Thursday, July 3, 2008

If you want Africa to Unite, think again

Countenance @ http://countenance.wordpress.com/ wrote a very interesting post about the so-called United States of Africa.

"When the African Union website opens, a welcome message declares that “Africa must unite.” But while such sentiment may be growing, an initiative to move the continent towards a formal union has failed.

Good luck. East Africans in a little east African country couldn’t even get along to the point where one ethnicity slaughtered a million of the other in an attempt at genocide in 1994.

How East Africans, West Africans, South Africans, Arabs and North Africans are supposed to compete for singular control of a unitary continental state without butchering each other is beyond me.

If there can be such a thing as a semi-successful AU, it will have to: (1) Apply only to sub-Saharan (i.e. black) Africa, (2) Allow for three sub-AU semi-sovereign entities encompassing the three major types of black Africans, (3) erase the current political map of sub-Saharan Africa, a legacy of European colonialism, and redraw the boundaries around tribes and ethnicities, (4) restore Zimbabwe and South Africa to white rule. "

I don't agree with everything he said, but the African Union needs to know that Africa is going to unite (eventually) just give it a few decades. Uniting by 2012 is out of the question.

This is Zimbabwe- The Campbell's are alive but traumatized for life.




Mike Campbell (74), his wife Angela (70) and their son-in-law-Ben were abducted from their farm in Zimbabwe and badly beaten.



"Mike, Angela and Ben were taken by a “war vet” named Gilbert Moyo and approximately twenty thugs to Pixton Mine (Pixton Mine is currently being used as a youth militia torture camp). Implicated in the attack is a Zanu PF party member named ‘Mazambani’ and an army General.
Cold water was thrown over them before all were beaten.
Mike Campbell, who is 74 years old, was beaten with rifle butts. Mike has serious concussion and a broken collar bone and fingers.
Mike’s wife Angela (70) was thrown to the ground by the abductors resulting in a double fracture of her arm/shoulder, requiring surgery. One of the militia took burning twigs from the fire and put them on her lips."

The attack was of course "justified", after they were beaten to near death, they were forced to sign a formal withdrawal of their case from the SADC Tribunal.
All of this was to take their farm away.

God help them.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The Human Stain

Most of the movies nowadays are based on books. Personally, I prefer the books. You just have to read The Notebook and a Walk to Remember before watching them. When you read a book, you start painting pictures of charcters in your mind.

The Human Stain was a good movie based on a great book.



The book is loosely based on the life of Anatole Broyard, a Creole ( mixed race) literary critic. When he started his career after World War 2, he decided to "pass" as white. After his death, his race was questioned in many articles. This encouraged his daughter to trace her roots back to West Africa.

The book is about Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics at a fictitious university in Massachessets. At first, we knew nothing of his background , he was just your average Jewish-American man. Earlier in the movie, he is accussed of using a racial slur and because of that, he quits his job.
The movie is narratted by Nathan Zuckerman, his close friend who ends up writing his story. Then the flashbacks start, we are introduced to his family. His mother had an affair with a white men and he was the product, a green/blue-eyed very light-skinned Colored man.

Silk just chose the easy way out, all he had to do is check white on applications.

He chose to live a lie his whole life.


nterestingly, it was played by WentWorth Miller, an American of Syrian,Jamaican, African American, Lebanese, Somali, Russian and German heritage. He describes his father as black and his mother as white.

In 1994, Miller was a student at Princeton. He published a cartoon in the Daily Princetonian. The cartoon was misunderstood and he was accussed of being a racist. Interestingly, he didn't use the race card to explain this misunderstanding.