Soirée Internationale Solidaire with Guido van Hecke
Categories: Event
Date: 27/09/2017
Time: 19 h 00 - 23 h 00
Location: Restaurant "Les Ailes des Anges"
Links: iCal - Google Calendar
Soirée Internationale Solidaire (with Guido van Hecken)
This Soirée we will have Guido van Hecken as special guest speaker. Born in Antwerp, he grew up in the Belgian Congo, moved back to Belgium for secondary school. He completed his degrees in linguistics at the universities in Antwerp and Coimbra (Portugal), where he was actively involved in the opposition against the dictatorship in Portugal and its African colonies, and was a first-hand witness of the 1974 coup d’etat. To support the change, he founded the Flemish NGO “New Portugal Committee”, which organised support for workers and agricultural cooperatives. He lectured Portuguese (LouvainUniversity) and taught Spanish and moral education (Antwerp).
He moved to Africa and became Deputy Dean (Arts Department) at the University of Maputo(Mozambique), researched there with the Centre for African Studies (CEA) on the economic and social transformations after independence (his colleagues Ruth First and Aquino de Bragança were assassinated by the South-African apartheid regime). He actively supported the South-African ANC and the actions of its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe to end apartheid and racism and to establish a democratic society in South Africa.
Back in Europe, he studied development sociology and political economy of Southern Africa with Professor Harold Wolpe (Essex University, UK). He started working with the EP, became member of the Greens, concentrated on election observation, parliamentary capacity building, civic education programmes (AWEPA, Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa). He was election observer in more than twenty elections (mostly post-conflict states in Southern and Western Africa, Bosnia). He contributed to the drafting of the electoral law for Mozambique‘s first multi-party elections and co-authored an election observer’s manual. He organised seminars throughout Southern Africa on parliamentary work, the relationship with civil society, local authorities and was involved in capacity-building programmes for the Parliament of South Sudan. Together with Wangari Maathai (Peace Nobel Prize) he organised the first Euro-African Green Summit (Nairobi, Kenya).
He was appointed Chief of Cabinet of the Belgian Development Minister, where he took an active part in Belgian diplomatic efforts (including UN Security Council) to end the conflict in the African Great Lakes region.
After leaving government, he returned to the EP to work in the secretariat of the Development Committee (European Consensus on Development, Food Facility, Joint Africa-EU Strategy, EEAS, ACP, Pan-African Parliament) and taught European development policy at the Karel de Grote Hogeschool (Antwerp).
He is now President of Oxfam Solidarity Belgium.
Once the roughly 40 participants comprising never less than 25 different national backgrounds have arrived, I shortly introduce each participant. After having filled your plate at the hot buffet (as often as you want: à volonté), you are supposed to sit at several tables in order to give many others the pleasure of your company. At every soirée, a special speaker introduces his work, followed by questions and answers. At the end, everyone is asked to contribute to the costs of the dinner.
