Today we are inviting you, our readers, contributors, and supporters, to become Friends of Pambazuka.

Over the last 11 years, Pambazuka News has established itself as an online weekly providing probably the most comprehensive coverage of African struggles for dignity, self-determination and emancipation anywhere. This is due, not least, to the efforts of the more than 3,100 authors who provide cutting-edge commentary and analyses, to the thousands of readers and subscribers who distribute Pambazuka News widely, and the volunteer translators and editors who help us make Pambazuka News the most important voice on freedom and justice in Africa and the global South.

But Pambazuka is more than just an online weekly; more than just a newsletter. Over the years, it has become the means by which a vast community of activists, bloggers, intellectuals, organisations and social movements communicates to the wider world and, most importantly, with each other. It has become one of the means by which they contribute towards building a movement for freedom and social justice. We are proud to have provided the means by which networks of solidarity have flourished in Africa and beyond.

As we enter a period of a profound crisis of capitalism, as working people and the poor are being forced to pay the costs of that crisis through cuts in social expenditure, declining real incomes, privatisation of the commons, dispossession of land and natural resources, and dispossession of their right to determine their own futures as governments increasingly dance to the tune of the bankers and big business, the challenges facing Pambazuka are greater than ever.

Our task in the coming period will be to expand the capacity of Pambazuka to support the growing movements for social and political transformation that will ensure that the 99 percent reclaim their dignity and control their destinies. That is no easy task.

We want you to join us in helping to build and support those movements. Critical in that task will be the need to keep Pambazuka FREE AND INDEPENDENT. Pambazuka News is accessible to all free of charge. But we cannot manage without money. Through their financial support, the Friends of Pambazuka ensure that Pambazuka News continues to thrive and belong to the people and movements it serves.

If you think that Pambazuka is important, if you find what we do useful, if you like the materials we publish in Pambazuka News, then join the Friends of Pambazuka with a donation today. Together we will dare to invent the future.

Become a Friend of Pambazuka.

To find out more, write to us.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Please do not take Pambazuka for granted! Become a Pambazuka Friend.
NOW and help keep Pambazuka FREE and INDEPENDENT!

* Firoze Manji is the editor-in-chief of Pambazuka News.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.