the {warehouse} magazine

Bob Marley's Redemption Song is the anthem of Africans in the Caribbean. It is a story of longing for true emancipation and a promise that it will one day come.

Born violently out of Europe’s genocidal wars against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, fuelled by their lust for gold and sugar and their trade in captured Africans, the Caribbean is a colonial construct. One large plantation denoted by many races but one race, the Africans, having no say in their arrival.

In 2011, Caribbean Africans remain in a position similar to that of the captured African of yesteryear: nothing is negotiated on our own terms. If we do like Cuba, the single exception to the rule, then we subject ourselves to the full wrath of Empire.

At the age of twelve, Craig Kielburger had an epiphany while looking for comics in the newspaper. On that fateful day, Kielburger was sidetracked by the tragic tale of a Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih who was forced into bonded labour at the age of four and murdered at the age of twelve.

In response, Kielburger started a children’s rights movement that evolved into Free The Children, an international aid organization now active in 45 countries. In 1995, to help fund Free The Children’s projects, Kielburger and his brother Marc created Me to We, an innovative social enterprise that donates half its profits to Free The Children.

We sat down with Craig Kielburger in Free The Children’s Montreal office.

“Berlin of 1884 was affected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” - Ngugi wa Thiong’o –

In 1884, European imperial powers held a conference. This was no ordinary conference but one that decided the fate of a continent. Like children with too much candy, they gathered around a map of Africa and sliced it up between themselves. Partition preceded wars of conquest, resulting in the colonisation of virtually every corner of Africa. Europe had its cake, and it most certainly ate it too.

Over a century later and witness another scramble unfolding. The smoke in Libya has yet to clear yet vultures are already picking at the carcass. Five months of NATO bombing has opened the nation to a flock of foreign companies rushing for their piece of the proverbial pie. Italy, Libya’s old colonial overseer, is leading the charge with the British, French and Americans not far behind.

One of the dozens of post-election bloggers searching for an explanation for the NDP election surge – the orange wave - suggested that we needed to go out of the country to explain why suddenly hundreds of thousands of Canadians actually voted their values for the first time.

It is hard to argue that anything very dramatic happened during the election to explain the NDP’s incredible leap from perpetual third party status to the Official Opposition.  Sure, Layton did a reasonably good job and the campaign was smarter than the past two.  But the English language debate was hardly an obvious victory for Layton – no knock out punches, no big mistakes by any of the other leaders.