This is all too familiar. Aboriginal people’s ousted from their traditional living spaces, destroying culture, sacred spaces, dividing families… just too familiar.

We in the world must recognise, these evils are happening thousands of miles away, but what happens to the least of us, happens to all of us. We all pay the price.

“Indigenous Landowners have been stripped of their Constitutionally-protected land rights by the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Without any warning or consultation, on 27 May 2010, the government of PNG introduced emergency legislation that dissolves the Constitutional rights of all landowners in PNG, including the right of Indigenous People to own land, challenge resource projects in court and receive any form compensation for environmental damage.

‘The legislation was passed by Parliament without anybody being allowed to see the Bill before it was presented’, comments ACT NOW!, an independent organization based in PNG. ‘Nobody was allowed to read or comment on the text. There was no scrutiny by a Select Committee and not even a Parliamentary debate.’

The driving force behind the legislation and its secrecy–like pretty much every draconian measure ever introduced into law–is ‘National Interest.’”

(Via Papua New Guinea: Indigenous People stripped of land rights : Intercontinental Cry.)

“…King William was a friend of Bussa, the overall slave leader who was tried and put to death for his crime.”

This was taken from page 18 of this year’s edition of The Ins and Outs of Barbados, where the preceding paragraph discusses King William being the leader of the slaves from Sunbury Plantation House (the actual subject of the article) who participated in the greater Rebellion that they were all put to death for.

My question to the editors of this publication: Tell me: What was the crime that Bussa committed exactly?

Your article, doesn’t qualify your comment or discuss SLAVERY in Barbados, only the house in which the slavers lived. So why even put that whole paragraph this quote ends into the piece at all? Only to add a bit of ‘colour’ to the piece, because well we’re in Barbados after all?
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Back in November of 2008, faced with the need to begin travelling again post-baby, I made a largely fruitless trip down to Trinidad to renew my passport.

After the easy, smooth, frictionless experience of having it extended while I was in London, I found the arduous two-to-four-day process in Trinidad horrifying, and as I mentioned before, without ultimate success.

Why, in 2010, with Trinidad’s 2020 deadline for ‘progress’ looming, the process being demanded for acquiring official paperwork needs to be so cryptic, so time consuming, so mired in pointless wasted bureaucratic niggly wiggly nonsense, is beyond me.

The worst part is, if you are a Trinidadian and living in Europe or North America, you can post in your passport and documentation, and have the whole kit and kaboodle posted back to you. If you are resident in the Caribbean, you are basically fucked.

You cannot post in your documentation, you must go to the expense of traveling to Trinidad and submitting yourself to the demoralising experience that is this unbelievably time consuming process to get your paperwork.
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Every so often, some stupid shit pops up and I find the contrast between sense and nonsense just so glaring and pronounced, it warrants a comment. Fireal…

Me ain’t know about you, but apparently a furor has been brewing for a week or so about a ‘racist’ KFC ad aired in Australia. Being interested in Down Under (have no idea why, but I love the country, the Aborigines, the accent, and the insouciance of the Aussie character) and having several friends either originating from there, or currently residing there, I clicked this link in @mashable’s twitter timeline, and read their non-commentary about KFC’s embroiling by the American public taking offense to this ad.
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Excellent article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examining the underbelly of modern self-hatred among women of colour around the world.

She asks some pertinent questions about why we are continuing to spiral into forced de-racialisation and assimilation, without adequate social fight-back.

Come on sisters, stay away from the media’s grape kool-aid.

I know that I am consistently disturbed by the prevalence of these issues among my sisters, and I guess this is why I stopped wearing makeup, went back to my dreadlocks, and have largely eschewed all fashion.

I just can’t buy media images of what I am supposed to be. I refuse to be defined that way, but alas… I am unusual in the world and not the norm.

Back in the Sixties, the Black Is Beautiful movement in the U.S. spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Uganda, where I was growing up.

I stopped ironing my hair to try to make it look like Jean Shrimpton’s, and my African college room-mates let their hair go naturally Afro again. No more burnt hair in the sink, and a new dawn, we thought.

For a few decades, yes. But now we have a world where American morality and media impose their standardised Western notions on every corner of the globe. And a surge in ‘ethnic’ self-loathing and self-mutilation has emerged in its wake.

What is different now is the absence of any political or social fightback against this. The message seems to be that race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege. Then what?

Do Jet and Umi and all those other young women think they will be good enough to please the bigots of the BNP?

When, oh when, will we stop being our own worst enemies?

via YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN: Why are so many black and Asian women desperate to be white? | Mail Online.

“They will be failed states.” Bernadette Lewis, Secretary General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, says in article posted to 7 News Belize. She is referring to the Caribbean continuing to fall behind the other trading blocs because of a failure to properly implement information and communication technology.

This comment gave me goosebumps. Of course, this is because I am hearing the words I use when I preach to clients, colleagues and other citizens at every opportunity. I touched on this in a blog post last week, “The Boat That’s Pulled Away From The Barbadian Shore”.

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I sighed deeply, before I started typing. What a week this has been. So here’s what’s happening with this sad, sad iMac story I am telling.

Last week when I first wrote about what the last two months have been like, I cross posted my blog post to Apple’s discussion forum. I got a number of responses and a few of these were extremely rude, I must say.

A few people read (you must read ‘skimmed’ here) my first post and made a couple assumptions about how my computer went on the fritz, and decided that my case had no warrant.

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Jorge Heine wrote a piece about “The Demise of Maurice Bishop” for the Gleaner, and as I read, my gut twisted a little more over everything that happened in Grenada in late 1983.

I was a tad uneasy that they released Coard. I understate. I didn’t like it. As I watched/read news about his release, one thought repeated over and over: “Why?”

I don’t claim to know ALL, all, all, all the details about what happened in Grenada in Oct. 1983. I was a very little girl then, nine and a half. Old enough to begin thinking my own ideas about things–my mother up until that point made every effort to encourage me in this–but still innocent in my views of the world.

I can’t tell you I really knew who Maurice Bishop was before that either. At that time, I was Sea Child, living on a reef, covered in dried salt as much as not. That was my life then. I was cementing my life as a mermaid-waterchild.
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I must start at the beginning, for those of you who have not been following my reported travails in this situation through my Facebook and Twitter posts over the last couple of months.

Almost two months ago, electricity surged through my building and killed my iMac. At least that is what I thought had happened. I don’t actually know what happened. I had three other laptops on, plugged into the same surge suppressor, hard-drives plugged in all over, and none of them experienced any problems.

However, in searching forums online, I found numerous people reporting similar or close enough for me to figure something serious was up. Bottom line, my computer that had never given me trouble previously, suddenly went AWOL. And has remained decidedly so ever since.

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Highly inflammatory commentary by BFP on Barbados’ continued acceptance of cash, gifts and labour in exchange for silence and support with UN Votes.

What this article put me in mind of, is an experience I had when working as a journalist in Trinidad. I remember is receiving a letter from the local Chinese Embassy,  informing me I was incorrect in printing articles and photographs celebrating The Republic of Taiwan’s cultural programme in Trinidad. When I raised it with a superior, I was told I needed to be more sensitive to the politics of the situation.

Yeah….. riiighhhtttt. Read more…