South Africa

AFRICAN PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE

14-16 August 2008, Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa
See http://www.sacp.org.za/ for updates in due course.

1. Conference Details
1.1 Open invitation
1.2 Draft Conference Programme (see SACP web site)
1.3 Conference Themes
1.4 List of Speakers
1.5 List of participants
1.6 Media Accreditation

2. Registration details
2.1 Registration Form
2.2 Registration Fees

3. Call for papers
3.1 Conference Themes
3.2 Submission guidelines

4. Important dates (table omitted)
5. Conference Tour for Guests/Participants
6. Conference Invitation
6.1 Invitation to Exhibit company or organisational materials

7. Conference Gala Dinner
7.1 Invitation to Gala dinner
7.2 List of table hosts and guests

8. PLEDGES AND DONATIONS


1. CONFERENCE DETAILS
1.1 OPEN INVITATION

To: All Interested Organisations in Africa

INVITATION TO THE AFRICAN PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE, 14-16

Dennis Brutus, veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, describes how US, British and other major multinational corporations colluded with the racist regime of apartheid South Africa. Brutus is attempting to win reparations for superprofits made through the exploitation and repression of black South African workers. For further background to this, go to ``Can reparations for apartheid profits be won in US courts?''.

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Friday, July 11th, 2008

SOUTH AFRICAN POET DENNIS BRUTUS ON STEAL THIS RADIO!

By Patrick Bond

Dennis Brutus 

Durban, July 6, 2008 -- A telling remark about US imperialism's double standards was uttered by Clinton-era deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who a decade ago was the driver of reparations claims against pro-Nazi corporations, assisting plaintiffs to gain $8 billion from European banks and corporations which ripped off Holocaust victims' funds or which were 1930s beneficiaries of slave labour (both Jewish and non-Jewish).

But how about reparations for corporate profits made under South Africa's racist apartheid system? As a November 2002 keynote speaker for the “USA Engage” lobby of 650 multinational corporations organised to fight the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), Eizenstat warned that South African reparations activists “can galvanise public opinion and generate political support,” and “may achieve some success despite legal infirmities''.

July 5, 2008 -- A political economist and activist who directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, Patrick Bond was a featured guest speaker at the Green Left Weekly Social Change — Climate Change conference held in Sydney, Australia, in April.

Author of a range of books, including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, and Walk Left, Talk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Bond is a long-time advocate for radical solutions to the climate and social catastrophe wraught by global capitalism.

Lauren Carroll Harris spoke to Bond at the conference about responses to climate change.

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What has been the response of the market to the crisis of climate change and what role does carbon trading play?

Click HERE to view a CVET video production of a seminar at the University of the Western Cape on the past, present, and future of Marxism in South Africa, hel

Marxism in South Africa - Past, Present, & Future

September 6-8, 1991

By Barry Healy

June 14, 2008 -- This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, a heroic struggle in which, between October 1987 and June 1988, in some of the fiercest fighting in Africa since the Second World War, the South African Defence Force (SADF) were humiliatingly defeated by liberation forces in Angola.

Cuban assistance to Angolan resistance to the SADF invasion was vital. Defeat at Cuito Cuanavale spelled the doom of apartheid and the victory of the South African liberation movement.

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro famously observed that “the history of Africa will be written as before and after Cuito Cuanavale”. In South Africa’s Freedom Park, outside Pretoria, 2070 names of Cubans who fell in Angola are inscribed alongside those of South Africans who died during the anti-apartheid struggle.

Mannenberg


Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) is seen here visiting Mandela's cell on Robben Island, and wandering in and around Cape Town -- including the famed District Six and Mannenberg -- to the soundtrack of his now classic South African jazz tune Mannenberg (Is Where It's Happening).

Born in Durban and the author of a forthcoming book on Wentworth in Durban, Peter Mckenzie was a co-founder of the photo collective Afrapix agency under the auspices of the South African Council of Churches and the chief

By Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond

May 26, 2008 -- The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning (May 21). At 6:45am, in the warmth of a rising subtropical winter sun, two unemployed men strolling on Belair Road approached the middle-aged immigrant. They accosted him and demanded, in the local indigenous language isiZulu, that he say the word meaning ``elbow'' (this they referred to with their hand). The man answered ``idolo'', which unfortunately means ``knee''. The correct answer is ``indololwane''. His punishment: being beaten up severely, and then told to ``go home''.

March against xenophobia, Johannesburg, May 24, 2008.