Libros para no videntes

Archive for the ‘Africa Culture & Arts’ Category

“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 »

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 »

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 »