For Africa's Deaf and Blind, AIDS Is an Unknown Language
On my last trip to India, as I dodged traffic and attempted to navigate the cracked and uneven sidewalks of Calcutta, it occurred to me how impossible it would be for a blind person or someone confined to a wheelchair to perform even basic chores like shopping for food or clothes. In Canada we're used to seeing disabled people out and about, but in India I don't recall ever seeing them outside, except as beggars.
Now consider the difficulty of educating oneself about AIDS or taking an AIDS test. In countries where AIDS is a widespread, it can be a matter of life or death. This article describes the difficulties of AIDS education for the disabled and the progress made in Kenya and other African nations towards solving it.
There are signs of slow progress. Susan Mwikali, 23, appeared recently in a commercial aimed at disabled people in which she urged them to follow her lead and use condoms. Ms. Mwikali, the first runner-up in a beauty pageant organized last year for disabled Kenyan women, laughed heartily at the notion that disabled people do not have sex.
Billy's journey: Crossing the Sahara
I had heard that travelling overland was much cheaper than flying - and you didn't need a visa.I was also told it would take a week to reach Spain. Little did I know how wrong that was.
I left Dakar in November 1999, hoping to be in Europe for the millennium.
From the BBC site, the story of Mamadou Saliou "Billy" Diallo's tough journey from Senegal to a new life in Europe where he finally arrived... in March 2000. It is only two pages long but I'm sure a true description of the obstacles he faced could fill a book. In that sense it resembles the epic stories of migrants from South and Central America. The account of one migrant's journey from Honduras to the United States won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
There's also a connection between Billy's story and the previous entry on Spain's African Colonies. Billy's final "European" destination is the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, one of the last remnants of Spain's colonial presence in northern Morocco. Pictures of Ceuta and the other Spanish enclave, Melilla can be found here.
Until recently, I thought I knew which European powers had carved up Africa: France, Britain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium and Italy. From recent events, I've learned that Spain also managed to grab a few handfuls of African land.
A colony of Spain for 190 years, the tiny central African nation of Equatorial Guinea has recently been in the news as the target of a coup attempt. The Chronology of African Independence reveals Western Sahara as the other ex-Spanish colony although its status as a nation is disputed by its current occupier (colonizer?) Morocco.
The coup in Equatorial Guinea, despite occurring in a country prone to them has made the news because of the role played by South African mercenaries. The Globe's Stephanie Nolen gives some background on how they got into the business.
...The apartheid government trained thousands of "special operatives" to target the black resistance, and to lead proxy armies in the wars South Africa fought in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique.When the African National Congress came to power 10 years ago, there was a whole force of men with elite fighting skills, suddenly out of work.
They found it elsewhere in Africa. In 1995, for example, Executive Outcomes was contracted by deposed dictator Valentine Strasser to return him to power in Sierra Leone, in exchange for a lucrative diamond-rights contract. In 1993, the firm helped eradicate the UNITA rebels in Angola, and then got a $40-million contract to retrain their former enemies in the Angolan army.
The Head Heeb has some analysis and links: The Men Behind The Coup, Flight to Nowhere. Some speculate that the coup was funded by Severo Moto, an opposition politician exiled in Madrid, but a NYTimes story raises the possibility that the plotters may be closer to home.
There is nothing to indicate that Mr. du Toit's contract to train the military of the government he sought to overthrow is untoward. Indeed, President Obiang said at Wednesday's news conference that he knew "for sure" that his brother was not involved in any way with any venture involving Mr. du Toit."I think it's not true," he said. "Because if it was like this, I would have known."
Still, a jefe in a place like this always looks over his shoulder. After all, the sole successful coup here occurred in 1979, when Mr. Obiang himself, then a lowly lieutenant colonel, overthrew and executed the self-proclaimed "Unique Miracle," Francisco Macias Nguema.
Mr. Nguema was his uncle. It was a family affair.
This excerpt from a history of Angola on the excellent Country Studies site reveals the origins of the former Portuguese colony's name.
Shortly after Cão made his initial contact with the Kongo Kingdom of northern Angola in 1483, he established links farther south with Ndongo--an African state less advanced than Kongo that was made up of Kimbundu-speaking people. Their ruler, who was tributary to the manikongo, was called the ngola a kiluanje. It was the first part of the title, its pronunciation changed to "Angola," by which the Portuguese referred to the entire area.
Country Studies compiles on-line versions of handbooks for a wide variety of countries commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Army between 1986 and 1998. Although not every country is covered, the information here seems much more comprehensive then what you'll find in the CIA World Factbook.
This link is an English translation of the article from Le Monde implicating current Rwandan president and former rebel leader Paul Kagame in the 1994 attack that killed then President Juvenal Habyarimana. Kagame, who is currently on a state visist to Belgium, is adamantly denying the charge.
The politics which would explain this is confusing. It was thought previously that the attack was the work of Hutu extremists who used it as a pretext to launch their murderous genocide against the Tutsi minority. Romeo Dallaire's account is discussed in this Guardian article:
The junta that took control immediately afterwards, he wrote, ordered the presidential guard to seal off the crash site and allowed no independent inspection. Several senior members of the junta smirked when told that some of the wreckage had landed in Habyarimana's garden.
The Le Monde article includes the following explanation from a "key witness", a RPF dissident who claims to have taken orders for the attack from Kagame himself:
When questioned, this key witness gave details concerning the monstrous hypothesis that the RPF, the rebel movement originating in the Tutsi Diaspora, was ready to sacrifice, in order to seize power, the "interior Tutsis," that is to say relatives who remained in the country, in 1959, following the end of political domination by the ethnic minority in Rwanda. "Paul Kagame had little regard for the interior Tutsis whom he viewed almost as Hutus," stated Captain Abdul Ruzibiza. "The interior Tutsis were potential enemies that had to be eliminated along with the Hutus to regain power, that was Paul Kagame's essential objective."
The French reporter who broke the story, Stephen Smith, was interviewed tonight on As It Happens. He speculated that Kagame's inability to convince moderate Hutu's to side with the RPF in peace negotiations lead him to conclude that there was no political way to gain power. The attack and subsequent chaos provided a pretext for continuing military action.
Besides LGen Dallaire, there's another Canadian connection. An article in the National Post includes a mention of Louise Arbour, then a war crimes prosecutor, currently a Canadian Supreme Court judge, ordering an end to an earlier UN-sponsored investigation in to the crash.
Curiously, the April 1994 crash has made the news via another thread: the black box recovered from the plane was lost and then recently found "in a locked filing cabinet in the U.N. Peacekeeping Department's Air Safety Unit."
I still haven't seen a good explanation of why Haiti's deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide went (or was sent) to the Central African Republic and this article is no exception but at least they took a crack at some related questions like "What sort of place is the Central African Republic?"
The Head Heeb: Africa meets the Middle East, part 2: Strange Attractions
The Head Heeb is Jonathan Edelstein, a blogger with intriguingly disparate interests: Middle East politics, Pacific cultures and, of interest to this blog, post-colonial Africa. Besides turning up great articles, there's a wealth of snappily written analysis here and good (occasionally longwinded) comments too. The entry linked above talks about the relation between Egypt, traditionally considered part of the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.