten practical actions to support Africa’s development.” One of them is, “Work with other businesses in partnership with civil society organizations to support, social, health, human development and enterprise development.”

At every turn, it is public-private partnership, selling off government owned resources, or privatizing through partnering with business. This is seen in President Clinton’s New Partnership for African Development-NEPAD. President Bush has set up his own initiative, the Millennium Challenge Corporation-MCC, a U.S. government corporation, to administer funds. An informational brochure handed out at the G8 described it as “an innovative new foreign assistance program designed to eliminate extreme poverty and promote sustainable economic growth.” The purpose is to set up public-private partnerships-PPP. PPP’s are business arrangements for governments to transfer state-owned assets to. Since it is a business arrangement, it is run by the corporate partner that has the money. As expected, there are steps that countries need to take in order to be eligible, just like the World Bank qualifications. For example, the MCC Board approved a Compact with Cape Verde for approximately $110M. The Compact will support their efforts in achieving its overall national development goal of transforming its economy from aid-dependence to sustainable, private-sector led growth.”

At the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, an international public-private partnership, “The Congo Basin Forest Partnership,” was announced. It has eight African countries, six of the G8 countries, the American Forest and Paper Association, and four major environmental organizations including World Wildlife Federation as partners. Seventy-four million acres of land in Africa will be moved into this partnership! In an interview with a U.S. State Department official by colleague Joan Peros, he refused to comment on any debt-for-nature swaps!

The question that should be asked is “What will these countries have left once they privatize their state owned assets and change their form of government to meet a global structure of government?

In an interview at the G8 with an African official from an African consumers group, he voiced the same concerns. They have made it very clear to G8 leaders that they do not want any more aid with strings and privatizations.

On the other hand, as reported by the British magazine, Newstatesman, many African countries are turning to China for help. Nearly 700 Chinese companies operate in 49 African countries. Chinese trade with Africa will reach $30B next year—triple the level five years ago. By the end of 2005, according to the French paper, LeMonde, China will overtake Britain as Africa’s third-largest trading partner and it is increasingly turning to Africa as a source for oil, timber, and minerals for support its phenomenal growth.

The Sierra Leone tourism board and the Chinese construction company Henan Gouji recently signed a $220M agreement for a luxury golf course and five star hotel. Their tourism minister said, “Why should we wait for Britain or anyone else to get here? The Chinese are the ones coming to invest now.”

Last year, China’s export bank extended a $2B line of credit to the Angolan government for infrastructure projects. In return for low interest rates and a long repayment schedule, Angola will provide China with 10,000 barrels of oil a day and award China with large construction contracts. Interestingly enough, these are the terms that the World Bank should be offering! In Sudan where the U.S. maintains partial oil sanctions, China has become that country’s largest trading partner. The list goes on.

Is this a case of creating a major continental-wide problem and then solving it to get the intended result which is a grand transfer of wealth?

In conclusion, it is not only the assets of Africa which are at stake, but the whole transfer of wealth through our tax-dollars to support the “war on poverty.” In an interview with French President Jacques Chirac, I asked if the proposed “International Solidarity Levy” is going to be duplicated once it is in place. He told me there are many different proposals for global tax. I would assume that if the airline tax is passed without great opposition, that it will open “Pandora’s Box” to a countless number of other international taxes. Without Africa, global taxation would not be possible. So, what about Africa?

2011-02-15T14:35:00.000-08:00

KNOWLEDGE AND TRADITIONAL KNOW HOW

The struggle of Africa is inseparable from colonialism and still worse from the slave route it has travelled over 4 centuries.

In 1500, Africa had between 600 million and 1 billion people. In 1900, following the consequences of the slave trade and wars of colonization, the population fell to 100 million people, or a loss of 80 to 85%. Only the Amerindian people have gone through such a holocaust in the history of mankind. In 2000, the population of Africa is estimated at 710 million, or 12.5% of the world population.

The ingenuity, quality and quantity of work performed over several centuries, allowed Africa to build on it's past, providing a high living standard to feed her children all over the continent regardless of the population density or whether the soil was rich or poor. The abundance and prosperity that characterized Africa then were due to a dazzling development of knowledge and traditional know how, which was testified by pre-colonial travellers’ stories such as Kaznini, Ibn Battuta, Ca da Mosto and other Valentin Fernandes.

We owe the preservation and resurgence of knowledge and traditional know how in Africa, to the eras of cultural resistance by the community, to the genius of the people, to the dynamic Africanist for restoring the values of black civilization.

It is noble to plead for a rehabilitation of the knowledge and traditional know how, essential components of the revival of African culture and its reaching out for modern science.
All human civilization builds itself upon a representation of the echo of the myth which it has of its originality. However, the knowledge and traditional know how translate the symbolic representation of this myth, either material, or ideal or simply human.

REFUSE SOMEONE ELSE’S DENIAL

Learning a language, a culture is to open up to the Other, is to accept the Other and the Difference.

Like languages, cultures differ in what they have to translate in order to express the full richness of human experience.

Putting one’s National identity, one’s patriotism in the service of the inter cultural constitutes a challenge for these present generations.

Claim the right to difference, the Right to belong to a Group in the commonality between people.

No culture, no religion will find in a living space, an Earth culturally or spiritually poor, even less blank!!!
As one can live and translate his/her own culture, as one can underestimate the foundations of his/her own culture if one is not able to represent oneself what is the fruit of several contributions from the other cultural sources.
The cultures of the world are leaning on each other, hence their commonalities in the quest for our existential balance.

It is recognized that the diversity of cultures is based on their parallel convergences and the release of their experiencess through successive generations.

Pierre Bourdieu -New Liberal Speak

2010-09-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

New Liberal Speak, Notes on the new planetary vulgate
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant

Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies, employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of nowhere, is now on everyone's lips: `globalization' and `flexibility', `governance' and `employability', `underclass' and `exclusion', `new economy' and `zero tolerance', `communitarianism' and `multiculturalism', not to mention their so-called postmodern cousins, `minority', `ethnicity', `identity', `fragmentation', and so on. The diffusion of this new planetary vulgate - from which the terms `capitalism', `class', `exploitation', `domination' and `inequality' are conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent - is the result of a new type of imperialism. Its effects are all the more powerful and pernicious in that it is promoted not only by the partisans of the neoliberal revolution who, under cover of `modernization', intend to remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles, henceforth depicted as so many archaisms and obstacles to the emergent new order, but also by cultural producers (researchers, writers and artists) and left-wing activists, the vast majority of whom still think of themselves as progressives.

Like ethnic or gender domination, cultural imperialism is a form of symbolic violence that relies on a relationship of constrained communication to extort submission. In the case at hand, its particularity consists in universalizing the particularisms bound up with a singular historical experience. Thus, just as, in the nineteenth century, a number of so-called philosophical questions that were debated throughout Europe, such as Spengler's theme of `decadence' or Dilthey's dichotomy between explanation and understanding, originated, as historian Fritz Ringer has demonstrated, in the historical predicaments and conflicts specific to the peculiar world of German universities, so today many topics directly issued from the particularities and particularisms of US society and universities have been imposed upon the whole planet under apparently dehistoricized guises. These commonplaces (in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses withwhich one argues but over which there is no argument), these undiscussed presuppositions of the discussion owe most of their power to convince to the prestige of the place whence they emanate, and to the fact that, circulating in continuous flow from Berlin to Buenos Aires and from London to Lisbon, they are everywhere powerfully relayed by supposedly neutral agencies ranging from major international organizations (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Commission and OECD), conservative think-tanks (the Manhattan Institute in New York City, the Adam Smith Institute in London, the Fondation Saint-Simon in Paris, and the Deutsche Bank Fundation in Frankfurt) and philanthropic foundations, to the schools of power (Science-Po in France, the London School of Economics in England, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in America, etc.).

In addition to the automatic effect of the international circulation of ideas, which tends, by its very logic, to conceal their original conditions of production and signification, the play of preliminary definitions and scholastic deductions replaces the contingency of denegated sociological necessities with the appearance of logical necessity and tends to mask the historical roots of a whole set of questions and notions: the `efficiency' of the (free) market, the need for the recognition of (cultural) `identities' or the celebratory reassertion of (individual) `responsibility'. These will be said to be philosophical, sociological, economic or political, depending on the place and moment of reception. Thus `planetarized', or globalized in the strictly geographical sense of the term, by this uprooting and, at the same time, departicularized as a result of the illusory break effected by conceptualization, these commonplaces, which the perpetual media repetition has gradually transformed into a universal common sense, succeed in making us forget that, in many cases, they do nothing but express, in a truncated and unrecognizable form (including to those who are promoting it), the complex and contested realities of a particular historical society, tacitly constituted into the model and measure of all things: the American society of the post-Fordist and post-Keynesian era, the world's only superpower and symbolic Mecca. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the `shareholder-value' conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic activity.

The fuzzy and muddy debate about `multiculturalism' is a paradigmatic example. The term was recently imported into Europe to describe cultural pluralism in the civic sphere, whereas in the United States it refers, in the very movement which obfuscates it, to the continued ostracization of Blacks and to the crisis of the national mythology of the `American dream' of `equal opportunity for all', correlative of the bankruptcy of public education at the very time when competition for cultural capital is intensifying and class inequalities are growing at a dizzying pace. The locution `multicultural' conceals this crisis by artificially restricting it to the university microcosm and by expressing it on an ostensibly `ethnic' register, when what is really at stake is not the incorporation of marginalized cultures in the academic canon but access to the instruments of (re)production of the middle and upper classes, chief among them the university, in the context of active and massive disengagement by the state. North American `multiculturalism' is neither a concept nor a theory, nor a social or political movement - even though it claims to be all those things at the same time. It is a screen discourse, whose intellectual status is the product of a gigantic effect of national and international allodoxia, which deceives both those who are party to it and those who are not. It is also a North American discourse, even though it thinks of itself and presents itself as a universal discourse, to the extent that it expresses the contradictions specific to the predicament of US academics. Cut off from the public sphere and subjected to a high degree of competitive differentiation in their professional milieu, US professors have nowhere to invest their political libido but in campus squabbles dressed up as conceptual battles royal.

The imperialism of neoliberal reason finds its supreme intellectual accomplishment in two new figures of the cultural producer that are increasingly crowding the autonomous and critical intellectual born of the Enlightenment tradition out of the public scene. One is the expert who, in the shadowy corridors of ministries or company headquarters, or in the isolation of think-tanks, prepares highly technical documents, preferably couched in economic or mathematical language, used to justify policy choices made on decidedly non-technical grounds. (The perfect example being plans to `save' retirement schemes from the supposed threat posed by the increase in life expectancy, where demographic demonstrations are used to railroad privatization plans that consecrate the power of shareholders and shift risk to wage-earners through pensions funds). The other is the communication consultant to the prince - a defector from the academic world entered into the service of the dominant, whose mission is to give an academic veneer to the political projects of the new state and business nobility. Its planetary prototype is without contest the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, Director of the London School of Economics, and father of `structuration theory', a scholastic synthesis of various sociological and philosophical traditions decisively wrenched out of their context and thus ideally suited to the task of academicized sociodicy.

One may see the perfect illustration of the cunning of imperialist reason in the fact that it is England - which, for historical, cultural and linguistic reasons, stands in an intermediary, neutral position (in the etymological sense of `neither/nor' or `either/or') between the United States and continental Europe - that has supplied the world with a bicephalous Trojan horse, with one political and one intellectual head, in the dual persona of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens.

On the strength of his ties to politicians, Giddens has emerged as the globe-trotting apostle of a `Third Way' which, in his own words - which must here be cited from the catalogue of textbook-style definitions of his theories and political views in the FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) section of his London School of Economics website, (www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/FAQs.htm) - `takes a positive attitude towards globalization';
`tries [sic] to respond to changing patterns of inequality',
but begins by warning that `the poor today are not the same as the poor of the past', and that, `likewise, the rich are not the same as they used to be';
accepts the idea that `existing social welfare systems, and the broader structure of the State, are the source of problems, not only the means of resolving them';
`emphasizes that social and economic policy are intrinsically connected', in order better to assert that `social spending has to be assessed in terms of its consequences for the economy as a whole'; and, finally `concerns itself with mechanisms of exclusion at the bottom and the top [sic]', convinced as it is that `redefining inequality in relation to exclusion at both levels is consistent with a dynamic conception of inequality'.

The masters of the economy, and the other `excluded at the top', can sleep in peace: they have found their Pangloss.

This is a revised version of a translation by David Macey of an article that originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique 554, May 2000, pp. 6-7

Responsibility

2010-07-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from: Power, Responsibility and Freedom
An Internet Publication
By David Smail, Clinical Psychologist

Ever since I first started to think about the processes involved in the origins and experience of psychological distress, the question of responsibility has over and over again forced itself upon me. In this way, the view put forward here seems to have evolved through a kind of dialectical process, itself shaped by changes and developments in the socio-political context in which the phenomena of and explanations for 'mental disorder' have been set.

At first, in the early 1960s (in Britain), the dominant philosophy in both psychiatric and psychological spheres was crudely mechanistic and 'objective' in the sense beloved of behaviourists. 'Mental illnesses' were illnesses like any other, imposed on the hapless victim through events beyond his or her control and largely devoid of meaning as far as his or her personal life was concerned; or else they were the result of 'maladaptive' habits acquired through more or less accidental processes of conditioning. Alternative views (as for example psychoanalytic ones) were marginal and largely discredited, and treatment approaches relied on the application of medical or psychological techniques based on biological or behavioural assumptions which paid no attention at all to the patient's subjectivity.

In this setting, certainly, patients were not held officially accountable for their difficulties (though the various forms of 'treatment' meted out often contained a distinctly punitive element that, to the reflective onlooker, belied the morally neutral stance of the practitioners). As responsible agent and subject, the individual person was simply an irrelevance.

When, therefore, theoretical innovators arrived on the scene such as R.D. Laing in psychiatry and Carl Rogers and George Kelly in clinical psychology, their introduction into the picture of notions like meaning, subjectivity and responsibility (often borrowed from European phenomenology and existentialism) brought fresh, new perspectives which many of us seized on with relief and enthusiasm. The 'organism' that had been the object of the clinical gaze became a human being whose troubles were to be understood as the product of a particular life.

This new 'humanization' was reflected clearly enough in my own thinking and writing, and my first solo effort - Psychotherapy: A Personal Approach - duly contained a chapter on freedom and responsibility which draws heavily on Sartrean ideas. My concern in that book was to elaborate a view that tries to acknowledge the person's subjectivity and agency while rejecting any element of blame. These are themes which I have come back to again and again in my writing, and while I would still not repudiate the view put forward in that early work, it has since become modified to an extent which renders it, I think, more or less obsolete.

For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and - often explicitly and nearly always tacitly - holds people responsible for them. Even though the pendulum seems to have swung from an almost entirely exterior approach to an almost entirely interior one, the problem of responsibilty has not been solved: formerly we had people for whose condition nobody was responsible while now we have people whose condition is largely if not solely their own responsibility. The reason for this is to be found in what these two extreme positions have in common: a studied avoidance of the social dimension.

It is true that, as the pendulum began to swing (for example with Laing's work), the social power-structure did indeed become visible for a moment, even to the extent of spawning 'radical psychology' movements. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the possibility that emotional distress is the upshot of the way we organize our society has never been seriously entertained and at the present time is if anything further than ever from any kind of official recognition. The imputation of responsibility is absolutely central to this state of affairs.

'Responsibility' is, however, not a unitary concept, and is in fact used in a confusing number of overlapping senses, usually depending for their interpretation on the rhetorical ploy the utterer is seeking to adopt. The most frequent everyday use is that of responsibility as blame: 'who is responsible?' is equivalent to 'who is to blame?'. This is the sense in which people suffering emotional distress usually understand 'responsibility', and I would maintain that for the most part they are not mistaken in their anticipation that this is how society also understands it in relation to 'psychological disorder'.

Once the concept of responsibility is invoked in this sphere it raises the question of who is to blame for my suffering - I, or someone else? The message of the therapeutic industry has been that the blame lies with the sufferer; it is of course not stated as crudely as this, but is implied in the notion that somehow the individual lacks the moral fibre to face up to his or her difficulties and mobilize the necessary internal resources to deal with them. Most sufferers feel this keenly without any overt prompting from those around them: a guilty sense of weakness and moral inadequacy is one of the most frequent and uncomfortable accompaniments of distress.

With the exception of legal responsibility, which largely concerns the external imposition of clearly defined and codified rules and obligations that, it is assumed, the individual may choose to observe or transgress, 'responsibility' is usually seen as a kind of praiseworthy moral faculty internally available to everyone who is not in some way exceptionally damaged, as for example by brain injury or madness. 'Responsibility' is thus a kind of virtue (closely related to 'will power') which may be appealed to, a 'sense' which may when necessary be sternly invoked, or a capacity for resolve which may be stiffened through therapeutic intervention.

It is important to note this virtuous quality of responsibility, for while it may constitute a mark of maturity and an index of mental 'wellness', it is not usually seen as something beyond the person's power to summon up if absolutely necessary. Only in the most exceptional circumstances will a healthy adult be considered 'not responsible' for his or her actions. The exercise of this kind of virtuous, morally loaded responsibility is often seen as burdensome. To act responsibly is to act with consideration and restraint; to act irresponsibly is to be selfish, disobedient, disloyal.

There is enormous potential here for hypocrisy, sanctimony and manipulation. For when 'responsibility' of the morally virtuous kind is most earnestly advocated, it is usually by the advantaged for the disadvantaged. To say that someone is irresponsible, 'has no will-power', etc., is not to commiserate with them as having been somehow deprived of virtue, but at least tacitly to accuse them of wilfully witholding conduct that they could enact if they chose. There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down should act more responsibly.

The sense in which therapists and counsellors advocate responsibility for their clients probably derives from the existential view that, to achieve 'authenticity', a person must embrace the inevitability of their own choice of action: your fate is to be free and no one performs your actions but you. While this view does have the merit of escaping the blind mechanism of orthodox (medical and behavioural) approaches, it rarely manages to avoid the moralism which so easily attends the notion of responsibility, and therapeutic practitioners quickly find themselves in a familiar paradox.

For while they exhort their clients to 'take responsibility' for their lives, they concurrently assure them that they know that 'pull yourself together' is a popular prescription that doesn't work. The therapeutic notion of responsibility, it is implied, is altogether different, more subtle, than crude advice about pulling selves together. The trouble is, though, that in practice there is very little difference between these two approaches, and indeed as far as clients experience them they are virtually identical.

A further uncomfortable aspect of this paradox is that the role of qualified, trained professional usually implies that a skill is being offered which does not place the onus for its effectiveness on the client. Reasonably enough, in consulting a therapist or counsellor, clients expect to be cured, not to find that cure is a matter of their own responsibilty. Psychotherapy must surely be the only profession to posit fundamental principles such as client 'resistance' to account for its inability to deliver the goods.

To understand why therapists and counsellors have been locked in this contradiction for so long one need look no further than their interests. Quite obviously, they are unable to claim that their influence can reach in any significant way beyond the consulting room, and if they are to justify taking fees for their activities, it simply must be the case that clients harbour within them the possibility of change. Therapy creates the crucible in which it is forced thereafter to work its magic, and any theoretical consideration of responsibility is inexorably limited to the (supposed) moral resources of the client.

But the paradox of responsibility is escaped easily enough, I believe, if one extends the analysis beyond the walls of the consulting room. For responsibility is inextricably bound up with power, and power is accorded from without, not from within.

People cannot 'pull themselves together' not out of any wilful reluctance to do so but because the power to do so is not available to them. Exactly the same applies to 'responsibility. I can only be held responsible for what I have the power to do, and if I do indeed have the power to choose, only then can I reasonably be said to be responsible for my choices. No responsibility without power; no power without responsibility. And we are not talking here about 'will-power': the exercise of reponsibility in no way depends on the application of any such mysterious internal faculty (see above, 'The Experience of Self') but rather on the availablity of external powers and resources.

Our 'self-as-centre' culture makes it very difficult for us to conceive of responsibility as anything other than the application of personal influence which has its origin entirely within the individual agent. It takes quite an effort of imagination to see the person - as I suggest we should - as a point in social space-time through which powers flow. Though, as an individual, I am indeed that point through which whatever powers and resources available to me may be, so to speak, refracted back into the social world, I certainly did not personally create them out of nothing.

Quite apart from our star-struck admiration of celebrity, we have an enduring cultural tradition of fascination with and deference to power which induces us to see it as an individual quality - even, as I have already suggested, a virtue. We see 'great men' (and sometimes women) as preciously rare phenomena, bestowed upon the world by some nameless providence, and we honour their occurrence with a special kind of awed respect.

While there are clearly aspects of embodiment that contribute to some kinds of exceptional ability - not everyone can be an Olympic athlete - it is altogether an open question whether the kind of admiration we are ready all too often to accord people who find themselves in the position of wielding social power is justified by their personal qualities. It takes a Tolstoy (in War and Peace) to see through the myth surrounding Napoleon and it is only in retrospect that the absurdity of Hitler's status is revealed.

'The psychology of leaders,' Chomsky writes, 'is a topic of little interest. The institutional factors that constrain their actions and beliefs are what merit attention.'¹ And that is precisely the point: circumstances choose the person, not vice-versa. Since circumstances decree that there can be only one leader, we make the mistake of concluding that the leader who emerges - Hitler, say - is unique, either (at the time we adulate him) in his virtue or (after his fall from grace) in his evil. It is, however, the office (and what sustains it) that is unique, not the person. Just look at the politician who is voted from power or the pop star who falls out of the charts - victims of instant ordinariness! Here, before our very eyes, we observe what happens when social power ceases to flow through the embodied locus which constitutes our individuality. In fact, as the cynical manipulators of the popular culture industries well recognize, the 'unique star' can be elevated from a very wide range of very ordinary people, but, having been selected, it takes a rare and exceptionally balanced head for the manufactured celebrity not to believe in his or her own image.

The notion of 'responsibility' lies at the heart of what none might well call our suppression of the social. Whatever it is we seek to understand - ranging from the reasons for personal distress to the 'evil' of spectacular crime or the failure of public servants to avert some social disaster - it is always to an unanalysed and unanalysable individual, internal world (where 'blame' is harboured) that we turn our gaze. This evasion of the obvious - that it is the way our society is organized and structured that constitutes the main source of our difficulties - is understandable only in terms of the extent of the powers which are deployed to maintain it. This can be seen very clearly in current political discourse.

As essential cogs in the vast economic machine designed to extract profit for the minority at the top of the social pyramid, politicians have an important role in representing disadvantage as personal moral failure. How wittingly they perform this role is open to question but, as a matter of 'commentary', is a question of little interest. The distal pressures on the advocates of the 'third way' to reinforce an interiorized view of responsibility are enormous.

Policies of 'naming and shaming', the imputation that inadequacies in health and education are somehow due to the unwillingness of individual teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., to apply themselves to the full, linkage of 'rights' with 'responsibilities', and so on, all help to constitute the political paradox that those in the position (or so it would seem) of being most able to shape distal influences, expend the greatest energy in representing them as proximal (indeed internal).

In fact, of course, national politics does not so much exercise power as serve it. Where multinational capital dominates, the local political role becomes that of obscuring the true sources of power and the effects these have on the objective and subjective wellbeing of the citizenry. 'Politics' has become a form of management that itself actually destroys the public space in which political activity can take place. Our possibility of playing an active part in influencing those social structures that ultimately impinge intimately on our lives is whittled away to nothing, while our relative immiseration becomes internalized as personal fault.

Poverty, for example, is represented in 'third way' politics not as an evil that causes social disintegration and personal emotional damage, but as an unwarrantable 'excuse' for individual moral failure. The crumbling of public services, increase in crime, etc., are represented as the result of the incompetence, intransigence and irresponsibility of public sphere workers and of the 'evil' apparently endemic in the 'criminal element' of society.

When it comes to trying to decide what people can be held accountable for and what not, the subjective sense of 'responsibility' is almost entirely unreliable. Everyone is familiar with liars and self-deceivers who claim that something was not their fault when it obviously was. What presents more of a challenge to psychological understanding is those people who claim and feel responsibility for things that are in fact obviously outside their control. Perhaps it is the greater authenticity of the over-conscientious person compared with the deceiver that gives us a clue as to why any 'internal' account of responsibility is invalid. The conscience, after all, does not lie: it reports (commentates) faithfully enough on how it feels to be the instrument of wrong-doing. But, as is clearly demonstrated by those in whom it is over-developed, the conscience can be mistaken. What it is mistaken about is not the feeling of responsibility, but the origins (or possibly the definition) of the 'wrong-doing'.

It is the feeling of responsibility (conscience) that the powerful seek to exploit in others in order to divert attention from the actual (distal) causes of their discomfort. I am host to the powers that flow through me and, if I'm honest (authentic), I cannot deny the sense of ownership that they create in their passage. The person who does seek to deny this sense of ownership, possibly by claiming 'it wasn't me', or 'it's not my fault, I had a terrible childhood', etc., is indeed being inauthentic. But not necessarily inaccurate from a causal perspective. As a society we attach, in this instance, much greater weight to authenticity than to accuracy.

For the purposes of understanding how and why people experience and act in the world as they do, and what freedom they may have to act otherwise, the concept of 'responsibility' has become virtually useless. What we need is a psychology that switches its attention from a metaphorical 'inner world' to try instead to elaborate the ways in which powerful influences in the external environment of social space-time serve to liberate or enslave us as well as to shape our consciousness of ourselves. As things are, it is not at all clear how far individuals are able to marshal and control the influences that flow through them. Furthermore, in our attempt to understand the processes involved we are constantly misled by the assumption that our commentary refers directly to them.

Congo: Steal This Country

2010-04-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

From slavery to coltan, five centuries of fleecing.

By Jessica Calefati

1482 Portuguese explorers arrive at mouth of Congo River, find well-developed African kingdom [1] (pdf) of Kongo.

1520s Sugarcane plantations in Brazil ignite vast demand for African slaves. Over next 350 years more than 12 million people will be taken from African coast [2] near the mouth of the Congo River.

1526 In letter to Portuguese King João III, Kongo King Afonso I writes, "Our country is being completely depopulated [3]" by slave trade.

Mid-1800s Reports from David Livingstone and other explorers whet European appetite for ivory.

1885 Belgian King Leopold II wins recognition of Congo as his personal colony.

1887 Scottish veterinarian John Dunlop creates inflatable tire, launching worldwiderubber boom.

1893-1913 Peak of Congo rubber trade. Leopold's private army occupies villages,holds women hostage [4] to force men into the rain forest to gather wild rubber. Famine, disease, displacement ensue; uprisings bloodily suppressed. Congo's population drops from 20 million to 10 million in 40 years.

1895 First reported find of Congo gold, in Ituri.

1907 Diamonds discovered in Kasai province. Today Congo produces 17 percent of world's uncut diamonds.

1911 British soap tycoon William Lever visits to inspect his new holdings [5] of palmgroves.

1931 Railway completed from Katanga through Angola to Atlantic, parallel to old slave-trade route, for faster export of Congo copper. Profits mainly go to Belgium.

1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs built with Congolese uranium.

1960 After months of violent protests, Belgium grants Congo independence. Patrice Lumumba becomes prime minister [6], advocates African ownership of African resources.

1961 Lumumba killed, with Belgian help [7], after CIA assassination attempt fails.

1965 Joseph Mobutu, a 35-year-old army officer, seizes power in CIA-approved coup, ruthlessly crushes all opposition.

1966 Mobutu nationalizes mining, goes on to embezzle billions from trade in copper,cobalt, diamond, and coffee industries.

1971 Mobutu changes nation's name to Zaire and his own to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga—"The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."

1974 Muhammad Ali regains heavyweight crown [8] by defeating George Foreman in "Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa.

1977 Commodore begins selling personal computers; demand accelerates for minerals used in electronics, including gold, coltan (colombite-tantalite), and cassiterite (tin ore), all of which Congo produces in abundance.

1997 Mobutu overthrown, dies in exile [9] following year. Country renamed Democratic Republic of Congo.

1998 Rwanda and Uganda invade, try to overthrow Mobutu successor Laurent Kabila. Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Chad, Sudan also get involved, supporting Kabila and seizing mining concessions. Armed rebel groups proliferate, also capture mine sites.

1999 About 100 Congolese miners die when gold mine run by Ugandan military caves in.

1999 Six countries involved in war sign peace accord [10] in Zambia; UN peacekeepers deployed. Fighting for control of mining sites continues. Hundreds of thousands of civilians forced to flee.

2000 Coltan, in demand for cell phone manufacturing, sells at $380 a pound. Demand for tungsten, used to make phones vibrate (and lightbulbs glow), also surges.

2000 Kabila grants timber rights on 15 percent of Congo's land area to joint venture that includes high Zimbabwean officials and army officers.

2001 Kabila assassinated, succeeded [11] by his son Joseph.

2002 Second peace accord signed in South African luxury resort Sun City. Rebel warlords continue to fight.

2002 UN panel of experts estimates Rwanda has removed $320 million worth of minerals from eastern Congo during war.

2003 Amnesty International also targets Rwanda, saying that plunder of Congo's coltan and other minerals was a "carefully managed military operation [12]."

2006 UN helps arrange first free [13] elections since 1960. Joseph Kabila wins presidency, incorporates former rebel warlords into army and administration as price of shaky peace.

2007 Congo hit with Ebola outbreak.

2007 China signs long-term deal investing $9 billion in Congo in exchange for minerals worth some $50 billion, mainly copper and cobalt.

Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/democratic-republic-congo-timeline

Links:
[1] http://www.mgfa-potsdam.de/html/einsatzunterstuetzung/downloads/1_wwkongoenglisch.pdf
[2] http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces
[3] http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-afrteach&month=9911&week=c&msg=qBR39UCtdx+IzckJSURdPg&user=&pw=
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/scramble_for_africa_article_01.shtml
[5] http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,787466,00.html
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrcX3XUm7eA&feature=related
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/06/world/world-briefing-europe-belgium-apology-for-lumumba-killing.html?pagewanted=1
[8] http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/15499/Muhammad-Ali.html
[9] http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/080.html
[10] http://www.globalpolicy.org/security-council/index-of-countries-on-the-security-council-agenda/democratic-republic-of-congo.html
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/20/world/witnesses-describe-kabila-assassination-scene-but-motive-is-still-murky.html?pagewanted=1
[12] http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR620102003?open&of=ENG-398
[13] http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/publications/yir/2006/congo.htm

Drugs Gave Birth to the American Undercaste

2010-04-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades -- they are currently are at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes -- sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention president of the United States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. To listen to a TomCast audio interview in which Alexander explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here.

African tribe populated rest of the world

2009-09-19T13:12:00.001-07:00

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Published: 9:00PM BST 09 May 2009

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

Genetic analysis of modern day human populations in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and South America have revealed that they are all descended from these common ancestors.

It is thought that changes in the climate between 90,000 and 70,000 years ago caused sea levels to drop dramatically and allowed the crossing of the Red Sea to take place.

Dr Peter Forster, a senior lecturer in archaeogenetics at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge who carried out some of the genetic work, said: "The founder populations cannot have been very big. We are talking about just a few hundred individuals."

Homo sapiens, known casually as "modern humans", are thought to have first evolved around 195,000 years ago in east Africa – the earliest remains from that time were uncovered near the Omo River in Ethiopia.

It is thought that by 150,000 years ago these early modern humans had managed to spread to other parts of Africa and fossilised remains have been found on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

The earliest homo sapien remains found outside of Africa were discovered in Israel and are thought to be around 100,000 years old. They are remains of a group that left Africa through what is now the Sahara desert during a brief period when the climate grew wetter, turning the desert green with vegetation. This excursion, however, failed and the population died out when the climate started to dry out again.

While there are 14 ancestral populations in Africa itself, just one seems to have survived outside of the continent. The latest genetic research has shown that it was not until around 70,000 years ago that humans were able to take advantage of falling sea levels to cross into Arabia at the mouth of the Red Sea, which is now known as the Gate of Grief.

At the time the 18 mile gap between the continents would have dropped to just 8 miles. It is not clear how they might have made such a journey but once a cross, the humans were able to spread along the Arabian coast where fresh water springs helped support them.

It has long been assumed that humans success in spreading around the world was due to their adaptability and hunting skills. The latest research, however, suggests that the very early human pioneers who ventured out of Africa owe far more of their success to luck and favourable changes in climate change than had previously been realised.

Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist at the school of anthropology at Oxford University who has also led research on the genetic origins of humans outside Africa, said: "What you can see from the DNA of all non Africans is that they all belong to one tiny African branch that came across the Red Sea.

"If it was easy to get out of Africa we would have seen multiple African lineages in the DNA of non-Africans but that there was only one successful exit suggests it must have been very tough to get out. It was much drier and colder then."

Within around 5,000 years some of these early human pioneers had managed to spread along the edge of the Indian Ocean and down through south east Asia and arriving in Australia around 65,000 years ago.

Others made their way north through the Middle East and Pakistan to reach central Asia.

Around 50,000 years ago they also began spreading into Europe via the Bosporus at the Istanbul Strait. Again low sea levels allowed them to almost walk into Europe.

Once there they will have encountered Neanderthals, who, with bigger bodies were more adapted to the cold weather at the time, had been living in Europe for nearly a quarter of a million years but are thought to have died out due to changes in the climate.

By 25,000 years ago humans had spread into northern Europe and Siberia and then walked across the Bering land bridge into Alaska around 20,000 years ago.

The peak of the last ice age, which was reached around 19,000 years ago, saw human populations pushed south by the extreme cold and it was about 15,000 years ago that South America became the last continent on the planet to be colonised.

Britain and northern Scandinavia is thought to have been recolonised by modern humans after the last ice age between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

Dr Alice Roberts, an anatomist at Bristol University said: "There seems to have been a huge amount of luck involved as they were totally at the whim of the climate. The climate changed at just the right time to allow them to expand out of Africa and they were allowed to expand geographically as a result, but when the climate changed they shrank back again."

The idea that all non-African humans are descended from a single group of individuals contradicts previous theories that the different modern races evolved seperately from an earlier human ancestor known as Homo erectus in different parts of the world. Archaeologists in China, for example, believe they have strong evidence that the Chinese evolved directly from a lineage of Homo erectus that arrived in China 2 million years ago and not from African Homo sapiens.

But recent genetic work at Fudan University in Shanghai tested the Y chromosomes of more than 12,000 men currently living in different parts of China and found that they all descended from the original African humans.

Professor Li Jin, a geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai whose laboratory carried out the research, said: “We did not find a single individual that could be considered the decendants of homo erectus in China.

“I think we should all be happy with that, as afterall, it means that people from all over the world are not all that different from each other.”

DNA shows Aborigines descended from Africans

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Source: University of Cambridge

New research confirms theory that all modern humans are descended from the same small group of people

Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry. The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia's aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.

The research confirms the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis that all modern humans stem from a single group of Homo sapiens who emigrated from Africa 2,000 generations ago and spread throughout Eurasia over thousands of years. These settlers replaced other early humans (such as Neanderthals), rather than interbreeding with them.

Academics analysed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome DNA of Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians from New Guinea. This data was compared with the various DNA patterns associated with early humans. The research was an international effort, with researchers from Tartu in Estonia, Oxford, and Stanford in California all contributing key data and expertise.

The results showed that both the Aborigines and Melanesians share the genetic features that have been linked to the exodus of modern humans from Africa 50,000 years ago. Until now, one of the main reasons for doubting the "Out Of Africa" theory was the existence of inconsistent evidence in Australia. The skeletal and tool remains that have been found there are strikingly different from those elsewhere on the "coastal expressway" – the route through South Asia taken by the early settlers.

Some scholars argue that these discrepancies exist either because the early colonists interbred with the local Homo erectus population, or because there was a subsequent, secondary migration from Africa. Both explanations would undermine the theory of a single, common origin for modern-day humans. But in the latest research there was no evidence of a genetic inheritance from Homo erectus, indicating that the settlers did not mix and that these people therefore share the same direct ancestry as the other Eurasian peoples.

Geneticist Dr Peter Forster, who led the research, said: "Although it has been speculated that the populations of Australia and New Guinea came from the same ancestors, the fossil record differs so significantly it has been difficult to prove. For the first time, this evidence gives us a genetic link showing that the Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations are descended directly from the same specific group of people who emerged from the African migration."

At the time of the migration, 50,000 years ago, Australia and New Guinea were joined by a land bridge and the region was also only separated from the main Eurasian land mass by narrow straits such as Wallace's Line in Indonesia. The land bridge was submerged about 8,000 years ago.

The new study also explains why the fossil and archaeological record in Australia is so different to that found elsewhere even though the genetic record shows no evidence of interbreeding with Homo erectus, and indicates a single Palaeolithic colonisation event. The DNA patterns of the Australian and Melanesian populations show that the population evolved in relative isolation. The two groups also share certain genetic characteristics that are not found beyond Melanesia. This would suggest that there was very little gene flow into Australia after the original migration.

Dr Toomas Kivisild, from the Cambridge University Department of Biological Anthropology, who co-authored the report, said: "The evidence points to relative isolation after the initial arrival, which would mean any significant developments in skeletal form and tool use were not influenced by outside sources.

"There was probably a minor secondary gene flow into Australia while the land bridge from New Guinea was still open, but once it was submerged the population was apparently isolated for thousands of years. The differences in the archaeological record are probably the result of this, rather than any secondary migration or interbreeding."

The study is reported in the new issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Notes :

1. Homo sapiens originated in Africa 150,000 years ago and began to migrate 55,000 to 60,000 years ago. It is thought he arrived in Australia around 45,000 years before present (BP). Australia was, at the time, already colonised by homo erectus. The eastern migration route towards Australia is referred to as the "coastal express" route, due to the comparatively rapid progress made by those who used it. This dispersal, from Africa to Australia through Arabia, Asia and the Malay peninsula, could have occurred at a rate of 1km per year.

Yoruba Spirituality and Philosophy

2009-09-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

Yoruba Spirituality and Philosophy

There are various religious systems in Africa that share manycommonalties. To discuss them all in their intricacies wouldtake volumes. This page will attempt to focus on the Yoruba spiritual philosophy of West Africa. It stresses an extremely ancient rooted African tradition of working with natural forces and the ancestral realm to better one's life. Its system of divination in fact has led some scholars to remark on its similarity to Eastern philosophical beliefs such as those found

among the Chinese in the I Ching. And while it may not be as ancient as Nilotic beliefs, it is the African spiritual system that can be best called a world religion.

The origins of Yoruba religion lie at Ille-Ife', a holy city that is regarded as the cradle of civilization for the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. Currently there are 20 million or more people who speak Yoruba as their mother tongue. Yoruba speaking communities have lived in other West African

countries for centuries. When speaking of a "Yoruba spiritualsystem," we are discussing traditional beliefs of those who speak the language and not the more modern religions some may practice today (Christianity, Islam, etc.) Over the years the Yoruban spiritual system has taken on the characteristics of a world religion. With the trans Atlantic Slave Trade, the Yoruba religion was transplanted in various parts of the western hemisphere. Today it is practiced in a host of different forms. One of these is Vodoun, a mixture of Yoruba, Catholicism, and Freemasonry, in Haiti. It is known throughout South America, the Caribbean, and Central America as Santeria where it is practiced not only by Africans but also the descendants of indigenous peoples (misnomered Indians or Hispanic) that inhabit the region.

Worship in the Yoruba religion is based upon the belief in a Supreme Being (Oldumare), the creator of Heaven (Orun) and Earth (Aye); the belief in a multitude of spiritual deities (Orisha); and the belief in ancestral spirits (Egungun). The Yoruban spiritual system has been described as a pyramid with five layers. At the apex is Oldumare, the Supreme Being. The second layer beneath the Supreme

The traditional shrine as a symbol of our cultural history

Being is composed of lesser deities called Orisha. Below these deities are ancestral deities called Egungun. While all of the above are noted as spiritual beings, the next two layers of the pyramid consist of human beings. Firstly there are the kings, queens, chiefs, priests and priestesses while at the last layer are devotees. The Yoruba universe has a "heaven" and an "earth" which differs from the Western view. The Yoruba divide the physical world into two planes, the upper Outerworld

(Orun) and the world of the living (Aye). This universe is often pictured as sphere. Orun is the home of Oldumare, Creator and Supreme Being. It is also home to the Orisha and the ancestral spirits, Egungun. The heavenly plane (Orun) has two dimensions: simply put, a good heaven and a bad heaven. Earthly deeds and character decide which heaven one travels to when one dies. In traditional Yoruban belief there is no "hell" nor is there a "devil" in the western sense. It was not until 1850AD, with the influence of Christianity and Islam, that a "devil" was assigned to the Yoruba spiritual system.

The Yoruba believe in the existence of spiritual beings or divinities. Called Orishas, they are seen as emissaries of Oldumare from whom they emanated. These Orisha are ancestors whose great deeds earned them divinity. The Orisha are said to recognize themselves and are recognized through a host of different numbers and colors. These polarities which each Orisha exhibits are expressed as personalities called Roads or Paths of the Orisha. This is done through offerings to Orisha of their particular favorite foods and other gifts. One can learn much about these different Orishas by watching the forces of nature atwork about you. These Orishas can be contacted during a "bembe" where one or more of their priests will be mounted in a form of highly spiritualized trance possession. This possession by an Orisha is an integral part of Yoruba religious ritual as it serves as a means of communicating with the forces of Oldumare (God).

The Babaloawo, Diviner, holds a sacred place in Yoruba spirituality. It is the Babaloawo who calls upon Ifa, the oracle of divination who mediates between the Orishas

African Roots of Medicine

2009-09-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

THE AFRICAN ROOTS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE

TARIQ SAWANDI, M.H.

The African role in early Asian civilization has been submerged and distorted for centuries. Asia's African roots are well summarized in "African Presence in Early Asia" by Ivan Van Sertima/Runoko Rashidi, and "African Presence in Early China" by James Brunson. The original oriental people were Black and many of them still are Black - in southern China and Asia. The earliest occupants of Asia were "small black (pygmies)" who came to the region as early as 50,000 years ago. In "The Children of the Sun", George Parker writes "....it appears that the entire continent of Asia was originally the home of many black races and that theses races were the pioneers in establishing the wonderful civilizations that have flourished throughout this vast continent." Reports of major kingdoms ruled by Blacks are frequent in Chinese documents. Chinese historians described the Fou Nanese people of China as "small and black". The Ainus, Japan's oldest known inhabitants have traditions which tell of a race of dark dwarfs which inhabited Japan before they did. Historians Cheikh Anta Diop and Albert Churchward saw the Ainus as originating in Egypt! There is archaeological support for this. In addition, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia records the "Anu" (Ainu). The Anu are the same people who occupied Egypt for thousands of years. These same people are recorded to have made large migrations to the Asian continent taking with them thousands of years of African-Egyptian knowledge and influence.

This explains the existence of man-made pyramids in China and Japan! China's pyramids are located near Siang Fu city in the Shensi province. The Chinese do not know how they got there, but it is believed that Africans of the Nile Valley were the builders. (J. Perry: The Growth of Civilization, p. 106, 107).

African Development of Ancient Chinese Medicine

Ancient Chinese medicine dates back to the Shang Dynasty founded by the African-Mongolian King T'ang, or Ta. (1500-1000 B.C.). The Shang (or Chiang) and Chou dynasties were credited with bringing together the elements of Chinese medical theory. The Shang were given the name of Nakhi (Na-Black, Khi-man). Under this Black dynasty, the Chinese established the basic forms of a graceful calligraphy that has lasted to the present day. The first Chinese emperor, the legendary Fu-Hsi (2953-2838 B.C.) was a woolly haired Black man. He is said to have originated the I Ching, or The Book of Change, which is the oldest most revered system of prophecy. It is known to have influenced the most distinguished philosophers of Chinese medicine and thought.

Many of the great concepts of Chinese medical science which was compiled during the Shang period were later developed during the Han Dynasty (168 B.C. to 8 A.D.). During this period, medicine reflected the philosophical ideas associated in the earlier Chou and Shang period. The Han began to fuse Shang medical concepts with outlooks from the philosophical ideas of Confucius (551-479 B.C.). Toward that end, they generated a scheme which explained all phenomena in relation to the whole. Under this system, all natural phenomena including the human body and the organs were organized within the system of "Yin" and Yang" and the "five elements", or what is also called the "five phases" theory.

Han Dynasty physicians created great classic works, such as the Pen-ts'ao and the Nei Ching, or Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine (3rd Century B.C.), drawing its inspiration from more ancient sources rooted in Afro-centric thought. (See Diagram 1.)

DIAGRAM 1.

The Nei Ching, The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, a medical book reportedly written in the second century, B.C. before the birth of Hippocrates, the co-called father of Western medicine. According to Chinese legend, the Nei Ching was created through a dialogue between the legendary ruler Huang-Ti and his court physician, Chi Po. From the Nei Ching, thousands of books have been written about Chinese medicine.

Given these considerations, Chinese medicine echoes the logic of the Ancient Egyptians, which viewed the universe as process-oriented in which there are no boundaries between rest and motion, time and space, mind and matter, sickness and health. The Chinese looked at reality as a unified field, an interwoven pattern of inseparable links in a circular chain called the Tao. From the Tao flowed all things and events in nature: seasons, color, sound, organs, tissue, emotion, climate, matter and energy. (See Diagram 2.)

DIAGRAM 2

According to the Tao Te Ching, out of the One came the duality of Yin and Yang, and the immaterial breath (Chi), from which all physical matter and energy was created. This idea by Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu was borrowed from the earlier ancient Egyptian concept of "Nu" (formless water)", the duality of Shu and Tefnut, and the Nahab Kau (Tree of Life).

Yin/Yang Theory and the Concept of Chi

Chinese medicine places primary emphasis on the balance of "Chi" (Qi, or Ki), or Life energy constantly flowing throughout the body. There are 12 major meridians, or pathways for chi, and each is associated with a major vital organ or vital function. These meridians form an invisible network that carries chi to every tissue in the body. In health, it is properly balanced, but if it becomes unbalanced, the result is disease. It is the job of the Chinese doctor to restore the balance using diet, acupuncture, and herbal formulas.

The Life energy comes in two, but complementary parts: Yin and Yang. The Yin nature includes the earth, moon, night, fall and winter, cold, wetness, the feet, the female sex, tissue growth and a passive temperament. The Yang counterparts are the heavens, the sun, day, spring and summer, heat, dryness, light, the head, the male sex, tissue breakdown, and an aggressive temperament. All individuals have both male and female polarities which consist of the combinations of Yin and Yang, requiring the Chinese doctor to tailor treatments to the individual's needs. (See Diagram 3.)

DIAGRAM 3.

The Chinese Five-element system was heavily influenced by the ancient Egyptian's four-element conception. Each element relates to one season, one color and two organ systems, and they interact in subtle, and complicated ways through the energy of chi.

An important part of the Chinese doctor's evaluation is the overall relationship between the Yin and Yang balance in the patient's body. This is "Chi". Furthermore, we must bear in mind that Yin and Yang are complementary and not contradictory. There is no such thing as "good" and the other "bad". Rather, one seeks to find a harmony between the two energies. The ancient Egyptians first put forward this idea, explained in terms of "Shu" and "Tefnut", the dual complementary energy that flows in the universe. It was later adopted by the founders of Chinese medicine to distinguish between the Yin and Yang qualities of a person's character, or the constitution of one's illness.

The application of Yin and Yang is an important step in the process of making a traditional diagnosis and treatment.

Treating Conditions Through Chinese Medicine

Based on the assessment of Yin and Yang energy imbalance, the Chinese herbalist looks for patterns of distress in the patient's pulse, as well as tongue, face, and physical characteristics. The pulse system is highly developed in Chinese medicine, and consist of six positions on each wrist, and various pulse beats can be determined by the trained practitioner. According to Traditional Chinese medical text, the pulse corresponds to different organ networks, areas of the body, meridians or energy channels, and physiological processes like breathing, digestion and elimination. These are thought to function in phase with Yin and Yang principles and also the energies represented by the five elements: Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire. Some general diagnostic correspondence are:

YIN

YANG

Interior	Exterior
Front	Back
Lower section	Upper section
Bones	Skin
Inner organs	Outer organs
Blood	Chi (Life energy)
Chronic	Acute
Deficiency	Excess

In general, the basic treatment principles are to tonify or stimulate in a case of deficient Yin or Yang energy, and to sedate or disperse when the energy pattern is one of excess. Herbal formulas are then tailored to fit the individual's need, or designed to fit the overall condition of the patient.

Special herbal formulas have been traditionally used for thousands of years by Chinese herbalists for such ailments as fever, colds and flu, headaches, infections, menstrual problems, ulcers, high blood pressure, cancer, infertility, and diabetes to name a few.

References

1. The Destruction of Black Civilizations, Chancellor Williams.

2. The Missing Pages of History, Indus Khamit Kush

3. The Five Lost Books of Africa, Dr. Khallid Al-Mansour.

4. The Children of the Sun, George Parker.

5. African Presence in Early Asia, Ivan Van Sertima/Runoko Rashidi

6. The Way of Herbs, Michael Tierra

7. Chinese Herbal Medicine: Formulas and Strategies, Dan Bensky and Randall Barolet.

8. African Medicine: A guide to Yoruba divination and Herbal Medicine:, Tariq M. Sawandi

9. Chinese-Planetary Herbal Diagnosis, Michael and Lesley Tierra.

Egyptians, not Greeks were true fathers of medicine

Posted: Monday, May 14, 2007

by Staff Writers
Manchester, UK (SPX) May 11, 2007
Source: University of Manchester

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.

The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC – 1,000 years before Hippocrates was born.

"Classical scholars have always considered the ancient Greeks, particularly Hippocrates, as being the fathers of medicine but our findings suggest that the ancient Egyptians were practising a credible form of pharmacy and medicine much earlier," said Dr Jackie Campbell.

"When we compared the ancient remedies against modern pharmaceutical protocols and standards, we found the prescriptions in the ancient documents not only compared with pharmaceutical preparations of today but that many of the remedies had therapeutic merit."

The medical documents, which were first discovered in the mid-19th century, showed that ancient Egyptian physicians treated wounds with honey, resins and metals known to be antimicrobial.

The team also discovered prescriptions for laxatives of castor oil and colocynth and bulk laxatives of figs and bran. Other references show that colic was treated with hyoscyamus, which is still used today, and that cumin and coriander were used as intestinal carminatives.

Further evidence showed that musculo-skeletal disorders were treated with rubefacients to stimulate blood flow and poultices to warm and soothe. They used celery and saffron for rheumatism, which are currently topics of pharmaceutical research, and pomegranate was used to eradicate tapeworms, a remedy that remained in clinical use until 50 years ago.

"Many of the ancient remedies we discovered survived into the 20th century and, indeed, some remain in use today, albeit that the active component is now produced synthetically," said Dr Campbell.

"Other ingredients endure and acacia is still used in cough remedies while aloes forms a basis to soothe and heal skin conditions."

Fellow researcher Dr Ryan Metcalfe is now developing genetic techniques to investigate the medicinal plants of ancient Egypt. He has designed his research to determine which modern species the ancient botanical samples are most related to.

"This may allow us to determine a likely point of origin for the plant while providing additional evidence for the trade routes, purposeful cultivation, trade centres or places of treatment," said Dr Metcalfe.

"The work is inextricably linked to state-of-the-art chemical analyses used by my colleague Judith Seath, who specialises in the essential oils and resins used by the ancient Egyptians."

Professor Rosalie David, Director of the KNH Centre, said: "These results are very significant and show that the ancient Egyptians were practising a credible form of pharmacy long before the Greeks.

"Our research is continuing on a genetic, chemical and comparative basis to compare the medicinal plants of ancient Egypt with modern species and to investigate similarities between the traditional remedies of North Africa with the remedies used by their ancestors of 1,500 BC."

Reprinted from:
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/uom-eng050907.php

Myth of Religion

2009-05-01T10:11:00.001-07:00

It is not unusual that in the formation of a new religious system the creators attack and demonise the faiths that came before it even if these faiths was directly responsible for its very existence.

Often the new faith is presented in such a way as to appear that it was created in isolation and/or represents the highest wisdom born in the midst of a world steeped in iniquity. The old faith is painted with a brush of evil and godlessness. Judaism, progeny of Khemet(Kemet)/Egypt and Babylon, branded its parents as demonic and oppressive.

Christianity likewise, drew from ancestral Judaism and Kemet only what it wanted, rejected the rest and then burned its ancestral bridges. Its attempts were not thorough however; the "pagan" traces of Kemetic Wisdom Teachings and funerary rituals, the legacy of Bel and Mithra, Yusir and Auset, Zoroaster and Plato can be uncovered. Jesus was called the Christ, from the Greek Christus. This Christus comes from the Kemetic KRST [Karast], the Anointed One, the titles of Yusir, Tehuti/Thoth, and Heru. The Jewish equivalent is Messiah from the Kemetic "MESSU" on the one hand and MES-IAH on the other. MES means "to give birth", "son". Horus had a title called "MES", making him "Horus the Son". MES-IAH then is "the son of YAH".

SHOULD the Supreme Principle, total and universal, which the religious doctrines of the West call " God," be conceived of as impersonal or as personal? This question has given rise to interminable and moreover quite pointless discussions, because it originates from partial and incomplete conceptions which it would be useless to attempt to reconcile without going beyond the special domain, theological or philosophical, where they belong. Metaphysically, it must be said that the Principle is at once both impersonal and personal, according to the aspect under which It is viewed : impersonal, or, if preferred, " supra-personal " in Itself ; personal in relation to universal manifestation, without however this " Divine Personality " partaking in the least degree of an anthropomorphic character, for "personality" must not be confused with " individuality."

It is evident that an indefinite number of Divine Attributes may be conceived of in this manner, and indeed every quality enjoying a positive existence may thus be transposed by being envisaged in its principle ; each of these attributes, however, should be considered in reality only as a basis or support for meditation on a certain aspect of Universal Being.

it is clear that no doctrine was ever polytheistic in itself and in essence, since it could only become so as the result of a profound corruption, which moreover happens on a large scale much more rarely than is commonly supposed. In the East, where the tendency towards anthropomorphism is non-existent apart from individual aberrations that are always possible though rare and abnormal, nothing of the kind has ever succeeded in coming to light. This will no doubt surprise many Western people, who, being only acquainted with classical antiquity, are prone to look everywhere for " myths " and " paganism but it is none the less true. So far as India or Egypt is concerned, the symbolical image representing one or other of the Divine Attributes, is most certainly not an "idol,"' for it has never been taken for anything other than what it really is, namely a support for meditation and an auxiliary means of realization, each person moreover being free to attach himself according to preference to those symbols which are most in conformity with his personal tendencies.

For those holding on to the words of the "bible"... Know the scriptures in their original language!

Fela Kuti Music and Documentary

2009-05-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Part 2

Part3

Shell in court -role in Nigeria executions

2009-04-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

Nick Mathiason

Family of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged by his country's rulers in 1995, take oil giant to court in New York

Ken Saro-Wiwa swore that one day Shell, the oil giant, would answer for his death in a court of law. Next month, 14 years after his execution, the Nigerian environmental activist's dying wish is to be fulfilled.

In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.

The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court.
Saro-Wiwa became famous as a campaigner on behalf of the Ogoni people, leading peaceful protests against the environmental damage caused by oil companies in the Niger Delta. There was worldwide condemnation when, along with eight other activists, he was hanged by the Nigerian military government in 1995 after being charged with incitement to murder after the death of four Ogoni elders. Many of the prosecution witnesses later admitted that they had been bribed to give evidence against Saro-Wiwa, who was a respected television writer and businessman.

Lawyers in New York will allege that Shell actively subsidised a campaign of terror by security forces in the Niger Delta and attempted to influence the trial that led to Saro-Wiwa's execution. The lawsuit alleges that the company attempted to bribe two witnesses in his trial to testify against him. Members of Saro-Wiwa's family will take the stand for the first time to give their version of events, among them his brother Owens, who will allege that Brian Anderson, managing director of Shell's Nigerian subsidiary, told him: "It would not be impossible to get charges dropped if protests were called off." Anderson is fighting the action.
Witnesses who were shot by military police in the Niger Delta principally to protect the building of Shell's oil pipeline will allege that Shell, by paying the police to protect its interests, was complicit in acts of violence.

Speaking to the Observer from Abuja, Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa's son, Ken Wiwa, said: "For 14 years we have lived with the memory of a father, an uncle, a brother, a son executed for a crime he didn't commit. We have daily reminders. It's painful to live with a monstrous injustice. To wake up one day to finally get our day in court is tremendously satisfying.
"After the injustice of the original crime against my father, having to watch legal arguments [by Shell] using the highest-paid lawyers in the world is sickening. You can't describe how painful that is to go through.

"Part of the reason for the original protest was the way Shell behaved. Ogoni people made their living farming and fishing, but Shell was using open waste pits and oil pipelines criss-crossed the land. These polluting activities were put on top of a delicate ecosystem. It destroyed people's ability to sustain themselves. That's the impact of Shell and, when people tried to protest, they were brutally repressed."

In a statement, Shell this weekend described the executions of the Ogoni 9 as "tragic events carried out by the Nigerian government in power at the time".
"Shell attempted to persuade that government to grant clemency; to our deep regret, that appeal - and the appeals of many others - went unheard, and we were shocked and saddened when we heard the news. Shell in no way encouraged or advocated any act of violence against them or their fellow Ogonis. We believe that the evidence will show clearly that Shell was not responsible for these tragic events. The allegations made in the complaints against Royal Dutch/Shell concerning the 1995 executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow Ogonis are false and without merit."

US lawyers have finally won permission to bring the case to court under the alien tort statute, which gives non-US citizens the right to file claims in American courts for international human rights violations. The court case had been set for 27 April, though last night the date was moved to 26 May.
Today the oil-producing Niger Delta region is riven by intense violence and corruption. The Ogoni 9 trial is seen as a way of coming to terms with the past and building a non-violent future.
"We need to know the truth," said Ken Wiwa last night. "We need to have people account for their role in the executions and the displacement of the Ogoni people, many of whom feel traumatised. It will be a relief. It will enable people to face the future. That's the most important thing. Let's account for the past, so we can move forward."

Lawyers representing Saro-Wiwa's family have not sought specific damages should Shell be found liable, but legal experts say the oil giant could face fines running into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Jenny Green, a senior lawyer at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who has played a pivotal role in ensuring the Saro-Wiwa case made it to court, said: "Mosop [the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People] was formed to stand up to multinationals and the dictatorship that acted hand-in-hand. This is a significant moment, because it says you can't act with impunity."

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Sunday 5 April 2009.
//

Firms Urged to Boycott 'Blood Minerals'

2009-04-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

by Marina Litvinsky

WASHINGTON - The world's mass consumption of cell phones, laptops and other electronics fuels widespread sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to a new study released Wednesday by the non-profit Enough Project that echoes what many human rights activists and humanitarian workers have been saying for years.
The paper, "Can You Hear Congo Now? Cell Phones, Conflict Minerals, and the Worst Sexual Violence in the World," details how "conflict minerals" that are mined in the war-torn DRC are sold by rebel groups to purchase arms, and serve as a direct cause of widespread sexual violence in the war-torn country.

"The conflict in eastern DRC - the deadliest since World War II - is fuelled in significant part by a multi-million-dollar trade in minerals," the report states. "Armed groups generate an estimated 144 million dollars each year by trading four main minerals: the ores that produce the metals tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold."

Working with other non-governmental organisations, the Enough Project has spent the last year researching the supply chains that link these conflict minerals to many of the world's most demanded electronics, including cell phones, portable music players and computers.
DRC has suffered from violence brought on by the "resource curse" for well over a century. Over the past decade, various militias and military units that have dominated conflict-ridden areas of the country have vied for control of mineral-rich areas and their inhabitants in part by using sexual violence.
According to the study, 1,100 rape cases are reported each month, the world's highest rate of sexual violence against women and girls.

"Women from communities that are being displaced are sometimes so traumatized by the sexual violence that they will never return to their home areas," wrote John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough, in a recent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. "These crimes destroy families, decimate communities, and lethally spread HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases."
Years of unrest have plagued the region. Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by government forces and government-backed militias, hundreds of thousands of Hutus associated with the regime fled across the border into the DRC, as the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) conquered the country.
While many have since returned to Rwanda, the continued presence of "genocidaires" in eastern Congo has been cited by Kigali as justification for repeated incursion by its forces over the past 12 years into the region.

Indeed, the new study was released as Oxfam reported Wednesday that some 250,000 people in the DRC have been displaced following an unprecedented joint operation by Rwanda and the DRC's own army against the remnants of the Hutu forces earlier this year.
While the operation was hailed as a success by the two countries, the withdrawal of Rwandan forces over the past several weeks has enabled the Hutu militias to return to the region where they have carried out a campaign of looting and terror against the local population. Oxfam said that Congolese soldiers have also engaged in the violence.

"There is widespread looting, burning of villages and an unacceptable peak of sexual violence," Marcel Stoessel, Oxfam's country director in DR Congo, told the BBC.
According to the Enough study, the three main armed groups responsible for the violence and who also control much of the mineral trade are the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) and renegade units of the Congolese army (FARDC).

These armed groups profit from the mineral trade by forcibly controlling the mines and exacting bribes, or taxes, from transporters, local and international buyers and border controls.
The conflict minerals - tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold - are moved from Congo to countries in East Asia where they are processed into valuable metals needed for the manufacture of a wide range of electronics products.
The biggest use of tin worldwide is in electronic products, as a solder on circuit boards. Congolese armed groups earn approximately 85 million dollars a year from trade in tin, according to the paper.

Trade in tantalum, which is used to store electricity in capacitors in iPods, digital cameras, and cell phones earns the armed groups an estimated 8 million dollars annually. Tungsten, used to make cell phones vibrate, earns approximately 2 million dollars a year; and gold, used in jewelry and as a component in electronics, provides from 44 million dollars to 88 million dollars a year.
Enough called for electronics companies to endorse a pledge - similar to that made by the diamond and jewelry industry seven years ago regarding so-called "blood diamonds" - that they will manufacture their products without conflict minerals and make their supply chains subject to a transparent audit to back up the pledge.

According to the report, companies such as Apple, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, and Nintendo should "change their procurement practices and demand that their suppliers provide proof of where their minerals are sourced from."
Enough also urged consumers around the world to use their purchasing power by demanding that companies examine their business practices and become accountable for the sources of minerals used in many of their products

"We're asking consumers to endorse the conflict minerals pledge and contact the 21 leading electronics companies through our Raise Hope for Congo website to build pressure on these companies to make their products conflict-free," said Prendergast.
The paper also asks that U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress take concrete steps to ensure the end of violence in the DRC by combating its causes.
"President Obama must make a clean break with past policy toward Congo, which has too often been designed to half-heartedly manage the symptoms of the crisis through humanitarian aid, erratic diplomacy, and peacekeeping assistance," according to Prendergast.
He called for Obama to name a high-level special envoy with a team that can work in co-ordination with others on the local, national, and regional sources of instability; provide all necessary support to the International Criminal Court as it attempts to investigate and prosecute war crimes in the DRC, and press for making rape as a weapon of war a primary focus of criminal investigations in the eastern part of the country.
Enough also urged Congress to introduce legislation "that requires companies to disclose where their minerals are sourced, and creates penalties for those who continue purchasing conflict minerals."

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/02

Paris liberation - 'whites only'

2009-04-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

By Mike Thomson Presenter,
Document, BBC Radio 4

Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a "whites only" victory.
Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead.

Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.

By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Senegalais, lay dead.
Many of them were simply shot where they stood soon after surrendering to German troops who often regarded them as sub-human savages.
Their chance for revenge came in August 1944 as Allied troops prepared to retake Paris. But despite their overwhelming numbers, they were not to get it.

'More desirable'
The leader of the Free French forces, Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris.
“ I have told Colonel de Chevene that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division ” General Frederick Morgan
Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle's division must not contain any black soldiers.

In January 1944 Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, was to write in a memo stamped, "confidential": "It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel.

"This would indicate the Second Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred percent white."
At the time America segregated its own troops along racial lines and did not allow black GIs to fight alongside their white comrades until the late stages of the war.
Morocco division
Given the fact that Britain did not segregate its forces and had a large and valued Indian army, one might have expected London to object to such a racist policy.

Yet this does not appear to have been the case.
A document written by the British General, Frederick Morgan, to Allied Supreme Command stated: "It is unfortunate that the only French formation that is 100% white is an armoured division in Morocco.
"Every other French division is only about 40% white. I have told Colonel de Chevene that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division."

Finding an all-white division that was available proved to be impossible due to the enormous contribution made to the French Army by West African conscripts.
So, Allied Command insisted that all black soldiers be taken out and replaced by white ones from other units.
When it became clear that there were not enough white soldiers to fill the gaps, soldiers from parts of North Africa and the Middle East were used instead.
Pensions cut

In the end, nearly everyone was happy. De Gaulle got his wish to have a French division lead the liberation of Paris, even though the shortage of white troops meant that many of his men were actually Spanish.
“ We were colonised by the French. We were forced to go to war... France has not been grateful. Not at all. ” Issa Cisse Former French colonial soldier

The British and Americans got their "Whites Only" Liberation even though many of the troops involved were North African or Syrian.
For France's West African Tirailleurs Senegalais, however, there was little to celebrate.
Despite forming 65% of Free French Forces and dying in large numbers for France, they were to have no heroes' welcome in Paris.

After the liberation of the French capital many were simply stripped of their uniforms and sent home. To make matters even worse, in 1959 their pensions were frozen.
Former French colonial soldier, Issa Cisse from Senegal, who is now 87 years-old, looks back on it all with sadness and evident resentment.
"We, the Senegalese, were commanded by the white French chiefs," he said.
"We were colonised by the French. We were forced to go to war. Forced to follow the orders that said, do this, do that, and we did. France has not been grateful. Not at all."

A World Enslaved

2008-12-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

Marchers protest kidnappings in Port-au-Prince. (Photo: Ariana Cubillos / AP)

March/April 2008

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let's be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.

Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

And if you're going to buy one in five hours, you'd better get a move on. First, hail a taxi to JFK International Airport, and hop on a direct flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The flight takes three hours. After landing at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport, you will need 50 cents for the most common form of transport in Port-au-Prince, the tap-tap, a flatbed pickup retrofitted with benches and a canopy. Three quarters of the way up Route de Delmas, the capital's main street, tap the roof and hop out. There, on a side street, you will find a group of men standing in front of Le Réseau (The Network) barbershop. As you approach, a man steps forward: "Are you looking to get a person?"

Meet Benavil Lebhom. He smiles easily. He has a trim mustache and wears a multicolored, striped golf shirt, a gold chain, and Doc Martens knockoffs. Benavil is a courtier, or broker. He holds an official real estate license and calls himself an employment agent. Two thirds of the employees he places are child slaves. The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000. They are the restavèks, the "stay-withs," as they are euphemistically known in Creole. Forced, unpaid, they work in captivity from before dawn until night. Benavil and thousands of other formal and informal traffickers lure these children from desperately impoverished rural parents, with promises of free schooling and a better life.

The negotiation to buy a child slave might sound a bit like this:

"How quickly do you think it would be possible to bring a child in? Somebody who could clean and cook?" you ask. "I don't have a very big place; I have a small apartment. But I'm wondering how much that would cost? And how quickly?"

"Three days," Benavil responds.

"And you could bring the child here?" you inquire. "Or are there children here already?"

"I don't have any here in Port-au-Prince right now," says Benavil, his eyes widening at the thought of a foreign client. "I would go out to the countryside."

You ask about additional expenses. "Would I have to pay for transportation?"

"Bon," says Benavil. "A hundred U.S."

Smelling a rip-off, you press him, "And that's just for transportation?"

"Transportation would be about 100 Haitian," says Benavil, or around $13, "because you'd have to get out there. Plus [hotel and] food on the trip. Five hundred gourdes."

"Okay, 500 Haitian," you say.

Now you ask the big question: "And what would your fee be?" This is the moment of truth, and Benavil's eyes narrow as he determines how much he can take you for.

"A hundred. American."

"That seems like a lot," you say, with a smile so as not to kill the deal. "How much would you charge a Haitian?"

Benavil's voice rises with feigned indignation. "A hundred dollars. This is a major effort."

You hold firm. "Could you bring down your fee to 50 U.S.?"

Benavil pauses. But only for effect. He knows he's still got you for much more than a Haitian would pay. "Oui," he says with a smile.

But the deal isn't done. Benavil leans in close. "This is a rather delicate question. Is this someone you want as just a worker? Or also someone who will be a 'partner'? You understand what I mean?"

You don't blink at being asked if you want the child for sex. "I mean, is it possible to have someone that could be both?"

"Oui!" Benavil responds enthusiastically.

If you're interested in taking your purchase back to the United States, Benavil tells you that he can "arrange" the proper papers to make it look as though you've adopted the child.

He offers you a 13-year-old girl.

"That's a little bit old," you say.

"I know of another girl who's 12. Then ones that are 10, 11," he responds.

The negotiation is finished, and you tell Benavil not to make any moves without further word from you. Here, 600 miles from the United States, and five hours from Manhattan, you have successfully arranged to buy a human being for 50 bucks.

The Cruel Truth

It would be nice if that conversation, like the description of the journey, were fictional. It is not. I recorded it on Oct. 6, 2005, as part of four years of research into slavery on five continents. In the popular consciousness, "slavery" has come to be little more than just a metaphor for undue hardship. Investment bankers routinely refer to themselves as "high-paid wage slaves." Human rights activists may call $1-an-hour sweatshop laborers slaves, regardless of the fact that they are paid and can often walk away from the job. But the reality of slavery is far different. Slavery exists today on an unprecedented scale. In Africa, tens of thousands are chattel slaves, seized in war or tucked away for generations. Across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, traffickers have forced as many as 2 million into prostitution or labor. In South Asia, which has the highest concentration of slaves on the planet, nearly 10 million languish in bondage, unable to leave their captors until they pay off "debts," legal fictions that in many cases are generations old.

Few in the developed world have a grasp of the enormity of modern-day slavery. Fewer still are doing anything to combat it. Beginning in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush was urged by several of his key advisors to vigorously enforce the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, a U.S. law enacted a month earlier that sought to prosecute domestic human traffickers and cajole foreign governments into doing the same. The Bush administration trumpeted the effort - at home via the Christian evangelical media and more broadly via speeches and pronouncements, including in addresses to the U.N. General Assembly in 2003 and 2004. But even the quiet and diligent work of some within the U.S. State Department, which credibly claims to have secured more than 100 antitrafficking laws and more than 10,000 trafficking convictions worldwide, has resulted in no measurable decline in the number of slaves worldwide. Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. Justice Department increased human trafficking prosecutions from 3 to 32, and convictions from 10 to 98. By 2006, 27 states had passed antitrafficking laws. Yet, during the same period, the United States liberated less than 2 percent of its own modern-day slaves. As many as 17,500 new slaves continue to enter bondage in the United States every year.

The West's efforts have been, from the outset, hamstrung by a warped understanding of slavery. In the United States, a hard-driving coalition of feminist and evangelical activists has forced the Bush administration to focus almost exclusively on the sex trade. The official State Department line is that voluntary prostitution does not exist, and that commercial sex is the main driver of slavery today. In Europe, though Germany and the Netherlands have decriminalized most prostitution, other nations such as Bulgaria have moved in the opposite direction, bowing to U.S. pressure and cracking down on the flesh trade. But, across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, unregulated escort services are exploding with the help of the Internet. Even when enlightened governments have offered clearheaded solutions to deal with this problem, such as granting victims temporary residence, they have had little impact.

Many feel that sex slavery is particularly revolting - and it is. I saw it firsthand. In a Bucharest brothel, for instance, I was offered a mentally handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor. Recent studies have shown that locking up pimps and traffickers has had a negligible effect on the aggregate rates of bondage. And though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all victims. It's an approach that threatens to put most governments on the wrong side of history.

Indebted for Life

Save for the fact that he is male, Gonoo Lal Kol typifies the average slave of our modern age. (At his request, I have changed his first name.) Like a vast majority of the world's slaves, Gonoo is in debt bondage in South Asia. In his case, in an Indian quarry. Like most slaves, Gonoo is illiterate and unaware of the Indian laws that ban his bondage and provide for sanctions against his master. His story, told to me in more than a dozen conversations inside his 4-foot-high stone and grass hutch, represents the other side of the "Indian Miracle."

Gonoo lives in Lohagara Dhal, a forgotten corner of Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state that contains 8 percent of the world's poor. I met him one evening in December 2005 as he walked with two dozen other laborers in tattered and filthy clothes. Behind them was the quarry. In that pit, Gonoo, a member of the historically outcast Kol tribe, worked with his family 14 hours a day. His tools were simple, a rough-hewn hammer and an iron pike. His hands were covered in calluses, his fingertips worn away.

Gonoo's master is a tall, stout, surly contractor named Ramesh Garg. Garg is one of the wealthiest men in Shankargarh, the nearest sizable town, founded under the British Raj but now run by nearly 600 quarry contractors. He makes his money by enslaving entire families forced to work for no pay beyond alcohol, grain, and bare subsistence expenses. Their only use for Garg is to turn rock into silica sand, for colored glass, or gravel, for roads or ballast. Slavery scholar Kevin Bales estimates that a slave in the 19th-century American South had to work 20 years to recoup his or her purchase price. Gonoo and the other slaves earn a profit for Garg in two years.

Every single man, woman, and child in Lohagara Dhal is a slave. But, in theory at least, Garg neither bought nor owns them. They are working off debts, which, for many, started at less than $10. But interest accrues at over 100 percent annually here. Most of the debts span at least two generations, though they have no legal standing under modern Indian law. They are a fiction that Garg constructs through fraud and maintains through violence. The seed of Gonoo's slavery, for instance, was a loan of 62 cents. In 1958, his grandfather borrowed that amount from the owner of a farm where he worked. Three generations and three slavemasters later, Gonoo's family remains in bondage.

Bringing Freedom to Millions

Recently, many bold, underfunded groups have taken up the challenge of tearing out the roots of slavery. Some gained fame through dramatic slave rescues. Most learned that freeing slaves is impossible unless the slaves themselves choose to be free. Among the Kol of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, an organization called Pragati Gramodyog Sansthan (Progressive Institute for Village Enterprises, or PGS) has helped hundreds of families break the grip of the quarry contractors. Working methodically since 1985, PGS organizers slowly built up confidence among slaves. With PGS's help, the Kol formed microcredit unions and won leases to quarries so that they could keep the proceeds of their labor. Some bought property for the first time in their lives, a cow or a goat, and their incomes, which had been nil, multiplied quickly. PGS set up primary schools and dug wells. Villages that for generations had known nothing but slavery began to become free. PGS's success demonstrates that emancipation is merely the first step in abolition. Within the developed world, some national law enforcement agencies such as those in the Czech Republic and Sweden have finally begun to pursue the most culpable of human trafficking - slave-trading pimps and unscrupulous labor contractors. But more must be done to educate local police, even in the richest of nations. Too often, these street-level law enforcement personnel do not understand that it's just as likely for a prostitute to be a trafficking victim as it is for a nanny working without proper papers to be a slave. And, after they have been discovered by law enforcement, few rich nations provide slaves with the kind of rehabilitation, retraining, and protection needed to prevent their re-trafficking. The asylum now granted to former slaves in the United States and the Netherlands is a start. But more must be done.

The United Nations, whose founding principles call for it to fight bondage in all its forms, has done almost nothing to combat modern slavery. In January, Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, called for the international body to provide better quantification of human trafficking. Such number crunching would be valuable in combating that one particular manifestation of slavery. But there is little to suggest the United Nations, which consistently fails to hold its own member states accountable for widespread slavery, will be an effective tool in defeating the broader phenomenon.

Any lasting solutions to human trafficking must involve prevention programs in at-risk source countries. Absent an effective international body like the United Nations, such an effort will require pressure from the United States. So far, the United States has been willing to criticize some nations' records, but it has resisted doing so where it matters most, particularly in India. India abolished debt bondage in 1976, but with poor enforcement of the law locally, millions remain in bondage. In 2006 and 2007, the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons pressed U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to repudiate India's intransigence personally. And, in each instance, she did not.

The psychological, social, and economic bonds of slavery run deep, and for governments to be truly effective in eradicating slavery, they must partner with groups that can offer slaves a way to pull themselves up from bondage. One way to do that is to replicate the work of grassroots organizations such as Varanasi, India-based MSEMVS (Society for Human Development and Women's Empowerment). In 1996, the Indian group launched free transitional schools, where children who had been enslaved learned skills and acquired enough literacy to move on to formal schooling. The group also targeted mothers, providing them with training and start-up materials for microenterprises. In Thailand, a nation infamous for sex slavery, a similar group, the Labour Rights Promotion Network, works to keep desperately poor Burmese immigrants from the clutches of traffickers by, among other things, setting up schools and health programs. Even in the remote highlands of southern Haiti, activists with Limyè Lavi ("Light of Life") reach otherwise wholly isolated rural communities to warn them of the dangers of traffickers such as Benavil Lebhom and to help them organize informal schools to keep children near home. In recent years, the United States has shown an increasing willingness to help fund these kinds of organizations, one encouraging sign that the message may be getting through.

For four years, I saw dozens of people enslaved, several of whom traffickers like Benavil actually offered to sell to me. I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice. But the hard work of real emancipation can't be the burden of a select few. For thousands of slaves, grassroots groups like PGS and MSEMVS can help bring freedom. But, until governments define slavery in appropriately concise terms, prosecute the crime aggressively in all its forms, and encourage groups that empower slaves to free themselves, millions more will remain in bondage. And our collective promise of abolition will continue to mean nothing at all.

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E. Benjamin Skinner is the author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (New York: Free Press, 2008).

Haile Selassie I - Government

2008-12-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

When a whole nation accepts and maintains a government in existence, it means that the nation recognizes that government. There is always something moving, brewing. There are ambitious people everywhere. Wicked people. The only thing to do is to deal with them with courage and decision. One must beware of uncertainty, weakness or conflicting emotions - they lead to defeat. It is our opinion that the world has not changed at all. We believe that such changes have modified nothing. We don't even notice any difference between monarchies and republics: to us, they appear two substantially similar methods of governing a nation. Democracy, Republic:What do these words signify?
What have they changed in the world?
Have men become better, more loyal, kinder?Are the people happier?

All goes on as before, as always.Illusions, illusions. One should consider the interests of a nation before subverting it with words. Democracy is necessary in some cases and we believe some African peoples might adopt it. But in other cases it is a handful, a mistake. We are all adherent, whatever our internal political systems, of the principles of democratic action. Let us apply these to the unity we seek to create. Force must be used against force. We ourselves, by virtue of our descent from the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, ever since we accepted in trust, in 1916, first the regency of the Ethiopian realm and later, the Imperial Dignity, right up to the present, we have set out to the best of our ability, to improve, gradually, internal administration by introducing into the country western modes of civilization through which our people may attain a higher level. In explanation of the notion 'gradually': unless it is through coaxing a child and getting it accustomed, it will not be pleased if one takes from it what it has seized with its hand. When one gives such a baby any sort of food, it will not wish to eat it, unless one shows it to the child and lets it taste it. Unless they give it milk or other soft food until it grows teeth, it will not be able to eat when they place bread or meat before them. And similarly with people who have lived by custom only, without learning at school, without absorbing knowledge by the ear or observing and searching with the eye, it is necessary to accustom them, through educations to abandon habits by which they have for long been living, to make them accept new ways. yet not by hasty or cruel methods but by patience and study. gradually and over a prolonged period. Only a system which tolerates dissent can survive It gives us great pleasure to appear before this distinguished assemblage and we bring you the fraternal salutations of the Ethiopian people.

The people of Ethiopia and Trinidad and Tobago are joined in a massive and continuous effort to create for themselves a new and better way of life. They face many of the same problems. The hopes and aspirations which they share derive from the same essential beliefs in the nature and destiny of man. It is thus inevitably true that there should exist between those two great peoples strong and lasting ties of friendship and understanding Your role as the representatives of the people is a particularly critical one in the councils of the twentieth century. The manner in which a representative of the people should properly discharge his responsibilities has long been a matter for learned discussion among philosophers and political scientists. The world of the developing nations is creating new problems for the scholars to ponder as new societies are emerging to deal with the intricate and explosive questions of national and institutional development.

Is a representative responsible only to a constituency or to the particular group or interest which has chosen or appointed him? Certainly this responsibility must be an element in the thought and action of such a man, but there are higher values and greater interests and responsibilities than these. Obstacles Sectional, tribal and other divisive factors often pose major obstacles to national development. In their expanded sense, as narrowly national and ideological interests, they threaten unity and progress. No one is today so foolish as to believe thay any one nation constitutes a perfect monolith of faith and ideology. Nor could anyone wish that there should be such utter vanity of thought and aspiration. The systems of Government which have sought to impose uniformity of belief have survived briefly and then expired, blinded and weakened by obsessive reliance upon their supposed infallibility. The only system of Government which can survive is one which is prepared to tolerate dissent and criticism and Which accepts these as useful and in any case, inevitable aspects of all social and political relations. The tolerance of dissent and criticism within a Government proceeds from a single essential premise: that the Government exists to serve the people generally. Government servants, whether designated as representatives or not, have a trust to work for the general welfare. The same trust exists among the member states of international organizations. The members of such organizations must adhere to some tacit or expressed conception of international welfare.

Common Goals In the case of the Organization of African Unity, it is an African Unity, it is an African welfare; in the case of the United Nations Organization, it is world welfare. In one way or another, the member nation must accept in thought, spirit and action the basic premise of their institutions that men of all races, beliefs and status share some essential common goals. From this premise, no great and easy actions follow as corollaries. The representatives of peoples and nations can only come together with open and objective minds and willing hearts to engage in dialogue, without rigid dogmas and slogans and without violence. Working in this way achieves no instant Utopia. It may, however, enable us to achieve together what it is possible to achieve and to move forward steadily, if not always in great haste, with some degree of harmony and mutual understanding.

Africa Advocacy and The Zimbabwe Factor

2008-12-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

By Netfa FreemanJuly 10, 2008
blackcommentator.com

Like some BlackCommentator.com commentaries of the last two weeks, accounts of the situation in Zimbabwe by Africa advocacy organizations are virtually identical to those of corporate media, UK and US government officials. Solidarity With The People of Zimbabwe by Nunu Kidane, the quote by featured cartoonist Tony Namate published in the June 26th issue No. 283, and Bill Fletcher's commentary titled, Mugabe Sworn in Officially...Simultaneously Loses his Legacy, in last week's issue No. 284 all depict Zimbabwe as descending to hell in a hand basket at the hands of a despotic Mugabe.The disproportionate attention on Zimbabwe has intensified in the last few weeks as a result of the presidential run-off that took place Friday, June 27th. African (Black) people should see this attention clearly as a reason for extremely critical analysis on the matter.Malcolm X warned us that:
If you form the habit of going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west...you'll always be maneuvered into a situation where you are never fighting your actual enemies, where you will find yourself fighting your own self.First let me make it clear that the views and opinions in this commentary are my own and do not reflect the position of the Institute for Policy Studies. What about the facts in this commentary? Well, those speak for themselves.

After sharing some of what follows with a work colleague, her response to me was "all I hear you saying is that everything the MDC does is bad and everything Mugabe does is good." This was especially baffling since I had not once mentioned Mugabe's name in what I had said. I've often run into this sort of thing. It shows that hatred for Robert Mugabe has been stirred to such rabid levels that any statement even remotely favorable to him is not judged on merits of veracity but on its political mileage. It's not at all politically advantageous within the US for a person to be seen as favoring the Zimbabwe government, even if it's over imperialism. That is to say it's not the best avenue for an opportunist. African people cannot afford such defective political judgment. Given the age-old propaganda ploy of demonizing for dubious political ends we must be able to distinguish between blind idolizing and points of fact; between rabid contempt and points of fact. Is it blind idolizing or acknowledging a fact that a ZANU PF led government finally corrected the racist land allocation by redistributing land to over 300,000 indigenous Zimbabwean families? Is it not a fact that a ZANU PF led government has formed legislation to give majority ownership of the country's mines and enterprises to the Black majority? Is it not a fact that a ZANU PF led government jettisoned the imperialists' Economic Structural Adjustment Programs by imposing tariff restrictions and investment performance requirements, nationalizing certain business enterprises, and institutionalizing economic indigenization policies?

Bill Fletcher says, "The Bush administration is not in a position to lecture anyone on human rights or genuine elections. This fact, however, should NOT mean that we remain silent simply because President Bush holds President Mugabe in distain. The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend." While this makes a good disclaimer from the Bush agenda it also manages to reduce the issue to one of mere distain between individuals (Bush and Mugabe) versus being the reflection of a historical US policy toward Africa intended to preserve Western economic and political domination over Africa. Why does Bill fail to address exactly why the UK and US are targeting Zimbabwe and even more illuminating fail to address what specific methods they are using against her?

Bill insinuates that those of us who say the primary issue in Zimbabwe is imperialism are subscribing to the flawed logic that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Actually, Pan-Africanists logic and conviction deduces that because imperialism is an enemy of Africa and we are Africans then the enemies of Africa and/or Zimbabwe are our enemies. Right now imperialism's most pronounced and pointed attack on Africa is in Zimbabwe. When imperialism attacks Zimbabwe it is attacking us. This is our logic. The flawed logic of the "my enemy's enemy..." instead applies to the opposition in Zimbabwe since they are the ones working with the enemies of Africa and humanity for a regime change. Malcolm's statement is too relevant when we consider that the mission claimed by most Africa Advocacy organizations is to affect US policy toward Africa, yet their activities related to Zimbabwe more so resemble them. The solidarity fund for which Ms. Kidane advocates in her commentary is administered by Africa Action, whose stated mission is to "change U.S. foreign policy and the policies of international institutions in order to support African struggles for peace and development...by changing the policies of our own government, we have proven that we can make a real difference."

Although when it comes to Zimbabwe many of these organizations more than fall short on this mission, never addressing the policy and interests of their own government toward Zimbabwe and certainly taking no action to change it. Tellingly I have yet to see from these Africa advocates any real elaboration or analysis about the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). What would Malcolm say about that? Following such a lead by "advocates for Africa" is not thinking for ourselves or fighting the enemies of Africa. We cannot let the enemies of Africa and enemies of all humanity dictate how we see the world or Africa. They've become extremely sophisticated in how they advance their misinformation so we must become that much more sophisticated about where and how we get our information. For example the bio accompanying Tony Namate's cartoons brags that, "Zimbabwe's politicians...have described (his work) as treasonable and unpatriotic" as if this were an unreasonable accusation. But several of the media institutions accredited to him do belong to governments hostile to Zimbabwe and that are openly working for regime change against his country. Such as the US government funded Voice of America's Studio 7, Britain's BBC World, and Swedish TV. The intrinsic job then of these media regarding Zimbabwe can only be to attack her sovereignty and right to national self-determination through propaganda.

Based on the African experience should we trust media that is so egregiously wrong on Iraq and historically has never acknowledged immoral and illegal imperialist government agendas? Right now this media are complicit in hushing up the blatant double standard in the US' undeclared asylum for notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carrilles and its unjust imprisonment of five courageous men (a.k.a. The Cuban Five), whose only crime was attempting to thwart the terrorism by the likes of Posada. Yesterday, this regime change was directed at Ghana, Congo, and Vietnam to name only a few. Today it's Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe to name another few. Anywhere such an agenda is in place, a critical thinker knows to believe none of what we read or hear and only half of what we see.

Zimbabwean journalist and filmmaker Olley Maruma demonstrates how... "On 6 February 2002, The Zimbabwean Independent carried an article titled, My Ordeal as Mugabe's Prisoner, written by Basildon Peta. In the piece, Peta claimed that Zimbabwe's State security agents had wrongfully jailed him. The article was subsequently reproduced in many other newspapers in the West and elsewhere. It later turned out that the Zimbabwe police or state security agents had never arrested Peta. The fictitious article, in which Peta described vividly his "holding cell," an imaginary blocked toilet and the coarse behavior of Zimbabwe's security agents, was in fact the result of his fertile imagination. Yet he did not seem to feel any shame for having passed this off as truthful, fair and objective journalism. When his lies were exposed, Peta was dismissed from his job as a "special projects editor." "He fled Zimbabwe in disgrace to South Africa only to claim to the sympathetic Western media there that he had been 'hounded' out of Zimbabwe by a repressive state for his 'fearless reporting.' Thus, a dishonest man, who had been exposed to the world as a shameless liar, was hailed by the Western media as a hero. In no time, he was snapped up by the white South African media for whom he continued to write his false and vituperative stories demonizing the government of the 'dictator, Robert Mugabe'".

Now let us compare Guinea and Zimbabwe, both countries having a head of state who has been in power since early-mid 80's; Lansana Conte in Guinea and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Conte, however became leader through an imperialist backed military coup following the death of the democratically elected, Pan-Africanist President Sekou Ture. Mugabe on the other hand was democratically elected after earning his place as a freedom fighter in the struggle against British settler colonialism. But only Mugabe receives a heavy degree of patent denunciations for being "in power too long". Not blind idolizing but a point of fact. A little over a year ago, both countries experienced some internal unrest but not equal consideration by the media or civil society advocates for Africa. As part of a terrorizing spree in Zimbabwe by opposition members who had been firebombing public buses, kombis and police dormitories, and attacking citizens and police on the streets, the MDC with civil society organizations disguised a protest as a prayer vigil during a temporary ban on demonstrations. When an outnumbered group of police - who are rarely armed with guns - were attacked by the mob they were provoked into fatally shooting one of them. The police still received a brutal beating and had to flee.

The incident earned a flurry of attention from the international media that spun its coverage as a Mugabe crackdown on dissent completely omitting the actions of the mob. The imperialist governments and "civil society activists" all chimed in unison with condemnations of Mugabe and ZANU PF. However, the brutal and unprovoked attack by Conte, which mind you occurred roughly at the same time, went relatively unnoticed. Advancing on a crowd with tanks, Conte's forces sprayed a peaceful demonstration of thousands with rapid-fire automatic weapons killing over 60 people and some reports were as high as 200 killed.

The same benevolent Western governments and their NGO agents uttered hardly a critical murmur. Nevertheless Ms. Kidane says: "From news sources, teleconferences and the Zimbabwean Diaspora in the U.S. we hear of violence directed at opposition members who threaten President Mugabe and the current leadership of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU)." It is naïve not to be skeptical of recent reports that pin blame for all the violence on ZANU-PF given the frequent threats of violence from the MDC and civil society and reports from SADC, the UN and Human Rights Watch that point to violence on both sides. Further, it seems the violence is primarily committed by individuals and small groups taking action on their own, because passions on both sides are inflamed. Why are they inflamed?

The West's proxy provocateurs and sanctions have deliberately brought the situation to a boiling point. Mugabe has publicly scolded supporters of ZANU PF who've perpetrated violence, saying on one occasion, May 17 "Such violence is needless and must stop forthwith." He added, "Support comes from persuasion, not from pugilism. Genuine support for the party cannot come through coercion or violence". However, MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai has publicly declared that if Mugabe didn't go peacefully he'd be forced out violently. Five years ago Tsvangirai was exposed on video through meetings in London and Montreal, Canada in what was more than likely a plot to assassinate Mugabe and stage a coup d'état.

Tendai Biti, the MDC's Secretary General threatened Kenya-style electoral violence if Mugabe won this years election. A glimpse of the handbook being used in all the anti-Mugabe euphoria is revealed when outspoken Mugabe critic Archbishop Pius Ncube says "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe..." We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.".

Ncube's solution for Zimbabwe is for the former colonizers to intervene militarily. Is that not telling? What happens when we apply Malcolm's insistence on independent scrutiny to Kidane's request for contributions to a solidarity fund? Kidane says the fund is "organized by civil society organizations in the US who are directly linked to civil society groups on the ground - not political opposition groups as such." But assurances that recipients of the funds aren't political opposition cannot be true because if one is opposed to a government and engaged in work to change a political landscape then that is a political opposition. Thus Kidane uses the qualifier "as such."All the organizations supported by the fund: Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Crisis In Zimbabwe Coalition, and the Zimbabwe National Student Union were members of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), a coalition formed in 1997, which gave birth to the MDC.

We would be remiss in our analysis if we did not acknowledge that external forces like Britain's Westminster Fund for Democracy and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mostly funded the NCA . Now let us examine a couple of the fund's recipients individually to show just how deep the rabbit hole goes. One group the money would go to is the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which is already funded by the US' National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a supposedly private non-profit organization serving to maintain US global hegemony in the name of promoting democracy and human rights. We all know how the US promotes global democracy and human rights. The NED is funded by a US congressional appropriation and is used as a federal conduit to fund "civil society" organizations around the world. To illustrate just how non-political and nonpartisan Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition is, one should know that its chairperson, Arnold Tsunga, is a lawyer for the MDC. Its vice-chairperson, Collin Gwiyo, is a founding member of the MDC.

Another recipient of the fund is the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Who wouldn't sympathize with the rights of the working class? But please follow me on this. Kwame Nkrumah warns us that "mechanisms of neo-colonialism" often work through the labor movement. He explains:
In the labor field, for example, imperialism operates through labor arms like the Social Democratic parties of Europe led by the British Labor Party, and through such instruments as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), now apparently being superseded by the New York Africa-American Labor Center (AALC) under AFL-CIO chief George Meany and the well-known CIA man in labor's top echelons, Irving Brown [14].Philip Agee, former CIA operative and author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary, corroborates this in his thorough paper, Terrorism and Civil Society As Instruments of US Policy In Cuba, when he revealed that:
...the successes of revolutionary movements in Ethiopia, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Grenada, Nicaragua and elsewhere brought 'cold warrior' Democrats and 'internationalist' Republicans together to establish in 1979 the American Political Foundation (APF). The foundation's task was to study the feasibility of establishing through legislation a government-financed foundation to subsidize foreign operations in civil society through U.S. non-governmental organizations. Within APF four task forces were set up to conduct the study, one for the Democrats, one for the Republicans, one for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and one for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

The fact is that the AFL-CIO, which I have established above has a history of being used by the CIA, has an international arm called The Solidarity Center. The Solidarity Center works directly with ZCTU, advising them and advocating for them in the US. The Solidarity Center's "funding sources include the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Labor, the AFL-CIO, private foundations, and national and international labor organizations". Let's not also forget that Morgan Tsvangirai was once Secretary General of ZCTU until European trade unions handpicked him to be the leader of the MDC.

Kidane says, "When a democratic space such as this (with all its shortcomings) has been closed for the millions of Zimbabweans who had eagerly been awaiting a change in regime..." This seems to echo the media distortion that the people of Zimbabwe in the majority are chomping at the bit for regime change. What it ignores is that, despite the considerable pressures placed on Zimbabweans to boot out Mugabe's government, ZANU-PF did win the popular vote in the March 29 harmonized elections involving the presidential, parliamentary, senatorial and local authority elections.The pressures I am referring to are the - rarely, if ever mentioned - sanctions and economic crisis, pirate radio stations and "independent" media funded by the US, Britain and Netherlands to turn popular opinion against the government, and the provision of millions of dollars to civil society groups to oppose the Mugabe government.

So to be faced with a sustained program of vilification and regime change methods for nearly a decade and to still win the popular vote, the idea that the majority of Zimbabweans are eager to be free of Mugabe's government is absurd. In the March 29 presidential round of voting the margin of votes Tsvangirai received over Mugabe was just 4%. Also, ZANU PF won more seats in the senate, an absolute majority within five provinces and a simple majority within one. The MDC, on the other hand won only two provinces with an absolute majority and two with a simple majority.While the website of Nunu Kidane's Priority Africa Network believes "Africa has never been top agenda to the US", history might disagree. Remember Patrice Lumumba? Remember that the CIA overthrew Nkrumah and that the US government once bombed Libya? Sounds like a top billing to me. And even if it isn't, do we really want to be at the top of such an agenda?

We've established that the recipients of the Zimbabwe Solidarity Fund really are political opposition. It should be understood that supporting these organizations makes one more in common with the US and UK government's Africa policy than with African (Black) interests and progress. We are not hearing a whole lot about Zimbabwe right now because it's the worst case in Africa. We're hearing about it because it is top agenda for the US, UK, and EU.As a result of a previous BlackCommentator.com commentary I wrote, a reader sent me an appreciative email. After reading Nunu Kidane's commentary the same reader sent me the following message, which I share with his permission.
Africa has over fifty countries but the Mugabe government receives the lion's and tiger's share of criticism directed at governance on the continent. How is it possible for no Black American intellectual to condemn Meles Zenawi for overthrowing the first government in Somalia to bring some semblance of peace and order in almost twenty years? Is it possible that none of our observers have seen the destruction in the great lakes region perpetrated by Kagame of Rwanda? The French government has warrants outstanding for Kagame's role in the assassination of two African presidents; yet Black American thinkers have made no mention of this! The international criminal court in The Hague found Museveni of Uganda guilty of looting natural resources from the Congo. He also has about a million of his countrymen in concentration camps. Many of us are well traveled and well read but we only see what the master sees.

In conclusion as we say, there is clearly a striking double standard between the treatment of other countries in Africa and Zimbabwe. From this, one can only conclude that other countries don't get the same treatment because "there ain't no money in it".

Future Primitive - Division of Labour

2008-12-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

By John Zerzan

Division of labour, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the origins of this horrendous present. Shanks and Tilley (1987b) voice a rare,challenge: "The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present." Of course, the social sciences themselves work against the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In terms of human origins and development, the array of splintered fields and sub-fields-anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology, paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc.-mirrors the narrowing, crippling effect that civilisation has embodied from its very beginning.

Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied society. Unhappiness with contemporary life becomes distrust for the official lies that are told to legitimate that life, and a truer picture of human development emerges. Renunciation and subjugation in modern life have long been explained as necessary concomitants of "human nature." After all, our pre-civilised existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued us from savagery. 'Cave man' and 'Neanderthal' are still invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil.

This ideological view of our past has been radically overturned in recent decades, through the work of academics like Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins. A nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy has come about, with important implications. Now we can see that life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses.

And lately another stunning revelation has appeared, a related one that deepens the first and may be telling us something equally important about who we were and what we might again become. The main line of attack against new descriptions of gatherer-hunter life has been, though often indirect or not explicitly stated, to characterise that life, condescendingly, as the most an evolving species could achieve at an early stage. Thus, the argument allows that there was a long period of apparent grace and pacific existence, but says that humans simply didn't have the mental capacity to leave simple ways behind in favour of complex social and technological achievement.

In another fundamental blow to civilisation, we now learn that not only was human life once, and for so long, a state that did not know alienation or domination, but as the investigations since the '80s by archaeologists John Fowlett, Thomas Wynn, and others have shown, those humans possessed an intelligence at least equal to our own. At a stroke, as it were, the 'ignorance' thesis is disposed of, and we contemplate where we came from in a new light. To put the issue of mental capacity in context, it is useful to review the various (and again, ideologically loaded) interpretations of human origins and development. Robert Ardrey (1961, 1976) served up a bloodthirsty, macho version of prehistory, as have to slightly lesser degrees, Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger. Similarly, Freud and Konrad Lorenz wrote of the innate depravity of the species, thereby providing their contributions to hierarchy and power in the present.

Fortunately, a far more plausible outlook has emerged, one that corresponds to the overall version of Palaeolithic life in general. Food sharing has for some time been considered an integral part of earliest human society (e.g. Washburn and DeVore, 1961). Jane Goodall (1971) and Richard Leakey (1978), among others, have concluded that it was the key element in establishing our uniquely Homo development at least as early as two million years ago. This emphasis, carried forward since the early '70s by Linton, Zihiman, Tanner, and Isaac, has become ascendant. One of the telling arguments in favour of the co-operation thesis, as against that of generalised violence and male domination, involves a diminishing, during early evolution, of the difference in size and strength between males and females. Sexual dimorphism, as it is called, was originally very pronounced, including such features as prominent canines or 'fighting teeth' in males and much smaller canines for the female. The disappearance of large male canines strongly suggests that the female of the species exercised a selection for sociable, sharing males. Most apes today have significantly longer and larger canines, male to female, in the absence of this female choice capacity (Zihiman 1981, Tanner 1981).

Division of labour between the sexes is another key area in human beginnings, a condition once simply taken for granted and expressed by the term hunter-gatherer. Now it is widely accepted that gathering of plant foods, once thought to be the exclusive domain of women and of secondary importance to hunting by males, constituted the main food source (Johansen and Shreeve 1989). Since females were not significantly dependent on males for food (Hamilton 1984), it seems likely that rather than division of labour, flexibility and joint activity would have been central (Bender 1989). As Zihiman (1981) points out, an overall behavioural flexibility may have been the primary ingredient in early human existence. Joan Gero (1991) has demonstrated that stone tools were as likely to have been made by women as by men, and indeed Poirier (1987) reminds us that there is "no archaeological evidence supporting the contention that early humans exhibited a sexual division of labour." It is unlikely that food collecting involved much, if any, division of labour (Slocum 1975) and probably that sexual specialisation came quite late in human evolution (Zihiman 1981, Crader and Isaac 1981).

So if the adaptation that began our species centred on gathering, when did hunting come in? Binford (1984) has argued that there is no indication of use of animal products (i.e. evidence of butchery practices) until the appearance, relatively quite recent, of anatomically modern humans. Electron microscope studies of fossil teeth found in East Africa (Walker 1984) suggest a diet composed primarily of fruit, while a similar examination of stone tools from a 1.5-million-year-old site at Koobi Fora in Kenya (Keeley and Toth 1981) shows that they were used on plant materials. The small amount of meat in the early Palaeolithic diet was probably scavenged, rather than hunted (Ehrenberg 1989b).

The 'natural' condition of the species was evidently a diet made up largely of vegetables rich in fibre, as opposed to the modern high fat and animal protein diet with its attendant chronic disorders (Mendeloff 1977). Though our early forbears employed their "detailed knowledge of the environment and cognitive mapping" (Zihiman 1981) in the service of a plant gathering subsistence, the archaeological evidence for hunting appears to slowly increase with time (Hodder 1991).

Much evidence, however, has overturned assumptions as to widespread prehistoric hunting. Collections of bones seen earlier as evidence of large kills of mammals, for example, have turned out to be, upon closer examination, the results of movement by flowing water or caches by animals. Lewis Binford's "Were There Elephant Hunters at Tooralba?" (1989) is a good instance of such a closer look, in which he doubts there was significant hunting until 200,000 years ago or sooner. Adrienne Zihiman (1981) has concluded that "hunting arose relatively late in evolution," and "may not extend beyond the last one hundred thousand years." And there are many (e.g. Straus 1986, Trinkhaus 1986) who do not see evidence for serious hunting of large mammals until even later, viz. the later Upper Palaeolithic, just before the emergence of agriculture.

The oldest known surviving artifacts are stone tools from Hadar in eastern Africa. With more refined dating methods, they may prove to be 3.1 million years old (Klein 1989). Perhaps the main reason these may be classified as representing human effort is that they involve the crafting of one tool by using another, a uniquely human attribute so far as we know. Homo habilis, or 'handy man,' designates what has been thought of as the first known human species, its name reflecting association with the earliest stone tools (Coppens 1989). Basic wooden and bone implements, though more perishable and thus scantily represented in the archaeological record, were also used by Homo habilis as part of a "remarkably simple and effective" adaptation in Africa and Asia (Fagan 1990). Our ancestors at this stage had smaller brains and bodies than we do, but Poirier (1987) notes that "their postcranial anatomy was rather like modern humans," and Holloway (1972, 1974) allows that his studies of cranial endocasts from this period indicate a basically modern brain organisation. Similarly, tools older than two million years have been found to exhibit a consistent right-handed orientation in the ways stone has been flaked off in their formation. Right-handedness as a tendency is correlated in moderns with such distinctly human features as pronounced lateralization of the brain and marked functional separation of the cerebral hemispheres (Holloway 1981a). Klein (1989) concludes that "basic human cognitive and communicational abilities are almost certainly implied."

Homo erectus is the other main predecessor to Homo Sapiens, according to long-standing usage, appearing about 1.75 million years ago as humans moved out of forests into drier, more open African grasslands. Although brain-size alone does not necessarily correlate with mental capacity, the cranial capacity of Homo erectus overlaps with that of moderns such that this species "must have been capable of many of the same behaviours" (Ciochon, Olsen and Tames 1990). As Johanson and Edey (1981) put it, "If the largest brained erectus were to be rated against the smallest brained Sapiens-all their other characteristics ignored-their species names would have to be reversed." Homo Neanderthalus, which immediately preceded us, possessed brains somewhat larger than our own (Delson 1985, Holloway 1985, Donald 1991). Though of course the much maligned Neanderthal has been pictured as a primitive, brutish creature-in keeping with the prevailing Hobbesian ideology-despite manifest intelligence as well as enormous physical strength (Shreeve 1991).

Recently, however, the whole species framework has become a doubtful proposition (Day 1987, Rightmire 1990). Attention has been drawn to the fact that fossil specimens from various Homo species "all show intermediate morphological traits," leading to suspicion of an arbitrary division of humanity into separate taxa (Gingerich 1979, Tobias 1982). Fagan (1989), for example, tells us that "it is very hard to draw a clear taxonomic boundary between Homo erectus and archaic Homo Sapiens on the one hand, and between archaic and anatomically modern Homo Sapiens on the other." Likewise, Foley (1989): "the anatomical distinctions between Homo erectus and Homo Sapiens are not great." Jelinek (1978) flatly declares that "there is no good reason, anatomical or cultural" for separating erectus and Sapiens into two species, and has concluded (1980a) that people -from at least the Middle Palaeolithic onward "may be viewed as Homo Sapiens" (as does Hublin 1986). The tremendous upward revision of early intelligence, discussed below, must be seen as connected to the present confusion over species, as the once-prevailing overall evolutionary model gives way.

But the controversy over species categorisation is only interesting in the context of how our earliest forbears lived. Despite the minimal nature of what could be expected to survive so many millennia, we can glimpse some of the texture of that life, with its often elegant, pre-division of labour approaches. The 'tool kit' from the Olduvai Gorge area made famous by the Leakeys contains "at least six clearly recognisable tool types" dating from about 1.7 million years ago (M. Leakey, 1978). There soon appeared the Acheulian handaxe, with its symmetrical beauty, in use for about a million years. Teardrop-shaped, and possessed of a remarkable balance, it exudes grace and utility from an era much prior to symbolisation. Isaac (1986) noted that "the basic needs for sharp edges that humans have can be met from the varied range of forms generated from 'Oldowan' patterns of stone flaking," wondering how it came to be thought that "more complex equals better adapted." In this distant early time, according to cut-marks found on surviving bones, humans were using scavenged animal sinews and skins for such things as cord, bags, and rugs (Gowlett 1984). Further evidence suggests furs for cave wall coverings and seats, and seaweed beds for sleeping (Butzer 1970).

The use of fire goes back almost two million years (Kempe 1988) and might have appeared even earlier but for the tropical conditions of humanity's original African homeland, as Poirier (1987) implies. Perfected fire-making included the firing of caves to eliminate insects and heated pebble floors (Perles 1975, Lumley 1976), amenities that show up very early in the Palaeolithic.

As John Gowlett (1986) notes, there are still some archaeologists who consider anything earlier than Homo sapiens- a mere 30,000 years ago-as greatly more primitive than we "fully human" types. But along with the documentation, referred to above, of fundamentally 'modern' brain anatomy even in early humans, this minority must now contend with recent work depicting complete human intelligence as present virtually with the birth of the Homo Species. Thomas Wynn (1985) judged manufacture of the Acheulian handaxe to have required "a stage of intelligence that is typical of fully modern adults." Gowlett, like Wynn, examines the required "operational thinking" involved in the right hammer, the right force and the right striking angle, in an ordered sequence and with flexibility needed for modifying the procedure. He contends that manipulation, concentration, visualisation of form in three dimensions, and planning were needed, and that these requirements "were the common property of early human beings as much as two million years ago, and this," he adds, "is hard knowledge, not speculation."

During the vast time-span of the Palaeolithic, there were remarkably few changes in technology (Rolland 1990). Innovation, "over 2.5 million years measured in stone tool development was practically nil," according to Gerhard Kraus (1990). Seen in the light of what we now know of prehistoric intelligence, such 'stagnation' is especially vexing to many social scientists. "It is difficult to comprehend such slow development," in the judgment of Wymer (1989). It strikes me as very plausible that intelligence, informed by the success and satisfaction of a gatherer-hunter existence, is the very reason for the pronounced absence of 'progress'. Division of labour, domestication, symbolic culture-these were evidently refused until very recently. Contemporary thought, in its post-modern incarnation, would like to rule out the reality of a divide between nature and culture; given the abilities present among people before civilisation, however, it may be more accurate to say that, basically, they long chose nature over culture. It is also popular to see almost every human act or object as symbolic (e.g. Botscharow 1989), a position which is, generally speaking, part of the denial of a nature versus culture distinction. But it is culture as the manipulation of basic symbolic forms that is involved here. It also seems clear that reified time, language (written, certainly, and probably spoken language for all or most of this period), number, and art had no place, despite an intelligence fully capable of them.

I would like to interject, in passing, my agreement with Goldschmidt (1990) that "the hidden dimension in the construction of the symbolic world is time." And as Norman O. Brown put it, "life not repressed is not in historical time," which I take as a reminder that time as a materiality is not inherent in reality, but a cultural imposition, perhaps the first cultural imposition, on it. As this elemental dimension of symbolic culture progresses, so does, by equal steps, alienation from the natural.

Cohen (1974) has discussed symbols as "essential for the development and maintenance of social order." Which implies - as does, more forcefully, a great deal of positive evidence - that before the emergence of symbols there was no condition of dis-order requiring them. In a similar vein, Levi-Strauss (1953) pointed out that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution." So whence the absence of order, the conflicts or 'oppositions'? The literature on the Paleolithic contains almost nothing that deals with this essential question, among thousands of monographs on specific features. A reasonable hypothesis, in my opinion, is that division of labour, unnoticed because of its glacially slow pace, and not sufficiently understood because of its newness, began to cause small fissures in the human community and unhealthy practices vis-_-vis nature. In the later Upper Palaeolithic, "15,000 years ago, we begin to observe specialised collection of plants in the Middle East, and specialised hunting," observed Gowlett (1984). The sudden appearance of symbolic activities (e.g. ritual and art) in the Upper Palaeolithic has definitely seemed to archaeologists one of prehistory's "big surprises" (Binford 1972b), given the absence of such behaviours in the Middle Palaeolithic (Foster 1990, Koziowski 1990). But signs of division of labour and specialisation were making their presence felt as a breakdown of wholeness and natural order, a lack that needed redressing. What is surprising is that this transition to civilisation can still be seen as benign. Foster (1990) seems to celebrate it by concluding that the "symbolic mode...has proved extraordinarily adaptive, else why has Homo Sapiens become material master of the world?" He is certainly correct, as he is to recognise "the manipulation of symbols [to be] the very stuff of culture," but he appears oblivious to the fact that this successful adaptation has brought alienation and destruction of nature along to their present horrifying prominence.

It is reasonable to assume that the symbolic world originated in the formulation of language, which somehow appeared from a "matrix of extensive non-verbal communication" (Tanner and Zihiman 1976) and face-to-face contact. There is no agreement as to when language began, but no evidence exists of speech before the cultural 'explosion' of the later Upper Palaeolithic (Dibble 1984, 1989). It seems to have acted as an "inhibiting agent," a way of bringing life under "greater control" (Mumford 1972), stemming the flood of images and sensations to which the pre-modern individual was open. In this sense it would have likely marked an early turning away from a life of openness and communion with nature, toward one more oriented to the overlordship and domestication that followed symbolic culture's inauguration. It is probably a mistake, by the way, to assume that thought is advanced (if there were such a thing as 'neutral' thought, whose advance could be universally appreciated) because we actually think in language; there is no conclusive evidence that we must do so (Allport 1983). There are many cases (Lecours and Joanette 1980, Levine et al. 1982), involving stroke and like impairments, of patients who have lost speech, including the ability to talk silently to themselves, who were fully capable of coherent thought of all kinds. These data strongly suggest that "human intellectual skill is uniquely powerful, even in the absence of language" (Donald 1991).

The start of an appreciation of domestication, or taming of nature, is seen in a cultural ordering of the wild, through ritual. Evidently, the female as a cultural category, viz. seen as wild or dangerous, dates from this period. The ritual 'Venus' figurines appear as of 25,000 years ago, and seem to be an example of earliest symbolic likeness of women for the purpose of representation and control (Hodder 1990). Even more concretely, subjugation of the wild occurs at this time in the first systematic hunting of large mammals; ritual was an integral part of this activity (Hammond 1974, Frison 1986). Ritual, as shamanic practice, may also be considered as a regression from that state in which all shared a consciousness we would now classify as extrasensory (Leonard 1972).When specialists alone claim access to such perceptual heights as may have been once communal, further backward moves in division of labour are facilitated or enhanced. The way back to bliss through ritual is a virtually universal mythic theme, promising the dissolution of measurable time, among other joys. This theme of ritual points to an absence that it falsely claims to fill, as does symbolic culture in general.

Ritual as a means of organising emotions, a method of cultural direction and restraint, introduces art, a facet of ritual expressiveness (Bender 1989). "There can be little doubt," to Gans (1985), "that the various forms of secular art derive originally from ritual." We can detect the beginning of an unease, a feeling that an earlier, direct authenticity is departing. La Barre (1972), I believe, is correct in judging that "art and religion alike arise from unsatisfied desire." At first, more abstractly as language, then more purposively as ritual and art, culture steps in to deal artificially with spiritual and social anxiety.

The emergence of symbolic culture, with its inherent will to manipulate and control, soon opened the door to domestication of nature. After two million years of human life within the bounds of nature, in balance with other wild species, agriculture changed our lifestyle, our way of adapting, in an unprecedented way. Never before has such a radical change occurred in a species so utterly and so swiftly (Pfeiffer 1977). Self-domestication through language, ritual, and art inspired the taming of plants and animals that followed. Appearing only 10,000 years ago, farming quickly triumphed; for control, by its very nature, invites intensification. Once the will to production broke through, it became more productive the more efficiently it was exercised, and hence more ascendant and adaptive.

Agriculture enables greatly increased division of labour, establishes the material foundations of social hierarchy, and initiates environmental destruction. Priests, kings, drudgery, sexual inequality, warfare are a few of its fairly immediate specific consequences (Ehrenberg 1986b, Wymer 1981, Festinger 1983). Whereas Palaeolithic peoples enjoyed a highly varied diet, using several thousand species of plants for food, with farming these sources were vastly reduced (White 1959, Gouldie 1986).

Given the intelligence and the very great practical knowledge of Stone Age humanity, the question has often been asked, "Why didn't agriculture begin, at say, 1,000,000 B.C. rather than about 8,000 B.C.?" I have provided a brief answer in terms of slowly accelerating alienation in the form of division of labour and symbolisation, but given how negative the results were, it is still a bewildering phenomenon. Thus, as Binford (1968) put it, "The question to be asked is not why agriculture...was not developed everywhere, but why it was developed at all." The end of gatherer-hunter life brought a decline in size, stature, and skeletal robusticity (Cohen and Armelagos 1981, Harris and Ross 1981), and introduced tooth decay, nutritional deficiencies, and most infectious diseases (Larsen 1982, Buikstra 1976a, Cohen 1981). "Taken as a whole...an overall decline in the quality - and probably the length - of human life," concluded Cohen and Armelagos (1981).

Another outcome was the invention of number, unnecessary before the ownership of crops, animals, and land that is one of agriculture's hallmarks. The development of number further impelled the urge to treat nature as something to be dominated. Writing was also required by Domestication, for the earliest business transactions and political administration (Larsen 1988). Levi-Strauss has argued persuasively that the primary function of written communication was to facilitate exploitation and subjugation (1955); cities and empires, for example, would be impossible without it. Here we see clearly the joining of the logic of symbolisation and the growth of capital.

Conformity, repetition, and regularity were the keys to civilisation upon its triumph, replacing the spontaneity, enchantment, and discovery of the pre-agricultural human state that survived so very long. Clark (1979) cites a gatherer-hunter "amplitude of leisure," deciding "it was this and the pleasurable way of life that went with it, rather than penury and a day-long grind, that explains why social life remained so static." One of the most enduring and, widespread myths is that there was once a Golden Age, characterised by peace and innocence, and that something happened to destroy this idyll and consign us to misery and suffering. Eden, or whatever name it goes by, was the home of our primeval forager ancestors, and expresses the yearning of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.

The once-rich environs people inhabited prior to domestication and agriculture are now virtually non-existent. For the few remaining foragers there exist only the most marginal lands, those isolated places as yet unwanted by agriculture. And surviving gatherer-hunters, who have somehow managed to evade civilisation's tremendous pressures to turn them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political subjects, wage labourers), have all been influenced by contact with outside peoples (Lee 1976, Mithen 1990).

Duffy (1984) points out that the present day gatherer-hunters he studied, the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa, have been acculturated by surrounding villager-agriculturists for hundreds of years, and to some extent, by generations of contact with government authorities and missionaries. And yet it seems that an impulse toward authentic life can survive down through the ages. "Try to imagine," he counsels, "a way of life where land, shelter, and food are free, and where there are no leaders, bosses, politics, organised crime, taxes, or laws. Add to this the benefits of being part of a society where everything is shared, where there are no rich people and no poor people, and where happiness does not mean the accumulation of material possessions." The Mbuti have never domesticated animals or planted crops.

Among the members of non-agriculturist bands resides a highly sane combination of little work and material abundance. Bodley (1976) discovered that the San (a.k.a. Bushmen), of the harsh Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, work fewer hours, and fewer of their number work, than do the neighbouring cultivators. In times of drought, moreover, it has been the San to whom the farmers have turned for their survival (Lee 1968). They spend "strikingly little time labouring and much time at rest and leisure," according to Tanaka (1980), while others (e.g. Marshall 1976, Guenther 1976) have commented on San vitality and freedom compared with sedentary farmers, their relatively secure and easygoing life.

Flood (1983) noted that to Australian aborigines "the labour involved in tilling and planting outweighed the possible advantages." Speaking more generally, Tanaka (1976) has pointed to the abundant and stable plant foods in the society of early humanity, just as "they exist in every modern, gatherer society." Likewise, Festinger (1983) referred Palaeolithic access to "considerable food without a great deal of effort," adding that "contemporary groups that still Iive on hunting and gathering do very well, even though they have been pushed into very marginal habitats." As Hole and Flannery (1963) summarised: "No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing." They have much more free time, adds Binford (1968), "than do modern industrial or farm workers, or even professors of archaeology."

The non-domesticated know that, as Vaneigem (1975) put it, only the present can be total. This by itself means that they live life with incomparably greater immediacy, density and passion than we do. It has been said that some revolutionary days are worth centuries; until then "We look before and after," as Shelley wrote, "And sigh for what is not...."

The Mbuti believe (Turnbull 1976) that "by a correct fulfilment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves." Primitive peoples do not live through memories, and generally have no interest in birthdays or measuring their ages (Cipriani 1966). As for the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire to control nature. Their moment-by- moment joining with the flux and flow of the natural world does not preclude an awareness of the seasons, but this does not constitute an alienated time consciousness that robs them of the present.

Though contemporary gatherer-hunters eat more meat than their prehistoric forbears, vegetable foods still constitute the main stay of their diet in tropical and subtropical region (Lee 1968a, Yellen and Lee 1976). Both the Kalahari San and the Hazda of East Africa, where game is more abundant than in the Kalahari, rely on gathering for eighty percent of their sustenance (Tanaka 1980). The !Kung branch of the San search for more than a hundred different kinds of plants (Thomas 1968) and exhibit no nutritional deficiency (Truswell and Hansen 1976). This is similar to the healthful, varied diet of Australian foragers (Fisher 1982, Flood 1983). The overall diet of gatherers is better than that of cultivators, starvation is very rare, and their health status generally superior, with much less chronic disease (Lee and Devore 1968a, Ackerman 1990).

Lauren van der Post (1958) expressed wonder at the exuberant San laugh, which rises "sheer from the stomach, a laugh you never hear among civilised people." He found this emblematic of a great vigour and clarity of senses that yet manages to withstand and elude the onslaught of civilisation. Truswell and Hansen (1976) may have encountered it in the person of a San who had survived an unarmed fight with a leopard; although injured, he had killed the animal with his bare hands.

The Andaman Islanders, west of Thailand, have no leaders, no idea of symbolic representation, and no domesticated animals. There is also an absence of aggression, violence, and disease; wounds heal surprisingly quickly, and their sight and hearing are particularly acute. They are said to have declined since European intrusion in the mid-19th century, but exhibit other such remarkable physical traits as a natural immunity to malaria, skin with sufficient elasticity to rule out post childbirth stretch marks and the wrinkling we associate with aging, and an 'unbelievable' strength of teeth: Cipriani (1966) reported seeing children of 10 to 15 years crush nails with them. He also testified to the Andamese practice of collecting honey with no protective clothing at all; "yet they are never stung, and watching them one felt in the presence of some age-old mystery, lost by the civilised world." DeVries (1952) has cited a wide range of contrasts by which the superior health of gatherer-hunters can be established, including an absence of degenerative diseases, mental disabilities, and childbirth without difficulty or pain. He also points out that this begins to erode from the moment of contact with civilisation.

Relatedly, there is a great deal of evidence not for only physical and emotional vigour among primitives but also concerning their heightened sensory abilities. Darwin described people at the southernmost tip of South America who went about almost naked in frigid conditions, while Peasley (1983) observed Aborigines who were renowned for their ability to live through bitterly cold desert nights "without any form of clothing." Levi-Strauss (1979) was astounded to learn of a particular [South American) tribe which was able to "see the planet Venus in full daylight," a feat comparable to that of the North African Dogon who consider Sirius B the most important star; somehow aware without instruments, of a star that can only be found with the most powerful of telescopes (Temple 1976). In this vein Boyden (1970) recounted the Bushman ability to see four of the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye.

"Not even the father of an extended family can tell his sons and daughters what to do. Most people appear to operate on their own internal schedules," reported Lee (1972) of the !Kung of Botswana. Ingold (1987) judged that "in most hunting & gathering societies, a supreme value is placed upon the principle of individual autonomy," similar to Wilson's finding (1988) of "an ethic of independence" that is "common to the focused open societies." The esteemed field anthropologist Radin (1953) went so far as to say: "Free scope is allowed for every conceivable kind of personal outlet or expression in primitive society. No moral judgment is passed on any aspect of human personality as such."

Turnbull (1976) looked on the structure of Mbuti social life as "an apparent vacuum, a lack of internal system that is almost anarchical." According to Duffy (1984), "the Mbuti are naturally acephalous--they do not have leaders or rulers, and decisions concerning the band are made by consensus." There is an enormous qualitative difference between foragers and farmers in this regard, as in so many others. For instance, agricultural Bantu tribes (e.g. the Saga) surround the San, and are organised by kingship, hierarchy and work; the San exhibit egalitarianism, autonomy, and sharing. Domestication is the principle which accounts for this drastic distinction.

When progressive estrangement from nature became outright social control (agriculture), more than just social attitudes changed. Descriptions by sailors and explorers who arrived in "newly discovered" regions tell how wild mammals and birds originally showed no fear at all of the human invaders (Brock 1981). A few contemporary gatherers practised no hunting before outside contact, e.g. the Tasaday of the Philippines (Nance 1975), but while the majority certainly do hunt, "it is not normally an aggressive act" (Rohrlich-Leavitt 1976). Turnbull (1965) observed Mbuti hunting as quite without any aggressive spirit, even carried out with a sort of regret. Hewitt (1986) reported a sympathy bond between hunter and hunted among the Xan Bushmen he encountered in the 19th century.

The development of symbolic culture, which rapidly led to agriculture, is linked through ritual to alienated social life among extant foraging groups. Bloch (1977) found a correlation between levels of ritual and hierarchy. Put negatively, Woodburn (1968) could see the connection between an absence of ritual and the absence of specialised roles and hierarchy among the Hazda of Tanzania. Turner's study of the west African Ndembu (1957) revealed a profusion of ritual structures and ceremonies intended to redress the conflicts arising from the breakdown of an earlier, more seamless society. These ceremonies and structures function in a politically integrative way. Ritual is a repetitive activity for which outcomes and responses are essentially assured by social contract; it conveys the message that symbolic practice, via group membership and social rules, provides control (Cohen 1985). Ritual fosters the concept of control domination, and has been seen to tend toward leadership roles (Hitchcock 1982) and centralised political structure (Lourandos 1985). A monopoly of ceremonial institutions clearly extends the concept of authority (Bender 1978), and may itself be the original formal authority.

Among agricultural tribes of New Guinea, leadership and the inequality it implies are based upon participation in hierarchies of ritual initiation or upon shamanistic spirit-mediumship (Kelly 1977, Modjeska 1982). In the role of shamans we see a concrete practice of ritual as it contributes to domination in human society.

Berndt (1974a) has discussed the importance among Aborigines of ritual sexual division of labour in the development of negative sex roles, while Randolph (1988) comes straight to the point: "Ritual activity is needed to create 'proper' men and women." There is "no reason in nature" for gender divisions, argues Bender (1989). "They have to be created by proscription and taboo, they have to be 'naturalised' through ideology and ritual." But gatherer-hunter societies, by their very nature, deny ritual its potential to domesticate women. The structure (non-structure?) of egalitarian bands, even those most oriented toward hunting, includes a guarantee of autonomy to both sexes. This guarantee is the fact that the materials of subsistence are equally available to women and men and that, further, the success of the band is dependent on co-operation based on that autonomy (Leacock 1978, Friedl 1975). The spheres of the sexes are often somewhat separate, but inasmuch as the contribution of women is generally at least equal to that of men, social equality of the sexes is "a key feature of forager societies" (Ehrenberg 1989b). Many anthropologists, in fact, have found the status of women in forager groups to be higher than in any other type of society (e.g. Fluer-Lobban 1979, Rohrlich-Leavitt, Sykes and Weatherford 1975, Leacock 1978).

In all major decisions, observed Turnbull (1970) of the Mbuti, "men and women have equal say, hunting and gathering being equally important." He made it clear (1981) that there is sexual differentiation--probably a good deal more than was the case with their distant forbears--"but without any sense of superordination or subordination." Men actually work more hours than women among the !Kung, according to Post and Taylor (1984). It should be added, in terms of the division of labour common among contemporary gatherer-hunters, that this differentiation of roles is by no means universal. Nor was it when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, of the Fenni of the Baltic region, that "the women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men...and count their lot happier than that of others who groan over field labour." Or when Procopius found, in the 6th century A.D., that the Serithifinni of what is now Finland "neither till the land themselves, nor do their women work it for them, but the women regularly join the men in hunting."

Darwin (1871) found another aspect of sexual equality:"...in utterly barbarous tribes the women have more power in choosing, rejecting, and tempting their lovers, or of afterwards changing their husbands, than might have been expected." The !Kung Bushmen and Mbuti exemplify this female autonomy, as reported by Marshall (1959) and Thomas (1965); "Women apparently leave a man whenever they are unhappy with their marriage," concluded Begler (1978). Marshall (1970) also found that rape was extremely rare or absent among the !Kung.

An intriguing phenomenon concerning gatherer-hunter women is their ability to prevent pregnancy in the absence of any contraception (Silberbauer 1981). Many hypotheses have been put forth and debunked, e.g. conception somehow related to levels of body fat (Frisch 1974, Leibowitz 1986). What seems a very plausible explanation is based on the fact that undomesticated people are very much more in tune with their physical selves. Foraging women's senses and processes are not alienated from themselves or dulled; control over childbearing is probably less than mysterious to those whose bodies are not foreign objects to be acted upon.

The Pygmies of Zaire celebrate the first menstrual period of every girl with a great festival of gratitude and rejoicing (Turnbull 1962). The young woman feels pride and pleasure, and the entire band expresses its happiness. Among agricultural villagers, however, a menstruating woman is regarded as unclean and dangerous, to be quarantined by taboo (Duffy 1984). The relaxed, egalitarian relationship between San men and women, with its flexibility of roles and mutual respect impressed Draper (1971, 1972, 1975); a relationship, she made clear, that endures as long as they remain gatherer- hunters and no longer.

Duffy (1984) found that each child in an Mbuti camp calls every man father and every woman mother. Forager children receive far more care, time, and attention than do those in civilisation's isolated nuclear families. Post and Taylor (1984) described the "almost permanent contact" with their mothers and other adults that Bushman children enjoy. !Kung infants studied by Ainsworth (1967) showed marked precocity of early cognitive and motor skills development. This was attributed both to the exercise and stimulation produced by unrestricted freedom of movement, and to the high degree of physical warmth and closeness between !Kung parents and children (see also Konner 1976)

Coontz and Henderson (1986) point to a growing body of evidence in support of the proposition that relations between the sexes are most egalitarian in the simplest foraging societies. Women play an essential role in traditional agriculture, but receive no corresponding status for their contribution, unlike the case of gatherer-hunter society (Chevillard and Leconte 1986, Whyte 1978). As with plants and animals, so are women subject to domestication with the coming of agriculture. Culture, securing its foundations with the new order, requires the firm subjugation of instinct, freedom, and sexuality. All dis-order must be banished, the elemental and spontaneous taken firmly in hand. Women's creativity and their very being as sexual persons are pressured to give way to the role, expressed in all peasant religions, of Great Mother, that is, fecund breeder of men and food.

Tribal conflicts, Godelier (1977) argues, are "explainable primarily by reference to colonial domination" and should not be seen as having an origin "in the functioning of precolonial structures." Certainly contact with civilisation can have an unsettling, degenerative effect, but Godelier's Marxism (viz. unwillingness to question domestication/production), is, one suspects, relevant to such a judgment. Thus it could be said that the Copper Eskimos, who have a significant incidence of homicide within their group (Damas 1972), owe this violence to the impact of outside influences, but their reliance on domesticated dogs should also be noted.

Sahlins (1972) spoke of this eloquently: "The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation."

The "common tendency" of gatherer-hunters "to reject farming until it was absolutely thrust upon them" (Bodley1976) bespeaks a nature/culture divide also present in the Mbuti recognition that if one of them becomes a villager he is no longer an Mbuti (Turnbull 1976). They know that forager band and agriculturist village are opposed societies with opposed values.

At times, however, the crucial factor of domestication can be lost sight of. "The historic foraging populations of the Western Coast of North America have long been considered anomalous among foragers," declared Cohen (1981); as Kelly (1991) also put it, "tribes of the Northwest Coast break all the stereotypes of hunter-gatherers." These foragers, whose main sustenance is fishing, have exhibited such alienated features as chiefs, hierarchy, warfare and slavery. But almost always overlooked are their domesticated tobacco and domesticated dogs. Even this celebrated 'anomaly' contains features of domestication. Its practice, from ritual to production, with various accompanying forms of domination, seems to anchor and promote the facets of decline from an earlier state of grace.

Thomas (1981) provides another North American example, that of the Great Basin Shoshones and three of their component societies, the Kawich Mountain Shoshones, Reese River Shoshones, and Owens Valley Paiutes. The three groups showed distinctly different levels of agriculture, with increasing territoriality or ownership and hierarchy closely corresponding to higher degrees of domestication. To 'define' a disalienated world would be impossible and even undesirable, but I think we can and should try to reveal the unworld of today and how it got this way. We have taken a monstrously wrong turn with symbolic culture and division of labour, from a place of enchantment, understanding and wholeness to the absence we find at the heart of the doctrine of progress. Empty and emptying, the logic of domestication, with its demand to control everything, now shows us the ruin of the civilisation that ruins the rest. Assuming the inferiority of nature enables the domination of cultural systems that soon will make the very earth uninhabitable.

Postmodernism says to us that a society without power relations can only be an abstraction (Foucault, 1982). This is a lie unless we accept the death of nature and renounce what once was and what we can find again. Turnbull spoke of the intimacy between Mbuti people and the forest, dancing almost as if making love to the forest. In the bosom of a life of equals that is no abstraction, that struggles to endure, they were "dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon " {The spelling mistakes etc are probably not the fault of the author.

John Zerzan is the author of Future Primitive (1994, Autonomedia)

"Roots and Culture"

2008-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

"Roots and Culture"

The frequently used hendiadys, 'Roots and Culture', is a fundamental concept in Rastafari. Essentially, it promotes the awareness of one's cultural and spiritual heritage - a theme that can be relevant to every individual, whatever his or her background.

It is often said, If you don't know where you're coming from, you won't know where you're going. For Black Africans exiled for generations in the Caribbean, the rediscovery of an ancient and noble heritage has enabled a re-evaluation of their own identity, and encouraged them to break the shackles of the slave mentality and aspire to the heights of a glorious African past.

The Rastafarian dream of repatriation is closely linked to the rediscovery of one's roots. Traditionally, repatriation was seen in very literal terms of travelling back to Africa, to the homeland of Black ancestors who were forcefully removed during the years of the slave trade.

However, as Rastafarian practice becomes increasingly diverse, this geographically limited concept has necessarily grown to accommodate the aspirations of non Africans, who frequently interpret 'repatriation' in metaphorical or specifically spiritual terms, as the urge to leave behind the snare of temptation and negative feeling ('Babylon') in an effort to return to a purer and cleaner state of mind ('Zion').

Today, anthropologists tell us that Africa was the true cradle of humankind. This seems to evoke a very deep emotional response in many people, even in those who are not of recent African descent. It is easy to dismiss this feeling as a projection of a romanticised ideal of the primordial earthly paradise. But such a widespread resurgence of interest in all things African may suggest some lingering consciousness of a universal African aboriginal identity of humankind.

As the roots of a plant anchor it in the ground and give it stability, the knowledge of one's cultural and spiritual heritage gives a sure foundation on which to build one's sense of identity. It may also engender deep feelings of appreciation, admiration and respect for those who have gone before and helped to shape our modern world. Thus it may reverse the current trend of dismissing our ancestors as simple minded folk who believed in magic and miracles and the sacredness of things, so that perhaps ultimately we can learn from them important and refreshing lessons for our secular age.

The prevailing assumption in the west that progress demands us to turn our backs on the past and look instead to the future has caused tradition, myth and ritual to be forgotten. Such ancient relics appear to have no relation to our present existence. We often speak of them being 'stuck in the past'. But the Rastafarian concept of roots and culture is based on a much more dynamic and flexible understanding of 'tradition' as living, constantly evolving, adaptive and adoptive, the collective experience of communities accumulated by successive generations since time immemorial.

If we look to the past which is known, rather than to the future which is unknown, we are not prone to suffer from blindness of vision, and so we gain a true sense of perspective in time, seeing our own place in history. The future need not surprise us unawares, for it is not substantially different from the past: tomorrow contains elements of yesterday and today.

Thus the past is the key to the future, just as the awareness of cultural roots is the key to society's progress, and the acknowledgement of one's spiritual roots in God is the key to mystical union with the Most High.

Concept of "Livity"

2008-12-02T09:06:00.001-08:00

Rastafari is often considered by its followers more a function of the heart and a way of life (a 'livity') than a religion. This may be influenced by a dislike for the negative connotations of the term 'religion', which today is often blamed for many wars and much hatred and misunderstanding. On this website, I have avoided referring to Rastafari as a 'religion', though undeniably it does have many 'religious' aspects.

Perhaps more important still is the implication that one does not 'convert' to become a Rastafarian; instead one simply lives the Rasta way of life, and hence remains essentially much truer to oneself and to God. The point is to set an example through righteous livity, rather than to waste time arguing over doctrines and dogmas of belief.

The word 'livity' is a very concise expression, embodying many of the key principles of Rastafari. At its core, it obviously contains the idea of 'life' or'living'. This is a major preoccupation in the very life-oriented Rasta tradition, with its pragmatic emphasis on acting to improve one's current situation rather than simply resigning oneself to Babylon and hoping for a better existence in the afterlife. The sacredness and assertive power of life are also closely linked to the very real presence of the 'living God', who always remains directly and intimately connected with people's everyday lives, for'Almighty God is a living man', never a distant impersonal force. Jah live!

Concept of "I and I"

2008-12-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

"I and I"

(sometimes spelled InI)

The ultimate expression of the uniquely Rastafarian concept of 'Inity' (unity) is the phrase 'I and I', which effectively replaces personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, etc), which are considered divisive.
As Bunny Wailer sings (in the song 'Armageddon'),

In the beginning
There was but one concept
And that's the concept of I.
Then arose Apollyon the Devil
Claiming that it's you and I.

Rastafarians seek to avoid any form of division, segregation, or disunity, including all 'isms and schisms' - hence, Rastas generally dislike the term 'Rastafarianism', preferring simply 'Rastafari'. Harmony and communion among fellow Idren (brethren and sistren) and between humankind and God are the ideals to be striven for. This is reflected in the Jamaican greeting and parting phrase 'One Love'.

'I and I' is an interesting part-contradiction of Freud's concept of the 'I' (ego). Normally, the name 'I' can only be used by the speaker to refer to him or herself. Moreover, the ability to consciously recognise oneself as an 'I', distinguishable from one's surroundings, seems to be a distinctively human characteristic, not shared by the animal, plant or mineral kingdoms. In contrast, 'I and I' can refer to any number of individuals, often being extended ad infinitum: I and I and I and I and I... and hence implying an 'endless circle of Inity'. Needless to say, such abolition of personal pronouns can lead to confusion! Hence one may hear also phrases such as 'the-I' ('you'), or 'I-man' ('I').

The syllable 'I' is one of the most frequently recurring in reggae songs, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the name 'Rastafari' itself ends with this same sound (at least in its English pronunciation; in Amharic, it is pronounced 'ras ta-fa-ree'). 'I' may replace an existing initial syllable of a word, or it may be suffixed, as in 'Zion-I'. This often lends a more sacred quality to words. Not surprisingly, the Roman numeral 'I' (one) appended to the name of the Emperor Haile Selassie I (implying 'the first') has come to be pronounced almost exclusively in the same way.

The distinctively Rastafarian phenomenon of incorporating the sound 'I' into words has become so widespread and well recognised as to be given its own term: 'I-word forming'. Naturally, it produces some obvious rhyme schemes in reggae lyrics, since the words Rastafari, Selassie I, I and I, Most I (High), Zion-I, and so on all end in the same sound. Other I-words you may meet include Idren (brethren and sistren), I-didate (meditate), Iley (highly), Imanity (humanity), Iration (creation), I-shence (incense, or herb), Ises (praises), I-story (history), Ital, Iternity (eternity), Itinually (continually), Itiopia(Ethiopia), Iwa (hour, time), Iyant (chant).

...May the I be iley blessed in Iternity, and Ises to the Most I! Yes-I!

The phrase 'I and I' also suggests the oneness of God (Jah) and humankind. Along these lines, the ancient German mystic Meister Eckhart said:

"If I am to know God directly,
I must become completely He and He I,
so that this He and this I become and are one I".

"Ital" Vegan Diet

2008-12-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

"Ital" Vegan Diet

The word Ital is most often used in the context of food. It usually means'pure' or 'natural' - that is, without additives of any sort, organically produced, and non-processed.

In theory, Ital is also strictly vegan, or at least vegetarian, though as with many aspects of Rastafari culture, there may be considerable diversity of practice. Hence, some Rastas have absolutely vegan and even salt-free diets, while others consume dairy products including eggs, and at least some also eat fish and even meats.

However, pork is generally avoided, in accordance with the Old Testament dietary restrictions. On similar lines, the Ital diet may also be linked strongly with the biblical Nazirite Vow, which requires abstinence from wine and other fermented drink.

Another scriptural verse that is often cited is 1 Corinthians 6:19, which speaks of the 'temple' of the human body. The idea that the physical body should be kept pure and holy as a temple for the Divine is a very ancient concept indeed, based on a paradox in which the part contains the whole, the finite contains the infinite, the microcosm contains the macrocosm. Today this idea appears to be re-emerging as a powerful metaphor in a number of modern religious movements. Abstaining from the intake of 'polluting' or 'defiling' substances is one important way of observing boundaries of respect for thesacred, just as is the case in spatial terms within an actual temple.

Fresh fruit and vegetables, including exotic varieties, are easily come by in Jamaica. Hence, the Ital diet seems an especially natural choice for Rastas living in the Caribbean. Moreover it fits very closely with the recommendations of modern health experts and dieticians, who advocate the timeless wisdom of such sayings as 'Nature knows best', and 'You are what you eat'.

At its best, Ital cuisine is anything but dull!

Tim Wise on White privilege

2008-11-02T09:27:00.000-08:00

Sibiri Samake Mali Music Donso wassoulou Mande

2008-10-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

Neba Solo - More Mali music

A US unified military command for Africa

2008-10-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

In February 2007, President Bush announced the creation of a unified military command for Africa.

But some experts suggest the command’s creation was motivated by more specific concerns: China and oil. With Soviet influence gone and France’s traditional presence much diminished, China has poured money into the continent in recent years as it jockeys for access to natural resources. And the United States is projected to import at least 25 percent of its oil from Africa by 2015, according to the National Intelligence Council.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/13255/

John Akpata - on the hemp plant

2008-10-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Part 2

2008-10-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

JAH Bless