South Africa’s old guard of separatist whites who supported the racist policy of apartheid have been reading with interest about Dylann Roof, accused assassin in the deaths of nine churchgoers at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The right-wing Front National party was quoted to say that the photo of shooting suspect Roof, wearing a jacket bearing apartheid-era South African and Rhodesian flags, was photoshopped.

“…The liberal media in South Africa and a host of liberal social media platforms have been spitting acid about the young man who shot and killed a number of African Americans in a church in Charleston in the south of America”, they wrote in a Facebook post.

“Front National South Africa started questioning the picture … and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the Facebook profile ‘disappeared’, but not before we got hold of the original “un-photoshopped” picture. The REAL badge is rather reminiscent of the logo of the American Democratic Party of Barack Obama!”

Another view was expressed by South African writer Eusebius McKaiser who pleaded for understanding of a wayward young man.

“Dylann Roof isn’t a terrorist,” insisted McKaiser. “He isn’t a racist. He isn’t a monster. He isn’t a murderer. And he certainly isn’t singularly responsible for having allegedly killed nine people.

‘Roof is the product of a world that created him… We created the racist society into which poor Roof was born. It is our collective racism and hatred that are the building blocks of the Roof tragedy.

“Perhaps the saddest part of the whole tragedy is that Roof’s empathy for other people shone so brightly for an hour in that church,” the black South African lamented. “For a whole hour, he was in communion with people different from him. He reportedly tells us that he almost didn’t shoot any of them because they were so nice to him. I confess, I was moved to tears.

“What that shows is that it would be cruel for us to lock up Roof and scapegoat him for society’s ills.”

An opposing view appeared in the Mail & Guardian by Terri Barnes, history professor now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who compared the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the policy of enforced racial segregation, at the University of Cape Town with the Confederate flag.

Barnes wrote: “After a great deal of pressure from many quarters and a lot of good, hard debate, the statue has since come down. (Still), the odious Confederate flag and versions thereof officially fly in seven US states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.

“Cape Town University had the wisdom to remove a symbol of racist oppression, elitism, and callous barbarism from its campus. Will Americans have the wisdom to tackle their own outdated symbols of a horrible past?”

“It is heartbreaking,” the long-time resident of South Africa continued, “even in the midst of a killing season the likes of which America has perhaps never before witnessed — that the stench of the old South Africa and of racist Rhodesia still have the power to inspire someone like Roof.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A Portuguese slave ship that left Mozambique in 1794 bound for Brazil had hardly rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope when it broke apart violently on two reefs only 100 yards from shore.

The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the enslaved Africans survived. An estimated 212 Africans did not and perished at sea.

The ship lay undisturbed in its watery grave until a chance discovery by divers searching the wreck who found iron ballasts – evidence that slaves had been the cargo on the boat.

This week, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain.

It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.

For the museum — set to open on the National Mall in Washington next year — the find represents the culmination of more than a decade of work searching for the remains of a slave ship that could help tell the story of the 12 million people who were forcibly moved, over some 60,000 voyages, from Africa to North America, the West Indies, South America and Europe.

So far, no skeletons or even partial remains have been found in the wreck.

On Tuesday, when Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s African-American museum, will join his counterparts in Cape Town to announce the discovery of the São José, there will be a memorial service near the site where the ship went down. Divers will place soil from Mozambique Island on the underwater site to memorialise the graves of the 212 drowned slaves.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Muhammadu Buhari, his hand on the Holy Book, was sworn in as Nigeria’s president at an open-air ceremony this past Friday in the capital city of Abuja. His speech acknowledged many of the challenges facing the largest democracy in Africa but offered hope that these challenges could be met.

Giving thanks to God “who has preserved us to witness this day and this occasion,” he recognised with appreciation the millions of supporters who waited long hours in the rain and hot sun to cast votes, who carried on the campaign on social media, and even to those who voted for his opponent, former president, Goodluck Jonathan.

“These countrymen and women contributed to make our democratic culture truly competitive, strong and definitive,” he said.

A Muslim by birth, Buhari addressed concerns of some the nation’s Christian community, saying: “I intend to keep my oath and serve as President to all Nigerians.”

After listing the nation’s most intractable problems – pervasive corruption, insecurity due to a terroristic insurgency, dire fuel and power shortages – he sounded a rallying cry. “We can fix our problems,” he said. One reporter called expectations of the population “catastrophic.”

Specifically, in the case of Boko Haram, the insurgent group, a new strategy was unveiled that would move the Army Command and Control Center from the capital Abuja to the insurgents’ home base in Maiduguri “until the group is completely subdued.”

“But we cannot claim to have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls and all other innocent persons held hostage by insurgents.”

“We as Nigerians are heirs to great civilizations,” he said referencing history. “Shehu Othman Dan fodio’s caliphate, the Kanem Borno Empire, the Oyo Empire, the Benin Empire and King Jaja’s formidable domain. The blood of those great ancestors flow in our veins. What is now required is to build on these legacies, to modernize and uplift Nigeria.”

Working people – “labor unions, organized private sector, the press and civil society organizations” – must unite to raise productivity so that everybody will have the opportunity to share in increased prosperity, he said. He tipped his hat to the Nigerian press – “the most vibrant in Africa“ – but asked them to exercise their powers with responsibility and patriotism.

The speech closed with a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that speaks of “a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” and closes with “We must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”

“We have an opportunity,” the new president reiterated. “Let us take it.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A UN officer receiving Burundian refugees in Tanzania. Credit: UN photo

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 20 2015 (IPS)

Burundi’s President Pierre Nkuruziza, who narrowly avoided his removal from office by a citizen-backed military coup, has turned against the media that closely reported the day to day protests.

Nkuruziza was out of the country in Tanzania at a meeting of East African leaders when he learned that hundreds of Burundians were cheering his overthrow and thousands were fleeing into exile. Upon his return he quickly regrouped, dismissing the defence and foreign ministers and attacking news outlets.

A press release from the Committee to Protect Journalists recapped: “In recent days, at least five radio stations were attacked during violence over an attempted coup in the capital, Bujumbura, and threats were made against a newspaper which caused it to stop publishing, according to reports.”

“We call on the authorities and the citizens of Burundi to respect the role of journalists and the media during these uncertain times, when a consistent flow of information is vital,” said Sue Valentine, CPJ Africa Program Coordinator. “Attacking news outlets is never a solution, especially when citizens need to know what is happening around them and those in power should be listening to what their people are saying.”

Last Thursday, unidentified individuals fired grenades into the compounds of privately owned stations Bonesha FM, Renaissance Radio and Television, Radio Isanganiro, and the privately owned Burundian station African Public Radio, according to reports. Another report on Thursday said that the offices of African Public Radio had been burned down, with a report saying that it had been hit by a rocket. None of the stations are currently operating.

In Burundi, where Internet penetration was only 1.3 per cent in 2013 according to the International Telecommunications Union, radio is the primary source of news.

Meanwhile, elections are going forward next month despite an outcry from citizens that the president was seeking a third term in office in violation of the constitution.

Requests that the elections be postponed were most recently received from Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. Previous requests came from the Burundi’s Catholic hierarchy and the U.S. State Department, among others.

President Nkuruziza, a former rebel leader from the Hutu majority, in his first public address, thanked loyalist forces for crushing the attempted coup. He warned demonstrators to end weeks of protests against his bid for a third consecutive term in office.

Nkuruziza, who uses Twitter, then sent the following tweet: “I ask all Burundians to keep calm. The situation is under control.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

In the midst of one of Africa’s largest slums, vegetables are growing.

It began as a French initiative to support jobless youth after a spasm of post-election violence in 2008 – and feed them at the same time.

The ‘garden-in-a-sack’ concept, introduced by the NGO Solidarites International, makes it possible to grow food in small spaces and save money for other purchases. In Mathare, Kiambiu and Kibera slums, with close to 3 million inhabitants, Solidarités has brought sack-gardening to about 22,109 households, directly benefitting over 110,000 people.

The upright urban farms in Kibera consist of a series of sacks filled with manure, soil and small stones that enable water to drain. From the tops and sides of these sacks, referred to as multi-story gardens, Kibera farmers grow kale, spinach, onions, tomatoes, vegetables and arrowroot which sprout from the tops and sides.

Today, Kibera has thousands of sack gardens spread across 16 villages in the slum, according to Douglas Kangi, principal agricultural officer on the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Across Africa, informal growing operations are expected to become critical in the coming years. With a constant stream of people leaving the farms for the cities, the continent’s urban population is set to top 700 million by 2030 up from 400 million today and 53 million in 1960, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

City farming, either in sacks or on small bits of land, has taken root in Cameroon, Malawi and Ghana with 25 to 50 percent of all city households said to be engaged in food cropping. In Malawi, 700,000 city dwellers have home gardens. In Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, some schools have their own gardening programmes.

Meanwhile, in Mali, farmers with small plots are still reeling from a recently-published agreement between Mali and Libya which gave a 50-year, renewable lease for 100,000 hectares of rich farmland to Libya free of charge, water rights included, in exchange for the building of an irrigation system and other infrastructure needed to grow rice and raise cattle.

The land in question is located in the Office du Niger, the agricultural heart of the West African country and responsible for most of the country’s food.

With the current chaos following Qadaffi’s ouster and death, and a punishing drought, the prospect of a major displacement of the Malian farmers seems dim. Still, tens of thousands of poor families live and grow crops on the land but are uncertain what their future holds.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The days of African presidents rewriting the constitution to crown themselves Presidents for Life may be coming to a close but Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza appears to have missed the signs of this historical shift.

Opposition to his tone-deaf overreach for an unconstitutional third term now includes religious leaders, members of his party, members of the military and a wide swathe of the population.

Even a finger-wagging message from the U.S. was studiously ignored.

Now, street protests have turned deadly as the president’s remaining loyalists turned their guns on unarmed civilians marching with hands up in the iconic “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Whatever happens in Burundi, this development sends a strong message to other African presidents who may be tempted to cling to power against the will of the people,” said Maud Jullien, a reporter for the BBC in the Burundi capital of Bujumbura.

Recent images of Burundians carried on television, showed crowds of cheering people marching through the streets and chanting “No to a Third Term”. One young man stopped to tell a reporter: “It’s the people’s victory. We fought and were shot at. We didn’t eat but in the end, victory is ours.”

As in Burkina Faso, which recently sent its president packing, military leaders in Burundi have moved into the vacuum left by Nkurunziza who was outside of the country at a meeting of East African leaders in Tanzania when the coup was announced. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

Maj Gen Godefroid Niyombare, a former intelligence chief and ally of the president who was dismissed in February, took the helm and announced that since the president had lost support of the people as well as of “many high-ranking army and police officials”, the airport would be shut down, effectively cutting off Nkrunuziza’s path to return home.

“We don’t think Burundi should be allowed to go to war again,” declared South African President Jacob Zuma after a meeting with Namibian President Hage Geingob. “People must stop the escalation of the violence that is taking place there.”

Zuma said the violence was particularly regrettable since Burundi has enjoyed a decade of peace after a bitter civil war had been hard won.

Rwandese President Paul Kagame also weighed in. “If your own citizens tell you we don’t want you to lead us, how do you say I am staying whether you want me or not?”

Curiously, Burundi is among the top five African countries receiving U.S. military training. Of the five – Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda and Burundi – three are now led by U.S.-trained soldiers, noted Wall Street Journal correspondent Drew Hinshaw.

Sean McFate, who trained soldiers in Burundi and Liberia from the U.S. security company DynCorp, warned: “If the most capable institution is the military, in a crisis, that is what the country is going to lean on, whether that is the appropriate tool or not.”

This partially explains why African leaders initially opposed the siting of the U.S. Africa Command on the African continent.

Although President Barack Obama cautioned in a speech in Ghana that Africa needed strong institutions, not strongmen, his administration has seen the great part of U.S. funds earmarked for training soldiers, not building health ministries or electoral commissions.

Speaking from Tanzania, in one of his last televised addresses, Nkrunuziza said he saw no problems in holding national elections scheduled for Jun. 26. The country’s Catholic bishops feel otherwise.

“Instead of sticking to this path of confrontation which mostly leads to loss of lives, our leaders and all other protagonists should embrace dialogue and consultation,” said Bishop Gervais Banshimiyubusa, head of the Conference of Catholic Bishops in Burundi.

Catholics make up roughly two-thirds of Burundi’s seven million population and yield significant political influence.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Rhinos in the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, Tshwane, Gauteng, South Africa. Credit: cc by 4.0

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 13 2015 (IPS)

Thefts, murders and mutilation of Africa’s wildlife, from white rhinos to elephants with their prized horns and tusks, are at an all-time high, say conservationists who are keeping track of the poaching of species by fortune-seeking hunters.

To save the animals from further decimation, the U.S.-based Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA) proposes moving about 1,000 of South Africa’s white rhinos to a comparable climate in the U.S.

Allan Warren of the EWA says the need is urgent as rhinos are being poached to near extinction in southern Africa, and there appears to be no effort to stop it.

“The rhino horn is worth about 90,000 U.S. dollars per kilogramme, and each horn weighs about four kilos so it is more valuable than gold,” Warren said.

Under EWA’s scheme, rhinos would relocate to individual ranches in Texas, with South African ranchers granted partial ownership of the rhinos’ offspring. “It is not about hunting, it’s about preserving, saving the species from certain annihilation in South Africa,” Warren said. “Most of the rhinos to be moved are these baby rhinos whose mothers are slaughtered by poachers who slice off their horns.”

According to an “Elephant Summit” in 2013 held in Gaborone, Botswana, run by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the majority of animal tusks wind up in Asia. The U.S., Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands are also cited to a lesser degree on the summit’s map.

In March of this year, world leaders met again in Kasane, Botswana to review progress since the 2014 London Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade. According to this group, illegal sales of ivory are now a 19 billion dollar business, 1000 park rangers have been killed by poachers in the last decade, and a rhino is killed every 11 hours.

With Botswana having a tough policing policy that has sharply reduced poaching, South Africa earlier this year approved the transfer of about 100 rhinos to that country. In addition to providing more space, Botswana also has a harsh “shoot to kill” policy against the hunters. It’s controversial, but some wildlife conservationists believe it’s the only way to stem poaching.

A different solution was proposed by Rhinos Without Borders which, in partnership with Great Plains Conservation, as well as various government ministries and safari groups, hopes to move up to 100 rhinos (both black and white) from existing high density populations in South Africa, and release them into the wild in various parts of Botswana.

Meanwhile, the plan to move rhinos to Texas faces several challenges: it needs approval from the US Department of Agriculture, it must find enough ranchers in Texas who want to take the rhinos; and it must raise the funds to move the creatures, at an estimated cost of at least 50,000 dollars per rhinoceros.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Credit: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 12 2015 (IPS)

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, co-curator of a spectacular World Voices week with over 100 African writers, closed the May 4-10 event with an admonition.

Referencing “codes of silence” that govern American life, Adichi urged her audience at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union University in New York City “to reject silence.”

“There is a general tendency in the United States to define problems of censorship as essentially foreign problems,” she was quoted to say by reporter Nicole Lee, writing for the Guardian UK publication.

Americans like to be comfortable and this comfort has brought a “dangerous silencing” into American public conversation, Adichie observed. “The fear of causing offense, the fear of ruffling the careful layers of comfort, becomes a fetish,” she said. As such, the goal of many public conversations in the United States “is not truth … [it] is comfort”.

According to Adichie, social media is a contemporary “tool of silencing”. The Twitter campaign to Bring Back Our Girls focused on the abduction of 200 girls in Nigeria, for example, and it appeared as if Boko Haram only targeted girls.

While that image recalled the actions of the Taliban in denying rights to women and girls, in fact, the terrorist group kidnapped almost as many young boys, making them into child soldiers. Boko Haram, she reminded the audience, is opposed to Western-style education for both girls and boys.

“It is censorship to force a story to fit into something that already pre-exists,” she said.

Breaking silences, Adichie cautioned, is not always welcomed. “I have often been told that I cannot speak on certain issues because I am young, and female or, to use the disparaging ‘Nigerian speak,’ because I am a ‘small girl’ … I have also been told that I should not speak because I am a fiction writer … But I am as much a citizen as I am a writer.”

It was as a citizen and writer that Adichie spoke out against the recent criminalisation of homosexuality in her home country, a law that not only put the safety of many innocent civilians at risk, but also many of her friends, as the Guardian writer pointed out.

Chimamanda Adichie has been called “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”. The author of Purple Hibiscus,” a coming-of-age novel set in post-colonial Nigeria, and two more critically-acclaimed novels, “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006) and “Americanah” (2013), as well as a collection of short stories, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008.

The country’s elections in March have made Adichie more optimistic about Nigeria’s prospects. “It was proof that democracy…is making progress,” she says.

The event was hosted by the Freedom to Write group PEN American Center.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

With no new infections in 42 days, Liberia has been declared free and clear of Ebola by the World Health Organization.

The announcement was made in the emergency command center in Monrovia, a room packed with reporters, aid agencies and dignitaries, including the U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Deborah R. Malac. Responses ranged from applause to tears followed by a moment of silence called by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

“At this symbolic juncture, I ask the whole world to remember the 4,608 Liberians who lost their lives, and the many thousands more who endured the horror of fighting the disease,” Johnson-Sirleaf said.

“Let us celebrate, but stay mindful and vigilant,” she said. “Clearly, the events of the last year must never be forgotten.

Then, in an action of physical closeness not seen in many months, she went around the room shaking hands.

It was just over a year – in March 2014 – that the outbreak was confirmed in Liberia. It had traveled swiftly south, from Guinea to Sierra Leone and then Liberia, frightening health officials and world health agencies with its deadly ferocity. In Liberia more than 3,000 Ebola cases were confirmed and more than 4,700 cases were fatal.

But alarm bells had hardly been sounded before the virus reached foreign shores. In July 2014, a Liberian-American, Patrick Sawyer, collapsed and died in Nigeria, leaving 19 people infected and eight dead. Four months later, Thomas Eric Duncan flew into Texas where his symptoms exploded. Sent home with antibiotics, he survived only a short time after re-entering Texas Presbyterian Hospital, where he passed away on Oct. 8.

Less than a year has passed and Liberians have successfully prevented any new infections since the last case was reported on March 20th.

Still, outbreaks persist in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, creating a risk that infected people may cross into Liberia over the region’s exceptionally porous borders.

Meanwhile, writing in FrontpageAfricaonline, Liberians gave thanks to God, the Liberian President, U.S. President Obama and the American people, the European Union, Cuba, China, support from Nigeria and Ghana, the United Nations and other NGOs.

“Liberian people at home and abroad, thanks,” wrote Boima Gbelly, described as self-employed. “If we fought this unknown enemy, certainly we can fight other challenges. Let’s unite and help build a prosperous Liberia in a civil manner.”

“Lord, with you, all things are possible,” wrote Daa Onenokay, of the Liberian diaspora. “We want to extend thanks and sincere appreciation to our international partners for all the help and support which brought relief to Liberia… We hope that the entire Mano River Basin will be Ebola-free soon.”

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Aerial Views of Ifo 2 Refugee Camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 5 2015 (IPS)

At a meeting with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry this week pledged an extra 45 million dollars for the U.N. which is sheltering over a half million refugees fleeing civil unrest, terrorism and violence in Somalia and South Sudan.

The Dadaab refugee camp – the largest in Africa – was threatened with closure after Somali militants of the al-Shabab insurgent group attacked a Kenyan university not far from the Somali border. Over 147 students, mostly Christians, were slaughtered by the group.

The U.N. set up the first camp at Dadaab in 1991, and many who live in the now-sprawling complex are teenagers and children who have never been to the countries their parents fled.

The funding brings Washington’s refugee aid to Kenya to 289 million dollars in the past two years. The U.S. also has a widening military footprint in the region. U.S. drones have been hunting down and striking at al-Shabab militia from a military hub in Djibouti. This year the U.S. will spend 100 million dollars on anti-terrorism efforts in Kenya, Kerry said.

This anti-terrorism effort could include the sharing of intelligence, which would be useful in preventing future attacks, as well as help with funds to combat youth radicalisation and for counter-terrorism training.

Kerry took issue with opposition leaders in Kenya who call for the immediate withdrawal of Kenyan troops from Somalia – a presence that is blamed for the al-Shabab attacks on Kenyan citizens. Urging Kenya to be a little patient, he added: “The exit strategy needs to be a success.”

Kerry said the Kenyan president has now agreed to leave the refugees in place for the time being. “Kenya has a great tradition of hosting refugees, and the key is to accelerate efforts to have a plan in place for the people in all the refugee camps to be able to return home, in an orderly and voluntary manner, with dignity and with safety,” he said. “That’s his goal. That’s our goal.”

Kerry outlined other planned spending in the region, including five million dollars to finance a court in South Sudan to hold perpetrators of violence to account.

The trip to Kenya was the first by a senior U.S. official since 2012, ending a freeze between the two countries started by charges against Kenyatta for crimes against humanity over post-election violence in 2007 and 2009. The case by the International Criminal Court was closed after failure to win cooperation last year.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Prize-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is hoping to break down some stereotypes at the upcoming World Voices Festival sponsored by the PEN America free expression group.

Chimamanda is the co-curator in the festival which starts from May 4. The author of Purple Hisbiscus, her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013), she warns of the “danger of a single story” – the idea that people living in certain areas of the world all have one kind of experience.

In the hopes of winning a wider audience for African writers, she’s chosen Nigerian-American author Teju Cole, author of The White Savior Industrial Complex, and Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe, among others.

“It was important to get people who actually live on the continent, along with those who have left,” she told the Wall Street Journal from her part-time home in Columbia, Maryland.

A roster of 100 writers from 30 countries will take part in this year’s Africa programme. Other authors at this year’s festival themed “On Africa” include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes, Senegalese screenwriter Boubacar Boris Diop, and South African visual activist Zanele Muholi.

World Voices was launched 11 years ago in the wake of 9/11 to combat “American cultural isolationism.” The annual literary extravaganza adopted a new curatorial approach for its 2015 edition which is taking place under the theme “On Africa.”

This year’s event spotlights the new and old schools of creative writing arising from across the continent with a lineup of workshops, readings, and conversations focusing on migration, memory and imagination, the importance of bearing witness, the role of literature in Africa’s gay rights movement and the future of queer creative communities across Africa and its diaspora.

“Focusing on the African continent is an ambitious undertaking,” said Laszlo Jakab Orsós, festival director. “We cannot, in one week-long Festival, even come close to presenting the entirety of the riveting literary landscapes throughout Africa, but we’re excited to present a select group of writers and artists who, I believe, will inspire New York audiences with their uncompromising and brilliant work.

“It’s our privilege to put the spotlight on these writers, and it is my hope that they will challenge all of us to create art that is bravely subversive and relevant to our time.”

The 11th annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will take place in various locations throughout New York City  from May 4-10. Visit the official PEN World Voices Festival website for more information on the schedule of events and the full list of festival participants.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Boko Haram, fleeing to a new hideout, has abandoned hundreds of women and girls in the Sambisa forest where the high school girls from Chibok were initially taken over one year ago. It is not certain, however, that the freed girls and women were part of the 200 plus kidnapped victims of Boko Haram, officials say.

Over the past few weeks, Nigerian troops claim to have rescued about 1,000 women and girls. “Many of them told us that they have been hungry for days,” said Sani Datti, spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency.

However, kidnapping is still advancing and at least 2,000 new women and girls have been taken by the militants, according to Amnesty International.

Less mentioned are the boys seized and forced to become child soldiers. As many boys have been kidnapped as girls but the military hasn’t reported freeing boys in any significant number.

Boko Haram may have abandoned the girls but continues to occupy territory beyond Nigeria. A video released last month announced a new name (Iswap) for Islamic State’s West Africa Province and a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State (IS).

“It would be naive on the part of Nigeria’s authorities to think it is on the brink of victory,” wrote Tomi Oladipo for BBC Lagos. Sambisa forest is mine-infested and it is likely the Iswap fighters know this terrain better than the military does, he wrote. “The Nigerian military is likely to face its toughest battle yet,” he affirmed.

The head of the United Nations Population Fund, Babatunde Osotimehin, discussed the rehabilitation of the rescued women and children. He said his organisation had put in place a formidable team to restore the dignity of the girls, who were facing severe psychosocial trauma.

Interviews with some of the rescued girls appeared on the BBC website. According to the former hostages, Boko Haram fighters began pelting the women with stones when they refused to flee with their captors. Some were killed in that incident, the women said. Others were killed inadvertently by the military during the rescue operation.

“Soldiers did not realize that we were not the enemies,” and some women were run over by their trucks,” survivor Asama Umoru told the news station.

“Every day, we witnessed the death of one of us and waited for our turn,” said Asabe Umaru, a 24-year-old mother of two.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Hundreds protest police brutality in Jerusalem, April 30, 2015 Credit: Screen capture/Facebook

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 4 2015 (IPS)

A video that caught an Israeli police officer and a volunteer shoving and punching a black soldier in uniform outraged members of the Ethiopian Jewish community and set off a clash Sunday between Ethiopian Jews and police in central Tel Aviv.

Thousands took part in the Sunday protest over the incident, including many non-Ethiopian Israelis. Police met the crowd, which froze traffic along a major highway, with water cannons and tear gas.

Some 13 people were injured and two policemen were reportedly suspended on suspicion of using excessive force.

From the video, caught by a security camera, the soldier, Damas Pakada, a member of the Israeli Defense Force, appears to be pushing a bicycle. Two officers approach him and after a brief interaction, attack him, push him to the ground, punch him, and appear to put him in a headlock. The officers look to weigh about twice Pakada’s slim size.

Pakada was initially accused of attacking the officer and arrested, only to be released once the surveillance video of the attack was uploaded to social media.

Fentahun Assefa- Dawit, executive director of Tebeka – Advocacy for Equality and Justice for Ethiopian Israelis, says that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but not an isolated incident.

The only thing unique about this incident, he said, is that it was caught on film. Young Ethiopian Israelis being attacked by police and then falsely accused of crimes is an all-too common scenario, he said.

“You can imagine, if there were no footage, what would have happened to this soldier?” asks Assefa-Dawit rhetorically. Pakada would have been put in jail with a record for assaulting a police officer following him around for the rest of his life.

The clashes reflected widespread frustration in the Ethiopian community which, three decades after it first arrived in Israel, has become an underclass plagued by poverty, crime and unemployment.

“Anyone who attended the protest yesterday experienced at one point in their life humiliation based on nothing but skin color,” said Mehereta Baruch-Ron, a Tel Aviv deputy mayor of Ethiopian descent. ‘We have had enough. It is time to do something.’

Shlomo Molla, a former lawmaker of Ethiopian origin, said his generation failed to make a change and that hope lies with the younger generation who were born in Israel and are less intimidated by the establishment.

“We should stop enlisting in the army, not join the police, and stop paying taxes, because if the state doesn’t take its citizens into account, the citizens are also permitted not to take the state into account.’

Children of the older generation of Ethiopian Jews speak fluent Hebrew, study in universities and serve in the army alongside native Israelis. But despite such gains, the younger generation is still struggling compared to other Israelis.

As the video of the beating went viral, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set up a meeting with the young soldier. “I was shocked by the pictures,” he told Pakada.” We cannot accept it, we will change things.”

“Maybe good things will come out of this difficult situation.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Nigeria’s president-elect is already making waves with his pledge to attack corruption, starting with the missing 20 billion dollars allegedly swiped from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation during the previous administration.

Muhammadu Buhari pledged to pursue the claim of former Central Bank governor, Lamido Sanusi, who was suspended last year by former president Goodluck Jonathan after he warned of massive mismanagement by the oil corporation. His claim was never investigated by the ex-president.

“This issue is not over yet,” declared Buhari, who will be sworn in on May 29. “Once we assume office we will order a fresh probe into the matter… We will not allow people to steal money meant for Nigerians to buy shares and stash (them) away in foreign lands.”

Buhari’s warning to those who pocketed national funds thrilled Africans as far away as Zambia and prompted an editorial in The Post newspaper.

“Nigerian President-elect General Muhammadu Buhari’s message on corruption brings some hope for that country and our continent,” wrote The Post’s editor in a piece viewed 1,294 times.

The editorial continued: “We wish this was the message we were getting from our own President, Edgar Lungu. But it is not. If there is anything Edgar hardly talks about, it is corruption.

“What we have in Zambia today is a corrupt government… This is a government where those in leadership are the ones getting government contracts. They are the suppliers of government. Leaders and cadres of the ruling party are the ones doing business with government.

“If one scrutinises all government contracts, it will not be difficult to discover that almost all of them have been given to people connected to the ruling party and its leadership…. When one criticises such practices, he is seen to be hurtful, frustrated.

“Look at how quickly those in the leadership of government, from president to the lowest cadre, become rich! What is the magic? Where is the money coming from? It is from corruption, from bribes, from selling government policy. There is no other source of that money other than corruption.”

Africans surveyed by the group Afrobarometer in 2013 expressed similar views and many believe the situation has deteriorated in the last decade.

In the survey of 34 countries, 56 percent of the 51,000 people surveyed thought their governments were doing “fairly badly” or “very badly” in the fight against corruption. Only 35 percent said their governments were doing “fairly well” or “very well”.

Among those most dissatisfied by official efforts to end corruption were Nigerians and Egyptians at the top, followed by Zimbabweans, Ugandans and Sudanese, Kenyans, Malians, Tunisians, Togolese, Tanzanians and South Africans.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A practice of denying admission to South African public schools of children without visas or whose parents are refugees from other African countries is creating a foundation for the current rash of xenophobia, critics of the practice say.

Jean-Luc Ntumba from the DRC, a father of three, said he was unable to enroll his children in public schools. “They could not even give a reason why they could not take my kids,” he said in an interview with the BBC. “I’m not happy with that. Because we also have rights to education for our kids.”

A provision in South Africa’s constitution gives everyone the right to a basic education, but some children of asylum seekers and refugees are still turned away. Two years ago, South Africa-based Lawyers for Human Rights and the Centre for Child Law sued the government over the plight of eight minor children from the Democratic Republic of Congo struggling to attend South African public schools.

While the case was won by the lawyers’ group, the ruling was not enforced. “We’ve written letters,” said Neo Chokoe of Lawyers for Human Rights, “and we have not seen them complying with the court order.” A new lawsuit on the issue is planned, she said.

The privately-run Albert Street Refugee School, run by teachers from all over Africa, has been seeking full approval by the Education Department since 2008. William Kandowe, the school’s head teacher, expressed frustration.

“This is how xenophobia starts,” he complained to the BBC. “They always threaten to close us down. When they say we don’t have fire escapes, we find donors to put fire escapes. When they say we don’t have libraries, we find donors to put libraries.

“They just don’t want to say we are closing you down because you’re foreign nationals.”

Launched by Methodists, the school provides instruction from grades one through 12 for some 600 refugee children.

The right of refugee children to attend school has been raised by groups including the U.N. refugee agency and the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg which found that schools often demanded documents to enroll a child which are not legally required.

A 2013 report published in the Africa Education Review questioned whether South Africa could meet its Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal education if refugee children are not schooled.

“Refugee children have limited opportunities to secondary education and experience many problems accessing primary education because of their refugee status,” said the report.

The South African study is symptomatic of the global refugee experience, the report’s authors wrote. The Second Millennium Development Goal will not be realised unless the education of refugee children is taken seriously.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, overriding objections to an ill-advised third term, now faces a growing popular movement to oust him after his term ends this coming June.

On Sunday, thousands of angry Burundians filled the streets in the capital, Bujumbura, to protest a manouevre by the ruling party to put Nkurunziza back in office for one more term of five years. The constitution allows just two terms, back to back.

News reporters at the scene said the protestors were attacked by police who fired tear gas and water cannons. Nine people were reported killed on Sunday in the melee.

Nkurunziza came to power in 2005, when a 12-year-long civil war officially ended. Presidential elections are scheduled for Jun. 26.

In an effort to control the widely disseminated images of tear gassed protestors and other abuses, the Nkurunziza government banned demonstrations, deployed the army and shut down the main independent radio station, saying it was disrupting the peace.

A prominent human rights activist, Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, was arrested and reportedly brutalised during a police raid at the headquarters of a media association.

Another activist, Vital Nshimirimana, head of an NGO forum and leader of the campaign to block a third presidential term, is reportedly being sought by police.

The ruling party is attempting to use a loophole, saying the president’s installation in 2005 came about through a vote by parliament to lead a transitional government and not by popular vote.

Those who oppose Nkurunziza running for a third term include members of his own party, lawmakers, the clergy, student groups and civil society. Washington has also expressed its displeasure, saying that with the decision to allow an additional term, the country was “losing an historic opportunity to strengthen its democracy by establishing a tradition of peaceful democratic transition.”

Many Burundians are still traumatised by an armed conflict that lasted from 1993 to 2005 in which over 300,000 people died. The conflict was between the minority Tutsi-dominated army and mainly Hutu rebel groups, such as Nkurunziza’s CNDD-FDD.

With memories of that conflict still fresh, more than 10,000 Burundians have fled to neighbouring Rwanda, citing pressure to support Nkurunziza’s party. The ruling party’s youth wing, known as Imbonerakure, is also striking fear in the population, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

Not all leaders who refuse to relinquish power are successful, however. A similar bid by the president of Burkina Faso was defeated in a recent popular uprising that sent the disgraced leader into exile.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

On Earth Day, Apr. 22, Kenyan activist Phyllis Omido takes the stage in Washington DC to receive the Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts to defend her community from lead poisoning and force the closure of a lead smelting plant that was emitting fumes and spewing untreated acid wastewater into streams, poisoning the neighbourhood – including her own baby.

Courtesy of the Goldman Prize.

“At first we thought he had malaria or typhoid, but doctors found he was suffering from lead poisoning,” Omido recalled. The lead was traced to a smelter where Phyllis had recently started work as a community liaison officer.

“The doctors said the lead reached my baby through my breast milk,” Phyllis said in London last week as she made the trip to the U.S. to receive the Africa award of the prestigious Goldman prize.

The smelter – built in the heart of Owino Uhuru, a densely-packed slum in Mombasa, Kenya’s second city – extracted lead from used car batteries. Lead is a potent neurotoxin. It damages the development of children, targeting the brain and nervous system.

The smelter began operations in 2009 without any environmental impact assessment (EIA). One of Phyllis’s first jobs was to commission one. The findings revealed that the smelter was poisoning the neighbourhood, but the company was unwilling to move.

“I went to the company’s directors and the government’s environment agency, which had licensed the smelter. I showed them reports from lead experts. But nobody wanted to listen,” she says. Meanwhile, children were getting sick; women were having miscarriages; even the neighbourhood chickens were dying.

She claims that the company routinely sacked workers after a few months because it knew their exposure to lead was unsafe. But after a worker died, the community held a demonstration. A local MP, who was also a minister for the environment, came. “We hoped he would help. But he said we should keep quiet because the company brought jobs. He accused me of being in league with his political opponents.”

After a long struggle, with help from Human Rights Watch and the U.N. special rapporteur on toxic waste, she was able to see the company close the plant in 2014.

Since then, she has set up a local NGO, the Center for Justice, Governance and Environmental Action, to fight other causes like salt miners who are damaging Kenya’s nearby coastal fisheries. And she has more work to do in Owino Uhuru.

Omido and the other prize recipients – from Myanmar, Canada, Haiti, Scotland and Honduras – will each receive 175,000 dollars for their ongoing work. Dana King and conservation scientist Dr. M Sanjayan will be Masters of Ceremonies. For more information about the prize, visit the website.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

An Anglo-Nigerian writer has respectfully urged Pope Francis to look beyond Armenia for the first genocide of the 20th century.

In an essay in the British Guardian, David Olusoga wrote: “When the media analysts at the Vatican scrutinize the social media traffic of the past seven days, their eyes might well be drawn away from Turkey and the Armenian diaspora towards a cluster of tweets, comments and Facebook posts that emanate from Africa.

“There, another debate raged last week,” he said. “The pope’s description of the Armenian massacre as “the first genocide of the 20th century” was simply incorrect. That grim distinction belongs to the genocide that imperial Germany unleashed a decade earlier against the Herero and Nama, two ethnic groups who lived in the former colony of South West Africa, modern Namibia.”

Olusoga pointed out that the Namibian genocide, 1904-1909, “seemed to prefigure the later horrors of that troubled century.” The systematic extermination of around 80 percent of the Herero people and 50 percent of the Nama was the work both of German soldiers and colonial administrators; “banal, desk-bound killers.” The most reliable figures estimate 90,000 people were killed, he said.

In the case of the Herero, he recalled, “an official, written order – the extermination order – was issued by the German commander, explicitly condemning the entire people to annihilation. After military attempts to bring this about had been thwarted, the liquidation of the surviving Herero, along with the Nama people, was continued in concentration camps, a term that was used at the time for the archipelago of facilities the Germans built across Namibia.”

“Some of the victims of the Namibian genocide were transported to those camps in cattle trucks and the bodies of some of the victims were subjected to pseudoscientific racial examinations and dissections.”

Recollection of this horror comes as a conference on reparations winds up in New York. However, unlike in the U.S. which apologized for slavery by resolutions in the House and Senate a decade ago, “All of this is now well known and widely accepted in Africa and even in Germany,” says Olusoga.

“In 2004, the German government apologized to the Herero and admitted that what Germany had done to their ancestors constituted a genocide,” he said. “As the co-author of one of the more recent histories of the genocide, I am regularly invited to attend conferences and give lectures on the subject in Germany and the word is spreading. A decade ago, my co-author and I described what took place in Namibia between 1904 and 1909 as “Germany’s forgotten genocide”. That phrase is now past its sell-by date, everywhere, it seems, other than in the Vatican.”

Olusoga wondered if the pope’s statement was made in ignorance or if the Vatican was guilty of the sin of deliberate omission. “Catholicism is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else,” he observed – “200 million Africans are followers of the faith. But awareness of history is also increasing in Africa and crimes such as the Namibian genocide can no longer be ignored, whether by accident or design.”

David Olusoga is the co-author, with Casper Erichsen, of The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Shocking images of South Africans beating foreign-born residents residing in Durban, Johannesburg and other parts stunned the continent which had taken a message of brotherhood from former president Nelson Mandela.

At least six people were killed, more than 5,000 displaced and shops were looted and razed in the attacks which have been building over weeks. Most of those affected were refugees and asylum seekers who were forced to leave their countries due to war and persecution, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees said.

The riots forced President Jacob Zuma to cancel a state visit to Indonesia and visit one of the camps in the Durban suburb of Chatsworth, where more than a thousand foreign nationals were sleeping in tents and relying on volunteers for food. Many were boarding buses to return to Malawi, Zimbabwe, and other home countries.

“It is not every South African who says go away, not at all. It is a very small number who say so,” Zuma said. “We want to live as sisters and brothers.”

The spark for the attacks was linked to comments by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini at a traditional event north of KwaZulu Natal. At first he seemed to be criticising South Africans for being lazy and not wanting to plough their fields. “When foreigners look at (us), they say ‘let us exploit this nation of idiots. As I speak, you find their unsightly goods hanging all over our shops. They dirty our streets. We cannot even recognise which shop is which, there are foreigners everywhere.”

He later denied the statement until media replayed a recording of it.

Retaliation against the attacks was seen in Mozambique after a national was seen murdered on TV. South African vehicles were pelted with stones. In Nigeria, South African companies were reportedly threatened with closure. Protests were seen at various South African embassies across the continent, and several South African musicians were forced to cancel concerts abroad.

Sasol, an energy and chemical giant, evacuated 340 South Africans from Mozambique over fears for their safety. In Zambia, a privately owned radio station stopped playing South African music in protest.

An anti-xenophobic peace march organised by South African local officials took place on Apr. 16 and was well attended. Some 5,000 people including religious leaders and politicians marched in solidarity with foreign nationals. The atmosphere was mostly calm, with protesters singing solidarity songs.

Still, Jean-Pierre Lukamba, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, feared for the worst. “They are using us as scapegoats,” he said.

“Every day, migrants are living in this fire. It’s not just attacks. It’s institutionalised xenophobia. The government must do something. Those people aren’t just mad for no reason. They want electricity, they want jobs, they want water.”

Lukamba said he’s part of an organisation trying to negotiate between the two sides. “They don’t understand the history of Africa; if they do, they would know each of us, we are one,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

As Europeans debated their policies towards the leaky flotillas steaming out of Libya, carrying most to a certain death at sea, members of ISIL were streaming a video of captured Ethiopian Christians on a beach.

One group of Christians is on their knees and shot to death. Another group is beheaded. The video bore the official logo of the ISIL media arm Al-Furgan and resembled previous videos released by the group, Al Jazeera reported.

A masked fighter is seen delivering a long statement between pieces of footage of the slaughter. The victims were identified as “followers of the cross from the enemy Ethiopian Church”.

Earlier this year, fighters pledging allegiance to ISIL released a video purporting to show the killing of 20 Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Ghanaian abducted in Libya.

According to a release by the group Coptic Solidarity, the Christians were killed for refusing to pay a tax, imposed on non-Muslims in an Islamic state who refuse to convert.

Since the U.S.-assisted removal of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has become a hotbed of Islamist violence with no central government.

With security denied in Libya, some 900 migrants made their way to the sea last week, hoping to reach Malta. When the boat capsized after a few days, many were trapped behind doors locked by their smugglers. Between 28 and 50 survivors have been found.

The Italian Coast Guard is collecting statements from other survivors, prosecutors said. Passengers were from Algeria, Egypt, Somalia, Niger, Senegal, Mali, Zambia, Bangladesh and Ghana.

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said that the incident could be worse than an incident last week in which 400 refugees and migrants died in the Mediterranean.

Human Rights Watch urged the European Union to act quickly. “The EU is standing by with arms crossed while hundreds die off its shores,” said Judith Sunderland, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “These deaths might well have been prevented if the EU had launched a genuine search-and-rescue effort.”

In a statement released Sunday, the U.N. said that it planned action down the road but didn’t detail any immediate plans to help with the search for the victims of this accident.

Doctors Without Borders also had strong words for the tragedy. “A mass grave is being created in the Mediterranean Sea and European policies are responsible,” said the group’s president, Loris De Filippi. He compared the high number of deaths to “figures from a war zone.”

“Faced with thousands of desperate people fleeing wars and crises, Europe has closed borders, forcing people in search of protection to risk their lives and die at sea,” he said. “This tragedy is only just beginning, but it can and should be stopped.”

Doctors Without Borders will begin its own rescue effort, he added, because “as a medical, humanitarian organization, we simply cannot wait any longer.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The United Nations, which is sheltering over 600,000 refugees from war-torn Somalia, has been ordered by Kenyan authorities to relocate the camp in three months.

“We have asked the UNHCR (the U.N. Refugee Agency) to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” said Kenya’s deputy president William Ruto in a statement Saturday.

“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” he said, referring to the university that was attacked by Somali militants on Apr. 2.

Dadaab, the camp near the border with Somalia, is the largest refugee camp in Africa.

Macharia Munene, professor of international relations at the United States International University-Africa, said the logistics of moving hundreds of thousands of refugees across the border would be “a tall order”.

But he said there were now safe areas within Somalia from where the al Shabab armed group had been chased out by African Union forces in recent years.

“Kenya is in an emergency situation… Each country has an obligation to look after its people first,” he told Reuters.

In an effort to reassure Kenyans that the government is concerned with their safety, Kenya has been building a 440-mile wall along the entire length of the border with Somalia to keep out al Shabab militants.

But according to security and policy analyst Abdulahi Boru Halakhe, the strategy is ill-conceived. “Building the wall assumes that all al-Shabab members come from Somalia and ignores the group’s cells in Kenya and easy routes through neighboring Uganda and Tanzania,” he wrote in an opinion for Al Jazeera news.

“In fact, the suspected mastermind of the Garissa attack was a Kenyan schoolteacher from the town, and one of his accomplices was a son of a Kenyan government official.”

Joshua Meservey of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center expressed his view that Kenya was scapegoating the mostly Muslim refugees for their own security failings.

Further, suggested Mohamed Abdi, a refugee at the camp, moving the camp inside Somalia would boost al-Shabab’s recruitment efforts among the camp’s impoverished men, whose livelihoods would be threatened if their homes are displaced.

Meanwhile, the UNHCR claims it has not received any official communication from Kenyan authorities but rejects the apparent effort to use the refugees as scapegoats.

“Blanket measures that target people based on nationality or membership of a group will only cause suffering to innocent people and are usually ineffective,” said UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards. Three months, he added, is not realistic for such a relocation.

In a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, a teaching hospital and other medical groups, Ghana has launched its first-ever training programme in emergency medicine and nursing.

Some 15 specialist-emergency physicians, trained in the programme, are already working in hospitals in the Ashanti, Greater Accra and Northern regions. Some 35 trained nurses have been posted to facilities across eight regions in the country.

The project emerged in response to the Accra Sports Stadium disaster of May 9, 2001 at the Ohene Djan Sports Stadium. Two popular teams were scheduled to play and trouble was anticipated. After the home side scored two late goals, the losing team’s fans began tossing plastic seats and bottles onto the pitch. Police responded by throwing tear gas into the crowd, sparking a stampede which led to the deaths from compressive asphyxia of 127 people.

Some gates were locked, preventing escape. The medical staff at the stadium had already gone home. “It was the longest and darkest night in Africa soccer history,” wrote Kent Mensah in goal.com

Authorities were blamed in an official inquiry with over-reacting, reckless behavior and indiscriminate firing of plastic bullets and tear gas. Six officers were accused of dishonesty and failure to take quick action.

A hearing on the incident failed to find any guilty parties but Ghanaians remember the disaster on May 9 each year. A monument “I Am My Brother’s Keeper”, mounted at the stadium, recalls the 127 lives that were lost.

In response to public pressure, a national Accident and Emergency Center was built in Kumasi. The Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons approached the Department of Emergency Medicine at Michigan University and a partnership was developed.

Prior to this new programme, most emergency care centers were staffed by medical officers with no formal training in Emergency Medicine. There were “casualty departments” in the larger hospitals but staffing was inadequate and relatively junior. Ambulance services are confined to regional capitals and are virtually non-existent in rural areas.

The training will “improve the provision of emergency medical care in Ghana through innovative and sustainable physician, nursing, and medical student training programs,” Michigan University wrote on its website. “These programs will increase the number of qualified emergency health care workers retained over time in areas where they are most needed. “

Funding for the project comes from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center which is reported to be investing 130 million dollars in emergency medicine capacity across the continent.

Fifty 50 emergency nursing trainees are expected to complete their training by 2016, with 20 emergency medical technicians having been trained in triaging, resuscitation and acute care management.

Togolese opposition leaders are issuing calls for change – the mantra of President Barack Obama – as they seek the end of the 50-year dynasty of the Gnassingbe family in Togolese politics.

Originally scheduled for Apr. 15, a presidential election will take place Apr. 25 after voter lists are checked as ordered by the Economic Community of West African States. Over 3.5 million voters are eligible to vote out of a population of nearly seven million.

Opposition parties said the list includes thousands of people who have registered twice and are likely to vote for the incumbent president.

President Faure Gnassingbe’s main challenger is Jean-Pierre Fabre, heading up the Combat for Political Change party, who faces a difficult political landscape made up of 37 ethnic groups – the main ones being the Ewe in the south (40 percent of the population), the Kotokolis in the center and the Kabye people in the north (22 percent). The Ewe straddle the Togo-Ghana boundary.

Gnassingbe rose to power in 2005 after the death of his father, General Gnassingbe Eyadema, who ruled the tiny West African nation with an iron fist for 38 years. In recent months, opposition parties have tried to limit the number of five-year terms that a president can serve to two but the reform was blocked by Gnassingbe’s party.

At his party’s convention in February, which drew some 700 delegates, Gnassingbe modestly accepted his party’s backing to run for a third term.

“It is out of duty to our country Togo and trust in the ideals that we all share that I have the honor to accept to be invested as the presidential candidate of our (Union for the Republic) UNIR party,” he said. “I accept this nomination with a deep sense of humility.”

Years ago, Togo formed part of the Slave Coast, where captives were shipped abroad by European slavers during the 17th century. In 1884 it became the German protectorate of Togoland.

Political parties were legalised in 1991 and a democratic constitution was adopted in 1992.

In November and December last year, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to demand term limits but were turned back by police firing tear gas.

According to Unicef, 73 percent of Togo’s rural population and 91 percent of the northern Savanes region, lives below the poverty line.

The Unicef website for Togo reads: “The country is at a crucial point in its history. Another generation of children cannot be lost to poor services and abuses of their fundamental rights. National and international partners have a unique opportunity to ensure the health, education and social services for children in need in Togo.”

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is predicted to roll up an easy victory in national polls this week, adding another five-year term to his already 26 years in office.

Voting began Monday and will continue for three days. More than 13 million people are registered to vote at some 11,000 polling stations around the country.

The country’s main opposition groups, however, have refused to participate, leaving some 15 little-known candidates to challenge Bashir. Among them is Fatima Abd-al-Mahmud, the only female candidate, running on the Sudanese Socialist Democratic Union ticket. A pediatrician, the 71-year-old entered politics four decades ago and has served in several ministerial posts.

Leaders of the opposition say that no credible elections can be held until peace is restored in all of the country’s regions and until all political prisoners are released and press freedom is restored.

“We are not going to participate in this election because it is not fair and free,” declared Hassan Osman Rizig, deputy president of the opposition Reform Now Movement party. “It is not recognised by the internal opposition or by the international community.”

“This is not an election and I personally, and our movement, shall not recognise this election,” echoed Minni Minnawi, chair of a Sudan Liberation Army faction that has been fighting government forces in Darfur for years, in a Guardian (UK) newspaper interview via satellite phone.

Fighting has been relentless in Darfur, Blue Nile and the South Kordofan region of Sudan, near the South Sudanese border, since conflict erupted in the fall of 2011 between the armed forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North.

In January, Sudanese air force planes bombing rebels in the Nuba Mountains area struck a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), where some 150 patients were being treated. Two bombs landed inside the hospital compound, the doctors’ group said, injuring one MSF staffer and one patient.

Still, the world community has shown signs of easing up on Bashir, once a roundly-criticised international pariah. The International Criminal Court, citing lack of support from the U.N. Security Council, ended its investigation of abuses in Darfur although the president still faces charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and three counts of genocide – accusations he denies.

Other actions favouring Bashir was the recent decision by Washington to allow communications equipment including smartphones and laptops into the country.

Both Bashir and opposition members have made improved relations with the U.S. a high priority in their campaign rallies.

The elections will be monitored by the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and the Arab League. European monitors have decided to stay home, citing doubts the exercise could produce credible results.

Quota systems in place are expected to ensure that women occupy at least 25 percent of seats in the national assembly and that all the country’s regions are fairly represented.

In a prepared speech after the murder of dozens of Kenyans last year, President Uhuru Kenyatta declared a national war on terror. “This is a war against Kenya and Kenyans,” he said. “It is a war that every one of us must fight.”

It was a speech he gave in December after the killing of 36 miners working in a quarry not far from the border with Somalia. They were reportedly slain by members of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

Once again, a few days ago, Kenyans reeled in shock, but this time at news of the massacre of at least 147 students – nearly all young Christian males – by a small rebel band filtered through the media.Despite its peaceful appearance, the [Garissa] university college was a known target for the fury of the Somali-based Al-Shabaab group which has been at war with Kenya for many years. The fact that only a small handful of security guards were on duty when the attack began shocked many.

The slaughter began in the dark pre-dawn hours of Apr. 2 while everyone slept until they were awakened by the popping sounds of gunfire. The militants urged students to cooperate. “If you want to survive, come out. If you want to die, stay inside,” they warned the still-groggy students.

“I knew those guys were lying,” said a 23-year-old student Elosy Karimi who described to a reporter how she hid in the ceiling above her bunk bed for over 24 hours.

President Barack Obama, still planning a trip to Kenya, commiserated: “Words cannot adequately condemn the terrorist atrocities that took place at Garissa University College, where innocent men and women were brazenly and brutally massacred. We join the world in mourning them, many of whom were students pursuing an education in the pursuit of a better life for themselves and their loved ones. “

“They represented a brighter future for a region that has seen too much violence for far too long.”

Garissa University College lies northeast of Nairobi, near to the border with Somalia. A small school with a staff of 75, it was recently upgraded to give technical and vocational degrees as part of Moi University. Computer science and information technology were introduced last year. But the bucolic nature of the college, highlighted by a flock of sheep, green leaves and natural springs, was apparent on the school’s website.

Despite its peaceful appearance, the university college was a known target for the fury of the Somali-based Al-Shabaab group which has been at war with Kenya for many years. The fact that only a small handful of security guards were on duty when the attack began shocked many.

It was particularly inexplicable as there had been recent warnings of an Al-Shabaab attack at Garissa and other universities. A travel advisory issued by the British government just days earlier had warned against travel to Garissa.

While some foreign media outlets describe Kenya as “powerless in the face of a ruthless terrorist organisation,” Kenya is a major military power in the region, having one of the highest defence budgets in Africa, thanks to two decades of a steady increase in military spending.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent research organisation, the country purchased 19.8 billion Kenyan shillings (216 million dollars) worth of advanced weapons in five years between 2010 and 2014, up from 919.4 million Kenyan shillings (10 million dollars) between 2005 and 2009 — marking a huge jump in the period — which is the highest in the East Africa.

Yet four gunmen managed to hold off elite counter-terror police and military units called to the scene while they systematically massacred “hostages.” This is hardly unprecedented,” Patrick Gathara, a security analyst wrote in Al Jazeera news service.

“Much the same happened at Westgate (Mall) where four gunmen supposedly kept hundreds of cops and soldiers at bay for four days, apparently taking time off to pray and relax while the security agents looted the mall.”

“The government responded with a crackdown that targeted the ethnic Somali population within Nairobi – little more than an exercise in scapegoating and extortion,” he recalled. “Similarly, Garissa itself, which is populated mainly by ethnic Somalis, has been the site for ‘security operations’ – another term for collective punishment – for well over half a century.”

Government’s failure to stem the rise in insecurity has not gone unnoticed in the Kenyan community, especially since Kenya’s incursion into Somalia in Operation Linda Nchi in 2011. A reduction of troops was expected in 2014 after complaints by the Somali government.

A Twitter feed titled #GarissaAttack quickly filled up with comments and complaints. Ory Okolloh Mwangi, well-known ‘Kenyan pundit’, wrote: “When you look at the resources poured into winning one single seat in Kajiado Central, and then how we are responding to Garissa. Ai?”

Senator James Orengo pleaded:  “We know very well the consequences of a war of occupation. We must withdraw our troops from Somalia to end this. We must rethink our strategy and have a targeted and principled way of engaging Somalia rather than put our people at risk.”

Questions are forming, wrote Gathara, about whether this disaster is just the latest in a series of preventable terrorist atrocities that have now claimed more than 350 lives in the last two years.

An earlier security operation, a week into the Kenyatta presidency, saw the indiscriminate arrest of over 600 Garissa residents, including newly-elected local leaders, by a security team the government itself had described as “rotten”, wrote Gathara.

“Now, after the latest Garissa atrocity, President Kenyatta has issued another directive of dubious legality,” continued Gathara, namely calling up 10,000 new officers despite a court order freezing police recruitment following a corruption-riddled exercise last year.

“What is Kenya’s plan as far as Somalia is concerned?” asked Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, East Africa researcher with Amnesty International, regarding the Kenya’s troops stationed in Somalia. “What does the exit plan look like? Is it two years? Is it three years”?

Edited by Phil Harris    

General Muhammadu Buhari holding a broom at a campaign rally. Photo credit: By Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Flickr: Wahlkampf in Nigeria 2015)/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK/ABUJA, Apr 2 2015 (IPS)

After several tension-filled months, a majority of Nigerians swept in an opposition leader and former military man, Muhammadu Buhari, to succeed incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, whose failure to contain a terrorist wave in the northern states doomed his re-election chances.

Buhari had previously ruled Nigeria from January 1984 until August 1985 – a period in which there were widespread accusations of human rights abuses – after taking charge following a military coup in December 1983.

The Mar. 28 elections were observed by teams from the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union. Carl LeVan, an assistant professor at the School of International Service, American University in Washington, DC, took part in the National Democratic Institute’s election observation mission from the United States.“[President Muhammadu] Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted” – Carl LeVan, member of a U.S. observation mission for the Mar. 28 presidential election in Nigeria

Speaking with IPS, LeVan, author of Dictators and Democracy in African Development (2015), remarked on the surprise success of Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) party that was only formed in February 2013.

“The defeat of Africa’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party, will bring the All Progressives Congress (APC) into power after barely two years of organising, mobilising and coalition building. (Muhammadu) Buhari will enter office with a strong mandate from the voters, having won four out of the country’s six geopolitical zones, and the APC will enjoy a comfortable majority in the Senate.

“Though a northern Muslim from Katsina, his support included the predominantly Yoruba southwest, where President Goodluck Jonathan recent delivered bags of cash to traditional rulers according to news reports and where the militant Odudwa Peoples’ Congress launched a wave of thuggery in recent weeks.”

The election upset was especially poignant for Nigerians of the northern states, the area most devastated by Boko Haram terror attacks. While some of the vote counting was impeccable, not all of the voting went smoothly. Observers told of protestors objecting to perceived rigging, harassment, ballot boxes snatched and over-voting.

“Even before the results were announced,” said LeVan, “voters in the north reacted with jubilation, and militant groups, including the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, began surreptitiously re-arming in the creeks of the south. Sources I met with over the weekend in Rivers State say they have seen caches of weapons in camps backed by militants such Ateke Tom and others.

“In addition to such seemingly minor procedural problems, the public was locked out of some collation (vote counting) centres. We also received credible reports of serious harassment. A soldier was killed in some of the violence in Port Harcourt, and a large protest took the state electoral commission by storm on Sunday.”

The opposition victory has been achieved but some are already wondering what the new leader, not known for his adherence to human rights, will prioritise.

According to LeVan, “Buhari has a mandate, and his most urgent challenge is to neither misinterpret nor abuse it.

“According to an Afrobarometer poll released on Mar. 23, 40 percent of Nigerians say the president ‘should be allowed to govern freely without wasting time to justify expenses’, and 25 percent say the president should ‘pass laws without worrying about what the National Assembly thinks’. Sixty-eight percent are not very or not at all satisfied with the way democracy is working.”

Recalling a recent national election won by a former dictator, LeVan said that “the last time Nigeria elected a former dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, he spent his first term battling the National Assembly and quelling violence in the region that largely voted against him. But he also began building institutions and establishing trust with his sceptics.

“The last time Nigerians had Buhari at the helm, the jubilation quickly gave way to frustration, repression, and economic failure.

“Buhari’s ‘honeymoon’ will therefore be critical, and probably even shorter lived than his memories of 1984. He will need to do more than make grand rhetorical gestures to democracy; he’ll need to practice it and educate his own supporters about the advantages of the justice and fairness it offers, even where the cost may be the kind of efficiency the Afrobarometer respondents appear to be longing for.”

LeVan also urged the new president to “go south” in view of the fact that Nigeria has often been a divided country with loyalties to different regional centres and different religious and ethnic affiliations, because this would send a “valuable message to northerners that he is everyone’s president.”

By “going south”, he said, the newly-elected president “could also include a clear transition plan or policy for the status of the ongoing amnesty programme for the Niger Delta militants, who need reassurance that they do not need an Ijaw president [like President Goodluck Jonathan] in order to have “resource control” taken seriously, or to have environmental clean-up and developmental needs addressed.

“The sooner and more clearly they hear this message, the less likely will be the re-ignition of the Delta rebellions … This is also important because in a country partly divided along religious lines between north and south, Afrobarometer reports that trust in religious leaders at 29 percent is higher than in the National Assembly, governors, local governments, or even traditional rulers (16 percent).

“Christian Igbos in the east (who overwhelmingly rejected the APC) and minorities in the south need to know they can trust Buhari, and he needs their cooperation to govern peacefully and practically.”

LeVan also suggested that Buhari should “reset” national security strategy, perhaps by ”replacing key members of the national security establishment.

“While some continuity may help preserve institutionalised knowledge, particularly with regard to the recent ‘surge’ against Boko Haram, the mishandling of the Chibok girls’ kidnapping reduced confidence in the national security team, and the pressure applied to the electoral commission prior to the election delay has contributed to the perception that some soldiers and many advisers are partisan.”

Boko Haram has been displaced but not defeated, LeVan warned, and this means creating a “credible counter-insurgency strategy”.

Among others, such a strategy would include “sustained high-level interactions with the multinational coalition partners, and a repairing of bridges to the United States, United Kingdom and other allies with a stake in Nigeria’s peaceful prosperity.”

In this context, said LeVan, a visit to the United States and the United Kingdom would be beneficial to reconnect with a disenchanted diaspora. “This will be important in the United States, where leadership in Congress has interpreted Boko Haram as a war against Christians, rather than a complex insurgency with many different victims and deep historical and socio-economic roots.

“Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted.”

LeVan also advised Buhari to pick a “credible, competent and diverse economic team”, noting that “in early 2014, the government of Nigeria (along with the World Bank and others) highlighted trends in economic diversification. The near crisis triggered by the decline in oil prices since then suggests either these claims were overstated or much more work needs to be done.

Buhari could reform the refinery and oil importation mechanisms, commit to publishing all of the federal governments revenue transfers to subnational units each month (like it used to), and pick a combination of experts from academia, the private sector and the bureaucracy to get the economy back on track.”

“A few obvious steps,” concluded LeVan, “would go a long way: reaffirm the independence of the Central Bank (whose governor was replaced last year), stabilise the currency, and consult the National Assembly about budget plans and fiscal crises … The rest is up to the Nigerian people, who spoke on Mar. 28. Voting was just the beginning.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Any views expressed by persons cited in this article do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

The Southern Africa Litigation Centre, Amnesty International and over a dozen other human rights organisations including the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights have signed an open letter demanding justice for crusading Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, whose exposés have offended several military officials and other higher-ups.

In their letter, published this week in a Malawian newspaper, the group praised Marques for “his long history of holding the Angolan government to account for human rights abuses and corruption through his insightful, thoughtful and well regarded journalistic investigations” and noted that “for his efforts, he has been arrested and detained multiple times in Angola.”

In the latest effort to silence Marques, legal action was launched by a group of generals over his book ‘Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola’, first published in Portugal in 2011.

The book cites a litany of human rights violations – including killings, torture and forced evictions – that took place in Lunda Norte in northeastern Angola where diamond excavations were taking place. Military officials, diamond miners and private security contractors – named in the book – first attempted to sue Marques for defamation in Portugal but their case was dismissed.

After the book appeared, the author filed a charge with the Angolan Attorney General on Nov. 14, 2011. He called on the authorities to investigate the moral responsibility of the generals for serious abuses. After hearing victims’ testimonies in 2012, the Attorney General set the case aside. New charges were then filed against Marques.

If convicted, he faces up to nine years in prison and damages of 1.2 million dollars on the charge.

“Mr Marques is the recipient of numerous prestigious international awards for his work. He is an equal opportunity human rights defender, working to expose violations no matter who is the accused or accuser,” the open letter writers noted.

Angola, the fourth-biggest diamond producing country by value, has been relaxing restrictions on exploration and development after producers, including South African giant De Beers, cut back operations during the global financial crisis. The move is worrying environmentalists as well as local people and the rise in numbers of anti-government protests is an irritant to the authorities who are keen to make an example of Marques with a successful prosecution.

In his speech as joint winner of the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expressions in Journalism award last week, one of several international honours he has received, Marques said that the trial would make him stronger.

“It will show Angolans there is nothing to fear and challenge them to hold the authorities to account,” he said in a press interview.

Seven journalists have been murdered in Angola since 1992 and many others intimidated or imprisoned, according to The Guardian newspaper. This month, two activists, Marcos Mavungo and Arao Bula Tempo, were arrested in Angola’s northern oil-producing province Cabinda, hours before an anti-government protest was due to take place. They have been jailed on charges of sedition.

Previous demonstrations have been broken up using what Human Rights Watch call “excessive force” and last year a female student was hospitalised after a beating by police for taking part in a march.

Other signers to the open letter include Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the UK-based Media Legal Defence Initiative.

Edited by Phil Harris    

*The book – Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola – is not yet available in English.

Showing a “commendable determination to register their vote and choose their leaders,” Nigerians by the hundreds of thousands lined up at polling stations across the country to select the next president and National Assembly of their country, U.S. and British witnesses to the hotly-contested presidential polls observed.

In a joint statement by the British Foreign Secretary and the U.S. Secretary of State, the observer governments “welcomed the largely peaceful vote on March 28.”

Concerns over the possibilities of fraud were quietly swept away when the national election commission called the winner of the country’s presidential poll as Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Buhari edged out his rival by around two million votes. A phone call from the defeated president, Goodluck Jonathan, reached Buhari’s headquarters about five minutes before five with congratulations on the victory.

After 35 of the 36 states’ vote totals were tallied, Buhari appeared to have captured 14.9 million votes compared to Jonathan’s 12.8 million.

The massive balloting and collection was marred by missteps as the new voter cards failed, sensitive materials were snatched, election officials were held captive, and protestors were tear-gassed.

Thousands of ballots were rejected and some polling stations were closed without notice including in major cities such as Lagos.

Even before preliminary tallies were recorded, the opposition APC rejected the process in Rivers state and denounced the vote there as “a sham and a charade”.

A similar complaint came from Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State who complained of soldiers harassing voters, shootings, ballot boxes mishandled, and the arrest of his senior special advisor. “This is the worst act of militarisation of democracy,” the governor said.

The new imported biometric machines “largely failed to read voter cards,” commented Kayode Idowu, spokesman for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Even the president was affected as three machines failed to recognise the fingerprints of Goodluck Jonathan and his wife.

Unlike in previous years, social media captured many of the conflict images, which were quickly uploaded on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This moved one commentator, Daniel M. Bijimi, to call out on Twitter: “Everyone with an internet enabling phone is now a journalist in #NigeriaDecides and #Nigeria2015!”

Among the citizen photos were two from Rivers state where women are seen in clouds of teargas as they struggled to reach the office of INEC to demand suspension of the electoral commissioner who they claimed was rigging the election for the outgoing president.

In southern Akwa Ibom state, citizen journalists captured the governorship candidate from the opposition displaying sheets of ballots discarded allegedly by rogue staff of INEC and officials of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

The number of rejected ballots around the country was disturbingly high. Nassarawa, in the nation’s center, registered 10,094 rejected ballots – enough to put either of the candidates way over the top.

In the final hours before victory was called, the major contenders – President Jonathan of PDP, seeking re-election, and Muhammadu Buhari of APC, an ex-military man seeking a return to power – were running neck and neck.

In addition to the PDP and APC, 13 other parties were vying for the nation’s top job in polls across 36 states and 68 million registered voters.

Among those commenting on the polls was Nigeria’s foremost man of letters, Wole Soyinka, who lamented: “This has been one of the most vicious, unprincipled, vulgar and violent election exercises I have ever witnessed…I just hope we won’t go down as being the incorrigible giant of Africa.”

Since a coup d’etat and an extremely bloody aftermath, not much has improved in the Central African Republic and that suits the black market diamond merchants just fine.

With news cameras turned away, their trade in ‘conflict diamonds’ is proceeding at a gallop, observers say, despite a global ban.

The diamond-trading ban was imposed by the Kimberley Process, a global gem-verification group formed to halt the outflow of precious stones from conflict zones. The Central African Republic is the only country among 22 diamond producers to be covered by a ban.

The ban went into effect in May 2013, two months after President Francois Bozize was overthrown by mainly Muslim militias known as Seleka. In mid-2013, groups calling themselves the anti-balaka rose up to fight the Seleka. The mostly Christian anti-balaka, who harbor hatred against Muslims, initially committed large-scale reprisal attacks against Muslim civilians and later against others.

A transitional government was installed, but attacks on civilians remain alarming and widespread. Hundreds of Muslims are said to be trapped in enclaves in the western part of the country, fearing reprisals from the anti-Muslim militia. U.N. officials called it “ethnic cleansing” but stopped short of saying the word “genocide.”

Even before the ban, an unofficial market for gems in the Central African Republic was raking in millions. High taxes on diamonds — 12 percent compared with 3.25 percent in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo – led to about 30 percent of the sparkling stones being smuggled to Cameroon or Sudan’s Darfur region, according to the International Peace Information Service, or IPIS, an Antwerp, Belgium-based research group.

A U.N. panel of experts on the Central African Republic has confirmed the illegal diamond trade is alive and well. Since the ban was introduced, at least 140,000 carats of diamonds valued at 24 million dollars have been smuggled out of the country, said Aurelien Llorca, coordinator of the U.N. panel.

With the earnings from conflict diamonds, the militias buy weapons, pay soldiers, enrich rebel leaders and keep ordinary citizens in fear, in refugee camps, or separated from their families. In and around the city of Bambari and in other regions, attacks against civilians are reported almost daily.

A ceasefire between the parties to the conflict signed in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, in July 2014, has been largely ignored.

The Central African Republic was once ranked as the world’s 10th-biggest diamond producer by value and its profits have funded successive military regimes since the country gained independence from France in 1960.

This week, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an urgent appeal to provide farmers with seeds for the upcoming planting season. Some 1.5 million people are food insecure and the number is like to rise without immediate support, they said.

South Sudan’s Democratic Army Cobra Faction announced its third release of child soldiers as agreed in a pact with the government signed last May.

Over the weekend, 654 children registered with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) were released – bringing the total freed by the militia group since January to 1,314.

The children exchanged their weapons and uniforms for civilian clothes at a ceremony in Lekuangole, in Jinglei State. Some 3,000 children are slated to be freed under the U.N. deal.

The children – between 11 and 17 years of age – had been enlisted to carry AK-47s, raid homes and cattle farms and take part in deadly revenge attacks through South Sudan.

A nine-year-old girl was among four girls freed with the boy soldiers – part of the largest ever release of child fighters in the world’s youngest nation, the United Nations said on Monday.

“While we welcome freedom for the children, we are also deeply disturbed by the hundreds of children (still) being abducted in Upper Nile and Unity States,” UNICEF’s country representative, Jonathan Veitch, said in a statement.

“Boys are being targeted and rounded up by forces of the government and opposition.”

One child soldier, 12-year-old Steven, speaking to an NGO in the region, said: “There was nothing for me in Pibor (his home town). No roads or hospitals or even schools. Sometimes there was no food. But life in the (fighting faction) was not good. There is no rest,” he said.

At a ceremony on the day of their release, a former leader was seen wiping away tears as the youngsters recited their military chant for the last time. He said to the young children: “That song you sing, that is an adult struggle.”

A South Sudan military spokesman, meanwhile, insists that standing orders prohibit the military from recruiting children.

Some 12,000 children are still in active combat both on the side of the rebels and militias allied to government, Unicef says, making the removal of child fighters from the conflict a difficult task.

The heaviest combat is taking place in the oil regions, as forces loyal to former Vice President Riek Machar battle with government forces for control of the oil fields.

Oil production is down by a third to 160,000 barrels a day, straining the country’s ability to pay for food and other vital imports.

Talks to reach a power-sharing agreement broke down again in Ethiopia this month after the two sides disagreed on how to share executive power in an interim government.

The International Crisis Group estimates that at least 50,000 people have been killed in the conflict, while nearly two million people remain displaced.

At home she was subjected to death threats for defending women in northeastern Kenya who are vulnerable to rape, female circumcision and murder. This month, Amran Abdundi Amram was cheered as a hero as she collected the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Campaigning.

The 15th annual freedom prize was presented this month by the U.K.-based international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression. The award honours outstanding individuals in four categories: Journalism, arts, campaigning and digital activism.

Abdundi, who heads up Frontier Indigenous Network (FIN), has been setting up shelters along the border between Kenya and Somalia – an area where militant groups pose a growing threat to local communities. In addition to the shelters, FIN maps out conflict areas, targets the illegal arms trade and has set up radio listening groups.

In thanking the judges, Abdundi acknowledged the efforts of local women with whom she had worked for over a decade. “This award goes to marginalised women of northern Kenya … for fighting outdated cultural practices that deny them the right to own property, that expose them to dangerous practices like FGM, and threaten them with sexual exploitation.”

Other women FIN defends include “conflict concubines” who were abducted by armed youths at the height of armed violence in northern Kenya and acted as comfort women for armed militias. “When these women came back from conflict zones with children born out of wedlock, they were rejected by their families. This award is for them.”

Lastly, she thanked the women who used loud speakers to block their attackers. “We documented the abuses along the border,” she said.

“The women of northern Kenya will now know that their struggles and their efforts to fight for their rights are being recognised internationally,” she said. “You are a true partner of the women of northern Kenya.”

Also recognised by the Index was Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais. Marques was singled out for his courageous work exposing corruption in government and business in Angola.

Among his investigative pieces was an expose of the ruling family of Pres. Jose Eduardo dos Santos whose daughter Isabel controls over a billion dollars in assets obtained through her father, according to Marques. In 2011, he wrote a book called “Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola,” which recounts 500 cases of torture and 100 killings that took place over 18 months in a diamond-mining district in Angola. According to the book, the torture and killings were carried out by guards from a private security firm and by members of the Angolan Armed Forces.

Next week, Marques is scheduled to appear before a court on defamation and criminal libel charges filed by nine Angolan generals and the private security firm used by the President.

Letters protesting his prosecution have been sent to the African Commission and the U.N. by Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch and 14 other human rights and free speech groups.

Accepting his award, Marques dedicated it to “my fellow Ethiopian colleagues Eskinder Nega, Reeyot Alemo and the Zone 9 bloggers. They are all in jail, currently serving some of the harshest sentences in Africa for the crime of exercising their right to freedom of expression.” Alemu, he added, has been denied adequate health care although in “desperate” need.

Other winners for 2015 were Mouad “El Haqed” Belghouat, a rapper from Morocco; Safa Al Ahmad, a Saudi journalist, and the Hungarian freedom of information website Atlatszo.

Journalists, activists, hip hop artists and a United States diplomat were rounded up by police at a pro-democracy event on Sunday in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sponsored in part by the U.S. government. Security forces charged them with threatening stability, according to a government spokesperson.

The diplomat, Kevin Sturr, “Was among a group of people believed to be in the process of bringing an attack against state security”, said Congo’s Information Minister Lambert Mende. Sturr, who works with the USAID’s democracy and good governance program in Congo, was returned to the U.S. Embassy late Sunday night, Mende said on Monday.

The activists included members of Burkina Faso’s Balai Citoyen and Senegal’s Y’en a Marre movements. Both have led large-scale protests in recent years against presidents attempting to extend their time in office.

The round up was an unpleasant surprise for U.S. officials. “This event is one of many activities the U.S. government supports that involve youth and civil society as part of our broader commitment to encourage a range of voices to be heard,” the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki complained that U.S. authorities had not been officially informed about why Sturr was detained. “Our ambassador in Kinshasa has raised this at the highest levels with the DRC government,” Psaki said.

Congolese government officials and ruling coalition parties were invited to the event and some attended, the Embassy said, describing the youth groups involved as well-regarded and non-partisan.

According to the Minister, the Congo’s intelligence services believed the news conference — billed as an exchange between African civil society organizations — was in fact a project organized by “instructors in insurrection”.

“There are the three Senegalese and the Burkinabe and their Congolese accomplices who continue to be questioned,” Mende added. “Each will have his fate… Either they will be released or put at the disposition of the public prosecutor.”

Foreign activists arrested included Fadel Barro, a member of the Senegalese collective of journalists and hip-hop artists “Y’en a Marre”, which helped organize protests against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s bid for a third term in 2012.

The group had gathered to support “Filimbi” – a Congolese movement that aims for greater youth participation in politics, when they were rounded up.

Proposed changes in Congo’s electoral law have sparked mass protests against what many view as an attempt by President Joseph Kabila to prolong his time in power. Human Rights Watch reported that at least 40 people were killed in Kinshasa and the eastern city of Goma at protests so far this year.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

An internal war is roiling the administration of President Ernest Bai Koroma with the Vice President, Samuel Sam-Sumana, at dead center. The VP, expelled last week from the ruling All People’s Congress (APC), is said to be forming a rival political movement from his home district in Kono, the country’s raw diamond capital, and an election decider.

Tensions grew so hot this week that President Koroma sent soldiers to surround Sam-Sumana’s home. This prompted the VP to put in a hurried asylum request with the U.S. embassy which has taken no action on the matter as yet.

“I have fled my house and am with my wife in a place I cannot disclose, waiting to hear from the U.S. Ambassador, whom I have asked for asylum,” Mr. Sam-Sumana told local media.

“I don’t feel safe this morning as vice-president,” he told the AP news agency by phone. He said he had spoken to US Ambassador John Hoover and was waiting for a response.

It’s not the first crisis for the Vice President, son of an influential ruling family. In 2011 his office was identified in a TV documentary investigating illegal logging. The matter was dubbed “Timbergate” by the press.

Other serious problems with the Vice President were quietly dismissed by the President. This became an irritant for the Campaign for Good Governance, a civil society group, which asked why Sam Sumana had not “cleared his name from the many allegations such as the cocaine trade and illegal timber logging that were brought against him while he was vice president in the last five years”.

“As an independent organisation, we want to see people with integrity and a clean record in our governance system,” Valnora Edwin was quoted to have said.

In the decision to expel Sam-Sumana, after a three month investigation, the VP was accused of “inciting anti-party activity, fermenting violence, deceit, false statement amounting to fraud, inciting hate, threatening the personal security of key party functionaries, flouting of rulings and decisions of the party, carrying out anti-party propaganda, and engaging in activities inconsistent with the achievement of the party’s objectives.”

Further, it was alleged, the Vice President had falsified his academic qualification – that he has a graduate degree – lied that he was Muslim prior to his selection as running-mate in 2007, and was the mastermind of political violence against party comrades in the volatile Kono district.

On the announcement of the expulsion, a large crowd gathered at party headquarters to celebrate despite the ban on such events under public emergency laws to control the spread of Ebola. The president himself was seen smiling and waving as his motorcade slowly made its way through the cheering crowd. Under the constitution, Sam Sumana cannot be fired but only impeached or removed for sufficient cause.

“Whatever way this political struggle for power and influence go, it serves as an unnecessary distraction to our fight to end the Ebola outbreak,” observed Abu-Bakarr Sheriff in a Concord Times editorial. Most significantly, it would vindicate the view that President Koroma committed an error in judgment by retaining a man with more than a fair share of scandals as the second gentleman of the republic.”

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

The somber face of a young man from Sierra Leone has become the emblem of Ebola’s living survivors, suffering in silence without families, papers, or homes.

A photo of Jimmy Thoronka appeared this week in local British papers. An undeclared refugee, he went missing after competing in last summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The 20-year-old was a star sprinter but fell apart as Ebola took his uncle, then his adoptive mother and four siblings. He had already lost his birth parents in the country’s civil war.

Scared to go back, he decided to stay on after his visa ran out.

Thus began a seven-month spell of ‘living rough” on the streets. There were days without meals, sleeping in parks or night buses in London. When his whereabouts emerged last week, he was arrested for overstaying his visa. He was finally released Saturday night after an interview with immigration officers.

His plight, on the heels of the huge loss of life in three West African countries, now over 9,000, sparked an online campaign in his name. Thousands took part, including the comedian Russell Brand, the actor Samantha Morton and the model Lily Cole. More than 30,000 dollars was raised.

The collection took Thoronka by complete surprise. “I am amazed that people all over the world have offered to help me after they read my story. I don’t know how to thank everyone. If I can make a success of my life as a sprinter my plan is to go back to Sierra Leone and help homeless people. I know how much suffering there is when you are homeless. Last week I had no hope but now maybe I will make it.”

Thoronka’s case put a spotlight on the UK’s use of immigration detention. A recent report from an all-party parliamentary group called for detention to be limited to 28 days and used only in exceptional circumstances.

“Immigration removal centres are places where many detainees languish in indefinite detention despite not being accused of any crime, and this has a tremendous negative impact,” Emma Mlotshwa, coordinator of Medical Justice, told the Guardian. “We have seen detainees’ mental and physical health deteriorate in immigration detention and we fear for this man’s wellbeing, given his existing reported vulnerabilities.”

The fund appeal for Thoronka was started by a Cambridge University student, whose PhD is on how social networking can be used for social good. The money will be put in a trust and will pay for fees and some living costs of a year at a residential athletics training facility.

Meanwhile, the death toll from the virus in Sierra Leone is more than 3,500 and in the most recent development, Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana put himself in quarantine after the death from Ebola of one of his security guards. He is set to become acting president when President Ernest Bai Koroma leaves Sierra Leone to attend a European Union conference on Ebola in Belgium. Sam-Sumana is expected to carry out the presidential duties from his home.

He is the highest-ranking African official to be quarantined in West Africa.

The wife of former president Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast will serve jail time for inciting election violence in the 2011 post-election crisis.

Simone Gbagbo was found guilty this week of “disturbing the peace, forming and organising armed gangs and undermining state security,” according to her defence lawyer, Rodrigue Dadje. The sentence of 20 years was twice as long as prosecutors had sought.

Earlier, it appeared that she would receive a lesser sentence than she would have at the International Criminal Court (ICC) where her husband is now on trial for similar crimes. The Alassane Ouattara government refused to send her to The Hague, saying she would get a fair trial at home.

Mrs Gbagbo, 65, who may also be called by the ICC for suspected crimes against humanity, was tried along with 82 other allies of ex-President Laurent Gbagbo.

“I don’t know exactly what the concrete actions are that I am being accused of,” Mrs. Gbagbo said when the hearing began, insisting also that her husband Laurent Gbagbo was the legitimate winner of a 2010 presidential election that sparked five months of violence.

Scuffles broke out outside the courtroom with her opponents shouting “Murderers!” and her supporters shouting back “Liars!”

The court also ruled that her civil rights will be suspended for a period of 10 years. The former president’s son, Michel Gbagbo, was also convicted and sentenced to five years in jail.

Pascal Affi-N’Guessan, President of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, and one-time prime minister, received an 18-month suspended sentence. Last month his name was officially removed from the U.N.’s sanctions list despite his “obstruction of the peace and reconciliation process, and incitement to hatred and violence.”

Ivory Coast’s brief 2011 civil war was sparked by Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to step down after a disputed election backed by the international community. Violence erupted between supporters of the former president and Alassane Ouattara, now president. Some 3,000 people died in the melee which reached up into rural areas on the north.

The ex-first lady said she had been insulted and humiliated by the prosecution, which, she said, had failed to prove her guilt.

Still, “I’m prepared to forgive. I forgive because, if we don’t forgive, this country will burn, she said.

Mr Gbagbo is currently awaiting trial at the ICC, accused of crimes against humanity for his suspected role in orchestrating the violence.