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In Katanga, where the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a partnership formed in 1906 between King Leopold II, the Société Générale de Belgique and British interests – demanded a flow of cheap labour to exploit the region’s mineral resources, the government obliged with a series of decrees, in 1906, 1910 and 1933, requiring that each ‘tribe’ be identified, separated and resettled in its own ‘homeland’, supervised by its own native authority. One district commissioner complained of his duties that some ethnic groups were ‘totally jumbled’: ‘It will be very difficult to organise them.’ The separation was accomplished between 1925 and 1930, by means of ethnic cleansing.

When they confronted the militant Luba trade unions in the mines of Katanga, the Belgians forged an alliance with the indigenous Lunda, and proclaimed a coalition of ‘civilisers’ and ‘authentic Katangans’.

The government of the newly independent Congo responded to the secession in Katanga by sending in troops. Ordered to also put down the South Kasai secession on their way to Katanga, the Congolese National Army went on a rampage, slaughtering civilians. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congolese political historian, has argued that the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, committed his ‘first major political blunder’ when instead of seeking to heal the rift in a ‘bitter inter-ethnic conflict’ between ‘indigènes’ and ‘non-indigènes’, he chose to side with one group against another. His political enemies held Lumumba responsible for the ensuing political violence; on 5 September 1960 Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, described it as ‘genocide’. On the same day, the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, dismissed Lumumba.

A census tagged every villager as a ‘native’ of a particular tribal homeland. ‘Forced relocations,’ Johan Pottier writes, ‘were the norm.’

Part constitutional conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy.

The proceedings of the CNS were televised throughout urban Congo, inspiring the growth of civic organisations and strengthening the opposition, but as it prepared to deal with two of the most sensitive dossiers on its agenda – ill-gotten gains and political assassinations – the conference was abruptly closed in December 1992 and never reconvened. This was a sign of the regime’s continuing strength, and the fragility of the opposition. The key weakness of the opposition was that it failed to move away from nativist definitions of political belonging, which fragmented it again and again, to an inclusive understanding of citizenship, which might have appealed to immigrants who had come to Congo at different periods and united them in a single movement.

The existence of the Hutu camps, armed and funded, and home to two million refugees or more, had a devastating effect on civilian life in Kivu. It led to the dollarisation of the economy and price rises (including rents) well beyond the reach of local people. As the Interahamwe unleashed a regime of terror against Congolese Tutsi, another wave of younger men moved across the border to enlist in the RPF. Among them was Laurent Nkunda, the future commander of the notorious Banyamulenge militia (Tutsi), wanted for war crimes in Congo and now detained in Rwanda. The anatomy of political life in Kivu began to resemble that of Rwanda just before the genocide, where every political party had its own militia: in Kivu, every native authority began to acquire one.

Two conferences have been held to try to halt the conflict in Congo, the first in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1999, the second in Sun City, South Africa, in 2002. The Lusaka agreement required the foreign forces to withdraw and the local militias to disarm under UN auspices. Sun City, by contrast, bore a recognisably South African imprint: opposition groups would participate in the transitional government, the national assembly and the senate, while the militias – numbering anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000 men – would be integrated into the new national army along with former rebels, in a process known as ‘brassage’.

Why lump rebels and local militias together when the first were organised along ideological lines as a supra-local army and the second were largely a local phenomenon tied to specific communities?

The supreme difficulty in Congo, as I’ve said, is the persistence of the native authority, which, for all the complexities of ethnicity, is still in place as an organising principle. It is now the terrain on which new forms of political authority, flaunted by young men bearing arms, confront older forms steeped in patriarchal tradition. (This same confrontation has also unfolded in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone, where youth-led rebellions have eroded older kinds of authority.)

Even the worst perpetrators of violence in Congo must be understood as human actors caught up in a conflict that started with the colonial conquest a century ago. That means shifting the focus from individual acts to the cycle of violence, from atrocities to the issues that drive them. Instead of recognising and facing the real challenge – to reform the native authority so that local militias can be held politically accountable – the ‘international community’ has chosen to induct them into a ballooning, dysfunctional colonial-style army, leaving the native authority to grind along unchanged.

Nkrumah’s book of letters The Conakry Years, which consisted of all of Nkrumah’s personal letters written and received while he was in Guinea after the Central Intelligence Agency’s sponsored coup that overthrew his government on February 24, 1966 (almost a year to the day after Malcolm was assassinated) contains letters Nkrumah wrote to Malcolm and to others about Malcolm, detailing Nkrumah’s efforts to persuade Malcolm to stay in Ghana and become a part of Nkrumah’s staff to work on their Pan-Africanist objective.

Nkrumah’s letters mention that he confided in Malcolm that Ghanaian intelligence forces had revealed that Malcolm would be killed within months if he returned to the US but according to Nkrumah, that revelation seemed to spark Malcolm’s desire to return to the fire-hot situation against him in the US. Still, Malcolm collaborated in his recently published diary his intense desire to become a part of this network of Pan-Africanists in West Africa.

It’s also worth noting that three short years later another African revolutionary from the US ended up accepting Nkrumah’s offer to move to Guinea-Conakry and become his political secretary. Kwame Ture – then known as Stokely Carmichael – left the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party and agreed to accept the task of building the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

There’s little question that people within the Nation had some involvement. The antagonism between Malcolm and the hierarchy of the Nation of Islam at the time, including National Secretary John Ali, Elijah Muhammad Jr. (son of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad), Minister James Shabazz from New Jersey, Clarence X Gill the Fruit of Islam Captain from New Jersey and others, is well documented.

There’s no refuting that Malcolm was diagnosed as being poisoned in Egypt and his recollection of the experience in his diary will make your own stomach tighten up. There’s also no doubt that the French Government, which had no policy of rejecting entry to persons, refused Malcolm entry into their country shortly before his murder while the rumours swirled that their decision was based on their desire to not permit Malcolm to be killed on French soil.

We are completely aware that it is the job of our enemies to confuse people about whom we are and who our leaders are, so the Malcolm X postage stamp and every other way the capitalism system makes a concession to recognising the revolutionary Malcolm is only happening because they want to frame his image before we do.

It won’t work. Sekou Toure was correct when he said “truth crushed to Earth shall rise a thousand times”. Malcolm was a Pan-Africanist, that’s why there are as many, if not more, tributes to him outside of the US as there are inside. The people of Ghana expressed their understanding of this phenomenon in 1964 when they named him Omawale – "the son who has returned home".

continental unity.

the US encouraged European countries to end their direct colonization of other people and their lands and opt for development aid – a disguised form of colonization, since this aid means the former colonies now owed the former colonizer. Not a single country has ever managed to pay off any of those loans.

Looking at what is happening today in South Africa, one can only marvel at what Sobukwe foresaw decades ago. South Africa is still trapped in the colonial patterns of trade which exports large quantities of raw mineral resources to other countries and then becomes the market for their finished products.

Today this can be seen in the bilateral agreement between Pretoria and Beijing. The agreement allows for the massive exportation of South Africa’s raw mineral resources to China while China sells back their finished textile products.

The level of mobilization and training of party guards currently exercised by the leading political parties in Tanzania especially in the mainland amounts to the breach of the constitution. The ruling party and government jointly shoulder the responsibility for failing to uphold the constitution. One sees an institutional weakness of a high degree in this matter.

Following the winds of change that blew across Africa in 1990s, just like in other parts of the world, Tanzania experienced the pressure to change accordingly. As a result, then President Ali Hassan Mwinyi appointed a commission headed by Judge Francis Nyalali and tasked it with looking into whether the nation should stick to the single party rule or adopt a multi-party political dispensation.[11] Among other findings, the commission recommended the adoption of a multiparty system and identified 40 laws which had to either be repealed or reformed to suit the new political arrangement. At this juncture, it is important to note that the establishment of the people`s militia had been commissioned by the ruling party (TANU) and there wasn`t a specific law in that respect. This didn`t sound legally awkward at the time possibly due to supremacy of the party but the Nyalali Commision Report (1992) hinted that, although the people`s militia was recognized by law, it was not legally established.[12]

Similarly, the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s histories to understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states that erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to go in both movements. Yet in a short time they have made extraordinary gains. Women are increasingly represented on governing councils and active in their armed ranks, but the real revolution is seen within the domestic sphere, where caring for children, health and home are shared labor between men and women.

In keeping with his praxis of the responsibility of the intellectual to the wider society, Dr Rodney became involved in the struggle for socio-political justice wherever he found himself. This activism brought him into conflict with the new post-independence government and state, which quickly became suspicious and, in some instances, intolerant of dissent. It was against this background that he was banned from Jamaica in 1968 by the then government, which viewed his groundings with the poor and the powerless as a form of political destabilisation.

His move to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica brought him into contact with the wider Caribbean movement. It was at this point that he made the crucial decision to study African history, a decision that further broadened his world-view. By the time he earned a doctorate in that field at age 24 in 1966, his reputation as a brilliant scholar was already developing.

The challenge for both parties and the government to which they belong is how to isolate the PPP’s cynicism without compromising justice for Dr Rodney. Unfortunately, the government has done a poor job in that regard. Reckless and uninformed statements by some ministers have not helped. How do we expect to build a new political culture when we pay scant respect for justice for those who suffered and engage in derision and dismissive rhetoric about those who sought to liberate our minds and our society from plantationhood?

In the end, this government which I voted for and support to the fullest cannot and must not stand in the way of its own historical mandate to help raise Guyana to a new and enlightened existence. This government cannot disappoint Guyana; if it does, we will be forever confined to the backwaters of the political world.

In the end, Walter Rodney’s spirit will not go away because, he, Dr Rodney, was more than just a trouble-maker, he was, still is and will always be a huge part of the conscience of this idea and reality called Guyana, the Caribbean Civilisation and their contribution to World Civilisation.

We regularly read in the press that Saudi Arabia ↑ has purchased enormous areas of crop land for rice production, and several members of the government possess large areas of land in some of Burkina Faso’s most fertile areas without even being farmers! The recently adopted land tenure law is encouraging the development of these destabilising trends.

Let me give an example. In 1999, a rural Burkinabé woman, Nagbila Aisseta, accepted ↑ the Hunger Project Africa Prize awarded to the 'women farmers of Africa'. She was a poor woman aged 35 who had not left her village since birth, had never entered a car, knew nothing at all of modern life, but who, little by little, had developed initiatives to create a large organisation involved in livestock farming, agriculture, and market gardening to tackle malnutrition in her area. She was invited to receive her prize at a ceremony at the United Nations headquarters and asked to submit her speech prior to the event in the national Mooré language. It was to be translated into English, which she did not speak, for another person to read out during the ceremony. But she said “No. If it is me that has received the prize then I should speak directly to those who gave it to me. The way I was brought up, when you thank someone you thank them directly, without a go-between.” She asked the United Nations to find a Burkinabé interpreter who could understand both Mooré and English in order to ensure simultaneous interpretation. And this is how it was done. She knew her rights -  in this case the right to speak!

The current crisis, however, has dictated a more central role for African governments in regulating their economies, preventing capital flight, and creative taxation, so that Africa's resources benefit her people. Africa's focus must be on creating decent jobs by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises that add productive value to Africa's vast natural resources.

a multi-stakeholder forum convened in Tunis at the end of November that brought together leading economists, government officials, and civil society representatives.

The forum was the first high-profile event of the newly formed Coalition for Dialogue on Africa (CoDA), chaired by Botswana's former President, Festus Mogae.

CoDA is driven by African institutions and carves out greater space for civil society to set the agenda. At the forum, Professor Fantu Cheru of the Nordic Africa Institute urged support for "knowledge production on the continent."  The establishment of CoDA is a big step in that direction.

We must, as the Tunis Forum convener Abdoulaye Bathily, Senegalese academic and former minister of environment, urges "redefine Africa's development paradigm, and above all, support the emergence of new practices and citizen actions in Africa's public space."