Challenging world poverty is the promise in Labour’s manifesto. "Put the Iraq war behind you and join us to help Africa," is their pitch. But Tony Blair’s ties to George Bush, his partner in crime in Iraq, destroy any hope of this.
At the start of this week there were over 20,000 miners on strike in Free State at gold mines owned by the Harmony firm. Workers are 100 percent behind the action and are determined to fight until they win. The company has claimed that the strike is about job losses, but this is not true.
African-Caribbean children are more than three times as likely to be excluded from school as white pupils, according to independent research done for the government.
African SpiritsVarious artistsSoul Brother
In 1995 the John Coltrane disciple Pharoah Sanders sang the refrain, "Our roots began in Africa." He was recreating a form of music that developed in the late 1960s, known as "spiritual jazz".
There were many telling moments after South Africa’s first democratic election. I’d like to touch on one which I think is relevant to the changes being made to our country’s law.
A government that gives in to multinationals at home cannot curb their ravages abroad. That is the central reason why Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa is little more than a PR exercise.
HAVE YOU read The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré? It is about the human suffering caused by a Western pharmaceutical company which uses Africans as guinea pigs for drug testing. In Cameroon, West Africa, that fiction is terribly alive.
I lived for many years in South Africa, during the dark days of apartheid. During that time, Britain’s legal system was held up as a beacon of light and hope, as the prison bars of the apartheid state closed around us.
The centrepiece of chancellor Gordon Brown’s "Marshall Plan for Africa" came under fire from the World Development Movement (WDM) last week. Far from helping the world’s poorest, it will actively undermine the campaign to end global poverty.
In his state of the nation address at the opening of parliament, South African president Thabo Mbeki once again revealed how out of touch with reality he is.
