Reparations to Africa and the Group of Eminent Persons

In the last ten years, a worldwide movement has emerged for reparations to various previously subordinated groups for past wrongs. This paper discusses the movement for reparations to the continent of Africa. It begins with a discussion of the United Nations-sponsored World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. It then traces the discussion of reparations to Africa back to the Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) established in the early 1990s by the Organization of African Unity to pursue reparations for slavery and (perhaps) other wrongs perpetrated on Africa. Only three members of this group are still active: they are J. F. Ade Ajayi, Ali A. Mazrui, and Dudley Thompson. The present author interviewed all three in December 2002. An essay by J. F. Ade Ajayi is included in this volume. After discussion of the GEP, this essay looks at precedents for the demand for reparations to Africa. It closes with an assessment of the likelihood that a large social movement for reparations will develop

Quality-constrained routing in publish/subscribe systems

Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not given explicit destination addresses, but destinations are determined by matching the subscription declared by subscribers. For a dynamic computing environment with applications that have quality demands, this is not sufficient. Routing decision should, in such environments, not only depend on the subscription predicate, but should also take the quality-constraints of applications and characteristics of network paths into account. We identified three abstraction levels of these quality constraints: functional, middleware and network. The main contribution of the paper is the concept of the integration of these constraints into the pub/sub routing. This is done by extending the syntax of pub/sub system and applying four generic, proposed by us, guidelines. The added values of quality-constrained routing concept are: message delivery satisfying quality demands of applications, improvement of system scalability and more optimise use of the network resources. We discuss the use case that shows the practical value of our concept

Lieux de l’identité : Quelques réflexions sur le devoir de porter témoignage face à l’impératif de construire au présent le lien social (Hommage à Aimé Césaire)

Déjà en 1939, Aimé Césaire s’est présenté comme bouche parlant au nom et à la place de ceux qui étaient réduits au silence par l’oppression coloniale ou raciale. Face au long passé de la réduction au silence des esclaves et de leurs descendants, le monde contemporain doit ouvrir l’espace public non seulement à l’histoire, mais également à la mémoire de l’esclavage et de la traite. Les afrodescendants ne racontent pas seulement, ils performent également leurs mémoires afin de rendre présents leurs ascendants réduits à l’esclavage. Écouter ces mémoires permet de reconstruire le lien social afin qu’ils se sentent citoyens du monde multiculturel, cosmopolite et séculier, avait récemment écrit Henry Louis Gates.As early as 1939, Aimé Césaire took on the role of spokesperson for those who had been reduced to silence as a result of colonial or racial oppression. Faced with the long tradition of voicelessness of slaves and their descendants, the contemporary world must open up public space not only to the history but also to the memory of slavery and of the slave trade. People of African descent not only narrate their memories but also perform them in order to recall their enslaved ancestors. Listening to their memories means reconstructing social ties in order that they may feel that they are, as Henry Louis Gates puts it, truly “citizens of a multicultural, cosmopolitan, secular world.