Chaptered into the key themes 'legacy', 'racism', 'generations', 'identity', 'education', 'reparations', and 'changes', this is in many ways a worthy documentary that had to be made, had to comprehensively document the history of African enslavement and its legacy to the present day, including the sadly prevalent racism and de facto economic apartheid that perniciously persists in the West. However, for those familiar with the facts of the Slave Trade and aware of the inequalities and injusticies that to this day disadvantage non-whites, the documentary tells us nothing we did not aleady know, while those who know nothing beyond the vague platitudes may, by dint of such uninterest, be less than likely to choose ever to watch the film. Hence it's not clear who the intended audience is. Although that must on the face of it seem a very minor issue, it is a query that returned to my mind many times in watching this film, and remained unresolved until the final chapter, in particular the contribution by Paul Robeson Jr: the film, much as African culture itself, must be for everyone, whatever their colour or ethnicity. This may seem obvious; yet, I feel, becomes lost on occasions, especially in the chapter on education.

I've a few misgivings about the film. First is the omission of any mention of Arab slaving that still continues to this day from Mauretania in the west to Sudan in the east, as well as in the Arabian peninsula. I have witnessed this with my own eyes and ears during the years I lived in Africa, black Africans routinely referred to as, often pejoratively addressed as, and frequently treated as 'abd' (plural 'abeed' = 'slave', in Arabic), children often no more than six or seven years old working fifteen or more hours a day in Arab households for no wage beyond beatings, insult, and degrading humiliation. It would be dishonest to deny the social ills and injustices that this has wrought in north and east Africa. Anti-Slavery International conservatively estimates, for example, that in Niger alone there are 43,000 people still living in slavery, hardly a platform on which to build successful modern economies and democratic societies that respect the rights of all irrespective of skin colour.

A second issue that slightly troubled me is that, although replete with images of Africa, the documentary was dominated by the African diaspora to the extent that Africa itself, its peoples, its cultures, risked being lost. Even when speaking from Africa (Rabbi Kohain Halevi in Ghana, for example), the speakers were born elsewhere (Rabbi Kohain Halevi, for example, in New York): where were the Angolans? where the Nigerians? the Malians? surely they should be permitted to speak for themselves?

The third issue I have is with a misquotation, and entirely out of context, from Charles Darwin's 'The Descent of Man': "At some future period, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world", in its restored context expressed with regret by a scientist, and son of an abolitionist, who elsewhere in the same volume wrote sternly of "the great sin of Slavery". Remembering how Fox News similarly decontextualised and misrepresented the views of the African-American pastor Jeremiah Wright ("God damn America") in the 2008 U.S. election year, I should like to hope that the mis-quoting and mis-use of Darwin in this documentary, and omission of Darwin's reference to "man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian", was done in error rather than in ignorance or malice. Nevetheless to demonise Darwin (and I noticed in the Education chapter that question 4 on the blackboard relating to Darwin and evolutionary theory had, in the Africanised version, been removed) would be unfortunate in light of the fact that Darwin, unfashionably for his time, believed fervently and passionately that evolutionary theory would prove the *common* descent of *all* human beings. Wisdom is in recognising good science, whatever the skin colour of the scientist, a sentiment with which I am sure the makers of this documentary, in rightfully lauding great African teachers, would agree.

"There's a lot of black heroes that I've never learned about but I could tell you a lot about Henry VIII", says a black British schoolboy, tellingly revealing the arbitrary and arguably damaging anglo- and euro-centric bias of History education in schools. And yet I have mixed feelings about the chapter on education. The analysis of 'colonial education' is generally strong, while Rabbi Kohain Halevi's naming of important African figures such as Mansa Musa, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Frederick Douglass (unfortunately mis-spelt in the documentary), Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, and other luminaries (though there are notable omissions, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Cynthia McKinney, two of the most cogent and inspired political voices of our generation) is a powerful reminder that Africa and the African diaspora have contributed immensely to the intellectual and moral capital of humanity. (On reflection, I also do not recall there having been mention made of Franz Fanon and Walter Rodney.) The film rightly showcases the Lotus Academy School in Philadelphia as a model of Africa-centric education. Yet with its annual school fees of $4,900, an initial payment of $490, a before-school programme for an annual fee of $350, an after-school programme at $1000 with a penalty fee of $25 for each 15 minute period after closing time, and a registration fee of $75, it places itself well beyond the means of those families whose children would benefit the most. Unaffordable school fees throw up as much a barrier to education in the United States as they do in Africa itself ("School fees are keeping children out of the classroom, and many of these are the most vulnerable children in our societies", UN Children's Fund); in Cape Town for example, while a monied elite may enjoy the luxury of sending their children to Bishops or Herschel, children in townships such as Guguletu and Khayelitscha will, under financial pressures, as often as not never complete their schooling. A far better model in this documentary for education in a British context might have been the state schools of Towers Hamlets, in the East End of London, where Black History is written into the curriculum, as is the Battle of Cable Street, celebrating the victory against fascism and the racist Blackshirts on 4th October 1936. I have no doubt that there are similar schools in the USA that, if an American model of good practice were wanted, would have served as more inclusive examples than the Lotus Academy School.

"The question is not whether but how", says attoney-at-law Nicole Devereux. The chapter on Reparations is one of the more interesting, addressing as it does what is arguably one of the most challenging and most hotly disputed issues arising out of the legacy of black enslavement. Should reparations take the form of cash payments? if so, to whom? to individuals? to organisations? to countries? "Give every black person something", suggests Ms Devereux. Give to Condoleezza Rice as is given to the family on Food Stamps? to oil-wealthy Nigeria as to impoverished Burkina Faso? There is no easy answer. Entrepreneur Chris Thomas offers some of the more thoughtful ideas, for example that African American students (and one can envisage the same in the countries of Europe) attend university for free. Parenthetically, I recall a black South African friend here in London telling me how, when asked what she was doing in the UK, replied with obvious relish to her interlocutor: "I'm collecting my grandfather's back pay"; a similar point is poignantly made in the documentary by student Shakeeta Sturden, reflecting on how accumulated inherited wealth has been a privilege only whites have enjoyed. Overall the statements of all speakers are interesting, some imaginative, and all deserving of our attention. No conclusions nor consensus are reached; but the real point, to bring the issue back to the centre of discourse on the legacy of slavery, is eloquently achieved.

The final chapter, 'Changes', offers a sequence of proposals by which Africans of the diaspora might themselves make positive changes to their lives: 'Vote', 'Go to Afrika', 'Read', 'Get into business', 'Sankofa' ("go back and take" in the Akan language of Ghana). Inspired and inspiring voices, the most powerful for me being that of Paul Robeson Jr (but I confess his father, both as musician and as political activist, has always been a personal hero for me) whose restrained ecumenical message shifts Africa from the margins to the very roots and core of what it means to be human: "How do we reverse the after-effects of slavery ... how do we claim our full place in society. The first is to assert, to reassert, our identification with our cultural traditions ... Part of that is to see how universal it is, how connected we are to the folk cultures, to the people's cultures of people throughout the world, so that we tread not only on our own ground, we share this common cultural ground with the people of the world. ... We should give back to the cultures of the world from that richness."

This is an ambitious film, largely successful, and one I would certainly recommend to others, whether Europeans or Africans.

"You use virtually any method necessary to get what you want", asserts Major Joseph Blair, instructor in the early 1980s at the School of the Americas, Georgia, where the military personnel of US-sponsored Latin American dictatorships were "taught interrogation and torture techniques", the manuals now in the public domain.

"Torture?" asks Pilger.

"And killing. If there's someone you don't want, you kill them ... you assassinate them with one of your death squads."

From the gunning down of unarmed mourners at a funeral in El Salvador, through the US-backed campaign against the indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala (described by the United Nations as 'genocide'), the systematic massacre in one Salvadorian village of at least 200 defenceless women and children ("You could hear their screams for their mothers and fathers", testifies a survivor), to the gang rape of nuns orchestrated by a man identified as an American national in Guatemala's torture chambers, John Pilger's well researched narrative documents the United States' rampage, through its clients and proxies, of subversion, suppression, plunder, and murder throughout the Latin American continent since 1945, brutally overthrowing democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

"Is that OK to overthrow a democratically elected government?" asks Pilger of Duane Clarridge, head of the CIA's Latin American division in the early 1980s.

"It depends on what your national security interests are", comes Clarridge's response.

Questioned on the carnage wrought on the civilian populations of America's client dictatorships in Latin America, Clarridge peremptorily replies: "That's just tough ... and if you don't like it, lump it. Get used to it, world ... if our interests are threatened, we're gonna do it". And what are those interests? The US-sponsored coup to oust Chavez as President of oil-rich Venezuela rehearses a typical story: read 'economic interests', 'security' a code word for rapacious greed by the large corporations who, it becomes clear (but have we ever doubted it? presidential candidate Ron Paul indeed made it a platform of his 2008 campaign), effectively own the US government.

Challenging George W. Bush's assessment in the wake of 9/11 that the US was attacked because "they hate our freedoms", Osama bin Laden poignantly retorted: "Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example." For it has rather been a succession of US administrations, hand-in-glove with powerful monied elites, who have ruthlessly demonstrated beyond question a hatred of freedom, a hatred of democracy, a contempt for human rights and human dignity, where these conflict with America's economic "interests".

Sister Dianna Ortiz, an America nun and missionary who survived torture and gang-rape by the military in Guatemala, reflects painfully on her own experiences in 1989: "I've heard people say that what happened in Abu Ghraib is an isolated incident, and I have to just shake my head and say, 'Are we on the same planet? Aren't you aware of our history? Isn't history taught in the classroom?'" John Pilger's courageous and shocking film, The War On Democracy, should unquestionably be on that History curriculum.

I feel uncomfortable having to write a less than complimentary review of what in many ways is a very fine film, the more so knowing that giants of the struggle such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela contributed significantly to the film. But this must be said: the film fails utterly to capture the daily brutalities of the racist apartheid regime that for nearly 50 years effectively sought to reduce the native peoples of South Africa to nothing more than a slave class of fractured families, characteristically men to the mines, women to domestic service in white households. When the white interrogator refers to "my country" it would have been interesting to have flagged that the indigenous peoples of the country were denied even citizenship. In the South Africa Museum in Cape Town (now the Iziko Museum) the indigenous Khoisan were displayed alongside the baboons (and indeed were routinely rudely addressed as 'baboons'), obscene testimony to the fact that they were regarded as something less than human. This Afrikaner world view, essential in contextualising the action, was not clearly communicated in the film.

Perhaps as disturbing as anything else for me, since it eloquently mirrored much of the miscalculated mood of the film itself, was the blurb on the back of the DVD box: "Amazingly talented Academy Award-winning star Whoopi Goldberg ... lights up the screen in her latest hit--the exhilarating and entertaining Sarafina!" Yes, Whoopi Goldberg is a hugely talented actress, but why choose an American actress who cannot even muster a South African accent when there are so many equally talented black South African actresses who could have played the role? And why "her latest hit"? a "hit", for heaven's sake! and yes, indeed it was, but was that really the point of the film? another "hit" for a foreign actress? "Lights up the screen"? yes, in a way that is surreally far remote from the revolutionary seriousness and sufferings of the black South African teachers I know. What lit up the screen for me was rather the burning of the quisling Sabela. And "exhilarating and entertaining"? yes, sadly I'm afraid it truly was: it oozed with entertainment, obfuscating the brutalised lives to which, in reality, the children were condemned.

So why does all this matter? It matters because, in popular consciousness, the film enters the heterogeneous cannon of documents telling the story of one of the most appalling crimes in human history. Imagine, by way of comparison, an all-singing all-dancing musical on Auschwitz, a top hat and tails tap-dance through the events of 9/11, a jolly sing-along in Guantanamo, a Sabra and Chatila soft shoe shuffle. Is my point coming across? While I acknowledge that as initially (1988) a Broadway musical it may have brought awareness of the evils of apartheid to a New York audience, to deliver on celluloid what is in effect a sanitised African version of The Sound Of Music, just another "hit" for an American actress, is to betray those who suffered throughout the struggles. If you must watch this film, first go visit the Apartheid Museum and Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto to glean a bit of context.

Cinematographically well-crafted, judiciously cast, superbly acted, sensitively and intelligently scripted and directed by the brilliant Raoul Peck (who also wrote and directed "Sometimes in April", probably the best film yet made on the Rwandan genocide), the film dramatically snapshots an important and defining moment in the history of the Congo. Eriq Ebouaney's persuasive performance in the role of Patrice Lumumba is especially impressive.

Film, however, is often a poor medium for representing the depths and intricacies of history: there's only so much one can pack into 115 minutes. And this is where the film sadly flounders: while for those who know the history the film serves as a dramatic and recognizable--yet elliptical--synopsis, for those who know little of the decolonization of the Congo the film will be a poor surrogate for books such as Ludo de Witte's "The Assassination of Lumumba". My advice would be to read first, watch the film only afterwards.

My wife is black South African from a township, so maybe she rather than I ought to have written this review. The film is certainly great cinema: wonderful performances from gifted actors, an authentic sense of place, a powerful story line, a refusal to descend into cheap sentimentality ... and thank heavens the temptation to create a love interest between Tsotsi and Miriam was tastefully resisted.

What struck us both as dishonest, however, was the perhaps blinkered accent on the redemption of Tsotsi through his care for the baby and his reflection through the baby on his own childhood marred by a drunken and brutal father and by his mother clearly dying from AIDS-related illness--if only it were so simple as that, if only the horrific social conditions created by years of apartheid could be swept aside so casually ... if only it were conveniently true that we could glibly explain away the appalling poverty of the townships in terms of bad booze and AIDS. The wealthy black parents from whom the baby was kidnapped told a different story: that post-apartheid South Africa may be under new management, a fortunate few black faces behind the gates that once sheltered the privileges of white faces, but otherwise it's pretty much business as usual. To not contextualise Tsotsi's story within that persistent social and economic inequality was to miss an important opportunity.

Undeniably this book has become influential -- it was, for example, the numerous citations in articles by others that persuaded me to buy. Yet not only is it replete with risible factual errors (to give just a very few examples within the space of a mere 17 pages: "Apache ... is a shareware program", p.93; "BitTorrent is a Web site that allows users to upload their own online [sic] music libraries", p.95; "Much like Microsoft Windows, Linux offers a family of operating systems", p.106; "in November 2004, the Mozilla Foundation ... released Firefox", p.110, a browser that I and countless others had been happily using in beta since the Spring) that undermine the reader's confidence in the factual reliability of the tome as a whole, it also reinvents the world with a vocabulary that obfuscates what otherwise would be the fairly uncontentious historical realities of Western colonial and neo-colonial adventures. The creation of terms and labels carries with it the risk that the act of labelling itself constructs, and the public acceptance of the label serves to sustain, the phenomenon it purports to name. Thus Friedman's bizarre and unnecessary invention of three eras that he dubs "Globalization 1.0", "Globalization 2.0", and "Globalization 3.0" obscures the fact that he is in reality talking respectively about a resource economy based on Western exploitation of its colonies for their raw materials, about a manufacturing economy that increasingly saw the export of the manufacturing base to cheap-labour countries of the South, and about -- the present era -- the export of what he terms "grunt work" (p.14) to low-wage workers in poorer countries.

But, as much as anything else, I am intrigued by Freidman's incogitant espousal of what I see to be a fadish trend these days towards decimal versioning of things for which, it seems to me, decimalisation is not only unnecessary in principle but also unused in what would otherwise be normal practice. The `point-zero' suffix to his three "Globalization"s suggests that there may also be significant intermediate gradations, on the model of version numbers for software or draft documents; yet a browse of Freidman's book shows there to be (unsurprisingly) no textual occurrence of such. So why use it?

All in all, a disappointing read.

Here is yet a another slim volume (one of many recent) by the man whom I, myself too a theoretical linguist and a passionate libertarian communist, have for so many years admired and respected. In this volume, sadly, the needle appears to have got stuck in the proberbial vinyl groove: Chomsky is merely spinning around repeatedly on material that, for the most part, he has tackled in far greater depth and far more persuasively in earlier publications. When, for example, on page 68 he again refers to the "World Court condemnation of the US", one feels one subliminally hears the click of the stylus in the groove: he has made reference to this some half dozen times already in the previous sixty-seven pages and nothing is added or achieved by its reiteration. While his inimitable rhetorical style still impresses, for too much of the volume it is style without great substance.

Apologists could of course generously argue that, in an edited compilation of interview transcipts, one should not expect to find either depth or detail. Or alternatively it might be argued that a volume such as this ought best be understood to be a key-point compendium of, and hence accessible introduction to, Chomsky's views that might subsequently be explored by the reader in greater depth in other weightier tomes (such as, for example, Deterring Democracy or Necessary Illusions). And, finally, one might blame the format: over a number of disparate interviews, there are bound to be repetitions. But whatever the reason, the result is disappointing: Chomsky owes it to his own reputation as well as to his readers to do better than this.

Buy it and read it nonetheless: it's still a great deal better an exploration and analysis of the circumstances leading to 9/11 than many a best-seller.