The big African market
The World Social Forum is a big African open air market: for ideas and mobilisation; for radical activists and moderate conceptualists; for demonstrations, street theatres and for people who need to sell water and sandwiches to make a living.
As in any large market, you lose the overview. And you will be surprised by what you find. Yesterday I was looking for workshops on migration. When they were cancelled, I ended up with the Lesbian Coalition of Kenya. It was a wonderful surprise. They taught me what it means to be excluded from a community and to fight for rights. Nothing else could have been more useful for my own work with refugees.
Each day, the market becomes more local: banana vendors have arrived at the conference venue; tons of handicrafts are displayed on cloths spread out on the ground; street children look around curiously. Ideas meet reality in a very visible, palpable way. The new arrivals remind us that we have been, and still are, afraid of the poor, because they might disturb or change our agenda and bring insecurity.
I do not know how the numerous initiatives will come together at the end of the forum to propose alternative policies on a global level about the reform of the UN system, migration, debt and development, and many other issues too numerous to name or even count. It is difficult to come to conclusions. Often there is a mix of action and confusion.
While self-organisation proves its strength and its unity, the World Social Forum certainly achieves one goal: to give weight to the experience of those who suffer from unjust policies.
Not too many, though, are able to be present in person. Some 50 young men and women from the poor areas of Nairobi, however, stormed into the tent of one of the more expensive food caterers at lunchtime where the food was such as only the rich can afford. The hungry youngsters ate everything in sight, thereby dramatically claiming their right to food. And the police did not intervene during the protest lunch.
Br Michael Schöpf SJ (JRS-Europe)
24 January 2007