Baba Aye's

1. Introduction On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, which had held over $600 million worth of assets, collapsed, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States . This marked a turning point in world history, similar to the Wall Street Crash of October 29, 1929, that had signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. Once again the material crisis of the world capitalist economy has brought human kind to a point of transition where ideas and forces behind these engage in an attempt to forge or re-forge a new order, re-formulate policies and construct new (or re-hashed) paradigms for the disciplines and practice of economics, politics, finance and international relations. Concepts and processes of ‘financialization’, ‘corporate governance’ and ‘globalization’ which have come to assume front burner positions in the last thirty years of neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, now take on even more critical importance. The different views on what they entail and the consequence...

Reading the Maps: 'I did a lot of work when I was able': remembering John Saville, 1916-2009 Excellent biographical post on John Saville....one of the richest minds and committed socialist fighters in the 20th Century.

It's thirty three years today since Hastings Ndlovu, Hector Pieterson and twenty one other children were mowed down by the hat-filled bullets of the apartheid state machine, in the South Western Township (Soweto) of Orlando, which had produced the Mandelas, and Sisulus then in prison. Their crime was refusing to be taught with what Desmond Tutu described as "the oppressors language" in line with the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974. Over 500 persons were to be shot dead or never to be seen again from the violence that rocked the apartheid enclave for days after this. It was actually the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime as within and outside the country the visible "fire in Soweto, burning all my people" (as Okosun rightly sang) became a clarion for action Sam Nzima's picture of 12-year old Hector carried in the arms of his cousin, with his sister running along distraught by trauma, became a prick on the conscience of humanity (although of course w...

Myths are stories that acquire larger than life dimension and which many persons in a society could tend to believe as having something to do with reality. Indeed more often than not, myths could have that smoke if not the fire of historical facts, in them. Indeed, like the axiom of there being a fire wherever you find smoke; some myths tend to amount to falsities, moving with every motion forward even further from the half-truths they started as. A particular myth in Nigeria’s recent history is that of June 12. Quite a few Nigerians stood, sat and even ate (as in ‘chopped’ money) on June 12 while both its struggle and its gravy train subsisted. Just as the Daniel Kanus of this world swore that they would neither eat nor drink without Abacha succeeding himself, so did a number of NGO careerists push Abiola, as some would say, to an early grave, insisting on the validation of June 12. I am actually less disturbed by this or the fact that business is now going on as usual with proposals...