Libros para no videntes

Two films about the Congo are playing in South Africa, and they are packing the houses. One is about Patrice Lumumba, a former prime minister of Zaire, and the other about Mobutu, a three decades dictator of Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The movies and the stories behind them are fascinating of themselves. Why they are packing the theaters in South Africa simply adds flavor to that fascination. Read the rest of this entry »

We are about to walk you through a wild, wild ride. We are going to take you from Steven Spielberg’s movie, “Raiders of the lost Ark,” starring Harrison Ford, to a quick exploration of the Ark of the Covenant, to the city of Axum, Ethiopia, where some say the Ark is now located, and then on to Rome. We will end up finally in Dar es Salaam, where we believe Tanzania’s President Mkapa, perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps very shrewdly, has hit upon what could turn out to be a major fire-storm on the matter of African intellectual property rights. Hold on tightly, this is going to be a fun-filled and fast ride through a complex labyrinth to a modern subject with profound implications. This story, originally published on this web site on June 24, 2001, has been in the news recently. The Ethiopian prime minister on June 10, 2002, formally asked Italy to return the Axum obelisk. Read the rest of this entry »

“While parts of Europe struggled to emerge from the Dark Ages, trade and culture flourished in great cities of West Africa, where artisans crafted sumptuous gold objects and scholars attracted students to centers of learning. The history of medieval Africa, long ignored and distorted, is here given full attention.” Those are the words of Hazel Rochman, written while reviewing the book The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa. We too want to give medieval Africa our full attention. UNIC NIGERIA Read the rest of this entry »

The city of Alexandria, Egypt has gotten a new library. It was driven by a terrific vision about how to combine the heritage of the past with a revival of cultural radiance that can reach out to the entire world of the present and future. The heritage of the Ptolemies serves as the inspiration. The library will seek to continue that legacy by assembling and preserving the record of human achievement, yet it will also join with modern international information networks to serve researchers around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

We are big, big fans of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California at Los Angeles, the famed UCLA. The Fowler has terrific exhibitions of African art. Its web site is currently presenting a fabulous exhibition of the Sufi art of Senegal. It was at one time called “Passport to Paradise,” but has since been renamed to “A Saint in the city: Sufi arts of urban Senegal.” We urge you to visit Fowler’s on-line presentation. It is filled with wonderful art and informative text. Here is one example of the text, to help explain the pieces of wall art shown here: Read the rest of this entry »

“The story we are trying to tell is about permanence and change, how some aspects of material culture remain consistent and some things change constantly.”

The Brooklyn Museum of Art has one of the finest collections in the world of Egyptian antiquities and on April 12 will open its exhibition, “Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity.” The museum will double the number of items on display to 600. Overall, it is said to have some 4,000 objects.

The museum has renovated its Egyptian Galleries to handle this exhibition. The oldest artifact in the exhibit, an ivory statuette of a male figure, is dated to about 3800 B.C. The museum says, “With the opening of ‘Egypt Reborn,’ and with over 1150 works of art now in place, the completed Egyptian Galleries at last make available masterpieces representing every period of ancient Egyptian history from one of the finest collections in the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

This African is an African-killer operating under the cover of wanting to kill Americans.

His name is Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. He is an al-Qaeda suspect and has been indicted in the US for masterminding the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, bombings that killed mostly Africans (231), not Americans (12), even though the US was the target. This is an FBI photo of him. He is from the Comoros Islands. The Kenyan security ministry says he is either in Somalia or Kenya. The FBI says he likes to wear baseball caps, dress casually, and is good with computers. He is in his late 20s or early 30s. He can speak French, Arabic and English. He has previously used the alias “Harun.” Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: This is a running story and photo gallery. We are adding new photography every few days, as it comes in, and new text, as the situation changes. As of May 22, we have photos of the innocents, the Lendu and Hema belligerents, the Ugandan army, the pretty blue helmets, and now the French, whose army seems available only for duty in Africa where it feels omnipotent. Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier article, we noted that amidst the great commotion of Senegal’s capital, Dakar, there is an image of one man nearly everywhere, on doors, on walls, outside and inside, the image of the saint, poet, and mystic named Sheik Amadou Bamba. In this follow-up report, we become acquainted with the sacred city of Touba which Bamba founded, the Great Mosque of Touba whose construction he began, and the annual pilgrimage that his followers make each year to honor his exile from Senegal by the French colonizers. That exile simply caused Sheik Bamba’s following to grow, but more importantly, his exile caused people to find a way, through faith, to restore their dignity. Read the rest of this entry »

Sara is the short-name used these days for Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan slave woman who at the tender age of 20 was taken from Cape Town to London and then on to Paris to be displayed naked in their streets and at their circuses like an animal her European audiences viewed her to be. Her story is a tearful and moving one. It is at once the story of an everyday woman, a human being, one of us, treated in the most grotesque ways, used as “scientific proof” of “European white superiority,” But it is also a story about the more widespread “social, political, scientific and philosophical assumptions which transformed one young African woman into a representation of savage sexuality and racial inferiority.” Finally, her story is one that provokes us to look in some detail at the power of imagery to form opinions, and the way such power has been employed to depict people of color, especially women of color. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a conference held last year in Oudtshoorn, South Africa, which is on South Africa’s famous Garden Route between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. At this conference, the Khoisan people were officially proclaimed to be the first indigenous people of South Africa. As the layman looks into what this means, some interesting lessons emerge about the way we have tended to classify different people in different ways, and frequently in the wrong ways. Canadian socio-linguist Nigel Crawhall says it this way: “These people moved across this land before any other human being. It was they who named the plants and the trees and the features of this land. . . . There [has been an] explosion of identity . . . [among] people who had spent their whole lives having to hide who they were. These people had been destroyed and now suddenly there [is] light and air.” Read the rest of this entry »

Arusha National Park, Tanzania hosts the Burundi peace talks, the international tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide, and the headquarters for the rapidly developing East African Community. But it is a regular town too, a tourist center close to spectacular national parks, and a place where residents are working many of the same problems and challenges faced by any other town world wide. Let’s see a few of Arusha’s “other sides.” Read the rest of this entry »