MF GALAXY

FM 88.5 Edmonton cjsr.com 6 pm Mountain Time In the Global North, chocolate is a major part of our lives. We give it as the generic token of affection at Christmas. On Valentine’s Day we send it as a sign of romantic love. When we need a mood booster or something to staunch our hunger, we grab a chocolate bar. In recent years, it’s become a staple of corporate journalism to report on the supposed health benefits of consuming chocolate, or on the alleged debate over chocolate’s power as an aphrodisiac, or how the effects of chocolate on brain chemistry mimic those of post-orgasmic flush. But what almost no one in the Global North realises is that chocolate is not simply big flavour or even big business, but a big, gaping wound in the body of human rights. The world’s number one supplier of cocoa beans, the central ingredient in chocolate, is Ivory Coast, a country whose cocoa farmers routinely employ child labourers who aren’t paid. That means they’re enslaved . These same children are...

CJSR FM88 http://www.cjsr.com/ 6 PM Mountain Time Few violations of human rights and human dignity are more profound t han that of life-long forced labour. People forced to work for others without pay and without libe rty or rights are denied all the opportunities for joy, peace, personal relationships, education and social action that middle class and affluent people throughout the world take for granted. Over the course of centuries, the European Holocaust against the civilisations of West Afrika forced at least 12 million people into life-long, inherited enslavement; but as G. Stavrianos argues in Global Rift, an additional 36 million people were killed or died due to abuse, disease and deprivation during capture, forced marches to the coast, and the Atlantic middle passage, before landing on a gulag which stretched across two continents and the Caribbean. This European holocaust against Afrika, called the Maafa by some Pan-Afrikanists, therefore claimed the lives of, at mi...