New African articles from April 2006

New African archives from April 2006

40 years of indefatigable bravery.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Forty years is an important milestone, because it not only ends the youthful age but it also marks the beginning of full-fledged adulthood. New African magazine celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. During that period, it has educated...

Nkrumah was no Moses or Joshua.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... In narrating and paying tribute to Nkrumah for his achievements, Baffour Ankomah failed to mention Nkrumah's political mentor, George Padmore, let alone pay him a little tribute as well. Padmore was the backbone and pillar behind Nkrumah, and...

A visionary par excellence.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Your 25-page tribute to Kwame Nkrumah (NA Feb) is instructive and educative to the African mind (keep up the good work). It heightened my admiration for the great visionary. This was a man who was simply generations ahead of his time. It is...

Nkrumah never dies.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... This is to applaud your "collector's item" on Nkrumah (40 years after the shameful coup), and to thank the staff of New African for your hard work. We, the current generation of Africans, should learn from the great man. He wanted a...

Nkrumah, second only to Garvey.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Thanks to New African for dedicating the February issue to the great man, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. The infamous coup of 24 February 1996 did affect me personally, disrupted Ghana nationally and Africa continentally. At the time, my father was a...

Let's not be self-righteous.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... New African's February issue profiling the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah with contributions (and reprinted speeches) by Africa's great leaders such as Presidents Sam Nujoma, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda as well as other Africans and Africanists...

To good Christian Katie.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Katie Phelps' "let-down" to New African's critique of the US exemplifies the common Christian American blindness. "How could anyone hate all of us American Christians after all the good work we have done?" The American Indians know some of this...

Katie's 'powerful' country.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Allow me space to ask Katie Phelps one question: Are all the reports shown on CNN, BBC, DW-TV, CCTV or French TV always positive about Africa? And do they give Africans the right of reply? You said America is a successful and powerful...

Negative perceptions.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Leslie Goffe and Osei Boateng's report on the Africa channel in Los Angeles, California, (NA Jan 2006) was a breath of fresh air for me as an African living in the US for the past 20 years. The channel will overcome some negative perceptions of...

Has Kibaki delivered?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... In response to your March cover story, I render the following response. First of all, I write this as the thick smoke of the government's raid on the Standard Media Group's premises still chokes Kenyans. With this action, the much touted...

Sackcloth and ashes.(black africans)
April 1, 2006... "Those who dare spit at the sky, only dirty their own faces"--African proverb. As Beefs was enjoying its well-deserved holiday (this column hasn't appeared for the past three issues, apologies dear readers), a kind friend in Germany...

Who were the ancient Egyptians?
April 1, 2006... Ayi Kwei Armah, the acclaimed Ghanaian novelist, poet and scholar, is about to publish a new book, his memoirs, entitled The Eloquence of the Scribes. He has given New African the right to serialise it even before it comes out in May. This is...

The identity of the creators of Ancient Egypt: Ayi Kwei Armah now takes us through the nitty gritty of who the Ancient Egyptians really were.
April 1, 2006... Now let us focus on the question of the identity of the creators of Ancient Egypt. The natural flow of population from the African heartland outward brought groups to settle in the Nile valley. Would these people have been black? Necessarily...

'The last task of the oppressed is to enlighten the oppressors'.
April 1, 2006... As if it to confirm the comment of the Brazilian contemporary thinker, Paulo Freire, that "the last task of the oppressed is to enlighten the oppressors", Archbishop Desmond Tutu, visiting London in March for a meeting of the new UN initiative...

Drcongo: a ray of hope; At long last, after five years of a bitter war and two years of transitional government, the people of DRCongo will have the chance to choose their own leaders on 18 June, in the first multi-party elections since the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Antoine Lokongo reports.
April 1, 2006... The stage is now set, and hopefully, barring a catastrophe, the long-suffering people of Congo will have the chance to elect their own leaders in elections slated for 18 June. This followed the promulgation of a new constitution on 18 February....

Kenya.(raid on 'The Standard ' media group)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The raid by the government on The Standard media group on 2 March (photo above) has attracted the ire of the World Bank whose country director, Colin Bruce, now says that the Washington-based Bank has added press freedom to a list of conditions...

Zambia: keep quiet, I won't; What started as a cordial relationship between former President Kenneth Kaunda and the incumbent Levy Mwanawasa has of late turned sour. Mwanawasa's supporters want Kaunda to keep quiet, but the former president says he won't. Austin Mbewe reports from Lusaka.
April 1, 2006... A war of words erupted in February between former President Kenneth Kaunda and the government of President Levy Mwanawasa. Reason: Kaunda's comments on matters of governance did not go down well with Mwanawasa's government. That, though, was...

Ghana: big do next year; Ghana celebrated 49 years of independence on 6 March with an upbeat President John Kufuor promising that the golden jubilee next year would be special--a year-long celebration in fact, to champion excellence in Africa. Tom Mbakwe reports.
April 1, 2006... Forty-nine years ago, Ghana became the first country of the then colonised Africa to gain its independence. Its then prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, famously told the world at the time that Ghana's independence was meaningless without the total...

Zimbabwe.(police investigates Members of Parliament planning to kill President Robert Mugabe )(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... At the time of going to press, Zimbabwean police were investigating an alleged coup plot to kill President Robert Mugabe hours after celebrating his 82nd birthday on 21 February in Mutare, 260km east of Harare. Eleven people, some of whom were...

South Africa: the coming of the black middle class; Although their numbers are growing, the general trouble with South Africa's new black middle class is their huge appetite for consumption, rather than savings and investments. With the least hiccup in the economy, they will be the first to go down. Kgomotso Nyanto reports.
April 1, 2006... They drive the latest flashy cars and don designer clothes. They have "invaded" white suburbia and private schools where they learn about Francis Bacon and Napoleon. In South Africa's trendy shopping malls, they are increasingly making their...

Cameroon: for those who say Africa had no writing system ... According to orthodox history, Africa had no indigenous writing systems before the arrival of the Europeans on our shores. The photos on the pages opposite should put the matter to rest. A project to save one of Africa's indigenous writing systems, the Bamum script, has been launched in Cameroon. Tansa Musa reports from Yaounde.
April 1, 2006... In a small dusty room inside the walls of the Bamum Palace at Foumban in western Cameroon are held over 7,000 documents, many of which pre-date the arrival in the area of the first Europeans in 1902. These are the Bamum Palace Archives. The...

Seychelles: the secret of vanilla; Vanilla is a mysterious and beautiful orchid vine which for centuries enchanted the world with the aroma and flavour of its fruits. Tony Mathiot has followed the trail of its fragrance back to its primeval origins and discovers how once upon a time vanilla brought fortune and prosperity to the Seychelles.
April 1, 2006... One early morning in 1841, on a large plantation at Belle Vue on the island of Reunion, a lanky 12-year-old black boy, Edmund Albius, was walking in his master's orchard, contemplating the prospect of another working day. He liked his master...

8th Pan-African Congress in Harare.(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The 8th Pan-African Congress is to be held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in October this year. According to the convener, Ibbo Mandaza (pictured above), the 8th Congress will develop the achievements and gains of the 7th Pan-African Congress held in...

Botswana: voices of the San (2).
April 1, 2006... Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), at 52,000 sq kms, is one of the world's largest conservation areas. It was set up in 1961 to safeguard the Kalahari ecosystem and to provide security for the most persecuted--the 3,000 San people...

Botswana: how De Beers views the situation; This is De Beers' official response to the CKGR tussle.(Central Kalahari Game Reserve )
April 1, 2006... "There is no motive, and it would defy logic, for the Botswana government to remove people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) for fear they might make claim to any diamonds found there, as claimed by Survival. As in many other...

Uganda: 'better the devil you know ...'; Although Kizza Besigye gave the incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, a run for his money in the 23 February elections, he lost due to the general feeling that it was "better the devil you know, than the angel you don't", reports Stuart Price from Kampala.(Forum for Democratic Change,)
April 1, 2006... In the end, the fear of election violence and a return to political troubles never transpired when Uganda went to the polls on 23 February. Apart from a few isolated incidents, polling, which saw 75% of the 10.8m registered voters cast their...

Are you a native? Carina Ray trudges through the archives and finds the colonial definition of who was a "native" very interesting. Each British colonial government in Africa strategically defined "native" according to its own specific set of local circumstances and interests.
April 1, 2006... Apart from "tribe", no other word is as synonymous with British colonialism as that of "native". The architects of colonialism invested considerable energy in creating and policing boundaries between "natives" and "Europeans" in order to...

Farewell to the 'zulu queen'.(Peggy Cripps)
April 1, 2006... Throughout the British Empire--which ruled half the world between the 18th and 20th centuries--there was an unwritten rule: blacks must not marry white women or make love to them. You can therefore imagine the uproar in 1953 when it was...

What is 'race' and what is 'racism'? (3).
April 1, 2006... We conclude Dr Charles Quist-Adade's three-part series on race and racism. "No one is born a racist bigot," he writes. "In other words, racial bigotry or racial prejudice is not genetically or biologically determined... Therefore, if most...

Haiti: the deep roots of liberty; Rene Preval, the former ally of the deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide, has become the new president of Haiti after a hard struggle by the country's poor who, despite harassment, voted massively for Preval in the February elections. Manne Granqvist reports.
April 1, 2006... In 1802, two years before revolting slaves turned France's crown colony of St Domingue into the independent black nation of Haiti, the revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture was captured by Napoleon's troops. From the ship that would take...

Cote d'Ivoire: hard times at Abidjan zoo; Years of dwindling economic fortunes and political conflict have taken their toll on the Abidjan National zoological park. Its administrators are struggling to keep it going, but for how long?, asks Josephine Akarue.
April 1, 2006... The air is warm and humid. Gentle lights dance from two eyes laced with anticipation. There is no hate in them; no open anger or naked brutality--just dark wells of secret longing and veiled frustration. Around the head is a thick mesh of...

Benin's art of history.
April 1, 2006... One of the most venerable ancient kingdoms of West Africa can trace its beginnings to the early 13th century when the Fon, a people closely related to the Yoruba, migrated from around the River Niger to settle in the south of what is now the...

Fated for the lofty perch.
April 1, 2006... David Adjaye (left) is one of the most acclaimed architects of his generation. His startlingly beautiful and innovative building projects now grace the capitals of countries around the world. Born in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Ghanaian...

Togo: same old problems; The lack of democracy is not the only problem in Togo, but also the declining economy. A major problem is that vital decisions are taken by a small group of military men, weakening the role of the president and the prime minister, writes Dr Yves Ekoue Amaizo.
April 1, 2006... The European Union (EU) suspended its economic cooperation with Togo in 1993, essentially because of a recurrent lack of democracy highlighted by an absence of transparency in electoral procedures and several violations of humans rights. ...