Like South Africa twenty-five years ago, Israel today portrays itself as a progressive liberal democracy, an endangered island of modernity in a backward and hostile region. The existence of a gay rights movement in Israel is deployed as another example of this modernity. I think that these similarities tell us a great deal, that they actually reveal the underlying process that they are designed to obscure—a common colonial project.

In the heart of Africa, did a Canadian mining company cut a deal with an infamous and violent African militia that played a major role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994? According to one expert of the militia, known as the “FDLR,” or the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda, the mining company has no other choice if it wants to safely dig up billions-of-dollars worth of gold for themselves and their investors.

Campaigning on a platform of “A People’s Contract to Create Work and Fight Poverty,” the ruling African National Congress (ANC) received nearly 70 per cent of the popular vote in South Africa’s third democratic election in March, 2004.

In one corner of the village, the sun shines through the dusty and cracked windows of the village’s one-room assembly hall. Sitting on the building’s cement floor are 60 girls and young women, the reason for today’s celebration. The day is a chance to teach the young women an important lesson that may one day save their lives.