Africa Follow

WHEN SOUTH Africans went to the polls this week it marked ten years since black people won the right to vote. A cursory examination of South Africa today reveals deep cracks in the post-apartheid capitalist society. Despite big talk about what has been achieved, the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. The majority black ANC government wants South Africans to celebrate and relish the newfound peace, justice and national unity after centuries of conflict, division and injustice.

WHEN SOUTH Africans went to the polls this week it marked ten years since black people won the right to vote. A cursory examination of South Africa today reveals deep cracks in the post-apartheid capitalist society. Despite big talk about what has been achieved, the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. The majority black ANC government wants South Africans to celebrate and relish the newfound peace, justice and national unity after centuries of conflict, division and injustice.

GENOCIDE IS an overused word, but ten years ago it took place in the tiny African country of Rwanda. Throughout 100 days between 800,000 and one million people were murdered in a country of just six million. The media coverage remembering these events conveys the horror. But much of it also accepts two arguments. The first is that there was something inexplicable about what occurred-or that perhaps this is something uniquely "African".

Observing the Commonwealth Conference over the past week, I can't help feeling a degree of grudging admiration for Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe – for all that I detest him for the devastation he has inflicted on his own people.

AROUND ELEVEN million people are facing hunger in the African country of Ethiopia in 2003. But the huge multinational Nestlé has caused outrage by demanding $6 million from the Ethiopian government. It is claiming compensation for a company that was nationalised 27 years ago by the military government and later bought by NestlŽ. Nestlé is one of the world's largest food companies. It makes $6 million profit every hour.

OVER 900 people packed into a World Development Movement meeting in London last Thursday to hear speakers report back from the WTO talks in Cancun. Prof Yash Tandon, an African delegate to the WTO, gave a perspective from the inside. The FT had a report saying that poor countries were "likely to be the biggest losers" from the collapse of the talks. Yash explained how this was completely upside down-no deal was much better than a bad deal.

Leo Zeilig traces the history of the crisis gripping Liberia.

THE WORLD Development Movement is holding a public meeting on Thursday 18 September to discuss the outcome of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting which will take place from 10 to 14 September in Cancun, Mexico. Speakers include George Monbiot, Professor Yash Tandon (African delegate to the WTO), Carmen Diaz and Barry Coates.

THE PHOTOGRAPH on this page is of 16 year old Alhassan Kamara. He is an asylum seeker from war-torn Sierra Leone, West Africa. He did not want his full face photographed for fear of being singled out in the future. Known by his friends and family as "Alaska", this young man escaped a brutal civil war.

NO SANE person could be unmoved by the terrible suffering of people in the West African state of Liberia. Fourteen years of brutal civil war has seen at least 200,000 people killed out of a population of three million. Many others have been injured or lost their homes.

FAR FROM being a drain on the economy, workers from abroad keep key industries and services in Britain going. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) showed last week how some parts of the NHS would "cease to function" without nurses from South Africa and the Philippines. Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence has uncovered how "in food processing there is a hidden army of labour on whom we all depend".

GEORGE BUSH'S visit to Africa last week was a grotesque spectacle. Nowhere else on earth has suffered so much from the policies he and those he represents push across the world. His visit came as a United Nations (UN) report showed how in over 50 countries, many in Africa, society has been plunged backwards in the last decade.