Wolpe Lectures & Reviews January - June 2007 MBEKI UNAUTHORISED (World Premiere) Ben Cashdan, Walden Bello & others 28 June 2007 The rise of the disciplinary university Jane Duncan 17 May 2007 Making Real the Right to Housing” Miloon Kothari 19 April 2007 Regaining our Tongues: The Challenges of Writing in Indigenous Languages Ngugi wa Thiong'o 23 March 2007 Fatima Meer Activism for Democracy 22 February 2007 SPECIAL WOLPE LECTURE: MBEKI UNAUTHORISED (World Premiere) Ben Cashdan, Walden Bello & others MBEKI UNAUTHORISED (World Premiere) A documentary by Ben Cashdan, Redi Direko and Meril Rasmussen The film SABC did not want you to see - about South Africa’s president, technocratic management and political paranoia Join the filmmakers, plus discussion panelists: Walden Bello, Moema Miranda and Virginia Setshedi Thursday, 28 June, 5:30-7:30pm, Ocean Conference Centre, 121 Marine Parade View Poster for the film ‘The public have been denied the opportunity to see an independent and professional portrait of their president and denied the opportunity to make up their own minds.’ - International Federation of Journalists general secretary Aidan White, May 2006 This is the world premiere of the film that the SA Broadcasting Corporation banned in 2006. Although the SABC will show MBEKI UNAUTHORISED at some point in edited form in the future, the CCS Wolpe Lecture series invites a Durban audience to ‘the Director’s Cut’ on June 28, preceded by a discussion on political leadership in the early 21st century. From Brazil to South Africa to Asia and many points in between, political leaders of middle-income countries are combining ‘neoliberal’ (free-market) economic strategies with technocratic managerialism and a political populism that often amounts to mere leftwing posturing. South Africa is a case in point, as this documentary shows. Lead filmmaker Ben Cashdan will discuss the film and show additional clips starting at 6:40pm. From 5:30 pm, to discuss the phenomenon of technocratic but paranoid political leadership under conditions of neoliberalism, we are fortunate to welcome Walden Bello (Focus on the Global South, Manila) and Moema Miranda (IBASE, Rio), along with leading South African civil society activist Virginia Setshedi (FXI, Joburg) Wolpe Lecture: “The rise of the disciplinary university” by Jane Duncan 17 May 2007 Howard College, University of KwaZulu-Natal Click here to read this in Zulu Introduction: a free speech code for Universities? Recently, the University of KwaZulu-Natal has been a flashpoint for controversies around academic freedom, with disciplinary action having been taken against two academics for a number of alleged misconducts, including speaking to the media. A case has also arisen at Fort Hare University, involving a law professor who is being disciplined for criticizing the University administration in his lectures, at conferences, in private conversations and in the media. These academics are accused of bringing their respective institutions into disrepute, including by lying to the media, and defaming University managers. A member of the support staff of the Tshwane University of Technology is being charged with the apartheid era offence of immorality, for distributing sexually explicit photographs to some of his friends. A disciplinary case is also being heard at Wits University, where students are being charged for bringing the institution into disrepute for criticizing the lack of freedom of expression on campus, in the media. These are not the only problems. Laws, rules and regulations are being developed that have a direct and potentially negative impact on academic freedom; not much attention has been paid to these as they do not originate from the Ministry of Education, but from other spheres of government. We should be very concerned about these developments. If freedom of expression is compromised unduly, then the academic project will be compromised. Given the controversies that the above mentioned cases have generated – between University staff and managers, and even amongst academics themselves - these cases also suggest that the University community is becoming increasingly divided over what can and cannot be said in University contexts. It is necessary to debate the implications of these cases, as freedom of expression is a precondition for the academic project itself. While I will deal with all these cases in detail, the fact that they have arisen suggest a growing disciplinary culture in Universities that places greater controls on academics and students on the basis of what they say. I believe that these disciplinaries are indications of a systemic shift in the academic freedom climate. My thesis about the systemic nature of academic censorship – which I will argue - leads me to certain conclusions and recommendations, which I will raise upfront. There is a need for an audit of all subsidiary legislation at University level. This audit should cover Universities' conditions of service, rules governing student activities on campus and all rules and by-laws impacting on academic freedom on campus. The purpose is to test their constitutionality, as there are growing indications that there are problems with a number of these subsidiary rules. Student, academic and worker organisations based on campus should consider advocating for a freedom of expression code, similar to the one adopted by the American Association of University Professors in 1994. In terms of this code: 'On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it may not be expressed'.[1] The code then goes on to state that it may be tempting to proscribe racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults…, [but] this speech - however repugnant - almost always express ideas’.[2] The code goes on to state: 'Indeed, by proscribing any ideas, a University sets an example that profoundly disservices its academic mission'.[3] The code concludes: 'Institutions should adopt and invoke a range of measures that penalize conduct and behaviour, rather than speech—such as rules against defacing property, physical intimidation or harassment, or disruption of campus activities. All members of the campus community should be made aware of such rules, and administrators should be ready to use them in preference to speech-directed sanctions'.[4] Such a code would compliment, and elaborate on the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility[5], which sets out the procedures for disciplining of staff based on democratic means of self-government by academics, and entrenches the basic principle of free speech. The Declaration is crucial for redefining social role of intellectuals, as part of the broader struggles for freedom and social justice: after all, social relevance is the most effective bulwark against interference in academic freedom. However, the Declaration does not codify standards for the protection of free expression, including standards for dealing with what one could term 'bad speech'. While I am wary about the effectiveness of advocating technical solutions to political problems, if developed in an open and consultative fashion, the code should become an organizing tool as well. The process of debate that leads up the development of such a code should provoke academics and students to think deeply, and challenge one another’s assumptions, about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable speech. It is important that these standards are defined by knowledge workers, and not managers, as is the case at the moment. The code should also define what administrative actions could be considered academic freedom violations. It should pronounce on whether administrators should be allowed to use University money (public funds) for instituting defamation actions against their own staff. These debates are already taking place in forums like the Change@UKZN list; so, to convert these debates into a movement towards an academic freedom code of charter is a logical progression. However, the development of such a code should not just involve academics and students; it must involve the very communities that the University claims to serve. While not being prescriptive, it should set standards for the relationships between intellectuals and social movements, to ensure that intellectuals do not control movements, while at the same time ensuring that they have the right to critical distance. Such a code must include the voices of those who are researched, and should set expectations from that University. It should state what communities want out of that University. Why is this important in a free speech code? At the end of the day, the most effective antidotes against attacks on academic freedom are social engagement and relevance. Also, real misconduct is less likely to arise in an institution that has a purpose that everyone identifies with, an institution that is vision and mission-driven, rather than driven by the need to control. As scholars of Poststructuralist theory will tell us, disciplinary cultures tend to produce delinquency. The development of such a code raises the tricky question of enforcement. Campus based and off-campus organizations need to debate the pros and cons of establishing an academic self-regulatory structure that takes up the challenge of Article 26 of the Kampala Declaration, which states the following: 'It is incumbent on the African intellectual community to form its own organizations to monitor and publicise violations of the rights and freedoms stipulated herein'.[6] This self-regulatory structure would adjudicate on violations of the code, and impose sanctions where necessary. Sanctions would include censure of institutions or individuals for failing to adhere to the principles of academic freedom. This body would effectively become the Press Ombudsman of academia. There are real dangers in the establishment of such a structure, but there are real possibilities too. What needs to be debated is whether the dangers outweigh the possibilities. Its establishment will mean that Universities will strip out misconduct cases on the basis of what people say, from the disciplinary process, which should be reserved for bad deeds, not bad words. This will also allow academics to engage in a process of peer review, and judge the speech of other academics on the grounds of ethical principles, rather than according to managerialist criteria concerned primarily with the reputation of their institutions. Academic institutions that do violate the academic freedom of their academics will be blacklisted, and members will be strongly discouraged from taking up positions at such institutions. It may be argued that the above mentioned suggestion is an overreaction to recent incidents, and that the disciplinaries mentioned above are isolated incidents; therefore one should not extrapolate the emergence of a trend from them. This is a naïve argument, for the reasons that I will set out below. There are several macro-trends in the labour, academic and general free speech environments that need to be appreciated to see why the disciplinaries mentioned above are signs of a more general shift in climate. First trend: the managerial restructuring of labour The upward trend of labour cases relating to the freedom of expression of staff at Universities mirrors the upward trend in freedom of expression-related labour cases generally: the first macro-trend. The advent of democracy held out hopes that a freedom of expression-friendly labour dispensation would be introduced. In fact, one of the first cases the Constitutional Court dealt with in 1994 concerned the freedom of association and expression of members of the South African National Defence Force's (SANDF), who up to that point had been prohibited from forming their own unions and engaging in public protest. This prohibition was contained in the SANDF's Military Discipline Code. In this judgment striking down this prohibition, the Court noted that the speech of employees who criticize their employers is constitutionally protected: the Court argued that '…a culture of Constitutionality can hardly succeed if the Constitution is not applied daily in our Courts, from the highest to the lowest, as well as at the workplace'.[7] In spite of the Constitutional Court judgment, and in spite of other court judgments protecting the right to freedom of expression in the workplace, a growing number of employers are reviving apartheid-style tactics to silence their employees' critical voices, in a bid to protect their public reputations. The rise of workplace censorship could be linked to what Sandile Buhlungu and Eddie Webster refer to as 'the new workplace authoritarianism' linked to the pressures on industries to become globally competitive. Workplaces are restructured, leading to core workers being shifted into the non-core zone, effectively casting them out of the formal economy.[8] In the process, working conditions have declined for many workers, leading to worker resistance. It is telling that some of the criticisms that employers attempt to stifle involve declining working conditions flowing from the restructuring of workplaces. Casualisation of labour has made the control of workers' voices easier, as workers may be forced to practice self-censorship fearing that their contracts may not be renewed. But there are those who speak out, in the process facing the wrath of their employers. Non-unionised workers and members of trade unions operating outside of the established federations are especially vulnerable to attack. More and more companies are also accusing unions and employees of defamation. Some employers also claim that the contract of employment requires the employee to honour a fiduciary duty to the employer, which includes a duty to be loyal to the company and to protect the integrity of the company brand. Employers who make this argument are, in effect, arguing that the employment contract allows them to contract the employee out of their Constitutional rights. Employers also seem to be oblivious to the fact that political speech must receive the highest protection. Speech about working conditions all too often crosses into the terrain of political speech. Yet such speech is also under threat. With respect to freedom of expression, the conditions of service of many companies may date back to apartheid, thereby binding employees to archaic definitions of misconduct. In the process, apartheid-style repression of workers rights is reinforcing new forms of managerial repression. Nowhere is this disciplinary culture more apparent than in the commercial and catering sector, where superexploitation abounds. On 8 November 2005, Royal Ascot Superspar employee and member of the Congress of South African Workers' Unions (Cosawu), Vusi Sibeko, was suspended for gross misconduct. The misconduct related to an article that he had written for Izwi la Basebenzi¸ a periodical published by the Democratic Socialist Movement. Sibeko had, in the article, accused the Spar store of bad labour practices and of not paying workers the minimum wage as determined by the Department of Labour. Spar argued that the article defamed the company and instilled a negative attitude in workers towards the company. He was subsequently dismissed. Sibeko appeared before a conciliation hearing of the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) on the 23 January 2006. Super Spar, however, was not present. The matter went to arbitration at the end of February 2006. The CCMA found Sibeko's dismissal to be unfair as it violated his Constitutional right to freedom of expression. In his judgement, CCMA commissioner Sowaybo Flowers noted the following: 'Historically, workers had used the workplace as a battleground to fight discrimination, authoritarianism and oppression, and the workplace is the place where the culture of apartheid and racism were crushed. Workers contributed much to the labour laws as we know them today. Many lost their lives in the process. There cannot be any possible reason why now, after democracy has been obtained, that freedom of expression would be denied'.[9] Unfortunately, Spar has decided to appeal the case to the Labour Court. Apart from the Sibeko case mentioned above, there are other recent cases of free speech infringements in private sector institutions. For instance, Faizel Katkodia, an employee at Standard Bank, was called to a disciplinary hearing for sending out emails critical of the state of Israel to his private mailing list using the bank’s internet resources. He has been charged for using the bank’s internet resources in violation of bank policy of bringing the bank into disrepute. In the public service, a specific set of considerations applies. In spite of the fact that it is practically impossible to defame state institutions, a growing number of employees are being disciplined for criticizing the state institutions they work for. In these cases, management is often conflated with the institution itself; so criticism of the management is, by definition, criticism of the institution, and therefore an expression of disloyalty to the institution. In reality, criticism of management could be an expression of profound loyalty to the notion of public service, in that workers are willing to risk disciplinary action to raise a debate about the state of the public service. Many of these criticisms revolve around cutbacks to the public service, and the impact on service delivery of the commercialization or corporatisation of these services. This change in the nature of public services is leading to these services becoming 'brands', like private companies: hence workers who criticize these services, especially in the media, are accused of damaging the brand. The application of managerial practices in the public service centralizes power in the hands of a few managers, which also creates a hostile climate for free expression at the workplace. Gags in the health and education sectors have also become increasingly commonplace. The problem has even gone right up to the highest office in South Africa. Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva is a former director in the Office of the Rights of the Child (ORC), based in the presidency and reporting to Minister Essop Pahad. In June 2003, Mkhwanazi-Xaluva was dismissed by the Presidency for, she claims, having blown the whistle on sexual harassment by a consultant to the ORC who, she says, was a friend of Pahad. The matter was referred to the General Public Service Sectoral Bargaining Council, which reinstated her in November 2003. She was dismissed again for interviews she had given to the media regarding her initial dismissal. Once again, the matter went to the General Public Service Sectoral Bargaining Council in February 2006. Mkhwanazi-Xaluva won the case in the Bargaining Council. The Presidency has since appealed to the Labour Court, and Pahad has argued in papers that her statements about him are defamatory, and that she should be disallowed from working for the state ever again.[10] The closest parallel to what is starting to emerge in Universities is taking place at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). Possibly the most widely publicized incident of disciplinary action against an employee involved SAFM anchor John Perlman, who was given a verbal warning for bringing the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) into disrepute. Perlman clashed with the SABC's spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago on air by confirming the existence of a blacklist of political commentators, despite the SABC's protestations to the contrary; in the process, he merely fulfilled his ethical obligation to speak the truth and debunk the SABC’s ‘spin’ on the matter. So, there is an emerging trend towards employers acting against employees who criticise them, which flows from the corporate managerial restructuring of labour, which intensified in the late 1990’s. Second trend: the corporatisation of academia The second trend relates to shifts in the nature of academic institutions, as the pressures of globalisation push Universities towards full corporatisation. One of the consequences of the proletarianisation of the professoriate is that the labour relations dispensation that applies in broader society - with all its recent problems - is being imported into Universities. Until recently, South African Universities have escaped the international trend towards full corporatisation. However, declining budgets from the late 1990’s onwards forced Universities to find ways of supplementing their budgets to attract private funding, leading to an emphasis on income-generating postgraduate research (often at the expense of teaching). When research is driven by private sector and donor power, research focussing on poor people or motivated by pressing social problems becomes marginalised. As Rhodes University Sociology Professor Jimmy Adesina has stated, ‘the idea that you can sit down and write about something because it is important is becoming more and more alien’.[11] When a University is corporatised, power becomes ‘sucked up’ to the top, and is often centralized in the person of the Vice Chancellor. The University becomes a brand in the commercial sense. Substantial notions accountability to the academic project are replaced by narrow notions of accountability to administrators and managers; in fact, in the entrepreneurial University model, management IS the University. Criticism of the management amounts to criticism of the University, and therefore damage to the brand. Disciplinary measures against those who bring the brand into disrepute becomes an essential part of brand management. A concrete expression of this redistribution of power relates to the roles of Deans. Many Universities have replaced elected Deans with appointed Deans, often disempowering the ability of Faculty Boards to ensure accountability to the academics in the faculty. Another often-noted feature of the corporatised University is that Senate becomes marginalized in favour of an increasingly powerful executive management;[12] Senate decisions may even be overruled without consultation, purely on financial grounds. Corporatised Universities are also hostile places for students from working class backgrounds, who are often excluded for financial reasons. As the University becomes more market-driven, it may also loses its moorings in the very community it claims to serve. The disciplinary process also becomes increasingly technicised, and in the process is taken out of the hands of academics and placed in the hands of managers and external lawyers. As corporatised Universities are driven to protect their brands, they will be tempted to prioritise the right to reputation over their right to freedom of expression; this is an inevitable consequence of corporatisation. In the process, the principle of peer review is thrown out the window, as articulated in the Kampala Declaration, which makes it clear that discipline should be effected by a democratically elected body of the academic community. The reason for vesting disciplinary action in the hands of academics is clear: academics are best placed to judge their peers, and are also best placed to consider the seriousness of their wrongdoings against an academic’s entire record as a teacher and scholar. These mitigating factors are important to consider, given that a narrow interpretation of misconduct will trip many academics up. As Jimmy Adesina has noted, ‘If you want to find dirt on people you will find it if you look hard enough. The value of that person to society – their change agency value – recedes into the background as a consideration. What they did wrong is the issue’. However, in the affected institutions, an often-expressed sentiment amongst staff is that the standards of conduct that apply to ordinary academics simply do not apply to top management. Third trend: state steering of academia and progressive competitiveness This brings me to my third point: the role of government policy in bringing pressures to bear on academic freedom. It is wrong to attribute the current pressures on academic freedom to corporatisation alone, as some of the recent contributors to the debate on academic freedom have suggested.[13] This view is captured by Roger Southall and Julian Cobbing, when they state: ‘Whereas previously, under apartheid, the principal threat to freedom was external to the ‘liberal University’ in the form of government pressure upon individual institutions and individuals to conform to state ideology and rubrics, the new threat is primarily internal, with academics becoming increasingly intolerant of robust internal dissent. We identify this as expressive of a shift away from “colonial liberalism” towards corporate authoritarianism’.[14] This view fails to take into account the complex relationship between external and internal factors in shaping the academic freedom environment. It also fails to take into account recent government-initiated developments in higher education, as well as in the general free speech environment. In 2001, the Ministry of Education adopted a more interventionist approach, where its earlier consultative approach was replaced by a centralized policy of steering Universities towards certain goals. The National Plan for Higher Education in South Africa[15] is based on the acceptance that the pressures of globalization require a change in the nature of academic institutions to assist in the drive for global competitiveness; to this end, the Ministry required Universities to increase their research outputs and to encourage innovation. To this end, the Plan involved increasing the number of enrolments in business, commerce and science, engineering and technology, and increasing enrolments in career-orientated programmes. Universities must ‘deliver’ graduates capable of meeting the high skill/high wage demands of the service orientated economy, while also de-racialising to address the skewed legacy of apartheid-era higher education. The Ministry stated that autonomy cannot be used as an excuse not to transform, and that it will intervene if necessary to ensure that national development goals are met. In spite of the Ministry’s protestations that Humanities must not suffer as a consequence of this shift in priorities, whole art departments have been closed down. Universities are at a loss as to how to demonstrate ‘outputs’ in the narrow technicist sense in music, art and drama; as a result, marginalization becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy, as these disciplines are unable to generate income. The Plan recognizes the commercial potential of University research output, and calls for more postgraduate students to further University based research agendas. In the conclusion, the authors argue that ‘if the higher education system is to become a key engine for reconstruction and development, it is imperative that it is restructured to enable it to fulfill this critical role. This requires a single minded sense of purpose and mission by all the constituencies in higher education…[italics mine]’.[16] And therein lies the problem; there can be no single minded approach in a situation where the development model itself if contested. If this single-mindedness is imposed from above, it will be resisted by critical minds. The imposition of a single-minded purpose based on the oxymoronic notion of progressive competitiveness has generated its own contradictions, and hence its own opposition. State sanctioned managerialism dictates a single-minded response: disciplinary action. This should not be taken to mean that all staff are innocents and all managers wrong, but the disciplinary turn in Universities is a symptom of a growing crisis of legitimacy of the state’s transformation project. The Ministry’s restructuring of higher education paved the way for a peculiar variation on the international corporatised model. Termed ‘transformative managerialism’ by Tembile Kulati and Teboho Moja[17], University managers have been strengthened to drive transformation from the top, in line with policy pressures or market principles. This brand of ‘transformation’ involves addressing the legacy of apartheid by creating equity of access to higher education, while responding to the pressures of globalization to create a high skill/ high wage, globally competitive service economy. These are deeply conflicting projects, and Vice Chancellors are ultimately responsible for managing these conflict. As different sections of the University community become conscious of these conflicts, express them, and then fight them out, the logic of corporatisation drives managers to act against those who sharpen the contradictions. Government policy is impacting on academic freedom in even more direct ways, but because they do not come from the expected source of pressure – namely the Department of Education – they are hardly factored into the current academic freedom debate. Fourth trend: freedom of expression and neo-conservatism The rise of post-9/11 neo-conservatism is also starting to have an impact on the free speech of academics, marking the fourth trend affecting the academic freedom climate (although it is closely related to the third trend). In an attempt to increase control, some managers are blending still unreformed apartheid era labour regimes with new post-9/11 surveillance regimes, to produce a new post-apartheid University model: the University as panopticon. Changes in the regimes of surveillance outside the University are coinciding, and complimenting, changes to the regimes of surveillance inside the University. Neo-conservatism is extremely hostile to controversial forms of speech, which it considers to be subversive of patriotic goals: in the United States, such thinking has also led to growing clampdowns on academics critical of how the Bush Administration is prosecuting the war against terror. The AAUP’s freedom of expression code has proved to be an important bulwark against these incursions. In South Africa, aspects of neo-conservative thinking are becoming increasingly apparent, and are impacting negatively on freedom of expression. For instance, a firm of attorneys (Richard Buys Attorneys) has developed a template for electronic communications policies[18] which bans huge swathes of internet content, using the one of the post-9/11 laws promulgated in South Africa recently, the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (Rica), as justification. The fact that Rica is being implemented in the absence of Privacy legislation is already a problem, but already there are signs that institutions are using the gap that Rica presents them with to introduce electronic communications policies that are even more restrictive than the actual legislation. Users are forbidden from distributing ‘illegal content’, which the Policy defines as e-mails that are ‘pornographic, oppressive, racist, sexist, defamatory against any user or third party, offensive to any group, a violation of a User’s or a third party’s privacy, identity or personality, copyright infringement, malicious codes such as viruses and Trojan Horses, and content containing any personal information of user’s or third parties without their consent’.[19] If this template was used to develop Electronic Communications Policies at academic institutions, the academic project would grind to a halt. Medical students using the internet to research sexually transmitted diseases, or a sociology lecturer researching the social effects of pornography, will be guilty of trading in ‘illegal content’. So would the English lecturer e-mailing lecture notes to his students about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Campus based Palestinian student organisations should forget about distributing advocacy material on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Politics lecturers researching the prevalence of racism and sexism will also fall foul of the policy. Yet in spite of the sheer stupidity of this template, the UKZN has based its draft Electronic Communications Policy on it[20], and in March 2006 the Tshwane University of Technology developed a policy using the same template.[21] It is unclear how far this template has spread: hence the need for the audit, mentioned earlier. In terms of both policies, University e-mail users must adhere to certain rules, and will be disciplined for failing to do so. Yet the UKZN’s draft policy has a particularly problematic aspect, in that students and staff are deemed to have given consent to have their e-mails monitored when they commence studies or employment[22], which violates the requirement of the Act for users to give prior written consent. Users are referred to Schedules 1, 2, 6, 7 and 11 of the Film and Publications Act for a definition of pornographic content, in spite of the fact that Schedule 11 was repealed in 2004. Interestingly, the policy does not recognise the exemption in Schedule 5 of the Act’s schedules, which exempts technical, professional, educational, scientific, documentary, literary or artistic publications. So if these policies are adopted unchanged, it will mean that the UKZN and TUT do not recognize exemptions for academic speech, in spite of their being academic institutions. This erosion of the protected status of academic speech is taking place on another front, in the form of the controversial Film and Publications Amendment Bill. While this Bill has received much bad press lately for its attempts to subject the media to pre-publication censorship, what is not being debated is the pre- and post-publication censorship that it will subject academics to. The Film and Publications Act of 1996 distinguished between publications and films: with the former being free for distribution unless someone complains. The latter must be submitted to the Film and Publications Board for classification, based on the premise that film is a more pervasive medium than publications and therefore must be more tightly controlled. So the written word is ‘innocent until proven guilt’. As mentioned earlier, artistic and academic speech that falls within the ‘extremely naughty’ XX and X18 classifications are exempted. Also, films and publications that contain forms of expression that do not receive constitutional protection in s.16(2) of the constitution – namely propaganda for war, incitement for imminent violence and hate speech – are prohibited, and offenders face up to five years in jail. However, artistic and academic speech are exempted from this offense. However, the Amendment Bill seeks to change these arrangements. It states that: ‘Any person who, for distribution or exhibition in the Republic, creates, produces, publishes or advertises any publication that contains visual presentations, descriptions or representations of or amounting to— (a) sexual conduct; (b) propaganda for war; (c) incitement to imminent violence; or (d) the advocacy of hatred based on any identifiable group characteristic, shall submit in the prescribed manner such publication for examination and classification to the classification office before such publication is distributed, exhibited, offered or advertised for distribution or exhibition’.[23] This means that writers will be required to police themselves and submit publications for classification to the Board if they may fall foul of the above categories. This applies to academics too. While the exemptions still stand, the grounds for exemption have been narrowed. Academics need to decide how they feel about submitting publications on controversial matters to the Board - which is controlled by the Department of Home Affairs - for the Board to decide whether to exempt these publications or not, as this is the import of the Bill. It would appear that the academic speech for exemptions for child abuse, propaganda for war and incitement to imminent violence have disappeared entirely, and the exemption now applies only to the clearly unconstitutional definition of hate speech. In addition, the scope for prohibited publications in these categories has been broadened. So now, publications that merely describe child abuse or propaganda for war will be prohibited, which is bad news for political scientists studying the invasion of Iraq, for instance, or media effects scholars studying the effects of pornography on audiences. Academic speech which falls into the XX category should now be classified as X18, which requires publishers to confine their publications to adult shops or to place them in plastic wrappers. Clearly, this is an untenable arrangement for academic journals. The developments around interception legislation, and how it is being interpreted, and the Film and Publications Bill, strongly suggest that the spaces for controversial academic speech are being narrowed. While the government is not responsible for the restrictive way in which Rica is being interpreted, it should be noted that both Rica and the Film and Publications Act have been amended to reduce the space for controversial speech over time. Hardly had Rica been promulgated, than an amendment Bill was introduced to make it possible for the government to monitor pre-paid cell phone users. Each successive amendment may see the bar for academic speech being lowered even further. The Film and Publications Act was amended in 1999 and again in 2004, so the current Bill will be the third amendment in ten years. Each successive amended has restricted speech slightly more than the previous one, under the guise of fighting the scourge of child pornography. It should not surprise academics if the next amendment removes exemptions for academic speech entirely. Yet academics and students have been largely silent on these developments. www.fxi.org.za Review of the Center for Civil Society’s (CCS) Harold Wolpe Lecture titled: “Making Real the Right to Housing” by Miloon Kothari, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur, 19 April 2007 By Simon Mapadimeng. CCS lectures are a major attraction for communities in and around the Greater eThekwini Municipality Metropolitan area. CCS has, from its inception, has been centrally concerned with issues of pressing concern to community struggles. Like other preceding lectures, this one also had one of the key basic service questions, housing, as its main theme. The scene was set for the lecture by the screening of an episode of the SABC TV documentary, Special Assignment. This episode focused on the issue of forced evictions in Chatsworth, a historically Indian township located on the southern side of Durban. It was also about water cut-offs and evictions of the members of the community from government or public houses by the police. It highlighted the collective struggles and resistance by communities to the evictions and cut- offs and showed the profound importance of the issue of housing rights. Before starting his lecture, Miloon Kothari remarked on how glad he was to be in South Africa, a country whose liberation struggles has inspired more other struggles around the world. What caught his eye whilst in Durban was the street named after the world renowned struggle icon, Mahatma Gandhi, who distinguished himself through a non-violent leadership approach to struggles against apartheid and colonial domination in both South Africa and India. He then introduced himself, and indicated that the UN Human Rights Council, to which he was appointed as Special Rapporteur, is the highest decision making structure within the UN on Human Rights (HR) issues, tasked with ensuring that the HR of all are protected and guarding against all forms of discriminations. The UN Human Rights Council could thus be no better place for Kothari to be given that he is a well recognized economic, social and cultural rights activist. His visit to SA was on the basis of a fact finding mission to make some observations about housing and land situation with the view to reporting back to the UN Human Rights Council. He saw his CCS Harold Wolpe lecture as an opportunity for him to share his personal assessment of global scenario on housing and land rights as well as preliminary observations he has made in SA on the same issues. He indicated the gravity of the global housing question, with about one and half of the world population having no access to “adequate housing” and over hundred million people being homeless. However the weakness in his lecture lies in his failure to explain or outline what for the UN and/or even for him constitutes ‘adequate housing?’ It is important to clarify this as one is left to speculate what this concept really means or what he means by it. Could it be that by this concept he is referring to just having a shelter or just four walls full round wall around, or a roof over one’s head? Does he refer to a house with the right number of rooms to accommodate the entire family or household members? That is, a house with kitchen, bed rooms, sitting room, entertainment room, etc. What exactly does this mean? What would be considered an acceptable housing unit or structure? Such clarification is not only conceptually necessary but it is also particularly important in the South African context, given the wide variety of housing structures that governments, both during the apartheid (match-boxes in the former black townships) and in the post-apartheid period (the so called low-cost houses and popularly known as the RDP houses), have put up for people. These descriptive terms occurred because of the controversial nature of these housing units. For instance, more often than not, in the every day public discourse, there is a perception that the apartheid match-boxes i.e. houses in the black townships are of better quality than the RDP houses built by the post-apartheid government, with the latter seen as generally inadequate for normal family life. It should be noted that such perception is developed out of criticism of this inadequate houses and that the comparison made does not necessarily legitimise the apartheid created black townships and their inadequate infrastructures including housing units (or match-boxes). Interestingly, the term match-box was developed in the light of dissatisfaction with the inadequate nature of the houses built by the apartheid government. Most of these houses are overcrowded and small in size. So, what this suggests is that both regimes i.e. the apartheid and post-apartheid, built inadequate houses for people. Hence, the persistence of the chronic housing problem in the country. In the lecture, Kothari focused on two key aspects a) the main causes of the housing problems or what he sees as the major global trends defining the housing problems and b) his proposed way-forward on how this problem can be resolved or tackled, as well as the opportunities and challenges to finding solutions to the problems. The first main factor and/or trend he mentioned is that of rapid economic globalization characterized by commodification and privatisation of basic services and human rights, resulting in a situation whereby social services such as housing are not seen as basic rights. This can, he argues, can be seen from the following: i) the installation of water meters, ii) too much emphasis laid on cutting down costs, iii) outsourcing of social services resulting in non-accountability to people who are recipients of such services, and iv) the vision of creating world class cities in the light of the need to host world events such as the 2010 FIFA Soccer World cup and ICC Cricket World Cup. Closely linked to the above factor or trend are, according to Kothari, forced evictions or what in SA are notoriously known as forced removals. These evictions occur surprisingly not only in authoritarian countries but also in democratic countries. The evictions, driven by projects development and market considerations, result in serious violations of human rights and deepened poverty and inequalities. In Cambodia, for instance, Kothari found that the government was involved in land grabbing (e.g. government buildings) selling to private developers, in the process forcing people off the land. This phenomenon, he argues, is on increase in the world. Other examples of land grabbings he cites include Operation Murambatsvina (translated as sweep away the garbage) in Zimbabwe which has left large numbers of people homeless and Operation Makeover in Mumbai, India, conducted by authorities between November 2004 and February 2005 whereby up to 400 000 slum residents were evicted. In Nigeria, between 2003 and 2004, the so-called the Abuja Master Plan led to forced evictions and relocations of up to 800 000 people, often left without alternative viable means and access to livelihood. In the US, in the state of Chicago, he argues, thousands of public housing units were removed with the majority of victims affected being the African Americans in the area. In all these cases, Kothari finds a total disregard for fundamental human rights. Communities affected were not given any prior notice or warnings nor were they consulted and allowed to participate in the decision making processes that have serious implications for their lives. Also characterizing evictions by municipalities is the use of excessive force and violence over the people being evicted when they try to resist and demand consultations. In Zimbabwe, for example, he argues that defenders of human rights are beaten up and subjected to harassments. He notes that in some countries, anti-terrorism legislations and policies are used by authorities to legitimize arrest of activists. The resulting social impact of evictions is severe for the evicted. The evictions leave them with little or no socio-economic rights in a state of landless and homelessness. They increase vulnerability to poverty as the evicted people and communities lose out on their livelihoods sources and experience breakdowns in family and kinship ties. Women, in particular, became the most vulnerable, especially to acts of violence, insecurity, poverty, and disease. In some situations, when men or husbands die, he finds that women face the dangers of exploitation due to property ownership relations which tend to favour men over women. He noted that in some countries, there is a gap between the recognition of women’s rights and implementation of those rights. Hence a culture of lip-service about women being legally protected from violence and abuse. Kothari identified the neglect of rural areas as a factor in the housing problem. He argues that rural areas are being ignored with an eye to the global phenomenon of rapid urbanisation. The urban areas are seen as a priority for housing and land provision. Kothari’s point is highly relevant to the SA situation whereby there has always been an urban-bias in development policies which benefited mainly the urban areas, especially in terms of infrastructural development such as the roads, communication system, and public transport facilities. To this day, there are still inequities between the urban and the rural areas. Today, this approach is likely to be perpetuated by the research reports with policy implications such as the 2006 Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) . For CDE, as mentioned in this report, the majority of South Africans and especially the economically active sections of the population do not see their future attached to land in rural areas. According to this report, SA is no longer highly rural as 60% of its population is urbanized. It argues that prosperity for people lies in the cities where employment opportunities exist. It states that land demand is mainly in urban and peri-urban areas and that only few in rural areas need land for farming purposes. The report claims that high on the list of priority demands are urban jobs and houses as opposed to land in rural areas, which explain the reasons for land invasions in urban areas. The danger with this perspective though as I have argued elsewhere before , is of perpetuation of the inherited problem of an urban bias in development policies. This could remain so despite the post-apartheid government policy and development approach which seeks to strike a balance between the rural and urban development. This is clearly represented in the government’s Urban Renewal Programme and the Integrated Rural Development Strategy which aim at developing infrastructure in both rural and urban areas. Not only is this perspective problematic in terms of the dangers of promoting and perpetuating urban bias in policies, but also fails to take into account the realities of today in SA i.e. that the urban economy, which has increased in capital intensity as the report rightly points out, has grown through job shedding. It has led to job-less growth. Part of this has been, and contrary to the report’s claims about increasing urbanisation, massive retrenchments of workers. A significant number of the retrenched workers returned to their permanent rural homesteads. Most research in SA has shown that the urban labour force has and continues to be largely rural migrants while not negating the fact that other workers live in historically black townships. This suggests that housing and land questions in rural SA, just as in the urban areas, remain crucial and need equal and urgent attention. Perhaps even more dangerous about the perspective led by the CDE and the likes is that they fail to realise that the urban problems such as increasing crime, poverty, slum conditions or informal settlements, prostitution and homelessness are directly linked to the failure to strike a balance between urban and rural development due to urban bias. Notwithstanding the devastating impact of evictions that have aggravated the housing and land problems, Kothari however notes a disturbing silence and lack of collective action and protest to challenge land speculations and government-led land evictions under market pressures. As he pointed out, there has not been any expressed anger about the evictions as could be seen in the cases of Cambodia, and also recently in Zimbabwe where no solidarity with the Zimbabweans was shown by South Africa government and other African states. He made a particular mention to South Africa’s policy of quiet diplomacy which he found to be disturbing in view of the serious violations of human rights violations in the neighboring state. Kothari however did not leave the audience with pessimism and a sense of total gloom. He highlighted some promising signs and developments aimed at challenging this situation and defending human rights including the right to land and adequate housing. He, for instance, acknowledged that there is around the world today, the emergence of social movements whose main approach is human rights. Prominent in this development is the World Social Forum (WSF) which works across sectors and which he sees as a positive development for forging global solidarity and needs to be consolidated and supported. He also believes that human rights organisations and activists should use the existing space and instruments such as human rights principles as enshrined in most countries’ national constitutions and of course also in the UN statutes to advance the struggle for defense of the human rights. He advocated a global collective effort towards achieving a consensus on human rights whereby principles such as non-discrimination and self-determination are closely guarded and protected. Further, he emphasized as vital, the need to greatly use community-based consultative and participatory approach whereby communities and their members are given an opportunity to influence and shape the outcome of decisions around policy development, implementation and monitoring. Linked to this is the need to provide people with enhanced access to information in order to encourage informed interventions and participation. Most importantly, he believes that involvement and participation should not occur at the expense of active mobilisation of communities to challenge, protest and resist forced evictions, and that this could still be done in a peaceful way highlighting the plight of the masses in the face of neo-liberal marketisation of life. This is what Issa Shivji (2005) has labeled “markets in poverty, ignorance and disease” advocated by the promoters of globalisation such as the World Trade Organisation and multinational corporations. Kothari concluded with a poem by an Indian poet to emphasis his concluding point. Its central message is that communities and all those committed to human rights across the globe should stand up and speak out against neo-liberal capitalism and come together in a collective effort to resist it. On the whole, the Wolpe lecture was a very powerful and well timed initiative by someone with a genuine interest and concern about the plight of the poor and the marginalized under the overwhelming forces of neo-liberal capitalism. My sense is that the UN could grow powerfully as an institution with socio-political activists of Kothari’s caliber. Footnotes 1 Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) 2005. “Land Reform in South Africa – a 21st Century Perspective”, Research Report no.14. 2 Refer to my paper titled “The land redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) sub-programme: opportunity for or constraint to land redistribution, rural economic development and poverty alleviation?” in Transformation, 52, 2005. 3 See for instance Moodie, D. (with Vivienne Ndatshe). 1994. Going for Gold: Men, Mines Migrants. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; Sitas, A. 1996. “The New Tribalism: Hostels and Violence.” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 22, No. 22; Bonnin, D. 1999. ‘We Went to Arm Ourselves at the Fields of Suffering’: Traditions, Experiences and Grassroots Intellectuals in the Making of Class. Labour, Capital and Society, 32:1; Mapadimeng, MS. 2007. “Ubuntu/Botho Culture - A Path to Improved Performance and Socio-Economic Development in Post-apartheid SA: Beyond Rhetoric.” a PhD Thesis, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban. Background Miloon Kothari was appointed in September 2000 by the UN Commission on Human Rights as Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. His mandate involves reporting annually on the status worldwide of the realization of the rights related to adequate housing and identifying practical solutions and good practices towards this end. An architect by training, he has extensive experience in the areas of housing and land rights. Mr. Kothari is also the coordinator of the South Asian Regional Programme of the Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network and a founding member of the International NGO Committee on Human Rights in Trade and Investment. He is a member since 2005 of the Leadership Council of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Mr. Kothari spoke with Horst Rutsch of the UN Chronicle in early 2006. Interview with Miloon Kothari On the mandate as Rapporteur on adequate housing My mandate is very broad and includes such issues as access to water and electricity, sanitation, land rights, forced evictions and displacement due to development and disasters, and post-conflict and ethnic-conflict situations. There has also been a very strong focus in the mandate on women’s rights to housing, land, property and inheritance, as well as a very strong human rights perspective, building on the recognition of the right to adequate housing in numerous international human rights instruments and reaffirmed in the Habitat Agenda. The attempt is to project the human right to housing, both in terms of analyzing the situation on the ground and proposing solutions, and what steps Governments should take to recognize this human right, including the need for it to be realized without discrimination. If I were to make an overall assessment of my work for the UN, including through eight country missions and seven regional consultations on women and housing and land, as well as participation at major international conferences and quite a bit of research and writing, is that the situation is worse than it was five years ago. The right to housing has been receiving increased attention, but the situation on the ground is getting worse as the number of people living in adverse conditions continues to grow. On the problem of land speculation An overwhelming concern for me is the intense property and land speculation, and there appears to be no attempt by Governments to control this, which makes it very difficult for the poor to access affordable housing. It is even affecting the middle class, as you can see in New York City and in other cities worldwide. There is no control for this rampant land and property speculation. I have been on missions and have had discussions with ministers on why there was no affordable housing market and why Governments did not intervene and make sure that property prices and rentals were not out of the reach of the poor. The usual answer is that such intervention would destabilize the economy. I find that there is a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with economic parameters—looking at growth for the sake of growth, and all the criticism that you would have of a neo-liberal Washington consensus-type of approach, which I think has become deeply entrenched. It is also something that we find at national levels, where Governments are seeking to invest and gain returns through privatization of water, electricity and sanitation—rights and resources that are critical to make housing a human right. I think there is overwhelming evidence worldwide showing that this kind of approach does not meet the needs of the very poor. For example, I find that the housing finance system does not meet the needs of the bottom 20 per cent of the global population; it is geared towards the lower-middle and middle classes. When you get this kind of assessment, it is very clear that Governments, even of developing countries, can no longer make the excuse that they don’t have enough resources to provide or create conditions for everyone to have the right to housing or food. It is not just a question of not having the resources but also a step that can be taken by reorienting financing that is already available for housing. The second main area of concern related to property speculation is land grabbing. It’s a phenomenon wherein any means possible, including legislative, is used to confiscate or grab land. For example, this whole dogma of eminent domain, where you have a system that the State can effectively confiscate any land with its own opportunistic notion of public purpose, and the people affected do not have any legal means to challenge such acquisition, except to challenge the amount of compensation they would get. If this is done in a way where such actions contain a political element, particularly affecting religious minorities such as in Iran, certain communities are summarily dispossessed of their homes and lands. Another example are the kind of land concession given to foreign companies, for logging, etc., approved by the Government of Cambodia, which severely affects the housing and land rights of indigenous people. There is this element of discrimination, based on race, ethnicity or income levels that comes in, where particular groups are affected even more. On discrimination against vulnerable groups There are vulnerable ethnic and religious minorities, including women across the board. So you have a predatory, exploitative system that treats land, property and housing as a commodity, essentially something out there in the market. It does not give due recognition to the social dimensions of housing, land and property. These are essentially human rights closely tied to survival and livelihood, something that people depend on every day, and their access to these rights, regardless of the level of income and which class or religion they belong to, needs to be protected. But what we find is a situation where States, instead of assuming that responsibility in accordance with international instruments and their own constitutions, are withdrawing from their role as protector and guarantor. And because in many countries there are active land cartels, property developers and politicians who are very powerful and can influence States’ decisions, the Governments, in a sense, lose control of these areas, so land grabbing is becoming a global phenomenon. This is very disturbing. On forced evictions and involuntary displacements The third area which I have come across intensively is the situation of forced evictions: the involuntary displacement of thousands of people because of development and disaster related projects, and also due to conflicts. My main recommendation to the UN system is that much more emphasis must be given to people who are being displaced because of so-called development—by that I mean large dams and mining projects, infrastructure development, environmental and city beautification projects. I don’t know if you are familiar with the situation in May-June 2005 in Zimbabwe, where 700,000 people had been displaced within six weeks, and between November 2004 and March 2005 some 300,000 to 400,000 were displaced in a huge slum-clearance drive in Mumbai, India. If you look at the manner in which cities in developing countries have become the best-practice or are referred to as world-class cities such as Shanghai, they have developed, causing large-scale dislocations, especially of the elderly and the poor. These forced evictions have become really almost an epidemic—it is happening all over the world. One of my interventions, in my 2006 report to the Commission, is to propose a set of guidelines on steps that Governments need to take to minimize evictions, through simple steps like consultations with communities and exploration of alternatives—a range of different options that are usually not taken. There has to be careful assessment of what is to be done. Even from an economic perspective, most of the evictions do not make sense because, as experience in different parts of the world has shown, upgrading settlements where infrastructures have already existed for decades cost far less than relocating a huge number of people. In many cases, such as in Zimbabwe or Mumbai, most of those evicted become homeless, as they are not offered adequate resettlement or are taken away from the centre of the cities and resettled far away where there is no livelihood. They have no access to education for their children and no adequate water and sanitation. Governments do not have the capacity nor the interest or commitment to manage the resettlement. On the phenomenon of ‘urban and rural apartheid’ Forced evictions are becoming more and more routine. The result of this is the creation of what I call “urban and rural apartheid”—the separation of the rich from the poor in cities and rural areas. More and more housing developments are being built only for the wealthy, and the poor are being evicted or forced to live in the ghettos. The kind of judicious master planning that is called for, with mixed-income land use as a principle, is happening less and less. This kind of “apartheid” is tragically being supported in many parts of the world by the judiciary, which should instead uphold human rights and impose justice, but instead is increasingly becoming part of the elite in societies that are anti-poor. This is very dangerous, as there is a conflict between human rights. For example, a court judgment for a city beautification calls for development that would lead to displacement of people, or for an industrial plant to be closed without any recourse to rehabilitating people who would lose their jobs and their homes, thus placing the right to safe environment over the right to housing and the right to work. On the increasing trend of homelessness The other phenomenon that is the theme in my report to the Commission on Human Rights in 2005 is homelessness. We find this happening across the world, including in developed countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, and even in countries with very vibrant economies. This increasing homelessness is very disturbing due to several factors. One is very closely linked to the over-reliance on the market for solutions. For example, in the current United States administration policy, there is a very direct attack on subsidies provided to low-income, mostly African-American communities, such as housing vouchers that will make it possible to rent. But then support for public housing is being withdrawn, and existing public housing dismantled, and the result is that people are forced out onto the street. There is also an increase in domestic violence. This is another area I am looking at: the link between violence against women and the right to housing. When you look at shelters around the world, we find gross inadequacies. There are, for example, some 10,000 homeless women in Delhi and only 1 per cent of them have access to shelter. There is also a system where people with mental or other disabilities are released from an institution without a corresponding system of re-housing, and so many of them end up on the streets. I find this really disturbing, as the poor are more and more stigmatized. For example, in the United States, if you are homeless, you can be treated as a criminal. In India, we have a law called the “Bombay Vagrancy and Prevention of Beggary Act”, which authorizes the police to pick up somebody and put them in jail. So, we are finding that it is not only a question of neglect of the poor, but we have moved into this very dangerous terrain where we are now beginning to see a systematic assault on the poor. On the vicious connection between inadequate housing and violence, particularly against women In a recent regional consultation in Washington, D.C. for the global UN study on women, housing and land, we heard the voices of women from the United States and Canada. Several testimonies were about the United States Government policy that leads to the separation of women and children. A single mother who cannot qualify and provide for adequate housing has her children taken away from her. So instead of the State supporting these women to acquire better housing, or giving them subsidies and better support, it takes away their children and put them in foster care. There are also many such cases in Canada, especially with indigenous people. If you look at statistics there, the indigenous women and young girls are proportionately much more prone to violence, including rape, on the city streets. And you have a situation in developing countries where people are forced to live in inadequate conditions, without privacy and with much more incidences of violence. So these are some areas of concern and the scale of the problems we are facing. On the silent crisis of housing as a global challenge Absolutely, I think that the crisis of housing and land is so severe that it needs much more global attention and requires to be firmly on the global agenda. The UN system needs to take a more careful look at it. There is a culture of silence, for example, when it comes to the struggle women are facing in terms of equal rights to land property, housing and inheritance. This culture of silence, whether at home or in the community, exists because the people in power—the partner, politicians and bureaucrats, etc.—are mostly men, and it is not in their interest to speak openly or admit that they are not allowing women the freedom to have their rights to property, or that there is such a high incidence and prevalence of domestic violence. There is a huge simmering crisis that is affecting millions of women worldwide and we are not giving this the attention it deserves. What we are trying to bring out in the Commission studies and reports is that there is not only a culture of silence but also of neglect in terms of cultures and traditions, where the dominance of customary traditions is such that it discriminates against women and treats them as much more inferior than men. In countries where there are strong traditions stemming from religion, whether Islamic or predominantly Christian, it is important for Governments to reconcile national and religious laws with international human rights obligations, and to ensure that there is no pre-eminence given to one specific interpretation of religious laws over women’s human rights. I saw this clearly in countries like Iran, where there is one specific interpretation of religious laws and the Koran that leads to discrimination against women in terms of their access to housing, land, property and inheritance. On the trend of claiming exception to international law It is the legal responsibility of States that have ratified international instruments to bring national laws in line and to demonstrate that they are implementing these laws. In my reports, we call for property inheritance and for recognition of women’s equal rights to housing, as well as for the implementation of constitutional provisions and national law. Around the world, you will find that there are more and more laws that recognize women’s rights, but there is a huge gap between recognition and implementation. We asked Governments to supply us with information on these issues and we get answers like: “We have this law”; “We are considering this policy”; “We have these administrative actions”. But there is very little information on how these laws, policies or actions have been implemented. If you listen to the voices of women from the field, you’ll find that there is very little implementation. People are not even aware that these laws exist. What dominates is customary practice or just neglect. On the link between property rights and HIV/AIDS In my last report on housing, we made a link between HIV/AIDS and property. It’s very common in countries in sub-Saharan Africa that if a woman’s husband died of HIV/AIDS or she herself has the disease , she is stigmatized and thrown out of the house by relatives, and nobody will rent her a place. Obviously, in such a situation there should be a policy or legal intervention that protects women's right to housing, or some positive developments with domestic violence legislation. For example, in India and Mongolia, the recent laws call for the man to be evicted. Also one of the major problems is that women have no choice but to continue to tolerate domestic violence, otherwise they will be homeless or be separated from their children. Therefore, we are encouraging legislation that protects women's right to housing and ensures that they have equal rights and privacy, as well as other steps that could be taken. I think there is this situation all over the world where women generally are essentially homeless. It doesn't matter what their income group is, because they don't have statutory rights in their homes. There is a move in legislation to recognize that, but women live with a constant insecurity. For example, testimonies of even upper-class and middle-class women reveal that they can be thrown out of the house and have nowhere to go. So there is no protective system, and for women living in poverty the consequences are much more serious. On the collaboration with other UN agencies One of the problems that we have in this work is that resources are very limited. As you know, it is an honorary position and we are not paid staff of the United Nations. The main reason for this is to maintain independence and so that we can even be critical of the work of the Organization. The support we get from the United Nations is for the missions and travel, and a full-time person assisting the Rapporteurs out of the High Commissioner's Office in Geneva. This kind of a situation places restrictions on how much we can do, how many places we can visit and how much research we can get done. Of course, we rely on civil society and the UN agencies, so occasionally there are situations where I work with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); but it's not systematic. We have to take the initiative, in a sense. There is also a need for much more awareness and integration of the work of special rapporteurs across the UN system; right now, it is still very ad hoc. You will find some rapporteurs working very closely with UN agencies. What we find lacking, and where there is a great hope for improvement, is a closer working relationship on a consistent basis with the UN Secretariat in New York. There is definitely a disconnect between what happens in the human rights field in Geneva and the political level in New York. With the political, humanitarian and many other areas of the United Nations, I see hope for much more collaborative work. For example, on internally displaced persons following the tsunami disaster, we are closely working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and are in touch with different UN agencies involved. But again, that is not something that is built into within the UN system. This is an area that is being looked at very closely in the reform process of the Organization. I think the whole initiative to turn the Commission on Human Rights into the Human Rights Council is welcomed by the rapporteurs, as it will bring much more attention to human rights issues in general. I think the Secretary-General's initiative, which has led to a significant increase in the budget of the High Commissioner's Office, will increase the expertise and the capacity of the Office to support human rights work---this is very positive. But where I still find the biggest obstacle remaining is the reluctance of States, even UN agencies, to whole-heartedly and sincerely adopt the human rights approach and comply with international human rights instruments, which the UN Charter also calls for. In the last ten years, there was supposedly much more effort in mainstreaming human rights, but I don't see that happening so much in practice. I have found resistance within some UN agencies, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for example, and even the UN Habitat---I don't find a very open commitment to that. Also in the work of the special envoy on the tsunami, you don't find former United States President Bill Clinton telling an affected country that in a post-disaster situation one should be implementing human rights obligations. But that should be a clear and uncompromising message. When we don't do that, very often we gloss over some of the realities and don't notice the discrimination on the ground, because we don't look at the ground reality through the human rights lens. It's not something that is an add-on. These are obligations all of us, whether UN agencies and representatives or Member States, should have---a primary obligation that even the Secretary-General has consistently addressed. I find that hesitation, what I would call spinelessness, to hold Governments accountable to their own commitments very disturbing. Review of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wolpe Lecture: Regaining our Tongues: The Challenges of Writing in Indigenous Languages Regaining our Tongues: The Challenges of Writing in Indigenous Languages by Annsilla Nyar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Can we reclaim our mother tongue languages? The Harold Wolpe lecture delivered by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of Africa's most celebrated writers, brought the emotive issue of language-and its centrality to issues of power and ideology- once more back to the table. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s presentation at the Wolpe lecture was jointly hosted by the Center for Civil Society and the Center for Creative Arts as part of the Time of the Writer Festival. Howard College, one of the University of Kwa Zulu Natal’s oldest and most elegant buildings, was packed to capacity with those wanting to hear the critically acclaimed Kenyan writer share his thoughts about the possibilities for regaining and reclaiming African indigenous languages. The slight and softly spoken countenance of the speaker belied the revolutionary theme of his presentation. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written formerly in English, producing such successful novels as Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, which depict the conflict between Christianity, colonial education, and the oppression suffered his native Kikuyu and other Africans groups under colonialism. His passionate brand of Marxist political and literary activism saw him imprisoned without trial in 1978 in a maximum security prison by the Kenyan government. During his detention, he produced a memoir of his prison experience entitled Detained, which was written on prison issue toilet paper. Following his release from prison he went into self imposed exile in the United States to teach literature at several American universities. It was then that he renounced writing in English and turned to working exclusively in his regional native tongue of Gikuyu. Ngugi’s critique centred on the deterioration of mother tongue languages as the ideological legacy of colonialism. Colonial policy meant that the language of the colonizing nation was forced onto local people, often with a systematic prohibition of indigenous languages. In colonial Kenya English was used as the sole means of instruction in public school system. He sketched a portrait of language as a tool of colonialism and vividly described being humiliated and shamed for speaking his native tongue as part of his colonial schooling. He passionately advocated for the rejuvenation and development of African mother tongue languages. Ngugi wa Thiong’o captures the paradox of English vs indigenous languages in the world today. To some, English anywhere outside the mother tongue context, is an alien imposed concept. As the linear tongue of the colonial enterprise, it has become synonymous with racial cruelties and injustice and the denigration of local cultures. More so, as representative of something specifically Anglo American and Western, it has become a world language to the extent that Anglo-American Western culture has become hegemonic in the world. But then to others, while English may not be their mother tongue, it is nevertheless their language and an expression of their lived identity. In this view English has become a world language to the extent that it has become divested of any association with colonialism and its adjunct, Western culture. As Chinua Achebe, another major literary figure states, Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it. Where do we place ourselves in this paradox? Ngugi’s presentation raised the important question of what happens to other mother tongues, but then it similarly raised other questions in the contexts of our own struggles with the prevailing cultural globalism. What, then, should become of the English language in former colonies? Is English, as Salman Rushdie says, a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of the Empire or has it actually evolved to fit the need of its speakers in the post-colonial world? Should it be rejected or embraced? Does writing in English suggest the betrayal of our mother tongues or does it represent the assumption of a new post-colonial identity? Not so long ago, language policy was the subject of intense and often bitter, debate in South Africa. The country adopted a multilingual language policy which gives official recognition to eleven languages, including English and Afrikaans and nine indigenous languages. But the celebrated new language freedoms and opportunities have not really translated into the envisioned linguistic equality for South Africans. African languages remain on the periphery of the academy in South Africa. While the education system purports to be multilingual, most educational institutions do not use the learner’s mother tongue as languages of learning and teaching. Parents and students prefer to be taught in English and most teachers are inadequately prepared. As one student pointed out to Ngugi, proficiency in English is a must for young job seekers. The globalised world of economic possibility is symbolised by English. One could almost feel the passion from youth in the room wanting to communicate this paradox to Ngugi and its centrality to their lives as young South Africans: the difference between what is practical and what is desirable. Faced with a barrage of questions regarding the technical aspects of the ideal of reclaiming mother tongue languages, Ngugi persisted to make his point in a stronger fashion: “The death of many languages should never be the condition for the life of a few .... A language for the world? A world of languages! The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, provided there is independence, equality, democracy, and peace among nations.” He called for a partnership amongst several key stakeholders: government in creating an enabling environment for linguistic development; writers and storytellers; publishers and readers. Ngugi’s Wolpe presentation was beautiful and extremely necessary. It is high time that this issue return to the national agenda. However, disappointingly, it failed to address the huge socio-political complexities of the language issue. Nor did it acknowledge the fact that this dilemma is not simply the province of Africa and its colonial past. It is very much a global issue. UNESCO estimates that half of the world’s 6000 to 7000 mother tongue languages are in danger of extinction. The challenges of immigration and integration in many Northern countries represent a serious threat to mother tongue languages. Take the Republican state of California in the United States. In 1998 California imposed English as the sole medium of instruction in all its public schools, effectively alienating mostly Spanish-speaking learners. It earned the anger of civil rights organizations in the US, a country where 3 to 4 million children speak English poorly or not at all. The paradox remains, and frustratingly so. Annsilla Nyar is a Research Fellow at the Center for Civil Society. Bio: World-acclaimed novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic and social activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in colonial Kenya in 1938, and was educated at Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Leeds, Britain. wa Thiong'o's early works such as the play The Black Hermit (1962) and novels Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1969) eloquently depict the conflicts of the transition from colonialism to post-colonialism and have as one of their major themes the Mau Mau War of Independence, the central historical episode in the making of modern Kenya. wa Thiong'o‘s writing reflected a strong, principled and uncensored political voice. It was a voice that made him a threat to the Kenyan government under the Moi dictatorship. Matters came to a head in 1977, when wa Thiong'o's (co-written) political plays The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) and novel Petals of Blood - where he boldly denounced the inequalities, injustices and the abuses of power rampant in neo-colonial Kenya - led to his arrest, and imprisonment without trial. In prison, wa Thiong'o made his famous decision to abandon English as his primary language of creative writing and committed himself to writing in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Following that decision, he wrote, on prison toilet paper, the novel, Caitani Mutharabaini (1981) translated into English as Devil on the Cross. After Amnesty International named wa Thiong'o a Prisoner of Conscience, an international campaign secured his release a year later. However, the Moi dictatorship barred him from jobs at colleges and universities in the country. He resumed his writing and his activities in the theater and in so doing, continued to be an uncomfortable voice for the Moi dictatorship. In 1982, wa Thiong'o was forced into a twenty-two year long exile after receiving assassination threats from the dictatorship. During his exile, he lectured at many universities in London and the USA and also studied film in Sweden. His next Gikuyu novel, Matigari ma Njiruungi, was published in 1986. Thinking that the novel's protagonist was an actual person, Moi infamously issued a warrant for his arrest but on learning that the character was fictional, had the novel banned instead. Between 1986 and 1996, Matigari ma Njiruungi could not be sold in Kenyan bookshops. The dictatorship also had wa Thiong'o’s books removed from all educational institutions. wa Thiong'o has published numerous influential essay collections including Decolonising the Mind, Homecoming and Moving the Centre, and has edited various literary journals. He is a distinguished speaker and recipient of many honors including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature and seven honorary doctorates. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's latest and much awaited novel, Murogo wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow) was published in 2006 and has been called “a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's career thus far.” It will be launched during Time of the Writer festival March 22 18h45 Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre Deck. On Human Rights Day 21 March wa Thiong'o will present The Pen in the Fight for Human Rights, a discussion with Bheki Peterson at 19h30 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre. See www.cca.ukzn.ac.za for more festival information or 031 260 2506 or cca@ukzn.ac.za Ngugi wa Thiong'o Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer of Gikuyu descent, began a very successful career writing in English before turning to work almost entirely in his native Gikuyu. In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his farewell to English, Ngugi describes language as a way people have not only of describing the world, but of understanding themselves. For him, English in Africa is a cultural bomb that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-colonial cultures and history and as a way of installing the dominance of new, more insidious forms of colonialism. Writing in Gikuyu, then, is Ngugi's way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of acknowledging and communicating their present. Ngugi is not concerned primarily with universality, though models of struggle can always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity of his individual groups. In a general statement, Ngugi points out that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore the loss of the former results in the loss of the latter: [A] specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries. Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. . . . Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world. . . . Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (15-16) Aside from Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi has written several novels in English: Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat, The River Between, and Petals of Blood, as well as a memoir of the time he spent detained by the Kenyan government-- Detained. Other works include his essays, collected in Homecoming, the short story collection, Secret Lives, and the plays The Black Hermit and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Micere Mugo). Since turning to Gikuyu, Ngugi has written the play I Will Marry When I Want (with Ngugi wa Mirii) and the novels Devil on the Cross and Matigari. Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the politics of language From: The Humanist | Date: 3/1/1993 | Author: Pelton, Theodore I am concerned with moving the centre . . . from its assumed location in the West to a multi-plicity of spheres in an the cultures of the world. {This} will contribute to the freeing of world cultures from the restrictive ways of nationahsm, class, race, and gender. In this sense I am an unrepentant universalist. For I believe that whlee retaining its roots in regional and national individuality, true humanism with its universal reaching out, can flower among the peoples of the earth . . . . - Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms The name Ngugi wa Thiong'o may be less recognizable to American audiences than those of Nobel Prize-winning African writers Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka or even Nigerian novehst Chinua Achebe. And yet, the life and work of Ngugi provide an excellent starting point for people who wish to achieve some awareness of the many inter-related dilemmas - cultural, political, linguistic, developmental - that beset an entire continent of people and yet remain obscure even for the vast majority of educated Americans. In fact, Ngugi - the author of 19 books of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and children's literature - is as important today as any other single literary figure in understanding the problems of post, colonial Africa. Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born James Ngugi in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya. In 1967, at the age of 29, Ngugi - already the author of three critically acclaimed novels - began an address to the Fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa by shocking his audience. I am not a man of the church, he stated. I am not even a Christian. Ngugi went on to censure the church for its role in the colonizing of his native land. At the end of the speech, a quavering old man approached the front of the auditorium, shaking a cane and denouncing Ngugi for blasphemy. And you are a Christian, the man rather absurdly insisted. Your name, James, is a Christian name. Perhaps as a result of this encounter, the next novel James Ngugi published bore his new Africanized name, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, formed by joining his mother's and father's family names. It is the name he has used ever since. Thus, to approach Ngugi the writer, one must also confront this carefully cultivated mythic presence. Ngugi sees himself not just as a writer but also as a revolutionary continuing the fight against Western imperialism - particularly the sophisticated form of economic imperialsm that, he argues, has replaced traditional colonialism in his country. In his first three novels, Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), he set out to develop a national literature for Kenya in the immediate wake of that nation's liberation from British rule. Setting his novels' plots against such historic events as the Mau Mau uprising and the subsequent day of Kenyan independence (or Uhuru) in 1963, Ngugi sought to create and establish historical legends for a nation less than half a decade old. Ngugi was firm in his denunciation of any compromise with British colonialism - so much so, in fact, that his personality and radicalism have become as important to his stature among African writers as his works. Stories of Ngugi's fiery literary and political activism now form a kind of oral literature among students of contemporary African culture. Ngugi himself has launched a second career telling these stories in subsequent nonfiction books, as well as in lectures and readings across Europe and North America. One of the most famous of these stories concerns his experiences with the Kamiriithu theater project. Ngugi had been persuaded by the villagers in Kamiriithu, where he lived while teaching at the nearby University of Nairobi, to begin working with the local theater group on literacy projects. Since many of the villagers didn?t speak Enghsh - the language of the former colonial administration, in which Ngugi had written his first four novels - and since he had an interest in exploring the traditions of pre-colonial African expression, Ngugi decided to write and produce a play in his own regional language, Gikuyu. This was a bold initiative. Until 1970, theater in Kenya had been monopolized by the Kenyan National Theatre, a British-based company that produced largely Western plays, in English, with British actors. The Kenyan National Theatre had also altered the traditional space of African theater from a less formalized outdoor setting to a more formal and Westernized indoor one. Ngugi was interested in opening up the theater to the peasantry again; he wanted to make it not just an isolated aesthetic event for the cultural elite but part and parcel of the . . . daily and seasonal life of the community, as song and ritual had once been in the Kenyan countryside. The play which resulted from Ngugi's experiments with the Kamiriithu Theatre, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), was wildly popular. Drawing from the experiences of theater participants who had been involved in the events of the time depicted - one man who made fake guns for the play had actually made real guns for the rebels - Ngugi allowed the audience themselves to feel a vital part of the artistic creation. The Kenyan government, however, was not as enthusiastic; it withdrew the license that allowed the gathering at the theater. Ngugi was arrested at the end of 1977 and spent the whole of 1978 in a maximum security prison, detained without even the doubtful benefit of a trial, as he noted in his book Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Later attempts by others to resurrect the theater led first to a government ban on theatrical activities in the area and later to the razing of the open-air theater itself. In cell 16 of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Ngugi began to write his fifth novel - and his first in Gikuyu. He had been raised as a speaker of the language despite attempts by the British colonial administration to install English as its language of instruction in Kenya (in the schools Ngugi attended, children were punished if they were caught speaking Gikuyu on the grounds). Until 1978, all of Ngugi's works had been written in English, but now he desired not the international audience English afforded but the local one reachable only through Gikuyu. This proved to be a formidable challenge; although British missionaries had developed a written form of the language in order to make the Bible more widely available to this audience, there was no formal literature written in Gikuyu, and native speakers were punished for attempts to write secular works in the language. By writing a novel, Ngugi was now stretching this written language system beyond any previous test, especially since it required him to standardize written Gikuyu and make it more accurately reflect the way native speakers practiced it. As it turned out, an even more immediate challenge for Ngugi was how to actuafly write a book in prison when he was denied access to writing paper except for the purpose of making a confession. Ngugi solved this problem by writing on toilet paper - a seemingly impossible undertaking, but as Ngugi explained in Decolonizing the Mind: Toilet paper at Kamiti was meant to punish prisoners. So it was very coarse. But what was bad for the body was good for the pen. This novel, Caitaani Mutharabainin (Devil on the Cross), was hugely popular, finding an audience even among the illiterate; it led, among other things, to the development of professional readers, who sat in bars and read aloud to the clientele until a key passage, at which point they would stop and make sure their glasses were refilled before they continued the story. But after selling as well as any Englis-language novel ever published in Kenya, Devil on the Cross was banned by the government. A subsequent novel written in Gikuyu, Matigari, was published in that language by Heinemann of London but was seized upon arrival in Kenya; in fact, Ngugi's translation of this novel into English is the only version legally available in Kenya today. Ngugi now lives in exile; he has taught at Yale University and Amherst College and was recently appointed professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University. Why, the reader may be wondering at this point, did Ngugi's work so consistently run afoul of the Kenyan government? Ngugi contends that it was his choice of Gikuyu, more than any other single factor, which led both to his imprisonment and to his subsequent exile. A reader unfamiliar with African literature might be puzzled by this. Why wouldn't the Kenyan authorities wish to permit literary works written in an indigenous African language? One would think that the government of an independent African state, nearly 30 years after Uhuru, would seek both to champion its own languages as evidence of its cultural independence from the West and to celebrate its successful struggle against tyranny - in this case, the Mau Mau uprising which began its guerrilla war against Britain in 1952. It is important to remember here that Kenya, like many other African states, is a nation whose boundaries were artificially drawn in Europe. Although the Kenyan government has never officially explained why Ngugi was detained, we can see in this an initial reason for its actions. Kenya relies upon English as a unifying force; the citizens of that country are in the paradoxical position of having as their only common language the one spoken by their former oppressors. Nor is this situation peculiar to Kenya; Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has written of this problem in Africa in general, and in his article The Role of the Writer in a New Nation, published in a 1964 issue of Nigeria Magazine, he made clear his own opposition to the use of African languages for African literature: It is not that I underrate their importance. But since I am considering the role of the writer in building a new nation I wish to concentrate on those who write for the whole nation whose audience cuts across tribe or clan. And these, for good or ill, are writers in English. Achebe has since modified his position, saying that he admires those writers who use African languages for their works but remains adamant about the use of English in his own. And it is important to remember that Achebe's credentials as a champion of literary Africanicity are impeccable. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is probably the best-known African novel in the United States, and one that consciously seeks to show, in Achebe's words, that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry, and, above all, they had dignity. Moreover, Achebe's position on the use of European languages is more in keeping with the feelings of most African writers than Ngugi's. Thus, the issue of which language should be used to compose a truly African contemporary literature is murky at best. Ngugi steadfastly maintains that writing in African languages is a necessary step toward cultural identity and independence from centuries of European exploitation. But, as critic David Westley has noted, the problem is historically complex: as a strategy to maintain apartheid - by definition the separation of defined racial groups - south Africa for many years encouraged African,language manuscripts, under the theory that the resulting problems of communication would make it harder for various groups to band together and collectively protest government policies. Of course, discussions of language alone neglect the all-important issue of class, an issue to which Ngugi continually returns. The masses of peasants and workers in Kenya are largely illiterate in English, and it is precisely these people from whom the government wishes to keep Ngugi's writings. The reason is a simple one: Ngugi is an explicit and unabashed Marxist, and his works recall the revolutionary spirit of the Mau Mau rebellion which convinced the English to relinquish control of Kenya. A little history is necessary here. While the origins of the term are controversial, Mau Mau seems to have originally been a British term to describe the small bands of guerrillas which sought to resist the domination of British settlers in the 1950s. At that time, the Mau Maus did not constitute an actual national movement. The British settlers, however, grew increasingly worried about their tenuous hold on the country; only 1 percent of the population, they nonetheless controlled all the best farmland in Kenya. Taking advantage of a change in colonial administration, the settlers began spreading horror stories of a nationwide revolution in the offing. The authorities responded with a crackdown; gradually, however, the measures taken - illegal detentions, the razing of villages, and the imposition of a 24-hour curfew had the ironic effect of provoking more and more people, particularly Gikuyu, to join the guerrilla bands. Soon, the tiny force that the British tried to extinguish became a substantial guerrilla army (in Gikuyu, The Land and Freedom Army). The national state of emergency that was supposed to last several weeks lasted for seven years; for four of these years, the so-called Mau Mau rebels fought a guerrilla war against British rule. Eventually, the British defeated this army, killing its leader, Dedan Kimathi, and establishing prison camps to rehabilitate captured rebels. In their attempts to make these prisoners confess their allegiance to Mau Mau (a step in the rehabilitation process), prison officials practiced horrible tortures - twisting mens' testicles, punching prisoners into incoherence, sometimes whipping them to death. When the British government itself, thousands of miles away, learned what was being carried out in its name, it decided to follow a new policy in Kenya and readied the country for independence. However, the independence Britain had in mind was not the same as that which the Land and Freedom Army had fought for. If independence was to be granted, the British wished to yield control to a government they had themselves trained and installed - one that could be counted on to protect the landed interests in the nation. Thus, the colonial administration stepped down and a neocolonial administration - answerable not to the Kenyan people but to the economic interests that still retained actual control of the country - took its place. The Kenyan rebels returning from jail found, in the words of Anthony Howarth and David Koff in their 1973 documentary Black Man's Country, a nation that they had helped create, but which they had no place in. Ngugi asserts that the Kenyan goverrunent - and other neocolonial administrations like it in Africa - are fronts for U.S., led imperialism, a phrase he returns to again and again. He continually reminds us that the world is and always has been a linked unit, that the rich - be they nations or individuals - did not get that way on their own, but profited by the labor of the poor. Over the last 400 years, Ngugi said at a recent conference at Yale University, the developments in the West have not just been the result of internal social dynamics but also of the West's relationship with Africa, Asia, and South America. The so-called First World's privileged position did not come about simply by means of superior technical ingenuity or managerial skills (much as we like to laud ourselves for these things); it began with the stolen labor of slavery and continued with the enforced labor of colonial governments, working hand in hand with multinational corporations. In sum, Ngugi argues, if today a nation enjoys wealth - particularly great wealth, as we do in the United States - it is directly linked to exploitation somewhere else in the world. This is why the Kenyan government, acting as the proxy of Western investment, will not tolerate the widespread dissemination of a revolutionary message by a fiercely committed Marxist who is also national hero (in 1964, Ngugi published the first novel in English by an East African), through a populist medium like drama or through structures designed to empower workers (written literature read aloud to the illiterate). In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi describes a revealing example of the type of self-discovery which occurred during his rehearsals of Ngaahica Ndeenda: I remember for instance how one group who worked in a particular department at the nearby Bata shoe factory sat down to work out the process and quantity of their exploitation in order to explain it all to those of us who had never worked in a factory. Within a single day, they would make shoes to the value of all he monthly wages for the entire work force of three thousand. . . . For whom were they working for the other twenty-nine days? They calculated what of what they produced went to wear and tear of the machinery and for the repayment initial capital, and because the company had been there since 1938 they assumed that the initial investment had been repaid a long time ago. To whom did the rest go? To the owners in Canada. At a time when African governments do not wish to alienate large lender nations, such rhetoric represents a real threat to any neocolonialist regime. As Ngugi himself puts it: A writer who tries to communicate the message of revolutionary unity and hope in the languages of the people becomes a subversive character. It is then that writing in African languages becomes a subversive or treasonable offence with such a writer facing possibilities of prison, exile, or even death. For him there are no national accolades, no new year honors, only abuse and slander and innumerable lies from the mouths of the armed power of a ruling minority. Ngugi's ear of imprisonment seems to have a marked impact on his writing. As he notes in Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary, he found himself analyzing the purposes of detention itself: Political detention, not disregarding its punitive aspects, serves a deeper, exemplary ritual symbolism. If they can break such patriot, if they can make him come out of detention crying I am sorry for all my sins, such an unprincipled about-turn would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few. The confession and its corollary, Father, forgive us our sins, becomes a cleansing ritual for all the past and current repressive deeds of such neocolonial regime. But Ngugi abjured the cleansing ritual. He is determined to keep the past alive, and Detained i Wolpe Lecture: Taking up the cudgels to deepen democracy Fatima Meer February 22 2007 Taking up the cudgels to deepen democracy In this excerpt from her Harold Wolpe Memorial lecture at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, Prof Fatima Meer calls for a South African social forum Those who are ruling us have usurped power. They are incapable of establishing equality or democracy. Who, then, will establish this democracy? You will find two communities in the world today, divided against each other. One is the community of governments and the capitalists of the world, which met recently in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. The other community is civil society. But many of us in civil society have been converted into vote banks and consumers for the other community. Delivering his Budget speech, Trevor Manuel was ebullient as ever, and all we heard about were billions and billions of rands that we had helped to save. And then there was this pittance for those on social grants. There was so much self-congratulation in that house of parliament. We have hundreds of organisations throughout the country, maybe even thousands. What we lack is the co-ordination of these organisations, so that we can form a South African Social Forum to connect to the World Social Forum. Discrimination South Africa is a microcosm of the world. Previously discrimination was based on colour, now it is based on class. The poor are blamed. There are all sorts of myths that radiate all over the place, because the media is not in our hands. It is up to us to liberate ourselves. They are not going to give it to us. As a young girl I learnt that freedom is not presented to you on a platter. We have to struggle for it, we have to fight for it. You know those institutions which have usurped power in South Africa and the world: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. All these organisations are structured to exploit us and the rest of the world. We lived throughout colonisation, a pernicious system. It transferred the resources of Africa, Latin America and Asia to Europe and North America. They transferred the populations they wanted, as slaves and indentured labourers. Replacing colonisation is a new form of domination, ravaging and destroying the world: globalisation. Those in charge cannot tolerate a moral order. They have broken the link in our two-dimensional humanity: body and soul, material and spirit. They have completely destroyed the idea of the spirit or soul. It does not consume, and they cannot profit through that part of humanity. They concentrate on science and technology, which they develop to increase their exploitation of our universe. Challenge The activism of civil society is not something that began recently. It started in the 19th century and, here in Durban, Mahatma Gandhi later developed the strategy of satyagraha, the struggle for truth. The challenge we face is enormous, and so we must establish a South African Social Forum, along the lines of the World Social Forum, which has already held so many successful summits and meetings, roughly 18 in other African countries. As far as the existing Social Movements Indaba network is concerned, I would hope they would partner with all our movements to form a social forum. Community organisations founded the last bastion of the fight against apartheid, the United Democratic Front. The Congress of the People was authored by similar organisations coming together, as was the Freedom Charter, which was the basis of our constitution. The challenges before us are enormous. If we accept the responsibility of organising democracy in our country, we have to work out solutions collectively. We have the intellectual capacity. More important, we are motivated. We as civil society are also the repository of the moral order. Together we will overcome.  Back

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