'Mr. Bond',
What is this a 'rebuttal' to? What you have posted is very interesting and is broadly related to my original posting but I'd be interested to know more specifically how you think the two issues are related. The original yahoo news story , about how young people in Africa, particularly places like Liberia, Togo and Ivory Coast, do not seem to differentiate between 'Rockafella' and 'Rockefeller', in other words both the hip hop and establishment cultures are embraced as representing 'America' which is not necessarily untrue, but is symptomatic of a naivite among some (many) Africans about the way Hip Hop has been co-opted and recruited to serve as an ambassador of American 'culture'. It is worth noting that hip-hop culture also has important political significance in Africa as well, notably in South Africa, where it has taken on an interesting racial dimension, where 'colored' youth indentify more with hip-hop than 'black' youth, who tend to listen to reggae and African pop, see Lee Watkins" `Simunye, we are not one': ethnicity, difference and the hip-hoppers of Cape Town." http://rac.sagepub.com/cgi/rapidpdf/43/1/29
"The emergence of hip-hop is associated with the resurgence of black nationalism in the US, where it is near impossible to separate black nationalism from class struggle. Similarly, in Cape Town, hip-hop is strongly associated with colour and class consciousness, as well as political mobilisation. During apartheid, hip-hoppers in the wasteland of Cape Town, an area known as the Cape Flats, used hip-hop to work through the tensions of being racially marginalised from local domains of power.[1] These days, hip-hoppers continue to draw attention to their status as the victims of local and global racism. Most of the hip-hoppers are `coloured',[2] in apartheid terms that is, and while most of them identify with black people around the globe and with the ideology of black consciousness,[3] others look to the past and identify themselves as coloureds. These allegiances mark hip-hop on the Cape Flats as a space of contestation, and they speak to the category of blackness as one of heterogeneity and difference."
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Wanzala" <jwanzala at hotmail.com> New African protest slogan: "Tell George Bush to send us guns!"
My rebuttal for the 'masses' (since this week in four SA cities we're launching the SR2005):
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Excerpt from 'US Empire and South African Subimperialism' - in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Eds), Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded, London, Merlin and New York, Monthly Review Press, pp.125-144.
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What are US planners up to in Africa? As one illustration, an expert at the US Naval War College recently drew up 'The Pentagon's New Map,' highlighting countries now considered danger zones for imperialism. In Africa, these included Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Somalia and even South Africa, sites which could not only 'incubate the next generation of global terrorists', but also host interminable poverty, disease and routine mass murder.[1] Benign - or malign - neglect would no longer be sufficient. The period during the 1990s after the failed Somali intervention, when Washington's armchair warriors let Africa slide out of view, may have come to an end with September 11. Army General Charles Wald, who controls the Africa Programme of the European Command, told the BBC in early 2004 that he aims to have five brigades with 15,000 men working in cooperation with regional partners including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and two others still to be chosen.[2] NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General James Jones, confirmed the US geographical strategy in May 2003: 'The carrier battle groups of the future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future may not spend six months in the Mediterranean Sea but I'll bet they'll spend half the time down the West Coast of Africa.'[3] Within weeks, 3000 US troops had been deployed off the coast of Liberia (and went briefly ashore to stabilize the country after Charles Taylor departed). Potential US bases were suggested for Ghana, Senegal and Mali, as well as the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.[4] Another base was occupied by 1,500 US troops in the small Horn country of Djibouti. Botswana and Mozambique were also part of the Pentagon's strategy, and South Africa would remain a crucial partner.