:: The HSRC (The Human Sciences Research Council) of South Africa is a South African based research agency and open access publisher. With the stated purpose of “support[ing] the social science research community through a strong commitment to ‘opening access to quality social science in Africa” has free PDF downloads of some of their books.

Some titles worth checking out include:

::Education in Exile: SOMAFCO, the ANC school in Tanzania, 1978 to 1992

::Black Student Politics, Higher Education & Apartheid: From SASO to SANSCO, 1968-1990

::Stealing Empire: P2P, intellectual property and hip-hop subversion

::The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Land Rights: Case studies from Kenya

::The Land and Property Rights of Women and orphans in the context of HIV and AIDS: Case studies from Zimbabwe

Congratulations to Ushahidi as this excellent African project has won first prize at the Net Squared Challenge competition. This is one huge prize and just shows what can be done with little resources - where there is a will there is a way. They project now has $25,000 so there is no telling where this project will end.

Read more about the project and the prize at White African………..

Tags:
Ushahidi
Web 2.0 + Africa
Kenya

The West has been using Africa to dump it’s toxic waste and unwantables for years and continues despite being illegal since 1992. In 1998 the EU implemented a ban against exportation of hazardous waste the West. [the USA, Canada and New Zealand refused to sign]. Just after the Tsunami of December 2004, barrels of medical and chemical waste left on the shores of Somalia were broken open and the contents spilled. Some of the waste had been there since the early 80s when warlords received large payments from the West to dump the waste mainly from Switzerland and Italy. In the late 80s large amounts of toxic waste from Italy were found in Koko Beach, Delta State Nigeria resulting in burns, vomiting blood and partial paralysis by those who came into contact with the waste. In 2006 a Dutch ship dumped tons of caustic washings used to clean oil drums on Abidjan leaving people complaining of nausea, headaches and vomiting.

The dumping of toxic waste has been replaced by dumping of electronic waste, computers mobile phones which contain “cadmium, lead, mercury and other poisons”. In 2006 the Independent reported

Two years later the dumping continues. The figures are astounding. Each year the EU produces 8.7 million tons of E-waste of which 6.6 million tons leaves Europe each year - where does it go? Mainly to Africa and often under the guise of “charitable donantions” where it is left in landfills and ponds and where much of it is burnt sending out huge quantities of lead and mercury which then enter the food chain. The dumps become “working” areas for poor people mainly children searching for scraps of metal and other bits they can sell. Every month about 500,000 used computers are arriving in Lagos alone with only a small percentage working and the rest end up as toxic waste. NGOs, businesses, unscrupulous local businessmen but most of all the EU are all complicit in the trade of electronic waste arriving in West Africa from Europe as this video shows.

Links: Cheap Monkeys
; Bleeding toxins from dead PCs

Tags:
Toxic Waste
E-Waste + Nigeria
West Africa

A sentimental post

afropanavisions left this thoughtful comment on South Africa

I was so saddened, that the very people who received international solidarity to help bring about the end of the dreadful system of apartheid would turned into such monsters to hurt those who are foreign born.

What a sad day it is indeed.

Despite this there is still some sanity and wisdom to be found. Chinua Achebe on the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart……. I loved this interview - uplifting and full of gentleness and hope.

On bridging the Atlantic

Yes, well I’ll tell you another story. James Baldwin and I were invited to speak at an African literature conference somewhere in the South, and what Baldwin said in talking about me to the audience is that “This is a brother I had not seen for 400 years,” and people laughed. And he said that it was not intended that he and I should ever meet. That’s what you asked me. Part of the center of the plan was that we should not know each other. So that’s why our task is, in my view, so very important: that in spite of that intention to keep us apart, there will be some people who would refuse and insist on knowing their brothers and sisters who had been sold away and lost. There are some people who knew that it was important to discover them, and I’m not talking in the past, because the problem remains. There are so many of us on both sides of the Atlantic who do not know the importance of that recognition, that this is my brother, this is my sister, that their story is the same as my story. Whatever variations, it is basically the same story

On which character he would be in TFA

And so there are parts of me in different people. Perhaps the most moderate one, because moderation is important here. Okonkwo is a man of excess. I respect him as a hero, but a flawed hero. But very interesting, nevertheless; that’s why he is famous. Now, his friend, Obierika, is more moderate, the kind of person who would keep the house in order. And so if I had to be one person, if it’s not Ezinma it probably would be Obierika

On Nigeria

Nigeria is home. First of all, that’s what it means to me: it’s home. It’s a very frustrating home, a very annoying home, but it is my home. And if I had my way, that’s where this interview would be happening. But since it’s not gone that way, you know, I don’t believe in weeping over something. I think it’s more effective, more useful, to find what you can do rather than what you can’t do. So, Nigeria has such a wonderful possibility built into it, but it’s something it never uses. Talent. It would rather use a half-baked person rather than someone who is highly qualified. But that’s the country I’ve got.

On women

here is a misreading of my fiction in that complaint. I think many people think that what I’m doing is praising the position of women. It’s not; in fact, it’s very opposite. What I was doing was pointing out how unjust the Igbo society is to women. And how better to explore it than to make the hero of this story, Okonkwo…all his problems are problems to do with the feminine. There’s nothing else wrong with Okonkwo except his failure to understand that the gentleness, the compassion that we associate with women is even more important than strength. Now, people don’t understand why I am showing these women who are not in charge. I’m showing them that way because that’s how it is in this society I want to change. And that’s what Okonkwo was not able to learn, and I want others after him to learn it: that women, compassion, music…these things are as valuable—more valuable—than war and violence.

On Okonkwo

Yeah, it’s interesting how you put it. He has, and what I feel towards him is a sense of wonder and pity. Pity is probably not a good word because Okonkwo is a very dignified and proud person and would not like anyone to pity him. But I am sort of concerned that a major aspect of our human experience has to be suffering and failing to reach where you set out to go because of all kinds of things on the way. One day somebody came to me in the hospital after I had this accident, and the question he asked me was, “Why you? Why would this happen to you?” So I said—I didn’t think twice—I said to him, “Do you have an idea of somebody else to whom it should have happened?” What I was saying is that the world is tragic by nature. And that’s why tragic stories appeal to me, far more than happy and comic stories. Both the tragic and the comic are there in our lives, but somehow the tragic one, the Okonkwo kind of story, is the one that speaks most to us.

And the rest of wisdom……………….

Tags:
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
Nigeria + Literature

Kameelah adds to the discussion on xenophobia in South Africa by linking to a number of articles in Pambazuka News and by making a connection between the violence, poverty and global food crisis.

connected to this food crisis is the rise in violence against immigrants especially in south africa–joburg to be specific though cape town has had it’s share of anti-somali violence………….it certainly breaks my heart to see poor folks turn on each other rather than channeling this anger in a productive way that targets the people and institutions that are more responsible for this crisis than a 20-something zimbabwean fleeing mugabe. but in reality, having not eaten in two days and being unemployed for two months, i really cannot expect a town hall meeting and a civil discussion. folks are hungry and frustrated.

One of the articles in Pambazuka News by Owen Sichone, traces violences across the continent - Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda - and asks why anyone should be surprised over SA’s response to foreigners. The important point is that Sichone reiterates the connection between anti-immigration, poverty and social inequalities.

So why is Pius “confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid” ? Like the Biafrans, they have been let done by their leaders. Just look at post-elections Kenya and see the petty bourgeois selfishness that Museveni criticised in his own country and you will understand that South African leaders have not just keep silent about the support they received from the Frontline States (including Nigeria) but that they have not shared the national cake equitably. The inherited Brazilian style gap between rich and poor always creates violence in society. There is still apartheid in post apartheid South Africa and it is not just the foreign Africans who suffer. Indeed the Nigerian doctors and other professionals are more likely to be beneficiaries of the end of the apartheid system than the poor workers whose factories closed down because of the flood of cheaper Chinese goods onto a previously protected market and now have no hope of ever earning wages again.

So let us not portray South Africans as ignorant, ungrateful or just bloodthirsty. The only way to reverse xenophobia, whether in Nigeria, Russia or South Africa is by exposing its roots in social inequalities and joining the struggle against social injustice.

The reasons given by indigenous people for their dislike of immigrants is the same whether in South Africa, Britain, France or the US. They are taking our jobs, our women, they are responsible for increases in the crime rate, they walk off the plane / boat / bus and into a flat, they undermine our labour. Sit on a bus in London and watch when a Somali woman gets on with a pram and a toddler. The hostility is so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife and it’s not just white people who are hostile. The reality is so far from the myth, so how does the myth begin to dominate and feed the hostility and violence? The media creates and uses the myth to either attack one political party’s policies or support another, so in the UK you have a situation where the present Labour government is desperately trying to hold on to power and immigration is the ideal issue to latch on to because it feeds into people’s myths about why they don’t have a job or a flat. You only need one story in the Daily Mail about a Nigerian woman who “heard” you can get a flat easy with a child so went to Nigeria bought a baby for £150 and came back to get a council flat, for all immigrants to be crooks, liars and baby thieves and worse “Africans sell their babies!” Hating and blaming someone you see every day for your poverty is so much easier than facing up to the fact that you don’t have a flat because Thatcher sold everyone the idea of home ownership as opposed to social housing which was never replaced. And now there just isn’t enough to go around and never will be unless a government is elected that will start to build the millions of homes needed - in that sense the chickens cant roost cause they have no home to come back to.

Tags:
South Africa
Immigration