[DEBATE] : (Fwd) CCS CT event, 23/11: Brutus & Bond at CCR with Ronald Suresh Roberts

[Patrick Bond]

(Join us for 'conflict resolution', or not...)

NOVEMBER 23

CIVIL SOCIETY & SOCIAL JUSTICE
Debating local/global analysis and practice

Thursday, November 23, 5-7pm

CENTRE FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION
UCT Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Cape Town

Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond launch three books and DVDs from the 
Centre for Civil Society:

• POETRY & PROTEST
Dennis Brutus (UKZN Press 2006)

• LOOTING AFRICA
• TALK LEFT WALK RIGHT
Patrick Bond (UKZN Press & Zed 2006)

• CCS WIRED (DVD set)

Interrogation by:
Ronald Suresh Roberts

***

Introducing two new DVDs highlighting research, advocacy and mobilisation

CCS WIRED
September 2006 edition

Research-in-progress, plus documentaries on new social mobilisations

CCS and our filmmaker friends – Heidi Bachram, Heinrich Bohmke, Ben 
Cashdan, Daniel Chavez, Michele Citoni, Rehana Dada, Sally Giles, Fazel 
Khan, Vincent Moloi, Ntokozo Mthembu, Aoibheann O'Sullivan, John Pilger, 
Gillian Schutte Singiswa, Sipho Singiswa, Greg Streak, Jann Turner and 
Shannon Walsh – announce the first edition of CCS WIRED, two DVDs that 
capture some of our Centre's research-in-progress as well as scenes of 
struggle, pain, suffering, joy, victories, defeats, and commitments in 
South Africa and across the region.

It's a goldmine of data and doccies. We have jammed our own publications 
- Research Report collections, Wolpe Memorial lectures, Civil Society 
Readers, etc - plus more than 30 films representing South/ern Africa's 
'new social mobilisations' onto two pieces of plastic.

CCS WIRED documents protests and social justice campaigns in SA that 
began in a systematic way when Durban's Chatsworth community erupted in 
1999. Going back further, John Pilger generously offered his 1998 film 
Apartheid Did Not Die, which predicted the subsequent uprisings. By late 
2005, the SA Police estimated that there were 5800 protests in the prior 
year, 13% of which they deemed ‘illegal’. Something is wrong in the New 
SA - the research and films available in CCS WIRED show what, and why 
citizens are resisting.

There is also documentation of regional Southern African advocacy for 
social and ecological justice – which will be the primary focus of CCS 
WIRED (2007.1), given civil society’s efforts to build the World Social 
Forum in Nairobi from 25-29 January.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We offer gratitude to the contributors, especially the 
low-paid doccie makers. They have given us their work gratis; please 
support them when you see them filming in a war zone near you. (In some 
cases, the filmmaker offered us a high-resolution version you are free 
to broadcast or screen to the public. In other cases the filmmaker 
desires that you contact them by email so as to obtain a high-res 
version if you want to do a screening or broadcast the doccie.) The DVDs 
can be screened on a computer only (not a DVD player). For best results, 
copy the DVDs to your hard drive and play direct.

Invaluable production support was provided by Ben Cashdan, Library 
Design, Collective Film and Video, and TripleAim. Our funders are warmly 
thanked: Sanpad, Osisa, Southern Africa Trust, Mott, Atlantic 
Philanthropies, Ford, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, ActionAid, OxfamGB and 
the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust.

***

NEW MEMOIRE by
DENNIS BRUTUS

Poet, writer, distinguished educator and activist, Dennis Brutus was 
born in Zimbabwe in 1924 and educated in South Africa. Brutus’s 
political campaigns led to his banning from all political and social 
activity and to his subsequent arrest and incarceration on Robben 
Island. He left South Africa in 1966 and made his home in England until 
1983 when he won the right to stay in the US as a political refugee.
Currently a Visiting Scholar at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, 
Brutus is Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies at the University of 
Pittsburgh. He was formerly visiting prof. at the Universities of Denver 
and Texas, and Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of 
Colorado. He was the recipient of the Langston Hughes Award in 1987 (the 
first non-African American to receive that award), and was honoured with 
the first Paul Robeson Award in 1989 for ‘artistic excellence, political 
consciousness and integrity’. He holds six honorary doctorates.
Brutus’s new political memoire, edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim, 
includes not only his finest poetry, but analysis of the anti-apartheid 
struggle, work against injustices by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade 
Organisation in Third World countries, and campaigns against militarism 
and US war crimes.

WWW.HAYMARKETPRESS.ORG

***

Looting Africa
The economics of exploitation

By Patrick Bond

Zed Books (London) and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (Pietermaritzburg)
ISBN: 1842778129
EAN: 9781842778128
224 Pages
Binding: Hardcover
Publication date: 2006-07-01

Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming 
poorer. From Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers’ 
debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and 
the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the 
Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa’s gains have been mainly limited to public 
relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial 
relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted 
investment, capital flight and the continent’s brain/skills drain. 
Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the 
emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites. While noting their role 
as collaborators, this book contextualises Africa’s wealth outflow 
within a stagnant yet financially volatile world economy.

Patrick Bond’s book provides a solid theoretical, empirical, and 
analytical framework proving that the processes of looting the African 
continent, which started with the slave trade, have continued to this day.
Professor Issa Shivji, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Patrick’s books on post-apartheid South Africa have been a beacon, and 
his latest is a brilliant analysis and timely expose of the rapacious 
forces ranged against Africans today.
John Pilger, author and film maker

Contents

List of figures, List of tables
Preface and acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Poor Africa – Two views
• Introduction
• Racism, inequality, patriarchy, anthropomorphism
• The structure of this book

Chapter 2: Global uneven and combined development -
Neoliberalism, stagnation, financial volatility
• Introduction
• Global stagnation, volatility and crisis displacement
• New rounds of global financial volatility?
• Draining the South

Chapter 3: Financial inflows and outflows -
Phantom aid, debt peonage, capital flight
• Introduction
• Aid ebbs, flows and phantoms
• Debt repayment squeeze
• Debt relief smoke and mirrors
• Nigeria scammed
• Financial portfolio (dis)investment and capital flight
• Financial liberalization’s false promises

Chapter 4: Unequal exchange revisited -
Trade, investment, wealth depletion
• Introduction
• Trade traps
• Commodity export dependency and falling terms of trade
• Rural inequality and perverse subsidies
• From Doha to Hong Kong
• Investment, production and exploitation
• FDI and natural capital depletion
• Accounting for nature
• Foreign investment in privatization
• Foreign investment, tax fraud and transfer pricing
• Production, transport and the ecological debt
• Labour migration as resource depletion

Chapter 5: Global apartheid’s African agents –
Homegrown neoliberalism, repression, failed reform
• Introduction
• African neoliberalism derailed?
• Elite opportunities lost
• Global governance gimmicks at the Bretton Woods Institutions
• UN Security Council obstinance

Chapter 6: Militarism and looming subimperialism in Africa –
Washington, London, Pretoria
• Introduction
• Washington’s reach
• South Africa’s subimperial functions
• Pretoria’s world leadership?
• Staking claims through Nepad
• Johannesburg business interests

Chapter 7: Civil society resistance – Two views
• Introduction
• A major distraction gimmick
• Reparations from and closure of global financial institutions
• Programmes to end the looting
• From space to network to state?
• Conclusion: From looting to liberation

***

Talk Left, Walk Right
South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms

by Patrick Bond
cartoons by Zapiro
(Second Edition, 2006)

Thabo Mbeki has advocated unity with global justice movement activists: 
‘They may act in ways you and I may not like and break windows in the 
street, but the message they communicate relates.’

This raises two critical questions: is the South African government 
genuinely opposed to what Mbeki calls ‘global apartheid’? And are the 
reforms advocated by Pretoria succeeding - even on their own limited terms?

Mbeki’s critics, from left and right alike, suggest that his AIDS 
policies, corrupt arms deal and support for Zimbabwe’s repressive regime 
have damaged his credibility beyond repair. Others claim Mbeki’s global 
ambition is his saving grace. But the content of Pretoria’s broader 
reform strategy is rarely examined.

Between incomparable drawings by Jonathan Shapiro, Patrick Bond 
considers the dynamics of international political economy and geopolitics.

He reviews a series of contemporary examples where Pretoria is 
frustrated by unfavourable power relations: US unilateralism and 
militarism, the UN’s World Conference Against Racism and reparations for 
apartheid profits, soured trade deals, stingy debt relief and 
counterproductive international financial flows, unsuccessful reform of 
multilateral institutions, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, 
the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the World 
Water Forum, UN Security Council reform, haggling with the G8, and 
African peace-building.

The Afterword to this updated edition provides critical analysis from 
the 2004-06 period, characterised by backsliding in nearly all areas of 
global governance.

Bond poses alternatives and also assesses the progressive social 
movements, which may well be Mbeki’s most persistent, unforgiving 
judges, both locally and globally.

'Thanks to Parick Bond's analytical skills and brilliant cartoons by 
Zapiro, Talk Left, Walk Right allows global justice activists to decode 
rhetoric and reality: from Washington and Davos conferences to the South 
African townships. Mbeki and the ANC are not hapless victims, but are 
deeply implicated in promoting faraway ideologies and unaccountable powers.'
Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director, Daughters of Mumbi Global Resource 
Centre, Nairobi

'Bond knows the debates on political economy as well as he knows South 
Africa and its politica... More than any other writer, he keeps alive 
our early hopes for a different script for South Africa's foreign policy.'
Peter Vale, Nelson Mandela Chair of Politics, Rhodes University, in 
International Affairs

Contents

Lists of figures and tables
Preface and acknowledgements

PART ONE: CONTEXT

1 Introduction:
Against global apartheid?
2 Global-local power relations:
Ideology, image and war games

PART TWO: ISSUES AND EVENTS

3 Racism talk-shop, reparations sabotage:
 From reconciliation to amnesia
4 Pretoria’s trade off:
Splitting Africa for the WTO
5 Washington renamed:
A ‘Monterrey Consensus’ on global finance
6 NEPAD neutered:
Tragedy or joke?
7 The ‘W$$D’:
Pretoria meets its match
8 Water wars:
 From Johannesburg to Kyoto and back

PART THREE: POLITICAL ANALYSIS,
STRATEGY AND ALLIANCES

9 Pretoria talk:
Exhausted Leninism and the ‘ultraleft’
10 Analysing Washington’s agenda:
Are there anti-imperial options?
11 Movement strategy:
To abolish, not polish, global apartheid

AFTERWORD

***

Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Memorial Tower Building Room 198, Howard College Campus, Durban
Telephone: 031 260 3195 fax 031 260 2502 Website: www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs