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in that polarisation, Islam was avoiding the main questions. The nature of the state is one thing, but there are other major challenges - what it will take to tackle the issues of social corruption, for example, social justice, and the economic system – and what are the future challenges when it comes to equality between the citizens, in particular in the field of the job market and equal opportunity for men and for women? This is at the centre of the question that is the Arab Awakening

Since the beginning of the 1920’s, Islamism was very close in positioning in some respects to ‘liberation theology’. But that is no longer the case. Now the most important example of the last fifteen years is the move from Erbakan to Erdoğan, creating the Turkish model that has been highly successful in economic terms, but only in fact by buying into and succeeding in being integrated into the global economic system. 

Don’t they talk about the need for redistribution? One gets the impressions that the Salafi argument is often more concerned about looking after the poor? TR: Yes, but within the system.  You can be a very charitable capitalist.  Like Sarkozy was saying, we have to ‘moralise capitalism’, which for me is a contradiction in terms.

The Arab “Spring” (a misnomer to begin with for reasons that require their own list) is like a spectacle. But not any spectacle. It is a spectacle in which “we” the democrats and “developed” world watch the “others” trying to catch up, despite so many efforts to support their oppressors. Until last week, the voyeurism was sympathetic, even if patrimonial or patronizing. But after the recent events, the voyeurism and subsequent reactions to the violence that killed a US Ambassador in Libya turned into something else. It recast the entire spectacle in terms and imagery reminiscent of what we are used to observing in the center’s gaze towards the periphery: a sense of amazement and intrigue that can under certain circumstances quickly turn into something associated with zoology. Was it really worth it to let these creatures out of their cages? After all, look at what they are doing. Only now do we know that fighting for one’s dignity may not have been worthwhile because a bunch of fanatics did what they did.

it is not a priori that one cannot ever ponder the thought of whether it was really worth it, per the above note. As many know, this thought was pondered in both Libya and Syria by those who lost limb and loved ones, and by those who might see their country falling apart. So it does depend on who’s doing the pondering, what they know, what they experienced, on what basis they are pondering, and where/how to actually utter it! To do so on CNN casually, considering all that can ben considered here, is the kind of liberal brutality that has historically damaged not just one life, but whole countries, and without being insulted, attacked, or even threatened (Iraq being a case in point). But that war was legally sanctioned domestically, and voted for in a nicely air-conditioned room, by people who dress well, and speak of liberal values, and might not mind if someone insulted their prophet or God.

In a way counterrevolution started already mid-March 2011 when Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain to put an end to the movement. Precisely at the same moment NATO forces struck Gaddafi. Cracking down on the uprising in Bahrain, while supporting Benghazi ?

It was an Arab movement in the sense that it happened from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian-Arabian Gulf, which constitutes a cultural and linguistic zone, even if the local dialects are different, a significant number of people have a mother tongue other than Arabic (Tamazight, Kurds…) or do not consider themselves Arabs. A region stretching out from its common destiny.

Through the policies of infitâh (economic opening) and the process of privatization, the coherence of the system built post independence has vanished. Neoliberalism has deepened the differences between rich and poor. For the oligarchies, privatization was the opportunity to plunder and control the benefits of oil and other raw materials but also to snaffle the grants of foreign aid. In each country the gap between oligarchy and society has widened. And rage has accumulated.

“Washington must stop subcontracting Syria policy to the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. They are clearly part of the anti-Assad effort, but the United States cannot tolerate Syria becoming a proxy state for yet another regional power,” wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington Post, July 20).

Pletka was the biggest supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the once exiled Iraqi, who she once described as “a trusted associate of the Central Intelligence Agency (and) the key player in a unsuccessful coup to overthrow Saddam Hussein” in the 1990s (LA Times, June 4, 2004).

Although the destruction of an Arab country is not a moral issue as far as the neocons are concerned, the chaos and subsequent violence that followed the US war in 2003 made it impossible for warring ‘intellectuals’ to promote their ideas with the same language of old. Some reinvention was now necessary. Discredited organizations were shut down and new ones were hastily founded. One such platform was the Foreign Policy Initiative, which was founded by neoconservatives who cleverly reworded old slogans.

‘We’ve heard so much negativity, but can you tell us what you are actually doing about it?’ The question came from the back of the hall at the Africa Centre in London, where over 100 people had gathered to hear about the state of contemporary African protest movements from a panel of African activists including Ayanda Kota of the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Bayo Oyenuga of Occupy Nigeria, Osama Zumam of the Sudanese Communist Party and the respected commentator and political activist Yash Tandon.

However, these events have rarely been articulated into an African narrative, with the result that western audiences end up being drip-fed stories reinforcing the impression of stereotypical African instability and ‘Afro-pessimism’. Yet if the under or mis-reported uprisings, protests, revolts and changes of regime in many parts of Africa over the past few years (including, amongst others Cote D'Ivoire, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Mozambique) have told us anything, it is that politics on the continent does not always, or mostly, take place at the point of a gun. 

Shrinking the state in Africa (an outcome of these policies as enforced by international donors) has produced the very conditions which protestors have revolted against: corruption, rising utility prices, and growing inequality.

If the IMF leadership praised the dictatorship, insisted on austerity and advocated squeezing poor people for more taxes, what business does it have today in giving similar advice to Tunisia, or anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa, or for that matter Europe or anywhere at all? What can we learn about IMF thinking in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as Palestine?

In contrast, there was no IMF conditionality aimed at reforming the dictatorship and halting widespread corruption by Ben Ali and his wife's notorious Trabelsi family, or lessening the two families' extreme level of business concentration, or ending the regime's reliance upon murderous security forces to defend Tunisian crony capitalism, or lowering the hedonism for which Ben Ali had become famous.

In addition to expanding Public Private Partnerships (PPPs, a euphemism for services privatization and outsourcing), the IMF named its priorities: "adopting as early as possible a full-fledged VAT, complementing energy subsidy reform with better-targeted transfers to the most needy, and containing the fiscal cost of the pension and health reforms."

Egypt was never cleansed of corrupt figures by the Muslim Brotherhood, which instead joined them. Key figures in Egypt, like Al-Azhar’s Grand Mufti Ahmed Al-Tayeb (who was appointed by Mubarak), criticized the Muslim Brotherhood when Mubark was in power, then denounced Mubarak and supported the Muslim Brotherhood when it gained power, and then denounced the Muslim Brotherhood when the military removed it from power.

Unless a democratically-elected government is killing its own people arbitrarily and acting outside the law, there is no legitimate excuse for removing it from power by means of military force. There is nothing wrong with the act of protesting, but there is something wrong when a military coup is initiated by a corrupt military force that works in the services of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Expecting to win the 2012 elections, at first the Egyptian military fielded one of its generals and a former Mubarak cabinet minister (and the last prime minister to serve under Mubarak), Ahmed Shafik, for the position of Egyptian president. If not a Mubarak loyalist per se, Shafik was a supporter of the old regime’s political establishment that gave him and the military privileged powers. When Ahmed Shafik lost there was a delay in recognizing Morsi as the president-elect, because the military was considering rejecting the election results and instead announcing a military coup.

Three years ago when Tajudeen Abdul Raheem died in Nairobi, I met one of his many Nairobi-based friends a week later. In jest, he said to me: “Awino, before you die be sure to leave a list of your friends’ names so that we call on them after you die”. It was a tongue in cheek statement but one that epitomized the reality of Taju’s life. He ‘belonged’ to many and even though most of us did not know him very well, his larger than life personality, a connection to his own struggles and an interest in his contributions to the Pan African movement made it seem as though you were comrades from another life time. He had a way of making you feel like you were old friends. You could not but take ownership of him. I am reminded of this conversation today because of the metaphorical similarities it bears with the events that occurred in Egypt and Tunisia specifically. At the height of the ‘Arab Spring’ many African and Pan African commentators were quick to counter the overwhelmingly western media narrative that positioned the uprisings as part of an Arab – Middle Eastern process, disconnected from the histories of democratisation in the rest of Africa. Some needed to take ‘ownership’ of the popular uprisings as Pan African in nature, as inspired by the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1990s in particular and shaped by the some of our liberation giants – Nkrumah, Cabral, Senghor, Sankara and Lumumba to name a few. In fact, the uprisings presented an opportunity to dismantle the North Africa – Sub Saharan Africa divide. Re-asserting the Pan African slant and situating the ideologies of the Fanons of this world offered an incredible opportunity – we hoped – to transform the uprising discourses and in turn those claimed by the youth in these countries.

Despite symbols of democracy such as a seemingly valid constitution, regular cosmetic elections in other parts of the continent, the democratic process was a journey which had effectively been reclaimed by the masses and not left to the political elite.

I must underscore that what I speak about here is not the instrumental debate of whether Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans consider themselves African. By virtue of geography and history they are African without a doubt. In fact, one of the most popular refrains today is the fact that Tunisia gave Africa its name. The more important question for me is whether being African is simply a process of naming or whether it is connected to belonging? If becoming African entails a much a more complex process that is not simply limited to a shared history of colonial oppression, then what do we need to do to differently as those interested in a Pan African agenda beyond invoking semantics?

Hatay was overran by Saudi and Qatari jihadi cadres, pampered by the US, EU and Turkish logistics, support, weaponry and cash. The terror these people have been spreading in this historically peaceful, multi-cultural and tolerant part of the world, could hardly be described in words.

the local elites, right now in January 2014, are doing whatever they can, to prevent the re election of Ms Dilma Roussef… You are an experienced Latin America´s observer, you know very well…

I witnessed President Morsi of Egypt (I was critical of his rule at first, as I was critical of the government of Mr. Shinawatra, before real horror swept both Egypt and Thailand), being overthrown by the military, which, while in its zealous over-drive, managed in the process to murder several thousands of mainly poor Egyptian people.

They demanded, and won promises for, what people in other Arab states are also now seeking - a multiparty system, freedom of the press, and the prospect of genuine democratic pluralist elections.

In late 2010, Egypt was the scene of a bloody attack against a Coptic church in Alexandria. Nobody could then have imagined that a few weeks later, massive crowds of Muslims, Christians and agnostics would gather together in the same city to help force Hosni Mubarak from power.

because of the depth of the current crisis of capitalism, that duality will become, I believe, ever more polarised in the coming period. In this presentation I want to explore some of the causes and dynamics around what I would describe as a time of African Awakenings.

Indeed, I think it would be a mistake to consider the shifting political and social climate in Africa being based on the overt, large-scale uprisings alone. There is growing evidence in a number of countries of social movements re-emerging during the last 10 years, providing a framework through which the disenfranchised have begun to re-assert their own dignity, proclaiming - even if only implicitly - their aspiration to determine their own destiny, their own right to self-determination.

The remarkable growth and spread of alternative media such as Pambazuka News is, I would suggest, further testimony of the changing mood on the continent. Ten years ago when we launched Pambazuka News, I was dismissed as a hopeless romantic for naming the website and newsletter 'Pambazuka' meaning, in Kiswahili, the awakening. I believe that the gathering momentum of these awakenings defines the social and political scene on the continent today. We are witnessing not so much an ‘Arab Spring’ as an African Awakening.