Largely in response to the violence that engulfed much of the country in the wake of its hotly contested and vigorously disputed December, 2007 elections Kenya has drafted a new constitution and presented the draft to the public. (You can download a copy here. Hat tip.)

Kenya’s Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Peter Ogego issued a statement regarding the new constitution:

“On Tuesday, Kenya’s Committee of Experts, the body charged with steering Kenya’s constitutional review, released a draft of the new Kenyan Constitution. This represents a major landmark on Kenya’s path of political and constitutional reform, a process that was initiated after the 2007 election violence.
The new constitution is based on ten cardinal principles that will pave the way for a united and more democratic Kenya. Among these principles are: sharing of executive power among the president and prime minister, a decentralized government with constraints on executive power, a new two chamber parliament and a Supreme Court.
The Committee of Experts also proposes changes to the electoral process to avoid election disputes in the future.
President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga are grateful to the Committee of Experts for their hard work. The release of this Constitution marks a new beginning for Kenya and an important opportunity for all Kenyans to participate in transforming their country in a democratic and transparent manner. There now follows a period of public consultation on the document with the final draft to be voted on by the Kenyan people in a referendum there after.”

This process strikes me as one that falls into the category of necessary but not sufficient if the goal is to emerge from the 2007 fiasco with a stronger sense of national cohesion. For whatever the constitution, the underlying causes of violence still exist, including the tendency of politicians to manipulate so-called ethnic issues when it suits them to do so.

The long-awaited Gautrain, which is to connect Johannesburg and Pretoria, will have one of its sections complete by next year’s World Cup. I am a supporter of light rail. And I am all for improving South Africa’s transportation networks, which range from the quite good to the quite abysmal. And a fast, efficient train between Joberg and Pretoria will benefit hundreds of thousands of South Africans. But let’s not kid ourselves as to who is going to benefit from the section of the Gautrain in question, which will connect OR Tambo International Airport with Sandton. It’s not going to be the mass of South Africans. And the beneficiaries won’t even come from a small slice of working and middle class South Africans. The main benefits will be the tiny slice of residents of one of South Africa’s most affluent suburbs, still disproportionately white (though this is changing).  Certainly this is how politics works — you benefit Sandton now so that down the road you can benefit Alexandra. But let’s just be real as to what this new development means and what it doesn’t.

As a followup to the story about South African mercenaries training members of Guinea’s ruthless junta: The South African government has begun investigations into the matter. Meanwhile the story gets more complicated, and perhaps alarming, as it seems that among the mercenaries is at least one former high-ranking member of the South African Police Services (SAPS). These South Africans are apparently working for a Dubai-based security company. The former SAPS policeman in question, Daniel Oosthuizen, was an 18-year veteran of the SAPS< meaning that he got its start with its apartheid-era predecessor, the South African Police (SAP). Many former apartheid security officials have found their way into the furtive world of private military operations, not a few of which have been involved in underhanded activities in foreign countries.

Three stories brought to you by The Archival Platform, an innovative new approach to archives, memory, history and archival-related information and advocacy in South Africa, based at the University of Cape Town. All three stories are related to Southern African heritage sites:

The Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthata (formerly Umtata), in South Africa’s Eastern Cape has “opened a new exhibition that will form the centrepiece of the museum’s celebration of the life and times of Nelson Mandela.”

A new Contract Labour and Apartheid Museum (yes, the perhaps unfortunate acronym will be CLAM) will be opening in Walvis Bay in Namibia sometime in the (hopefully) not-so-distant future.

Finally, and perhaps tragically, Robben Island appears to be under threat. From rabbits. Or, dare I say it, wascally wabbits.

I don’t usually find myself taking Julius Malema’s side, mostly because of style rather than substance, but I think he and I are on the same page on this one. Can we all just stay here in Reasonable Land for a little while and that acknowledge that as bad, foolish, harmful, and shameful as Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS policies were, and they were a whole bushel full of awful, they are not in any way, shape, or form comparable to genocide? Let us not add Reductio ad Genocidum to the list of egregious rhetorical tactics that poison the well of public dialogue.

In a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece HDS Greenway makes the argument that democracy might not be for everybody. Africa only gets peripheral mention in this particular version of a fairly common argument that is probably true as far as it goes. But the problem I always have with these sorts of contrarian exercises is: who gets left out?

Fine. Democracy is not for all nation states, I guess. But at what point do we make these decisions and based on what? It is all well and good to assert, as Greenway does, “In much of Africa democracy has provided a shell under which gangsters plunder and beggar their people.” But in these cases is the problem really democracy? Or that Africans are somehow incapable of supporting democratic institutions? Or is there something else — much else — at work here?

Embracing defeatism hardly seems like a workable approach. Nor does abandoning principles behind democracy. So, yes, democracy might not be for everybody, but surely democratization could be, given the right approach, with local concerns and ideas at the forefront, with an understanding that changes won’t happen overnight, and with the realization that democratization needs to go hand-in-hand with development. Greenway’s is surely a call for a more realistic perspective on what can and should be done in Afghanistan, but at the same time it can be seen as a determinist or even an essentialist argument against even making the effort. Realism, whatever that actually means, is fine. Fatalism is not.

Is Mali ripe for radical Islamist terrorist exploitation? That is certainly the fear of many in the US and Britain, as well as in Mali itself. A group known as “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” has been active in Algeria, and the fear is that the organization plans to expand outward toward Mali. Andrew Harding of the BBC went to Timbuktu to see for himself. The locals seem pretty sanguine, dismissive, even, though American tourism has dried up as a result of US fears.

I don’t want to say that the controversy over the vuvuzela at South African football games can be reduced merely to race. But the calls for the banning of the ubiquitous horns from next year’s World Cup shows a remarkable sense of cultural blinders. The latest demand that South Africans yield their own sporting quirk comes from the Japanese, but they are only the latest in a line that will continue through next year’s tournament.

Look, it seems quite clear that we are willing to put up with English fans (and others) singing songs from the terraces which, if you are not a fan of the team is probably pretty annoying. The Wave, the Tomahawk Chop, marching bands, cheerleaders, chants, cowbells, thunderstix, booking bass drums, whistles — these things are all annoying to the outsider and, perhaps most to the point, to the visiting fan. College football in the US alone produces as many annoying traditions as there are teams (”Rocky Top” played incessantly in Nehlan Stadium, anyone?) but no one calls for banning these traditions.

The vuvuzela is a longstanding tradition in South African football circles. The world needs to deal with it. But hopefully all of the non-African teams and their fans are annoyed as hell by them. After all, if this is going to be Africa’s World Cup, let’s hope all of the teams benefit from the intolerance of the many.

It isn’t easy being a continental superpower. This is a lesson that South Africa learns on a regular basis. By most measures, South Africa is the most powerful country in Africa, which begs the question of what it means to be the most powerful country in Africa. Culturally and economically the country’s influence is pretty clear. Throughout southern Africa in particular people drink products from South African Breweries, watch or listen to programs produced by the SABC, and purchase goods that are imported to Africa through Cape Town and Durban and Joberg and Pretoria. Most would acknowledge that the South African military is the most formidable in the region. And politically, South Africa casts a huge shadow. The confluence of these markers of powers culminates in the 2010 World Cup.

But South Africa’s status breeds mixed feelings, ranging from pride to  jealousy to hostility. If the country throws its weight around, or benefits disproportionately from, say, bilateral agreements, it is resented. If South Africa does not act firmly enough, as, say, in Zimbabwe, it is accused of being feckless. The reality is that South Africa’s diplomatic power comes primarily in its power to persuade, which resides more in the known capacity of its economy and military and culture than in the actual leveraging of those things.

For at least the time being the tensions within the ANC’s tripartite alliance over the establishment of the National Planning Commission (NPC) appear to have been assuaged. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe assures us that all is well, and to prove it he had beside him at his announcement two nodding figureheads, one each from the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions COSATU). Of course none of this means that SACP and COSATU are actually appeased. But merely that the ANC stalwarts have convinced them that they need to go along to get along. My guess is that the ANC hierarchy was happy to remind their partners on the left precisely who holds all of the cards right now in South African politics.