Amrit Wilson
Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan,…
This is a Bengali translation of Hindutva and its relationship with Zionism, by Amrit Wilson: ISBN 978-1-990263-76-7. Written in December 2022, this text is based on a lecture given earlier at the invitation of the Institute of Palestine Studies. Since then, the relationship between Israel and India has deepened further and atrocities have skyrocketed in both countries. On 5 April 2023, Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers inside. At the same time, Israel is facing internal turmoil in a battle between a diverse group, including those who think the current settler colony is a democratic nation and want things to remain as they are, and those who stand even further to the right. Significantly, the BJP, India’s ruling party, supports the latter. This book is about Hindutva, the ideology which drives the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli apartheid state. In this era of rising fascism, these two remarkably similar ideologies are crucially important in cementing the economic and military alliance between two of the world’s most repressive right-wing states – while helping to legitimize them in cultural arenas. Israel is, of course, a settler colonial state, but it is also, like India, a fascist state, not only because of ‘the extremist parties that [are] part of the government’ but also because of ‘their enablers – Netanyahu and his chauvinistic Likud party which long strove for a Jewish state dominating both sides of the Jordan River.’ In the words of Marwan Bishara, Netanyahu is ‘the godfather of modern Israeli fascism.’ This essay focuses primarily on Hindutva, discussing Zionism mainly to highlight its similarities, links and increasing alliances with Hindutva.
Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan,…
SKU: | N/A |
---|---|
Categories: | Civics & Citizenship, Hindutva, Human Rights, India, Neoliberalism, Political Freedom & Security, Political Science, Religion |
Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
---|
The value of this brilliant, thoroughly researched, and vigorously written book extends far beyond Makerere University and the case study of its academic union that is a central feature. The authors raise questions applicable to universities worldwide: the meaning of “democracy” for members of the academy, the relationship of the university to government, and the responsibility of academics and the media to the society that they ostensibly serve. Makerere’s failure to advance gender equity is the main focus of one chapter and a leitmotif in several others. A probing and sometimes personal analysis of the Law School, with which all the authors are associated, complements its contribution to the cause of democracy in Uganda. At once reflective and challenging, the authors invite further exploration by academics and policy-makers around the world.
— Carol Sicherman author of Becoming an African University: Makerere, 1922-2000 (2005), Professor Emerita, Lehman College, City University of New York
Penned by brilliant legal academics, this anthology about that African academic giant—Makerere University—takes the reader on a fascinat- ing and engaging journey about the history of the organizational expression of African intellectuals and their links to the democratic struggles in Uganda. Arguably the best text on academia I have read in a long time, the book provides a deeply examined and superbly chronicled account of the manner in which Makerere University has been a thorn in the side of successive dictatorial governments, while also unpacking the warts that threaten to blight the academy; simply magnificent!
— Dr. Willy Mutunga, Chief Justice & President of Supreme Court, Republic of Kenya, 2011-2016
This is a very valuable and a timely contribution to our understanding of sites of struggle in African countries. It focuses on Makerere University as a site of struggle for democratisation. The authors have done a marvellous job. If the sister universities of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were to produce studies, we would have a veritable trilogy of struggles at our universities in East Africa.
— Issa G Shivji, Professor Emeritus of Public Law & First Julius Nyerere Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Alma mater to presidents, public intellectuals and pundits of all disciplines, Makerere University has attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention, both in respect of its prominence and achievements, as well as with regard to its failures and foibles. As the oldest (and arguably best-known) university in Uganda and the wider eastern and central Africa region, Makerere looms large in the history of higher education on the continent.
This book explores the relationship between a public university of unique historical importance and the contestations over democratization that have taken place both within campus and beyond. It is pivoted around the late-20th century struggles by university staff and students for improved living conditions against the backdrop of the early programs of structural adjustment and economic reform pursued by the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government adopted soon after taking power in 1986.
Although seemingly introverted in focus, in many respects these efforts represented the earliest forms of political resistance against a regime of governance that promised a great deal, but disappointingly delivered considerably less. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate that there is neither a single narrative nor a textbook formula about the relationship between the academy and democratic struggles. Instead of forcing an unsupported and false consensus on the definitive role of Academia in politics, the book seeks to stimulate a robust debate on the subject.
CONTENTS
Preface by Hon. Justice Solomy Balungi Bossa
1. Introduction: The Academy and Political Struggle in Uganda J. Oloka-Onyango
2. The Role of Academia in the Democratization Process Benson Tusasirwe
3. For whom doth the Academic bell really toll? Unpacking the engagement of Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) in Uganda’s Democratization struggles Maria Nassali
4. Intellectuals and the Fourth Estate: Analyzing the Coverage of Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) in the Ugandan Media (1989-2020) Ivan Okuda
5. Between Activism and “Hooliganism”: Civic Engagement and Democratic Struggles in Makerere University Students Guild Dan Ngabirano
6. Juggling the Personal and the Political: The Case of Female Academics at Makerere University Sylvia Tamale
7. Contending with the past and building for the future? The Paradoxical contribution of Makerere University School of Law to dictatorship and democratization in Uganda Busingye Kabumba
8. Conclusion: The Political Economy of University Education: Revisiting democratic alternatives for Makerere and Uganda Frederick W. Jjuuko
Contributing Authors
The industrial food system is a major driver of climate change. Food sovereignty is critical to any lasting and just solution. The Great Climate Robbery shows readers how the industrial food system causes climate change, how food and agribusiness corporations are getting away with it and what can be done to turn things around.
Críticas da obra:
“Uma provocante crítica à extração contemporânea dos recursos (talvez mais adequadamente, “exploração” dos recursos) na África Subsariana. Na sua convincente análise, e em momentos abrasadora, Bassey apresenta uma critica cativante e abrangente da crise social e ambiental que se vive na África” – Chatham House
“De escravos a diamantes e passando pelo petróleo, há muito que os países mais consumistas têm vindo a pilhar a África a seu bel-prazer. Bassey explica muito bem como tudo isso tem vindo a acontecer, frisando bem o que procura a África: Justiça. Leia a obra e junte-se ao apelo de Bassey” – Annie Leonard, autora d´A estória das coisas
“Um livro que explica, de forma perspicaz e eloquente, o que a África pode fazer para travar as novas formas de colonização exacerbadas pelo caos das mudanças climáticas” – Pablo Solon, ex-embaixador da Bolívia nas Nações Unidas
“É uma obra que, a par da forte denúncia que faz da ganância e do saque da riqueza africana, apresenta perspetivas de esperança” – Camilla Toulmin, presidente do Instituto Internacional de Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente
“A África e o seu ambiente. Com um estilo refrescante, o autor torna as suas ideias extremamente acessíveis. Um dos mais proeminentes ambientalistas da África, faz uma análise abrangente dos desafios que enfrenta o continente, inspirando as pessoas a agir.” – David Fig, Presidente da Biowatch South Africa e autor do Staking Their Claims
“Para aqueles que ainda estão sépticos dos efeitos das mudanças climáticas, este livro vai deixa-los não apenas incomodados e preocupados, mas também motiva-los a fazer alguma coisa” – Nigerian Compass
O nigeriano Nnimmo Bassey é arquiteto, ativista ambiental e escritor. Foi presidente dos Amigos da Terra Internacional (Friends of the Earth International) de 2008 a 2012 e Diretor Executivo da Ação pelos Direitos Ambientais (Environmental Rights Action) durante duas décadas. Em 2009, foi nomeado “Herói do Ambiente” pela revista Time e, em 2010, foi co-vencedor do prestigiado Right Livelihood Award (considerado o Prémio Nobel Alternativo). Em 2012, ganhou o Rafto Prize. É atualmente diretor da Fundação Health of Mother Earth, uma organização ambientalista de reflexão e advocacia.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Love After Babel wins Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association
Congratulations to Chandramohan S!
Love after Babel is a collection of poems that deal with themes such as caste, the resistance of Dalit people, Dalit literature, islamophobia and other political themes, with almost one hundred poems divided into three sections (Call Me Ishmail Tonight; Name Me a Word; Love after Babel). The introduction is by Suraj Yengde (award-winning scholar and activist from India, author of the bestseller Caste Matters, inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-racism and Accountability, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School).
Chandramohan’s poems are dialogues of the ‘ self’ with the ‘other’. He brings to life a world that subverts myths, literary canons, gender and caste stereotypes by pooling in sparklingly new metaphors with sensitivity and care. He draws his images from contemporary incidents as well as myths and legends of yore, and delves deep into the politicized realm, thus ‘rupturing the hymen of demarcations’ of identity, resistance, repression and love.
—Babitha Marina Justin, poet, artist and academician
Chandramohan’s poetry is an extraordinary combination of a strong individual voice, crying out against a deeply felt sense of personal abuse, and a sophisticated understanding of the long history and mythology of such abuse, in India but also in the world at large. Mythological figures like Shambuka and Urmila illluminate, and are illuminated by, modern atrocities. The poems are by turns shocking, moving, and exhilarating. —Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades.
Chandramohan S has the stark ability as a poet to react to any social happening, and these turn out to be in the most responses to societal happenings, plunged into the dark interiors of human behavior. So these could be related to caste oppression. Economic exploitation, religious polemics etc. But the poetic ability or the agility is always there to handle a situation born out of politico- social situations. There lies his remarkable dexterity as a poet commentator. His lines are direct, and even angry. But that does not matter. This is poetry- at its best. No wonder then that, his poems have been published world wide. He is perhaps now one of the very few, if not the only Indian poet in English to have taken the burden of social and political repression, as a distinct and livid political idiom. To read his poems is also painful, but the poetry is in the pain!—Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong in North East India. He has been writing and publishing his poetry for the last 33 years.
Had an honor to introduce this extremely riveting collection of humanity-filled radical lines “Love After Babel” told by the incomparable art form—Dalit Poetry. Chandramohan is confidently flirtatious with his words. by
The essays here contribute to developing and deepening an understanding of the ecological challenges ravaging Nigeria, Africa and our world today. They illustrate the global nature of these terrors. These essays are not meant just to enable for coffee table chatter: they are intended as calls to action, as a means of encouraging others facing similar threats to share their experiences.
Set out in seven sections, this book of 54 essays deals with deep ecological changes taking place primarily in Nigeria but with clear linkages to changes elsewhere in the world. The essays are laid out with an undergird of concerns that characterise the author’s approach to human rights and environmental justice advocacy. The first section rightly presents broad spectrum ecological wars manifesting through disappearing trees, spreading desertification, floods, gas flaring and false climate solutions.
You can read this book online for free.
The second section zeroes in on the different types of violence that pervade the oil fields of the Niger Delta and draws out the divisive power of crude oil by holding up Sudan as a country divided by oil and which has created a myriad of fissures in Nigeria. The exploitation of crude oil sucks not just the crude, it also sucks the dignity of workers that must work at the most polluting fronts.
Section three underscores the need for strict regulation of the fossil fuels sector and shows that voluntary transparency templates adopted by transnational oil companies are mere foils to fool the gullible and are exercises in futility as the profit driven corporations would do anything to ensure that their balance sheets please their top guns and shareholders. The fourth section builds up with examples of gross environmental misbehaviours that leave sorrow and blood in a diversity of communities ranging from Chile to Brazil and the United States of America.
Section five of the book is like a wedge in between layers of ecological disasters and extractive opacity. It takes a look at the socio-political malaise of Nigeria, closing with an acerbic look at crude-propelled despotism and philanthropic tokens erected as payment for indulgence or as some sort of pollution offsets.
The closing sections provide excellent analyses of the gaps and contortions in the regulatory regimes in Nigeria. It would be surprising if these were not met with resistance on the ground.
These essays provide insights into the background to the horrific ecological manifestations that dot the Nigerian environment and the ecological cancers spreading in the world. They underscore the fact there are no one-issue struggles. Working in a context where analyses of ecological matters is not the norm, decades of consistent environmental activism has placed the writer in good stead to unlock the webs that promote these scandalous realities.
Beyond the critique of neo-liberalism, there is therefore a pressing need to reflect about alternatives that will help Africa back out of this dead-end and find its own path. This is the perspective adopted by this book edited by Ndongo Samba Sylla, which compiles contributions of experts on Africa’s development issues. Can democracy help to achieve the changes that Africans aspire to? If yes, under what conditions? Otherwise, what is the alternative?
Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe is a detailed journalistic account of how the EU is attempting to limit mobility within the African continent as a matter of the EU’s domestic policy agenda, hence the title hinting at the many agreements (with Turkey, Libya, Sudan) aimed at blocking migrants from approaching the European continent. The new “Berlin Wall” not only encircles Europe, but also generates a proliferation of militarised borders in Africa. …To summarise, the authors argue, Europe desires protected borders and open markets. The novelty is the amount of material that this book contains about African desires and strategies, both as a continent and as single states. This, in particular, makes the work a collection of extremely valuable directions of research. In fact, Africa, if one were to simplify the continent’s intentions, is depicted as aspiring to the exact opposite of Europe, namely open borders (with the African Union aspiring to free movement within the continent) and protected markets (protected from Western corporate predatory strategies). Moreover, contrary to the narrative of aid according to which the West “helps develop” Africa, the figures quoted by the authors suggest the opposite: while Sub-Saharan Africa receives $134 billion a year in development funding, $192 billions flow out of Africa, with $46 billion in profit for major corporations and another $35 billion vanishing in tax havens (218). https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2022/02/double-book by Oana Pârvan.
The USA is divided around the wall President Trump wants to build along the Mexican border. Europe has long answered this question at its own southern border: put up that wall but don’t make it look like one.
Today the EU is trying to close as many deals as it can with African states, making it harder and harder for refugees to find protection and more dangerous for labour migrants to reach places where they can earn an income. But this is not the only effect: the more Europe tries to control migration from Africa, the harder it becomes for many Africans to move freely through their own continent, even within their own countries.
Increasingly, the billions Europe pays for migration control are described as official development assistance (ODA), more widely known as development aid, supposedly for poverty relief and humanitarian assistance. The EU is spending billions buying African leaders as gatekeepers, including dictators and suspected war criminals. And the real beneficiaries are the military and technology corporations involved in the implementation.
Originally published as Diktatoren als Türsteher Europas: Wie die EU ihre Grenzen nach Afrika verlagert.(Ch. Links Verlag, 2017), this English translation includes updated materials and analyses. Accompanying video at https://www.dw.com/en/the-gatekeepers-of-europe-outsourcing-border-controls-to-africa/av-45599271
You can read this book online for free.
Translated by: Lydia Baldwin | querzaehlen and Emal Ghamsharick
Europe delegates, shameful as it is, its dirty work on migration to African States, some of which hasten to endorse this role with servility. They hope to stay in the race and be treated on an equal footing with a Europe … In a word, colonization is draped in new clothes, but its consequences are the same as ever for people, for women, children and men who sometimes have no other way out than to flee a daily life that kills them. This is an important book for understanding these conditions.
– Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, Frantz Fanon Foundation/Fondation Frantz Fanon
Migrants die of thirst in the Sonoran desert, drown in the Mediterranean, are murdered by gangs in Libya and Mexico, and disappear forever in doomed journeys that leave no trace. When we speak of immigration policies in rich countries today, we are really speaking about complicity in mass murder. This study brilliantly exposes how so-called liberal governments in Europe are outsourcing the violent repression of migrants to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and local tyrants in Africa.
– Mike Davis, writer, political activist, urban theorist and historian; Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside
This book makes a depressing reading for any concerned African by clearly exposing how often European leaders and opinion makers continue to portray African migration with a mix of disdain, fear, racism and backward arguments. A unique contribution.
– Prof. Carlos Lopes, Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town and African Union High Representative for Partnerships with Europe.
Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest provides a sampling of insightful articles from the first five issues of Nokoko, journal of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. It brings together pieces that the journal’s editorial board felt were particularly perspicacious in their analysis and resonant in their crafting. Uniting them in this book permits a new dialogue to emerge around the key themes of cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest. Their intersection here sheds light on important issues for Africans in the twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
Introduction: On the matter of African matters—Blair Rutherford and Pius Adesanmi
Two cities: Guangzhou / Lagos—Wendy Thompson Taiwo
Catherine Acholonu (1951- 2014): The female writer as a goddess—Nduka Otiono
Filming home, plurality of identity, belonging and homing in transnational African cinema—Suvi Lensu
‘Spare Tires’, ‘Second Fiddle’ and ‘Prostitutes’? Interrogating discourses about women and politics in
Nigeria—Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin
The South African Reserve Bank and the telling of monetary stories—Elizabeth Cobbett
The neoliberal turn in the SADC: Regional integration and disintegration—Jessica Evans
Indian hair, the after-temple-life: Class, gender and 137 race representations of the African American woman in the human hair industry—Nadège Compaore
The role of radio and mobile phones in conflict situations: The case of the 2008 Zimbabwe elections and xenophobic attacks in Cape Town—Wallace Chuma
The story of Cape Town’s two marches: Personal reflections on going home—Stephanie Urdang
Beyond an epistemology of bread, butter, culture and power: Mapping the African feminist movement—Sinmi Akin-Aina
Setting the agenda for our leaders from under a tree: The People’s Parliament in Nairobi—Wangui Kimari and Jacob Rasmussen
Politics across boundaries: Pan-Africanism: Seeds for African unity—Gacheke Gachihi
Afterword: Incorporeal words: The tragic passing of Pius Adesanmi—Blair Rutherford
About the contributors
About the Institute of African Studies
Nokoko podcasts