Textbooks may soon be available online if a pilot project yields results. The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) has entered into an agreement with the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) meant to provide learning materials to schools in soft copies as well as online. According to the deal, the CCK will fund digitalisation of 11 Form One subjects at an initial cost of Sh15.2 million.

In September 2008, ministers from over 100 countries, heads of bilateral and multilateral development agencies, donor organisations, and civil society organisations from around the world will gather in Accra for the Third High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (2-4 September 2008). This meeting has been promoted as helping “developing countries and marginalised people in their fight against poverty by making aid more transparent, accountable and results-oriented.” The agenda for ‘Aid Effectiveness’ has, however, come under heavy criticism from many quarters. This timely book cautions developing countries against endorsing the agenda proposed at this meeting. If adopted, it would subject the recipients to a discipline of collective control by the donors right down to the village level.

Since the arrival of Hugo Chavez on the Venezuelan scene—and later, for the left and the right, on the world scene—he's been the source of considerable interest.  Is he a new caudillo in the Latin American style, perhaps a reincarnation of Argentina's Juan Domingo Peron, or is he just an ego-maniac, who seeks to install a dictatorship on Venezuela? 

Steve Ellner's recent book shows that Chavez and the movement he heads is much more important than either of these two questions suggest.  Unlike the large majority of the writing on Venezuela in the Chavez era, which focus on Chavez' "style" or personality, Ellner focuses on substantive issues, especially around class and race.  Ellner's approach rests "on the proposition that political movements best serve a developing nation by combining efforts to achieve four critical goals, as opposed to one or two of them to the exclusion of others."  He then identifies these goals:  "(1) the struggle for social justice; (2) the struggle for democracy; (3) the effort to promote national economic development; and (4) the adoption of economic and political nationalism."

The MDC leadership have had their travel documents returned, after they were confiscated on Thursday afternoon to block them from travelling to South Africa. President Morgan Tsvangirai, Secretary General Tendai Biti and Secretary for Foreign Affairs Professor Elphas Mukonoweshuro were heading to Johannesburg to attend the SADC summit this weekend, when they were prevented from boarding their flight by immigration officials.

This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians.

Ishmael Beah’s memoirs, A Long Way Gone, is an emergency one. Not only does Beah highlight the horrors of war that he went through in Sierra Leone, but he also reveals how gross and wasteful war is. Just like Grace Akallo’s Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children, Els De Temmerman’s Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda, John Bul Dau’s God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir, the documentary, The Lost Boys of Sudan, and the film, Blood Diamond, the children who are not killed during the war are turned into soldiers and indoctrinated in murderous violence. The gun is magnified. What starts as a war tactic eventually becomes deeply ingrained in children’s mind, the gun becomes not only a ‘vehicle’ to power but power itself.

Beah begins his story in an engaging but detached manner. News of war come to him as if the war is happening in a faraway and different land. Later, as fleeing refugees begin to spill into his town does Beah realise that the war is taking place in his country. Soon it ravages a substantial chunk including his home area and neighbouring towns. In an effort to escape, Beah ends up right in the arms of the rebels. He is forced to grow. He loses his childhood, his family, his friends and part of his dream. Throughout the war he carries remnants of his dream in his pocket—cassette tapes of rap music. In his mind are snapshots of the schools he would have gone to and the kind of hip-hop artist he would have become had war not destroyed the tapestry of his dreams. This is what becomes of Beah’s land: littered with bodies. “The flies are so excited and intoxicated that they fall on the pools of blood and die.”

Recently, the Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group in Bamenda has republished Francis Nyamnjoh’s first novel Mind Searching (2007 [1991]). After having read A Nose for Money (2006) which came with lightning and thunder, Mind Searching entered my mind as a thought provoking but gentle breath of air. The central theme in the two novels is the perverse functioning of the political system and its effects on the man in the street, in Mind Searching explicitly set in Cameroon, in A Nose For Money in the fictional Mimboland, a mirror of Nyamnjoh’s beloved and reviled Cameroon. Where the protagonist of Mind Searching, Judascious Fanda Yanda, is presented as a more or less virtuous man in most part of the book, Prospère, the protagonist of the second novel, is far more opportunistic right from the start. Although the idea that greed is stronger than anything else prevails in both novels, it is worked out in much more detail in A Nose for Money.

MIND SEARCHING

As the title Mind Searching suggests, the reader is presented with the detailed river of thoughts of Judascious Fanda Yanda. He is a young man, a pious Christian, living in Briqueterie, a poor neighbourhood of the capital. One of the persons who gives him a lot of food for thought is the very prosperous Honourable Vice Minister, who attends the same church as he does. Judascious Fanda Yanda knows that this minister rends nocturnal visits to a fortune teller behind his shack. When there is a baptism feast at the residence of the minister, Judascious Fanda Yanda decides to “capitalise” upon the piece of knowledge that he has (p.106) by telling the minister he knows all about his secret visits. It appears that this is the key to a better life, providing Judascious Fanda Yanda an entrance to the world of the well-to-do-people: It so happens that the Honourable V.M. gives him a job as his Private Secretary in exchange for keeping the secret. like At the end of the story, Judascious Fanda Yanda can be considered a successful young man, who has moved from the shacks of the neighbourhood Briqueterie to the upper-class quarter of Bastos.

Cinema in all its diversity will once again be celebrated at the 29th Durban International Film Festival which runs from 23 July to 3 August. Featuring more than 200 films from more than 95 countries, spread over more than 300 screenings at 26 venues across the city, the festival will bring together established masters of cinema and innovative new talents from around the world.

In a twist of realism, a new feature film, "Johnny Mad Dog", uses a cast of actual ex-child soldiers from Liberia to portray the violent lives of youth forced to participate in armed conflict. The original script was adapted from Emmanuel Dongala's acclaimed book "Johnny Chien Mechant". Johnny, 15, and his small commando unit comprised of young boys ages 6 to 15, rip through an unnamed African country, terrorising and slaying everything in their path.

On the heels of yet another G8 summit the global hand-wringing about the crisis of African development lumbers ahead with its parade of conferences, commissions and concerts proclaiming support for the poor from the seats of power. Conspicuously absent from the spectacle of solidarity is any acknowledgement of history. In fact, the discourse and politics of the West’s relationship with the African continent is deliberately, decidedly and dangerously a-historical.

Like the small boy watching the parade, who exclaims that the emperor has no clothes, Gerald Caplan has written a small but powerful book to expose this latest betrayal of Africa: the denial of context and history. A Canadian scholar and political activist with a life-long commitment to justice and African development, Caplan has made a much needed intervention in debates about Africa’s future. His book, The Betrayal of Africa, asserts that history matters, for understanding the present in which we live, and for finding ways forward to the future we desire.

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits: An anthology
by Rasna Warah
Author House, 2008

There is a new, East African book, edited by the excellent Kenyan columnist Rasna Warah, that for us here in the region articulates postdevelopmentalist concerns from a more relevant, specific and local perspective – indeed, in exemplary fashion employing the sort of local and grassroots perspective that such thinkers and activists claim that classical developmentalism too frequently ignores.

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits is an anthology that brings together some of the region’s best and best-loved writers, whose individual essays enable a kaleidoscopic view of developmentalism in East Africa, its discontents, its hubris, its smugness, its ability to kill through often genuine and well-meant kindness.

In it, as the editor states in her very accessible introduction, we find young and established writers who are, if you like, reformed developmentalists and former NGOers themselves, who are diasporans who can see the industry from the ‘external’ perspective of the donors, leftists who can penetrate the sinister economic motives behind certain forms of development, fiction writers who bring a knowing wit to the debate, investigative journalists who know how to hunt down and express the real suffering of individuals and communities. And the names of the writers are those we know, as East Africans, we can respect. Among others, we have Rasna Warah, Binyavanga Wainaina, Parselelo Kantai, Sunny Bindra, Onyango Oloo, Kalundi Serumaga, Issa Shivji and Firoze Manji.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

*Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

This collection looks at the on-going significance of Black Consciousness, situating it in a global frame, examining the legacy of Steve Biko, the current state of post-apartheid South African politics, and the culture and history of the anti-apartheid movements.

A collection of cartoons from Francis Odupute from Nigeria

The Kanifing Court trying Dida Halake, former Managing Director of the Observer Company Limited, publishers of the pro-government Daily Observer newspaper, on June 25, 2008 granted him bail after almost two weeks in detention.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/385/49113noartist.jpgThe importance of appropriate communication was impressed upon Petra Rohr-Röuendaal while teaching in a Botswana squatter camp in 1976. The World Bank had decided to offer interest free loans to residents who wished to build themselves houses, and distributed a leaflet explaining the scheme. Sadly, few of its target audience were able to read it. On pointing this out to the World Bank, the author was commissioned to rectify the matter by producing an educational comic strip, which proved a great success. Since then she has produced a huge number of educational illustrations, run workshops, developed games and puppet shows, and has helped others to do the same.

‘Where there is no artist’ is a collection of over 1,200 drawings on a variety of development themes, mostly Africa based, which may be used free for education or non-profit making purposes. The book is aimed at fieldworkers, teachers, grassroots communities, anyone who needs to be able to create visual aids with very few resources or skills. It contains clear and simple instructions for how to use the drawings; how to copy them, how they may be used – for instance to create posters, games, flannel board figures or comic strips – all with an emphasis on community participation. In addition there is a section on how to draw, and some guidelines on techniques such as lettering and silk-screen printing. The drawings are engaging and skilled, and often humorous. For those with access to a computer the contents of the book are reproduced on two CDROMs, the images being in jpg format.

A valuable resource.

Practical Action Publishing
Available at

In 2006, Mimi Cherono Ng'ok, a young Kenyan-born photographer chose to document immigrants from different African countries living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her interest in this project was sparked by the attacks of the Somali community who were living in Cape Town in 2006.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the six-month prison sentences that a court in the southwestern city of Bulawayo passed on three South African drivers on 2 June for “unauthorised possession of TV broadcast equipment” and urges the judicial authorities to release them.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) are pleased to announce their joint initiative to host a major conference on the vexed question of the causes and consequences of corruption in Africa and to invite interested researchers and policy intellectuals to submit abstracts and paper proposals for consideration for presentation at the conference. The conference is one of the major activities being organized to mark the 50th anniversary of UNECA. It will be held at the United Nations Conference Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 29th to 31st October, 2008. The working languages for the conference would be English and French.

Beyond the Book: Integrating alternative media into publishing plans A participatory workshop at the Cape Town Book Fair (16 June 2008) for all people involved in generating, producing, distributing, promoting and using information for development.

This is an exhibition being organized by Communion and Liberation (CL), an
international Catholic organisation that has as part of its objectives the
promotion of culture and education. In Kenya, CL is affiliated to AVSI
Foundation, Companionship of Works Association (CoWA), St Kizito
Vocational Training Institute and Cardinal Otunga Secondary School among
others.