New African articles from February 2002

New African archives from February 2002

Letters.
February 1, 2002... Whose puppets? Baffour Ankomah baffles me. Usually I find him transparently clear, and mostly I find myself in agreement with him. Neither is true in his piece, Our Friend Tony (part I), (NA, Dec). Here are a few questions I would like him...

Natural beauty: The Samburu of Kenya. (The Gallery).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Just north if the equator, where the Great Rift Valley provides some of the most spectacular scenery in Kenya, lies Danburuland, home to a race of proud, semi-nomadic pastoralists, the Samburu. Like their more famous relatives, the Maasai, they...

Puppets? no, they are darlings. (View from the Editor).
February 1, 2002... "What troubles me about Baffour's statements is that he (of all people) should write as if African leaders are puppets in the hands of the US and Britain, who can be bought to pursue interests other than their own" -- Colin Legum. This is...

Who is toying with the rand? (South Africa).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... The mystery surrounding the dramatic decline in recent weeks of the South African currency, the rand, finally unravelled on 4 January when the chairman of the South African Chamber of Commerce, Kevin Wakeford, called for a commission of enquiry...

Crunch time! (Zimbabwe).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... The two-edged sword of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) was wheeled out in Malawi where the Community's leaders met from 13-15 January to discuss Congo, Angola and Zimbabwe. In the final communique, the SADC urged...

Who killed the attorney general? (Nigeria).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... The murder of Ajibola James Ige, Nigeria's attorney general and minister for justice, by assassins who violated his Ibadan home on 23 December, has left more questions than answers for the country's bewildered citizens. No acceptable excuse has...

New president, old problems. (Zambia).
February 1, 2002... As we went to press, allegations of vote-rigging, ballot stealing and legal battles were still being intensely discussed in Zambia following the 27 December controversial elections that saw the ruling MMD, written off before the elections,...

Why the Euro is special. (Africa/Europe).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... For the African countries who use the CFA franc as their common currency, a recent book on the march of the euro, the EU common currency to which the CFA was pegged in January 1999, holds a lot of lessons. The roots of the CFA, the common...

'Poetry has lost one of its masters'. (Senegal).
February 1, 2002... The news broke on 20 December. Senegal's founding president, poet, philosopher, professor and great statesman, Leopold Sedar Senghor had died at his residence in Verson, northern France, at the age of 95. It was Senegal's current president,...

Did museveni order 12 January shooting? (Uganda).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Did he or did he not? This was the big debate in Uganda as we went to press. Did President Yoweri Museveni order the 12 January shooting of a journalism student at a rally organised in Kampala by the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), the old party...

Can Kufuor deliver? (Ghana Special Report).(President John Agyekum Kufuor)(Cover Story)
February 1, 2002... Ghana celebrates 45 years as an independent nation on 6 March. It was a joyous occasion 45 years ago, as Ghana's independence opened the floodgates to black African liberation from colonial rule. On 27 April, Ghana will again observe the 30th...

No, you can't have your industries: How Nkrumah's dream to industrialise Ghana as a model for the whole of Africa was frustrated. (Ghana Special Report).(Kwame Nkrumah)(Cover Story)
February 1, 2002... In 1992, BBC-TV showed a remarkable documentary entitled "Black Power". It was about Ghana's Volta River Project which the country's first president, Kwame Nkrumah had planned as the core of an integrated industrial programme to transform the...

Nkrumah surely must be turning in his grave: The BBC's "Black Power" documentary, transcribed and with added comment. (Ghana Special Report).(Kwame Nkrumah)
February 1, 2002... BBC narrator [1992]: Thirty-five years ago, one man set out to turn this country into a modern utopia. He was Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of a newly black African country. His aim was to transform Ghana into a society shaped and driven...

Mae Jemison honoured. (Diaspora).(first African-American in space)
February 1, 2002... Dr Mae Jemison (above), the first African-American to go into space, was among 23 distinguished recipients of the 6th Multicultural Prism Awards held recently in Beverly Hills, California, USA. A one-time US Peace Corps volunteer in Africa...

The Zimbabwe Mkangi did not see.(response to Katama Mkangi, New African, December 2001)(Cover Story)
February 1, 2002... The Kenyan professor, Katama Mkangi, returned from his second one-month visit to Zimbabwe in September and wrote about his impressions (see NA Dec). Here is a counter to what he saw, by the Dutch journalist and our correspondent in Amsterdam,...

Should all these go as well? (Zimbabwe Analysis).(response to article by Bram Postumus in this issue, p. 26)(Cover Story)
February 1, 2002... "A government that fails to deliver should be out on its ear. There is nothing imperialistic, white, British or American about it", writes Brain posthumus on p26-27. In that case, should the presidents below go as well? If yes, why hasn't the...

Building bridges across borders: Neil Ford writes about the benefits to come from the recently created great Limpopo Transfrontier Park linking South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. (Feature: Environment).
February 1, 2002... The recent delivery of a family of seven elephants at Pafuri in Mozambique's Coutada 16 Park was a key moment in the creation of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The seven were the first delivery of some 40 elephants, which are being...

The Mountain People revisited: Curtis Abraham went to Ik-land in Uganda and saw how wrong Colin Turnbull, the British-born American anthropologist, was in his 1972 book on the Ik, the mountain people. (Feature: Uganda).
February 1, 2002... On 1 February 1966, Colin M. Turnbull, while among the Ik people of Karamoja, northeast Uganda, wrote a letter to his friend and boss at New York's American Museum of Natural History. Responding to an idea suggested by Shapiro (a noted...

Tourism: The Gambia to get even better. (Travel).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... The Gambia is poised to significantly increase its annual charter tourist arrival figures from the present 100,000 to 1 million by the year 2007. This, according to the director-general of the newly established Gambia Tourism Authority, Habib...

Those Africans, they won't mind. (Not in black or white).(African concerns following terrorist attacks on US)
February 1, 2002... Over 2,000 years after Hannibal, the concept of what constitutes an honourable military victory -- an understanding held consistently during all the preceding centuries -- has been degraded, has evaporated even, in just a few weeks. ...

Life in Ghana in the 1950s: "Imagine me, at the age of 13, being torn from the bosom of my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, my friends and my schoolmates, to go and tough it in a town in which I was a complete stranger." Part one.
February 1, 2002... Isn't it amazing that some of the most important -- and often positive -- turning points in our lives, are created by people who, at the time, we thought were out to cause us harm, and whom we therefore passionately hated as a result? Like...

The father of Kenyan independence. (Books: Kenya).('Koinange-wa-Mbiyu -- Mau Mau's Misunderstood Leader' by Jeff Koinange)
February 1, 2002... Koinange-wa-Mbiyu -- Mau Mau's misunderstood leader. by Jeff Koinange, 126 pages. Koinange-wa-Mbiyu's biography written by his journalist grandson, Jeff Koinange, is a necessary trip down memory-lane. A senior chief in Kenya, Koinange...

Books -- Africa's best 100. (Literature).
February 1, 2002... In the panorama of Harare's Sculpture Gardens, close to the National Art Gallery, Africa's foremost literary event of the century is scheduled to take place in the spring of 2002. The African list of "The Best 100 Books", an idea coined by...

Tanzania seen through Tanzanian eyes. (Books: Tanzania).(Tanzania: African Eden)
February 1, 2002... The African eden as seen by Javed Jafferji and Graham Mercer. New African allowed the two men behind the fascinating coffee-table book, Tanzania - African Eden, to tell the story about the book and the country. Javed Jafferji (a...

Not for faint hearts. (Books: Zimbabwe).('The Blackness of Black' by Claude Maredza)
February 1, 2002... The blackness of block. by Claude Maredza. published by Norumedzo enterprises, harare, Zimbabwe. Tel: (263 91)38 20 99. 83 pages. Claude Maredza has a rather interesting personal history. A Zimbabwean, aged 41, he is a qualified accountant,...

Blue book: The preface. (Cover story 3: Namibia).
February 1, 2002... In 1926, Britain, Germany and South Africa agreed to destroy a damning "blue book" published in 1918 by the British government "by Command of his majesty", King George v, about German atrocities in Namibia, then called South-West Africa (see...