This time last year I was visiting Haiti and my host was Rea Dol and her family, all members of the Lavalas Movement and she herself co-founder of SOPUDEP school. SOPUDEP which created in 2001, is a private non-profit school that exists through the sheer determination of Rea and her colleagues. The school serves the poorest and most vulnerable children of the community of Petion-Ville since 2001. The children who attend SOPUDEP school would never have a chance at an education save for this wonderful project. Most of them also receive their only hot meal every school day through the school’s Hot Lunch Program. Given the latest rise in food prices and the hardship this has caused Haitian families, the Hot Lunch Program is an indispensable component SOPUDEP’s work in the community.

However the school has been the focus of unwanted attention and attempts to close it down by the authorities reminiscent of it’s orginal use during the Duvaliers period between 1956 to 1986, when it was home of a notorious Tonton Macoute, Lionel Woolly, known as “Little Eye, and included a torture chamber.

The school started with 160 children but there are now over 480. Initially it includes a government funding hot lunch programme for students and staff. For many this was their only meal of the day. When President Aristide was outstead in 2004 the programme was ended and the first attacks against the school began by various anti-Aristide and anti-Lavalas militias. Still the school has survived and in March this year the hot meal lunch programme began again.

This is what is happening:

For several months now, a variety of characters have appeared at the school to demand they vacate the premises. Some falsely stated they were descendants of the original owner but mostly it was an attempt to pressure the school by disrupting its normal operation. On Monday July 28, 2008, the Mayor of Petion-Ville, Lydie Clark Parent, delivered an eight (8) day eviction notice to SOPUDEP to vacate their school premises. This action is NOT legal as SOPUDEP has a 12-year lease on the property that expires in 2012. The school’s rights under this contract were ultimately respected by the Mayor’s office and the government of Latortue in 2004-2006 and has subsequently been recognized as valid by the Ministry of Education and the Preval administration.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2008, the SOPUDEP school will begin the procedure to file an injunction against Mayor Lydie Clark Parent and ask the court to uphold their binding 12-year lease at their current location. In an effort to show Mayor Parent and the Haitian court the importance of the SOPUDEP school, they ask that all people of goodwill and solidarity please write a letter expressing their support for the school and its more that 450 students. These letters will be critical to showing the wide-spread support SOPUDEP school has throughout the world in the coming days and weeks. Please take five minutes of your time as soon as possible and help save this wonderful resource for Haiti’s poorest children in Petion-Ville, Haiti by writing a letter on their behalf today!

Who is Lionel Wooley?

Lionel Wooley was an assassin for the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. In exchange for killing opponents of these repressive regimes in Haiti, he was allowed to steal the property of his victims and claim them as his own. In late 2000, Lionel Wooley died in exile in Miami and the government expropriated the properties he had stolen. Most were returned to the surviving members of the original victim’s families but a few had no known descendents. Among these few properties was a dilapidated mansion, burned and pillaged by an angry local community after the departure of Baby Doc. It is situated in the hills of Petion-Ville behind the Montana Hotel .

Who owns the property?

The property passed through Mayor Sulley Guriere of Petion-Ville, to SOPUDEP whose membership actively participates in the National Literacy Project. Although the literacy campaign is designed for adults 30-60, SOPUDEP was deeply affected by the number of school age children who attended classes as well. They were mostly children of the poor whose parents could not afford to send them to school and could not find a place for them in the over crowded classrooms of the already overwhelmed public schools system. For this reason SOPUDEP made a decision to turn the property into a school for the most vulnerable and poor children of Petion-Ville. The SOPUDEP team hired a lawyer and began the legal process for acquiring a long term lease of the property in 2000 as well as restructuring their organization to meet the requirements of the Haitian government to operate the school. SOPUDEP was given a 12-year lease on the property that expires in 2012 and was provided accreditation by the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Education to conduct a school at the facility.

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With the pre and post election crisis in Zimbabwe there is, quite rightly, a focus on the present and future - a Zimbabwe without Mugabe and Zanu-PF. However Zimbabwe’s history is often lost in the present environment of fear, violence and economic catastrophe in the country. In this extensive article “In the Shadow of the Empire” Noah Tucket looks back on “120 years” of Zimbabwe and in particular Britain’s colonial rampage of what was originally Matabeleland and Mashonaland in the late 1800s and questions the motives behind Western (British and American) policy towards the country…..

The British point of view was set out succinctly by the UK’s former Foreign Secretary, Lord Peter Carrington:

For 15 years [following independence in 1980] Zimbabwe didn’t do too badly […] It was all right and then things went wrong so Mr. Mugabe played the race card, and then that didn’t work because all the [land] redistribution went to all the friends and the people who didn’t do anything about it. And then subsequently he’s become more and more authoritarian and you’ve seen Zimbabwe, the strongest economy in Africa, go down the drain. And it’s a disgraceful state of affairs.

Lord Carrington’s comment was made in a BBC ‘Breakfast with Frost’ programme in 2005. The other participant in the interview was Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the UK, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, who intervened:

Well let us not forget, you know, Lord Carrington referred to the race card. The question of race has never been very far in Zimbabwean politics. We all know that during the 90 years of colonial rule the land was forcibly taken from the black majority.

The black majority was brutalised, we never heard of any human rights […] And indeed the question of land being owned by white people in Zimbabwe was not introduced by President Mugabe. It was introduced by the British colonial administration. Therefore, any land reform programme in Zimbabwe had to acquire land from white people, that’s how the race sector comes in, in order to distribute to the black majority.

The noble lord responded by dismissing the colonial past, as if it had no effect on shaping the present:

This is absolutely irrelevant to what is happening in Zimbabwe at the present time. The white farmers and all the rest of it, that’s all history. What has happened since, there’s been an authoritarian government, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe, you’ve seen what’s happened to the currency, you’ve seen what’s happened to the food, they’re starving. Continued……

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Zimbabwe
Britain

“Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice” at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. The show collects work by five immigrants, four of them now living in Greater Boston, the fifth a former MassArt student.

Slide Show

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African Art
Social Injustice

I was not here in the 70s so no, I don’t remember Olive Morris but do remember the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the early 80s which she was a founder member. Morris was part of the Brixton Black Panther Party and early post -WWII Black struggle in Britain.

Olive Morris was a key figure in Lambeth’s local history. She worked with the Black Panther movement; set up Brixton Black Women’s Group, was a founder member of The Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and was central to the squatter campaigns of the 1970s. She died tragically young in 1979 at age 27.

The aim of this weblog is to create a collective portrait of Olive Morris, bringing together the personal memories of those who knew her, and publishing online information and materials relating to her life and work. Lambeth Council has one of its main buildings named after her and yet there is very little information about Olive Morris that is publicly available, especially on the Internet.

By the mid 80s police racial harassment along with the “sus - stop and search” laws contributed to the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985; the Handsworth riots of 81 and 85 and Broadwater Farm riot in 1985. .

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Black Britain
Brixton Black Panthers
Brixton Riots

Changeseeker, of Why Am I Not Surprised, says, “Yesterday, surfing the web for the first time since I moved last week, I decided to stalk my favorite website builder’s work and came across a call for applications for the Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program. The application period opened May 12th and closes July 15th, so if you don’t have an idea you’ve already fleshed out pretty seriously, it’s probably too late. And the competition is only for African filmmakers. But you never know.

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