AFRICA

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
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kmaherali
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Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Topan: Here is the problem with East African Kiswahili

Highlights:

Do you think that research in Swahili is given the attention it deserves in universities, especially in East Africa?

The study of Swahili should be expanded; not just in terms of language and literature. But even before getting to that stage. Some weeds should be removed because of some misperceptions. We shouldn’t be involved in defining who a Mswahili is and who is not.

We should expand Swahili to ask: How does Swahili relate to other disciplines – Geography, Social Sciences, etc., so that there is an understanding not only of the vocabulary, but also of the capacity of the language to deal with the other aspects of life; and of the people because Kiswahili started as a language of a particular people but is now the language of millions of people in East Africa.

What does it mean for a language to be a lingua franca for millions of people? Do we simply use it the way we want or should there be an academy that puts boundaries or frameworks on its use? Do we have a group of translators to keep translating books
in Swahili? Those are the questions we need to ask rather than going back to the identity issues; we’ve gone past the stage.

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http://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/Topan ... index.html
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Share the Pork, Be President for Life

African voters won't tolerate the strongmen of the past, but they'll bend the rules for leaders who bring prosperity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/opini ... d=45305309
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Wasting Less of Africa’s Harvest in Order to Prosper

Last year, Tanzania had exciting news: a bumper harvest of corn. But even as farmers were celebrating — corn is a staple eaten at almost every meal — much of the crop had already been spoiled, having grown moldy or been infested by insects and rodents. The problem was that farmers lacked the capacity to store food safely. Even the government’s national reserve system had run out of space to hold the overflow.

Such shortages of capacity persist, and not just in Tanzania. The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that largely because of a lack of infrastructure for refrigeration, transportation and sanitary, airtight storage, 15 to 20 percent of grain crops in sub-Saharan Africa and about half of fruits and vegetables show spoilage before they reach market.

The fight against hunger in Africa has experienced many successes in boosting agricultural production — from improving seeds to disseminating solar-powered irrigation. It’s only now that agricultural organizations and experts are recognizing that lack of storage represents a major impediment to keeping all those harvests edible. It’s a difficult problem because a vast majority of Africa’s crops are grown by smallholder farmers, who lack the resources to invest in refrigeration or effective storage facilities for staples like corn and beans.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... 05309&_r=0
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Mothers Helping Mothers to Live With H.I.V.

When Teresa Njeri got pregnant in 2001 in Kiambu, a suburb of Nairobi, it was the end of the world. She was joyous about the pregnancy — but an AIDS test showed she was H.I.V.-positive. A clinician told her: “Make sure your husband comes in for testing — and don’t sleep with him.”

“I knew if you have AIDS you are going to die,” Njeri told me in an interview last week. But the clinic staff told her she had a chance to save her child. They gave her and the baby medicine that lowered the risk of H.I.V. transmission, and her son was born H.I.V.-free.

That was her only joy. Her husband left her and she moved in with an aunt. When her son was 7 months old, Njeri developed full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis. She had not told her family she had H.I.V.; they learned when hospital staff told them to come care for her.

Njeri’s family started to keep away from her so she wouldn’t contaminate them. Her parents took her son back to the family’s village, assuming she would soon die. “The only friend I had was the preacher on TV, who gave me spiritual help,” she said.

Njeri’s experience was woefully typical for H.I.V.-positive women in Africa about 15 years ago. But today mothers and babies are more likely to be healthy. Since 2000, there has been a 58 percent drop in new infections of infants, Unaids, the United Nations AIDS-fighting agency, announced this week. In 2000, only 1 million people worldwide took the antiretrovirals that make having H.I.V. a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. Today, 15 million do. New infections are down by 35 percent and AIDS-related deaths down by 41 percent.

Mothers and babies are now living because lifesaving drugs now reach far more of the world’s poorest mothers. Also, countries have adopted new medical protocols that better protect both mother and child. But for hundreds of thousands of women so far, there has been another difference — they have been helped by Teresa Njeri and other H.I.V.-positive mothers.

Njeri’s recovery began when she heard on the radio about a support group for people with H.I.V. On her first visit, she was startled to hear everyone in the circle introduce themselves and say “I am H.I.V.-positive.” “Are these people mad?” she thought. “This isn’t something you tell people just like that.” But the support group became the most important thing in her life. “It gave me a place to go and cry until I was O.K. It was the only place I could discuss things. They would tell me ‘you’re not the only one.’”

In August, 2004, Njeri was able to get antiretrovirals. She began volunteering at the hospital, talking to pregnant women. In 2008 a nurse told her that someone was coming to Kiambu looking to hire H.I.V.-positive mothers, and suggested she apply.

The organization was mothers2mothers. It was founded by Mitchell Besser, an obstetrician-gynecologist from New Jersey working at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. With many of his patients, Besser had no one on the medical staff who came from the same social world or even spoke the same language; at times he would ask the janitor to tell young, frightened girls they were H.I.V.-positive, said Robin Smalley, a co-founder of m2m. South Africa had begun a program to give medicines to pregnant women and their babies, but mothers weren’t using the medicine. So Besser asked some of his former patients to counsel his new patients.

Photo

A mothers2mothers client and her child in Uganda.Credit Karin Schermbrucker


Now mothers2mothers trains and pays mentor mothers in six African countries to work with pregnant women and new mothers, largely in clinics and hospitals. Today Njeri is an m2m site supervisor at a major hospital. She is healthy and going to college, and with her salary has been able to buy land for her son, who is now 13, to live on when he is older.

M2m, which now gets half its money from United States government anti-AIDS programs, is not the only organization that uses H.I.V.-positive mothers as peer mentors, but it is by far the largest, and probably the only one that pays them salaries. M2m and its local partners have helped several governments — in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa — to establish similar mentor mother corps, and they still work closely with the Kenyan national and South African provincial programs.

Mentor mother programs are intended to address one of the biggest conundrums of the AIDS epidemic: The technology has progressed, but social, cultural and psychological barriers can keep people from taking advantage of it. Mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. has been virtually eliminated in wealthy countries — and now in Cuba. (With no intervention the transmission rate is 40 percent.) The necessary drugs and tests are not available everywhere in poor countries, but they are widespread; in 2013, 68 percent of pregnant mothers in Africa’s high-burden countries received some services to prevent transmission.

But even where mothers use services, they often stop when the baby is born. This is dangerous: Unaids estimates that more than half of mother-to-child transmission takes place during breast-feeding. (Breast-feeding is safe if done exclusively. But mixing in any other food — even water — irritates the baby’s stomach and puts her at risk for transmission.) Infants should also be given an antibiotic to protect them from other infections. They need to take H.I.V. tests at 6 to 8 weeks and at 18 months. Mothers should start antiretrovirals as soon as the virus is diagnosed and continue taking them the rest of their lives.

“Most of the mothers come once,” said Dr. Linda Kisaakye, program officer for monitoring and evaluation in Uganda’s program to prevent mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. “But many don’t come back. They treat their clinic record more like a report card. If there are complications later they can say, ‘Oh, I actually attended.’”

Why would they not take advantage of a way to save themselves and their babies? “A lot of it is the cultural issue,” Kisaakye said. “They feel ‘my grandmother never attended clinic and had 10 children, so why should I go to the hospital?’” But there are also barriers even to those who understand the importance. The stigma attached to being H.I.V.-positive, while much reduced from a decade ago, is still fierce. Many people still believe that H.I.V. is a death sentence. A positive test can cost a woman her marriage, financial support, friends and family. “It’s denial,” Kisaakye said. “It’s: ‘Before I went and tested, I was alive and well and life was normal. Let me just pretend that this never happened.’”

That’s where mentor mothers come in.

Imagine a woman who has just learned she has H.I.V. She’s in shock. The line for the clinic is out the door and nurses are rushing from patient to patient.

A mentor mother can sit down and listen – and calm the patient. “When you tell her you’re H.I.V.-positive, some think you are cheating them,” said Carolyne Njoga, a mentor mother in Muhoroni, a small town in western Kenya. “They think someone who’s H.I.V.-positive is very thin and cannot talk about herself. But you say: ‘I was tested. I went through this experience.’”

A mentor mother can give another woman practical advice about handling a baby’s medicines and feeding or about taking her own medicines, disclosing her status and dealing with the reaction. M2m’s mentors are also trained to talk to women and couples about safe sex, family planning, malaria and tuberculosis, nutrition, cervical cancer and gender violence.

Most women do come to the clinic when they realize they are pregnant. But at each point after that, adherence to their medical plan drops more and more — especially after birth. “The baby is born — the first test of the baby is negative,” said Frank Beadle de Palomo, m2m’s chief executive. “Mom starts to think ‘I did what I needed to do.’ As H.I.V. becomes just something else she’s dealing with, it’s easy to drop in adherence to your meds. So for us, the need is sustained behavior change.”

To bring in women who drop out of care, m2m has mentor mothers in four countries who ride bicycles from village to village, knocking on doors of mothers who missed medical appointments. “It’s not just about the first pill,” said Dr. Stephen Lee, vice president for implementation and country management at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which contracts with m2m to conduct some of its programs, at the moment in Malawi. “It’s all about all the pills that need to be taken for many years. You need both the facility and the community approach.”

Until recently, m2m lacked well-designed independent studies of its effectiveness. But in late 2013, the organization commissioned an independent study, which was published this January. The study looked at 31 clinics in Uganda where m2m was working, along with 31 similar clinics that did not have the program. (The match was not perfect — women in the m2m clinics were slightly older and more educated, on average, than women in the other clinics.)

More women at the m2m sites stuck with their medical care than at sites where m2m didn’t work. (The study included all women at m2m sites, even if they chose not to use m2m’s services.) Their babies had much higher rates of exclusive breast-feeding, were 45 percent more likely to get the necessary drugs to prevent transmission at birth, and were, most important, more likely to be H.I.V.-negative. Women at the m2m sites were also more likely to tell their partners they had H.I.V., and suffered less isolation and depression. For every dollar spent on the program, the study concluded, Uganda saved $11.40 in treatment costs because fewer babies had H.I.V.

A few years ago, GiveWell, an organization that evaluates charities, criticized m2m’s claims about how many women it was reaching. In several countries, GiveWell pointed out, m2m claimed to have served more than the total number of H.I.V.-positive pregnant women.

M2m provided GiveWell with a truly inadequate response — we disagree, and anyone who wants information can contact us, the group said. But Smalley said the group realized that a lot of women had visited more than one clinic and had been counted twice. It has revised those numbers and now tries to adjust figures for double-counting.

The too-high figures, however, still appear in some prominent places on the group’s website; for example, it claims to have reached 104,000 women in Swaziland, which is at least double what is realistic. (Smalley said the website had not been kept up to date.) Overclaiming is hardly unique to m2m, but there’s no reason for it — not when there’s evidence that the work it actually does is effective.

Although m2m has had to leave several countries when its funding dried up, mentor mother programs are growing — in Kenya, for example, m2m or Kenyan mentor mother programs now reach nearly 70 percent of H.I.V.-positive women giving birth. But given their value, they are nowhere near as widespread as they should be. The problem is that to be effective, the mothers must be paid — and regardless of how much the program saves later, money is a problem now. “The biggest question has been the stipend that we pay them,” said Dr. Martin Sirengo, head of the national AIDS program in Kenya. “We need to understand that they are unlike volunteer health workers. They are full time, work with the health team and do a great job.”

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.” She is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... -i-v/?_r=0
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Nobody Should Be President for Life,’ Obama Tells Africa

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — President Obama jabbed at the power structures of Africa on Tuesday by calling for long-entrenched leaders to step down, using off-the-cuff remarks about his own political standing and his stature as the first American president with African roots to try to reshape the continent’s politics.

“I actually think I’m a pretty good president,” Mr. Obama told diplomats from across Africa, departing from his prepared text to present himself as a model for giving up power when term limits are reached. “I think if I ran, I could win.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/world ... 87722&_r=0
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A Milestone in Africa: No Polio Cases in a Year

It has been one full year since polio was detected anywhere in Africa, a significant milestone in global health that has left health experts around the world quietly celebrating.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/healt ... d=71987722
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Outcry for Cecil the Lion Could Undercut Conservation Efforts

Despite intensifying calls to ban or restrict trophy hunting in Africa after the killing of a lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe, most conservation groups, wildlife management experts and African governments support the practice as a way to maintain wildlife. Hunting, they contend, is part of a complex economy that has so far proven to be the most effective method of conservation, not only in Africa but around the world as well.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/world ... k&WT.mc_c=
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Election in Tanzania to Challenge Half a Century of One-Party Rule

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — The governing party, which has reigned for decades, is determined to extend its monopoly on power. The opposition is convinced it has the numbers to take over. The population is growing at an explosive rate, with millions mired in poverty. Gangs of young men from rival parties have already clashed in an uncharacteristic burst of political violence.

On Sunday, Tanzania, usually one of Africa’s most peaceful nations, a country of stunning game parks and a storied history along its Indian Ocean coast, faces its gravest political test: the most heavily contested and unpredictable presidential election in the nation’s 50-plus years. Most observers, including leading officials, say it is too close to call, which makes people nervous. Many expatriates and others with wealth have jetted off, choosing these weeks as the right time to take an impromptu family vacation.

The backdrop is a continent whose relationship with democracy has become ambivalent, at best. Tunisia held its first democratic presidential vote last year, while in Nigeria something remarkable happened: The president freely admitted defeat in elections and handed over power to a rival from another party, the first such transfer since the return of democratic rule there.

But elsewhere on the continent, more and more leaders seem to be rolling back the democratic spirit. From Burundi to Burkina Faso, several presidents have recently pushed to abolish term limits, with varying degrees of success — and chaos.

This past week, police squads opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, as they protested their president’s attempt to prolong his seemingly eternal hold on power. Uganda is cracking down on dissidents. The Kenyan National Assembly just voted to jail journalists who “defamed” politicians. That bill is still in flux but a recent front-page headline in Nairobi read, “Democracy under attack.”

There has been less Western pressure, too, what some diplomats have unofficially called democracy fatigue. The diplomatic focus in Africa has swung to business, counterterrorism and competition for influence with China — and away from good governance.

This all leaves Tanzanians unsure of what will happen next. Will the governing party, the Party of the Revolution, one of Africa’s best-oiled political machines, try to rig the vote this weekend, as the opposition contends? Will opposition supporters riot in major urban areas if they lose, as the governing party fears?

For elections in relatively new multiparty democracies, the big question is not so much who will win but whether the loser will accept defeat.

“I’m scared,” said John Mashaka, an American-educated entrepreneur who recently returned home to Tanzania to start a renewable energy company. “This is a very beautiful country, and we just don’t want political goons to push it into flames.”

Tanzanian security forces have already deployed at crucial intersections in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, with flak jackets, assault rifles and belts of tear gas canisters. Large trucks packed with soldiers rumble through town, drawing hard looks from the masses of unemployed youths who line the curbs of many streets, chewing hard, unripe mangoes, desperate for something to do — and something to eat.

But Tanzania has often proved the exception to the rule. Unlike many other nations in Africa, it is not plagued by ethnic divisions that simmer and explode at apparently erratic intervals. Its founding father, Julius K. Nyerere, did a better job than just about anyone on the continent in uniting a diverse population under one flag by pushing one language, Swahili, and insisting that children go to high school in different areas as a way to break down ethnic prejudices.

“Unity Is Victory” is the governing party’s motto, seen everywhere, on fluttering flags, T-shirts, scarves and baseball caps, the election goodies tossed out by the truckload.

The governing party’s presidential candidate, John Magufuli, is considered relatively honest and a hard worker. As minister of public works, he used to hide in the back of cargo trucks and pop out at weigh stations to arrest crooked cops and civil servants.

Slick billboards feature 10-foot-tall pictures of Mr. Magufuli, with the descriptions: “The hard worker,” “The one who follows up,” “The ethical one.”

But Mr. Magufuli, 55, a surprise choice who was a chemist and hardly a high-profile figure before this election, faces a powerful challenger: Edward Lowassa, a former prime minister with an extensive political network and deep pockets. Mr. Lowassa, 62, travels across this country, twice the size of California, by helicopter, swooping in to electrify crowds of thousands who sweat under the sun for hours to hear him speak for a couple of minutes.

Mr. Lowassa’s health is not good. He was implicated in corruption scandals. He was a prominent member of the governing party for years.

But that does not seem to matter to many voters, who view him as their best chance to break from the past.

We want change,” said Amina Saidi, a vegetable vendor, as she sat on a metal bench, the paint flaking off, in front of a pile of untouched onions. “Mabadiliko” — changes — is the buzzword on Dar es Salaam’s streets.

She went on: “We want to try out another party to see if it will empower us or if it will behave like the other.”

Many people here say that it is absurd and unhealthy for Tanzania, with a population of 53 million, to be ruled by essentially the same political party since independence in the early 1960s (the mainland won independence in 1961, the island of Zanzibar in 1963). Though the Party of the Revolution was founded in 1977, it is widely considered a continuation of the same political party that led Tanzania to self-rule. No other party in Africa has reigned that long, without a single interruption.

Many Tanzanians say the governing party was good in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe even into the ’90s, but has since lost its way. Tanzania remains one of the poorest countries in the world, yet millions of dollars in public money have vanished in recent corruption scandals. This year, an influential government minister, when questioned about a suspicious payment, said she had spent $5,000 on “vegetables.” Many Tanzanians, who cannot afford fresh vegetables, found that deeply offensive.

The current president, Jakaya Kikwete, is widely considered a disappointment; corruption seemed to bloom under his watch. But at least, critics say, he respected his term limits, agreeing to step down after 10 years, unlike a number of his cohorts.

Mr. Mashaka, the renewable energy entrepreneur, said that the election on Sunday would be historic but that it could easily spin out of control.

“Just look at all these youth,” he said, as he cruised behind the wheel of his shiny new black truck, past a crowd of young men slumped on cheap Chinese motorcycles.

“They’re like the wildebeest: They don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know where they’ve been, they just want change,” he said, and then laughed uneasily.

“Overnight change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/world ... d=45305309
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The Pope’s Failure in Africa

Pope Francis, now safely back in Rome, missed a major opportunity on his trip to Africa. His pleas for peace and reconciliation between the continent’s Christians and Muslims were well-received, by both faiths. His castigation of the indifference of the rich, as he stood amid a cardboard slum, was apt. He was widely applauded when he warned of catastrophe if this week’s Paris climate negotiations do not succeed. But when it came to the way gay people are treated on a continent in which homosexuality is illegal in many countries, he offered only a deafening silence.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/opini ... 05309&_r=0
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U.S. Support of Gay Rights in Africa May Have Done More Harm Than Good

LAGOS, Nigeria — Suspicious neighbors and landlords pry into their private lives. Blackmailers hunt for victims on the social media sites they use to meet others of the same sex. Police officers routinely stop them to search for incriminating images and chats on their cellphones.

Since an anti-gay law went into effect last year, many gay Nigerians say they have been subjected to new levels of harassment, even violence.

They blame the law, the authorities and broad social intolerance for their troubles. But they also blame an unwavering supporter whose commitment to their cause has been unquestioned and conspicuous across Africa: the United States government.

“The U.S. support is making matters worse,” said Mike, 24, a university student studying biology in Minna, a town in central Nigeria who asked that his full name not be used for his safety. “There’s more resistance now. It’s triggered people’s defense mechanism.”

Four years ago, the American government embarked on an ambitious campaign to expand civil rights for gay people overseas by marshaling its diplomats, directing its foreign aid and deploying President Obama to speak before hostile audiences.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/world ... 87722&_r=0
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Nigeria Goes to the Mall

Excerpt:

The emergence of malls — and mall culture — in Nigeria reflects broad trends on the continent, including a growing middle class with spending power and the rapid expansion of cities like Warri that are little known outside the region.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/world ... d=71987722
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African Economies, and Hopes for New Era, Are Shaken by China

JOHANNESBURG — Years of rapid economic growth across sub-Saharan Africa fueled hopes of a prosperous new era. To many, the world’s poorest continent was finally emerging, with economies that were no longer dependent on the fickle global demand for Africa’s raw resources.

But as China’s economy slows and its once seemingly insatiable hunger for Africa’s commodities wanes, many African economies are tumbling, quickly.

Since the start of this year, the outlook across the continent has grown grimmer, especially in its two biggest economies, Nigeria and South Africa. Their currencies fell to record lows this month as China, Africa’s biggest trading partner, announced that imports from Africa plummeted nearly 40 percent in 2015.

“We can see what drove the growth in Africa when demand goes away,” said Greg Mills, the director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a Johannesburg-based economic research group. “Well, demand has gone away, and it’s not pretty.”

The International Monetary Fund has in recent months sharply cut its projections for the continent. Credit rating agencies have downgraded or lowered their outlook on commodity exporters like Angola, Ghana, Mozambique and Zambia, which were the darlings of international investors until just over a year ago.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world ... d=71987722
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Malawi Gets Its First Grammy Nomination, With Album by Prison Inmates

ZOMBA, Malawi — Old, overcrowded and unsanitary, the maximum-security Zomba prison holds murderers, robbers, rapists — and Grammy-nominated singers.

In a makeshift studio near a carpentry workshop, 14 prisoners and two guards recorded an unusual album of lessons and loss, sin and forgiveness. Now it is going up against the works of well-known performers in the world music category, earning the small, impoverished nation of Malawi its first chance at a Grammy Award, which will be announced Monday night.

“Many people across the world who had never heard of Malawi are now saying, ‘There’s a country called Malawi!’ ” said Chikondi Salanje, 32, who is scheduled to be released in August after serving five years for robbery.

His song, “Listen to Me,” advises children to heed their parents — something, he added, he had failed to do himself.

Produced by Ian Brennan, an American who has wandered the globe in search of original music, the album, “I Have No Everything Here,” has been an unexpected boon for an overlooked nation, and even more so for its penal system, long criticized for its sometimes cruel conditions.

The music, often observations about problems afflicting African societies, also offers insights into the lives of its performers, like the three sisters who sing of the killing that brought them to Zomba to serve life sentences.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/world ... d=45305309
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Nigeria’s Booming Film Industry Redefines African Life

Excerpt:

“In Nollywood, you don’t waste time,” he said. “It’s not the technical depth that has made our films so popular. It’s because of the story. We tell African stories.”

The stories told by Nigeria’s booming film industry, known as Nollywood, have emerged as a cultural phenomenon across Africa, the vanguard of the country’s growing influence across the continent in music, comedy, fashion and even religion.
Photo

A film set in Illah, a village in southeastern Nigeria, where electricity generators are a necessity for movie production crews.Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, overtook its rival, South Africa, as the continent’s largest economy two years ago, thanks in part to the film industry’s explosive growth. Nollywood — a term I helped coin with a 2002 article when Nigeria’s movies were just starting to gain popularity outside the country — is an expression of boundless Nigerian entrepreneurialism and the nation’s self-perception as the natural leader of Africa, the one destined to speak on the continent’s behalf.

“The Nigerian movies are very, very popular in Tanzania, and, culturally, they’ve affected a lot of people,” said Songa wa Songa, a Tanzanian journalist. “A lot of people now speak with a Nigerian accent here very well thanks to Nollywood. Nigerians have succeeded through Nollywood to export who they are, their culture, their lifestyle, everything.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/world ... 87722&_r=0
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Out of Africa, Part II

Extract:

There are almost no young or middle-aged men in this village of 300. They’re gone.

It wasn’t disease. They’ve all hit the road. The village’s climate-hammered farmlands can no longer sustain them, and with so many kids — 42 percent of Senegal’s population is under 14 years old — there are too many mouths to feed from the declining yields. So the men have scattered to the four winds in search of any job that will pay them enough to live on and send some money back to their wives or parents.

This trend is repeating itself all across West Africa, which is why every month thousands of men try to migrate to Europe by boat, bus, foot or plane. Meanwhile, refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the same. Together, these two flows pose a huge challenge for the future of Europe.

Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one did me, that when you don’t have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don’t calculate the odds. You just go.

......
Africa has always had migrants, but this time is different. There are so many more people and so much less natural capital — Lake Chad alone has lost 90 percent of its water — and with cellphones everyone can see a better world in Europe.

Gardens or walls? It’s really not a choice. We have to help them fix their gardens because no walls will keep them home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/opini ... d=71987722
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Out of Africa, Part III

Extracts:

"Standing next to a broken drainage pipe, Matador says to me: “It pains me because the people, they’re forced to leave. To build Senegal we need those young people. But how can we keep them here in these conditions?” No wonder Matador has a popular rap lyric, which plays on an alliteration, that describes the choice for too many of his generation: “Barça or Barsak” — either catch a boat to Barcelona or to the beyond — i.e., die."

*****

"When human beings are under stress, he adds, “they will do anything to survive. You live here and you see on TV people having a good life, and democracy [in Europe], and here you are in a poor life, people have to do something — people now are taking any kind of boat to get to Europe. And even if they see people dying, they are still going. They don’t have the tools to survive here. The human being is just a more intelligent animal, and if [he or she] is pushed to the extreme, the animal instinct will come out to survive. Everyone wants a better life.”"

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/opini ... ef=opinion
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A Mission to Bring STEM Skills, and Robots, to Children in West Africa

DAKAR, Senegal — One robot slammed into some blocks and nearly fell to the floor. Another sideswiped a wall. Yet another spun in dizzying circles.

So when the robot built by students from an all-girls school finally navigated the twists of the maze, flawlessly rounding every corner and touching every required flag, the crowd went nuts.

The girls were among students from 25 schools who gathered in Dakar to compete in the second annual Pan-African Robotics Competition.

For five days, in a city where horses and carts are still fixtures on the many unpaved roads, boys and girls from sixth grade to high school hunched over laptops and tablets at a camp, entering code to guide their small blue robots through a labyrinth meant to test their skills in a competition on the final day.

The event was organized by Sidy Ndao, a Senegalese-born engineering professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who is on a mission to help further science, technology, engineering and math education, known as STEM skills, in West Africa.

In America, the need for more STEM education has become a stump speech delivered by many economists and business leaders. They emphasize that improving these skills will help the United States create more jobs, compete better globally and increase its economic growth.

The same is true, Dr. Ndao said, in Senegal and across West Africa, where incorporating STEM education can help set a course to improve everything from sanitation systems to agriculture and can create jobs in a place with soaring unemployment.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/world ... d=71987722
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Africa’s Charcoal Economy Is Cooking. The Trees Are Paying.

Extract:

As Africa’s population is expected to swell and urbanize at an even faster rate over the next decades, the continent’s demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

The charcoal business, along with the expanding use of land for farming, is expected to increase deforestation and worsen the effects of climate change on a continent poorly equipped to adapt to it.

“It’s all interconnected, this long-term trajectory and the long-term effects on climate change,” said Henry Neufeldt, an expert on charcoal and climate change at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya. “Just imagine transforming all that land into smoke, and not reforesting. In the next 30 years, a lot of forests and landscapes are going to be degraded because of charcoal demand, and because of the lack of policies to counter that effect.”

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/world ... 05309&_r=0
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Panama Papers Reveal Wide Use of Shell Companies by African Officials

WASHINGTON — Entrepreneurs and corrupt officials across Africa have used shell companies to hide profits from the sale of natural resources and the bribes paid to gain access to them, according to records leaked from a Panamanian law firm.

Owners of the hidden companies include, from Nigeria alone, three oil ministers, several senior employees of the national oil company and two former state governors who were convicted of laundering ill-gotten money from the oil industry, new reports about Africa based on the Panama Papers show. The owners of diamond mines in Sierra Leone and safari companies in Kenya and Zimbabwe also created shell companies.

Some of the assets cycled through the shell companies were used to buy yachts, private jets, Manhattan penthouses and luxury homes in Beverly Hills, Calif., the law firm documents show.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/world ... d=71987722
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Poverty, Drought and Felled Trees Imperil Malawi Water Supply

Extract:

"Few places on the continent have been hit as hard by human-led environmental degradation and climate change as Malawi, a poor though politically stable nation in southeastern Africa. The effects of climate change, including shorter rainy seasons and the worst drought in decades, have pushed people into cities looking for jobs or into activities like charcoal burning. These changes have caused water shortages and power blackouts that have merely heightened the demand for ever more trees from the forest."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/world ... d=45305309
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Inspired by the U.S., West Africans Wield Smartphones to Fight Police Abuse

DAKAR, Senegal — The YouTube video shows a grim scene from Ivory Coast: An unarmed man lies on a street with his arms up. A police officer fires a shot that appears to strike him.

The man, a theft suspect, squirms on the road as the officer kicks and hovers over him, firing his weapon several times near his head, bullets hitting the ground just inches away. The officer then aims directly at the man’s forehead and pulls the trigger, killing him.

The video, recorded by an onlooker using a cellphone camera, spread widely across social media this summer, attracting comments like “What is this horror.”

“Isn’t this what’s happening in the USA right now?” writes one viewer. “We’re killing innocent people.”

Inspired by the videos that have captured police killings and defined the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, West Africans are increasingly deploying social media in nations where corruption and abuse by security forces sometimes occur with few repercussions.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/world ... 87722&_r=0
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Watching the Kenyan Wind

The fierce winds blowing around Kenya’s Lake Turkana were long the bane of herders eking out a living in the arid, isolated hills. Now those winds are powering a wind farm whose grand promise and many problems are being closely followed across sub-Saharan Africa, where almost two-thirds of the population still has no access to electricity.

This month, the 155th of the planned 365 turbines went up at the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, which when completed next year will provide 310 megawatts, or about a fifth of Kenya’s generating capacity. The project is as ambitious as it is huge. It is the largest private investment in Kenya’s history, with the wind farm covering 40,000 acres. It is also in one of the most remote corners of Kenya, roughly 750 miles from the main seaport of Mombasa, where the turbines arrive; 375 miles from the capital of Nairobi; and 265 miles from the nearest transmission grid. When construction began last year there were no paved roads anywhere near the lake — in fact, no infrastructure of any sort.

It is what Kenya and other sub-Saharan countries need: abundant power that helps each nation meet its obligations under the Paris climate-change agreement, unleashes economic potential and lights dark homes. Yet the project also demonstrates the huge hurdles in undertaking large projects in a region of poor infrastructure, widespread corruption and weak financial markets. Since the project was proposed, Kenya has had a number of corruption scandals and a contested election that set off a wave of violence. In 2012 the World Bank decided not to support the project based on the argument that it would generate more power than Kenya needs. And local communities have filed a lawsuit, still pending resolution, to nullify the project’s land titles.

Still, the project went ahead. The African Development Bank took the World Bank’s place; the European Investment Bank and various European development agencies joined in; the Kenyan government provided needed assurances; Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems signed on to provide the turbines; and a year ago Google, which has invested in clean-energy projects around the world, announced it would take a 12.5 percent stake once the project is finished.

There’s a lot riding on those desert winds. If they succeed in powering economic growth in Kenya, they will most likely motivate Kenya’s neighbors and other sub-Saharan countries to invest in wind. That would be good for Africa, and good for global climate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/opini ... ef=opinion
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Windmills or Reactor Cores? Inside South Africa’s Energy Clash

UPINGTON, South Africa — In one of the most sun-drenched corners of the planet, a 670-foot tower rises above a desert dotted with 4,160 mirrors. Tracking the sun throughout the day, the mirrors, called heliostats, redirect the sun’s rays into the tower, where water is heated to generate steam — and electricity.

Since the plant, Khi Solar One, began operating early this year near Upington, it has produced enough power for 65,000 homes during the day, but also, thanks to the latest technology, for a few hours after the sun sets.

South Africa is experiencing a boom in renewable energy, nonexistent here just a few years ago. Now, dozens of solar plants clustered in the country’s northern reaches and wind farms operating along the southern coast are generating 2.2 gigawatts — more than what most African nations can produce.

As the facilities have increased production, they have helped stop the blackouts that plagued South Africa until a year ago. In a country still dependent on coal, the renewable energy industry has been lauded by many energy experts and environmentalists as a model for developing nations.

But South Africa’s utility, Eskom, and some government officials do not see it that way. Criticizing wind and solar energy as costly and unreliable, they are pressing instead for a huge investment in nuclear energy: three power stations with a total of up to nine reactors to generate 9.6 gigawatts.

The battle over South Africa’s energy future has become increasingly fierce, often fought over kilowatts and other technical details, sometimes waged with bitter personal attacks between functionaries and electrical engineers. It is also being fought on South Africa’s larger political landscape, with forces seemingly close to the scandal-ridden administration of President Jacob Zuma pushing hardest for the nuclear deal while others support an expansion of renewables.

“A line of attack is that anyone who wants nuclear is linked to President Zuma and therefore is corrupt,” said Matshela Koko, the head of generation at Eskom. “People aren’t dispassionate about nuclear. People have taken a political view. If you’re dispassionate, and look at the science and engineering of it, you will conclude that you need nuclear.”

Developing nations are closely watching the standoff between nuclear and renewables, two forms of low-carbon energy that they hope will power their growing economies. Countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Belarus, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam are adopting nuclear power.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/world ... d=71987722
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The Economist explains

Why Africa’s borders are a mess

ARGUMENTS over parking spaces rarely turn into international incidents. Not so in June last year at Vurra, on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Young Congolese walked 300 metres beyond the customs post ostensibly to build a parking yard, in what they said was no man’s land. Ugandans demurred, blocking the road with logs. The border was closed for two months. Such confusion is not unusual in Africa. Only a third of its 83,000km of land borders is properly demarcated. The African Union (AU) is helping states to tidy up the situation, but it has repeatedly pushed back the deadline for finishing the job. It was meant to be done in 2012, then 2017, and now, it was announced last month, in 2022. Why is it so hard to demarcate Africa’s borders and why does it matter?

Most pre-colonial borders were fuzzy. Europeans changed that, carving up territory by drawing lines on maps. ‘We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other,” mused the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in 1890, “only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.” It took 30 years to settle the boundary between Congo and Uganda, for example, after the Belgians twice got their rivers muddled up. In 1964 independent African states, anxious to avoid conflict, agreed to stick with the colonial borders. But they made little effort to mark out frontiers on the ground.

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http://www.economist.com/blogs/economis ... lydispatch
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Post by Admin »

Mowla said there are borders in Africa that makes no sense at all.

I recently read that countries with strait lines in their borders were more prone to wars. is it not because borders have been drawn artificially by colonial powers and these drawing did not respect the concept of Nations.
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Amazing Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Africa

written by Chris R June 2, 2016

Africa is a continent that everyone has an opinion on but nobody really understands. Africa is actually made up of diverse countries that are in several different economic and sociological states. You can’t paint a broad brush of the continent thanks to your opinion on one or two places. So knowing that Africa gets a mixed reputation we decided to dig deep into the archives and pull up some of the most jaw dropping, fascinating facts around about the continent. If you are a tourist willing to hike around the globe then Africa should be on your list and before you put it on your list you should know one or two things about it. Listed below are 12 jaw dropping facts about the continent of Africa.

Africa and Europe are only nine miles apart!

When you talk about Europe and you talk about Africa you tend to think of them as two distinctive worlds, separated not just by culture but also by insane distances. So it should surprise you at least a little bit that Europe and Africa are only a measly nine miles apart, spanning the Strait of Gibralatar. The Strait of Gibraltar is situated in between Spain and Morocco and there have been talks of the two countries working together to create an underwater rail tunnel in order for transportation to be quick and painless. You could go on a routine fishing trip, with a nice car rental cheap enough to drive you between the two continents on a tank of gas if there were an actual rail system there. Next time people talk about Africa, bring this fact up!

Slide show:
http://www.touristate.com/africa/amazin ... now-africa

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Relations with Africa: In conversation with Canada’s foreign minister

Canada’s Foreign Minister, Stéphane Dion, made his first-visit to sub-Saharan Africa earlier this month. He visited Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia. Here, he reflects on his visit to each country, why the one-year-old Justin Trudeau government will continue to be engaged to the continent, on human rights, trade, aid and what he thinks are the biggest challenges of the continent.

Q: You made your first visit to Africa as Foreign Minister. What were some of the highlights?

A: In Abuja, I co-chaired the 5th Canada-Nigeria Binational Conference, with Nigerian Foreign Minister Onyeama. During the conference, we discussed regional and global issues facing Africa, including security and counterterrorism, development and governance, immigration, and trade and investment.

While in Nairobi, I discussed a broad range of shared interests with President Uhuru Kenyatta, and the Principal Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Monica Kathina Juma. We also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Aga Khan Council on co-operation during emergencies, and it was a highlight for me to build on the longstanding relationship between Canada and the Aga Khan Council. The Government of Canada announced $19.1 million to improve the technical and vocational education training system, so young Kenyans have the tools they need to access several demand-driven economic sectors.

In Addis Ababa, I met Prime Minister Hailemariam and announced $5 million in new support for the African Union Commission (AUC), to advance African priorities in empowering the most vulnerable, including women and girls, good governance, renewable energy, and intra-African trade. The AU is, more than never, an essential organization and a key interlocutor for Canada. Through our engagement with it, we continue to help empower citizens of this continent to lead their own development.

I raised the importance of continued African participation in the International Criminal Court. Canada was deeply saddened to learn South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia plan to withdraw. We believe engaging African partners on this issue – including the many that support the ICC – is essential to strengthening the ICC and ensuring it continues to respond to the needs of victims of serious international crimes on behalf of the international community.

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http://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/special- ... -minister/
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Gambia Finally Rejects Its Tyrant

The despot Yahya Jammeh once said he was prepared to stay in power for a billion years if that’s how long it took to execute his vision for Gambia, the tiny West African nation he has ruled.

On Thursday, in a stunning upset, voters decided that 22 years had been plenty. They elected as president Adama Barrow, a little-known real estate developer who became the standard-bearer of the opposition after several of its leaders were detained. Mr. Jammeh, who has led the nation since 1994, after he helped stage a coup, briefly considered disavowing the results. But he conceded and has vowed to hand over power, raising the prospect that radical reforms will take root in one of the world’s most authoritarian nations.

Mr. Barrow’s victory was a triumph for democracy on a continent where autocratic rule is the norm and peaceful transitions of power have become increasingly rare.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opini ... dline&te=1
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To Be or Not to Be a Dictator

On Dec. 2, Yahya Jammeh, the dictator of the small West African country Gambia, did something remarkably undictatorial: He agreed to step down after losing an election. But a week later, he reverted to type, appearing live on state television to reject the results.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/opini ... ef=opinion
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Ethiopia opens Africa’s tallest and most controversial dam

The Gibe III dam has the capacity to double the country’s electricity output at the flick of a switch

SUB-Saharan Africa’s largest mass-housing programme; its first metro; its biggest army. Ethiopia’s government likes to deal in superlatives. Last week the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) added another to the list: the tallest dam.

After years of delay, due primarily to funding shortages, the prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegne, at last inaugurated the 243-metre (800ft) Gibe III dam on the Omo River on December 17th. Its hydroelectric plant has the potential to double the country’s measly energy output at the flick of a switch.

Dubbed “the water tower of Africa”, Ethiopia has long sought to harness the power of the rivers that tumble from its highlands. Flagship dam projects were central to the modernisation plans drawn up by the Italian administration of 1936-1941 and by the former emperor, Haile Selassie, in the 1960s. Gibe III is the latest in a series being built along the Omo River by the government, which is also constructing what will be the largest-ever dam in Africa when it opens, in theory, next year: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. Together these projects are intended to turn Ethiopia, which has scarce minerals but enormous hydropower potential, into a renewable-energy exporter. Gibe III alone is expected to generate as much electricity as currently produced by the whole of neighbouring Kenya, which has enthusiastically signed up to buy some of its power. The export earnings will help to plug Ethiopia’s gaping current-account deficit, while the cheap power will provide a timely fillip to its nascent manufacturing sector.

Large dams tend to be controversial, wherever they are built. An Oxford University study published in 2014 argued that large-scale hydroelectric projects are almost always damaging to developing economies, saddling them with debt while offering scant benefit for the populations they displace. But Gibe III has been especially contentious since work began in 2006. The African Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank all declined to finance the project directly. In the end the Ethiopian government stumped up the cash with the help of a $470m Chinese loan.

More...
http://www.economist.com/news/21712281- ... ity-output
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Congolese pop music

An oddly symbiotic relationship between some of Africa’s best singers and worst politicians


http://www.economist.com/news/middle-ea ... /8589823/n

Extract:

Alas, like the country itself, Congolese music is blighted by corruption. Since Congo has few producers or studios, only a tiny market for sales and a population who almost all live on a few dollars a day, Congolese musicians have to survive from patronage, like Mozart in 18th-century Vienna but with even more flamboyant clothes.

The politicians are happy with this arrangement. In a country where almost nobody reads newspapers and everyone has a radio, music is the easiest way for them to reach potential supporters. Music and politics in Congo are thus entwined. And with an election looming in 2017, the relationship will only grow closer.
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