Why does the Kenyan Government need tanks?

Thirty-three Soviet-style battle tanks, to be precise. Along with anti-aircraft systems, rocket launchers, and ammunition?

This is the cargo of MV Faina, Ukrainian ship hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean off the East African Coast. Initially, it was claimed that the arms were destined for South Sudan. Now, Kenya's government insists the shipment was for Kenya.

Either way - what exactly are these arms for? How is the Kenyan government planning to use them - and on whom?

Read, and listen to, objections from Kenyan civil society on the website of The Mars Group.

You have to read

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

It connects all the dots of the current financial meltdown. And the impact of global capitalism / corporatism over the last 50 years. It tells you how free-market fundamentalism:

- drives political crises,
- instigates massacres of democracy,
- engineers economic collapse, and
- demands authoritarian state terror

from Israel to South Africa to Poland.

What I love about Klein is her commitment as an activist to sharing the rigor of her scholarship. How many authors invest the time and resources to make their primary sources available online?

This book is giving me nightmares. Especially Chapter 1 on the CIA's torture lab, and Chapter 3 on the mass atrocities committed by the US-backed Pinochet regime in Chile. Yet it makes my brain sing with the peculiar happiness of multiple aha! moments.

I took three bows in Ferrara

Photo: Federica Poggi, for Internazionale Festival

before an audience of over 600 people inside the Cinema Apollo. They filled the standing room at the back and flowed over to sit on the floor almost half-way down the aisle. A hundred or more stood on the cobbled street outside to watch the performance broadcast live on a large outdoor screen.

I performed in English. You can see the Italian translation of my words on the screen behind me. I wasn't sure if the performance would speak across the language barrier, especially in its barest-bones form - no theatre lighting, set, or music. My backdrop was the neon yellow banner strip listing all the festival sponsors, which you can also see in the photo.

I woke up at 2am the night before, thinking:

There's no way I can pull this off.

I got out of bed and rehearsed the pieces until 5am, trying out every idea I could come up with, every variation on how to do them, on that stage, in those circumstances.

During the poems, the audience was so hushed, I was convinced they weren't getting it. I should have remembered opening night in Vienna.

When I ended, there was no yelling. Just a strong, heavy rhythm of clapping that filled the cinema, pushed against the stage and the walls. Steady, sustained, solid waves of applause, that went on and on and on and on.

From the Ferrara Blog:

Ma l’applauso più lungo è stato quello per Migritude, l’emozionante performance di Shailja Patel (nella foto), certamente uno degli incontri che resteranno nella memoria del pubblico di quest’edizione dl festival. “Ha trovato un modo di esprimersi che commuove e insieme colpisce, davvero potente”, commentano in platea. Racconta le appropriazioni della cultura indiana da parte dei coloni, canta gli stati d’animo dei migranti e fa pensare; da decisa femminista omaggia Bi Kidude, novantenne musicista Zanzibari, e sbalordisce. Continuano a ringraziarla, dal pubblico. Prima delle domande ai relatori e fino al termine della conferenza: stupenda, bravissima, grazie”, gridano…

Twitter

OK.

I succumbed.

Tweet.

Because people can get lost in those huge yawning chasms between email, blog postings, and text messages :-).

"It is not power that corrupts

but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear