A TRIBUTE TO CLAUDIA JONES

Thursday 26 October 7pm

Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0DU

Book tickets here http://tinyurl.com/yamdq2jj

• Claudia Webbe, Islington Councillor and member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee in the Chair
• Winston Pinder, friend of Claudia, on Claudia’s life as socialist, organiser and writer
• Meirian Jump, Archivist & Library Manager, on Claudia’s archives at the MML

Claudia Jones (1915-1964) was a political activist and tireless anti-racist campaigner. Her activity as a member of the Communist Party USA – during a period of McCarthyite attacks on the left in America – led to her imprisonment and deportation in 1955. She moved to the UK where she was instrumental in founding the Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 and established the first major black British newspaper The West Indian Gazette. She was an inspirational speaker, addressing numerous peace and trade union meetings. At her funeral in 1965 Paul Robeson gave the following tribute ‘It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women’.

Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School

AfricaFocus Bulletin September 25, 2017 (170925) (Reposted from sources cited below)

Illicit Financial Flows: Why We Should Claim These Resources for Gender, Economic and Social Justice

by Dr Attiya Waris

Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)

July 28, 2017

http://www.awid.org – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/ych3zce3

Concept and Scale of Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs)

The concept of illicit financial flows (IFFs) is characterised by a lack of a unique consensual definition. Cobham, for example, explains the difference between a narrow and wider definition as follows:

“There are two main definitions of illicit financial flows (IFF). One equates ‘illicit’ with ‘illegal’, so that IFFs are movements of money or capital from one country to another that are illegally earned, transferred, and/or utilized. This would include individual and corporate tax evasion but not avoidance (which is legal), and other criminal activity like bribery or the trafficking of drugs or people.

The other relies on the dictionary definition of ‘illicit’ as ‘forbidden by law, rules or custom’ – encompassing the illegal but also including the socially unpalatable, such as the multinational corporate tax avoidance”.

For the purpose of this brief, we will use the broader definition that encompasses tax evasion, particularly by multinational corporations (MNCs). This is because the strong corporate lobby has largely shaped the very design of tax laws around the world. Exercising their economic and political influence on countries, they can define what type of tax avoidance is considered legal or illegal in different countries according to their profit interests.

Illicit financial flows can be broken down into three main types:

1. Proceeds from corrupt dealings: For example, bribes by corporations to secure public contracts/permits or false declaration of corporate profits in order to evade tax payment, especially by extractive industries such as mining and oil exploration.
2. Proceeds from criminal activities: A system of bank secrecy is necessary to conceal the origins of illegally obtained money (e.g. from human trafficking or sale of illegal arms), typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses – a process known as “money laundering”.
3. Proceeds from commercial tax abuse: tax abuse includes both tax evasion and tax avoidance by corporations and wealthy elites by using, for example, anonymous shell companies in secrecy jurisdictions 4 that hide who the beneficial owners really are and/or obscure information from tax authorities. Another form of commercial tax abuse by MNC’s is to over quote imports or under quote exports, to hide the real value of products, and therefore profits – a process known as “trade mispricing”.

The exact amount of money being transferred through these systems is hard to calculate, because IFFs can only be traced through the international banking system. This does not account for money that simply moves from one place to another, within or across to states, without the aid of the banking system, for example, cash in exchange for political favors or ivory in exchange for small arms. While estimating just how much money is lost through IFFs can be a difficult task due to the inherent secrecy involved in their movement, there is consensus that they represent a tremendous problem.

The Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC) released an infographic (http://tinyurl.com/yde4gqsa) summarizing the different existing estimates. For example, using data of trade misinvoicing, the Global Financial Integrity estimates, that as much as 7.8 trillion was lost by developing and emerging countries to IFFs from 2004 to 2013, and that this loss is getting bigger.

The landmark report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa (also known as the Mbeki report) estimates Africa to be losing more than $50 billion annually in IFFs. This reality is having severe consequences to the development of the continent. “Their economies do not benefit from the multiplier effects of the domestic use of such resources, whether for consumption or investment. Such lost opportunities impact negatively on growth and ultimately on job creation in Africa”, 6 states the report.

To illustrate the effects on development, the same report cites a study (O’Hare and others 2013) on the potential impact of IFFs on under- five child and infant mortality in the region. “Without IFFs, the Central African Republic would have been able to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 on child mortality in 45 years compared with the 218 years at current rates of progress. Other striking examples are Mauritania, 19 years rather than 198 years; Swaziland, 27 years rather than 155 years; and the Republic of Congo, 10 years rather than 120 years. Perhaps most striking is the finding that if IFFs had been arrested by the turn of the century, Africa would reach MDG 4 by 2016” . The sheer amount shows that these ‘lost’ resources could have assisted states nationally and regionally to achieve the unmet Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Moving forward, this could play a crucial role in financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and mobilizing the maximum available resources to ensure the realization of human rights and social justice.

Efforts to quantify the gendered impact and implications of IFFs across the African continent are needed more than ever. The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) in partnership with Trust Africa, set out an important path in 2016 to strategically discuss with other organizations, how to effectively address this problem and propose political solutions supported by global processes to curb IFFs.

The Disproportionate Impact of IFFs on Gender Justice

Gender impacts of IFFs tend to be understood and studied at the national and even local level, with scarce literature that focuses on the global impact of IFFs as an obstacle to the realization of women’s rights and gender justice.

We take a look at some specific impacts here:

Impact on delivery of social services

An inadequate tax collection system has a direct impact on a country’s budget deficit. The result has commonly been a reduction in key areas such as education, health care, cares facilities, which has a direct impact on women and women-headed households that are more vulnerable to national budget constraints.

Despite external constraints, decisions on budget spending at the national level are highly political and gendered. The decision to choose between privileging certain areas like militarization and propaganda over social spending on people’s needs in the areas mentioned above, is part of maintaining the status quo of power by local and global elites. The lower the investment in education, the easier to control a population kept on survival mode.

The feminisation of poverty is a persistent phenomenon in which women are overrepresented amongst the most poor, with low-paid and poor-quality jobs. Because of unequal gendered power relations and entrenched cultural stereotypes that define women and girls identities and social roles, they predominantly do unpaid care work across the world. This situation has an impact on the advancement of women and girls’ human rights It perpetuates their impoverishment, acting as an obstacle to women and girls participation in the paid economy, political life and bodily and sexual autonomy. For these reasons, women tend to be more dependent on public social services, which have the capacity to shift the unpaid care burden that falls disproportionately on their shoulders. Failure to mobilize public resources therefore robs women and children of the much-needed public services, which reflects a lack of recognition of the role of the care economy in subsidizing the entire economy.

Unemployment and under investment in the economy

When monies are illicitly transferred out of developing countries, the loss of public resources impacts negatively the economic development of a country and ultimately job creation. Similarly, when profits are illicitly transferred out of developing countries, reinvestment and the concomitant economic expansion to create local jobs are not taking place in these countries.

Lack of public investment has consequently led to lack of employment creation and greater unemployment, hitting women particularly hard. According to 2016 ILO figures, in many regions in the world, in comparison to men, women are more likely to become and remain unemployed. They have fewer chances to participate in the labour force and – when they do – often have to accept lower quality jobs. Women are typically the first to lose their jobs and/or accept shorter hours and bad working conditions to keep jobs.

Regressive fiscal policies

IFFs often trigger regressive tax policies – countries facing budget deficit tend to cover that through increased consumption taxes rather than taxing the wealthy. Neoliberal assumptions that taxing the wealthy would result in the withdrawal of private investment in a given economy have permeated so deeply in economic policy decision-making, that putting profit over people has become an unquestionable reality worldwide, even as it remains fundamentally a political decision. Increasing consumption taxes is in many cases the less costly of options for governments (both economically and politically). After all, media corporations will not attack them as they would if they tax the wealthy and also because, unfortunately, in most cases there is not enough of a ‘counter-power’ / people power to stop them.

A great way to get middle and even working class people to support governments that will not invest in social welfare, is the argument that the impoverished don’t pay taxes and live off benefits that formalized workers sustain with their contributions. The invisibility of consumer taxes, and of who pays them the most in proportion to their income, is an effective tool for preserving the status quo. Countries that refuse to put into place mechanisms to efficiently tax those with greater wealth and income (both individuals and corporations) typically resort to indirect tax mechanisms – such as high rates of value added tax (VAT) – that collect taxes from consumer goods or services rather than from individuals or companies. These have a particularly negative effect on informal workers and people living in poverty – the majority of whom are women – as they spend a large part of their income on taxes for the essential goods and services they consume to sustain livelihoods, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and aid dependence.

Marta Luttgrodt, 48, sells SABMiller beer from her stall     in the shadow of the company’s Accra Brewery, Ghana.     Photograph: Jane Hahn/Jane Hahn/ActionAid    

A poignant example is the SAB Miller case in Ghana where Marta, who sells beer at her small stall in Accra, Ghana outside the SAB Miller factory, was paying more tax than the factory right next to her informal stand. This situation does little to encourage informal workers to register as formal workers, as this would further increase their tax burden. As a result, this perpetuates a situation in which informal workers are ineligible to receive social services like health and pension benefits; yet corporations and large businesses with huge profits are not pushed to contribute to building and sustaining the infrastructure for these same basic services.

Principles of Equality and non-discrimination

Tax policies can play a crucial role in reducing inequality and redistributing resources in order to level the playing field as much as possible.

The failure to prevent corruption and the fact that tax amnesties continue to be granted to large corporations, fuel the desire among common taxpayers to be part of those that outwit the state and its tax administration.

Equitable and progressive tax policies, based on human rights, have the potential to reduce inequalities and redistribute resources to achieve development goals and end impoverishment. Yet the wealthy few access legal and financial advice and services to better exploit tax loopholes, or open undeclared foreign bank accounts in low-tax jurisdictions.

Reliance on debt and development cooperation

Hidden wealth also increases inequality between developed and developing countries. For instance the African Tax Administration Forum estimates that up to one-third of Africa’s wealth is being held abroad. This wealth and its associated income are beyond the reach of African tax authorities. It deprives countries of resources that could be used to mitigate inequality, and further enrich donor countries, where it is stored. This income could address the over-dependence on overseas development assistance (ODA), and shift the balance of power between donor and recipient countries; and enable self-determined development priorities and outcomes, rather than those imposed by ODA conditionality, including trade conditions.

Threat to Women’s Peace and security

Lost resources through IFFs often cannot be used legitimately and end up fuelling criminal activity, including illegal arms trade, human trafficking – of which 49% of victims are women and 21% are girls 24 – and other activities undermining peace and human rights.

The data is patchy given the illegal nature of IFFs, but evidence gathered by many including Cobham, the Tax Justice Network and the report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows out of Africa, noted that “IFF thrive on conflict and insecurity and also exacerbate both, undermining the financial and political prospects for effective states to deliver and support development progress.”

Considering the well-documented impact that war and conflict has on women and girls, the issue of IFFs is of outmost importance to tackle the financial enablers behind conflict and militarization.

Resourcing for women’s rights and gender justice

One of the biggest challenges facing the implementation of long agreed commitments on human rights, women’s rights and gender equality and related goals, like those contained in Agenda 2030, is ensuring that resources are sufficiently allocated.

States have an obligation to mobilize the maximum available resources for the realization of human rights. Progressive taxation plays a key role in mobilizing public resources and is a key tool for addressing economic inequality, including gender inequality. The hidden resources of illicit financial flows must be unlocked and returned to bolster domestic resourcing of development goals and gender equality.

The United States and the International Debate on Illicit Financial Flows

In Africa, the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (https://www.uneca.org/iff) and the Stop the Bleeding Campaign to End Illicit Financial Flows from Africa (http://stopthebleedingafrica.org/) have put this term and this issue on the agenda for African governments and civil society organizations around the continent.

In contrast, the term is not very familiar even among policy analysts in the United States, but the issues of tax justice, tax evasion, and tax avoidance are central to debate in both political circles and among social justice organizations. The focus is primarily on the domestic issue of how the rich do not pay their fair share. There is also an understanding that this has an international dimension, but there is little awareness of how the United States itself contributes to illicit financial flows. The challenge is to make these connections. This background note provides several resources useful for doing so.

Financial Secrecy Index, Tax Justice Network http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/

The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their offshore financial activities. A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows or capital flight.

An estimated $21 to $32 trillion of private financial wealth is located, untaxed or lightly taxed, in secrecy jurisdictions around the world. Secrecy jurisdictions Рa term we often use as an alternative to the more widely used term tax havens Рuse secrecy to attract illicit and illegitimate or abusive financial flows. Illicit cross-border financial flows have been estimated at $1-1.6 trillion per year: dwarfing the US$135 billion or so in global foreign aid. Since the 1970s African countries alone have lost over $1 trillion in capital flight, while combined external debts are less than $200 billion. So Africa is a major net creditor to the world Рbut its assets are in the hands of a wealthy ̩lite, protected by offshore secrecy; while the debts are shouldered by broad African populations.

Top 15 countries: 1. Switzerland, 2. Hong Kong, 3. USA, 4. Singapore, 5. Cayman Islands, 6. Luxembourg, 7. Lebanon, 8. Germany, 9. Bahrain, 10. United Arab Emirates (Dubai), 11. Macao, 12. Japan, 13. Panama, 14. Marshall Islands, 15. United Kingdom

Fact Sheet on Offshore Corporate Loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness https://americansfortaxfairness.org/ – direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/y7kmqs8x

“Many U.S. corporations use offshore tax havens and other accounting gimmicks to avoid paying as much as $90 billion a year in federal income taxes. A large loophole at the heart of U.S. tax law enables corporations to avoid paying taxes on foreign profits until they are brought home. Known as “deferral,” it provides a huge incentive to keep profits offshore as long as possible.

Deferral gives corporations enormous incentives to use accounting tricks to make it appear that profits earned here were generated in a tax haven. Profits are funneled through subsidiaries, often shell companies with few employees and little real business activity. Effectively, firms launder U.S. profits to avoid paying U.S. Taxes.”

Background notes on tax justice and illicit financial flows in U.S. political context

Prepared by AfricaFocus Bulletin for Solidarity Center Mini-Symposium, September 28, 2017 Africa & the U.S.: Illicit Financial Flows, Tax Justice, and Economic Inequality

The “tax reform” debate

“The big battle throughout the fall will be taxes. The Republicans are trying to decide whether to go for massive tax cuts–particularly for corporations, which are awash in cash, and the rich–or massive tax cuts plus an overhaul of the tax system that will permanently favor the wealthy and the corporations (and probably hurt the middle class).” – Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin, Facebook post, September 2, 2017 https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1/posts/1488929127839470

“It’s a Myth That Corporate Tax Cuts Mean More Jobs,” by Sarah Anderson The New York Times, August 30, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/y8fqapyq

“The arithmetic for us is simple,” AT&T’s chief executive, Randall Stephenson, said on CNBC in May. If Congress were to cut the 35 percent tax on corporate profits to 20 percent, he declared, “I know exactly what AT&T would do — we’d invest more” in the United States. Every $1 billion in tax savings would create 7,000 well-paying jobs, Mr. Stephenson went on to say. The correlation between lower corporate taxes and more jobs, he assured viewers, runs “very, very tight.”

As Congress prepares to take up tax legislation this fall, including an effort to reduce the corporate tax rate, this bold jobs claim merits examination. Notably, it comes from the chief executive of a company that’s already paying comparatively little in federal taxes.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, AT&T enjoyed an effective tax rate of just 8 percent between 2008 and 2015, despite recording a profit in the United States each year, by exploiting tax breaks and loopholes. (The company argues that it pays significant taxes, at a rate close to 34 percent in recent years, but that includes deferred taxes and state and local levies.) Despite the enormous savings AT&T has realized, the company has been downsizing. Although it hires thousands of people a year, the company, by our analysis at the Institute for Policy Studies, reduced its total work force by nearly 80,000 jobs between 2008 and 2016, accounting for acquisitions and spinoffs each involving more than 2,000 workers.

Institute for Policy Studies report: “Corporate Tax Cuts Boost CEO Pay, Not Jobs” http://www.ips-dc.org – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/y7fdkovy 3-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIdOkaeqe2E

House Speaker Paul Ryan is proposing to cut the statutory federal corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent. President Trump wants to slash the rate even further, to just 15 percent. Their core argument? Lowering the tax burden will lead to more and better jobs.

To investigate this claim, this report is the first to analyze the job creation records of the 92 publicly held U.S. corporations that reported a U.S. profit every year from 2008 through 2015 and paid less than 20 percent of these earnings in federal income tax. Did these reduced tax rates actually lead to greater employment within the 92 firms? The data we have compiled give a definitive — and sobering — answer.

The money-laundering debate and the Trump investigation

Dan Froomkin, “Trump’s World of Luxury Real Estate is Fueled by Money-Laundering” American Constitution Society Blog, August 31, 2017

Brief excerpt. Full article at: http://tinyurl.com/y93w93f8

The ultra-high-end real estate business, where Donald Trump made a lot of his money, is the easiest place for oligarchs and others to launder large amounts of illicit cash. And because several of the lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian connections with the Trump presidential campaign are specialists in money-laundering and other financial crimes, some observers are speculating that he may be looking into Trump’s past business dealings to see if any of those connections are relevant to the matter at hand.

The fact that money-launderers flock to luxury real estate is nothing new, and isn’t much of a mystery either. It’s the direct result of a major loophole in U.S. government rules that require banks to report cash deposits over $10,000 — but allow property owners to accept $10 million in cash for a condo without divulging who gave it to them.

…

For fraudsters, drug cartels, oligarchs and corrupt foreign government officials looking for a way to launder huge sums of illicit cash — and park it somewhere safe — high-end real estate is the investment of choice. “You can put a lot of money in one place at one time, without raising any eyebrows,” says Heather Lowe, legal counsel for the dirty-money watchdog group Global Financial Integrity. The Treasury Department explains it this way: “The real estate market can be an attractive vehicle for laundering illicit gains because of the manner in which it appreciates in value, ‘cleans’ large sums of money in a single transaction, and shields ill-gotten gains from market instability and exchange-rate fluctuations.”

A New York Times series in 2015 found that more than half of the $8 billion spent each year on New York residences that cost more than $5 million comes from shell corporations that mask the real owners’ identities, one possible sign of moneylaundering.

Global Witness, “Undercover in New York,” January 2016 https://www.globalwitness.org/shadyinc/

“We went undercover and approached 13 New York law firms. We deliberately posed as someone designed to raise red flags for money laundering. We said we were advising an African minister who had accumulated millions of dollars, and we wanted to buy a Gulfstream Jet, a brownstone and a yacht. We said we needed to get the money into the U.S. without detection.

To be clear, the meetings with the lawyers were all preliminary. None of the law firms took our investigator on as a client, and no money was moved. Nonetheless, the results were shocking; all but one of the the lawyers had suggestions on how to move the funds. To see what some of them said, watch [this 3-minute video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8pgI60GrvU

Current Congressional Legislation related to Illicit Financial Flows and Tax Justice

Corporate Transparency Act of 2017 A bill to amend title 31, United States Code, to ensure that persons who form corporations or limited liability companies in the United States disclose the beneficial owners of those corporations or limited liability companies, in order to prevent wrongdoers from exploiting United States corporations and limited liability companies for criminal gain, to assist law enforcement in detecting, preventing, and punishing terrorism, money laundering, and other misconduct involving United States corporations and limited liability companies, and for other purposes.

1. 1717: Sponsor Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), 1 cosponsor, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/s1717 H.R. 3089: Sponsor Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), 10 cosponsors (5R, 5D) https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr3089

Related background on beneficial ownership https://thefactcoalition.org/issues/incorporation-transparency

Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act A bill to end offshore corporate tax avoidance, and for other purposes.

Summary: This bill authorizes the Department of the Treasury to impose restrictions on foreign jurisdictions or financial institutions to counter money laundering and efforts to significantly impede U.S. tax enforcement. It amends the Internal Revenue Code to expand reporting requirements for certain foreign investments and accounts held by U.S. persons, and amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to: (1) require corporations to disclose certain financial information on a country-by-country basis, and (2) impose penalties for failing to disclose offshore holdings.

1. 841: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), no cosponsors https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/s851 H.R. 1932: Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), 59 cosponsors, all Democrats https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1932

Related background on country-by-country reporting https://thefactcoalition.org/resources/country-by-country-reporting

Inclusive Prosperity Act of 2017 A bill to impose a tax on certain trading transactions to invest in our families and communities, improve our infrastructure and our environment, strengthen our financial security, expand opportunity and reduce market volatility.

1. 805: Sen. Bernard Sanders (D-VT), no cosponsors https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/s805 H.R. 144: Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), 23 cosponsors, all Democrats https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr1144

Related background on financial transaction (“Robin Hood”) taxes http://www.robinhoodtax.org/how/everything-you-need-to-know

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AfricaFocus Bulletin
April 10, 2017 (170410)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“On February 18th I lost my grand aunt – my grandmother really …
This incredible woman, May Kyomugasho Katebaka left us at the age of
97. We last met in 2014 when I visited her. She’s a fierce woman.
Fierce in her religion but also fierce in her knowledge of what she
wanted from the world. And that is what moves me. Moves me every time
one claims feminism is foreign and for the educated, un-african. She
always came to mind when I met such arguments. I would tell myself
that if only they could hear half her life story, then they would
understand why I am such a rebellion.” – Rosebell Kagumire
(https://rosebellkagumire.com/)

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NOTE: AfricaFocus is beginning a transition to a new email
distribution system and format. To preview this Bulletin in the new
format, visit http://eepurl.com/cKnLuT. To sign up for the new format
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“Today as ever, African female activists are reshaping not just
African feminist agendas but global ones as well,” wrote scholar
Aili Mari Tripp in a March 8 article published in African Arguments.
But this was only a small sample of articles and web features that
have recently appeared highlighting different aspects of “African
feminism(s),” as well as a host of new books by both famous and
relatively unknown authors.

Among sources that have come to my attention in the last month, this
AfricaFocus Bulletin features the overview article by Aili Mari
Tripp, a reflection by Ugandan journalist and activist Rosebell
Kagumire, several additional links to web features from the African
Feminist Forum and OkayAfrica, and a listing of a selection of
recent related books, from 2017, 2016, and 2015.

The article from March 8, International Women’s Day, was the initial
impetus for this Bulletin. But it is appropriate that the Bulletin
comes only a few days after April 7 (Mozambican Women’s Day),
commemorated to honor the example of Josina Muthemba Machel (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josina_Machel), who I was privileged
to work with in Dar es Salaam in 1966-1967, a few years before her
death at the age of 25 on April 7, 1971. [I don’t know who wrote the
Wikipedia article, but it is substantive and, to my knowledge,
accurate).

Additional recent web references

African Feminist Forum, “Know Your African Feminists” and “African
Feminist Ancestors” Accessed March 2017
http://www.africanfeministforum.com/ – direct URLs:
http://tinyurl.com/mrlua9o and http://tinyurl.com/nxg3u8v

“Talking African Feminisms with Dr. Sylvia Tamale,”
Rosebell Kagumire blog, August 19, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/m9l3fav

“OkayAfrica’s 100 Women” Accessed March 2017
http://www.okayafrica.com/100-women/

“Ghana: Women are the new face of telecommunications’ players,”
Balancing Act Africa, March 17, 2017
http://tinyurl.com/ma3j2sr

“Malawi: Rural Women, Empowerment and Mining,” Publish What You Pay,
December 19, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/m35tt3k

Eunice Onwona, “Karen Attiah Is the ‘Warrior of Diversity’
Channeling Journalism Into Activism,” OkayAfrica, March 17, 2017
http://tinyurl.com/mwvggag

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

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Those who Defied the Odds, Those Who Stood True to their Beliefs
Till the End

by Rosebell Kagumire

African Feminism, March 22, 2017

http://africanfeminism.com – direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/m3h7dhw

On February 18th I lost my grand aunt – my grandmother really
(English limitations) because in my culture a sister of my
grandmother is my grandmother. Both have almost equal roles and
space in your life.

This incredible woman, May Kyomugasho Katebaka left us at the age of
97. We last met in 2014 when I visited her. She’s a fierce woman.
Fierce in her religion but also fierce in her knowledge of what she
wanted from the world. And that is what moves me. Moves me every time
one claims feminism is foreign and for the educated, un-african. She
always came to mind when I met such arguments. I would tell myself
that if only they could hear half her life story, then they would
understand why I am such a rebellion.

Grandma May, always made it a point to tell us she got ‘saved/born
again’ in 1949. Religion was at the centre of her life. She always
told us had it not been for her selfless service in the church, she
would have ended up like most women of her time.  She was one of the
few among millions of women at the time who could read. And that
came through the colonial state where knowledge of the bible
accorded one certain privileges.

Her life is an inspiration. She was married, briefly, and quickly
figured out that married life wasn’t for her so she dedicated
herself to serving the church. Where she was married and even when
she didn’t have children of her own, she is known to have treated
the kids she found in the home like her own. Of course this is
something many women are required of by society and the conditions
are often not on their side – women should have choices – but the
love between her and her step children remained even when she was
longer part of their family. That love was demonstrated till the
end.

In my culture and many in Uganda still, unmarried and childless
women are scorned upon but Grandmother May commanded a certain
respect above all these. She managed to weave her life story, with a
church as her shelter, to be who she wanted to be. Of course many
would say she should ‘have had a child at least’ and god knows what
other pressures she faced. All these little narrow definitions of
what a woman’s life should be according to society wouldn’t dwindle
her.

I loved her and she lived an exceptional life and didn’t matter who
accepted it. She was beautiful too and a deep deep soul. In many
ways she was still traditional like I remember her asking me to
always wear long t-shirts over my jeans – you know – not to show
‘secret body parts’ like we call it in my Runyankole. I usually
laughed these off.

She is inspiration and the fact that her life in itself – some
aspects probably weren’t intentional – but she never followed the
crowd. And that’s enough to get me through this life. I thought in
the spirit of women’s history month, Grandma May fully represents
the people in my life that shattered those expectations. To
understand where we are going we must always look back for a lesson,
inspiration and sometimes caution.

********************************************************

How African feminism changed the world

Aili Mari Tripp

African Arguments, March 8, 2017

http://www.africanarguments.org – direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/hrpzdbw

[Aili Mari Tripp is Professor of Political Science and Evjue Bascom
Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She is the co-editor, with Balghis Badri, of
Women’s Activism in Africa (2017).]

Today as ever, African female activists are reshaping not just
African feminist agendas but global ones as well.

One of the great fallacies one still hears today is that feminism
started in the Global North and found its way to the Global South.
Another is that universal understandings of women’s rights as
embodied in UN treaties and conventions were formulated by activists
in the North.

International Women’s Day, however, provides an opportunity to
highlight the reality: that not only do feminisms in the Global
South have their own trajectories, inspirations, and demands, but
they have contributed significantly to today’s global understandings
of women’s rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where
women are increasingly exerting leadership from politics to business
and have helped shape global norms regarding women’s rights in
multiple arenas.

For decades, African activists have rejected the notion that one can
subsume all feminist agendas under a Western one. As far back as the
1976 international conference on Women and Development at Wellesley
College, Egyptian novelist Nawal El-Saadawi and Moroccan sociologist
Fatema Mernissi challenged efforts by Western feminists to define
global feminism. In the drafting of the 1979 Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the All African
Women’s Conference was one of six organisations and the only
regional body involved.

African women have also been influencing national gender policies
for over half a century. In 1960, for example, Mail’s Jacqueline Ki-
zerbo had already developed the idea of considering the gender
impacts of policies. It was only decades later that this idea – now
commonly known as “gender mainstreaming” – gained international
currency, particularly in national budgetary processes.

In key UN conferences, African women activists have been visible
from the outset. Egypt’s Aida Gindy held the first international
meeting on Women in Economic Development in 1972. The Kenya Women’s
Group helped organise the 1985 UN Conference on Women in which
African women brought issues of apartheid and national liberation to
the fore. And Egypt’s Aziza Husayn helped organise the 1994 Cairo
International Conference on Population and Development, which
shifted the debate around population control away from a traditional
family planning emphasis on quotas and targets to one focused on
women’s rights and health.

Additionally, Sierra Leone’s Filomena Steady was one of the key
conveners of the Earth Summit in 1992. Tanzania’s Gertrude Mongella
was General Secretary of the pivotal 1995 UN Beijing Conference. And
African women peace-builders played a crucial role in the 2000
Windhoek conference, which paved the way for a UN Security Council
Resolution encouraging the inclusion of women in peace negotiations
and peacekeeping missions around the world.

Leading the world

Women in Africa have also set new standards for women’s political
leadership globally. The likes of Guinea’s Jeanne Martin Cissé,
Liberia’s Angie Brooks and Tanzania’s Anna Tibaijuka and Asha-Rose
Migiro have all held top positions at the UN. Meanwhile at a
national level, many African countries have made important gains in
women’s representation.

Rwandan women today hold 62% of the country’s legislative seats, the
highest in the world. In Senegal, South Africa, Namibia, and
Mozambique, more than 40% of parliamentary seats are held by women.
There are female speakers of the house in one fifth of African
parliaments, higher than the world average of 14%. Women have
claimed positions in key ministries throughout Africa. And women
have increasingly run for executive positions, with Liberia, the
Central African Republic, Malawi and Mauritius all having had female
heads of state. Moreover, these increases in female representation
are taking place across the continent, including predominantly
Muslim countries such as Senegal, where women hold 43% of
legislative seats.

These new patterns are found at the regional level too, with women
holding 50% of the positions at in African Union Commission,
compared to just one-third at the European Commission. South
Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma meanwhile chaired the AU Commission
from 2012 to 2017.

Women’s strong presence in African parliaments has resulted in new
discussions about strategies to enhance female political
representation worldwide. Scandinavian scholars such as Drude
Dahlerup and Lenita Freidenvall even argue that the incremental
model that led to high rates of female representation in Nordic
countries in the 1970s has now been replaced by the “fast track”
African model in which dramatic jumps in representation are brought
about by electoral quotas.

Shaping the world

African women have also been pioneering in business. Aspiring young
female entrepreneurs today have several role models they can follow
such as Ghana’s Esther Ocloo, who pursued the idea of formalising
local women’s credit associations and became a founding member of
one of the first microcredit banks, Women’s Worlds Banking, in 1979.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, African countries
have almost equal numbers of men and women either actively involved
in business start-ups or in the phase of starting a new firm. And in
countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia, women are reportedly
more likely to be entrepreneurs than men.

These changes are evident not only at the grassroots but, to an
extent, at the highest levels. Female representation in boardrooms
worldwide is very poor, but Africa’s rate of 14.4% is only slightly
behind Europe (18%) and the US (17%), and ahead of Asia, Latin
America and the Middle East.

Finally, a younger generation of activists is emerging throughout
Africa today and redefining feminism from an African perspective.
One sees this not only in the work of the African Feminist Forum,
which first met in 2006, but also in the work of figures such as
novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who issued a clarion call to women
in her video We Should All be Feminist, adapted from her 2013 Ted
Talk, in which she explores what it means to be an African feminist.
Her book length essay by the same title is found on bookshelves in
major cities around the world, and the Swedish Women’s Lobby has
given it to every 16-year-old in Sweden to help them think about
gender equality.

Feminist discourse meanwhile has become commonplace throughout the
continent on websites, blogs, journals, and social media. New
feminist novels like Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya), Kintu by
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Uganda), and Americanah by Adichie
(Nigeria) have offered new ways of imagining women.

There are clearly still enormous hurdles for African feminists to
overcome in fighting for gender equality. But as they have over the
past half a century, Africa’s women activists of today are reshaping
not only African feminist agendas in tackling these challenges, but
global ones as well.

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Books, 2017

[Thanks to Kathleen Sheldon for most of these suggested books.
Short quotes after each book are from the publishers’ descriptions
unless source is otherwise cited.]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in
Fifteen Suggestions, 2017. “Adichie has partly written Dear Ijeawele
to reclaim the word feminism from its abusers and misusers. Her
advice is not only to provide children with alternatives—to empower
boys and girls to understand there is no single way to be—but also
to understand that the only universal in this world is difference.”
– Emma Brockes, The Guardian (UK)
http://amzn.to/2ndqp05

Balghis Badri and Aili Mari Tripp, eds. Women’s Activism in Africa:
Struggles for Rights and Representation, 2017. “Drawing on case
studies and fresh empirical material from across the continent, the
authors challenge the prevailing assumption that notions of women’s
rights have trickled down from the global north to the south,
showing instead that these movements have been shaped by above all
the unique experiences and concerns of the local women involved.”
http://amzn.to/2nJLhxq

Helene Cooper. Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf, 2017. “Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and
bestselling author Helene Cooper deftly weaves Sirleaf’s personal
story into the larger narrative of the coming of age of Liberian
women.”
http://amzn.to/2nCo0Nm

Linda M. Heywood. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen
Hardcover, 2017. “Though largely unknown in the Western world, the
seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most
multifaceted rulers in history, a woman who rivaled Elizabeth I and
Catherine the Great in political cunning and military prowess.”
http://amzn.to/2nnklmd

Kathleen Sheldon. African Women: Early History to the 21st Century.
2017. “The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey
establish a grand narrative about women’s roles in the history of
Africa.”
http://amzn.to/2ndpiNS

Books, 2016

Berger, Iris. Women in Twentieth-Century Africa, 2016. “This book
introduces students to many remarkable women, who organized
religious and political movements, fought in anti-colonial wars, ran
away to escape arranged marriages, and during the 1990s began
successful campaigns for gender parity in national legislatures.”
http://amzn.to/2nJSnSC

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela. Mothers on the Move: Reproducing
Belonging Between Africa and Europe, 2016. “[The author”takes
readers back and forth between Cameroon and Germany to explore how
migrant mothers—through the careful and at times difficult
management of relationships—juggle belonging in multiple places at
once: their new country, their old country, and the diasporic
community that bridges them.”
http://amzn.to/2o5jC6c

Hunt, Swanee. Rwandan Women Rising. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2017. “[The author] shares the stories of some seventy
women—heralded activists and unsung heroes alike—who overcame
unfathomable brutality, unrecoverable loss, and unending challenges
to rebuild Rwandan society.”
http://amzn.to/2o56cY4

Mgbako, Chi Adanna. To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker
Activism in Africa, 2016. “Well-written and elegant, Mgbako’s
research reveals the rise of African sex work activism and the
ongoing trials and tribulations of organizing in the face of
economic, social, and political adversity.” – Aziza
Ahmed,Northeastern University
http://amzn.to/2nVXb3V

Rhine, Kathryn A. The Unseen Things: Women, Secrecy, and HIV in
Northern Nigeria, 2016. “The book is especially innovative in its
rich detail about desire, pleasure and love, and the strategies men
and women use to reconstitute relationships after testing positive
for HIV.” – Carolyn Sargent, Washington University in St. Louis
http://amzn.to/2nCFqd1

Scully, Pamela. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Ohio Short Histories of
Africa), 2016. “A clear and concise introduction to the woman and to
the domestic and international politics that have shaped her
personally and professionally.” —Peace A. Medie, University of Ghana
http://amzn.to/2ndGpPI

Sylvanus, Nina. Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and
Materiality in West Africa, 2016. “[The author] tells a captivating
story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa,
showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and
circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and
history.”
http://amzn.to/2nJW8Ye

Books, 2015

Galawdewos, Wendy Laura Belcher, and Michael Kleiner. The Life and
Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century
African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, 2015.
“This is the first English translation of the earliest-known book-
length biography of an African woman, and one of the few lives of an
African woman written by Africans before the nineteenth century.”
http://amzn.to/2nnpSco

*****************************************************

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By A. Shaw and James Thompson

We are talking about race and the fight against racism.

Race seems to be short hand for all of us –the human race.

Race suggests some kind of totality among people.

Racism, on the other hand, necessarily implies segments of the race that are hostile towards one another.

So, racists are hostile segments of the people. For example, some racists hate all of the human race.

These are called misanthropes. Misanthropes hate and often want to destroy everybody. They often want to destroy the human race merely because members of the human race are human.

Other races hate and often want to destroy only half of the race.

These are called misandrists. They hate and often want to destroy boys and men simply because they are boys and men.

Another type of racist hates and often wants to destroy girls and women who constitute half of the race. These are called misogynists.

How can we fight the racism whether it aims to destroy the totality of the human race or the destruction of only the males or only the females?

Today, perhaps a doctor can give them a pill or an injection or lock them up or lie them on an injection table or hang them. In Texas, it is not feasible to electrocute all the racists because it would drain all the electricity. Texas administers so many lethal injections that it sometimes has to deal with shortages of the poison that it pumps into the veins of its people so it is not a viable option.

By the way, in the USA, a misogynist can become President and reside in the White House, Donald Trump.

At some point, it became obvious to even the racists that a racism based on gender was unsatisfactory. A gender based racism requires racists to destroy some of their parents and some of their siblings. So, the racists modified their racism to be based on color more than on gender in order to protect their kinfolk.

The racists then imagined that there is a multiplicity of racists based on color chiefly of the skin. The racists thereby discovered blacks, whites, yellows and later on during the latter 19^th and 20^th centuries, browns and reds.

Initially, the division of humanity consisted of blacks and whites. Later on the racists added the yellows. The prevalence of these sexual mixtures (miscegenation)made it difficult to determine whether an individual was this color or that color. Sometimes blacks who look like they were white insisted that they were black. Vice versa, sometimes whites who look like they were white insisted they were black. When the yellows entered the mixture, the problem of determination of racial identity grew more complex and hopeless. Nobody could tell whether somebody else was white or black. Among the whites, people discovered that other whites were the principle foe, for example, yellow haired and blue eyed people who were white hated some other people who did not have yellow hair and blue eyes even though they were white. So clearly color was an inadequate basis for racism.

In order to fight racism progressive people fought a legal struggle-both judicial and legislative-in which laws were passed to prohibit racist acts called discrimination, e.g. in the USA the civil rights act in 1964 and the voting rights act in 1965. The state in the USA mildly enforced these legal measures against racism over the last 50 years but the state in the USA did not enforce these anti-racist laws with the vigor to eradicate racism.

Around the middle of the 19^th century the form of racism based on skull shape became popular among the intelligentsia and almost replaced color based racism.

Skull based racism known as phrenology became popular, advocating that there was a relationship between skull shape and psychological characteristics. Almost all phrenologists insisted that non-whites lacked the kind of skull shape that results in the development of strong and smart individuals.

People relied on other scientists to debunk the non-sense of the phrenologists and after the defeat of the Nazi racists who were enthusiastic phrenologists, people widely saw that skull based racism was non-sense. So, to fight skull based racism and the residues of color and gender racism requires war.

This brings us up to the present time where the original basis of racism, the emergence of an economic surplus or deficit, generates race hatred mostly of the misanthropic form. There is a group of highly trained racists who argue that at least 80% of the world population must be exterminated so that the 20% can strive and survive. These are basically misanthropes. These misanthropes claim that they only want to get rid of about 80% of the world’s population.

If these racists were successful in wiping out 80% of the world’s population, they would then attempt to get rid of the remaining 20%. These racists so far believe that pestilence and famine are the best ways to get rid of the 80%, but these modern day racists do not overlook the Nazi contribution to racism. This racism can be described as industrialized genocide.

Contemporary racists primarily rely on the manufacture and distribution of lethal germs to produce the pestilence that can wipe out the 80%.

And this pestilence in turn produces the famine that greatly contributes to wiping out the 80%. Research institutes around the world are developing the viruses that will accelerate the rate of mass murder that is underway.

For decades, these institutes were mostly interested in the research of deadly biological agents but today their focus is mainly on the development of these agents.

There is a consideration that impedes the use of these deadly biological agents to attack the 80%. That consideration is the existence or absence of a highly effective antidote that will cure members of the 20% if they are inadvertently infected by the biological agents distributed by modern day racists.

People who talk about the conspiracy to wipe out 80% of the world population are ridiculed as hopeless and incurable paranoids.

The information concerning wiping out the 80% has been hacked but what do you do with the documentation that demonstrates that imperialists are conspiring to wipe out the 80%? Anyone who has possession of the data that proves the imperialists are wiping out the 80% would get the same kind of treatment as Edward Snowden. You cannot take the data hacked from biological research institutes to the bourgeois media because under bourgeois law they are required to notify the state.