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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 22, 2012 11:43:33 GMT 3
THE KISS OF THE DRAGON, IS IT A LOVE MATCH?Ignoring antiquity when Chinese naval captains like Admiral Zheng He (1400+) grazed the coasts of Afrika on trade missions, modern Afro-Chinese relations are traced to the Afro-Asian conference at Bandung in Indonesia, held in the year of our lord 1955. This www.blackpast.org/?q=gah/bandung-conference-1955 conference is remembered widely as the precursor to the Non aligned movement. (And now the so called South-South trading axis, the coooperation platform of which the FOCAC, Forum on China Afrika Cooperation, is currently the most dynamic economic talking-shop for Afrika's in all her external relations.) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BANDUNG 1955We will recall chairman Mao had just declared the the peoples republic of China arisen in 1949. That most of Afrika is still under colonialism, with Kenya in the throes of the Mau-Mau rebellion. Indeed China had few friends, with Mao already suspicious of comrade Stalin of the USSR, while the United States, reeling in horror at that large, populous landmass in red, was positively hysterical in enmity toward the fresh republic. It was therefore a tearful Chou en Lai ( the man had an inexhaustible bag of theatrical tricks) who, when Nasser of Egypt became the first African country to recognize China and promise full-fledged diplomatic ties in 1956, informed the world that he would pronounce the name 'MASRI' with tears forever! So consummate was Chou that his name has become legend in world schools of diplomacy. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDenlai.htm <> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_EnlaiAnd it is with him in mind that I will tell my story in this several part series for Jukwaa. Hence his portrait at the top. #I could not find one in which he embraces Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah at Bandung, which is the one I wanted.INTRODUCTION.It is an issue which has to be faced. The elephant is in the room. China has a very coherent Afrika policy, and a very coherent and integrated vision of her place in the world, now and forever. But there are fears, legitimate I think, that the Afrikan continent is not equally coherent, neither in her current economic ties to China and the rest of the world, nor in the sense of a thought-out comprehensive vision of a prosperous future, fulfilling the dreams and true aspirations of her people, in true freedom. But the debate is definitely on. A +. The China Afrika embrace can not be unlocked, it is too historically and economically logical. It only needs to be invigilated, revised when appropriate, so that the best interests of Afrika are manifested, her priorities asserted, and this does not, once more, become the great African robbery as we have seen in our dalliances with outside powers in the last 500 years. ---From the religious conquests of Christianity and Islam in search of slaves and ivory, to classical colonialism and neo-colonialism. All of them rapacious extractive regimes of terror and impoverisation. In this background then, I am going to try and assess this Eastern Wind. Some of these trade figures will terrify others, especially from the West who, in that foregone decade, considered Afrika the lost continent. Meanwhile, the Afro-Chinese trade was going geometrically ballistic in progression. Year- $ billions 2000 - 10 (Forum on China Afrika Cooperation, FOCAC, Beijin) 2003 - 18 (FOCAC Addis Abeba: action plan 2004-2006) 2005 - 40 ($40 billion is approximately Kenya's GDP] 2006 - 56 (Beijin Conference: 48 afro heads of state attend) 2007 - 66 (President Hu Jintao visits Afrika twice, one of them a 15 day stretch!) 2010 - 127 2009: China overtakes the USA as Afrika's leading trade partner. And continues to stretch the margin at a galloping rate. 2012. 30% of China's oil exports are from Afrika, and set to rise with instability in the middle east. 1. The projections for 2020 we will tackle later. There are some wars sighted ahead, especially in the middle east, and statisticians are holding fire, advicing caution! 2. Following the conclusion of the FOCAC Beijin 2012, I have found it fit to mull on this evolving power-house of the future. Afro-Asian relations in historical perspective. Now Jukwaa, fire your last Miguna salvos , reload and lets go East!--[continues shortly]---
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 22, 2012 12:26:09 GMT 3
PLUCKING THE PATIENT FRUITS OF THE WILY CHOU EN LAIWhile Chou flirted around charming the world on behalf of red China, Mao, however, was not of that make. Thinking about the position of China in the hostile world, and himself ablaze with revolutionary fire, Mao went to work on a theory which would later give us some of these concepts we use today automatically. Eg. the THIRD WORLD and 2nd (intermediate) world; and the concept of social imperialism, now upgraded to socialist imperialism to describe the practice of the then red empire Soviet Union, talking socialist brotherhood, practicing imperialist domination. ( But he could also give good bar talk, our Mao, like enemy of my enemy is my friend, guerrilla is fish in water, and a good woman tastes like ripe flavoured wine everywhere.) After the final finishing touches on his theory of the third world and Afrika as the next revolutionary nexus of the world, and the split with Moscow now complete with the soviets being pronounced guilty of revisionism, Mao now asked Chou en Lai in december 1963 to visit Afrika (for close to three months). Chou visited 10 African countries in a fact-finding mission, amazing some of his hosts by his demands to be lectured by the best academicians of that country, and amazing those lecturers by proving himself the most attentive and memorable student they ever heard. (An unconfirmed report says Chou joked: Dictator Mao will kill me if there is a question he will ask whose answer I wont know! And I can assure you he is a very sharp dictator --he talks/farts philosophy the whole day)! This is a difficult read from the CIA doctored archives. Some off cut remarks by Time magazine from the 60s are available for subscribers/members only so the link jams. But here is the scornful CIA, saying Afrika tells Chou off. www.faqs.org/cia/docs/81/0000252389/CHOU--EN---LAI--ENDS.html (But the author John K. Cooley in East wind over Afrika [1964]) did not scorn at Chou). But on his return home, his information was processed, and thought on, so that he was sent back to AFRIKA again twice in 1965, to Algeria, Egypt and Tanzania. Kenya, just a year independent and beholden to her former colonial masters, would not have the clever communist on visit. With Odinga Jaramogi thought to think communism is :-*food in the middle of the cold war, that would have been ... something else! And then there was that other Field Marshall of a mad jaruo, Okello, who, according to rumour, had just, with chinese help, overthrown the Sultan of Zanzibar with sticks and rungus, and Mao's little red book containing Jaluo Malo songs! No, Kenya did not need China and her golden-tongued seller of snake oil. We said: Go to hell little yellow man!CONTRADICTIONS.China was looking for friends, diplomatic and commercial missions, but also having a revolutionary theory of the West as cities, and the third world as the rural sea surrounding, besieging her. Revolutionary theory and diplomacy had an uneasy relationship. And these new forages by Chou too, inviting hostility from cold-war competitors, were termed frantic and declared failures by the international press: CHINA REBUFFED IN AFRIKA, as we have seen above, but Chou in characteristic wit responded: some trees take a century to bear fruit. Chou dead tomorrow, China stay forever. We will see.[/color] But China decided to support all liberation movements in Afrika (and the third world) and the new governments irrespective of their ideological leaning. Long term patience, Chou explained, the winds blowing west today, could blow east tomorrow. (but he omitted the vice versa)A paraphrase from his memoirs: Them Africans are still welded to their former colonial masters. That is the system of imperialism, independence as an artificial concession. Neither of domestic nor foreign policy are the Africans masters of their own house like us in China. They look at the dwarf Chou and compare him to the gigantic Americans, Brits and Russians, and ask, what can Chinaman bring to the table? who can blame them? Look here Mao, those philosophical airburgers from your little red book, they (africans) just laugh away in amusement! When I complained you are a great and very powerful dictator, they just amused themselves more, and said may be in my poor head! Patience, O Chairman!Thereafter Chou would go to work and adapt the key document of Chinese foreign policy toward the third world. In it were outlined his 5 principles of peaceful co-existence which he had sold to the Afro-Asia conference at Bandung, and the 8 principles of 'trade ties'! And these would guide China's relationship with Afrika until Deng Hsiao Ping emerged. THE 5 PRINCIPLES OF PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE ACCORDING TO EN LAI1. Respect of territorial integrity and sovereignity. 2. Non aggression. 3. Non intervention in internal affairs. 4.. Equality and win-win relations. 5. Peaceful co-existence itself. NB: During the turmoil of the cultural revolution, trade nearly ground to a halt.More on the 8 guiding principles of trade according to Chou, laterNEW KID ON THE BLOCK: DENG TSIAO PINGDeng identified technological backwardness as China's weakest point. (He used chinese anatomical illustrations of weak points which martial arts experts use for the quick-kill). The dragon spat no fire, he declared. Fire her up! he yelled! A ruthless pragmatist, He threw Mao's doctrinal confrontationalism with the West and ideas about world revolution out, and cultivated relations with the technological giants instead. Europe, USA, Japan, the imperial powers. Afrika? he never heard of it, and the continent suffered appropriate neglect with even large-scale infrastructural investments like the Tazara rail, suffering contractual neglect (on servicing and upgrade) and nearly going dodo. (Though on that we should surely blame our Tanzanian brothers, because Simple railways is an old technology ever since Stephenson won his famous race in medieval England with the Iron monster!). And Deng was a riot. It became a period of inverse relations: as china hurtled astronomically forward, Afrika like more or less stagnated under the regime of the poisonous IMF SAPs. But the open window, then open door policy, unleashed China economically, first by Specially designated economic zones, then whole provinces later. But this dynamism unleashed too, the desire for modernized relations concomitant with the new wealth, and so there was THE TIAN AMEN MASSACRE, as dissent was ruthlessly curtailed. Deng's pragmatism without deep thinking had run into an iceberg. The chinese leadership was shocked at the Western reaction. They were denounced, sanctions threatened, some instituted, and the hostility was so great China was relegated to the rank of primitive paria nation. Uncivilized: (no worse abuse can be hurled at China than that it is barbarian. Barbarian: that is how the chinese describe inferior peoples! And now the world said they were just that, barbarian). Deng went missing. ;D avvaworld.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/china-in-africa-2/It was a time to rethink and discover old friends, especially when Afrika stayed out of the chorus of condemnation, for its own selfish reasons, perhaps. (The debate was: are human rights as formulated by the West universal?). Deng turned his gaze to Afrika, also in need of markets for his manufactured cheap goods, in need of raw materials, and in need of company, even if only that of fellow rogues! But he was still no idealist, he put economics first. But left the rest of Chou en Lai's formulations intact. Afrika is strategic and most important yes, but economically and not as the revolutionary epicenter of world revolution! This refocusing by Deng and re-dusting of Chou en Lai's notes of old, leads to a dynamic relationship between China and Afrika (and indeed the rest of the third world) throughout the 90s, culminating in Beijin 2000 FOCAC conference. And the China-Afrika statement of mission: the Beijin declaration. Trade goes astronomical. In december 2003 Addis Ababa followed with the action plan 2004-2006. Then the 2006 super conference in Beijin, attended by 48 African heads of state, resulting in the South-South declaration. Afro-China trade speeds the more, And China rises to about number two in the World, second only to the USA. That is breaking a 'sound barrier' like with the jet fighters of old. 2009 was Sharm el Sheik in Egypt with its 10 point plan; and Beijin 2012 , whose Raila pictures Phil has been so kind to etalate or showcase, is supposed to be an evaluation of the past, and a re-definition of priorities, since in the meantime China is by far the biggest African trading partner, and still the fastest rising economic investing foreign power. And set to stay so. The tree that takes 100 years to bear fruit which was planted by Chou en Lai the witty littleman, is bearing fruit half a century earlier. That kind of shortcut must be GM I think!PS: And many quarters are worried about this penetration of Afrika by China. Jacob Zuma of Azania hit this note of warning yesterday in Beijin. www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2011/05/chinese-in-africa-economist-gets-some.htmlblog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/19/is_china_acting_responsibly_in_africa----------- Next I will, see the above foreign policy links, try to tackle the HECKLERS AND PROPHETS OF DOOM DECRYING CHINA'S COLONIALISM OF AFRIKA. AND OBAMA'S ANTI AFRIKA AGENDA IN FEAR OF THE SAME.
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Post by barmasaiengkeiyo on Jul 22, 2012 14:05:26 GMT 3
and you wonder why the capitalists in DC and London are shouting loud about human rights and democrazy in China.....Obama himself has stretched the empire's military industrial complex to a level that Asia and Africa are feeling suspicious of this black Kogelo prince, who unfortunately, is a puppet of the dirty AIPAC, Rotschild and other mafias
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 29, 2012 12:41:26 GMT 3
and you wonder why the capitalists in DC and London are shouting loud about human rights and democrazy in China.....Obama himself has stretched the empire's military industrial complex to a level that Asia and Africa are feeling suspicious of this black Kogelo prince, who unfortunately, is a puppet of the dirty AIPAC, Rotschild and other mafias Yeah, the deliberate policy of the USA to thwart China in Afrika as part of a global containment policy is in no doubt. What we shall reveal by fact and analysis to the bone, is just how insidious and anti Afrika it works out to be in practice. --Afro-American or no Afro-American be the PORK!
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 29, 2012 13:00:59 GMT 3
Before I embark on the second instalment, some perspectives from the bottom of the sea, where the tectonic forces at play are ripping centuries of unchanged formations, and their reports reach us as news bubbles, well, insignificant air bubbles of a volcanic island starting. GUANGZHOU city in GUANGDONG is known as CHOCOLATE CITY' because of the significant African diaspora there. But ... blog.foolsmountain.com/2008/06/14/chocolate-city-africans-seek-their-dreams-in-china/ African Immigrants Riot In China www.therightperspective.org/2012/06/26/african-immigrants-riot-in-china/Chinese police clash with African immigrants in Guangzhou More than 100 African immigrants rioted in the Chinese city of Guangzhou last Tuesday after an African man died in police custody. The June 19 riot started off as a protest against the death of an unidentified African man who argued with a Chinese man over how much he had to pay for a ride on an electric bicycle the day before. After being arrested, the African “suddenly fell unconscious” at a police station on Monday afternoon “and died after medical efforts failed,” according to Reuters. African immigrants protesting More than 100 African immigrants stopped traffic in Guangzhou, the capitol of Guangdong province and China’s third largest city with more than 12 million people. Some held up placards calling on police to “give us the dead body” of the man, while others threw rocks and water bottles at cars and officers. There are approximately 200,000 African immigrants living in the city. Anti-foreigner sentiment has been increasing in China, which has issued a crack-down on “illegal foreigners” in the country. Beijing launched a 100-day campaign to “clean out” foreigners living and working illegally in the city last May. Shanghai has also stepped up passport and other document checks on expatriates, according to Business Insider. Yang Rui The crack-down follows a xenophobic rant by state television host Yang Rui posted on China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo. According to the Wall Street Journal, Yang gave advice on how to “throw out the foreign trash” and held particular disdain for Al Jazeera‘s former China correspondent Melissa Chan, who was expelled from China in early May. Public support on Weibo has been largely in favor of the police, reports Tea Leaf Nation, with posters making racist comments about the Africans. “Troublemakers with no morals or civic values, don’t treat us as people,” wrote one poster. “This is our country, can’t let outsiders run wild and trample everything.” ---------------------- MEANWHILE, FROM THE DISTANT PAST! clyde.winters.tripod.com/junezine/id1.html
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 29, 2012 13:32:27 GMT 3
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 29, 2012 14:05:12 GMT 3
Show me, O young man, where thee thinks thy pride resideth! The winds of life Son, off they long tooketh my pride Rode away with my dignity and left tears of sand in my eyes! Stooped in shame I die, O if I could taketh back the time! ----( Tung' Odero Jakawanyama, Rusinga) PART 2 CHINA SERIES. KISSING WITH EYES WIDE OPENThere is this word dignity. I have never encountered it given much of a prominent place in economic theory, nor is it really given the pride of chapter in history. Yet in political theory, especially the discourse of liberation movements, all over the world and in whatever epoch, dignity remains a key concept. Colonialism is seen as a period in which dignity was achieved only from active struggle against the oppressor. I will strive in this episode of our series, to bestow 'pride of chapter' upon this mirage concept, dignity, in the evolving relationship between the red dragon and the groggy giant.Dignity appears to be like the illusive, diffuse concept of honour, a menace difficult to scientifically capture in a model, yet self-explanatory to all humans. It is one of the most powerful emotions, and motivators of men, both to evil, as in vengeance, and sacrifice, as in historic struggle. And indeed when Mao proclaimed his red republic, marking the end of centuries of turmoil in China, his legendary words were: THE CHINESE PEOPLE STAND UP! Liberation then, is the standing up of a people, reclaiming their dignity and chartering their own course; no longer pawns and marionettes moved by others, no longer lackeys and hirelings and errand boys of external forces. No longer bowed low in daily humuliation. Nationalism has an underbelly of pride.Liberation and dignity in this context, would mean the priorities of a land, economic $ cultural, and future, are set according to that particular nation's priorities, where those priorities really are never mysteries, such that a fake [anit-people] leadership always finds itself quickly enough in conflict with the populace. This latter is a well documented historical phenomenon in most post-colonial Afrika. Therefore, even if economically and financially considered, the word dignity has no place in the models currently in swank, it is my opinion the relationship between China and Afrika will continuously be haunted at every turn by the ghost of dignity --where words like equality or inequality start to have explosive meanings in the heart of the peoples. And the detail will be in how the two deal with one another's populations in their bellies. Below is a look at immigration policy blues as China swallows more blacks and suffers indigestion. Later we will look at the frolicky side of Guangzhou, the CHOCOLATE CITY of Guangdong province which is an economic power-house. www.polity.org.za/article/sino-african-relations-welcoming-trade-but-unwieldy-for-traders-2011-05-09 (No figures available from the relevant Chinese buro of stats) By some figures, the number of Chinese immigrants to Afrika in the last ten years are put at roughly 1m. Others top it to near 2 million. South Afrika leads the pack with half a million, the former frontline states, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabue, Angola, Namibia, are reckoned to account for 1 million; Nigeria and Congo too are huge, and rest are distributed amongst the remainder of the AU. The physical presence of the chinese in Afrika has, in under a decades, outstripped other earlier settler trade-partners, mainly caucasians and Indo-Asians. And then this: www.chinawhisper.com/chinese-in-africa-chinese-men-marry-african-wife [THIS IS THE LINK ABOVE WITH AFRO-CHINESE WIVES) ---------------- The first big wave of 'invasion' to settle, was of course the Arabs with their sword, or spread of Islam. These are the early centuries in which countries like Egypt ceased to be Christian, and became 'Islamic Arab emirates', at least in official mythology. ( From alternative Egyptian historians, the Arab population in Egypt is not a majority, but merely the ALL dominant, like the whites were during apartheid in South Afrika. State sponsored domination in every indicator thus. There is the story that 60% of Egyptians are 'illiterate' by design. But all Arabs, the ruling class of choice despite Nasser's historical progressiveness, are of course literate --Just like during apartheid in South Afrika with the whites. This is an illegal, seditious version of Egyptian history, and you will have to listen to Amazigh, or Berber chronicles, to hear it.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_peopleThe second big wave of settler invasion were the caucasian Christians, turning for instance Algeria into France (even if only in myth); and further south, the settlement of the Boers and the followers of Rhodes, later creating their tough republics of white supremacy called RSA and Rhodesia. Countries like Kenya became 'White Islands' too, but of course the settler populations were not comparable to the massive ones down South. Nor to the number of settler portuguese in Musumbiji. (The poor portuguese took to local women with a gusto! but that is another scandalous story!) Important is that there was a massive caucasian population that identified her future as Afrikan, even to the point of declaration of independence from the colonial motherland, much in the same way as the USA settlers did from Britain. The Boers called themselves the Afrikaner peoples, and went to the extraordinary level of finding justification for their land conquest in the bible, the word of God. --This portion of Afrika was their promised land. A Divine Gift! This was not colonialism! and definitely they would fight for their religious heritage. To date, this is still the biggest caucasian tribe in Afrika. I have more than a grudging respect for them. They built an atomic bomb to defend themselves as Afrikaner peoples. They would not cut and run. Come what may, they said, Afrika is our soil to the death. And up North, fellow whites do not regard them really as culturally fully white! Those Boers who migrated recently have discovered.John Vorster (white president of RSA): the notion within the ANC and their communist instigators, that we, the Afrikaner peoples, are not Afrikans and do not belong here, and will eventually flee, like happened with other white settlers in other parts of Afrika, is childish. This is our home forever, and we, the Afrikaner people, will defend our home with a fury the superior of a million Tshakas. Get used to us forever!Joe Slovo (Umkhonto we Sizwe, ANC). Everybody, adult, knows the ANC is not propagating the expulsion nor ethnic cleansing of whites from South Afrika. Vorster is childish, beholden to erroneous notions of racial hate and black exclusivity to South Afrika. We are fighting injustice, the state-sponsored terrorism and racial domination. I have news for you Mr. Racist President: As time goes on, and more and more Afrikaners open their eyes to this criminal reality of apartheid, they will increasingly join the ANC umbrella, and unite to defeat your Nationalist Party (NP). South Afrika, will be a multi-racial democracy. (With your grandsons the staunchest supporters of the ANC! and one of them even a senator for the SACP! (communist party of South Afrika!)NB: It is important to note, that the Afrikaners of South Africa, under the mixed-bag ANC leadership, have become the motor of an aggressive economic expansion of South Africa globally, but more importantly for this post, business expansion into Afrika. [ii] If we have the time, we will show that this class, already mature in a capitalist sense, is the one spearheading a (re?)structuring of the relationship between South Africa and China, away from clientelism. The 'black diamonds' have only been too ready to accept a patronage where they are auxillary. www.forbes.com/2010/06/21/forbes-india-black-diamonds-middle-class-spending.html[iii] In a strange twist of fate, I am ready to posit that it is the Afrikaner industrial class which is quickest to react to the possibility, that the cheap products China exports to Afrika, are totally stagnating if not killing off Africa's manufacturing options. This likely sets up the stage for protectionism ... and trade war with China? The textile industry concessions perhaps show a way to conflict resolution. Here is an anecdote. www.globalpost.com/dispatch/101202/south-africa-china-unions PERSPECTIVES.The deliberate South African expansion has seen a complex relationship with China, the other aggressive player in current Africa. This relationship has become both antagonistic, as in the mining concessions in the Congo and export conflicts in Namibia, but it is also cooperative, like the identification by the Chinese of South African banks to spearhead their financial diversification in Africa. (These are financial products, services, by companies independent of the chinese state and her intergovernmental financial packages). These three platforms we will need to keep in mind since they operate separately. 1. China Afrika Development Fund (CADF) 2. Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (CFDI) 3. Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) To this extent, International China development bank, operating as any international capitalist ;D, (China is South Africa's leading trading partner!!) has taken a 30% stake in Standard Bank of South Afrika. The first step in 'crossing the river by feeling the stones underneath'! ---------- Unknown to most people, Gaddafi's Libya and its exxonmobil, Oilibya, were negotiating a deal with the Chinese in which Oilibya [probably in a 50/50 joint venture] would become the oil company of Afrika. How? with China building roads everywhere, they would also build Oilibya tanking stations everywhere. With China set to be the dominant player in every African country, why would she not be the prefered seller of oil products to Africa? (it is ABC logic). With China set to build 6000km of rails in Africa just for starters, plus over 700 construction companies active, 'China related' enterprises could easily be the biggest consumer of fuel in Afrika. It would be prudent to have your own local oil company. It made economic sense everyway. And we aren't talking air traffic yet, nor the fuelling of ever more numerous giant ships ping-ponging between Afrika and China. But Hu Jintao, appetized by the already existent infrastructure of Oilibya and the 'sweetness' of Libya's crude (30% cheaper to refine), failed to consult the notes of the wary Chou en Lai in his expositions on the rules of trade. Chou, studying the erratic character of Muammar Gaddafi and his mercurial relationship with the West, not least of all his geographical proximity to Europe, which could easien military adventure by NATO, in addition to expected problems of his planned dynastic succession, given he was no longer a spring chicken, would no doubt have prudently advised another option, perhaps Angola's oil corp, with the South-African participation. (Those stones under the water in the river if one is not to be swept under!) It must be cautioned that the real exxonmobil, Esso, heavily invested in Angola, would fight tooth and nail to block such penentrative moves by China into her most lucrative backyard! But since then, China national petrol has bought a significant portion of Nigeria's national oil company. (Interesting anecdotes abound, about how this story is unfolding: China decided to build two refineries, one purely managed by the Oga Brothers, another themselves! And we check progress after one year! O my God!) THE NERVOUS ZUMA AS BILATERAL TRADE BOOMS.www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/354/78713.htmlThis China-SA dance is a relationship to watch, also in light of Zuma's expressed anxiety. TRADE IS TOO SKEWED TO THE ADVANTAGE OF CHINA HE SAYS HERE: www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=176686 . And, elsewhere on the wider continent, will they manage to strike a dynamic relationship?? share the spoils like gentle pirates or men, or will they, fired by greed and mutual suspicion, cannibalize one another in competition for dominance, in another cold war variant? That a trade war looms? Zuma's nervousness articulates the fears of the South African industrial class, which is majorly Afrikaner. My position is clear: Afrika has never needed her white tribe more than now. Historically the most ideologically mature capitalist class on the continent.And now back to dignity. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Anti-African_protestsThat was long ago, but a harbinger.As the Chinese flood Africa,There has also been traffic in the opposite direction, that is, the number of Afrikans reputed to be domiciled in China is, in the absence of statistics both in Afrika and China, rumoured to have spiraled, such that there is a social problem in some Chinese industrial cities, facing yes, a FLOOD of Afrikans! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africans_in_GuangzhouSimple: Black people are new to most of the chinese in their home towns. Most Africans in China are men, young men. No point elaborating on the confrontational anxiety young healthy black-skinned men tend to exercabate overseas.In one particularly ugly incident, before the Beijin Olympics, a municipality decided to clean herself off 'monkeys', leading to a mass arrest of blacks, in turn leading to a demonstration by the large black community there, leading to, in the nature of authoritarian regimes, beatings and pogroms and mass deportation. Hundred Congolese were amongst the deportees. When they arrived home, they told tales of horror, showed their injuries. Apparently the same stories were being told in Zambia, Angola, and Namibia. And two Nigerians had died, one of them lynched on the streets as police watched.suite101.com/article/the-worsening-plight-of-africans-in-china-a150147 And with Afrikan governments accused of not standing up for their migrant populations, neither in the middle east nor in China as written here: www.voanews.com/content/african_diaspora_criticizes_african_governments_indifference_towards_chinese_abuses/1447793.htmlPeople back home are wont to take matters into their own hands and do the necessary tit for tat. The backlash has been horrific. In Zambia where the chinese had even moved to selling eggs and vegetables in the gikombas and soko-^^s and doing roaring business (more about this later in a special section) to the chagrin of the locals, these rumours about the killing of Zambians in China proved to be the catalyst for several lynching attempts. Note that this is the Zambia where two chinese were acquitted after shooting 12 protesting workers at a factory, and also at Kapishi copper mines, about 30 Zambians died unnecessarily in an industrial accident. The Zambia where the 'cobra' candidate for president went on anti Chinese diatribes to win votes! www.afrik-news.com/article16469.html This was repeated in Angola; and deep in Congo, several Chinese construction and mining operations ground to a halt, as the military had to airlift the Chinese personnel to safety. It became obvious to all, that somewhere in the intensely intimate and growing relationship between China and Afrika, the word DIGNITY will find a place, or there will be a revolt, both in China and Afrika. The Chinese blogs also register growing Chinese animosity toward primitive darkies now loitering everywhere, bringing diseases like AIDS, cholera and the rest from wherever jungles they come from! This is an authoritative article on this topic of migration and Chinese laws on the same.www.polity.org.za/article/sino-african-relations-welcoming-trade-but-unwieldy-for-traders-2011-05-09To make matters worse, in Nigeria, a chinese company had locked the outside gates of the factory to prevent the African workers from escaping at night to go back to sleep after reporting. Then a fire broke out, and the workers could not escape anyway! Incinerated! Be sure as the rumour spread, no chinese walked the streets of Liberia that month. (Truth be told, The chinese employers behave in the same way in the philipines!) This will happen anywhere where there is no corporate governance, and no criminal liability as we saw with the Chinese managers who shot Zambians but were not prosecuted. And China is politically powerful enough in Afrika to just 'withdraw' the 'controversial' personel back to the motherland, instead of being jailed locally. DIGNITY O DIGNITY.An exploitative relationship, with one party having little or no rights, is doomed to generate violent conflict. And Afrika will become very unsafe for Chinese nationals who, for instance in East Afrika, can still roam easily anywhere without a care. Perceptions of colonialism and ingrained racism, unfortunately currently being drummed by Western corporate interests finding themselves no longer dominant players in this largesse, will also make Afrika unsafe for the Chinese, as we now increasingly see in Angola and the DRC. So me says, there will be dignity in our relationship with China, or the chinese in Afrika will be the latest evacuees! --If you remember how Sabena Belgian airlines worked around the clock to evacuate Belgians from the Congo soon after independence when riots broke out. A colonial arrangement of extraction under the mask of Trade, is a guaranteed messy divorce. But let us kiss the dragon back. Afrika needs her as much as they need us. Just keep your eyes open, dear. The look in your eyes when we kiss, I will kill for it!
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Post by OtishOtish on Jul 29, 2012 19:04:15 GMT 3
Jakaswanga: I have been fortunate enough to have travelled or lived in different parts of the world. From first-hand experiences, I consider the Chinese (from mainland China) to be the most racist people in the world.
(The pictures above of "happy couples", each of a Chinese man and a black woman, only prove that a hungry man will eat whatever is available and, perhaps, that an opening a wallet causes other things to be opened.)
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sky11
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Post by sky11 on Jul 30, 2012 4:09:46 GMT 3
@ Jakaswanga, nice post, I have also been following some of your comments (that includes you, Otishotish) you do have some good insights. That said I am gradually reading the information in this post.
From time in memoriam, Africans seem to be the only peoples who welcome strangers without questioning their intentions, we are prone to welcoming others with open arms, we still do, despite the evidence that lays before us (History (God, Guns and Gold in that order and for the present day I will add DEBT)) or do trinkets hoodwink us into believing the fabled altruistic intentions of others.
A slight detour, if I may,, I have not seen any kenyan or African for that matter that has produced a critical analysis of the relationship between ourselves and Europeans and I mean a truthful analysis from the pre-colonial era to the present, that, is something I would love to read and compare it to the so called threat from the Chinese. What I do know is that power relationship has NEVER changed from the time the European started trading in human cargo, they always have more money, they always have bigger guns, and they always have better technology (which they never share) and everything we do seems to always perpetually enrich them.
Others much wiser than myself have pointed out that a foreign policy is tied to the domestic economic requirements of a people, what is Kenyas foreign policy? that would in my opinion determine the nature of relationship between ourselves and others (Chinese) or is it a matter of receiving goodies (trinkets) and magnifying the trinkets as a major achievement? I believe Otishotish has pointed some of these trinkets out on the post pertaining to our prime minister's recent visit to China.
my two cents worth albeit a slight detour…
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Post by OtishOtish on Jul 30, 2012 7:05:42 GMT 3
From time in memoriam, Africans seem to be the only peoples who welcome strangers without questioning their intentions, we are prone to welcoming others with open arms, we still do, despite the evidence that lays before us (History (God, Guns and Gold in that order and for the present day I will add DEBT)) or do trinkets hoodwink us into believing the fabled altruistic intentions of others. There's an American phrase that comes to mind: suckers for punishment.I too have not seen anything worth quoting. In my youth, I read a lot about "neo-colonialism". At the time I thought that would lead to some insight that in turn would lead to the way in which we manage our relationships with other countries. It never did. As for our "intellectuals" today, they are most too busy telling us that they are "intellectuals". Once in a while, one gets a chance to do some just a tiny "work" but never seems capable of getting to it: A request to write a major speech for a prime minister is outsourced to an assistant, who outsources it to his houseboy, who eventually gets to Google. The end-result is that what should have been a simple matter ends up as something for national debate! It is painful to admit that yours is a true statement, but it is. There was a time when I believed that the fundamental problem with Africa has been, and is, its so-called leaders. Now I am not so sure. Not when people have a choice but still recycle the same bums into power. Almost every week, without fail, I will read on Jukwaa (and elsewhere) that these days Kenyans are intelligent people and will not be used by politicians, on the basis of money or tribe or whatever. Then I see all the GEMA lemmings rushing, behind Uhuru, to the edge of the cliff. And on the other side, there's KAMATUSA lemmings rushing behind Ruto. Never mind that the preliminary judgment against these two (on the basis of evidence that they have been allowed to mount a defense against) is that they are among the worst of the worst that our species has ever thrown up. I need not comment on Raila's lock on the Luos. Can anyone in Kenya be a viable presidential candidate who does not have a major tribe in the pocket? This is a rhetorical question that proves that Kenyans no longer bother about tribe ... As usual, I ended the week with a little "something stiff" with some of my compatriots. Raila's visit to China came up. I was told---and not for the first time---that these days we need not look to the West for Aid, that China and the East is the place to go. When I asked why we always have to be looking for "aid" and not doing for ourselves, I did not get a clear answer. Nor did I get an answer when I asked for figures on how much of what we get from the Chinese are loans (that have to be paid back) and how much are grants or actual investments. I think that, for most people, the Chinese running around must be pretty convincing. (At a later date, we might get to their running around, for a very long time, in places like next door Tanzania, which then needed European Norway to pull it out of the sh*t-hole.) Never mind. Kazi iendelee. While arguing East vs. West, I asked my compatriots if they knew that the detested George Bush had done more about HIV/AIDS in Africa than all other USA presidents put together. I asked them about what they knew about the Gates Foundation is and has been doing about malaria (a million+ killer) and other diseases in Africa. And why is the best research in tropical diseases etc done in London and not in Africa.? And did they know that our shameful begging has been so "effective" that it is taken as the norm to such an extent that the old "givers' (as opposed to the new would-be ones) no longer bother to make any noise about any of it? And so on, and so forth. I never did get an answer. As usual. But what the heck ... the something-stiff was good, the nyama-choma was prime, and what most of them really wanted to talk about was a former aide to the PM---does that person really own that hotel? is that person really doing things with that person? and did they really steal that? And then, the something-stiff being really good, every person had a cousin or a nephew who knew somebody who regularly talks to somebody who really knows .... Friend & Compatriot: Yours is worth more than 2 cents. Much, much more. But your timing is lousy. Raila, his former aide, MRC, the latest corruption scandal (money for the disabled), .... But back to the Chinese visit ... I very much doubt that Raila got us anything beyond the usual trinkets (to be paid for with interest). That might be considered a "poor performance"; but, given our history, if he did not sell us down the river, then we must consider ourselves way ahead. Therefore: RAILA FOR PRESIDENT! (But maybe we should first circumcise him.) Africa will get ahead when Africans wake up and decide to do something about and for Africa and Africans.
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Post by b6k on Jul 30, 2012 10:29:12 GMT 3
Africa will get ahead when Africans wake up and decide to do something about and for Africa and Africans. Otishotish, Gaddafi gave it a shot (provided he was recognized as king of kings) & look at what good that did for him. Besides those Aye-rabs aren't real Africans ;D Jakaswanga, illuminating posts about a most overlooked subject.
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sky11
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Post by sky11 on Jul 30, 2012 12:35:40 GMT 3
@ b6k, good point i.e. Gaddafi gave it a shot. Most of all it served as a severe warning to others who do not abide by the 'laid' down rules that define 'democracy'. Well, the Libyans now have a 'vibrant' democracy, right? We now see how Africans are being decimated as so called mercenaries in Libya. @ Otishotish, good responses, some had me cracking up (but with sadness). Phil, has provided a good graph depicting the trade data between Kenya and China, I believe that info. is from the IMF. My question is that no one has mentioned how that trade imbalance will sorted. Or shall we take the same approach with Europeans where they print some numbers on some papers, call it money, present that paper to us in exchange for real wealth i.e. that which we produce from our soil! They use the same real wealth from our soil to produce goods, which we in turn buy from them! I thought our intellectuals were meant to address such issues. The comment on Malaria research is excellent, and using that as an example; " malaria was endemic in Europe for centuries which is documented from the Roman times. For instance, there used to be malaria in the SWISS ALPINE VALLEY and all the way to Kola Peninsula in Russia.
How did Europe end this menace? Through industrialization and development. More advanced and intensive agriculture, hydro power plants caused swamps to be drained.
In other words, the type of stagnating water where malaria thrives was found incompatible with economic development.
In other words, huge public works and eradication systems freed Europe from Malaria.
When it comes to Africa, instead of them telling you what they did, or, if we know how to read, we read for ourselves, we get mosquito nets"Again I keep referring to those wiser than I am, whether we look East or West the BOSS is the same. The Boss who sits on the throne in the New Rome. Ps. I stumbled on a gem, recently i.e. From Colonial State to Gatekeeper State in Africa. www.einaudi.cornell.edu/node/7914. I would be happy to read your comments on that PDF document especially when one critically examines our real History, our relationship with the West and now the East.
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 30, 2012 21:28:37 GMT 3
Jakaswanga: I have been fortunate enough to have travelled or lived in different parts of the world. From first-hand experiences, I consider the Chinese (from mainland China) to be the most racist people in the world. (The pictures above of "happy couples", each of a Chinese man and a black woman, only prove that a hungry man will eat whatever is available and, perhaps, that an opening a wallet causes other things to be opened[/color].) Otishotish, Somewhere up there, discussing the various local habits of caucasian settlers, I wrote that the 'poor' portuguese took to local women with a gusto And I quickly added that is a scandalous story for another day. Actually the sociological theory is that the dictatorship of Portugal used the African colonies as a dump-yard of white refuse. Men, white trash who could not find mates, even white trash females. Thus starved, and given the chance to be Kings in Africa, they took to it like a drought-stricken camel chanced upon an oasis! Sometimes it is joked nobody has ever fought so hard to keep a harem like the portuguese did in Afrika!
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Post by OtishOtish on Jul 30, 2012 23:14:15 GMT 3
Phil, has provided a good graph depicting the trade data between Kenya and China, I believe that info. is from the IMF. My question is that no one has mentioned how that trade imbalance will sorted. Or shall we take the same approach with Europeans where they print some numbers on some papers, call it money, present that paper to us in exchange for real wealth i.e. that which we produce from our soil! They use the same real wealth from our soil to produce goods, which we in turn buy from them! I thought our intellectuals were meant to address such issues. Looking at the deals that have been signed in the past with the West and the ones that are now being signed with the East (China), I think our view is that is unthinking foreigners want to pay us for "useless stuff" in the ground, then why not. And from their point of view, it works well, because they just sell us the stuff they made from our stuff and get their money (times 100) right back! Our intellectuals? And who would those be? In the 60s and 70s, we had some towering figures who tackled, as best as they could, many of the issues of their time. They even inspired some of the youth to follow in their path. These days anyone who is not eating and getting rich is considered a fool. Why waste time in a library or spend late lonely nights thinking when you can make much more as a talking-head on TV or running a blog for some politician? About a decade or so, some wag coined the term "second-order fame"; I believe the original reference was to Paris Hilton or somebody like that. It refers to fame that is acquired not by doing anything worth fame but simply by being famous---being known for being known. That's pretty much our "intellectuals" today: They are always on TV or radio, they write in newspapers, they have their own blogs on which they dispense wisdom and expertise, they are quoted here and there .... they are famous. But if you try to dig into what they have done to make them famous, you find nothing. They have become famous for being famous. Thanks for the pointer to that article. (I will not get into why such an article is coming from New York University and not the University of Nairobi or wherever.) I quickly went through---it is a well-written easy read, without the sort of mindless jargon one expects from such things---and I will comment when I've had the chance to read again and properly masticate the contents.
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 31, 2012 22:41:36 GMT 3
From time in memoriam, Africans seem to be the only peoples who welcome strangers without questioning their intentions, we are prone to welcoming others with open arms, we still do, despite the evidence that lays before us (History (God, Guns and Gold in that order and for the present day I will add DEBT)) or do trinkets hoodwink us into believing the fabled altruistic intentions of others. There's an American phrase that comes to mind: suckers for punishment. I am still trying to wrap my head about this kind of thing below.WHY are there no major engineering firms in Afrika to do the simple, heavy infrastructure -- Roads, dredging, rails, bridges, and soak up the abundant cheap labour? I am curious as to how it is done in India, and the other LDC guys who are avoiding the chinese in infrastructural engineering. Let me give you a short story, on a day of a my horror. We crossed to Zambia from lower Katanga in search of some heavy equipment from a Chinese road constructor. There we found even wheel-barrow pushers imported from China, let alone lorry-drivers and engineers. I gaped like a moron. 'We' could not even push wheelbarrows to mix concrete for 'galbions'! This was a story worth following. What was this? After a day, I got hold of a union man who was busy with the situation, and then it all proved quite simple. The trade unions had proposed a minimum wage. The Chinese found it too high and negotiated an exclusive clause with the government behind the unions --something about bilateral pacts! but apparently the government lawyers had not understood all the fine-print. The Chinese labourers were, the union suspected --(the govt colluded with the chinese govt to refuse the union officials visas to go to investigate in china!)--- essentially prisoners from China, and were on forced labour in Afrika. The company could get bonuses from the central government for employing so many chinese overseas, falsifying papers in the home province they came from, and not revealing they were prisoners working for nothing. Double profit. You could say this was an international labour scam. As for engineers, the Zambian union man agreed even for a civil engineer from fresh from college, the salary was too high, compared to what the chinese put on paper they were paying their engineers, including hardship allowance! Imagine an engineer with 3 years experience from China earning in Afrika, far less than a fresh Afrikan graduate. And the chinese engineer is contracted to work 14 hours a day six days/w! and do manual work too. A mechanical engineer will be expected to physically repair broken down machines too. IE he must have the option certified mechanic before he is posted overseas. Zambian engineers do not work 14 hour days for 6 days, and importantly, NEVER go under leaking lorries to do mechanical repair. The Chinese company tried and they wouldn't. They would not even bother to learn repair. And they wanted to go for their long weekends to big towns to enjoy the life, which meant no work on friday afternoon (traveling) and monday morning (return)! I asked the chief engineer on site. He laughed that chinese ha ha hah! (Actually he was trained in England). I will never employ an Afrikan engineer he told me. I work 7 days a week. I can repair every machine in the company. I insist all my engineers do the same. I pay low. No Afrikan engineer accept those terms. I agreed, but told him to take a look at the eyes watching him. The blacks. There is latent animosity, and you are in the bush. Finish your job quick and get the hell out of here. He laughed: that is why I work 24/7 like a devil. I can smell the trouble. By the way, last time I was on the new Thika road by the Chinese, I did not see any Kenyan engineer. Too expensive I guess, and will not learn being a mechanic on every equipment on site! I keep on asking myself what I would do if I were that China man. Would I really want some proud Zambian messing with my deadlines? The truth is if I am working in the middle of a jungle, and I have lots of mechanical equipment, I would never employ any engineer who couldn't do repair nor maintainance, unless there were no allternative. And I happen to know china has been producing technicians like from the conveyor belt. They are ready to work 24/7 for $300/month in the Afrikan jungle. (I am sure the Chinese state tops it up abit back home in some discreet way!) Africa will get ahead when Africans wake up and decide to do something about and for Africa and Africans.
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Post by jakaswanga on Jul 31, 2012 23:11:47 GMT 3
But back to the Chinese visit ... I very much doubt that Raila got us anything beyond the usual trinkets (to be paid for with interest). That might be considered a "poor performance"; but, given our history, if he did not sell us down the river, then we must consider ourselves way ahead. Therefore: RAILA FOR PRESIDENT! (But maybe we should first circumcise him.) Africa will get ahead when Africans wake up and decide to do something about and for Africa and Africans.otishotish, The Chinese are in some kind of fix in Sudan www.afp.com/en/node/96493 There are too many Sudans, and they do not sing the same tune, and neutrality is becoming suspicious to some extra Sudans. There was that mini war that stopped the (Southern?) Sudanese oil from flowing up North through the only pipeline to port, when the South destroyed that famous oil field, Heglig in Abiye. China needs that oil, and now they were lobbying Raila to talk to his brother Kiir, to calm down quick and enhance up the pumping of oil through the North, even before the dispute is resolved fully. news.howzit.msn.com/south-sudan-sets-out-conditions-for-sudan-dealThe dispute is the North is/was stealing Southern oil revenues, and China herself, THE MAJOR CUSTOMER, has not yet agreed to change her payment mode, still paying direct to North Sudan, citing old contractual specifications which, according the south, no longer hold since Sudan mutated into two countries. Knowing how the Chinese operate in Afrika, they would not expect Raila to lobby Kiir for nothing. Someone on Jukwaa talked about 'unclear terms' of the packages Raila was bringing from Santa Claus, I wondered whether the relevant Jukwaaist was hinting at the Sudan angle. After such important pacts of large cash, as these one paraded between Kenya and China, it is imperative for a Head of State to explain the going rates, and it would prudently be good sport, to allow in-depth questioning of the documents signed on behalf of the wananchi. If only the Maasai were in a position to question Laibon Lenana as he put his illiterate fingers on that 1904 agreement!
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 4, 2012 16:53:41 GMT 3
and you wonder why the capitalists in DC and London are shouting loud about human rights and democrazy in China.....Obama himself has stretched the empire's military industrial complex to a level that Asia and Africa are feeling suspicious of this black Kogelo prince, who unfortunately, is a puppet of the dirty AIPAC, Rotschild and other mafias Yeah, the deliberate policy of the USA to thwart China in Afrika as part of a global containment policy is in no doubt. What we shall reveal by fact and analysis to the bone, is just how insidious and anti Afrika it works out to be in practice. --Afro-American or no Afro-American be the PORK! Feeling the heat in 2012 as they say, with China eclipsing the USA in Africa, first economically then the rest, Obama unveiled his so called Afrika policy. The House of four walls it was called: 1. Democracy 2.Economic growth 3. Security 4. Development Sitting on a panel listening to Chou en Lai and Barrack Obama pitch for the soul of Afrika, and interrogating them as if this were the oral of their lives, should prove a very iportant and delicate task. And who else can Afrika entrust such a mission to, if not the diligent minds of Jukwaa, once they are through with their favourite sport of entertaining Otishotish with some powerful thuds into Miguna's body. Absent in this debate will be what I shall respectably call the 'rais wa keshos' of Afrika. Those to navigate the narrow straits wherein lies the twin perils, the Skylla and the Karybdis. Otherwise for sooth we would subject them to even a more fierce examination of purpose, vision, strategy .... It is a worrying absence, to put it at its mildest. We are therefore this week, being treated to Obama's envoy Hillary, hilariously warning Afrika off unnamed predators interested only in the plunder of Afrika's raw materials, while the lovable, adorable Americans with their coffee-coloured president have Afrika's best interests at heart. The USA standing up for democracy and the rest. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/hillary-clinton-africa-chinaRetorted Xinhua immediately. “ Talks of a rampant extractive relationship is taking Cheap shots at China, and are part of a designed “a plot to sow discord between China and Afrika! The United States is bent on “selfish gain,” and Clinton's trip is part of a covert agenda aimed at least partly at discrediting China’s engagement with the continent and curbing China’s influence there.”NB: I wish the Americans would just pursue their interests without talking lots of goatdrops. These moral superiority gowns, the types the female Clinton dons when she comes, are a-tatters shredded and nowadays a bore. Confronted with the intimate relationship between the USA and Uganda's dictator, whose dislike for democratic practice is well known, Hillary was immediately caught off guard. "We are watchful and concerned of the backsliding tendencies on democracy in Afrika'! Well, when the fake Marshall Tantawi of Egypt conducted his coup the other day and ringed parliament with armour to prevent the brotherhood MPs, legitimately elected, from entering... was that the usually eloquent lawyer Hillary fumbling around her words? Hard trade with America, that is what I want. No bullshit talk on morality. I tire of lectures from the toilet hearts of ideological mercenaries and political hos, even when they serve a black POTUS who is half Jaluos!
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 5, 2012 10:25:54 GMT 3
LOOKING FOR ZELAWI'S SUCCESSOR & ETHIOPIA'S REPLACEMENT:
(AMERICAN ETHIOPIAN POLICY IN CRISIS. HILLARY SEEKING KENYA'S HAND)
Ethiopia is the pillar, the critical ally of the USA in her security policy in the Horn of Afrika and the Gulf. A solid and ancient Christian nation. Their millitary infrastructure built by both the Bush and Obama administrations is formidable. Zelawi's Ethiopia has enjoyed a largesse of $7bn/year for long, with the USA equiping the army to thunderous firepower, though nepotism has reduced her actual capabilities. (Eritrea once told them come baby come and ... they fled). But the army has been sufficient to do what it is meant to do: terrorize Ethiopians, and guarantee the presidency of the dictator Zelawi, and American interests.
SUCCESSION BLUES. MELES ZELAWI IS MISSING.
Meanwhile, the intelligence on the intrigues in Ethiopia, following the incapacitation of Meles Zalawi, would point to Hillary Clinton being consistent with her predecessors in hypocrisy, and therefore an exemplary piece of fraudulent work in talking democracy to Afrika in this trip. --Totally disingenuous, like Reagan's trouble-shooter from 1981-1989 Chester Crocker, who as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, kept on equating South African troops in Namibia to Cuban troops in Angola. His democratising policy was then called constructive engagement.
In April 1981 Crocker was dispatched to Afrika on a one week 11-nation tour, to sell his brain-child, the infamous constructive engagement. Mobutu Sese Seko was described as our best friend on the continent! (Like Obama's recent invitation of Zelawi to the USA, where a journalist ambushed him and gave him a thorough dress-down, vigilantly posted right here on Jukwaa some time back)!
Does Hillary Clinton know her history, so that she realize we have been here before, by another name! Only now, the new American Mobutu is Melez Zelawi??
Considering the actual practice of the United states toward Ethiopia, supporting the brutal dictator Melez Zelawi with $7bn/year of aid, in spite of recorded and evidenced abuses of every democratic sense, I am afraid Kenyans interested in a progressive free Kenya must fear the worst when they hear the word support from a state department functionary.
Zelawi has turned Ethiopia into a large scale prison, setting the stage for instability because of activated nationalist sentiments of nearly every ethnic group: Oromo, Amhara, Anywak, Ogadeni/Somalis. He keeps the largest security apparatus in the continent to run this dictatorship, wholly financed by the USA who needs some boots around to do the dirty jobs in an insecure region. So Zelawi could rig elections to his heart's desire and mow down demonstrators in Addis Abeba, mortgage large tracts of land and use his army to massacre the protesting peasants, appoint his wife to the largest company of the country and his daughter to some more. But what did Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama say? they gave him prisoners from Kenyans and Yemenis and Somalis to torture and glean intelligence from as suspected terrorists.
The very vocal Ethiopian community in the USA succeeded in having Melez Zelawi placed in the 'genocide watch list'! even if it needed working with the republicans. Some of these guys later found themselves with immigration offences and have since been deported from the USA. (These Joe Arpaio (Marcopa Arizona county) chicaneries by Obama are well documented)
So now As Melez Zelawi dozes off in morphine clad comas, and nobody to replace him suitable to the Americans --he retired 120 senior generals in 2011 to preclude this possibility, the Americans find themselves running a huge intelligence operation in Ethiopia which has already gotten them into conflict with other Ethiopian nationalism.
They are thus on the look out for friendlier environments in this unstable region. Kenya is in their focus as the new Ethiopia, the new boot boy, to do their bidding in exchange for an excess of $3bn/year for starters. Commissions taken not investigated.
It is a bargain the next president of Kenya may find difficult to resist, given the Americans wont mind if he and his familial cronies take a hefty commission in the process. But you can not just throw China out of the window in Afrika nowadays. Navigating between super-powers as you betray your people who are increasingly vocal, is a mind-shredding dilemma.
Countries which have been pillars in the defence of the vital interests in the United states, have never really responded to their own peoples democratic instincts. The money and political cover the USA gives them to do impunity, corrupts them even further. This is the poisoned chalice I was talking about, reviewing Hillary Clinton's charm offensive in Kenya.
Hope somebody comes up to their liking and they stay in Ethiopia!
Yeah, ogwang' chamo to tho romoe! --Everything has its price.
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 6, 2012 21:26:29 GMT 3
Show me, O young man, where thee thinks thy pride resideth! The winds of life Son, off they long tooketh my pride Rode away with my dignity and left tears of sand in my eyes! Stooped in shame I die, O if I could taketh back the time! ----( Tung' Odero Jakawanyama, Rusinga) DIGNITY O DIGNITY.An exploitative relationship, with one party having little or no rights, is doomed to generate violent conflict. And Afrika will become very unsafe for Chinese nationals who, for instance in East Afrika, can still roam easily anywhere without a care. Zambian miners kill Chinese manager during pay protest @bbc 5/8/12 Miners' pay at Chinese-run mines was lower than at other foreign-owned mines, a 2011 report said Continue reading the main story www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19135435Related StoriesCase dropped against mine bosses Chinese mines in Zambia 'unsafe' China answers Zambian critics Zambian miners have killed a Chinese manager by pushing a mine trolley at him during a riot at a coal mine in the south of the country. A second Chinese was injured, as were several Zambians, during the riot on Saturday. The workers were on strike at the mine in protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage. They were angry their wages were lower than a new minimum of $220 (£140) a month paid to shop workers. Zambia's minister of labour has gone to the Chinese-owned Collum coal mine in Sinazongwe, 325km (200 miles) south of the capital, Lusaka. "Wu Shengzai, aged 50, has been killed by protesting workers after being hit by a trolley which was pushed towards him by the rioting miners as he ran away into the underground where he wanted to seek refugee," Southern province police commissioner Fred Mutondo told state news agency, the Zambia News and Information Services. "He died on the spot while his colleague is in hospital." ============ It can be a very dangerous cocktail. Prejudice + raw and brutal exploitiation of labour. The dispute ceases to be pure economics. And the Zambian state has been percieved, like most African governments, to be reluctant for any number of reasons, toward prosecuting investing foreigners, even when abusive. Earlier on a chinese manager and his side-kick who shot and injured 12 Zambian workers over a pay dispute, were granted immunity from prosecution, and shipped out of the country.These are tell-tale warning signs. warning smokes of a fire below. I will soon report on the chinese-owned open mines in Niger, where there was a riot by Tuaregs, and a reverse case in Equitorial Guinea, where it is alleged Chinese workers under a brutal labour regime went on strike, and the chinese government allowed the use of local police to make mince meat of them. (this story is hard to chase).
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sky11
New Member
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Post by sky11 on Aug 8, 2012 10:36:12 GMT 3
When going through this post again and having another look at the photos of the Chinese with the local women marrying (plus having kids) reminded me of some old information which I am more than happy to share with you. These is a lesson that has not been taught by our 'intellectuals' i.e. you do recall John Speke from our History, well he is did note the following; "When Speke, as the first European, made this trip in 1857, the Arabs were merchants, living as aliens in the land. When in 1861 he passed the same way, the Arabs resembled great landed proprietors with rich estates and were waging war with the native territorial ruler. This process, repeatedly found in many other regions in the interior of Africa, is the necessary consequence of the balance of power. And some of you may have heard of 'Sir' Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin), i.e. the father eugenics movement. Influx of Chinese immigrants invades Africa driving locals out of business: is.gd/zoc079And the actual letter is.gd/5hRH1X Interesting times ahead… someone needs to tell me why we go to school, i.e. to get a job or to solve our problems (and ensure our survival as a people)
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 18, 2012 9:03:15 GMT 3
THE MURDER TRIAL OF GU QAILAI THE WIFE OF BO XILAI OF CHONGQING: ANY LESSONS? How, then, is Sino-African trade related to nepotism and corruption in China? how is it affected by subsequent power struggles permeating that forest of super-toxic vipers called the communist party? These inherent power struggles apparently do spill over into relations with Afrika, which means an Afrikan government may not be allied to China as such, but merely to one wing of of her nepotistic oligarchy, composed of red princelings. A pitfall which need must be seen. (Where is our OWN continental Afrika institute of Oriental $ China studies? to match the Confucius institutes springing up in Afrika, echoing the earlier proliferation of British councils and libraries across the commonwealth!) Good to know how your biggest trade partner and latest best friend, deals with their internal contradictions. So the case of the red princeling Bo Xilai and his wife, the once high-flying Gu Qailai, also dubbed the red Jackie Kennedy, should interest us a bit. Key words: Wang Lijun --former Chongqing police chief who tried to defect to the Americans; Neil Heywood --poisoned British (spy?) mediator between Western Capitals and Chinese big-wigs; Chongqing, place of the crime and theater of operations. Bo Guagua, the spoilt brat of a westernised punk of a son, who the loving mother allegedly sought to protect by murder. www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-10/gu-kailai-trial-sheds-light-on-chinas-legal-flawsWe may also later pause a bit, to consider the corruption case in Namibia and South Africa, in which none other than the son of Hu Jintao was involved, and how the Chinese government brought pressure on her weaker Afrikan partners to have the case quashed. How the powerful engaged in stalling, and let the trail grow cold in China. Refusing to cooperate with the African investigators. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5851056/Hu-Jintaos-son-linked-to-African-corruption-probe.html (Hu Jintao son linked to corruption in Afrika). Back to Bo Xilai. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Xilaiwww.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/07/gu-kailai-trial-china-bo-xilaiIt is now not known --not disclosed to the public-- where the disgraced Bo is held. -------- HINTS OF THE UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIP CHINA-SOUTH AFRIKAThere is the hilarious case of the alleged visa granted by South Afrika to the Dalai Lama, only for it to be canceled after a telephone call from Beijin. Desmond Tutu whose 80th birthday was the occasion, was in caricaturistic form: This Madiba boy! Spending all those dignified years in jail, standing up for freedom, only to surrender it for a few yuans! and he laughed in that infectious trademark manner of his. More here. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-151643831. Of course Mandela is not the serving president but Jaco b Zuma. {And earlier on Thabo Mbeki when South Afrika unceremoniously jilted Taiwan/Formosa on the orders of Beijin).2. On a light touch: Tutu and Mandela were great friends and, if one is to believe Walter Sisulu, they never grew up, but stayed mischievous boys in their relationship. One day Tutu stood up and challenged Mandela to lead by example once: This boy is living in sin with that hottie called Graca {Machel}! Even the cumulative sins of all apartheid presidents from Kruger to 'the Church', pale in comparison to Madiba's antic!Madiba: Jumping to his feet to the roar of the crowd: A man who goes around dressed in long female robes with his mmm freely dangling inside it, is not going to teach me moral lessons! look at the way he grins at hotties, is that not pure lust! Tutu is no a man of God, he is a man of lustful thoughts!( Walter Sisulu is forced to stand up and shut them up: Free at last we laugh in our land! but the rascals Madiba and Tutu we send back to Robben Island! he shouts!) Desmond Tutu has, as a safety device, a habit of telling the hard truths of current South Afrika as if Mandela is still president. A telling point. One day President Thabo Mbeki arrived very late to a function hosting ex president Mandela and the whole old guard. Tutu could not stand it: He said, looking at Mandela: They tell me you Madiba was never a minute late for a meal, all those 30 years in that paradise Robben Island. Now you are President, you come three days late for a meal! Why do you bother to eat at all? Mbeki 'fell sick', could barely eat and excused himself to leave the party early. When Tutu later was to come as negotiator in Kenyan-Pev, Mbeki and his south african loyalists in government let him hang, giving him no backing. And the clergyman fell flat on his face.I will miss the humour of this man, now that the Zuma and Mandela clans, united in the ownership of mines , (the new Openheimers and Cicil Rhodes of South Afrika) are mowing down their own citizens like the old apartheid government at Sharpeville. I wonder what Tutu is telling Mandela in his mind today. The two are old and frail, and Madiba no longer recieves visitors. -- Maybe he is a prisoner, you never know with power and money and old emperors and new poweful friends.
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Post by OtishOtish on Aug 19, 2012 1:47:42 GMT 3
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 25, 2012 15:44:16 GMT 3
I have needed to go to the shrines, for commiseration and to consult with the souls of the ancestors speaking for sooth! Here is the result.I do not scare easy, but this time I risk sounding alarmist, with reason. Yes, Sembene Ousmane blues. --By the time he died in 2007, Sembene Ousmane had more world fame as a cineast than celebrity status as a writer: films being more 'popular' so to speak. But it was as a young writer that he was catapulted to the limelight as one of Afrika's most perceptive observers, audacious and stylistically cheeky yes, but with a radical social vision. Sembene Ousmane was one of the stalwarts of the African writers series of Heinemann, his literary works studied all over the continent, and indeed it was his cheeky self who proposed one of the most celebrated if notorious allegories, a kitendawili, on the post independent African situation and her ruling class. The novel is titled Xala, thematically the discovery of [male] impotence on the night of consummation. And the price of redemption, if it could be a juju orchestrated lock. Gods bits of wood is the book which ranked Sembene as a world feat, a compulsory text in all departments of literature tackling a world comparative [dis]course, but it was cheeky Xala that, arguably, achieved notoriety in post-colonial Afrika, where universities were hotbeds of critique enlightenment. -- (The purge would soon come though, when the so called penetrative and radical writers would be erased from the syllabi of many colleges. I would think the IMF &W-Bank total take-over of Afrika could not have occurred, were the critical teachings, of pinpoint and intellectualized resistance, that men like wa Thiong'o & Sembene represented, not deliberately been curtailed and done for, but remained institutionally widespread across the continent. Their thinking had to be blackened out first, methinks, neutralizing Africa's intellectual defence mechanisms as it were. Sedating her senseless and setting her up for monopoly capital rape from the West.) (New Kenyan CJ Mutunga mourned it well, --this Chicago School walk over Afrika-- in his recent speech to the UON, on which Adongo reported for Jukwaa. Yes, tears, I have met colleagues who majored in Kenyan literature at UON without studying Ngugi wa Thiong'o! But of course UON is no longer a registered university in the world table. She lost her rank.)So, With the dotcom generation of UON graduates practicing literacy elsewhere, social media for example, let me say Xala tells the scandalizing tale of a nymphomaniac married to a semi-impotent lazy man, lacking in vigour, endurance and robust proportions. Somewhere in this marriage is a vacuum for an outsider to move in and do the necessary. The Chicago school had their fling and left the situation still wanting. Power abhors a vacuum, but nature even more so, and in life it is the fittest who survive. Enter the dragon. The ruling class of Africa being ideologically impotent, there is a vacancy for some robust outsider to come in, take leadership, and quench some fires that must be. Enter the Dragon. Enter Chinese dragons. The Red Capitalist China. What does China do what nobody else can?1. Total commitment. Long term, large scale, commercially infinite in every sector. Total engagement. With a passion.They are investing so much money in Afrika (the West wants that money too, but on their terms, like bailing out their PIIGS with it, while China wants to use it to buy their cutting-edge technological industries!) at such a scale that they must have a game plan for returns. Too much to write off as bad investment debts. Here to stay. In the next 5 years agreed in FOCAC 2012, China plans to train 100,000 technical experts from Africa. 55% in China. Anybody with an idea how many 'experts' have trained in the West in the last 100 years? or in Afrika herself? In other words, China takes over the schooling of African technicians. If Nairobi or Dakar institutes, etc, will not produce the required qualities and quantities of technical aptitude, those who need that kind of skilled labour will think and effect an alternative. Some guys are in a hurry. [ii] The Chinese have totally taken over infrastructure. 'Vertically intergrated' the sector like is more usual with Oil companies and the business of oil. Design, construction, materials, labour execution. African is a bystander, not even pushing a wheelbarrow of cement --over his dead body for $1/10 hour day! But there are 100 million Chinese ready to be shipped over to do it for less.
From airports to ports, from housing estates to factories, from roads to technical institutes, from rails to canals, from dams to inland water management, the chinese do it from top to bottom. The African a spectator in the second biggest invest transformation of the continent since the colonial layout. INFRASTRUCTURE: FROM THE WEST TO THE EAST. Colonialism came as a project of capital accumulation. Profit. This system, arising from a burgeoning industrialisation in Europe, historically speaking, was far the superior of the agrarian mode which it had crushed at home, and too, far the superior of the hunter-gatherer mode which could still be found in Afrika. Colonialism was also higher than the raw liquidation of whole indigenous populations, either by transfer, like the export of slaves, or extermination on scene, like the Germans did with the Hereros of Namibia. This colonial phase of capitalism, semi-industrial, needed a standing population on site. Working. Immediately raising the problem of control, immediately answering itself with the word government: resident legal order. Caveat: Exclusively under WHITE CONTROL. So, it was time for an overseer class of whites to camp on the ground, next to the honey-pot, otherwise those lazy natives could be trusted to revert to their primitive state --in which they were actually free and in control of their lands and affairs!
Lands too rich in agricultural potential, and too rich in natural resources to be left alone to their own fates. Lands where profit was ready-made. El Dorados. The colonies filled up with a white ruling class as a permanent resident population. And they would usher in one of the most radical historical transformations in Afrika (and indeed throughout the world where Europe was the Lord God). A dangerously false start as we shall see for Afrika. --A radical transformation not being indigenous, nor organically springing from the relevant peoples themselves, becomes an alienating process which would need an equally radical transformation to be adapted to the people, and, in the long run, be responsive to their aspirations in toto. A process which still proves beyond the ruling classes of Afrika. COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION.
The settler classes had as mission to integrate the colonies into the mother economy. Somethings had to be done. Eg: 1. Dams for electricity [Owen falls, Kariba] 2. Rail-roads through inhospitable jungles {Uganda railway; Dar-Mwanza rail} 4. Cities for administration and cultural show offs {Nairobi, Salisbury, Blantyre} 5. Standing armies, Kings rifles; monopoly legal payment tender (currency), pound shilling sterling 6. Commercial (Agro) companies [production and processing], Insurance and Banking 7. Miscellaneous [schools, hospitals, jails ...] .... Posts & Telecommunications etc This was a complex and labour demanding affair which was too much for a settler population. The native who earlier had been more marked for use and discard, slave, was now an asset to be invested in, albeit limitedly. A bit of education, but just as far asthe whiteman decided he needed. Bantustan education. (of course the jini was already out of the bottle, and rebellion was coming, with another false start: the colonial state as a given unitary whole, subsuming pre-colonial territorial boundaries and ethno loyalties, and enshrined in the OAU charter.). Given the purposes of colonialism, the infrastructure they laid was adequate for 100 years so to speak. Owen Falls Dam, with no plans for massive industrialisation of East Afrika as that would undermine Great Britain, was sufficient to power the colonial needs of the region; and the Uganda railway, from Kampala to Mombasa, a perfect aorta. So no plans for a MK1, a Mombasa Kampala super-highway 1. (That is Route 66 for you US guys, and L'Autoroute de Soleil for EU guys, the Sun-Route from Brussels/Berlin to Marseille, with the famous Periferique, the detour around Paris to avoid a whole day standing still at a jam in peak summer.) Then Flag Independence came, and the class of Mobutus, Kenyattas, Bandas, came to power. Great men yes, and fathers of their nations. But in the agenda we now discuss, cretins and half-awake dim wits. Men of alternative vision like the Lumumbas of Congo, would in this period be erased. The false start degenerating, ha, accelerating, into full-speed in the wrong direction. Obviously, by hindsight now, the colonial infrastructure which was inherited, was so complex and radical, that the post-colonial class of Afrikan elites could not fathom it. So they could not manage, nor improve, nor maintain, nor expand, nor plan for the follow-up stages. In the face of this impotence and population boom, the emblems of civilisation which had been planted by the colonial order, the infant legs of a modern state, wasted away in non-servicing and collapsed. Investments failed to be fed and wilted. 1. In the whole of Obote to Amin to early M7, Jinja dam did not receive the necessary look-overs. If you compare to the performance of the equivalent turbines [of the same make] used to power the Scottish highlands over the same period, you will shudder at the inefficiency. Not even that, but the complete lack of understanding of what a dam really is! A living thing which if not taken care of, rusts away and becomes a danger to the surrounding! 2. Uganda railways collapsed --first into KR &UR, then the inevitable death of both. The natives did not replace a single furlong of steel-track! Train moving was like car wheels stuck and spinning in mud! Rail transport abandoned!
But in the same period, rail travel rocketed around the world, and train technology skyrocketed to cope. Japan came up with bullet train. France TGV. Germany went into a model which today has given us the super-sonic magnetic-flux train technology: can hit 680km/hour flat out. (Commercially doing a run only in Shanghai China to date)
Meanwhile railways in Afrika were buried under bush, and a new generation of kids grew up who did not know what a train is! I took my sisters kid around 1984 to the train-station in Yala. The boy looked at me: what is a ... t..rain... station??? 3. Posts and telecommunications became an obsolete technology even before our local parastatal had installed old lines in all government offices in urban areas! Thanx, we jumped a stage: from the bush-tamtam to cordless. (first name of a mobile handset was 'cordless') 4. As flyovers went up around cities of the world, in Afrika even murram roads could not be maitained, and reverted to their old status of footpaths, with the one between Otishotish's home and the nearest urban center, deserving special mention. (and I loved the Awasi-Ahero stretch where, sometime back, the road migrated 300 meters into the neighbouring farms, at one time passing between a man's main house and his kitchen. If you were lucky, you could whizz past while the woman had finished cooking, and was preparing to cross the highway to deliver food to her hubby on the other side of the road, on his veranda!) Mayie Afrika! Yawa! All Afrika infrastructural services became overwhelmed by lack of planning and the rest of those reasons we have mentioned yore. This collapse, and inability to develop new, forward looking, more adequate responses to cope with the evident dire need, nor plan in advance, is the impotence Sembene Ousmane talks about. Vision 2030s as titillating prospects of multiple orgasms that we know are mirages. Unless good viagra is availed to fortify resolve. Now. Everywhere in them, a feeble constitution, A breed more hardier be bred to do the job --says Soyinka of the same class. Power abhors a vacuum, nature even more so. There is a vacancy the size of a ruling class in Afrika. The size of Afrika's hunger for transformation toward her actual destiny. This deficit will be cleared. As we fail, China does it. This is the ideological insight that informs China's coherence in Afrika. ---------- TO BE CONTINEUD, ON WHY THE CHINESE MUST TRANSFER PART OF THEIR POPULATION, JUST LIKE THE COLONIALISTS DID, TO TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS AROUND AFRIKA. I think it is inevitable.
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Post by OtishOtish on Aug 25, 2012 19:26:49 GMT 3
Jakaswanga, Man Who Appreciates One With!:
So, what exactly is/should be the role of Africans in all this? Perpetual bystanders in the matter of their own fate?
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Post by jakaswanga on Aug 25, 2012 20:32:06 GMT 3
Jakaswanga, Man Who Appreciates One With!: So, what exactly is/should be the role of Africans in all this? Perpetual bystanders in the matter of their own fate? At the end of this series we hope to have arrived at some insight, which can go for what to be done. One with, he he, do you have anyone in mind otishotish?
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