Africa Follow

ANTI-DEPORTATION campaigners will be holding a vigil at the Home Office in London next Thursday to highlight the case of Aziz Ahmed and his family. Aziz, a political refugee from East Africa, has been held in detention for over a year, in four different centres.

THE HEAD of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sensationally admitted last week that international bankers had forced a desperately poor African country to sell grain just as a famine began. They demanded that the life-saving grain was sold in order to repay debts.

OVER 100,000 South African council workers started their second week on all-out strike on Tuesday. They are fighting for a minimum wage of £150 a month. At present the minimum wage is £125 a month.

WHAT DID the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrial countries do last week while they skulked behind massive police protection at Kananaskis, deep in the Canadian Rockies? The British government had been busily briefing that they would deliver the "Marshall Plan for Africa" that Tony Blair promised at the disastrous G8 summit in Genoa last year.

Review of 'Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa', ed. Leo Zeilig, New Clarion Press £12.95

MORE THAN 70 people were arrested and beaten in Harare, Zimbabwe, last weekend. They were taking part in a peaceful commemoration of the Soweto anti-apartheid uprising in South Africa in 1976. Socialist MP Munyaradzi Gwisai, who is due to speak at Marxism 2002 in London, was singled out for special treatment by the riot police. He was severely beaten and needed urgent medical treatment.

ISRAEL'S WAR on the Palestinians is spreading convulsions across the Arab world. Popular outrage from Morocco, on the Atlantic coast of North Africa, to Jordan, in the heart of the Middle East, is pouring out against the US and Israel. More worrying for the corrupt rulers of the Arab regimes, anger on university campuses and on the streets is turning against them too. This is all taking place in a region which the world's most powerful state, the US, sees as vital to its global domination.

WITH BREATHTAKING gall, George W Bush last week declared that the election in Zimbabwe was a "flawed process". He added, "We do not recognise the outcome of this election." Only a man as stupid and arrogant as Bush could criticise the vote a year after he stole the US presidential election.

The latest album by Nigerian musician Femi Kuti and his band Positive Force has it all-politically and musically. The title track is a rallying cry all socialists will applaud. "Fight To Win" addresses the endless suffering of the African masses, and Femi sees the struggles of the people as a positive action.

The only certainty about politics in Zimbabwe is that there is a stormy time ahead. Socialist Worker went to press before any voting figures had been announced for the presidential election. Whatever result is finally announced will be hotly contested by the losing side.

Zimbabweans will vote for a president on Saturday and Sunday. They face a choice between Robert Mugabe's brutal regime and the Movement for Democratic Change's Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC contains good trade unionists and socialists, but is dominated by businessmen and white landowners.

The global 'civilisers' have left a bloody legacy in Africa.