My colleague Ryan Schlief and I are here in warm and sandy Dakar attending the 2011 World Social Forum along with about 75,000 other people from over 130 countries. We traveled all this way to meet with key allies in our forced evictions campaign, learn more about how activists around the world are using video in their advocacy on forced evictions, and brush up on our (very) rusty French.
So far the week has been exhilarating.
For now, because it’s almost 3 in the morning and we have an early start tomorrow, we’d like to share with you the first of a series of short interviews we’ll be shooting throughout the forum. In this conversation, Cosmas Ndira from the Tonderai Ndira Housing Cooperative talks about some of the root causes of forced evictions in Zimbabwe and also shares a personal story about the issue: