<h3>Afrique Sans Frontieres</h3>

Centre Noeuds [Roberto Matta]

I have undone this distance | So many times before | It seems as if this life of mine | Is trapped between two shores | As the little ones grow older on the station platform | I will undo that distance just once more.

Frank Paynter's stirring the pot. He points to Bruce Stirling on Worldchanging, commenting on, among other things, last year's World Summit on the Information Society, "...the weirdest global summit on the globe..." where "delegates from 180 nations triumphantly proclaimed the dawn of universal global access to information!" Yeah, okay, you're right to sneer. I agree. Sceptism is healthy. But give the guy a chance:

At WSIS, earnest people are trying hard to make it look like our world's net-transformation is happening on purpose. There might be a tipping point in there — if enough of them can agree on a societal spirit and a set of online rules.

Okay, we all know what that means. Back to the drawing board. Or does it? These guys are not figureheads, and they've travelled a long way from bureaucracy, immersing themselves "...apparently forever, in a dizzying host of thoroughly unlikely, lateral, polyglot connections." Pointing out WSIS drawbacks, e.g. the Net affords self-respecting, grease-palmed politicians few diplomatic, deliberative, multi-lingual regulators worthy of the name, Stirling sees the summit as a forum in which those who attend, do the work. They are "digital Sherpas", people capable of realising dreams. But success is not a dead cert.

WSIS may not succeed — but somebody probably could. Then you'd truly have the world-changing infant of the Net and the UN. The group that pulled that off could be bigger than the self-appointed Davos Forum, faster and smarter than the Porto Alegre contingent, less cranky than the Soros initiatives, less creepy than Bilderberg, more potent than MoveOn, and faster-spreading than Napster. Imagine that — what if that actually worked?

Ho-hum. Yeah, sure. What if...? Mind you, why the hell not? The World Forum on Communication Rights, a valuable exercise in its own right, runs alongside the WSIS as a sideshow. These people have clout. Imagine if...

And hold the thought...


Oceane les Tempetes [Roberto Matta]

My brothers and my sisters have been scattered in the wind | Dressed in cheap horizons that have never quite fitted | And for centuries they've travelled in a pale phantom ship | Sailing for that shore which has no other.

...while imagining Africa stripped of its borders, those long, straight strips drawn across the continent's face by its former rulers, the depraved European colonials of not so long ago. Crazed after a century of making like Americans in Iraq, the barbaric conquistadors drank the blood of millions before divvying up Africa among themselves. We locals eyed them quietly and waited. Time and opportunity swung our way during the sixties and we flogged our former masters like mange-ridden dogs before driving them back north with their tails between their legs.

A ghastly testament to white barbarity, the lines on the map remain. And that is apparently why Madison is hosting the AWB Conference 2004. Umm, yeah, that's the Africa Without Borders Conference, not the Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging. Though he might be one of the Great South Africans (according to SABC3's execrable programme of that name), Eugene Terreblanche wouldn't last a day in Madison. Americans aren't as tolerant as Africans. Africa Without Borders wants Pan-Africanism to work. Unlike the WSIS, its capacity to effect change lies beyond the ubiquity of information.

Borders are a bugger. Especially those drawn unilaterally by foreign slave traders, earth gougers, death dealers and soldiers of fortune. They give rise to a structured, artificial view of a world in flux. For the Westerner, globalisation transcends these now inconvenient lines on maps, rendering them superfluous. Advantages of globalisation, however, accrue only to said Westerners. Africans, who've heard the huge sucking sound off the west coast (where the oil used to be), are aware of this.

"Remember Mogadishu," mutters the old man to the young boy cleaning his rusted AK-47 at the entrance to his hut. The boy looks up at him and smiles. "Don't worry, Poppa. Najaf and Fallujah too. We'll just repeat the exercise. They won't be here long."

In general, Africans have long dispensed with or transcended the white man's borders. Ask any white man. Or woman, for that matter. Especially in Cape Town. "The buggers are all over the place. What do they think this is? Nirvana? I mean, the car park attendant is Rwandan, the cleaning lady is from Burundi, my son's drug dealer is from Nigeria and the Church is being flooded by people from the DRC. Angolans and Zimbabweans are taking jobs from our locals and I'm willing to bet Athlone's full of al-Qa'ida members from Algeria, Libya, Kenya and Tanzania. That said, they're certainly not as lazy as our chaps. Good luck to them."

Yes, well, that's Cape Town for you. It's becoming 'Africanised'. Not surprisingly, the rest of Africa's already Africanised. It's full of teachers, writers, soldiers, artists, politicians, peasants, musicians, academics, philosophers, businessmen and doctors...about 900 million people who view the world differently than your average NYSE stockbroker.

Some Africans, however, especially those buying into the crumbs falling from globalisation's groaning table, are into border maintenance. Self-proclaimed lords and masters of all they survey, they treat their countries and their people as personal assets. Their self-serving greed, fed by Western overlords driven crazy by the thought of all those diamonds, coltan, plutonium, manganese, uranium and all that oil, threatens Africa's future and its survival. A cursory study of Africa Without Borders' agenda [pdf] shows a life of indentured servitude does not appeal to all. Drawing on the teachings of our Sobukwes, Africa Without Borders seeks to swap the gun for the pen by employing an African mobilisation to effectively counter Western globalisation.

The conference kicks off by interrogating borders and nationalism in West Africa, defines Pan-Africanism and works from local to global, reinventing globalisation as a not-altogether undesirable inevitability contributing to Africa's development. Inexorably, we're drawn into examining methods of adding value to our intellectual, artistic, linguistic and cultural capital through media dissemination. Delegates will then comprehensively tackle problems (conflict, politics, xenophobia, educational constraints and hiv / AIDS) and try to assess the youth's potential to give weight and effect to change.

It seems delegates, drawing on the experience of African Americans, will then link the spread of essentially African ideas to the diaspora, the natural and unnatural flows of people, be they within or without Africa, examining quantitative and qualitative measurements of success and failure, and exploring advocacy and activism.

These delgates, unlike the World Summit on the Information Society mob, are intellectual rather than digital 'sherpas', seeking a free flow of ideas relegating borders to instruments of bureaucratic facilitation. Yet, much like the delegates at the WSIS, they are people capable of realising dreams. Applying Bruce Stirling's remarks quoted above, there is no reason why Africa Without Borders should not achieve its objectives. Africa's borders will then increasingly come to be seen for what they are, useful reminders of an unthinking globalisation's arbitrary nature; lines drawn in African blood by indifferent rulers preferring the sword to the pen.

From our hands leap the buildings | From our shoulders bridges fall | We stand astride the mountain | And pull out all the gold | The rivers of our homelands | Murmur in our dreams | We are trapped inside that distance | Until the future sets us free.

Johnny Clegg | Universal Men