“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

Tags:
African Art
Social Injustice

cross posted @ kameelahwrites.

The 21-st century pencil test

As attacks on foreigners intensified and spread across Johannesburg, mobs began pulling people out of shopping queues and forcing them to take “tests” to establish their nationality.

In a practice that recalls the humiliating “tests” used by apartheid officials to classify coloureds as white or black, reports came in that South African mobs were using similar techniques to identify foreigners.

African fears about SA are being confirmed

Betrayal describes the general reaction to the xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Betrayal and disgust. Like Caesar, we turn in shock and slowly reach for the knife in our back, not quite feeling the pain yet. Slowly we look down to our bloodied fingers, then look up to our brother. “Et tu Brute?” And thus, the word “brutal” enters the English language, with fratricidal betrayal.

Long-held fears, justified or otherwise, about South African ignorance and disdain towards other Africans are being confirmed. “I flew from Jo’burg sitting next to an elderly South African to Dakar. On arrival,” the Gambian lawyer continues, “he turned to me and asked, ‘Is Dakar in Africa?’ I was too embarrassed to reply.” Then he notes matter-of-factly: “This is a man who started working as a professional in 1972!”

Mbeki says govt wasn’t warned about attacks

President Thabo Mbeki on Tuesday denied reports that the South African government had been warned of the prospect of xenophobic attacks by the National Intelligence Agency.

Briefing reporters following his meeting with Nigerian President Umaru Yar-Adua, Mbeki said suggestions that the government was warned a year ago about the recent xenophobic violence were false.

“There was no such intelligence reports — they certainly did not come to me,” he said.

The power of positive people

While South Africa reeled in shock this week and the cumbersome machinery of international organisations creaked to life, the most effective responses to the xenophobic attacks came from municipalities, ordinary citizens and faith groups.

Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Deadly Threat in Tanzania

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.

Obama’s Victory in Democratic Party Poll Has Continent in a Spin

Until he started making news as a possible contender for the US presidency, Barack Obama, who this week won the Democratic ticket in the White House race, was almost unknown in Ethiopia. Now, he has a huge fan club in the country, with one of his greatest fans being Ms Birtukan Mideksa, former deputy chair of Ethiopia’s opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) party.

UN overstated Aids risk, says specialist

The United Nations has systematically exaggerated the scale of the Aids pandemic and the risk of the HIV virus affecting heterosexuals, claims a leading expert on the syndrome. The numbers of people worldwide with HIV have been inflated and the UN Aids agency has wasted billions of dollars on education aimed at people who are unlikely to become infected, says Professor James Chin, a former senior Aids official with the World Health Organisation. […]Chin will detail his claims this week in London in a meeting hosted by the International Policy Network, a free-market think tank, where he will launch a new report, called The Myth of a General Aids Pandemic.

This article “The Great Immigration Panic” is set in the US but in many ways speaks to the whole issue of immigration across the world including Europe and South Africa………..

Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

Tags:
Immigration
South Africa
Europe
Asylum Seekers
USA Immigration
Xenophobia

This statement from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction campaign links the regular evictions of it’s members with those of refugees who have been “evicted by violence” form their homes over the past few weeks. The link is important in understanding the role of the government in fueling the flames of xenophobia by police attacks against immigrant communities; the refusal of the government to recognise the status of Zimbabweans as refugees and according them the protection and support required by international law; the failure of the government to respond to the violence thereby implicitly supporting the violence by facilitating an environment where the poor not only fight amongst themselves for the crumbs of the earth, but feel justified in carrying out violent acts of hatred against foreigners.

That the only long-term solution to afrophobia (xenophobia) and other forms of violence is to end the oppression of all poor people living in South Africa. If the poor had houses, if the poor had jobs, if the poor had decent health-care, reasonably priced food staples, and meaningful redistribution of land, they would not be blaming and fighting their neighbors for the little scraps they do have. It has been well documented that most of the actual violence in Cape Town had very little to do with hatred for foreign Africans and everything to do with it being an excuse to snatch a bag of mealies. When people are hungry, they’ll do almost anything to feed their family.

Tags:

South Africa
Xenophobia
Immigration

People ask me:
where is home?

Last time I saw my village
it was burning
in the night.

My house, a screaming
mouth
of firehot fear
in the mask of darkness.

My only thought was flight.

Nobody here understands my language, so
I speak the tongue of compromise.
The grateful grammar
of being alive.

This is my certainty, my identity.

People ask me, where is home?
I say
home is where the heart is.

At night I watch the stars:
distant villages, all aflame,
terrified angels, running away.
© Phillippa Yaa de Villiers