Marian's Blog

Africa "Outside" History? President Sarkozy's infamous speech in Dakar, July 2007

Since his accession to the French presidency, I seem to have lost track of the times when to hear Nicolas Sarkozy speak is to re-affirm that truth indeed is stranger than fiction. It's likely that for most of his listeners who were present on 26 July 2007, in an auditorium of Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, this was another one of those days.

Nicolas Sarkozy's original discours in Dakar was in French, but as this event is so important, it was also important to share it as well in English. I'm sure there must be other language translations out there. We will look for them in order to post them. Now, a group of mostly African intellectuals has recently published a French-language response to Mr. Sarkozy. The edited volume is L'Afrique Repond a Sarkozy: Contre le discours de Dakar (Editions Philippe Rey, Paris, 2008) - "Africa Responds to [Nicolas] Sarkozy: Against the Dakar Discourse." Luckily for we Afrodescendants of the Americas (or "Negroes of the diaspora," as book editor Makhily Gassama quite oddly refers to us), the book includes a contribution by our Haitian writer-sister Kettly Mars. The following is an unofficial translation of Sarkozy's speech which is posted at the blog Dionysius Stoned. A thank you to DS, and certainly to the party or parties who made this original translation.

ADDRESS BY MR NICOLAS SARKOZY, PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHEIKH ANTA DIOP, DAKAR, SENEGAL, ON 26 JULY 2007

Ladies and gentlemen

Allow me first of all, to thank the Senegalese Government and people for their warm welcome. Allow me to thank the University of Dakar that allows me for the first time to address myself to the elite of the youth of Africa in the capacity of President of the French Republic.

I have come to talk to you with the frankness and sincerity that one owes to friends that one appreciates and respects. I appreciate and respect Africa and the Africans.

Between Senegal and France history has woven ties of a friendship that no one can undo. This friendship is strong and sincere. It is for this reason that I wanted to address, from Dakar, the fraternal greeting of France to all of Africa...

Gaza, Haifa, Somalia, Colombia, Srebrenica: Nurit Elhanan's "Women" at the Euro Parliament

"Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?"

Correction: Nine years have passed since I worked in eastern Bosnia in 1997. In July 1995 the mass killings took place there, in the town of Srebrenica. I also remember the quiet and private sheroism of two women whom I met there in early '97 in the course of my work. I want to thank those ladies. The first rushed up to us just outside Srebrenica's municipal building. She had the grace and courage to walk right over and personally welcome home the Bosnian Muslim man with us on his first return. I do not recall his name but he was the first Muslim member of Srebrenica's post-war municipal elections commission. Another member of our staff, a woman, had driven him over from Tuzla - across the IEBL. The IEBL is a boundary: the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, a border separating mostly Muslim parts of Bosnia from the eastern region's self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic - Republika Srpska. The second lady I met just before Orthodox Easter. I was walking in the center of Srebrenica when she intently crossed the main street to meet me. This wasn't far from the Dom Kultura (Cultural Center) building. She handed me a beautiful, hand-painted Easter egg, a real, edible egg, and I accepted it from her with a thank-you in her language and a smile. Srebrenica's a very small town. Yet even the whole world is small in many ways, especially once people begin to know each other. I was deeply touched by and will not forget the kindness at the root of these small yet expansive acts of willingness and courage shown by two women whose names I do not know; women I've yet to meet again.

Last March 8 (International Women's Day) in her speech to the European Parliament, Israeli educator Nurit Peled-Elhanan - mother of a 5 - correction: 13 year old daughter killed by a suicide bomber - posed a question made eternal by the writing of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966; real name Anna Andreyevna Gorenko). "Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of your cheek?"

Nurit Elhanan's comments here about motherhood and the womb draw attention to this masculinist idea of 'womb as political demographic enemy', the verbal expression of which, sadly, I've witnessed in my international human rights work, often or usually expressed by men from their exclusively male positions of political and/or religious authority.

The "Muslim womb" is hardly the only perceived enemy. On a personal tip, the same attitude's been in the U.S. and the Americas since Columbus arrived in 1492, followed by his son's arrival a short time later with his first cargo to the Americas of captured Africans. In recent United States' experience the hostility toward "other wombs" and the fertility of "others" - both female and male - has included forced sterilisation and sterilisation under vastly uninformed consent. A nurse in Pennsylvania once asked whether I wished to be sterilised. At that moment I was in active labour no less, and thank goodness with no drugs by choice. My immediate, unfiltered and exact reply was "HELL NO."

I received Elhanan's remarks as forwarded by Paola Manduca from Sami Ramadani of London. Paola shared them on an email list in preparation for last spring's Women's assembly of the 2006 European Social Forum in Atena (Athens, Greece). In the same vein we ask your support and signature on this online petition for the Kampala Resolution on Women, Peace and Conflict. Thank you. Peace.

                                                 Women

                             Nurit Peled-Elhanan

"Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always
an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the
European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have
invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the
women who suffer most from violence in my country are
the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate
my speech to Miriam Raban and her husband Kamal,
from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children
were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries
at the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand
trial for this murder. [continued below]

World Cup and Der Spiegel Online: German incident in an Italian hotel, 2004

None of us knows exactly how today's Italy-Germany match will go. Some folks are pulling even harder for Italia ever since Achim Achilles' "why bother" comments were published in his infamous (and now removed) column on Der Spiegel Online (DSO). (The last link is to a BBC story about the column.) I say "why bother" because, well, why bother writing and publishing such nonsense?? From what I read, the column wasn't witty and definitely was not funny. I won't say Achilles' comments came from all Germans because obviously they did not. Not to mention, as others have pointed out elsewhere, the name Achim Achilles isn't exactly culturally German itself. At the same time it seems his remarks aren't as isolated as most of us would wish. It's interesting to consider and discuss how such aggressively stereotypical thinking fits into "problem-making" versus the efforts at "problem-solving" that are going on simultaneously today across the globe, including in Italia and Germany. In his June 28 post titled "Heil Spiegel" Italian humorist/comedian Beppe Grillo ("GREEL-lo") writes about the Der Spiegel episode via his blog. To Der Spiegel Online's credit, two days after Grillo's post someone called "Roberto Longo" added DSO's apology - in 3 languages - on Grillo's site as a response to the "Heil Speigel" entry.

This forces me to recall the Italian press reports of the incident two summers ago (2004) in an Italian hotel (Il Tritone in Abano Terme, Padova) where German tourists actually demanded the hotel management remove from her job a young woman on a 1-month student internship working Tritone Hotel's front desk. If you read Italian, see Costantino Muscau's 24 May 2004 article in Corriere della Sera: "E nera, non puo stare alla reception". Translation: She's Black, she can't be [work] at the reception [desk]. The 18-year-old student worker was African and, for some reason, this particular group of foreign (German) tourists organised to get her fired; not because of anything incorrect in her work but because of who she was. Later the story came out of how her parents settled in Italy years earlier, her father, Ekoli Mahnge Zulu, being a former IBF welterweight world boxing champion. Unfortunately the Tritone hotel's management did cave-in to this crazy, racist pressure (from a group of German tourists no less), which justly brought lots of coverage and an outcry in the Italian media. This led to the young woman (Marlene Zulu, Zairoise by birth) being offered and accepting another "stage" at the "more appropriate" Rossini Hotel, also in Italy, in Pesaro. Daily injustices like this anywhere in the world and including Europe, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, should have such courageous outcomes far more often.

June: Caribbean American Heritage Month 2006

Props to our Caribbean cousins/sisters/brothers for Caribbean American Heritage Month 2006. Jasmyn Cannick has a good link on her site where she writes about Oakland, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee's 2005 proclamation, with a list of a few US folks of (recent) Caribbean descent/origin, like California's Mervyn Dymally, "the first foreign born member of the United States Congress, Marcus Garvey, Sidney Poitier, Colin Powell, Cicely Tyson, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Shirley Chisolm." The folks are even going to show us how to play cricket on the National Mall in DC. Do they plan to let women join in? More events and details at CaribbeanAmericanMonth.org site.

Hope somewhere in our humanity: Hermann Hesse to Teilhard de Chardin

We're off to an outdoor concert of jazz - "Black classical music" (my term since my 1975 Penn State radio show). In the midst of what I witness and write about in this blog, each day I'm on my own search for 'what helps us' - me especially - to become more fully human. Among the people, thinkers, writers, etc. I admire, whose actions, utterances and writings have influenced me, is the late French writer - Teilhard de Chardin. I came across an archived article at WIRED (Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, June 1995) on de Chardin and development of a "Net-based" global consciousness and how even 51 years after his death in 1955 de Chardin's thoughts connect to and continue to develop with this consciousness that's making itself real, as we Black Americans might say.

Kenya: An "Old Etonian" accused of killing not once but twice

Some say certain people's claims to being African are not taken seriously. And I might ask, not taken seriously by whom? Perhaps not wholly by themselves? Then there's the strange Kenya case of Thomas "Tom" Cholmondeley (possibly pronounced "chum-lee"?), accused yet again (and pleading not guilty) of a recent murder. I was surfing the net for info on contemporary African-Caribbean Cholmondeleys when I stumbled on this latest news story. Thoroughly appalling. The headline seemed so outlandish that I checked the allegation in two or three places, just to verify I was not reading something from 2005. I was not. In 2005 other charges against this Tom were dropped in the separate shooting death of a Kenya Wildlife Service warden.

Tom's an aristocrat, though possibly without the bearing. He seems to have a nasty streak of 'bad luck'. Or maybe just a nasty streak. His family happens to "own" approximately sixty-five to one hundred thousand (65,000-100,000) acres of Kenya. And he's Kenyan. And white.

Neither killing allegedly committed by the above-mentioned occurred in the parking lot of the type of Naivasha or Nairobi club as is frequented by persons of Tom's particular (Kenyan) background. To look at this from one angle it would seem Tom's 'claims to fame' are 1) social and 2) material. Or perhaps the order should be reversed. You need to read the articles linked below to begin to grasp the depths to which Tom's mostly poor yet (hopefully) equally Kenyan neighbours despise him. They say they find him "arrogant". How shocking. (snicker) All of which is very sad and once upon a time might have been avoided, possibly had Tom ever had a personality transplant. But I digress. A couple of the articles I've seen on the latest shooting include Barack Muluka's biting commentary in The East African Standard (Nairobi) in which he declares: "We live in a white man's world" (no date Sat, 13 May, sorry), and (London) Observer writer Tracy McVeigh's 14 May piece, also from Nairobi: "Protests grow at Kenya killing." [I thought the previous title looked a bit long!] It's the mainly British western press that's alluded to Tom's studies at Eton and to him as "an expat". I thought he was Kenyan.

The alleged killer's full name is "(Honorable) Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley", born 1968 (he is not 46 as some have reported). He possesses British peerage #68401, as listed here and is the son of the 5th Baron Delamere - who (for reasons possibly only fully comprehensible and interesting to Brits/Europeans and a few in the ex-colonies) also is known as Lord Delamere (as his ancestor in that book Out of Africa). These titles are not Kenyan. The social core of Tom's existence (and political clout) seems to derive almost entirely from this British/European peerage system that seeped into Kenyan life along with the larger, now post-colonial problem (if I may go there) for Africa, of "who gets the land?" In many social circles not limited to any single continent or region, being African does not "cut" the social "mustard". Europe, the USA and Latin America all come to mind. Oh -and Asia and the Middle East. That rule-of-thumb, however, does not usually apply to Tom's type of African. And being in firm possession of a country-sized slice of Africa is handy on the material side of this social equation. I doubt that in the past hundred years it was possible for a "new" family to acquire one-hundred thousand acres of Scotland, England or Wales. I don't think even northern Ireland. But East Africa, yes.

Back to Kenya, where breadwinners from two families are dead in a similar fashion and allegedly by the same hand. This reflects an almost incomprehensible contempt for human life, in particular for the lives and families of the dead Kenyans. This whole scandal also does much to exacerbate and nothing to help resolve Kenya's piece of East Africa's lingering post-colonial land-tenure problem. I know you didn't think that was limited only to Zimbabwe...

I've already 'blabbed' too much. If convicted, British-hereditary-peerage-aristocrat African scion Thomas Cholmondeley could face Kenya's death penalty. Depending on the winds in Nairobi, maybe, maybe not.

Some say certain people's claims to being African are not taken seriously. And I might ask, not taken seriously by whom? Perhaps not wholly by themselves? Then there's the strange Kenya case of Thomas "Tom" Cholmondeley (possibly pronounced "chum-lee"?), accused yet again (and pleading not guilty) of a recent murder. I was surfing the net for info on contemporary African-Caribbean Cholmondeleys when I stumbled on this latest news story. Thoroughly appalling. The headline seemed so outlandish that I checked the allegation in two or three places, just to verify I was not reading something from 2005. I was not. In 2005 other charges against this Tom were dropped in the separate shooting death of a Kenya Wildlife Service warden.

Tom's an aristocrat, though possibly without the bearing. He seems to have a nasty streak of 'bad luck'. Or maybe just a nasty streak. His family happens to "own" approximately sixty-five to one hundred thousand (65,000-100,000) acres of Kenya. And he's Kenyan. And white.

Neither killing allegedly committed by the above-mentioned occurred in the parking lot of the type of Naivasha or Nairobi club as is frequented by persons of Tom's particular (Kenyan) background. To look at this from one angle it would seem Tom's 'claims to fame' are 1) social and 2) material. Or perhaps the order should be reversed. You need to read the articles linked below to begin to grasp the depths to which Tom's mostly poor yet (hopefully) equally Kenyan neighbours despise him. They say they find him "arrogant". How shocking. (snicker) All of which is very sad and once upon a time might have been avoided, possibly had Tom ever had a personality transplant. But I digress. A couple of the articles I've seen on the latest shooting include Barack Muluka's biting commentary in The East African Standard (Nairobi) in which he declares: "We live in a white man's world" (no date Sat, 13 May, sorry), and (London) Observer writer Tracy McVeigh's 14 May piece, also from Nairobi: "Protests grow at Kenya killing." [I thought the previous title looked a bit long!] It's the mainly British western press that's alluded to Tom's studies at Eton and to him as "an expat". I thought he was Kenyan.

The alleged killer's full name is "(Honorable) Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley", born 1968 (he is not 46 as some have reported). He possesses British peerage #68401, as listed here and is the son of the 5th Baron Delamere - who (for reasons possibly only fully comprehensible and interesting to Brits/Europeans and a few in the ex-colonies) also is known as Lord Delamere (as his ancestor in that book Out of Africa). These titles are not Kenyan. The social core of Tom's existence (and political clout) seems to derive almost entirely from this British/European peerage system that seeped into Kenyan life along with the larger, now post-colonial problem (if I may go there) for Africa, of "who gets the land?" In many social circles not limited to any single continent or region, being African does not "cut" the social "mustard". Europe, the USA and Latin America all come to mind. Oh -and Asia and the Middle East. That rule-of-thumb, however, does not usually apply to Tom's type of African. And being in firm possession of a country-sized slice of Africa is handy on the material side of this social equation. I doubt that in the past hundred years it was possible for a "new" family to acquire one-hundred thousand acres of Scotland, England or Wales. I don't think even northern Ireland. But East Africa, yes.

Back to Kenya, where breadwinners from two families are dead in a similar fashion and allegedly by the same hand. This reflects an almost incomprehensible contempt for human life, in particular for the lives and families of the dead Kenyans. This whole scandal also does much to exacerbate and nothing to help resolve Kenya's piece of East Africa's lingering post-colonial land-tenure problem. I know you didn't think that was limited only to Zimbabwe...

I've already 'blabbed' too much. If convicted, British-hereditary-peerage-aristocrat African scion Thomas Cholmondeley could face Kenya's death penalty. Depending on the winds in Nairobi, maybe, maybe not.

New Orleans: "Out of Country voting" for others but no vote for displaced Americans

I'm re-ordering and slightly re-wording my previous post with emphasis here on New Orleans' 2006 mayoral election which has made no provision for the tens of thousands of displaced New Orleans voters who do not physically travel back to New Orleans to vote. It would be an understatement to say that expectation is not realistic. It's also pretty inhumane not to mention anti-democratic. Yet in spite of the human rights implications (international, not Baton Rouge's or Washington's) they've actually gone ahead today with an election for mayor of New Orleans, La. Tens of thousands of New Orleans voters remain displaced, even homeless, yet in the eight months since Katrina first hit neither the US nor Louisiana government saw fit to arrange "out-of-state polling" in the communities across the United States of America where Louisiana's citizens remain scattered. Ironically financial grants from the US made possible by Americans including New Orleans' displaced citizen-exiles have made it possible for displaced persons and communities in other countries - and those receiving refuge in the USA - to be able to vote in their own countries' elections. Some of those people have voted "out of country" inside the US where they've received refuge, living barely a stone's throw from displaced New Orleanians who have been given no place to vote. In international election missions we work hard to provide "out-of-country voting", absentee voting, and so on. So what's going on here? (continued)

State of the Black Union on CSPAN!

My brother just shared with me that the annual, public, free SOBU conference - the State of the Black Union - sponsored by broadcaster Tavis Smiley, is now being televised on CSPAN. Tavis says there are 5,000 persons attending the conference in Houston, Texas, plus scores more watching nationally and internationally via CSPAN. Thanks bro. Check it.

France's New National Remembrance Day for Slavery - African/Black History in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia

Two years ago, in November 2003, with the Alliance of People of African Descent in Europe, I participated in the European Social Forum held in France - in Saint Denis and next-door Paris. We had a lot of discussion of France's history of Black enslavement, especially in and with Haiti. This was on the eve of Haiti's 2004 bi-centennial (which was greatly under-observed internationally). Early 2004 witnessed the "mysterious" 'removal' of elected Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide. What role if any did France have in that?? The 2003 ESF experience in Paris could be the subject of at least one other blog entry. In any case, I would be very grateful if someone reading this might share this with Jacques Chirac and with anyone else thinking, or who needs to think, about public policy and public responsibility, and paucity of both, toward the historic global trafficking of African people. Today (actually yesterday) from Paris Associated Press reports: "France will introduce a national day of remembrance for slavery, an issue that still wounds "a large number of our fellow citizens," President Jacques Chirac said Wednesday." [4 Jan 2006.] Note to M. Chirac - this extends far beyond France. Not only is such a decision unbelievably overdue, these "wounds" of which Jacques Chirac speaks are found among and well beyond his "fellow" and sister French citizens. (This entry continues below!)

Frantz Fanon and France's Wretched of the Earth

I'm remembering the brother of a friend of mine from the Maghreb - northern Africa. Yes - Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and several other countries beyond are in and are part of Africa. My friend's older brother was killed some years ago - murdered it seems - in a small town in France; a town I visited. To my knowledge up to now no one has ever been arrested, let alone tried for this young man's tragic and unnatural death. I don't even have any idea whether French local authorities investigated the circumstances of his death. Last year in 2004, in spite of our collective efforts and dialogue at the 2003 European Social Forum (ESF/FSE) right there in France, in St. Denis and in Paris, there was precious little global recognition of France's history and responsibilities in Haiti during the 2004 bicentennaire - bicentennial - of the entire world's first modern Black republic. In spite of all this I maintain my love of France, though certainly not uncritically. I have lived and worked, struggled, learned and shared in France. Now national authorities have activated a state of emergency - un etat d'urgence - for the first time since Algeria's war of independence against France as European colonial occupier. There's a huge gap of both time and politics from 1955 to now. Yet not nearly enough has changed it seems. Coincidentally, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia also took place in 1955. Two of my blog categories are "Bandung+50" and "Wretched of the Earth?" I was very much influenced in choosing these themes by a person, a Black Frenchman and an historical cousin - another person of African descent from the Americas - named Frantz Fanon. Fanon authored two seminal works of "anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." Fanon died of cancer in Washington, DC on 6 Dec. 1961. In 1964, after his death, his third book appeared in English as Toward the African Revolution. Black Skin, White Masks originally was titled, "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." The above quote is from Prof. Deepika Bahri's informative Fanon website. Bahri, from India, is associate prof of English and director of Asian Studies at Emory University in the US. Her site also notes British director Isaac Julien's 1996 film on Fanon - Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, available from California Newsreel. Read more of this post below...

FRANTZ FANON, MD (1925-1961):

Native of MARTINIQUE, Caribbean Americas