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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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African Voices and activists at the World Social Forum in Nairobi - The uncertain Ways of transnational African Activism
| Panel |
69. The World Social Forum in Nairobi : exploring the making of African causes.
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| Paper ID | 679 |
| Author(s) |
Pommerolle, Marie-Emmanuelle ; Siméant, Johanna
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | Transnational social movement studies have long neglected the way activists from the South, and particularly from Africa, have managed to participate in World Social Forum processes. At the same time, alterglobal activists have sometimes been accused of either neglecting or dominating southern voices. The organization of the last WSF in Nairobi was seen as an opportunity to make African voices heard – Africa being at the same time seen as the continent most victim of economic globalization.
We would like to show in this paper how Africans activists managed to participate to this WSF in Nairobi, and to stress the complex relationship they have to northern, and other southern (such as Asia and Latin America) activists. The African alterglobal movement can be seen as a space of tensions (i.e between South Africans and the rest of the continent, between French and English speaking Africa, or between NGO style organisations and more radical organisations). These tensions in the alterglobal movement have also to be highlighted through the dynamic of national mobilisations in African countries.
Our work is based on a collective survey in Nairobi in January 2007 : a team of 23 French and 12 Kenyan scholars has made a collective ethnographic observation in a hundred workshops, added to the realization of 150 biographical interviews of African activists at the forum. The observation has allowed to observe how Africa was referred to in the WSF, how activists managed to pay their trip to Nairobi (often being financed by northern organisations), and also how afrocentric, anti-imperialist and anticolonial arguments have been used .
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