The other day I was reminded of this post on “Walls around the world” I wrote 18 months ago by a friend and I promised to post it again. Now there are even more walls. The whole of Gaza has always been a walled enclave in the midst of stolen lands. Now it is surrounded by walls of tanks and naval guns. Ironic that the siege of Gaza reminds me of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. I wonder if the Israeli IDF spokeswoman makes the connection - doubtful with such self-righteous supremacist arrogance.
Another new wall is the one between Zimbabwe and South Africa where refugees escaping hunger, political oppression and disease are chased by white vigilantes with automatic weapons and dragged back across the wired borders. If they make it to the city they face xenophobic hysteria from their brothers in the post apartheid wasteland’s.
And then there are the invisible borders - where people are divided between the included and excluded. Legal and illegal. welcome and unwelcome. Those in the clique and those standing on the periphery trying to enter till eventually they tire and go create their own set of invisible walled enclaves excluding and including according to some set of arbitrary criteria which is what makes cliques so horribly oppressive.
Whilst the Apartheid wall being built by the Israelis is probably the most well known there are other walls that have been built, are being built and will be built in the future.
Morocco built one in the 1980s during the war of independence with the Polisario Front. To maintain their occupation of Western Sahara the Moroccan government built a wall of 2700 kilometres with mines, across the desert with the help of their good friends the Israelis. The wall prevents the Saharawi from crossing back into their lands from the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria.
Then there are the new fences recently built between the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. Here Morocco acts as a proxy police force for Europe to prevent migrants from West Africa and Morocco from entering Spain. The fences are barbed wire with razor edges. Recently Spanish PM, Zapartero announced a third parameter fence as the present two are proving insufficient to stop people climbing over despite the dangers. Read the rest of this article »
RN from Squatter City has started a new blog “Stealth of Nations” which reports on the global informal economy. In this latest post he reports on the sale of shoes under Eko Bridge in Lagos
The Abassa Alakoro Market in Lagos, Nigeria. If Max Weber was right that “the ‘city’ is a market place,” then Lagos is the absolute definition of a city–and the informal economy is what made it that way.
The second hand shoes in the photo probably come from all over the world - some specially imported to sell under Eko Bridge. The global south has always been a huge market for used clothing, electronics, food (it is not difficult to find canned food well past it’s sell by date in markets), drugs and anything else the West no long wants or needs . This is fine to the extent that what is being sent is not a heath hazard or likely to generally add to an already polluted environment. Nonetheless with rising unemployment (set to reach between 3-5 million depending on how you calculate the figures) the market for used clothing in the West is growing and I wonder how that will affect markets in the global south? For example most people I know here in London buy at least some of their clothes and other products from charity shops or even better through the Freecycle networks.
For many the informal economy is the only means of survival whether you are a buyer or seller and I expect it to grow as people do whatever they need to, to survive.
The shoe of an unknown person killed by guns or bombs. How many empty shoes are lying alone their owners dead in Zimbabwe, the DRC and now Gaza?
Update - lack of concentration led to this post being published before it was completed!
Transsexualism is the ism at the point of treatment for a condition referred to as “gender dysphoria” which crudely means, “an extreme discomfort with birth sex”. This can affect male, female or other bodied people. Transsexuals as a result come in MTF (male to female) which means the individual’s sex preference is female or to be a woman. FTM (female to male) means the individual’s sex preference is male or to be a man. Female or male then also have feminine or masculine gender attributes or even both depending on the individual in question. Read the rest of this article »
After having been forced from their homes in Eldoret by post-election violence, three women talk about why their had to turn to prostitution to make a living
