Whose Rules Rule?

Yesterday I went to the World Development Movement's conference - Whose Rules Rule? - on Africa. It was a really good afternoon. I think that too few of the thinkings/suggestions/policies/insights into poverty that I've heard and read and have even been a part of are from people that have dealt with poverty on a day to day, face to face basis. I found it all fascinating, despite the fact that my head was pounding from being couped up in a lecture theatre on one of the hottest days of the year!
So, for all interested, a brief summary of some of the day's noteable points:

- Gyekye Tanoh from Third World Network Africa gave the opening talk. He made the excellent point that the 'problem of poverty' is not just a problem for people in less economically developed parts of the world - but a huge global problem related to a lack of equality and justice everywhere. He said it's the whole bad system, the way people deal with eachother, mis-lead, disrespect and con eachother that's the problem. He suggested that MAKECAPITALISMHISTORY would be a good idea. He said that if we think we've escaped poverty and curruption in this country, and others in the 'more developed' parts of the world. then we're fooling ourselves and we need to open our eyes. He said that policies being "encouraged" in developing countries, for example the privatisation of various things, are ones that have already done substantial damage to the developed countries they're coming from - that this is illogical, unfair and corrupt.

- Then I went to a seminar on Historical and Contemporary Slavery with two speakers:

Esther Stanford from the Black United Front said that society is still recovering from the trans-atlantic slave-trade that laid the foundations for modern slavery. She suggested that the trauma from this is still real, that people/communities of African origin in GB are suffesring from a lack of identity as a result. She said that the miseducation and misinformation surrounding the issue is as good as a cultural genocide; that school/crime stats regarding black young people and adults can be related to this. She has a challenging perspective on aid, asserting that aid should actually be viewed as a rightful reparation of the exploitation, robbery and rape of Africa by richer nations over years and years.

Kofi Mawuli-Klu from Rendezvous of Victory called for people to learn their history - if we know how the rich got rich then we'll know how the poor got poor; people need to face up to the past or they repeat the crimes of the past. He said that slavery most definitely continues into the present in many forms: the African people being removed from the wealth of their land (gold, diamonds, oil, coffee, aluminium) and receiving no benefit from it, whilst others do - this is slavery. He expressed his anger at the repeated ignoring of the African Union, that other groups such as the Commission for Africa being establised whilst many 'true' African voices of Africa are ignored equals corruption. He applauded the original abolition of (trans-atlantic) slavery - saying that it was a powerful uprising of ordinary people making a noise the authorities could not ignore - he said that this must happen again in the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign. He warned that initiatives such as Live8 are in danger of obscuring the truth, simplifying the matter of poverty, portraying an injustice as a misfortune or a stroke of bad-luck. He described some of the 'big personalities' of the campaign as skirting over/around the issues, "like tarzans, swinging from tree to tree in a fanfare of pop music"!

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