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Author Topic: Zimbabwe to issue 10-million-dollar bill!!!  (Read 5612 times)

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Offline ribbit

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Re: Zimbabwe to issue 10-million-dollar bill!!!
« Reply #30 on: January 20, 2008, 11:03:00 PM »
the way the SADC moving, they part of the problem too.

Offline ZANDOLIE

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Re: Zimbabwe to issue 10-million-dollar bill!!!
« Reply #31 on: January 20, 2008, 11:12:35 PM »
In Africa a leader's primary duty is to his own tribe. So even though they may come to prominence as a national leader, their psychological loyalty still lies with the close knitedness of the tribe and extended family. So within nationalistic structures their loyalty to the tribe compels them to look after the tribe first, more abstract national interests comes second. This is what comes off as corruption. The simple fact is most nations Africans are trapped in a nether-region where their basic cultural constructs are not compatible with their brick and mortar institutions.

As EricWilliams said a nation not grounded within its own culture is a nation without a soul.
Zando, how is this to be achieved in the modern day Africa?
there seems to be so many countries where this happens.....how can it be changed?

1) Dismantle institutions....completely unfeasible...will lead to war, slaughter and repression.
2) Cast off cherished material and social culture, embrace plurality and "modernity".....very do-able....but will lead to war, slaughter  repression.

Luckily much of #2 has already been accomplished. So might as well proceed in that direction.

Africa will soon cross the demographic transition, but there is still a heavy toll to pay.

That continent was used and discarded like a piece of toilet paper. It supplied the world with resources, industry, music, dance, philosophy.

Europe kicked her when she tried to get to her knees. But in the end you must stand up and walk away, not beg like a dog. And since nobody really helping, Africans must help themselves up out of poverty, aids, tribalism, repression. Or go the way of the neanderthal.....





 
« Last Edit: January 20, 2008, 11:15:56 PM by ZANDOLIE »
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Offline kounty

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Re: Zimbabwe to issue 10-million-dollar bill!!!
« Reply #32 on: May 21, 2008, 01:03:05 PM »
After Mandela stepped down you would think that his example would have been followed by "leaders" like Mugabe. Instead he will go down in history not as a freedom fighter but as a full time clown with a day job as an African politician.

I understand that there is a growing new generation of "bleck" farmers in South African who are running commercially successful operations. Mugabe's big mistake was basing land reform solely on political considerations. In "Sooth Efreecah" :rotfl: the land claims and general social reforms were done with much more thoughtfully in spite of the viciousness of aparteid. Mugabe's hero play well bite him in the ass.

He probably would have been more effective in achieving justice had he followed the slower but steady change of S. Africa.



not so fast zando...the race is not for the swiftest. my sister-in-law just move from SA (no more link to stay by when we qualify:)) to atlanta. true the whites move out, but a rich black class jus move in to take their place - the result - you have to live behind walls and a wall behind a wall behind a wall. armed convoys to drive your kids to school so they wouldn't get hijack. lil kids never ride the bus before, it was like the biggest disney world ride for them last summer, so they decide they want to be "free" and move here. I predict SA will explode in about 10 yrs.

The race is definitely not for the swiftest. That is why as far as agriculture goes S. African did a lot more right than Zimbabwe, they moved in  a more considered manner. As for as reforms in the rest of the country I know little about that. But the way you talk looks like things are very bad.

S. Africa is seen as the strongest economy in Africa but I know the crime situation is far out of control. It seems like the GDP is relatively good but only on paper.
What do you see as being the big problems there Bounty?

positive youtube video on SA situation

article on what's being done

essay by my very close American friend who is in university in cape town (insider's view)

basic crimes of ethnicity

“Tribalism is both the form of power and the form of revolt against it. The response to ethnically organized power in the local state is an ethnically defined revolt... The point of political activism must be both to recognize the starting point of resistance as shaped by the nature of power and to transcend its limits.”

−   Mahmood Mamdami

“The harsh reality is that racial, ethnic and class antagonism held in check under classic apartheid have resurfaced in the climate of liberalization and deracialization... The reforms have accentuated rather than dampened conflict.”

−   Mike Morris and Doug Hindson

“One Sunday morning, we just saw an army of Inkatha  coming in.  They brought people from all hostels  in the Reef. They intimidated, killed, and expelled hostel residents who disagreed and people from the surrounding community.”

- David Letsei

Gatsha Buthulezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu Nationalist formation funded, trained and explicitly backed by the apartheid government, refused to participate in the Truth and Reconcialation Commission hearings. Through their refusal – and the decision on the part of other South Africans to accept such a refusal – ethnically defined political formations became normalized within 'democratic' South Africa, and have been granted immunity for their crimes under apartheid.   The years of 'intra-ethnic civil war' preceding the transfer of power in 1994 left many thousands dead and the legacy of destabilization and terror tactics  developed in that time continue to haunt us. The basic crime of apartheid's encouragement of ethnic identification amongst Africans, (and the solidification of “Afrikaans” as a distinct, and protected, ethnic group) must be articulated and flatly rejected. Without a public, social 'consensus' against using ethnicity as a political force of mobilization, such horrific outbursts of violence are bound to re-emerge ('just now' ) and ethnicity will taint social policy at all levels of society.

THE RURAL IN THE URBAN

Apartheid carved South Africa into thousands of racially defined territories, and nine official (theoretically, ethnically 'pure') 'nations.' The principal ordering of society based on four distinct racial groups was constantly reinforced and managed through ethnic identities. The 'traditional' divisions and hierarchies of African peoples were intentionally utilized to further the ends of capital and whiteness. In other parts of colonized Africa, this process is described as 'indirect rule' – the 'Natives' are made responsible for implementing and enforcing policy that is developed by the colonial authorities, and which ultimately benefits the colonizers. This 'granting' of independence in the form of kings, a level of land and language rights, and so on, is not a gift but a key mechanism of subjugation and efficient exploitation. Mahmood Mamdami insists that apartheid didn't make South Africa an 'exceptional' form of colonialism, as 'indirect rule' was vital to apartheid policy.

The set of laws and ideology that the National Party came to label 'Apartheid,' had as one of its fundamental goals the effective management and control of African labor in order to meet the needs of the nation's white economic elite. The difficulty of this task lay in the fact that South Africa's economy was divided between mining, agriculture, and manufacturing; and each of these industries had need for different forms of dominated black labor. White farmers needed black peasants to be both dispossessed of land and kept out of the cities, so that they were dependant on employment on white-owned farms. Mining companies needed unskilled black workers that could be paid as close to nothing as possible, and bringing in landless peasants for nine months out of every year – while banning their wives and children from coming along – kept wages absurdly low. The growing manufacturing sector needed a stable urban black population, with some level of training, but degraded enough to gaurantee steady profit. How to manage these different needs?

The key phrase to tie all of this together was “influx control,” which is to say, the development of various methods of surveillance and repression to carefully control the “influx” of Africans into urban areas. First off, the apartheid state intervened to “situate the reserve army of labour, generated by capital accumulation in South Africa, in the rural areas rather than, as in the normal capitalist pattern, in urban slums.”  This 'reserve army of labour' was then legally banned from living in the city.  The Urban Areas Act  defines “the few blacks with legal permission to live in cities and large towns not as having a right to do so, but as exempt from the provisions of the act.”  Those Africans not 'exempt' from the ban on living in cities could only spend more than 72 hours in an urban area by obtaining a work contract. This contract would allow a person to work for a set period of time before needing to return to their rural 'home.'

According to Mamdami, “the migrant worker needs to be seen as the locus of all major social contradictions”  within South African apartheid. This is because migrant workers live in the intersections between the different domains of apartheid controls. In Mamdami's words, “the migrant worker was a free peasant transported to an urban industrial setting.” That is to say, a worker that remains a peasant despite being disciplined by the structure of modern industry; he is still governed by – and potentially forming allegiances based on - the tribal/ethnic identities of the bantustans. Therefore, migrant workers are a “class in civil society but not of civil society” - the “rural in the urban.”

This contradictory suspension between antagonistic social forces was intentionally encouraged by capitalists and apartheid social engineers. “Every effort was made to turn urban hostels in which migrants lived into enclaves shut off socially and physically from surrounding townships, just as an effort was made to subordinate migrants inside hostels to a regime of indirect rule.”  Within the hostels, all aspects of daily life were organized around ethnic hierarchies. “The fantasy of the hostel administration [was] that the hostel would be an extension of the reserve in which migrants would continue to live their lives in tribal harmony – sleeping in communal quarters at night while submitting to tribal discipline during the daytime – so that the world outside may continue as a white world.”

With the lifting of influx controls in 1986, “a social category of dispossessed and broken individuals, superfluous to and discarded by the system which 'created them,'” flooded out of the reserves and into the city. They made their way into the hostels and squatter camps of South Africa's cities, and the explosive mix of social and economic degradation and rigid ethnic hierarchies gave way to the disturbing violence of the late 80s and early 90s.

THE URBAN IN THE RURAL

“Few recognized that this general urban uprising... no matter how torrential, was confined to townships. It had yet to find a way to reach out to the countryside in the grip of indirect rule authorities and to the enclaves of that same authority in the urban areas.”

−   Mahmood Mamdami

In seeking an explanation for the 'civil war' between Zulus fighting for Zulu-ness and Zulus fighting for nonracial democracy, Mamdami points repeatedly to the moments within the anti-apartheid struggle when the movement failed to adequately address the needs and demands of migrant workers. Black unions in the 1970s made great strides in organizing hostel workers, and fought fiercely against barring migrants from union membership when the state legalized black unions in 1979; but the 'independent' unions focused solely on shop-floor issues and failed to address living conditions in the hostels. The community-based politics of the mid-80s was rooted almost exlusively in the townships, and migrants were even occasionally attacked by youth militants. “In the absence of an alternative – and progressive – link between the urban and the rural, migrants had no choice but to embrace the induna [headman]; the custodian of an authoritarian tribal tradition, he highlighted interethnic tension and downplayed popular and class interest.” Mamdami contrasts this failure to create a 'progressive' 'link between the urban and the rural' with “the 1950s, [when] migrants were the cutting edge of antichief struggles in the countryside. They were understood as an expression of the urban in the rural.”  Even within the tormenting strife of the early 90s, Mamdami points to a number of formations of Zulus that do not organize around their ethnicity (and, not within the ANC, either) but based on their shared interests as hostel dwellers.

As ethnicity was a key tool of the apartheid state, it is simultaneously the liberation struggle's 'weakest link.' The hopeful sentiment in a phrase such as the 'urban in the rural' can be seen as an assertion that limiting and dangerous identities can be undermined and surpassed through political action. But if ethnicity is taken at face value, or even as in some way a virtue, 'authoritarian tribal tradition' will remain a permanent spectre on the political landscape of this country.


« Last Edit: May 21, 2008, 01:06:49 PM by bounty killer »

 

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