Africa

Congo Week is coming to the University of Toronto. I'll be speaking on October 20th and my friend Brad Macintosh on October 15th. If you're in Toronto, check it out. Schedules here at:

http://friendsofthecongouoft.wordpress.com/

Report Back: Congo Briefing
A report from the Eastern DRC by Justin Podur

Wednesday July 29, 2009, 7pm Tinto Coffee House
89 Roncesvalles Ave, Toronto
(416) 530-5885

Writer Justin Podur visited Bukavu in South Kivu in the eastern DRC in June/July 2009 and interviewed human rights defenders, mining researchers, and medical and legal experts on sexual violence.

I returned from Bukavu yesterday. A sign of a country not having full sovereignty is the fact that you have to get there through another country. Those who have business in Rwanda can go through Rwanda, flying into Kigali and going overland into Bukavu via Cyangugu, which is Rwanda's sister city to Bukavu (and the place that the Rwandan army and militias have invaded Bukavu from numerous times during the war). An alternative is to fly into Kenya, from Kenya to Bujumbura in Burundi, and overland from Bujumbura.

BUKAVU, DRC - Like everything else, reading material is scarce and expensive here. There isn't a daily newspaper in Bukavu, and after visiting several libraries and bookstores in different parts of the city, I didn't see one even from another region. The media that people rely on seems to be the radio, but I've met a few radio journalists and they have the same scarcities, which makes it very difficult for them to cover issues and stories (not to mention the fact that journalists who cover controversial topics get assassinated every so often - more on that later).

I'm in Bukavu, in South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's a big city! About a million people, in the uplands, on the coast of a strange and geologically fascinating volcanic origin Lake Kivu. The city, and the province (which has about 4-5 million people according to estimates I've heard and read), have seen too much of too many kinds of violence over the past 15 years. I have wanted to come here for a long time, for various reasons.

I have been, over the past year or so, making a slow conversion to free software. It started when I interviewed Richard Stallman and tried to get ZNet moving in the direction of free software, along with some help from my friend Tarek. It's been a long process and I don't want to minimize the difficulties, but I have decided to aim for full conversion once Windows Vista replaces Windows XP to the point that XP is no longer supported (I'm typing this from an XP machine).

Stephen Lewis did the Massey Lectures this year. Previous Massey lecturers (that I've read and loved) include Noam Chomsky, Thomas King, and (that I've read and found interesting) Richard Lewontin and John Ralston Saul.

For those who don't know who Stephen Lewis is, he's the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He's also been a politician in Canada, a very important activist for Canada's social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP).

The Darfur conflict, much-hyped in the media, really began to take off *after* the Sudanese regime had signed a peace agreement with the strongest rebel group, the SPLA, in the south. The peace agreement with the SPLA, in which the long-time rebel leader, John Garang, became part of the government (Vice-President) brought the longest and most brutal part of the Sudanese civil war to a halt. The side effect was that it freed up the regime's hands to intensify the counterinsurgency in Darfur, leading to the Darfur crisis.

The living standards of the Zimbabweans have plummeted as the country’s gross domestic product has shrunk by more than 40 percent in the past five years, so the mainstream media tells us.

My name is Mandisi Majavu, am joining up forces with with Justin Podur. I’m based in South Africa, Durban; and predictably my blog will focus mainly on African politics. As a philosophy student, I like to practise my philosophical skills from time to time, and so tend to ramble about nothing. So please bear with me.