Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

In this lucid and eloquent article, John Maxwell traces the connections between European genocide in the West Indies and the devastation produced in Africa by the slave trade with modern day poverty, oppression, and degradation in both places. It is a powerful condemnation of the hypocrisy of western trumpeting of human rights. Maxwell writes a column called "Common Sense" for the Jamaican Observer where this was originally published. Reposted from Haiti-Cuba-Venezuela>Analysis .

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Christmas in Jamaica is bad enough. One good thing about Christmas Day is that it means the end of weeks of aural assaults by mindless rhymesters perverting songs of worship to paeans of praise for hucksters of all kinds, from shopkeepers to banks, from auto-parts dealers to purveyors of cheap, non-returnable, eminently breakable, non-biodegradable trash tricked out in plastic, tinsel and lead paint to lure innocent children and entrap their parents.

And, as a bonus, there are the sound-system parties, which allow you to dance in your own home to music played two miles away.  read more »

Reposted from IOL January 28, 2008.

Wellington - A veteran New Zealand anti-apartheid campaigner has rejected a nomination for a prestigious South African award for foreigners, saying he is dismayed over conditions in the country, local media reported on Monday.

John Minto, nominated for a Companion Of OR Tambo Award by a South African government official, asked for the nomination to be withdrawn, the Christchurch Press newspaper said.  read more »

Dear John Minto--Thank you for your open letter regarding (and refusing) the nomination for the OR Tambo Award. Your voice against the continuing impoverishment and discrimination against those who suffered the most under apartheid is a salutary reminder that one should not rest till everyone does benefit from the promised transformation of South African society.--In solidarity, Jacques Depelchin

Reposted from Abahlali baseMjondolo January 28, 2008.

Tena koe Thabo Mbeki,

I understand a nomination has been put forward for me to receive a South African honour later this year, the Companions of O R Tambo Award, on behalf of HART and the anti-apartheid movement of New Zealand for our work campaigning to end apartheid in South Africa.  read more »

Originally posted in Radical Philosophy Issue 123, January/February 2004.

Two hundred years ago this month (January 2004), the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacri?ce or promised more hope. And few have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.  read more »

Thank you, Martin, for this analysis which helps to put things in perspective. Is this really happening in South Africa? How come this kind of thing does not make the front page in international news? It could be a scene from Kenya, it could be a scene from one of the favellas in Latin America, it could be a scene straight out of pre-1994 South Africa. One does not even hear the usual voice of Desmond Tutu (but then one understands he is mending another trench with his own fundamentalist christian hierarchs).  read more »

As I read this interview, tears came to my eyes (not difficult since, it seems, I cry easily). Here is someone jailed for a quarter of a century for no reason other than saying and doing the things any human being would want to: be free, love others as one would want to be loved, deepest love for those who are most despised.

His spirit is still vibrant despite the punishment meant to kill him more than solitary confinement is meant to.  read more »

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With rising food prices and shortages on the horizon, OBA board member Raj Patel calls for farmers and landless people to take back our food system from corporate agriculture. Reposted from The Tablet, September 8, 2007.

The switch from fossil to biofuels is being encouraged by governments to combat global warming but emissions in their manufacture are worse than burning diesel. Now the quantity of land required is contributing to a worldwide shortage of food.  read more »

Eulogy for poet Sekou Sundiata delivered at his memorial service on Wednesday, Aug. 22, at New School University in New York City.

This great poet takes the name by which the world knows him from two great rulers of Africa. Sundiata, the first ruler of the Mali empire (1230AD), in what was called Africa’s Golden Age and Sekou after the Democratic Republic of Guinea’s liberator from French colonialism, the great leader, Sekou Toure.  read more »

The Ota Bengas of today are people all over the planet treated as less than human by a system built on greed, profit, and violence. What follows is an example. The story was reposted from HaitiAnalysis.Com.  read more »