The Dominion - Ted Rutland

"African People Pulling Together"

hillarybain — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:15:13 +0000

Black Nova Scotian community to join African Union

HALIFAX—“I’m a black man from a hostile environment,” says David Horne.

Horne is an international facilitator with the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC), and was in Halifax in the summer to address a town hall meeting at Africville Park. Along with the other organizers of the event, Horne was hoping to gauge the interest of the African Nova Scotian community in becoming part of the SRDC—and, indeed, becoming leading members of it. Around 150 people attended the town hall, trekking through a major downpour to discuss their collective future under the ceiling of an event-sized tent.

As Horne explained, the SRDC is a new initiative of the African Union, an organization that links together 55 of 56 countries on the African continent and is intended to create a common voice for African people in international affairs. Until recently, representation in the Union was limited to African people living on the continent. The estimated 350 million Africa-descended people living in the worldwide diaspora were excluded. But the African Union now wants to reach further. In addition to the five regions of the continent, the Union aims to create a “sixth region”: the worldwide diaspora.

For Horne, the creation of the sixth region is an acknowledgment of the affinities and commonalities that have endured among African people, wherever they happen to live in the present.

“You aren’t an African because you were born in Africa,” he tells the town hall audience. “You’re African because Africa was born in you.”

The sixth region initiative, in offering the diaspora an official role in the African Union, finally promises to create a venue large and inclusive enough for African people to come together and plan a better, collective future. It's a vision that Rocky Jones, a presenter at the town hall and longtime Halifax-based activist, summarized as “African people pulling together.”

At this point, the sixth region is only an invitation. It remains to be accepted,* Horne explains, and that means “organizing ourselves to present ourselves and represent ourselves.” Canada is one of many countries with a significant African diaspora, and the sixth region initiative calls for African Canadians to decide if they want to be included in the African Union and, if so, to elect a set of representatives. Each recognized community within Canada is to elect a “community council of elders,” while the overall African Canadian population is to elect a single representative to send to the African Union.

Horne hopes that the African Nova Scotian community will play a leading role amid the Canadian-based diaspora. The province is home to 47 black settlements with a history that predates the founding of Canada, and North Preston is recognized as the largest black community anywhere in the country.

“This is where the black population started [in Canada],” Horne explained. “We can’t go to Montreal, we can’t go to Toronto, we can’t go anyplace else before we go here. You are the beginning.”

Participants in town hall seemed impressed, and often inspired, by what they heard. Loud applause from the audience followed many of the presenters’ propositions, and there was a tangible sense of excitement about the overall vision. For African people to “pull together” would seem to create a new, stronger approach to the challenges that Africans face, from Harare to Halifax.

David Horne hails from Florida, but the “hostile environment” that he mentioned exists in Halifax as well. In the last decade alone, the HRM municipal government has been criticized for a number of decisions, including: sanctioning police-force racial profiling; closing public schools with a relatively high proportion of black students; situating a waste treatment facility in a poor and racialized neighbourhood; and undertaking repairs to Lake ste Major Road that greatly inconvenienced the residents of North Preston, while making a shortcut available to a neighbouring white community. And this string of issues stems from one institution: City Hall. Discrimination in the school system, the labour market, and in housing remain serious issues as well.

For Horne, however, African people are not only defined by the common problems they face. In the communities formed in hostile environments, there is a rich cultural and political tradition that needs to be recognized, honoured, and carried forward.

“We’re here to talk about moving forward,” he concluded. “You’ve been given a choice: you can get involved in the organizing of your part of the African diaspora. And in this world, you’re not always given a choice.”

The choice will need to be made by the community itself, and the town hall concluded with the formation of a committee that will seek to spread information about the sixth region and mobilize community members for a vote on the initiative, at a later date. In the meantime, the organizers of the event—including Horne, Jones, and Halifax resident Denise Allen—headed off to other African Nova Scotian communities to spread the world and offer new choices.

*At a meeting in North Preston on August 22, 2011, the African Nova Scotian community elected a Community Council of Elders and agreed to establish the first chapter of the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus in Canada.

Ted Rutland is a professor of urban studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is working on a book on the history of urban planning in Halifax, and travelled to Halifax in July to attend the town hall meeting at Africville Park. This article originally appeared in the Halifax Media Co-op.

African migrations

Citigroup Comes Clean: World's Largest Bank Adopts Landmark Environmental Policy

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 19:07:35 +0000

Rainforest Action Network activists hang a banner outside of Citibank Headquarters in New York City. Photo: Rainforest Action Network

In a surprise announcement on January 22nd, Citigroup signaled its intention to adopt a comprehensive environmental policy that even the company's staunchest critics are calling "the most significant environmental commitment to date in the financial services sector."

Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company, has been criticized in recent years for providing financial backing to a long list of ecologically and socially destructive projects around the world. The company's involvement with the Three Gorges Dam in China and the monolithic Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline in Africa, in particular, have drawn the ire of several significant Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

The new environmental policy, announced at a press conference at the headquarters of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), commits Citigroup to deny funding for any and all logging operations in tropical rainforests - a first in the financial services sector. Citigroup must also apply stringent prohibitions to guard against investment in illegal logging operations, and place strict restrictions on involvement with other extractive industries operating in sensitive ecosystems around the world. The policy covers all future lending and financing, but will not be applied retroactively to current Citigroup investments.

To combat climate change, the policy calls for Citigroup to curtail its emissions of greenhouse gases and strive to reduce the emissions of its lending portfolio by helping clients finance energy efficient technologies and renewable energy projects. In its annual Corporate Citizenship report, the company will report the greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector projects in its lending portfolio using methodologies that are peer reviewed with experts and NGOs. This is the first time that a private bank has offered such data.

"We aspire to operate according to the highest standards in every arena in which we do business, and the environment is no exception," said Charles Prince, Chief Executive Officer of Citigroup. "We believe we can make a difference by holding ourselves accountable for our own impact on the environment, by embedding our commitment to environmental responsibility in our lending practices, by embracing sustainable business opportunities, and by engaging in the public domain on these issues to help foster solutions to often very thorny questions."

The new policy is a response to an impressive three-year campaign by Rainforest Action Group and a broad coalition of environmentalists, human rights activists, and socially responsible investment groups. The campaign included television advertisements with Susan Sarandon and Daryl Hannah calling on customers to cut up their Citi credit cards, and print ads that ask, "It's 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your money is?" below photos of the ecological and social destruction caused by Citi-backed projects.

The coalition focused, from start to finish, on attaching a financial cost to the company's harmful activities by inspiring consumer boycotts and urging shareholders to sell off their Citigroup shares. "We saw vulnerability in Citigroup's desire to be the best-known consumer bank in the world," says RAN's Erick Brownstein. Symbolic of RAN's focus on the financial implications of malfeasance, the campaign was launched at Citigroup's annual shareholders meeting in the spring of 2001.

Following the money, from damaging projects to their source, has become the mantra of the global justice movement in recent years. Rather than shaming particular governments or singling-out every objectionable corporation, many NGOs and activists now concentrate on cutting off the money supply to projects deemed harmful - no matter who carries them out - by urging financial institutions to adopt ecologically and socially sensitive policies around lending and other types of project financing.

Government-affiliated financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were the early targets of this strategy because of their role in imposing neo-liberal, or "free market", economic policies upon poor countries and financing an endless string of misguided resource-extraction, energy, and transportation mega-projects. But private financial institutions have since overtaken, by far, the World Bank and IMF as the leading financiers of Third World development.

In the 1980s, roughly 80% of the money flowing to Third World countries came from governments and government-affiliated institutions. Today, it is corporations, not governments, which account for 80% of money flows to the Third World, and financial services companies regularly fund projects that even the World Bank deplores. As Michelle Chan-Fishel of Friends of the Earth puts it: "It's increasingly clear that the driver of development is no longer the World Bank."

Though Citigroup now has a strong environmental policy, few other financial institutions have taken such a step. Financing for destructive projects, in other words, is unlikely to dry up anytime soon. Fortunately, Rainforest Action Network seems intent on changing the entire financial services industry. After a successful end to its Citigroup campaign, RAN is now challenging "The Liquidators" - top US financial services companies lacking environmental standards - to "meet or beat" the terms of Citi's environmental policy.

Citigroup's policy is significant, not because of the small changes it will affect today, but because of the larger changes it could bring about later on. Its importance lies in the message it sends to the financial services industry. "Citigroup's new environmental initiatives signal the beginning of an ecological u-turn in the global marketplace," says Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network. "This is a wake up call to Wall Street as well as Washington."

- by Ted Rutland -