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CIVIL SOCIETY & SOCIAL JUSTICE
Thursday, November 23, 5-7pm
CENTRE FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION
UCT Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Cape Town
Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond launch three books and DVDs from the Centre for Civil Society:
POETRY & PROTEST: Dennis Brutus (UKZN Press 2006)
LOOTING AFRICA
TALK LEFT WALK RIGHT Patrick Bond (UKZN Press & Zed 2006)
CCS WIRED (DVD set)
Interrogation by: Ronald Suresh Roberts
NEW MEMOIRE by DENNIS BRUTUS
Poet, writer, distinguished educator and activist, Dennis Brutus was born in Zimbabwe in 1924 and educated in South Africa.
Brutus’s political campaigns led to his banning from all political and social activity and to his subsequent arrest and incarceration on Robben Island. He left South Africa in 1966 and made his home in England until 1983 when he won the right to stay in the US as a political refugee.
Currently a Visiting Scholar at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, Brutus is Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He was formerly visiting prof. at the Universities of Denver and Texas, and Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of Colorado. He was the recipient of the Langston Hughes Award in 1987 (the first non-African American to receive that award), and was honoured with the first Paul Robeson Award in 1989 for ‘artistic excellence, political consciousness and integrity’. He holds six honorary doctorates.
Brutus’s new political memoire, edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim, includes not only his finest poetry, but analysis of the anti-apartheid struggle, work against injustices by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation in Third World countries, and campaigns against militarism and US war crimes.
UKZN Press - www.ukznpress.co.za
Post: Private Bag X01, Scottsville 3209
Telephone: +27 (33) 260 5226 - Fax: +27 (33) 260 5801
General E-mail: books@ukzn.ac.za
Introducing new DVDs highlighting research, advocacy and mobilisation
CCS WIRED Research-in-progress, plus documentaries on new social mobilisations
CCS and our filmmaker friends – Heidi Bachram, Heinrich Bohmke, Ben Cashdan, Daniel Chavez, Michele Citoni, Rehana Dada,
Sally Giles, Fazel Khan, Vincent Moloi, Ntokozo Mthembu, Aoibheann O’Sullivan, John Pilger, Gillian Schutte Singiswa, Sipho Singiswa, Greg Streak, Jann Turner and Shannon Walsh – announce the first edition of CCS WIRED, two DVDs that capture some of our Centre’s research-in-progress as well as scenes of struggle, pain, suffering, joy, victories, defeats, and commitments in South Africa and across the region.
It’s a goldmine of data and doccies. We have jammed our own publications - Research Report collections, Wolpe Memorial lectures, Civil Society Readers, etc - plus more than 30 films representing South/ern Africa’s ‘new social mobilisations’ onto two pieces of plastic.
CCS WIRED documents protests and social justice campaigns in SA that began in a systematic way when Durban’s Chatsworth
community erupted in 1999. Going back further, John Pilger generously offered his 1998 film Apartheid Did Not Die, which predicted the subsequent uprisings. By late 2005, the SA Police estimated that there were 5800 protests in the prior year, 13% of which they deemed ‘illegal’. Something is wrong in the New SA - the research and films available in CCS WIRED show what, and why citizens are resisting.
There is also documentation of regional Southern African advocacy for social and ecological justice – which will be the primary focus of CCS WIRED (2007.1), to help build the World Social Forum in Nairobi from 25-29 January.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We offer gratitude to the contributors, especially the low-paid doccie makers. They have given us their
work gratis; please support them when you see them filming in a war zone near you. (In some cases, the filmmaker offered us a high-resolution version you are free to broadcast or screen to the public. In other cases the filmmaker desires that you contact them by email so as to obtain a high-res version if you want to do a screening or broadcast the doccie.) The DVDs can be screened on a computer only (not a DVD player). For best results, copy the DVDs to your hard drive and play direct.
Invaluable production support was provided by Ben Cashdan, Library Design, Collective Film and Video, and TripleAim. Our funders are warmly thanked, especially the Foundation for Human Rights, as well as Sanpad, Osisa, Southern Africa Trust, Mott, Atlantic Philanthropies, Ford, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, ActionAid, OxfamGB and the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust.
Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal Memorial Tower Building Room 198, Howard College Campus, Durban
Telephone: 031 260 3195
fax 031 260 2502
Looting Africa
Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming poorer. From Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers’ debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa’s gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment, capital flight and the continent’s brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most ruling elites. While noting their role as collaborators, this book contextualises Africa’s wealth outflow within a stagnant yet financially volatile world economy.
Patrick Bond’s book provides a solid theoretical, empirical, and analytical framework proving that the processes of looting the African continent, which started with the slave trade, have continued to this day.
Professor Issa Shivji, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Patrick’s books on post-apartheid South Africa have been a beacon, and his latest is a brilliant analysis and timely expose of the rapacious forces ranged against Africans today.
John Pilger, author and film maker
Talk Left Walk Right
Thabo Mbeki recently advocated unity with global justice activists: ‘They may act in ways you and I may not like and break windows in the street, but the message they communicate relates.’
This raises two critical questions: is the South African government genuinely opposed to what Mbeki calls ‘global apartheid’? And are the reforms advocated by Pretoria succeeding - even on their own limited terms? Talk Left Walk Right answers both in the negative.
Mbeki’s critics, from left and right alike, suggest that his AIDS policies, corrupt arms deal and support for Zimbabwe’s repressive regime have damaged his credibility beyond repair. Others claim Mbeki’s global ambition is his saving grace. But the content of Pretoria’s broader reform strategy is rarely examined.
Between incomparable cartoons by Zapiro, Patrick Bond considers the dynamics of international political economy and geopolitics
He reviews a series of contemporary examples where Pretoria is frustrated by unfavourable power relations: US unilateralism and militarism, the UN’s World Conference Against Racism and reparations for apartheid profits, soured trade deals, stingy debt relief and counterproductive international financial flows, unsuccessful reform of multilateral institutions, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the World Water Forum, UN Security Council reform, haggling with the G8, and African peace-building.
The Afterword to this updated edition provides critical analysis from the 2004-06 period, characterised by backsliding in nearly all areas of global governance
Bond poses alternatives and also assesses the progressive social movements, which may well be Mbeki’s most persistent, unforgiving judges, both locally and globally.
‘Thanks to Patrick Bond’s analytical skills and brilliant cartoons by Zapiro, Talk Left Walk Right allows global justice activists to decode rhetoric and reality: from Washington and Davos conferences to the South African townships. Mbeki and the ANC are not hapless victims, but are deeply implicated in promoting faraway ideologies and unaccountable powers’
Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director, Daughters of Mumbi Global Resource Centre, Nairobi
Bond knows the debates on political economy as well as he knows South Africa and its politics. More than any other writer, he keeps alive our hopes for a different script for SA foreign policy.’
Peter Vale, Nelson Mandela Chair of Politics, Rhodes University, in International Affairs
www.ukznpress.co.za
Private Bag X01, Scottsville 3209
Tel: +27 (33) 260 5226
Fax: +27 (33) 260 5801
General E-mail: books@ukzn.ac.za
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