ARS NOTORIA

A Coup-built West African Empire of Seven Countries? Whose Empire? With one exception, the seven coloured countries on the map above ( Senegal , Burkina Faso , Mali , Côte d'Ivoire , Mauritania , Guinea and Niger , have the following in common: ·          They have been subjected to recent military coups d’état. ·          Each coup has been, or is intended soon to be, made legal by elections. The exception is Senegal , where the eminence grise , President Abdoulaye Wade , 84 years old or more, has been President for ten years. He is the effective inheritor of the neo-colonialism of Léopold Sédar Senghor , but revised by Wade to conform with the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”. In Burkina Faso , in 1987, Blaise Compaoré led a coup d’état against his comrade-in-arms, President Thomas Sankara , “Africa’s Che Guevara”. In 1991, Compaoré staged an election and was declared the legal President. In 1991 Amadou Toumani Touré made a coup d’état in Mali . In 2002 the same Amad

Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974 By Philip S. Foner, Quartet Books, 1978 Pages 342-347 Paul Robeson, 1898-1976 An Open Letter to Jackie Robinson * Paul Robeson, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom , April 1953 I notice in a recent issue of “Our World” magazine that some folks think you’re too outspoken. Certainly not many of our folks share that view. They think like you that the Yankees, making many a “buck” off Harlem, might have had a few of our ball players just like Brooklyn. In fact I know you’ve seen where a couple of real brave fellows, the Turgerson brothers, think it’s about time we continued our breaking in to the Southern leagues – Arkansas and Mississippi included. I am happy, Jackie, to have been in the fight for real democracy in sport years ago. I was proud to stand with Judge Landis in 1946 and, at his invitation, address the major league owners, demanding that the bars against Negroes in baseball be dropped. I know from my experience as a pr

Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilisation or Barbarism, 1981 Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pages 309-313     Cheikh Anta Diop, 1923-1986 Chapter 17 [part] Does an African Philosophy Exist? The Egyptian Contribution to World Philosophical Thought In the classical sense of the term, a philosophical thought must bear out at least two fundamental criteria: It must be conscious of itself, of its own existence, as a thought. It must have accomplished, to a sufficient degree, the separation of myth from concept. Through examples given below, we will see how difficult it is sometimes to apply the latter criterion, even to the classical Greek philosophy. Before evaluating the extent to which the African conceptual universe respected these two principles, let us delimit first, with precision, the cultural area to which our analysis applies. It includes Pharaonic Egypt and the rest of Black Africa. Vis-à-vis Black Africa, Egypt has played the same role that the Greco-Latin civilization h

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Tuesday December 14 2010 DOCTORS and nurses protested in Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz on Tuesday night against regional government cuts to health services. by JAMES TWEEDIE Several hundred doctors and nurses, mostly members of nursing union SATSE and regional federation Intersindical Canaria, marched from the central Plaza Weyler to the nearby seat of the Canarian parliament. A cohort of pallbearers, followed by mourners, carried a coffin bearing the slogan: “R.I.P. Public Healthcare.” The regional government, a coalition of the conservative Peoples' Party and the nationalist Canarian Coalition, is currently debating a budget cut of €312 million – almost 12 per cent of the regional health budget – to be voted upon on December 20. This would be in addition to cuts of €72 million earlier this year. Some 2,000 nursing jobs are under threat and doctors face swingeing cuts in both their basic salaries and night duty rate. The pay cut would come on the heels

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Thursday December 9 CANARIAN junior doctors published an open letter to patients on Thursday giving their reasons for strike action later this month. by JAMES TWEEDIE The letter, entitled 'Perdon' (sorry) was released by the Grupo de Protesta de MIR Canarias, which represents resident trainee doctors in the archipelago's hospitals and health centres. It asked patients to support the doctors' campaign against regional government plans to cut their basic wage and night duty rate. This would come on top of a five per cent salary cut and a pensions freeze for all public sector workers imposed by the central government in Madrid this summer, a move which sparked a national one-day public sector strike on June 8 (pictured, below). Currently doctors earn an average of €1,100 per month basic, plus between €8.91 and €14,82 per hour – depending on seniority – for gruelling 17-hour overnight duties, which follow a normal seven-hour day shift between two to

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Thursday November 11 2010 Demonstrators marched in Santa Cruz on Thursday night against the week-long assault on a protest camp in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. by JAMES TWEEDIE Over one thousand people, many Sahrawis but the majority Spanish Canarians, marched through the city centre to a rally at Plaza Candelaria to demand an end to the police and military operation. The streets were filled with fluttering Sahrawi flags, while demonstrators chanted: “Free Sahara” and: “The crime is Morocco's, the responsibility is Spain's”. Others protested outside the Moroccan consulate on the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria, on what was the 92 nd  anniversary of the end of the First World War. Further protests were planned in the towns of La Oratava on Friday and Playa de Las Americas on Saturday, when there will also be a major demonstration in Spain's capital Madrid. More than 20,000 people had been camped outside Western Sahara's largest city El Aa

 Lucy and Miles on the demo, photograph by Betty Hall By Lucy Hall Blasting out dub step, noisy young people are singing and dancing around big speakers. Others try to make phone calls over the noise, attempting to meet up with friends. Some have painted faces,some are dressed up in costume- they look ridiculous. Notting Hill Carnival?  A party on Clapham Common? No, actually. it’s a 50,000 strong demonstration, and most of us are youngsters.  Since the cuts were announced I’ve protested outside the Tory conference in Birmingham. I've protested here, I've protested there. The marches are always enjoyable. The feeling of standing up for what you believe in is the best kind of feeling, and you are among like-minded people. It is refreshing and inspiring.  But Wednesday’s march against the rise in tuition fees and the cuts was like nothing anything our generation has ever done before; our apathetic, apolitical generation suddenly stepped up, and gave everyone a shock.

Students at the Mill Bank, photograph by Alexandra Santarelli Article by Alexandra Santarelli 10th of November 2010 is a date to remember, because it marks the first fightback against the ConLibs and their policies.  The demonstration for the increase of tuition fees started off near Embankment and then carried on with the students walking through Parliament Square with drums going to the beat of shouts, music and chants, saying  “No if, no buts, no education cuts.” I was walking and joining in with the singing and you could feel the adrenaline rising, growing stronger; but no one was as powerful, as shocking as the people outside number 30 MILL BANK where the Conservatives have their HQ.  At the start the situation outside the MILL BANK building seemed controlled. Later on though, I realised that at that point there were already people inside the building shouting, singing and inviting others on the demonstration to come inside.  But this mea

The Classics, New Century , Part 7 Rosa Luxemburg, 1871-1919 Reform or Revolution? Rosa Luxemburg’s “ Reform or Revolution? ” is a great classic. In the first place it is a thorough polemical rejection of Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 “ Evolutionary Socialism ”, which book Luxemburg deals with comprehensively, to the point where she concludes: “It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say. In the history of our party that is the only importance of Bernstein’s book.” This was true. The reformists have never made any advance on Bernstein; but they keep coming. “Reform or Revolution?” then at once becomes the beginning of an even more crucial polemic, this time between Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, which generated further “classics”, and which we will follow in this part of our course on the classics. Luxemburg demolishes Bernstein but then contradicts Lenin and is in turn corrected by Lenin’s final reply. In the process of these two successive polemics, the