From GSPC to AQIM: The evolution of an Algerian islamist terrorist group into an Al-Qa‘ida Affiliate and its implications for the Sahara-Sahel region
Al-Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Algeria’s largest and most active Islamist terrorist organization, was formerly known as the Groupe salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, and usually referred to by its French acronym (GSPC, Salafist Group for Call/Preaching and Combat). It began in the late 1990s as a splinter faction of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), then fighting a bloody insurgency against the Algerian military government with the goal of establishing an Islamic state. GSPC/AQIM eclipsed its predecessor and remains active not only in Algeria but also in the neighboring Sahelian states. Best known for its raids and bombings against Algerian military bases and convoys, the group has also perpetrated kidnappings of European tourists and terrorist attacks in Mauritania and Mali. It has likewise been linked to planned strikes in Europe, as well as to smuggling and human trafficking across the vast Sahara. This article will examine the transformation of the GSPC, whose stated goal was the overthrow of Algeria’s long-ruling secular nationalist government, into AQIM, a participant in the global jihad allegedly committed to the destruction of the “Far Enemy.”
The Western Sahara conflict: regional and international repercussions
The lack of resolution of the Western Sahara conflict boils down to two main points: the conflicting positions of Morocco and Western Saharan nationalists, on the one hand, and geopolitical considerations, on the other hand. These geopolitical interests have been the main impediment to the resolution of the conflict because they strengthened the obstinate position of Morocco, which argues, thanks to external support, that it will only negotiate on the basis of ‘autonomy’ within Moroccan sovereignty. This proposal currently enjoys the implicit consent of France, the United States, and Spain, regardless of UN resolutions that refute any preconditions for the current negotiations.
Call for Papers: “Africa for Sale”: Analysing and Theorizing Foreign Land Claims and Acquisitions
International Conference : ”Africa for Sale”
Analysing and Theorizing Foreign Land Claims and Acquisitions
Groningen University, Netherlands
Thursday 28 and Friday 29 October 2010
While foreign land acquisitions in Africa are no recent phenomenon, the last several decades have witnessed an unprecedented level of large-scale land acquisitions all over the continent; millions of hectares of land in Africa are increasingly claimed by and leased out to transnational entities, government businesses, multinational corporations, and international organisations. Sometimes referred to as “neo-colonialism” due to their resemblance to colonial land exploits, these acquisitions have been largely driven by a global “scramble” for food security and access to natural resources. Foreign actors gain access to land in part by employing discursive tools and media to portray African farmland as “unused” or “unproductive” while the local farmers are portrayed as “backwards”, underdeveloped, environmentally destructive, and desperately poor. access is also secured through the market capitalist economy and often legitimized as “economic growth” or “sustainable development”. Indeed, proponents argue that land deals bring new technologies, improved agricultural practices, poverty alleviation, and modernisation to developing countries.
However, the presence of foreign stakeholders in local territories also involves an encounter of often contradictory cultural paradigms, leading to pervasive social, economic and cultural changes and/or conflicts. In practice, these new land deals often result in the forced eviction of subsistence farmers from land which is simultaneously viewed as their “cultural heritage”, thereby severing them from their cultural and socio-economic attachments to past, present and future.
While the nature and scope of large-scale, foreign land acquisitions has been taken up by the non-governmental arena (e.g. NGOs) very little academic scholarship has addressed these deals both analytically and theoretically, from [comparative] historical and contemporary perspectives. In turn, several important questions remain unanswered: What are the implications of foreign land leases for local populations? How are these deals mediated, structured and legitimized? What is the role of multinational corporations in the economic, political, social, and environmental governance of developing countries in Africa?
Submissions addressing historical and contemporary aspects of foreign land acquisitions are welcome. We also encourage papers that offer methodological tools and theoretical models to analyse these land acquisitions. Due to the multifaceted theme of the conference, we seek and welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines.
Contributions addressing the following four fields are particularly welcome:
1.) Food security: Foreign (government or company) investments in “unused,” arable land for large-scale agricultural production.
2.) Large-Scale Mining: Multinational claims to land for mineral exploitation.
3.) Conservation Projects: International environmental NGO acquisition or control of land for biodiversity conservation and/or protected area management.
4.) Tourism: Land acquisitions for purposes of tourism development.
The following thematic list is provided to help orient potential submissions: Cultural Implications; Poverty and “Sustainable Development”; Food and Human Security; Neoliberalism; Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); China’s Engagement in Africa; Environmental, Social and Cultural Impacts; Socio-cultural dimensions of “compensation”; Multinational Mining; Land Tenure Conflict; Food and Financial Crisis; Bio-engineering; Corporate Governance; Offshore Food Production; Debt-for-Nature Swaps; REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation); Carbon Trades; Biopiracy; Ecotourism; Mining-Conservation Partnerships; Biodiversity Offsetting; Climate Change; Land as Cultural Heritage; Cultural Change; Resettlement; Indigenous Environmental Knowledge; World Bank “Growth Poles” Project; Special Economic Zones (SEZs)
Important dates:
– 15 May 2010: deadline for abstract submission of individual papers (max. 400 words) including brief biography of the author(s) (max. 100 words)
– 15 June 2010: selection of papers by the Conference Organising Committee and designing of the final programme
– 1 September: deadline for submission of selected papers (max. 8.000 words)
Abstracts and papers should be written in English. The conference language is English.
Please forward your submission to:
Conference Organising Committee:
Michel Doortmont (Groningen University), Sandra Evers (VU University Amsterdam),
Froukje Krijtenburg (independent researcher), Caroline Seagle (VU)
Email: NVASconference2010@hotmail.com
Conference fee:
– 25 euros for students (two days) and 12,50 euros per day.
– 50 euros for NVAS members (two days) and 25 euros per day.
– 100 euros for other participants (two days) and 50 euros per day.
Any further queries or requests for information on the conference should be sent to the above email address.
US Foreign Aid Bill: $8 billion “shall” go to GMO research
The “Global Food Security” bill is back. After its introduction in the Senate a year ago, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have been quietly pressing for this piece of legislation that aims to fight global hunger with one hand while orchestrating a giant taxpayer subsidy to pesticide and ag biotech companies with the other. The bill, also known as the Lugar-Casey Act — for Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Robert Casey (D-PA) — would refocus aid programs on agricultural development, with a caveat: public funding of genetically engineered (GE) seeds is what this bill means by “agricultural development.”
Last spring Pesticide Action Network joined Food First, Union of Concerned Scientists and other partners in commending the overall intention of the bill, while calling for the removal of the corporate give-away clause buried in its language. The Lugar-Casey Act directs some $7.7 billion to agricultural research and development, much of which could go directly into the coffers of corporations like Monsanto because of one clause mandating that research funds “shall” go towards GE crop research. Monsanto (the world’s largest purveyor of GM seeds) has done more lobbying on the Lugar-Casey Act than any other interest.
USAID would be responsible for implementing the bill. Over the last two decades, this agency has spent millions of US taxpayer dollars on developing GE crops, with not one success story to show for it. A highly touted partnership between USAID and Monsanto to develop a virus-resistant sweet potato in Kenya failed to deliver anything useful for farmers. After fourteen years and $6 million, local varieties vastly outperformed their genetically modified cousins in field trials.
“At the end of the day, GE crops don’t have much to offer – especially to farmers in the developing world,” notes PAN senior scientist Dr. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman. The bill’s single-minded focus on promoting GMOs runs directly counter to the scientific findings from the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, the IAASTD
http://www.panna.org/mag/summer2008/agriculture/business-as-usual-is-not-an-option.
This landmark report highlights the need to strengthen agroecological research to support small-scale farmers, while decreasing corporate control of seeds and the food system. “We will be working with partners in the coming weeks to mobilizing a strong message to the Senate reiterating our call to strip the GM clause from the bill,” adds Ishii-Eiteman.
Global Food Security Act
Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.fpif.org/articles/global_food_security_act
Conference on Zimbabwe: Dare to Shape the Future (April 15-16, 2010)
Dare to Shape the Future:
April 15-16, 2010
Washington DC Kellogg Conference Hotel
800 Florida Ave N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002-3695
April 15-16, 2010
Despite continuing tensions, Zimbabwe’s year long Inclusive Government has resulted in significant economic and political changes giving great relief to long suffering Zimbabweans. Considerable as these changes are, a lot remains to be done for Zimbabwe to fully transition to a peaceful and democratic order, particularly in terms of critical political reforms and national healing. In addition, to institutionalize irreversible political reforms, key questions must be addressed in relation to how Zimbabwe’s economy long ravaged by Structural Adjustment Programs and corruption, among other factors, can be reconstructed in the interest of ordinary people.
The conference theme, ‘Dare to Shape the Future’ emphasizes thinking outside the box and encourages participants to creatively imagine and help construct a different future for Zimbabwe, moving away from destructive polarization and conflict to justice, healing and reconciliation. And from repression, exploitation and poverty to freedom, equity and development. The conference will take place within the context of the yearlong existence of the Inclusive Government in Zimbabwe and will coincide with Zimbabwe’s 30th independence anniversary. In line with the theme of daring to shape the future – the conference will pioneer a culture of inclusive dialogue among a diverse range of stakeholders of different opinions and political stripes to help forge a new culture of tolerance. Speakers from Zimbabwe will help bring a better understanding of civil society struggles on the ground and how the solidarity community can help and will help shape people centered U.S. policies at a crucial time in Zimbabwe’s history.
Read More here:
http://www.africaaction.org/conference-home.html
Bill Sutherland, Pan African Pacifist, 1918-2010
Bill Sutherland, unofficial ambassador between the peoples of Africa and the Americas for over fifty years, died peacefully on the evening of January 2, 2010. He was 91.
A life-long pacifist and liberation advocate, Sutherland became involved in civil rights and anti-war activities as a youthful member of the Student Christian Movement in the 1930s. Sutherland was raised in New Jersey, the son of a prominent dentist and youngest brother to Reiter Sutherland and to Muriel Sutherland Snowden of Boston, who founded Freedom House in 1949 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant. He spent four years at Lewisburg Federal Correctional Facility in the 1940s as a conscientious objector to World War Two, striking up what became life-long friendships with fellow C.O.s Ralph DiGia, Bayard Rustin, George Houser, Dave Dellinger, and others. In 1951, in the early days of the Cold War, Sutherland, DiGia, Dellinger, and Quaker pacifist Art Emory constituted the Peacemaker bicycle project, which took the message of nuclear disarmament to both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In 1953, in coordination with the War Resisters International and with several activist groups and independence movement parties on the continent, he moved to what was then known as the Gold Coast. An active supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, he married playwright and Pan African cultural activist Efua Theodora, and became the headmaster of a rural secondary school. The call of Pan Africanist politics was very strong, and Sutherland was instrumental—along with a small group of African Americans living in Ghana at the time, including dentists Robert and Sara Lee–in hosting the visit of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King to the 1957 independence celebrations. In the early days of the first Ghanaian government, Sutherland also served on the organizing team of the All African Peoples Congress. He was appointed private secretary to Finance Minister Komla Gbedema. He was also central to the development of the Sahara Protest Team, which brought together African, European, and U.S. peace leaders to put their bodies in the way of nuclear testing in the Sahara Desert.
Sutherland left Ghana in 1961, working in both Lebanon and Israel for the founding of Peace Brigades International, and for the Israeli labor organization Histadrut. It was also in this period that he began a friendship with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan of the Ismaili community, working in support of displaced persons as Sadruddin became United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He settled in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1963, as a civil servant. Sutherland’s chief work in Dar involved support for the burgeoning independent governments and liberation movements. A close friend and associate of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Sutherland helped develop the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). He served as hospitality officer for the Sixth Pan African Congress—held in Dar in 1974—working with C.L.R. James and other long-time colleagues to bridge the gap between Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. He hosted countless individuals and delegations from the U.S. in these years, including assisting Malcolm X in what would be his last trip to Tanzania. His home in Dar became a camping ground for liberation leaders in exile from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and throughout the region. His love of music, especially jazz, his passion for tennis (which he played well into his 80s), and the pleasure he got from dancing, were hallmarks of his interactions, shared with political associates and personal friends the world over.
Despite Sutherland’s close association with those engaged in armed struggle, he maintained his connections with and commitment to revolutionary nonviolence, and joined the international staff of the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1974. As the AFSC pushed for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to South African anti-apartheid clergyman Bishop Desmond Tutu, Sutherland was working as the AFSC international representative. In 2003, the AFSC initiated an annual Bill Sutherland Institute, training Africa lobbyists and advocates in various policy issues and educational techniques. Sutherland was also the recipient of an honorary doctorate degree from Bates College, and served as a Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. He was awarded a special citation from the Gandhi Peace Foundation in India, and, in 2009, received the War Resisters League’s Grace Paley Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2000, Africa World Press published Sutherland’s Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation, co-authored by Matt Meyer. Archbishop Tutu, who wrote the foreword for the book, commented that “Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people . . . They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness.” On the occasion of Sutherland’s 90th birthday last year, Tutu called in a special message, noting that “the people of Africa owe Bill Sutherland a big thank you for his tireless support.”
Bill Sutherland is survived by three children—Esi Sutherland-Addy, Ralph Sutherland, and Amowi Sutherland Phillips—as well as grandchildren in Accra, Ghana; Spokane, Washington; Lewiston, Maine; New Haven, Connecticut; and Brooklyn, New York. In addition to scores of family members, friends, and loved ones, he will be missed by his niece, Gail Snowden, his loving partner Marilyn Meyer, and his “adopted” sons Matt Meyer and john powell. There will be a private funeral for family members this week, and memorial services will be organized for later this year.
Dennis Vincent Brutus, 1924-2009
Statement from the Brutus Family on the passing of Professor Dennis Brutus:
Professor Dennis Brutus died quietly in his sleep on the 26th December, earlier this morning. He is survived by his wife May, his sisters Helen and Dolly, eight children, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren in Hong Kong, England, the USA and Cape Town.
Dennis lived his life as so many would wish to, in service to the causes of justice, peace, freedom and the protection of the planet. He remained positive about the future, believing that popular movements will achieve their aims.
Dennis’ poetry, particularly of his prison experiences on Robben Island, has been taught in schools around the world. He was modest about his work, always trying to improve on his drafts.
His creativity crossed into other areas of his life, he used poetry to mobilize, to inspire others to action,
also to bring joy.
We wish to thank all the doctors, nurses and staff who provided excellent care for Dennis in his final months, and to also thank St Luke’s Hospice for their assistance.
There will be a private cremation within a few days and arrangements for a thanks giving service will be made
known in early January.
***
Dennis Vincent Brutus, 1924-2009
World-renowned political organizer and one of Africa’s most celebrated poets, Dennis Brutus, died early on December 26 in Cape Town, in his sleep, aged 85.
Even in his last days, Brutus was fully engaged, advocating social protest against those responsible for climate change, and promoting reparations to black South Africans from corporations that benefited from apartheid. He was a leading plaintiff in the Alien Tort Claims Act case against major firms that is now making progress in the US court system.
Brutus was born in Harare in 1924, but his South African parents soon moved to Port Elizabeth where he attended Paterson and Schauderville High Schools. He entered Fort Hare University on a full scholarship in 1940, graduating with a distinction in English and a second major in Psychology. Further studies in law at the University of the Witwatersrand were cut short by imprisonment for anti-apartheid activism.
Brutus’ political activity initially included extensive journalistic reporting, organising with the Teachers’ League and Congress movement, and leading the new South African Sports Association as an alternative to white sports bodies. After his banning in 1961 under the Suppression of Communism Act, he fled to Mozambique but was captured and deported to Johannesburg. There, in 1963, Brutus was shot in the back while attempting to escape police custody. Memorably, it was in front of Anglo American Corporation headquarters that he nearly died while awaiting an ambulance reserved for blacks.
While recovering, he was held in the Johannesburg Fort Prison cell which more than a half-century earlier housed Mahatma Gandhi. Brutus was transferred to Robben Island where he was jailed in the cell next to Nelson Mandela, and in 1964-65 wrote the collections Sirens Knuckles Boots and Letters to Martha, two of the richest poetic expressions of political incarceration.
Subsequently forced into exile, Brutus resumed simultaneous careers as a poet and anti-apartheid campaigner in London, and while working for the International Defense and Aid Fund, was instrumental in achieving the apartheid regime’s expulsion from the 1968 Mexican Olympics and then in 1970 from the Olympic movement.
Upon moving to the US in 1977, Brutus served as a professor of literature and African studies at Northwestern (Chicago) and Pittsburgh, and defeated high-profile efforts by the Reagan Administration to deport him during the early 1980s. He wrote numerous poems, ninety of which will be published posthumously next year by Worcester State University, and he helped organize major African writers organizations with his colleagues Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
Following the political transition in South Africa, Brutus resumed activities with grassroots social movements in his home country. In the late 1990s he also became a pivotal figure in the global justice
movement and a featured speaker each year at the World Social Forum, as well as at protests against the World Trade Organisation, G8, Bretton Woods Institutions and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
Brutus continued to serve in the anti-racism, reparations and economic justice movements as a leading strategist until his death, calling in August for the ‘Seattling’ of the recent Copenhagen summit because sufficient greenhouse gas emissions cuts and North-South ‘climate debt’ payments were not on the agenda.
His final academic appointment was as Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and for that university’s press and Haymarket Press, he published the autobiographical Poetry and Protest in 2006.
Amongst numerous recent accolades were the US War Resisters League peace award in September, two Doctor of Literature degrees conferred at Rhodes and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in April – following six other honorary doctorates – and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the South African government Department of Arts and Culture in 2008.
Brutus was also awarded membership in the South African Sports Hall of Fame in 2007, but rejected it on grounds that the institution had not confronted the country’s racist history. He also won the Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes awards.
The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle against injustice. Uniquely courageous, consistent and principled, Brutus bridged the global and local, politics and culture, class and race, the old and the young, the red and green. He was an emblem of solidarity with all those peoples oppressed and environments wrecked by the power of capital and state elites – hence some in the African National Congress government labeled him ‘ultraleft’. But given his role as a world-class poet, Brutus showed that social justice advocates can have both bread and roses.
Brutus’s poetry collections are: -Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, Ibaden, Nigeria and
Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 1963).
– Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (Heinemann, Oxford, 1968).
– Poems from Algiers (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Institute, Austin, Texas, 1970).
– A Simple Lust (Heinemann, Oxford, 1973).
– China Poems (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Centre, Austin, Texas, 1975).
– Strains (Troubador Press, Del Valle, Texas).
– Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press, Washington, DC and Heinemann, Oxford, 1978).
– Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, Enugu, Nigeria, 1982).
– Airs and Tributes (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 1989).
– Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1993).
– Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 2004).
– Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 2005).
– Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader, ed. Aisha Kareem and Lee Sustar (Haymarket Books, Chicago and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2006).
He is survived by his wife May, his sisters Helen and Dolly, eight children, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren in Hong Kong, England, the USA and Cape Town.
By Patrick Bond
Jennifer Davis awarded OR Tambo order by South Africa
South African Government to Recognize and Award Africa Action’s Jennifer Davis
Today as we celebrate Human Rights Day, Africa Action commemorates December 10th by honoring a former leader’s worthy legacy and imagining the future potential through action!
Jennifer Davis, Executive Director of Africa Action’s predecessor organizations is set to receive one of South Africa’s highest honors, the Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo. This is awarded to foreign nationals (Heads of State and Government) and other foreign dignitaries. It will be presented to Jennifer Davis tomorrow in Pretoria, South Africa for her contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, the field of education and commitment to human rights.
Read the rest at Africa Action
About the Photo: Jennifer Davis, Executive Director of the American Committee on Africa and The Africa Fund, and ANC President Oliver R. Tambo. On January 23, 1987 the American Committee on Africa and The Africa Fund hosted a reception in New York honoring President Tambo. At the reception The Africa Fund presented President Tambo with a check for more than $100,000 from money raised from the anti-apartheid album “Sun City”. The funds were to support ANC educational, cultural and other project for South African refugees. Used by permission of David Vita.
From African Activist Archive:
http://africanactivist.msu.edu/image.php?objectid=591
Review: Zunami! The 2009 South African Elections Edited by Roger Southall and John Daniel
Zunami! The 2009 South African Elections
Roger Southall and John Daniel (editors)
Pretoria, Jacana Media 2009
288 pages
The first part of the title of this book is a play on a statement made by Zwelinzima Vavi, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary, in 2005. At the time Vavi had said that any attempt to stop Zuma, then the ANC’s deputy president as he was preparing a challenge to Thabo Mbeki’s leadership, would be like ‘… trying to fight against the big wave of a tsunami’.
The editors of this volume suggest that the most recent general election in South Africa, April 2009, was mainly a referendum on Jacob Zuma. Though a number of other developments were also interesting — a decline in national support for the ANC with the exception of KwaZulu-Natal (it lost 5-10% of its vote share in eight of the nine provinces), the emergence of the new opposition party, the Congress of the People (COPE), among others— events around Zuma since 2005 dominated these elections.
The result is now well known. The ANC won by a large majority, just short of two-thirds, while COPE — a party of former ANC leaders closely associated with Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, established late 2008 — mustered 7 odd percent of the national vote. ‘… There was no serious suggestion during the 2009 election campaign that South Africa would have to confront the ‘turnover’ test — the willingness of an incumbent government in a new democracy to hand over power if defeated at the polls — which theorists consider the ultimate test of democratic consolidation’ (p.6).
University of the Witswatersrand political scientist Anthony Butler points out that the ANC hardly stretched itself. ‘Its manifestoes were moderate, uncontroversial, and anti-populist in economic policy’ (p.66).
The largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which has participated in postapartheid elections since 1994 in various disguises, only increased its vote — still largely limited to the majority of whites and some coloureds — by single digits. (In the chapter on the DA, University of Cape Town academic Zwelethu Jolobe, concludes otherwise: he claims that the DA has achieved ‘considerable success’ [p.146] since 1994.)
However, the election pointed to a number of exciting developments. The 7% earned by COPE is remarkable given that it was only formed in 2008. Compare that to the DA, which has not reached even 20% despite participating in elections since 1994. Though the editors agree that the emergence of COPE does not signal the ANC’s monopoly over voters, it still represents a significant development, especially as it emerged from within ANC ranks. In her chapter on COPE, political scientist Susan Booysen — who dismisses the smear that COPE is a mere extension of Thabo Mbeki loyalists — argues that COPE’s impact on South African politics was twofold: ‘It rendered the ANC more vibrant than it would have been without it, and it helped breathe life into opposition politics’ (86).
The book also contains two chapters dealing with the smaller opposition parties — the ethnic Inkatha Freedom Party, the United Democratic Movement, Independent Democrats, Freedom Front Plus (a white sectarian party whose leader was co-opted into Zuma’s new Cabinet). The prognosis on these parties is not as positive as with COPE. Instead, this may have been the last electoral showing by some of these parties.
Another exciting development was the participation of young people. A first time 18-year-old voter in 2009 was not even born when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. ‘A full third of the potential electorate had become eligible to vote’ (p.9). They were four when some of their parents voted for the first time in 1994. The only government they know is the ANC. They feel less of a recidivist attachment to the ANC or the party’s role in defeating Apartheid. Though most of them still voted ANC, increasingly they’ll judge the ANC on performance and for them the ANC is associated with deepening inequality, homelessness, lack of healthcare, and poor education, little accountability by public representatives and increased public corruption. Since 2004 there has been an increased in protest actions by poor black people. Zuma has some sympathy with these voters. However, it is unclear how that support will last the further we move away from the end of Apartheid.
In what may be good news for opposition parties, Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, a pollster at the University of Cape Town, argues that, contrary to popular wisdom, South African voters have become ‘less predictable’ and ‘significant potential exists for electoral fluidity’ (p.24). However, Schulz-Herzenberg points out that South African voters still learn much about politics ‘racial cues’ (p.44). In what reads like veiled criticism of the DA and its leader, Helen Zille, Schulz-Herzenberg writes ‘… to contest future elections seriously, [opposition parties] need to be more attentive and responsive to subtle shifts in political identity’ (p.44). Schulz-Herzenberg’s findings also suggest that voters increasingly factor in government performance evaluations.
Three chapters deal with topics that are not specifically focused on the political parties. Jane Duncan studies the media while Idasa researcher Judith February evaluates the electoral system and electoral machinery. February concludes that the election was ‘well run and well managed’. She has nothing but praise for the electoral commission. However, she points out that South Africa’s electoral system requires reform. While the party-list driven proportional representation-system that South Africa uses since 1994 ‘supports democratic values of fairness and inclusivity,’ crucially it lacks accountability, with representatives reverting to party bosses.
Finally, Shireen Hassim, who is probably the country’s foremost scholar on the relation between politics and gender, writes that gender was a ‘major fault-line’ in the 2009 election, but not in the way feminists preferred. Hassim points out any casual (feminist) observer of the 2009 elections ‘might conclude that she had finally arrived in heaven’. ‘Two of the top four contending parties are led by women, half the number of candidates on at least two parties’ lists are women, and the country has one of the most advanced legal, constitutional and institutional frameworks for ensuring gender equality in the world’ (p.195). However, politically active women were smeared as monstrous (Helen Zille became ‘Godzille’), as witches (supporters of COPE) or as benign mamas (the leaders of the ANC’s Women’s League).