NPA and Hawks under fire for failing to control illegal flow of money

Derek Hanekom asks Hawks if they were under political pressure to drop cases

By Moira Levy
31 August 2017

Informal miners search for diamonds. Parliamentarians blamed Zama-Zama, such as these men, for money illicitly leaving the country, but a lawyer GroundUp spoke to expressed scepticism. Archive photo: Shaun Swingler

The amount of money illegally leaving the country and draining the fiscus was described as “staggering” at a joint parliamentary committee meeting yesterday and Committee Chair Yunus Carrim begged the crime-fighting authorities reporting back to the meeting to tell the committees what they could do to help.

South Africa could not afford the loss of foreign exchange reserves, reduced tax collection, and the stifling of investment and trade resulting from these illegal outflows, he said, especially given the poor performance of the economy and projected low rate of growth.

It is not possible to estimate the amounts that are being lost to the economy through Illicit Financial Flows (IFF), but they run into hundreds of billions of rands of lost tax revenue. The last estimate in 2012 was set at more than $120-billion that had been illegally drained out of the economy.

This problem is not new and four parliamentary committees came together in 2015 to investigate what amendments and regulations were needed to clamp down on illegal financial transactions.

The Standing Committee on Finance and three National Assembly’s Portfolio Committees - Trade and Industry, Mineral Resources, and Police - were left more frustrated than ever after yesterday’s reportback.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Hawks came under fire for “abysmal” rates of prosecution.

The Hawks reported that of the 121 transactions referred by the South African Reserve Bank, only 54 cases were treated as IFFs, and so far three had been finalised in court. Twenty -five cases were still under investigation.

The ANC’s Derek Hanekom asked outright if the Hawks were under political pressure to drop certain cases. This was denied, but the DA’s David Maynier pushed on, asking what the Hawks were doing about the funds allegedly diverted from the Estina dairy farm project in the Free state to fund the controversial Gupta wedding held at Sun City.

“We need to do more,” Carrim said, “There are staggering amounts of money leaving the country illegally and there’s a desperate need to raise more revenue, especially with a projected 0.5% growth rate. So it’s just not acceptable that there are so few cases in the court.”

A multi-agency structure was set up in March to bring together all statutory bodies dealing with IFFs and Basic Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) but to date no prosecutions have been reported, which was described by Carrim as “a consummate lack of progress”.

However, the UDM pointed to a breakdown in communication between the various agencies that are supposed to be working together, saying they continue to work in silos. Nqabayomzi Kwankwa (UDM) said, “The right hand does not seem to know what the left hand is doing.”

The multi-agency task team to track down and prosecute IFFs and BEPs includes the South African Revenue Service, the Financial Intelligence Centre, the South African Reserve Bank and National Treasury. The four parliamentary Committees will meet at least four times a year to monitor progress and will come together every six months to pool their information and receive reportbacks from the task team.

All parties in the hearing agreed that the Hawks’ report left more questions than answers, and that the reported prosecutions and convictions were laughable in the face of the actual amounts being drained from the economy.

Acting Hawks head Yolisa Matakata conceded that the Hawks lacked forensic skills, which had to be outsourced, but said on the whole they had the necessary capacity.

The MPs suggested that illegal mining was a major source of illegal financial outflows. They said the Zama Zamas were the first step in a chain of cross-border deals that were growing in scale, functioning openly with large-scale machinery and illegal vehicles, often in cahoots with mine security. Trade in the products of illegal mining reached through a network of dealers throughout the country and beyond its borders. The DA’s James Lorimer estimated that R20 billion left the country from illegal mining. When asked by GroundUp to substantiate the figure he said it could be anywhere between R6 billion and R20 billion (he did not specify over what period or how he came to this estimate).

But Johan Lorenzen, a lawyer assisting artisanal miners to decriminalise their trade, was sceptical when he spoke to GroundUp: “It conflates Zama-Zama with big companies extracting wealth on a large scale. But even so I doubt R20 billion is a plausible number.” Lorenzen said that if artisanal mining was legalised it would significantly contribute to the tax base and help earn foreign revenue.

CORRECTION: The headline was changed after publication, and Lorimer’s comment to GroundUp was added.

Produced for GroundUp by Notes from the House.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Parliament hears how PRASA is going off the rails

“The more trains that are burnt and vandalised, the less we can operate.”

By Sune Payne
31 August 2017

A train at Cape Town station burns earlier this year. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Appropriations was briefed by PRASA on Wednesday about the extent of vandalism and violence on public trains and how this affects its service. Members heard that during the 2016-17 financial year 322 carriages were set alight and 3,591 crime incidents were reported on Metrorail. During this period 77% of trains ran on time, the committee was told.

PRASA says it has a total of 88 trains that it could put to use in the Western Cape but currently only 61 are in use due to vandalism and arson attacks.

The Acting Chief Executive Officer, Lindikhaya Zide, warned: “The more trains that are burnt and vandalised, the less we can operate.”

“We are experiencing a high rate of vandalism of our assets,” said Zide. He reported that Metrorail had refurbished 461 coaches nationally in the 2016-17 financial year.

MP Shaik Emam was concerned to know what PRASA was doing about passenger safety. Zide said PRASA was consulting the SA Police Service. On cable theft, he said PRASA was looking at how Eskom and Transnet were dealing with problems related to cable theft and trying to emulate that.
Speaking to GroundUp, Emam said he had doubts that PRASA could manage safety concerns as it only spends 6% on protection services. “We want to see how they manage to do this, when they spend so little on protection.”

The Chairperson of the Committee, Yvonne Phosa, said PRASA and the Department of Transport must ensure that “taxpayers’ money is well spent and not wasted”.

Produced for GroundUp by Notes from the House.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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You Can Still Be Transgender If You Don’t Feel Physical Dysphoria – Here’s Why

Has anyone ever implied that you’re “faking” being transgender because you don’t feel like you’re “born in the wrong body?”

The narrative of feeling like a person of one gender “trapped” in another gender’s body is true for some, but it doesn’t apply to all trans people. If you don’t experience physical dysphoria, that doesn’t mean you’re “not trans enough.”

But it hurts to be excluded based on this narrative, so here’s a comic to help you get through it. This explains the origins of the myth that trans people must experience physical dysphoria – and exactly what this misconception gets wrong.

With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism

Teacher caught on video beating student

Same teacher accused of sexual harassment

By Ashleigh Furlong
29 August 2017

Thandokhulu students protest on Monday against an alleged sexual assault by one of their teachers. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

A video has emerged of a teacher at Thandokhulu Secondary School in Mowbray hitting a learner. The same teacher has been accused of sexual assault by learners at the school.

In the video a man can be seen using his belt and smacking it in the direction of a learner, while the learner raises an arm for protection.

Video by unknown. GroundUp has blurred the face of the student in the forefront of the video.

Yesterday GroundUp reported on a protest held by learners at the school, where they called for the teacher to be suspended. The learners told GroundUp that in May one of the learners was sexually assaulted by the teacher when a group of choir members slept over at the school because of choir practice.

However, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has found the teacher not guilty, telling GroundUp that: “The matter was referred to Labour Relations by the school principal. Labour Relations have confirmed that the educator was found not guilty of the allegations and the charges withdrawn.”

Kealeboga Mase Ramaru, the deputy head of Equal Education’s Western Cape Office, told GroundUp that they had a meeting with the principal of Thandokhulu on Tuesday to discuss the teacher’s conduct. She said that the principal told them that when he requested reasons from the Department for the not guilty finding, he was told that there wasn’t a policy to release this information.
Ramaru added that a criminal case had also been opened against the teacher and that he is due to appear again in court on Thursday. She said that he had already appeared once in court but the magistrate apparently didn’t stipulate that he should be suspended from his position, pending the outcome of the case.

Ramaru said that the principal was set to call an emergency meeting today with the learners to discuss the matter.

As for the corporal punishment charge, Ramaru said that they were in the process of preparing evidence that would be presented to the principal.

GroundUp has seen a statement written by the learners where they say they “feel threatened by a teacher’s presence … after his sexual harassment case”.

“We feel that both the school and WCED has failed us as students because the teacher is still teaching at the school and the victim attends his classes,” the statement says. “We now feel vulnerable and that the school should take action and assure us and other students that we are safe.”

Corporal punishment in schools have been banned since 1997 but still remains a problem. According to the 2016 General Household Survey, about 10% of learners reportedly experienced corporal punishment in 2016. These rates were highest in the Eastern Cape where it sits at nearly 18% and lowest in the Western Cape and Gauteng where about 2% of learners said they had experienced corporal punishment.

In Equal Education’s 2016 social audit of schools in the Western Cape, they found that learners were beaten at 83% of the schools sampled and that this was a daily occurrence at 37% of the schools. “At more than 90% of schools with corporal punishment, teachers use some type of weapon,” stated the survey.

“Principals and teachers are the main individuals to whom learners are meant to report violent events. The reporting systems and structures that the WCED has in place are severely undermined by a situation in which learners in such a high proportion of schools can expect to be beaten by the same individuals entrusted with their safety,” said Equal Education.
GroundUp is continuing to investigate this story.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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For a primer on how to make fun of Nazis, look to Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin’s character Adenoid Hynkel was a not-so-subtle nod to Adolf Hitler.
Wikimedia Commons

White nationalists and neo-Nazis are having their moment. Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke is back, yet again, in the media spotlight, while newer figures such as white supremacist Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell are broadcasting their views via social media feeds and niche internet channels.

Many Americans are wondering if this resurgent movement should be ignored, feared or fought. What, exactly, is the best antidote for neo-Nazism?

What about laughter?

While the August 12 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia was no joke, the images of armor-clad, tiki-torch-wielding white nationalists did give fodder to late-night talk show hosts and editorial cartoonists.

In a different age, another ascendant white supremacist – Adolf Hitler – used a combination of garbled ideas, stagy phrasing and arch gestures to bewitch much of his nation, even as the rest of the world looked on in disbelief and terror.

While many anti-fascists offered serious and potent arguments against Hitler, comedians like Charlie Chaplin responded to the mortal threat that the Nazis posed in a different way: They used humor to highlight the absurdity and hypocrisy of both the message and its notorious messenger.

Chaplin homes in on his target

In late 1940, producer-director-star Charlie Chaplin released “The Great Dictator.” Often considered Chaplin’s last great film, “The Great Dictator” is the tale of a little Jewish barber in the mythical (but obviously German) nation of Tomania. The barber is mistaken for a dictator modeled after Adolf Hitler named Adenoid Hynkel, and the barber is forced to carry out his impersonation of the German warlord to save his own life.

Hitler’s trademark mustache mimicked Chaplin’s.
Insomnia Cured Here, CC BY-SA

The idea of a film satirizing Hitler was one Chaplin had been working on for years. Chaplin was a dedicated antifascist, and was alarmed at Hitler’s ability to captivate the German people. He warned members of the Hollywood community not to underestimate Hitler merely because they found him comical, an effect magnified by Hitler’s unfathomable decision to apparently borrow the most famous mustache in the world – Chaplin’s little black toothbrush – as his own trademark.

Chaplin regarded Hitler as one of the finest actors he had ever seen. (Hitler carefully monitored his public persona, studying photographs and film of his speeches, and taking lessons in public presentation.) Nonetheless, Chaplin, whose international success was based on little people challenging and defeating powerful institutions and individuals, recognized that comedy could be used against Hitler.

“It is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance.”

Chaplin was warned in 1939 that the film might be refused release in England and face censorship in the United States. Political factions in both nations were anxious to placate the unpredictable, angry Hitler, and “The Great Dictator” could be calculated to enrage the Nazis, who reviled Chaplin as a “Jewish acrobat.”

But Chaplin was a partner in the distribution company United Artists; simply put, he was his own producer, and answerable primarily to himself when it came to risky investments. Due to Chaplin’s perfectionism, all of his films were expensive. “The Great Dictator” was no different: It cost US$2 million to produce, an enormous sum at the time. That perfectionism delayed the film’s distribution until the height of the English Blitz, by which time audiences in the U.S. and England were ready for Chaplin’s humor of defiance. In 1940, the year of its release, “The Great Dictator” was the third highest-grossing film in the U.S.

Exposing a fraud

Much of the comedy of “The Great Dictator” comes from a merciless indictment of those who would follow such a patently idiotic character. The satire mocks Hitler’s absurdity, solipsism and overweening vanity, while also highlighting Germany’s psychological captivity to a political fraud.

All the techniques of the tyrant are on view: the arbitrary demonizing of identity groups, the insistence on mindless loyalty from his followers, the unpredictable behavior toward foreign leaders that ranges from mere abuse to deceit, even the hostility toward science in favor of dogma. (A series of inventors die while demonstrating the patently impossible military technology Hynkel demands, like a bulletproof suit and a parachute hat.) Hynkel is also a casual sexual harasser and grossly overestimates attendance at official functions.

Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Fake German’ speech from ‘The Great Dictator.’

Hynkel bloviates mindlessly and unintelligibly. U.S. and English audiences were already quite familiar with Hitler’s untranslated radio speeches, and Chaplin took advantage of this, making Hynkel’s speeches an amalgamation of gibberish, non sequiturs and vaudeville German dialect humor, as when he shouts, “Der Wienerschnitzel mit da lagerbieren, und das Sauerkraut!” (“The wienerschnitzel with the beer and the sauerkraut!”)

Would Hitler laugh at himself?

The success of “The Great Dictator” spawned a cottage industry of Hitler satire. Some of this work was relentlessly lowbrow, such as the Three Stooges’ short “You Nazty Spy!” (1940), Hal Roach Studios’ short feature “That Nazty Nuisance” (1943), and the Warner Bros.‘ animated shorts “The Duckators” (1942), “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1942) and “Daffy – The Commando” (1943).

The artistic peak of this cinematic effort was the mordant Ernst Lubitsch comedy “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), in which Hitler is explicitly compared to a ham actor-manager who embarks upon a vanity production of – what else? – “Hamlet.”

Hitler was a huge movie fan, and after the war, novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg found proof that Hitler had actually seen “The Great Dictator.” More intriguingly, Hitler ordered the film to be screened for him a second time. (Of course, ordinary Germans weren’t allowed to watch it.)

Interviewed for a 2001 documentary, Reinhard Spitzy, an intimate of Hitler, said he could easily imagine Hitler laughing privately at Chaplin’s burlesque of him.

The image of Hitler watching “The Great Dictator” a second time – admiring the work of the only public figure whose sheer charisma before the cameras could rival his own – is a compelling one.

Chaplin later said that had he known the extent of the Nazis’ barbarity, he would not have burlesqued them; their crimes were simply too immense for comedy, however trenchant. But perhaps “The Great Dictator” still reminds us of political comedy’s golden mean: The more political movements strive to be taken seriously, the more ripe a subject for satire they become.

Kevin Hagopian, Senior Lecturer of Media Studies (Cinema Studies), Pennsylvania State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Matatiele protesters demand roads and water

Roads closed with rocks and burning tyres

By Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik
28 August 2017

Matatiele residents want gravel roads like this road in Tshitsong to be tarred. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi.

Gravel roads between Hardenburg and Matatiele were closed with burning tyres and big rocks on Monday by angry Matatiele residents demanding better roads and clean water.

The protesters accuse the authorities of neglecting their town. They demand better roads between Matatiele and the border between South Africa and Lesotho. They also want clean water to be supplied to the villages.

Monday’s protest was the third in a month and protesters vowed to continue until their demands were met. Schools were closed and vehicles taking learners to schools were turned away.

Residents have formed a forum to express their grievances. Chairperson of the forum Nhlahla Ntsoti said Matatiele was at a standstill and this would continue until their demands were met. He said the town had been neglected for years. Residents had tried to hold meetings with Matatiele local municipality but promises had not been kept, he said.

“We are fed up and this time we are not going to stop until we are heard. We demand tarred roads, clean water and better health facilities.”

Ntsoti said women in Matatiele had to wake up at 02:00am to fetch water from the river and this was dangerous.

“With the high rate of women being raped and murdered we are scared that women in our area might be attacked if this issue of water is not addressed.”

He said the gravel roads made it difficult for ambulances to arrive in villages quickly and even police vans struggled to reach some of the villages because of poor road conditions.

“We are voters and we have rights. It is time our government takes us seriously like other towns. We are forgotten here,” he said.

Community member Thapelo Mokoena from Maluti village told GroundUp that if the gravel road between Maluti and the Lesotho border was not fixed, Matatiele would lose business. He said traders who travelled from Lesotho to Matatiele to sell goods had to drive on poor roads.

In some villages people had to walk kilometres to fetch water. Some people shared dirty water with animals. In some villages taps had been installed but never worked. In other villages boreholes had been installed but only worked for few months.

“We will continue with this fight,” he said.

Matatiele local municipality spokesperson Olwethu Gwanya said the municipality had held several meetings with residents. She said as far as she knew they wanted better roads but that was an issue not for the municipality but for the Department of Public Works.

“We called a meeting between the community and Department of Public Works and we asked for a chance to look into their complaints. It’s clear that the community was not happy, hence they decided to continue with their protest,” she said.

Ntsoti said Mehlomakhulu had been asked to pass their grievances on to the Premier’s office. He said the Premier had been asked to respond within seven days. Protesters would wait for him on the gravel roads, he said.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Shaun Abrahams ducks every issue UDF veterans raise

NPA head refuses to withdraw appeal in Zuma corruption case

By GroundUp Staff
29 August 2017

Shaun Abrahams, head of the National Prosecuting Authority, has responded to a letter addressed to him by UDF veterans. Photo from NPA website

National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) Shaun Abrahams says the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) will not withdraw its appeal against a court ruling on charges against President Jacob Zuma. Abrahams has also refused to supply a list of current cases relating to state capture and corruption.

Writing in response to a letter UDF veterans handed to the NPA on 7 August, Abrahams ducks every request in a response that is occasionally belligerent.

In April 2016 a full bench of the Gauteng High Court ruled that the NPA decision not to charge Zuma was irrational. The NPA then appealed against the decision. The UDF veterans’ letter called on Abrahams to drop the appeal. Abrahams’s response was that the matter preceded his time: “I regret to inform you that I am unable to accede thereto. As you are well aware, the history around this matter predates my appointment as the NDPP. The appeal pending in the Supreme Court of Appeal is premised largely on the powers of the NDPP and the functioning of the NPA. Finality is required in this regard.” Abrahams was appointed NDPP in 2015, about two years before the NPA appealed.

“I disagree with you that the NPA has failed to ‘act in terms of its Constitutional mandate to root out criminal activity within the state’ over the last decade. It is regrettable that you deemed to make such a general statement,” wrote Abrahams in the letter dated 16 August.

Abrahams rejected the UDF veterans’ claim that the NPA had been “glaringly absent” with respect to corruption, such as the Gupta email leaks uncovered, and that Abrahams’s silence made him complicit. “It is rather regrettable that you have to resort to making such comments not understanding the role and functioning of the NPA,” he wrote.

More than ten paragraphs of Abrahams’s 20 paragraph response describe the state structures responsible for fighting corruption. The essence of his claim is that the NPA is not responsible for what the UDF veterans are asking. Instead, he argues, their concerns should be raised with the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks).

So in response to the UDF veterans’ call for a “full list of current cases relating to state capture and corruption, including detailed time frames, charges, where these have been laid and court dates where these have been set,” Abrahams says this should be directed to the Hawks.

Abrahams tries to hit back at the UDF veterans: “It does concern me that your interest only lies in the eradication of criminal activity within the state. Regrettably you make no mention of your concerns of corruption and acts of criminal activity around the private sector.” This even though the UDF veterans’ letter explicitly mentions several private companies requiring investigation, including Cash Paymaster Services, Trillian, Tegeta, Oakbay, Mckinsey, Dongfang Electric Company, VR Laser, Multichoice, Linkway Trading and several others.

“Contrary to your belief, indicative of the tone of your letter, the NPA will continue to execute its constitutional mandate without fear, favour, or prejudice,” Abrahams ends.

UDF veteran Zelda Holtzman told GroundUp the group was unhappy with Abrahams’s response but that a fuller statement would be issued after the veterans meet in the first week of September.
Download and read Abrahams’s full response.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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When 'man's best friend' feels more hate than love for an owner

Let’s just go our separate ways.
anaxolotl, CC BY-NC

Everyone thinks that dogs worship their owners – viewing them as gods of some sort. While that may be true in the majority of cases, it isn’t always so. As a veterinarian who has focused on animal behavior and the human/canine bond for 30 years, I can confirm that sometimes, no matter what, a dog and his person just aren’t going to get along.

Take Ruckus, an adopted Wheaton terrier with an attitude. He pretty much hated his new owner, Rick, and was none too warm and fuzzy with Rick’s wife, Cindy. Although Rick was a terrific guy by human standards, Ruckus gave him hell – much the same as he had done with his previous male owner. It started slowly with some space guarding and territoriality. It eventually got so bad that Rick had to call on his way home to tell Cindy to confine Ruckus for fear of being attacked.

To Ruckus, Rick was persona non grata in his own home. It all ended very badly one day when Ruckus was tied up outside while Rick was mowing the lawn. Ruckus’s constant lunging eventually dislodged the tethering post and he flew at Rick, teeth bared and intent on committing grievous bodily harm. A wrestling match ensued; the police and animal control were called while Rick hung on with Ruckus in a choke hold. You really don’t want to know how this story ended: not well for Ruckus, I’m afraid.

Rick adored Ruckus, but it was one-way love. Ruckus truly hated him and engaged in what I called unidirectional aggression. I later found out that unidirectional aggression is a recognized entity in people as well as other animal species.

While there are dogs like Ruckus who frankly dislike their owner, there are others who get no pleasure out of living under the same roof as them. They merely tolerate certain people because they have no other choice. After adoption, these hapless hounds just find themselves having to endure uninteresting or punitive owners. Some withdraw and remain in a permanent funk. Others simply accept this shoddy treatment as the norm and carry on as best they can.

Fear can turn into aggression for some dogs.
Jan Tik, CC BY

In some cases, the dog may have good reason to be nonplussed with his owner: mistreatment will weaken and even seriously damage the human-animal bond. For example, a Brittany intended for hunting was constantly being trained by his owner using an electric shock collar. One day, the dog hid from him and lay quaking under the bed. When the man tried to drag him out, the dog bit him. You could say the man got his just desserts. The behavior the dog showed was fear aggression – directed toward the owner.

Curiously, this direct association between harsh treatment by an owner would not explain Ruckus’ situation because Rick never mistreated him. It seems most likely that Ruckus had been seriously abused by a man in the critical period of his development – certainly the within the first three to four months of life – and he never forgot it (almost like PTSD).

A German shepherd I wrote about in my book “The Dog Who Loved Too Much” was fearful of, but not aggressive to, his male owner. In this case, similar to the Ruckus situation, it was not what the male owner had done to the dog but what other men had done to the dog previously that carried over as a dislike of all men.

But this dog’s reaction was not proactive and aggressive like Ruckus’. Rather, it manifest as pure fear with no aggression – probably because of the dog’s naturally retiring temperament. When the man came home, the dog ran and hid and never appeared again until he left. The dog did not interact with him at all – except under one discrete circumstance.

When the man’s wife, a diabetic, became hypoglycemic at night (a very dangerous situation), the dog would run to the husband’s side of the bed and tug at the bedclothes until he woke up and realized the problem. The dog’s love for the wife caused him to overcome his fear and summon help when it was really needed. Bravery is not about having no fear but having the grit to fight through it. By this standard, the dog was as brave as they come – although he still would have preferred that the male owner did not exist at all.

I’m just not that into you… and I think you know why.
myri_bonnie, CC BY-NC-ND

So when you hear about dogs being “man’s best friend” and supplying “unconditional love” – that’s true only if the person adopts a compatible pet and invests time and attention, showing the dog it’s understood and appreciated. Long walks, plenty of fun, regular meals, clear communication, good leadership and affection should create the dog of everyone’s dreams.

It’s another instance where “the love you take is equal to the love you make,” to quote the Beatles. Mean-spirited owners, or those who have been duped into using punitive training methods, do not enjoy the wonderful bond that can exist – and their dogs do not appreciate them either.

Nicholas Dodman, Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Pharmacology and Animal Behavior, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Those who brought Zuma to power shouldn't be forgotten, or forgiven

The SACP and Cosatu have spoken out against South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma.
Flcker/GCIS

It is now a matter of record – rather than an issue for serious debate – that the presidency of Jacob Zuma has been an unmitigated disaster for South Africa.

Zuma’s stewardship – if his tenure since 2009 can be dignified with such a description – has been one long narrative of national decline. The fact that he remains in office is testament to the moral and intellectual decay of the governing African National Congress (ANC) over the course of his presidency.

That the party which produced such giants of the liberation struggle as Albert Luthuli, OR Tambo and Nelson Mandela should have repeatedly endorsed the leadership of such a compromised individual provides cause for great sadness at the humbling of a once great political movement.

But, as his presidency staggers on it has become noticeable that some in the ANC’s “broad church” are beginning to peel away in disgust. Over the last two years veterans of the movement have expressed dissatisfaction with the party’s direction and there have been frequent calls for Zuma to stand down.

There have been two unsuccessful attempts to unseat him at meetings of the ANC’s National Executive Committee (in November 2016 and May 2017. And eight motions of no confidence motions have been tabled against him in parliament. In the latest 26 ANC MPs voted with the opposition, with a further nine abstaining.

In addition, the ANC’s alliance partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), have both called for his resignation. Cosatu even barred him from attending its gatherings, an unprecedented humiliation for an ANC leader.

Yet these expressions of revulsion at Zuma’s leadership should be placed within their proper historical context. It is important to recall the role these two organisations had in helping facilitate this disaster in the first place.

Complicity and fantasy

Between 2005 and 2007 the SACP and Cosatu were fervent cheerleaders for Zuma in his successful campaign in 2009 to supplant Thabo Mbeki and become ANC president, and thus president of the country. The left projected their own ideological fantasies onto Zuma: they saw in him hope for a “left turn” and a repudiation of the neo-liberal economics which they associated with Mbeki.

This was always a bizarre position. There was nothing in Zuma’s record to inspire confidence that he would engineer a shift to the left. As the country’s deputy president from 1999 to 2005, he failed to strike a single dissenting note about the ideological direction of Mbeki’s macro-economic policy, far less set out an alternative left-wing prospectus.

There was also a significant body of evidence suggesting his politics were highly reactionary, with strong overtones of sexual and ethnic chauvinism which should have set alarm bells ringing for any self-respecting socialists.

For example, Zuma was acquitted of a rape charge in 2006 after deploying a defence which was deeply sexist and patriarchal. Zuma also uttered the notorious comment which would come to haunt him – that he had intercourse with his accuser knowing she was HIV positive but took a shower afterwards as a precaution against infection. This was a comment so steeped in ignorance that it should have immediately disqualified him from ever holding high political office.

But it didn’t end there. Throughout the rape trial his supporters gathered outside the court each day to hurl vicious sexist abuse at his accuser. “Burn the Bitch” was a favourite. Her name and address were also circulated in a contempt of court, actions which paved the way for harassment which eventually caused her to leave the country.

Not once when addressing his supporters at the end of each day’s proceedings, did Zuma condemn the abuse, or reproach his supporters. Instead, in a display of machismo, he chose to whip up the mob with militaristic anthems from the ANC armed struggle era. All of this in a country blighted by violence against women.

Rise of kleptocracy

Zuma also commenced his presidency with 783 unresolved charges of fraud, money laundering and embezzlement hanging over him relating to the notorious arms deal scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the SACP and Cosatu leadership chose to view those charges as evidence of a “conspiracy” against Zuma and an attempt to sabotage a socialist presidency.

They would now prefer their unconditional support for Zuma to be considered merely as an unfortunate historical footnote which has not tarnished their ideological credentials. They are wrong. Their willingness to overlook such egregious failings was a cynical betrayal of progressive values.

Julius Malema, once a staunch Zuma supporter is now his fierce critic.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook

Equally, Julius Malema, now the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, has sought to reinvent himself as a passionate opponent of Zuma. Yet as head of the ANC Youth League back in 2006-2007 he championed Zuma’s candidacy with a messianic fervour usually laced with threats against his opponents such as the infamous “shoot to kill for Zuma” slogan.

Mea culpa

Ten years on the chickens have come home to roost, and the grim reality of the Zuma presidency is now visible. The South African state has become little more than a plaything of the Zuma patronage network. This descent into kleptocracy has been documented in rich detail by a number of reports.

Consequently, the SACP and Cosatu have been compelled to recognise that Zuma, and his corrupt support networks are indeed a cancer in South African politics, shamelessly enriching themselves in a country still defined by poverty and extreme inequality with unemployment at 27.7% in the first quarter of 2017, and youth unemployment standing at 38%

The SACP and Cosatu may have found their voices over the last six months in lamenting this appalling record. But this has been a deathbed conversion, occurring much too late to carry any real conviction. The monster that is the Zuma presidency has wrought massive damage on South Africa and is rightly reviled. But the role of the SACP and Cosatu as architects of that debacle should be neither forgotten nor forgiven.

James Hamill, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why you should care about China’s VPN crackdown

Shutterstock

Internet censors have a new target. The Chinese and Russian governments recently announced plans to block the use of “virtual private networks” (VPNs), which are a key tool for people trying to avoid internet restrictions and surveillance.

This crackdown isn’t surprising, given the two countries’ histories of monitoring their citizens and blocking certain websites and online services. But it raises the question of whether other governments will follow this lead and introduce their own VPN bans, especially given how VPNs currently allow citizens to avoid the extensive internet surveillance that Western governments practice.

China and other countries block many websites they don’t want their citizens to access, including sites such as Twitter and YouTube that allow users to freely post almost anything they like. But Chinese internet users wishing to evade these restrictions can currently use VPNs to visit these sites, because they provide access via a separate encrypted server that can’t be monitored by the government.

Since Chinese internet service providers only filter out connections to the likes of Twitter and YouTube, users can still connect to sites which offer VPN services. VPN acts like a proxy, accessing the banned sites on the users’ behalf and allowing them to effectively bypass the restrictions, as well as avoiding government snooping. But now the Chinese government has ordered national telecommunications firms to block VPNs as well from February 2018.

Russia doesn’t block access to as many sites as China. It allows access to Facebook and Twitter, for example. But it still practices significant internet censorship. And now it has followed China’s lead by also restricting VPN services, stating the measure is intended to clamp down on anonymous access to unlawful content.

These events come as little surprise given China and Russia’s track records. China, in particular, has introduced a number of similar restrictions on VPNs in the past. These clampdowns were vigorously enforced for a period of time and then relaxed.



Although the new restrictions seem to be more comprehensive, it’s worth noting that they may also be temporary, with the official statement indicating that the measures would run until March 31, 2018. This may have something to do with the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China being held in Beijing in the autumn of 2017.

It’s also worth pointing out that both China and Russia are heavily invested in developing their industries and economies and keenly aware that this cannot occur without businesses and researchers being able to access internet resources. Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, stated at the Davos economic summit in January 2017 that he wanted to “redouble efforts to develop global connectivity”. This must include access to the internet.

However, there is significant concern from internet anti-censorship organisations that these kinds of events indicate a growing global trend. Governments are increasingly monitoring, restricting or censoring the internet activities of their own and other nations’ citizens.

This trend includes most major Western governments. For example, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been the subject of considerable debate for their practices of internet snooping and the mass collection of citizens’ data.

Western laws are vulnerable to VPNs

If the recent laws in China and Russia are alarming, so too are those such as the US Executive Order 12333, authorising the collection of data inside and outside US borders for “national security purposes”. This order permits the collection and storage of communication metadata and content without a warrant, court approval or reporting to Congress.

The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 isn’t far behind, requiring internet service providers to keep a full list of users’ connection records, including a list of every website that people have visited, for a year. The UK government has also announced plans to restrict access to pornography to over-18s and ban material it deems harmful altogether, something China has done for years. A major flaw in all these plans is that the surveillance and restrictions can be bypassed using a VPN.

While the restrictions on VPN services in China and Russia may be temporary in nature, they do form part of the increasing appetite of governments the world over to monitor and limit the activities of internet users. If Western governments begin to see VPNs as a threat to their own internet regulation, there’s a real chance they could follow the lead of China and Russia and introduce their own bans. Online privacy could be a concept heading for extinction.

Omair Uthmani, Lecturer in Networking and Security, Glasgow Caledonian University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Has South Africa’s labour movement become a middle class movement?

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the country’s largest trade union federation, has been losing members.
REUTERS/Rogan Ward

Do South African trade unions still represent the working class?

The South African labour landscape has undergone massive changes in the past few years that have left the country’s trade union movement almost unrecognisable from yesteryear.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, still the country’s largest trade union federation, has been bleeding members for a while and has been shaken to the core by the exit of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa. This exit has led to a new formation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions. Both labour federations still claim to represent the interests of the working class.

Something else, perhaps more fundamental has been changing within South Africa’s trade union movement. The membership base has shifted significantly from one dominated by unskilled and semiskilled workers to one that shows bias towards skilled and professional workers. This is captured in a series of surveys undertaken between 1994 and 2014, before the National Union of Metal Workers’s exit.

The data shows that less than 1% of members within the trade union movement classified themselves as professional in early years of democracy. The picture had changed radically by 2008 with 20% of the respondents classifying themselves as professional. It would therefore seem that South Africa’s trade union federation had become a home for middle class civil servants, rather than a working class federation.

The evolution

A group of labour scholars has been conducting surveys of Congress of South African Trade Unions members before every parliamentary election since 1994. The intention of the survey, titled Taking Democracy Seriously, was to study the impact of union democracy on parliamentary democracy.

The data set (drawn from five surveys, with the last conducted in 2014 just before National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa was expelled) tell us much more than just what union members’ attitudes towards democracy is. It paints a complex picture of who trade unions actually represent.

At its high point, the federation had a membership of 2.2 million. This was the result of three waves of unionisation.

The first wave of members comprised of workers who were organised into the initial manufacturing unions that resulted from the militancy of the 1973 strikes.

The second wave started in 1985 with the National Union of Mineworkers – the first to organise black miners and what was to become the largest union in the country – joining the Federation of South African Trade Unions in 1985.

The third wave came with the public sector unions that emerged after 1990. This wave benefited from the Labour Relations Act of 1995 which brought public sector employees under the same dispensation as the private sector in terms of collective bargaining and organisational rights.

In the early years of democracy public sector unions were so marginal to the federation and debates in labour studies that the researchers did not even include any unions from the public sector.

The professional factor

From 1994 union members were asked to classify themselves as being professional, clerical, supervisors, skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled. Less than 1% classified themselves as professional in 1994, 1998 and 2004.

The data reflects a major shift in the last two surveys conducted after the inclusion of public sector unions in the sample. 20% of respondents classified themselves as professional in 2008, and 19% in 2014. This constituted a fifth of federation membership base, certainly a massive shift from the early 1990s.

Those members who classified themselves as clerical remained more or less constant, with those classifying themselves as supervisors increasing slightly from 4% in 1994 to 6% in 2014.

What is interesting though, is an increase of those who classify themselves as skilled increasing from 21% in 1994 to 37% in 2014. Those who classify themselves as unskilled declined from 30% in 1994 to a mere 8% in 2014, almost equal to the members who are supervisors.

This means that while 60% of the federation was made of semi-skilled and unskilled workers in 1994, by 2014 roughly 60% classified themselves as either skilled or professional, a complete inversion.

Loss of unskilled members

What explains this major transformation in the federation’s membership composition? We explored three possible explanations.

The entry of public sector unions, representing civil servants like teachers and nurses, into the federation is a major factor. This is confirmed when one breaks down the levels of skill by whether members belong to private sector or public sector unions for the 2014 survey.

The data shows that 78% of union members who classify themselves as professionals is from public sector unions. The unskilled and semiskilled members tend to come from private sector unions.

Its clear that the increase in the number of professionals within the federation was mainly a result of the entry of public sector unions. But this factor does not provide enough of an explanation for the decline in the percentage of unskilled members. We have to look elsewhere for this.

The data suggests that the post-apartheid era facilitated upgrading of skills within the federation. The proportion of members who had Grades 5-7 declined from 15% in 1994 to a mere 2% in 2014. Those with Grades 8-10 declined from 44% in 1994 to 11% in 2014.

Members with Grades 11-12 increased from 31% in 1994 to 45% in 2014 and members with technical diplomas increased from 3% in 1994 to 20% in 2014. Those with university degrees rose from less than 1% in 1994 to 17% in 2014.

Almost 40% of the trade union members in our sample have tertiary qualifications in the form of technical diplomas or university degrees. But the skills upgrade explanation also leaves a bit of a puzzle.

Does the fact that these trade union members now have higher levels of formal qualifications mean that a much smaller proportion of the work in South Africa’s economy is now done by skilled rather than unskilled workers?
The labour market data more generally does not support this assumption. We have to look elsewhere for additional explanations.

A significant portion of South Africa’s unskilled manual labour is no longer performed by trade union members. This is due to the rise of non-permanent employment through subcontracting, casual labour, or informal forms of employment.

This means that as the trade union movement was gaining skilled and professional members it was bleeding unskilled manual workers. This leaves the question: has South Africa’s labour movement become a middle class movement, rather than one that primarily represents the working class?

This article is based on an extract from a chapter by Andries Bezuidenhout, Christine Bischoff and Ntsehiseng Nthejane in the newly published volume Labour Beyond Cosatu: Mapping the Rupture in South Africa’s Labour Landscape published by Wits University Press.

Andries Bezuidenhout, Associate Professor, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

These three firms own corporate America

The Big Three.

A fundamental change is underway in stock market investing, and the spin-off effects are poised to dramatically impact corporate America.

In the past, individuals and large institutions mostly invested in actively managed mutual funds, such as Fidelity, in which fund managers pick stocks with the aim of beating the market. But since the financial crisis of 2008, investors have shifted to index funds, which replicate established stock indices, such as the S&P 500.

The magnitude of the change is astounding: from 2007 to 2016, actively managed funds have recorded outflows of roughly US$1,200 billion, while index funds had inflows of over US$1,400 billion.

In the first quarter of 2017, index funds brought in more than US$200 billion – the highest quarterly value on record.

Democratising the market?

This shift, arguably the biggest investment swing in history, is due in large part to index funds’ much lower costs.

Actively managed funds analyse the market, and their managers are well paid for their labour. But the vast majority are not able to consistently beat the index.

So why pay 1% to 2% in fees every year for active funds when index funds cost a tenth of that and deliver the same performance?

Some observers have lauded this development as the “democratisation of investing”, because it has significantly lowered investor expenses.

But other impacts of this seismic shift are far from democratising. One crucial difference between the active fund and the index fund industries is that the former is fragmented, consisting of hundreds of different asset managers both small and large.

The fast-growing index sector, on the other hand, is highly concentrated. It is dominated by just three giant American asset managers: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – what we call the Big Three.



Lower fees aside, the rise of index funds has entailed a massive concentration of corporate ownership. Together, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have nearly US$11 trillion in assets under management. That’s more than all sovereign wealth funds combined and over three times the global hedge fund industry.

In a recently published paper, our CORPNET research project comprehensively mapped the ownership of the Big Three. We found that the Big Three, taken together, have become the largest shareholder in 40% of all publicly listed firms in the United States.

Figure 1: Network of ownership by the Big Three in listed US firms. (See our paper for explanation of colours).
Fichtner, Heemskerk & Garcia-Bernardo (2017)

In 2015, these 1,600 American firms had combined revenues of about US$9.1 trillion, a market capitalisation of more than US$17 trillion, and employed more than 23.5 million people.

In the S&P 500 – the benchmark index of America’s largest corporations – the situation is even more extreme. Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90% of S&P 500 firms, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. This is the index in which most people invest.

Figure 2: Statistics about the ownership of the Big Three in listed US firms.
Fichtner, Heemskerk & Garcia-Bernardo (2017)

The power of passive investors

With corporate ownership comes shareholder power. BlackRock recently argued that legally it was not the “owner” of the shares it holds but rather acts as a kind of custodian for their investors.

That’s a technicality for lawyers to sort. What is undeniable is that the Big Three do exert the voting rights attached to these shares. Therefore, they have to be perceived as de facto owners by corporate executives.

These companies have, in fact, publicly declared that they seek to exert influence. William McNabb, chairman and CEO of Vanguard, said in 2015 that, “In the past, some have mistakenly assumed that our predominantly passive management style suggests a passive attitude with respect to corporate governance. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

When we analysed the voting behaviour of the Big Three, we found that they coordinate it through centralised corporate governance departments. This requires significant efforts because technically the shares are held by many different individual funds.

Hence, just three companies wield an enormous potential power over corporate America. Interestingly, though, we found that the Big Three vote for management in about 90% of all votes at annual general meetings, while mostly voting against proposals sponsored by shareholders (such as calls for independent board chairmen).

One interpretation is that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are reluctant to exert their power over corporate America. Others question whether the Big Three really want this voting power, as they primarily seek to minimise costs.

Corporate American monopoly

What are the future consequences of the Big Three’s unprecedented common ownership position?

Research is still nascent, but some economists are already arguing that this concentration of shareholder power could have negative effects on competition.

Over the past decade, numerous US industries have become dominated by only a handful of companies, from aviation to banking. The Big Three – seen together – are virtually always the largest shareholder in the few competitors that remain in these sectors.

This is the case for American Airlines, Delta, and United Continental, as it is for the banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. All of these corporations are part of the S&P 500, the index in which most people invest.

Their CEOs are likely well aware that the Big Three are their firm’s dominant shareholder and would take that into account when making decisions. So, arguably, airlines have less incentive to lower prices because doing so would reduce overall returns for the Big Three, their common owner.

In this way, the Big Three may be exerting a kind of emergent “structural power” over much of corporate America.

Whether or not they sought to, the Big Three have accumulated extraordinary shareholder power, and they continue to do so. Index funds are a business of scale, which means that at this point competitors will find it very difficult to gain market shares.

In many respects, the index fund boom is turning BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street into something resembling low-cost public utilities with a quasi-monopolistic position. Facing such a concentration of ownership and thus potential power, we can expect demands for increased regulatory scrutiny of corporate America’s new “de facto permanent governing board” to increase in coming years.

Jan Fichtner, Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science, University of Amsterdam; Eelke Heemskerk, Associate Professor Political Science , University of Amsterdam, and Javier Garcia-Bernardo, PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The hidden stories of medical experimentation on Caribbean slave plantations

‘The Plantation,’ oil on wood, ca. 1825.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY

In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. Patients hope for miraculous remedies to restore their health.

We all want our medicines to work for us in wondrous ways. But how are human subjects chosen for experiments? Who bears the burden of risk? What ethical brakes keep scientific enthusiasm from overwhelming vulnerable populations? Who goes first?

Today, the question of underrepresented minorities in medical experimentation is still volatile. Minorities, especially African-Americans in the U.S., tend to be simultaneously underrepresented in medical research and historically exploited in experimentation.

My new book, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic,” zeroes in on human experimentation on Caribbean slave plantations in the late 1700s. Were slaves on New World sugar plantations used as human guinea pigs in the same way African-Americans were in the American South centuries later?

Exploitative experiments with slaves

History is littered with exploitative experiments in humans. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is probably one of the most infamous. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service offered 600 African-American men food, free medical care and burial insurance for participating in the study. About 400 of these poor Alabamans had syphilis. The government studied the natural progression of the disease until death, even though penicillin was an easy, cheap and safe cure.

This type of medical testing – empirical study through controlled trials – began in earnest in the late 1700s. Many poor souls were subjected to medical testing. In Europe and its American colonies, drug trials tended to overselect subjects from the poor and wards of the state, such as prisoners, hospital patients and orphans. Most experimental subjects came from the same groups used for dissection – that is, persons with no next of kin to insist on burial rites or to pay for expensive cures.

A sugar mill circa 1660.
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2882-111)

I was surprised to learn that, in many instances, doctors did not – as might be expected – use slaves as guinea pigs. Slaves were valuable property of powerful masters. The master’s will prevailed over a doctor’s advice.

A British physician in Jamaica reported he had developed a “perfect cure” for yaws, a horrid tropical infection of the skin, bones and joints bred of poverty and poor sanitation. The experimental treatment was slated to take three or four months. The masters, not caring to “lose their Slaves’ labor” for so long, denied the doctor’s request.

However, numerous slaves were exploited in medical experiments at this time. John Quier, a British doctor working in rural Jamaica, freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 slaves during the 1768 epidemic. Inoculation, a precursor to vaccine, involved inducing a light case of the disease in a healthy person in hopes of immunizing that person for life.

Lancet used to make small punctures – generally four or five – in the arm or leg for the purpose of inoculation.
Wellcome Images (L0057752), CC BY

Quier was employed by slave owners and would have inoculated plantation slaves for smallpox, with or without his scientific experiments. In all instances, masters had the final word. There was no issue of slave consent, or, for that matter, often physician consent.

But Quier did not simply inoculate to prevent disease. We see from his reports that he used slaves to explore questions that doctors in Europe dared not. He wanted to know, for example, whether one could safely inoculate menstruating or pregnant women. He also wanted to know if it was safe to inoculate newborn infants or a person already suffering from dropsy, yaws or fever and the like.

In his letters to colleagues in London, Quier reported that, to answer these questions, he sometimes inoculated repeatedly in the same person and at his own expense. Throughout his experiments, when pressed, Quier followed what he considered of interest to science – and not necessarily what was best for the human being standing in front of him.

Gender and science

The history of human experimentation is not merely about subjects used and misused, but also about subjects excluded from testing – and, as a consequence, from the potential benefits of a cure.

Today, medical researchers struggle to include women in clinical trials. It’s impossible to say when women were defined out as proper subjects of human research. But women were regularly included in medical research in the 18th century.

In 1721, the iconic Newgate Prison trials in England tested the safety and efficacy of smallpox inoculation. Of the elected six condemned criminals, there were three women and three men, matched as closely as possible for age.

Women also featured in Quier’s experiments, raising explosive questions about differences among women, many of which were about race.

For example, his London colleagues wondered whether his smallpox experiments done on “Negro women” were valid for English women. “Some gentlemen” in London were concerned that experiments done on slave women were not valid for “women of fashion, and of delicate constitutions.” Treatments appropriate for enslaved women, they warned, might well destroy ladies of “delicate habits, …educated in European luxury.”

African contributions to science

African, Amerindian and European knowledges mixed on Caribbean sugar plantations.

Europeans had little experience with the tropical disease they encountered in the Caribbean, but Africans did. One of my purposes in this book is to expand our knowledge of African contributions to science.

An extraordinary experiment in 1773 pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados. In something of a “cure-off,” a slave’s remedy for yaws was tested against the standard European remedy. Under the master’s careful eye, four slaves were treated by a European-trained surgeon, two by the slave doctor.

The surgeon employed a standard mercurial treatment, which, when taken over several years, tended to leave slaves’ health “broken.” Meanwhile, the slave set to work with methods learned in his “own Country” (presumably Africa). This consisted of sweating his patients “powerfully” twice a day in a cask with a small fire and by giving them a medicine made from two woods, known locally as “Bois Royale and Bois fer.”

The outcome? The slave’s patients were cured within a fortnight; the surgeon’s patients were not. The plantation owner, a man of science, consequently put the man of African origins in charge of all yaws patients in his plantation hospital. In the process, the enslaved man – who remained nameless and faceless throughout – was elevated in status to a “Negro Dr.”

African, Amerindian and European knowledges mixed on Caribbean sugar plantations.
Londa Schiebinger and Erik Steiner., CC BY-SA

The Atlantic world represents a step in globalization, the potential enrichment of the human experience when worlds collide. But the extinction of peoples, such as the Amerindians in the Greater Antilles, coupled with the fear and secrecy bred in the enslavement of Africans, meant that knowledge did not circulate freely. Amerindians and enslaved Africans strategically held many secrets. Though hidden or suppressed, much of this knowledge can still be found today in local Caribbean remedies.

Bertrand Bajon, a French physician working in Cayenne, envied the “numerous plant cures” known to “Indians and Negroes.” Bajon pleaded that “for the good of humanity” slaves be obliged to “communicate the plants he [or she] used and the manner in which they are employed.” In return, Bajon recommended the slave be offered freedom – but not until “a great number of experiments confirmed the cure’s virtue.”

We must remember that knowledge created in this period did not respond to science for its own sake, but was fired in the colonial crucible of conquest, slavery and violence.

Londa Schiebinger, Professor of History of Science, Stanford University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Trump's new Afghanistan strategy gets one thing right but questions remain

Donald Trump announced the new US strategy for the war in Afghanistan from Fort Myer, Virginia, on August 21 2017. Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Despite frequent past calls to disengage from Afghanistan after 16 years of US military involvement, President Donald Trump now has a strategy of continued engagement.

“My original instinct was to pull out”, he said on August 21 at the Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Virginia. But “decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office”.

Though short on details, the plan includes increasing US troop presence by 50% and bolstering the capacity of local armed forces and police, from front line troops to central command posts. Trump said the US will also get tougher on Afghan corruption and on Pakistani support for insurgents and will remain in Afghanistan as long as conditions require, with no set end date.

On its surface, this plan hits a lot of important marks for creating a stable and peaceful Afghanistan, but as an expert on the country and on international intervention, I also retain grave doubts about its sustainability and feasibility.

Staying the course

Proponents of radical change will likewise be disappointed. For Erik Prince, brother to US Education Secretary Betsy Devos and founder of the notorious private-security firm Blackwater, the war should be privatised.

The former West Wing advisor Steve Bannon agrees, and from his restored podium at Breitbart News he is now accusing Trump of “flip-flopping”.

MIT professor Barry Posen, like Trump in his past life, believes that the US should withdraw entirely, leaving Afghanistan to cause headaches for American enemies and rivals alike.

Eric Prince of Blackwater (now XE) helicopters send items to US troops in Afghanistan, 2007.
soldiersmediacenter/Wikimedia

In my assessment, retreat would be either cynical or dangerously off-target. Since 2001 the US has aimed to build stable Afghan institutions resilient enough to prevent the country from returning to its pre-September 11 2001 status as the ungovernable host of international terrorists.

A pullout would surrender this ambition, disregard the fate of the country’s citizens and, most likely, usher in a power vacuum that would haunt the world.

I’ve spoken at length with US and allied officials, and I do not think Afghanistan is on the brink of renewed Taliban dominance.

I do believe, however, that India is poised to go from soft power to hard power. India is investing more in Afghanistan than Pakistan is, including by offering more funds for development, yet to date it has kept its political profile low and restrained its export of arms.

But India will almost certainly flex its muscles if the US pulls out of the region while Pakistan continues its covert policy of stoking insurgency to gain political control.

As the authors conclude in the recent book I edited, South Asia and the Great Powers: International Relations and Regional Security, threats to Afghanistan’s future are plentiful – inside and out. The US is poor at regional strategy, India has great unrealised potential and Pakistan is fearful.

In Afghanistan, nationalism in the country’s largest ethnic community, the Pashtuns, could fuel new conflict if outsiders keep undermining government authority.

Wasted resources

Doubling down on capacity building does merit this warning, though: the present strategy has largely failed to meet the lofty promises of the 2006 Afghan Compact and ensuing 2008-2013 Afghan National Development Strategy. Enormous resources have been wasted over the past 15 years.

First, after knocking out the Taliban (temporarily, as it turns out), the Bush administration, along with NATO allies and other international partners, endeavoured to build a new, democratic Afghanistan in record time. But they didn’t know where to start nor how to sustain that effort.

By 2008, when president Barack Obama took office, it had become clear that this campaign was disconnected from reality. Obama added troops, advisers, and cash flows to secure the country, but he also wanted out. His administration’s strategic narrative of “transition” never really reflected conditions on the ground.

Trump, steering clear of this urge to retreat, has defined one clear priority: support the Afghan people who control the arms – the military and police top brass, plus their political masters.

Ultimately, the goal, it seems, is for a core of Afghan elites to begin acting in the public interest, rather than for private gain, and to empower Kabul so that the Taliban will come to the table for reconciliation talks that might bring Afghanistan’s long civil war to an end.

Patience as a strategy

Based on my research into power transitions and international intervention, such elites can emerge in different ways.

One path is to build up liberal democratic institutions and encourage civil society to grow and propel accountable leaders to the top. This was the international community’s strategy in Afghanistan since day one, and the outcome has been disappointing.

The international community has paid insufficient attention to another path, state-building, which is not incompatible with liberal institutionalism (if executed with patience and diplomatic skill). Elite power-sharing followed by investment in security ministries could work in Afghanistan.

But this requires US decision-makers, diplomats and military leaders to build relationships with foreign elites to draw them into public service, and to do so for the long haul, skills that don’t seem to be among Trump’s strong suits.

Since the US-backed president Hamid Karzai left office in 2014, Afghani government power has in effect been shared between the president and prime minister. This was a welcome change from Karzai’s absolutism, but power sharing has also proven politically explosive and the divided state has not served its people well.



Drawing high-level defence and police officials into a role as guardians of the public interest – where their allegiance first and foremost is to the state and not their tribe or family – is a necessary but complicated next step. The US and others are already investing in this area, but here, too, unresolved power balancing among ethnic groups spills over and complicates their work.

To turn a dispersed and fractious collection of elite players into a team capable of governing a nation, the US must engage not just Afghanistan’s government and military but also its warlords. Their violent history and disregard for the rule of law may seem objectionable, but without them power sharing in Kabul will come to naught.

I am not convinced that Trump can deliver on all of this. His speech was clouded by America First politics (“India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States”) and Trumpian bravado (“We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists”).

What the US strategy is still missing is the connection between American interests and those of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, whose elites essentially want to see power distributed in their capitals. US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defence James Mattis are all capable of this kind of real geopolitical thinking.

But if their president is not, they will fail in Afghanistan, too. Trump has stabilised the canoe in Afghanistan, but now he needs to paddle.

Sten Rynning, Professor of International Security and War Studies, University of Southern Denmark

This article was originally published on The Conversation.