#Zimbabwe’s Forgotten 20%
▻http://africasacountry.com/zimbabwes-forgotten-20
Zimbabwe makes a good story for western writers and readers. The staggering racism of the Rhodesian whites, the heroic liberation uprising, and Mugabe; a freedom fighter not unlike Nelson Mandela, who having spent more than a decade in prison, won the first democratic election and immediately called for racial reconciliation. Then, from the late ‘90s, […]
The black farm-worker communities who – under white employment – provided the sweat and toil which has driven the nation’s agriculture (and, hence, its economy) since the 1900s, make up nearly 20% of Zimbabwe’s population. Despite this, those farm-workers have accounted for less than 7% of the beneficiaries of land redistribution. Moreover, those workers suffered by far the worst of the violence and abuses committed during farm invasions – a suffering which was woefully underreported
Nelson Mandela To Be Renamed
▻http://africasacountry.com/nelson-mandela-to-be-renamed
The South African Government announced on Thursday that former President Nelson Mandela will be renamed ‘Nelson Mandela of the ANC’ with immediate effect. A spokesperson for President Jacob Zuma says the move comes in light of recent confusion over who owns Mandela’s legacy, claiming it was more fitting that “(T)he name of the African National […]
Long Walk to #Toronto
▻http://africasacountry.com/long-walk-to-toronto
It is a warm and breezy Sunday afternoon in Toronto, just the kind of weather that makes us question whether we should be going into a dark movie house to catch one the “hottest” screenings at this year’s international #FILM fest, or hanging a left to a sunny outdoor patio to quench our thirst with a cold […]
#MEDIA #NELSON_MANDELA #Justin_Chadwick #Mandela:_Long_Walk_to_Freedom #Nelson_Mandela #Sharpeville #Steve_Biko #Walter_Sisulu #Winnie_Mandela
Sur fond de rivalités syndicales et avant des élections en 2014, la mine de Marikana en #Afrique_du_Sud a fait une nouvelle victime. Le meurtre devant son domicile de Mme Nbongile Madolo, responsable du Syndicat national des mineurs (NUM), parmi les plus importants du pays, vient s’ajouter à d’autres assassinats, un an après les #grèves réprimées par la #police (34 morts). En mars, le long reportage de Sabine Cessou nous plongeait dans l’histoire sociale d’un pays en « état d’insurrection permanente », dont les racines politiques remontent au temps où Nelson Mandela était encore en prison.
Trois émeutes par jour en Afrique du Sud, par Sabine Cessou (#2013/03)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/03/CESSOU/48841
En dépit d’accusations de #corruption, le président Jacob Zuma a été réélu à la direction du Congrès national africain (ANC) le 18 décembre dernier. Mais les signes de fragilisation se multiplient, comme la création du parti Agang (« Construisons ») par la célèbre militante antiapartheid Mamphela Ramphele, en vue de l’élection présidentielle de 2014. La sanglante répression de la grève des mineurs de #Marikana, le 16 août 2012, a révélé l’ampleur de la crise sociale et les débats qu’elle suscite dans la nation arc-en-ciel.
#Conflit #Travail #Histoire #Violence #Chômage #Pauvreté #Politique #Apartheid #Syndicalisme #Parti_politique #Crise_économique #Mouvement_de_contestation
Lire aussi cet article pour l’heure réservé aux seul(e)s abonné(e)s (#paywall) : Nelson Mandela, les chemins inattendus, par Achille Mbembe dans le numéro d’août (#2013/08)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/08/MBEMBE/49518
Weekend #MUSIC Break 48
▻http://africasacountry.com/weekend-music-break-48
Rapper, activist, and radio host #Xuman returns with this week’s edition of “Rap Journal”. Addressing police corruption in #Senegal while paying homage to the South Africa’s beacon of light, Nelson Mandela. Look out for a guest appearance by Dead Prez’s M-1, who was in Senegal recently working on some music. Disregarding the controversy surrounding their movement in [...]
#D-Black #D2amajoe #Gaston #Ghana #Kanyi_Mavi #M.anifest #Souleymane_Faye #Stef_Bos
Mandela’s Jewish comrades
By Roy Isacowitz
Haaretz 30th of July 2013
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.538830
The predominance of Jews among the older generation of white anti-apartheid activists is unmistakable. As my father once put it, there was a minyan for every political discussion in Pretoria Central Prison after the imposition of martial law in 1960 - though never for the purpose of prayer, as far as I know. Most of the old-timers were comfortable in their Jewishness, but their rituals had a lot more to do with Marx than with the Almighty.
That Jewish asymmetry was on display this past week as South Africa marked the 50th anniversary of the 1963 police raid on Lilisleaf Farm, near Johannesburg, which served at the time as the headquarters of Umkonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the underground African National Congress. It doesn’t take much perspicuity to notice that all five of the white defendants in the subsequent trial were Jewish. (Another two Jews – one of whom, Arthur Goldreich, lived in Israel until his death in 2011 - escaped from detention before the trial.) Similarly, fully half the white defendants in the earlier Treason Trial (1956) were Jewish, as was the lead counsel.
The head count of white opponents of apartheid reads like a census list from one of the old shtetls in Lithuania (from where most South African Jews originated): Joe Slovo, Harold Wolpe, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Ronald Segal, Dennis Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, Solly Sachs, Helen Suzman, Ray Alexander, Ronnie Kasrils, Raymond Suttner, Ray Simons, Wolfie Kodish and many others. Some, like Ruth First, paid with their lives. Others were permanently disabled (Albie Sachs) or spent years in jail. Several, including Slovo, Kasrils and Albie Sachs, went on to fill senior positions in post-apartheid South African governments.
It is not only we hyper-sensitive Jews who pay attention to the Jewish hue of the white opposition. The apartheid regime also took note and made hay of it regularly. And Nelson Mandela (whose first employer, at a time when few companies would employ blacks, was my neighbor Lazar Sidelsky) remarked on it in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, when he wrote: “I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.”
That was certainly true of the Jews Mandela encountered during the struggle against apartheid, but it did not apply to the South African Jewish community as a whole. Nor does a legacy of prejudice adequately explain the heroism of the minority – though it may well account for the apathy and quiescence of the majority.
The fact is that all South African Jews benefited from apartheid and the majority tacitly supported it (while voting, in the main, against Afrikaner nationalism.) The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD), which remains the representative body of South African Jewry to this day, was resolute in its refusal to condemn apartheid and it did nothing to support the families of community members who had been banned, jailed or exiled. The Board’s first explicit condemnation of apartheid came in 1985, when South African racism was already on its last legs.
This #FILM Has Been Banned
▻http://africasacountry.com/this-film-has-been-banned
Following what transpired at the opening night of the 2013 #Durban_International_Film_Festival (DIFF), director #Jahmil_X.T._Qubeka’s “#Of_Good_Report” will go down in history as one of the most spectacular opening night films seen by almost no one. After the obligatory opening night speeches–many of them evoking Nelson Mandela on his birthday, the pre-1994 [...]
#censorship #Film_and_Publications_Board #Jonathan_Kovel #South_Africa
#Nelson_Mandela is around like never before
▻http://africasacountry.com/nelson-mandela-is-around-like-never-before
If one believes media reports, Nelson Mandela is no longer with us. Yet, in more ways than one, he is. In the midst of the frenzy of soundbites and images that now circulate through the space left by his anticipated absence, there is danger that Mandela will be honored, even monumentalized, but not meaningfully remembered. [...]
#HISTORY #POLITICS #Apartheid #Hendrik_Verwoerd #India #Mahatma_Gandhi #neo-liberalism
Un discours de Mandela sur l’apartheid israélien
▻http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/nicoleg/010713/un-discours-de-mandela-sur-lapartheid-israelien
Ce discours de Nelson Mandela a été donné aux Etats-Unis en 2001, à l’occasion de sa rencontre avec Thomas Friedman, un journaliste américain juif, spécialisé dans le Proche-Orient.
L’Etat palestinien ne peut être le sous-produit de l’Etat juif, juste pour garder la pureté juive d’Israël. La discrimination raciale d’Israël est la vie quotidienne de la plupart des Palestiniens. Depuis qu’Israël est un Etat juif, les Juifs israéliens sont capables d’accumuler des droits spéciaux que les non-juifs ne peuvent pas avoir. Les Arabes palestiniens n’ont aucune place dans un Etat « juif ».
L’apartheid est un crime contre l’humanité. Israël a privé des millions de Palestiniens de leur liberté et de la propriété. Il a perpétué un système de discrimination raciale et d’inégalité. Il a systématiquement incarcéré et torturé des milliers de Palestiniens, en violation des règles du droit international. Il a, en particulier, mené une guerre contre une population civile, en particulier les enfants.
(...)
Thomas, je n’abandonne pas la diplomatie au Moyen-Orient. Si vous voulez la paix et la démocratie, je vous soutiendrai. Si vous voulez [un] Apartheid formelle, nous ne vous soutiendrons pas. Si vous voulez soutenir la discrimination raciale et le nettoyage ethnique, nous nous opposerons à vous.
Quand vous saurez ce que vous voudrez, appelez moi.
3 #BOOKS on #Nelson_Mandela
▻http://africasacountry.com/3-books-on-nelson-mandela
Tweet The American public radio network, NPR, asked me to recommend 3 books its listeners could read on Nelson Mandela’s life and legacy. Of course I recommended #Long_Walk_to_Freedom and Conversations with Myself. I also included this small book: There is a tendency to set Mandela apart from the social or political movements that shaped [...]
Madiba, Maliba (and me)
▻http://africasacountry.com/madiba-maliba-and-me
Tweet We don’t live in a world of heroes, but at rare moments we celebrate those who emerge from the shadows to push them further back. I don’t know if #Nelson_Mandela has heroes. He must have. We all know he had comrades, both within the ANC and without. When he visited #Mali in 1996, he [...]
#FEATURED #Latest #Atlanta #Bamako #Georgia #Madeira_Keita #Martin_Luther_King_Jr. #Modibo_Keita
Ex-official: Cia Helped Jail Mandela - Chicago Tribune
▻http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-06-10/news/9002170271_1_anti-apartheid-activities-gerard-ludi-cia-spok
Un article de 1990,
WASHINGTON — For nearly 28 years the U.S. government has harbored an increasingly embarrassing secret: A CIA tip to South African intelligence agents led to the arrest that put black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela in prison for most of his adult life.
But now, with Mandela en route to the U.S. to a hero`s welcome, a former U.S. official has revealed that he has known of the CIA role since Mandela was seized by agents of the South African police special branch on Aug. 5, 1962.
After Mandela
▻http://africasacountry.com/what-will-happen-when-mandela-goes
I returned home to South Africa a few days before #Nelson_Mandela was readmitted to hospital. This is the fourth and longest period he has been under observation by doctors since last December, and many here are convinced this may be his final visit. Mandela has not been active in South African politics for at [...]
Le Front national et l’apartheid, petit rappel historique - Politis
▻http://www.politis.fr/Le-Front-national-et-l-apartheid,22865.html
Plus c’est gros, plus ça passe. Marine Le Pen, interrogée sur la disparition prochaine de Nelson Mandela, a affirmé au micro de France inter qu’il était « une figure d’apaisement » et que la fin de l’apartheid, « un système évidemment profondément contestable, condamnable et injuste », avait été « une bonne nouvelle pour le monde entier ».
Au journaliste Patrick Cohen qui lui faisait remarquer qu’au moment de la libération de Nelson Mandela, Jean-Marie Le Pen s’était dit « ni ému ni ravi », la présidente du Front national, qui n’en est pas à son premier mensonge dans une émission, a lancé à plusieurs reprise « vous vous trompez ». Avant de soupçonner notre confrère d’avoir été « chercher [ses] informations à Libération ou à Mediapart ».
La pauvresse a décidément la mémoire courte (ou sélective) car son père a bien tenu ces propos au cours d’une émission « l’Heure de vérité » en mai 1990. Quant à son affirmation, « mon père a toujours condamné l’apartheid », elle est contredite par ses propos dans cette émission à laquelle elle assistait pourtant, et au premier rang, comme on peut le voir sur la vidéo ci-dessous.
Il y qualifiait encore Nelson Mandela de « terroriste » en affirmant à 57’ :
« J’ai toujours une espèce de méfiance à l’égard des terroristes, quel que soit le niveau auquel ils se situent. »
Dans la suite de la conversation, Jean-Marie Le Pen, que l’on n’avait pas connu si prévenant pour accueillir d’anciens terroristes de l’OAS au sein du FN, paraît alors douter que « la politique de M. De Klerk a été la bonne » et juge possible une « disparition de l’Afrique-du-Sud (…) dans un chaos sanglant » qui destinerait ce pays à un avenir semblable au Vietnam ou au Cambodge.
L’Hôtel de ville de Paris propose une exposition, jusqu’au 6 juillet prochain, sur le désormais citoyen d’honneur #Nelson_Mandela, dans le cadre de la Saison sud-africaine en France. En juillet 2010, Alain Gresh nous invitait déjà à mettre en question les récits hagiographiques qui entourent sa vie, tant l’icône risque d’occulter le révolutionnaire.
L’Evangile selon Mandela, par Alain Gresh (#2010/07)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2010/07/GRESH/19390
Nelson Mandela bénéficie d’une adoration consensuelle. Et pourtant, sa légende apparaît très éloignée de la réalité, tellement il semble intolérable d’admettre que le nouveau messie a été un « terroriste », un « allié des communistes » et de l’Union soviétique (celle du « goulag »), un révolutionnaire déterminé.
#Racisme #Histoire #Apartheid #Inégalités #Droits_des_minorités #Afrique_du_Sud
What Israel could be like - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/what-israel-could-be-like.premium-1.516628
Teach us, dear South Africans, black, white and colored, how yesterday’s enemy becomes today’s partner. How to drive away the fear, erase the hatred, atone for the injustice and create new justice.
By Gideon Levy | Apr.21, 2013
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — When Adam Habib enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, he needed government permission: Habib is “colored” and the Jo’burg university was white. That was some 30 years ago. Next month Prof. Habib will begin his new job, vice chancellor of the university that barely admitted him as a student. The position is equivalent to university president in Israel. Habib’s alma mater is now one of South Africa’s top two universities. The majority of its students are black, and its president is colored. Only 30 years have passed.
Only 30 years have gone by since Roelf Meyer served as deputy minister of law and order in the apartheid regime and as minister of defense and minister of constitutional affairs and communication. Next month Meyer will submit a national defense review to South Africa’s government. The man who fought Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which he viewed as a terror organization, and who jailed its activists, became the defense adviser of the government headed by the ANC. In between he also testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about his role in the apartheid regime.
Both of these remarkable figures, Habib and Meyer, are the face of the new South Africa. Their story, like the story of their country, is among the most amazing in modern history. A visit to South Africa, which has more than a few challenges and tough problems - unemployment, crime, a failing education system and among the highest levels of economic inequality in the world - still stirs deep feelings of both wonder and envy.
The miracle of South Africa could have imparted a useful lesson to another modern miracle, that of Israel. It was born in the same year as apartheid, but look at where Israel is today in terms of morality and justice, and where South Africa is. Let us set aside, for the nonce, the increasing comparison between apartheid and the Israeli occupation regime, and instead study the lessons of the new South Africa. Had Israel (and also the Palestinians) done as South Africa did, we would have a different Israel today. South Africa proved, against all odds, that it is possible; is there anything more hopeful than this?
The South African miracle, the fall of an evil regime in favor of a just regime through a thrilling process of reconciliation, must be learned in Israel. Instead of battling Pretoria’s decision to label products from the settlements and boycott Israeli universities, it would have been better to send study missions from Israel to South Africa. Teach us, dear South Africans, black, white and colored, how yesterday’s enemy becomes today’s partner. How to drive away the fear, erase the hatred, atone for the injustice and create new justice.
The list of lessons is a long one. When Meyer was first elected to the apartheid parliament, he looked around and sensed that something was wrong. “Suddenly I felt I did not represent my nation,” he related this weekend at the former Afrikaner farm on the outskirts of Pretoria, where he is studiously working on his defense review. How many new Knesset members have ever looked around themselves and felt that something was amiss, that millions of people have no representation?
It continued with the impressive numbers of whites, including more than a few Jews, who took up the blacks’ struggle. MP Ben Turok, who is Jewish, spent years in prison and moved abroad as an exile; Judge Albie Sachs, another Jew, lost an arm and sight in one eye in an attempt on his life, and he too went into exile abroad. Like them, Ronnie Kasrils, Helen Suzman and many others paid a high personal price in the fight to obtain justice for the other, not for themselves. Where are their Israeli counterparts?
The main lesson for Israel lies in the formative moment for South Africa, when the dawning realization that apartheid could not continue spread: The army, the economy, the sanctions, the isolation enough, everyone said. And once that awareness crystallized, the road was a short one. Were Israel more conscious of its situation it would be in the same place, the place of saying we cannot go on like this. True, South Africa’s blacks had Nelson Mandela and the Palestinians have Mahmoud Abbas; South Africa’s whites had F. W. de Klerk and we have Benjamin Netanyahu. Nevertheless, look at South Africa and see what we could have had here.
Police murder in South Africa - World Socialist Web Site
►http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/09/pers-m09.html
Police murder in South Africa
9 March 2013
South Africa is an “angry nation” teetering “on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall,” warned Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela. “We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”
The WSWS needs your support!
Machel was speaking at the memorial service for Mido Macia, the 27-year-old Mozambican taxi driver who died after being dragged at speed down the road by a South African police van. He was then, according to fellow detainees, beaten in police custody. His crime was to argue with the police over having parked on the wrong side of the road.
Police murder in South Africa - World Socialist Web Site
►http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/09/pers-m09.html
Police murder in South Africa
9 March 2013
South Africa is an “angry nation” teetering “on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall,” warned Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela. “We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”
The WSWS needs your support!
Machel was speaking at the memorial service for Mido Macia, the 27-year of Mozambican taxi driver who died after being dragged at speed down the road by a South African police van. He was then, according to fellow detainees, beaten in police custody. His crime was to argue with the police over having parked on the wrong side of the road.
France : François Hollande va recevoir un prix pour la paix de l’Unesco, suite à l’intervention de la France au Mali - RFI
▻http://www.rfi.fr/contenu/france-francois-hollande-va-recevoir-prix-paix-unesco-suite-intervention-france-
L’Unesco a annoncé que le président de la République française se verra décerner le prix Félix Houphouët-Boigny pour la recherche de la paix. Le jury de ce prix, décerné pour la première fois à Nelson Mandela en 1991, a salué la « haute contribution à la paix et à la stabilité en Afrique » de François Hollande. Citant l’intervention militaire de la France au Mali le jury dit avoir « apprécié la solidarité manifestée par la France à l’égard des peuples africains. »
Nelson Mandela a été libéré, euh non, Florence Cassez | Rue89
▻http://www.rue89.com/2013/01/26/nelson-mandela-ete-libere-euh-non-florence-cassez-239022
En France, donc, cela fait partie des attributions d’un ministre des Affaires étrangères (en guerre) de recevoir les détenus de droit commun libérés à l’étranger.
En même temps, sauf aveux circonstanciés, on ne saura sans doute jamais si elle est coupable ou innocente...
Belle lucidité dans ce billet. Peu importe finalement qu’elle ait été complice ou pas de son compagnon, elle a payé..
Qu’on s’entende bien : je me réjouis que cette jeune femme soit en liberté. Si elle est innocente, c’est une grande victoire contre l’erreur judiciaire, la plus violente des injustices. Si elle est coupable de quelque chose, elle a payé : sept ans de détention, un tarif bienveillant en France pour complicité de crime crapuleux.
Ce qui est curieux, comme le souligne l’auteur, c’est que la France semble considérer cette histoire comme une nouvelle affaire Dreyfus, entre les captivités de Florence Aubenas et Ingrid Bétancourt..
Florence Cassez n’est cependant pas une otage, ni une militante des droits de l’homme ou des femmes, ni une volontaire d’ONG. Elle n’est surtout pas une femme qui aurait souffert en ayant défendu une cause que l’on estime juste.
(..)
Invictus - Clint Eastwood, 2009
En 1995, l’Afrique du Sud organise la Coupe du monde de rugby à XV. Nelson Mandela commence son premier mandat en tant que président du pays. Contre l’opinion de ses partisans, il sent dans l’événement sportif la possibilité de créer un sentiment d’union nationale derrière l’équipe des Springboks, symbole durant plusieurs décennies des blancs d’Afrique du Sud, de leur domination et de l’apartheid (1948-1991). « One team, one country » (« une équipe, un pays »).
http://files.mondialisationdusport.webnode.fr/200000370-d7929d88c6/Invictus-Affiche1.jpg 
http://voiretmanger.fr/wp-content/2010/01/invictus.jpg ►http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus_%28film,_2009%29
►http://voiretmanger.fr/2010/01/16/invictus-clint-eastwood
Les dérobades d’« Invictus » - @mona
►http://blog.mondediplo.net/2010-01-12-Les-derobades-d-Invictus
UAE Political Islamists Are Not ’Human Rights Defenders’
►http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/uae-islamists.html
For almost two years, the UAE’s political Islamists have been referred to in the West as human rights activists. No doubt, they are indeed activists with an agenda but there is also no doubt that they are not our version of Nelson Mandela, nor is their vision for the country that of the Magna Carta. I have been following their rhetoric — in Arabic — over the past few months on social media with great concern. I have found it to be xenophobic; anti-Semitic; sectarian; exclusionary; racist toward Asians, Africans and other Arabs and overall repugnant.
Regard d’une photographe sur des camps racistes
►http://www.lesnouvellesnews.fr/index.php/entreprendre-articles-section/saga/1331-regard-photographe-sur-des-camps-racistes
En 2007, alors journaliste dans le pays, Ilvy Njiokiktjien avait déjà réalisé un photoreportage - en ligne sur son site - dans un « camp de défense » pour Afrikaners, ces descendants de colons néerlandais. « Chez certains Sud-africains blancs existe la peur d’une guerre civile à la mort de Nelson Mandela », explique Ilvy Njiokiktjien dans une interview pour Canon (ici en anglais). « La plupart connaissent quelqu’un qui s’est fait voler sa voiture ou tirer dessus. Ils ont peur de marcher dans les rues et vivent retranchés dans des ensembles résidentiels derrière des hauts murs ».
Conséquence de cet état d’esprit, de plus en plus de familles envoient leurs enfants dans des camps où leurs sont dispensés des cours d’autodéfense. Et où l’accent est mis sur leur identité Afrikaner, en se fondant sur la langue (proche du néerlandais), la religion ou la couleur de peau.
Fear and no clean clothing: Amira Hass preparing to sail for Gaza - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
►http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/fear-and-no-clean-clothing-amira-hass-preparing-to-sail-for-gaza-1.369611
Heap said he was not surprised by the Canadian government’s opposition to the flotilla, and claimed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been a founder of a think tank that supported South Africa during the apartheid regime and that opposed sanctions against the regime and the release of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.