The deadline for stand bookings at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair – where the unveiling of Africa’s 100 best books of the twentieth century takes place – is June 17. Scheduled for Cape Town between July 26-28, the fair also has a second leg in Harare between July 29 and August 3.

The Vice President and secretary of State for women's affairs Isatou Njie Saidy will launch a book entitled 'Olimatou' by Matty Chama, a primary school drop herself.

Review by George Monbiot.
In his recent book The Song of the Earth, the Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate made the extraordinary claim that poetry could save the world. I think Alastair McIntosh has just proved him right.

This is a world-changing book, one of the most important I have ever read, which will transform our perception of ourselves, our history and our surroundings, much as the work of Alice Miller and Sven Lindqvist has done. It is a first step towards the decolonisation of the soul: the essential imaginative process we have to undergo if we are to save the world from the political and environmental catastrophes that threaten it.

Soil and Soul is an extraordinary adventure in theology, economics, ecology, history and politics. It takes us from the Hebrides to the Solomon Islands, gently guiding us towards a new and remarkable philosophy by means of compelling, beautifully written stories. It overflows with ecstasy, quiet wisdom and love – love for humanity, for the world, for our failings and our possibilities.

McIntosh tells the story of his exceptional childhood, the historical destabilisation of the community in which he was brought up and, as he travels and reads, his growing understanding of why and how this happened. He explores the colonisation of resources, of human labour and, most importantly, of our own perceptions. Then he uses this emerging wisdom and experience to develop daring and innovative means of tackling the powers that have deprived us of ourselves. With the people of the Isle of Eigg, he helped devise a strategy for overthrowing the once-intractable power of the landlord. Their remarkable victory – the first known case in which Scottish tenants cleared a laird from his own estate – galvanised public demands for widespread land reform in Scotland. When a multinational quarrying company announced its intention to turn a Hebridean mountain into a giant superquarry, McIntosh persuaded the Native American Warrior Chief Sulian Stone Eagle Herney to come to Scotland and help assemble the first-ever theological submission to a public inquiry. The publicity converted a local issue into an international one, developing one of the most striking challenges to corporate power in British history.

McIntosh draws on these experiences to develop a radical politics of place. He transforms our engagement with soil and soul – once the preserve of the right – into a new and compelling vision of freedom and social justice. His radical liberation theology, rediscovering both the presence of God in nature and the neglected femininity of divine wisdom, is persuasive enough to encourage even such an indurated old sceptic as myself to take another look at God.

By these means, Alastair McIntosh shows us, we can break the spell of consent, unchain our imaginations and challenge both power itself and the anomie and disaggregation on which power’s abuse thrives. The work of a great thinker and a great poet, Soil and Soul shows us how we can, in McIntosh’s words, make ‘beauty blossom anew out of desecration’.

Make no claim to know the world if you have not read this book.

Vijay S. Makhan.
African countries have experienced modest economic recovery during the 1990s. But these countries are caught in a vicious circle in which the existing economic structure cannot generate enough savings and export earnings needed to finance their development and mount a sustained assault on widespread poverty. Yet foreign aid has been cut back sharply and the continent receives only a trickle of foreign investment flows. New policy regimes are now in place, creating the right environment for external financing to make a major difference. Development finance is one of the foremost challenges facing African countries and the international community in the new century.

When UNESCO takes the floor at the First Global Forum on
Trade in Educational Service which is currently taking place in Washington, the United States, its message is clear: As stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, higher education shall be accessible to all on the basis of merit. "Higher education should is considered as a public service," says Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic of UNESCO's Division of Higher Education. She also quotes the Assistant Director-General for Education, John Daniel for saying that "when it comes to trade liberalization, higher education is not a product like bananas or cars.

CLASS STRUGGLE AND RESISTANCE IN AFRICA aims to reassert the classic Marxist tradition in Africa by examining the impact of recent working class struggles. It approaches these events by critically engaging with the experience of socialists in Africa and offering a contemporary analysis of the continent. The book attempts to unite working class protest and campaigns against the current orthodoxy of neo-liberal economic policies and privatisation. In so doing, it seeks to counter current policies of austerity and globalisation, and to launch a renaissance of socialist organisation in Africa. As Marx said, the point is not just to understand the world, but to change it!
‘This excellent collection brings us right to the cutting edge of class analysis, social struggle and socio-economic liberation in Africa. For all the progress made these last years in understanding and promoting African social-movement mobilisation during the neoliberal epoch, a missing link has been labour – and this book now fills that crucial gap.’
Patrick Bond, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. ISBN 1 873797 33 8, June 2002.

Our THURSDAY DISCUSSION SERIES has been very badly affected by gossip or innuendo that suggests that The Book Cafe has been "banned" etc.. etc.. The truth is sadly that political discussions are now regarded under the new law as "public gatherings" requiring ZRP permission. We have resolved to continue because a 5-year tradition of free and open democratic discussion is too important to abandon, at probably the most critical juncture. Where discussions have a political content we will obtain permission. Otherwise we continue as normal. We have taken all reasonable steps to protect ourselves and our patrons from any trouble. We are perfectly aware that the new law represents, in practice, a form of suppression of freedoms of speech and assembly. We hope that you may share our conviction that democacy is an elusive right unless it is practiced. That there is NO option BUT to continue to exercise the right of a community to discuss matters which concern their lives, even under exceptionally difficult circumstances.

A new publication now available from the Africa Institute of South Africa. Featuring . . .
- Country checklist
- Social data
- Economic data
- Political data: leadership changes, elections, military strength, from OAU to AU
And more... in an easy to read format, with statistics, tables, graphs, and more than 20 original maps.
Order and more information from the Africa Institute of South Africa.

The regional delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and seven West African artists have launched a music album titled 'Man is Man's remedy' that aims to raise awareness of basic principles of humanitarian law. The 8-track, non-commercial album, launched on Wednesday in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, was a collaborative work of four artists from Cote d'Ivoire, Assy Kywah of Benin, Sonia Carre d'as of Burkina Faso and Dama Damwuzan of Togo. Apart from a plea "to give back a little humanity to those who have lost it" in the title track, they also sing of child-soldiers, anti-personnel mines, small arms trafficking, women in war, prisoners, displacement, and respect for civilians during conflict.

Thomas Meyer
A critically important question confronts many countries in the post-Cold War epoch: are culturally determined political conflicts inevitable? While acknowledging people's need for identity, and that different cultures necessarily produce differentiated identities, Professor Meyer argues that difference only leads to intolerance and violence when politically ambitious leaderships exploit it. Fundamentalism is therefore essentially a political phenomenon that has occured in all civilizations, particularly in contemporary Europe and North America. In the present age of globalization, Meyer suggests that social crisis grows out of an exclusionary dynamic that marginalizes growing numbers of people. Little wonder that the deepening of inequality between North and South has undermined popular confidence in secular leaders' vision of development and triggered a divisive fundamentalism that declares war on modernism and, ironically, on traditionalism too. This argument contains real grounds for optimism. In seeking political strategies to defeat fundamentalism and the identity mania that accompanies it, the focus must be on developing economic and social structures that give all citizens a common interest in the operations of a socially responsible market economy, which delivers to all. Zed Books, ISBN 1 84277 063 2, 2002.

Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnne McGregor and Terence Ranger
Violence and Memory is the history of the former Shangani Reserve in Northern Matbeleland now known as Nkayi and Lupane. It is a rich and evocative study of the forced movement of people into a sparse wilderness area, in order to create a 'homeland' for the Ndebele after the conquest of the Ndebele state in the late 19th Century, and the emergence of this area in to a central platform of nationalist politics for the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU). The book explores, both the central theme of violence, not only under settler colonialism, but under the post-colonial dispensation, and the memory of that violence over a long period of time. Central to the study however is the development of nationalist politics in a particular rural setting, as a result of a complex interplay of rural and urban figures, and a combination of local grievances with broader territorial meanings of becoming national. Moreover the book explores the ways in which nationalist politics developed a moral economy, through which leaders and their practices, both in the anti-colonial struggle and in the form of the post colonial nationalist government, were held accountable according to norms and promises of nationalist objectives.
ISBN: 0 85255 642 X, 2000.

ABC titles and authors feature on the list recently announced by the 16-person Jury to select Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. Sosu's Call by Meshack Asare features in the top twelve books; and included in the 100 is History of the Yorubas by Samuel Johnson and Kiswahili. Past, Present and Future Horizons by Rocha Chimerah . ABC also stocks a new translation of Song of Lawino by Okot p'Bitek entitled The Defence of Lawino by Taban lo Liyong. The original is in the top 100. Other ABC authors feature on the list: Ama Ata Aidoo, Amina Mama, Charles Mungoshi, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Yvonne Vera and Ngugi wa Thiongo. The initiative was inspired by the noted scholar, Ali Mazrui, as a way of directing the spotlight of the world on the achievements of African writers published in the 20th century. The Jury said it was time to celebrate a century of superb achievement in African creative writing, scholarship and children's literature.

Mystery there certainly is, but not of the Harry Potter kind. Most South Africans believe in witches but they fear the misery they inflict. It is not simply a matter of a curse and suffering seven years of bad sex, unpleasant as that certainly is, but of the way a belief in witches ensures social control and conformity, and requires exile and even death as the ultimate form of elimination. Sakkie Niehaus' Witchcraft, Power and Politics is the most important book yet published on witchcraft. It does not lend itself to simple summaries and bullet-proof conclusions. And so I choose to address two themes that seem to me to bring out the best in the book. The first has to do with witchcraft as a cultural script and the second with witchcraft as a weapon of the weak. Pluto, London and David Philip, Cape Town, 2001.

You and your neighbor are more closely related than you think. Despite physical, psychological and cultural differences, every living person has at least one thing in common - we are all related to one woman who lived in east Africa more than 150,000 years ago. The Discovery Channel presents a startling two-hour special, THE REAL EVE, debuting worldwide on Sunday, April 21. Narrated by actor Danny Glover, THE REAL EVE reveals that humankind's shared genetic heritage links every living person on earth. The program also traces the expansion of modern humans throughout the world, from our fragile beginnings in Africa to our exodus through South Asia, down to Australia, up into Europe and finally into the Americas. Unfolding like a scientific detective story, THE REAL EVE enlists top scientists and cutting-edge research to prove that everyone on the planet today can trace one part of his or her genetic heritage back to one woman who lived in Africa, more than 150,000 years ago, through a unique part of our DNA.

UNESCO Dakar has launched an online discussion forum on educational facilities in sub-Saharan Africa. Six debates are proposed focusing on different aspects in education such as the impact of globalisation and poverty on schools and education.

From the 16th to the 19th century, more than 40,000 slave ships plied the waters of the Atlantic, bringing human cargo to the Americas. Drawing on a memoir by a lieutenant, historian Robert Harms tells the story of one such ship, a story that, although shocking to modern readers, "was distressingly ordinary in its own time and place." Designed to transport grain over short distances, the Diligent was perhaps not the most seaworthy of vessels. Still, by ship's officer Robert Durand's account, it transported nearly 300 victims at a time from the African coast to the French colony of Martinique, often at a terrible cost in life because of disease, malnutrition, and harsh shipboard discipline. Harms carefully reconstructs episodes in the ship's life, including the curious trial that ended its 1731 ocean crossing. More than that, he untangles the complex business of the slave trade, which was far from monolithic, depending instead on ever-shifting alliances and private agendas in the race for profit. As Harms notes, though more than 17,000 ships' logs from the slaving voyages of the 18th century have been recovered, only a few shed light on daily life aboard those vessels. His troubling narrative does just that, and it gives new evidence of the ordinariness of evil. Basic Books; ISBN: 0465028713, 2001.

A classic is born in this tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl's childhood. Born in England and now living in Wyoming, Fuller was conceived and bred on African soil during the Rhodesian civil war (1971-1979), a world where children over five "learn[ed] how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in the house, and ultimately, shoot-to-kill." With a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller describes her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes. Curfews and war, mosquitoes, land mines, ambushes and "an abundance of leopards" are the stuff of this childhood. "Dad has to go out into the bush... and find terrorists and fight them"; Mum saves the family from an Egyptian spitting cobra; they both fight "to keep one country in Africa white-run." The "A" schools ("with the best teachers and facilities") are for white children; "B" schools serve "children who are neither black nor white"; and "C" schools are for black children. Fuller's world is marked by sudden, drastic changes: the farm is taken away for "land redistribution"; one term at school, five white students are "left in the boarding house... among two hundred African students"; three of her four siblings die in infancy; the family constantly sets up house in hostile, desolate environments as they move from Rhodesia to Zambia to Malawi and back to Zambia. But Fuller's remarkable affection for her parents (who are racists) and her homeland (brutal under white and black rule) shines through. This affection, in spite of its subjects' prominent flaws, reveals their humanity and allows the reader direct entry into her world. Random House; ISBN: 0375507507, 2001.

Eritrea’s first National Book Fair is being held this week in the country’s capital, Asmara. The fair, attended by Eritrean authors, publishers and booksellers, is intended to promote reading and literature in a country where, after 30 years of war, books are considered an expensive luxury. Many schools have no books for their pupils, the country’s only two public libraries are in Asmara and the handful of bookshops which exist offer a very limited range. “There is a shortage of books but also little awareness of reading, especially in the countryside,” said Arefaine Tecle, a school librarian and member of the fair’s organising committee. “Our main objective is to promote literature, to tell people that reading is good for them and that it is fun. We also want to make readers aware of indigenous books and authors.”

Art touches personal, social, economical and physical aspects of life,
but art is also a mirror to time.
The new art initiative we have created on internet;
WWW.RT-IT.COM is also dealing with the issue of Time.
RT-IT stands for Real Time and Inner Time and is giving artists
the oppertunity to learn more about internet
and to send out their messages worldwide by the digital highway.
This time internet is not only used for artwork presentation,
but internet is becoming a medium whereby artists can express themselves.
It's a medium to work for and gain income from.
Artists are commisioned to make Time-Works,
which they scan and send to AfricanColours at the local InternetCafe.
AfricanColours is implementing these images into the special RT-IT format.
The original works of art are exhibited at the Internetcafe
and the virtual slideshow is worldwide on the internet.
The online exhibition will be open to the public
and the RT-IT project is paying for the internethours.

ARTICLE 19 has recently updated its Virtual Freedom of Expression Handbook, making it one of the most comprehensive internet-based resources on laws pertaining to freedom of expression. Using the handbook's handy search engine, readers can access summaries of all the free-expression related legal cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Important cases handled by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, the African Commission on Human and People's' Rights and various national courts are also accessible. ARTICLE 19 also provides detailed legal analyses of several key topics, such as defamation, national security and the Internet. Suggestions and contributions to the handbook are welcome.