Libyan Leader Ghadaffi's "king of kings" title is an insult to our African traditions. Before shouting about African unity let Gaddaffi first address the perpetual Arab discrimination of blacks in Libya and other member states of the Arab League...Until then, he remains "king of clowns."...It is time to address the Arab crimes against blacks starting with the story of the biblical Hagar, the trans-Saharan slave trade, the Egyptian exploitation of Nubia, the rape of black women and the imposition of their light-skinned bastard children as religious and community leaders of black Africans, the conflict in Darfur and South Sudan, the maltreatment of the so-called illegal immigrants in Arab states, the marginalized black populace of Arabia, to all the injustices you can think of.More here
More hereThe African Film Library, launched on Wednesday, 23 September 2009, consists of award-winning works from more than 80 filmmakers including Senegalese Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Mambety, Yousef Chahine from Egypt, Kwaw Ansah from Ghana and Haile Gerima from Ethiopia...The online library aims to create a new audience for existing and emerging African filmmakers through the digital archive of the continent's cultural cinematic heritage, and making African artists' works easily accessible via the internet to a wide viewership around the worldwide.
More hereThe crux of this piece is this: though the military claim to have relinquished power to democratically elected leaders in Nigeria, the fact is that they have remained firmly in control. They may not hold the horns of the political cow any longer, but they sure are milking it. In every key office in Nigeria today, you are likely to find a serving or ex military person. On the chairs and boards of major companies are former soldiers. On the thrones of powerful institutions are retired military officers.
It was said that the world domination that Japan failed to achieve militarily, it achieved by economic means. In the same way, the continued domination of Nigeria that the military could not sustain with their guns, they have succeeded in executing, sublimely, through the subtle pseudo-democracy they have installed in Nigeria. This has given them control of the key indices of political and economic power in the country.
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...any organization that is trying to do any serious work around leadership in Africa has make young people the core of any programming. Otherwise you haven’t looked the demographics of Africa yet and seriously thought about the implications. Convincing the Mugabe’s of the world to step down, is only part of the problem – you have to ask who is replacing the old guard? Is there a pipeline? Are the replacements different? Or are they just a younger, hungrier, more cynical version of the same (see Kenya’s parliament today).More here
I see that your foundation does offer scholarships to rising leaders, that’s a good start. But if the intention is to grow leaders at home, I would offer scholarships to enable students to attend local institutions as well.
The Achebe Center will build a world class institution that serves a new generation of African writers; encourages literary/cultural entrepreneurship; positions our literature in its appropriate place in world literature; and always serves the highest of ideals and ideas. Our current projects include facilitating events featuring visiting writers, artists and scholars; publishing books and chapbook; facilitating writer/artist residencies, projects and collaborations; the creation of a new low-residency creative writing program; and more.
There are two ways to kill in human community: you can kill a human being or you can kill the citizen. The first is biological; the second is sociological but no less real. The former is called homicide; the latter is civicide. Both are wrong, unlawful, and criminal. In addition, civicide is an egregious act of abuse of power.
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When food does not cross borders, hunger does. Politicians and experts meet in Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization to address “How to Feed the World in 2050,” building up to World Food Day on Friday. But famine looms right now in Kenya, Ethiopia and their neighbours, as many governments continue to reject the UNFAO's recipe for success: free trade in food.More here
When citizens who are economically and politically weak are not fluent in reading math,they are open to terrible exploitation from those who benefir from the asymmetry of information. Yet,it is easier now than ever before to help remedy this,even where education systems appear broken. We are witnessing the rapid expansion of communication networks that flatten hierarchies and allow disruptive change. We can now imagine that the unexpressed wisdom resident in so many disconnected people will find voice through new media,provided citizens can participate meaningfully.via Partnership for Higher Education in Africa
City scenes are a minor note in Tingatinga style, but the current I am most drawn to since I think the energy and improvisational flair of African urban life is often neglected in the obsessive concern among do-gooders for the social and physical shortcomings of these crowded, disorderly places.
Watch related video hereMore here
Facing power with truth, demanding justice and making change possible are things that are easier said than done. It takes courage, resilience and a belief in one's own voice and truth — qualities that Hadizatou Mani, a woman who was sold as a slave at the age of 12, possesses, not out of her wealth or education but out of her simple and most essential belief in human dignity and women's rights to equality and justice.More here
South Africans are a strange lot with a knack for trivia even when confronted with life-threatening tragedies. One would have thought they have learnt a lesson after the blistering criticism for the unforgivable xenophobic attacks on fellow African aliens last year. But now, even where the FIFA World Cup 2010 clock is ticking dangerously towards the goal line, the ‘rainbow nation’ is engrossed in the cameo tale of a disgraced sporting cheat, choosing to downplay the trinity of evil personified by crime, HIV/Aids and poverty.More here
...If I should say, divine consolation has made Africans to do nothing about situations they can change. It has made Africans to be contented with living on the edge of life-waiting for divine intervention that will not come-and with begging for bread which they can bake. The divine meaning has caused Africans to sleep when they should be wide awake. It has made Africans to keep praying and lazying about in churches, mosques and in all sorts of worship centers expecting manna from Heaven and miracles from above when they should be working, toiling and sweating out their human and economic salvation and emancipation.More here
Geoffrey Clarfield on development "It's very hard for people of Europe and North America to recognize that the things we hold to be natural are really cultural "
The Nigeria police was established as a coercive arm of the British colonialists and it is yet to free itself of that mentality. The language it speaks best is the language of force and violence. For the police, it is always ‘we’ against ‘them’. Similarly, criminal law in the country is mostly antiquated. The penal code was drafted in 1903, and bears little or no bearing to the social realities in Nigeria today. Our Arbitration laws are so outdated that legal practitioners prefer to take arbitration cases to other countries. Despite the advancements witnessed in the medical sciences in the last half century, the country’s Pharmacy Act has not changed in the nearly 50 years. Forensic science is primeval. Despite the fact that DNA evidence is regarded as nearly 100 percent accurate, it hardly appears anywhere in our statues.More here
If more scientists started pushing for a return to independent, curiosity-driven science, then this might also encourage the big funding agencies and the other new sources of private funds such as the Perimeter Institute or the Howard Hughes and Gates Foundations. Indeed, Weinstein suggests, these new structures may have similarities with recent developments in financial engineering with the new structures emerging as “intellectual hedge funds” in response to perceived inefficiencies of more traditional agents, which play the role of more risk-averse mutual funds.More here(PDF)
If only Africans would recognize organized religion’s incessant battle to crush their beliefs to the benefit of a religious culture that was carefully put together in Rome, the same culture that politically promoted sexual and racial intolerance while making Africans believe that the homosexuality was imported whilst Christianity is African. If only we had the slightest clue of the ongoing process of the redefinition of our hard earned civilization and freedom. Al-quaeda is not the only threat to our future freedom.More here
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
...that undermines not only political stability, but also sustained growth: the overwhelming power of the executive. Despite the introduction of formal elections, many African democracies persist in the old ways of seeing the government as a way of getting rich. Newly elected leaders tend to move toward accumulating more power and influence with the end result not much different from the personal rule of their authoritarian predecessors.More here
Despots have proliferated in post colonial Africa – not so much because of their ingenuity but because of the nature and character of the opposition forces arrayed against them. African despots have prevailed for decades because the forces of opposition against them are weak or no-existent.More here
South Africans and Nigerians (and indeed other African immigrant groups) have simply not had the time or the neutral space to grow an organic understanding of each other. The Nigerians arrive with their different, more distant colonial experience, with their mercantile spirit, with none of the conditioning of the South African menial wage-earning experience and – yes – with that swagger. They arrive in a vulnerable country where the legacy of institutional exclusion still thrives. They create spaces for themselves in whatever way they can and, of course, they arouse resentment.More here
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What passes for education in Africa is nothing but a conveyor belt system that churns out labor as opposed to critical thinkers. We must urgently probe political and economic systems that have alienated Africans from their own wealth and relegated them into spectators who watch on the sidelines as huge trucks ship out tree logs and small jet planes ship out minerals and ship back beer, pornographic magazines, cigarettes and guns.More here
As an African writer, I pluck what I know and throw it into a pot with what I don't and what I conjure out of nothing and dreams. I shake in all sorts of spices, grains, water, salt and lies, African or not, and try to create a new stew with new flavours every time. I ask my audience to demand this much of me and other African writers. To expect so much more than yesterday's leftovers: the newspapers' diarrhoeic stream of problems and problematic stories. Let's imagine together all the possible and impossible ways individuals try to make sense of themselves and their worlds, African or otherwise.More here
Many people think the lines on the map no longer matter, but Parag Khanna says they do. Using maps of the past and present, he explains the root causes of border conflicts worldwide and proposes simple yet cunning solutions for each.
