
Ayanda Kota, chairperson of the Grahamstown, South Africa, Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, was brutally beaten and arrested by the police today. Will he suffer the same fate as South Africa’s Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid leader and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who died in 1977 at age 31 in police custody, or Andries Tatane, a math teacher and community newspaper publisher whose police murder, caught on video during a protest on April 13, 2011, shocked the nation?

Former Lt. Jon Burge was equipped with a special unit that included individuals such as Joe “Machine Gun” Gorman, who participated in the assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton and Defense Captain Mark Clark. That is how he got his moniker “Machine Gun.”

Twenty years ago, on Feb. 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of his prison cell and, four years later, a huge majority elected him president. Now, after 16 years of ANC rule, the majority of South Africans are worse off than they were under the white minority regime.

The horrific disaster that befell Haiti Jan. 12 may have killed hundreds of thousands. According to the media, Haiti’s weak infrastructure and poor quality of construction account for the large number of deaths. Left to their own efforts, however, Haitians would have been more than able to build a reliable democracy with adequate infrastructure. But they have never been allowed to do so.

Happy New Year, Blessed Eid Al Adha and Happy Kwanzaa. I’ll be back in February 2009. Check the radio show and my blog for updates. I’ll be traveling. Tune in to Wanda’s Picks Radio at www.wandaspicks.com over the next month, when I will be broadcasting from Senegal, Mali and The Gambia.