Left Turn  http://www.leftturn.org/

Protests at the World Social Forum
By Ewa Jasiewicz

It’s a brutally hot January day in Nairobi, where more than 60,000
people from 1,400 organizations and 110 countries are gathered for the
2007 World Social Forum. Under a bright white sun, a dozen or so child
dancers from the plains of the Masai Mara are milling around outside a
canvas-tented restaurant. The chefs inside are serving whole roast
Tilapia, and firm hot pudding-bowl mounds of Ugali (boiled Maize) topped
with shredded pork and beef. Diners are quietly tucking into their
dishes at plastic chairs and tables.

More youngsters arrive outside – this bunch is a bit rougher, all boys,
‘slum-dwellers’, wearing worn-out, dusty clothes, and easy smiles.
They’re also visibly hungry, their necks craning to take in the sizzling
hotplates and polished, heaped salad cart.

More people show up, a ragtag of black, white and brown. They sit down
amongst the diners and some begin to speak to them. Did they know that
the restaurant they were eating in was part owned by the Kenyan Minister
for Internal Security, John ‘The Crusher’ Michuki? Michuki, a one time
District Officer serving in the British Colonial Administration in Nyeri
during the massively repressed Mau Mau revolt had also ordered armed
raids on The Standard newspaper and the Kenya Television News station in
Nairobi in March 2006. Michuki is also responsible for security forces,
which have been executing people in the settlements (‘slums’) with
impunity.

The diners meals have cost them around 500 schillings – $7, which is 2
whole days work in an Export Processing Zone or a week’s food for the
average Kenyan; 60% (20 million) of whom live on less than a dollar a
day.

Suddenly, the overpriced comfort zone erupts with singing, dancing,
jumping and fist-pumping. Palestinian, South African, French, Belgian,
Indian and more are up on their feet; some are holding hands, some are
banging drums, some are thumping plastic chairs. It’s a party, it’s a
protest, it’s a celebration of the impending Take.

The singing turns to chanting, the children leading the demand, ‘We Want
Food, We Want Food’. Negotiations ensue, backed up by shouting and
crowd-surging towards the steaming hotplates.

The management staunchly defend their overpriced wares. Negotiations
reach a deadlock and a plastic chair gets thrown. Hands begin to grab.
Those that can reach begin to help others, to plastic pups of fresh cold
water, lumps of marble cake are snatched; kids cram towards the steaming
hotplates, only hot glass between them and a full stomach; we are
hundreds, the management cannot hold the line.

The restaurant is going to have to give it up to a surging, swarming,
relentless quest for food. Protestors replace the waiters behind the hot
plates and start serving food, and a swell of triumph rolls through the
crowd. It’s a free-for-all, its ecstatic. Cheers and yelps and claps and
more fists pump the air. Floppy cardboard plates with greasy pilau and
shredded beef are yanked away by young lads who can’t believe their
luck. Cold slices of ham, bread rolls, spoonfuls of chili sauce, grilled
vegetables, roast potatoes, chopped salad, quartered butter chickens,
every last scrap of food is dished up and given out, portion after
portion disappearing into the hungry crowd.

This was the Nairobi World Social Forum – a celebration of global
struggles over land, water, food security; resistance to war,
occupation, imperialism, free market fundamentalism, governments and
their ‘Graft’ (Corruption). Unfortunately, the World Social Forum this
year was also the most commodified and exclusive so far, sponsored by
Celtel, Kenya Airways and Brazilian oil company Petrobras.

Organizations wishing to host activities (to bring their issue to
market) to in effect put forward their agenda had to pay 30,000
schillings for the privilege – a price so unaffordable it reduced most
poor Kenyans to spectators and subjects in the debates on their very own
lives. Despite the daily morning protests forcing the gates open for the
poor to get in free, many couldn’t even afford the bus fare to even
reach the gates of the Forum.

People’s Parliament

The antidote to this economic lockout was to organize a parallel, free
forum outside of but still part of the WSF. This is what Bunge La
Mwananchi (The Peoples’ Parliament) created. Bunge is a 15-year-old
voluntary, non-hierarchical Kenyan peoples’ movement. It organized the
first African Social Forum in Nairobi in 2005 and has catalyzed a series
of inspiring peoples’ campaigns and protests, including the food
liberation action and the daily gatecrashings. Bunge set up an
alternative 4-day event in the inner city Jevanjee Gardens. This was a
grassroots, paid-from-the-organizers-own-pockets, free event in a park,
with gatherings taking place under cloth canopies equipped with nothing
but plastic chairs and a PA system. Two women’s groups from the
Kamunkuji slums provided a meal and tea – 50 schillings for a plate of
rice and 10 for a cup of tea.

In the end 4000 people – the vast majority of them poor Kenyans – took
part. Internationals included Ponte Per, Novox, Alternatives
International, Iraq Occupation Focus, Jubilee South, Kenya Land
Alliance, Block G8 and the El Molo Rights and Development Forum.
Participants discussed land policy and ownership, squatterism and
landlessness, privatization, globalization, international trade and
treaties, food security, employment, rights of minorities and indigenous
populations, and socialism.

Exhausted workers and the unemployed sleep in the grass at Jevangee;
their arms shielding their eyes or providing a skin-pillow for their
heads. They slept under trees, beside hedgerows, some oblivious to the
forum; for this is a place to rest, to lay down ones head; to recoup.

The Peoples’ Parliament has been meeting regularly in Jevangee for over
10 years. Their corner of the park is a small tree-shaded corridor
flanked by two opposing benches. A tree stump bridges the two – it is
the ‘debate-master’s stool. Intent men (few women attend) in smart
shirts carrying folders and pens regularly come to think together, to
listen to each other, discuss their problems together and try and find a
solution together. They are inspired by their Mau Mau forefathers and
Malcolm X.

In Kenya, 80% of the country’s wealth is owned by 10% of the population
whilst 80% of the arable land is owned by 5% of the population. Since
2003, the cost of food, fuel and transport has increased by more than
100%. Maize Flour – or Unga – a staple for Kenya’s poor, shot up from 27
schillings to 60 schillings in 2003. Following the Unga price hike,
Bunge mounted an “Unga For 30 Schillings” campaign to agitate for a
reduction in food prices.

According to Wangui Mbatia, one of the leading women activists in the
leaderless Peoples Parliament, “the authorities nearly had a fit. The
police refused to let us have license for demonstrations or processions,
arguing that the campaign would spark a revolution! But the people were
generally very happy with the idea of reduced food prices, and last
year's budget reflected most of our recommendations.”

Bunge have run a series of campaigns on bread-and-butter - or
unga-and-water - issues over the past 15 years of their existence. These
include The Nile Water campaign against the Nile treaty authored by the
colonial British Government that restricts Kenya’s access to the waters
of Lake Victoria and the rivers around it; the Magadi Soda Campaign
against a British conglomerate which mines malakite (from which
silicates are extracted) and supplies over 40% of the world's silicon;
and the Constitution Campaign – an education and protest campaign for a
Kenyan constitution that respects human rights, which saw three of their
fellow protestors killed in prison following mass demonstrations.

People’s settlements

Many of Bunge’s organizers and members come from the peoples’
settlements (slums), which are home to over a million of Nairobi’s
inhabitants. Settlements such as Kibera, which is the biggest settlement
in Africa and was famously featured in ‘The Constant Gardener. Kibera is
a shanty settlement with open sewers, an HIV infection rate of 20% and
the ever-present threat of eviction by bulldozer, courtesy of the Kenyan
Government.

World Social Forum organizers arranged for participants to visit the
slums of Nairobi, either by guided tour or on planned marches. To
Wangui, who helps organize women in the settlements to fight for better
living conditions, it was an affront. ‘One does not need to see the
nakedness of our children to know that children have no clothes. I think
the idea was insulting; one learns absolutely nothing about poverty
after passing through a slum in a multitude.”

“People living in the slums have untold wealth,” Wangui continues.
“They have each other. In fact, that other world that the WSF speaks of
exists in the slums. Neighbors mind each other's children without any
semblance of structured childcare, they provide credit to each other,
they borrow foodstuffs from each other when they lack, they greet each
other every morning.... they are socialists! Every one minds the other-
when someone is sick, he's taken to the hospital by the neighbors, food
is cooked and children minded. But one cannot see those positive things
in one morning's procession through the slum. The result of such
procession is a group of "activists" dutifully horrified by the "extreme
poverty" they see, and to local NGOs, hope that the visiting donors will
be even more agreeable to increasing the bottom-line in their
proposals... It leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.”

But the resilience, innovation and anarchy of the Peoples Parliament
left a sweet taste in the mouths of those who spent time with them. They
sustained a sense and spirit of what social forums really can be and
should be – D.I.Y open events, open spaces, where people meet as equals
and co-operate to change their material and social conditions, from the
grassroots up, without selling out, and without giving up.


Ewa Jasiewicz was a delegate to the World Social Forum for the UK based
Iraq Occupation Focus (www.iraqoccupationfocus.org.uk) and works for
PLATFORM as a researcher/campaigner (www.platformlondon.org)